Jesus and the Womb of God

This is where I get creative and inspired and perhaps even mystical.

Creative is a dirty word in American business. I learned that the hard way. It shows signs of intelligence which is verboten in our present American fascist state of things left undone, half-assed in the political and religious forums now abandoned to MBAs, PhDs, lawyers and hedge fund managers.

I am inpired by my recent postings on the forgotten female half of our civilisation. I use the British/European spelling. There is no civilization left in the American myth. But that is another story. (sorry for the negative aside)

If you look at anything, you can look at it twice and in a totally different light. I like to use the Earp Brothers and the fight at the O.K. Corral in 1881 in Tombstone Arizona as an example of an urban legend being cast into stone. It, the bottom line, was that the Earp brothers were out to make money and blow town. The truth is that they acquired a lot of deeds for land, property and mines.

They wanted to leave but there were bigger crooks than they running the town. Somebody redrew the town map and every lot in town was in dispute and had to be resurveyed. Of course the surveying fee was outrageous and enough to make most people sell out at a discount and leave town. Or you could sue in court.

So while the Earp brothers got entangled in Republican urban politics they crossed paths with the cowboys and rural democratic politics. The demographics have reversed over a century later. While the Earps didn’t mind eating stolen Mexican beef bought off the Cowboys, the Cowboys wanted a little more respect from the Earps while in town. And so it went.

The rest is history or is it? The Urban legend of the good city dweller against the evil cattle rustlers was set in stone by Hollywood. The good guys were the urban crooks and the bad, bad cowboys just drifted away into history.

In dealing with the concept of women in the church or a religious setting, one has to wonder where and how the urban legend of Jesus got set in Stone. At one point Jesus was real and just like the Earp brothers in Tombstone.

Everybody has a story, a direction and a purpose in life. Getting back to Jesus. As I read and read account after account, opinion after opinion, urban legend after urban legend I have strangely come back to some sort of mystical concept of Jesus.

(Here comes the mystical?)

That if the oldest gospel is dated around 70 C.E., then the oral history is being told and few if any living witnesses to Jesus were still around. In a world with a life expectancy of 35 years for the average human beings then and up until the beginning of the twentieth century, then the first and oldest account of Jesus is a third person account of an urban legend.

Let me throw in a little Islamic perspective which says that Jesus did not die on the cross nor was resurrected. That Jesus was assumed into heaven like the legendary prophet Elijah and you have what I mix with the beginning of the Gospel of John.

The beginning of the gospel of John calls Jesus Logos or the word or the reason God comes down to the perception of man.

The gospel of John is much more fluid and poetic in parts than the first three gospels. John is also the start of the Urban legend of the Jews as bad guys and the Jesus posse as the goodie two shoes of that O.K. Corral scenario.

Anyway, I look at the third party account of Mark and realize that if Mark is not a living eyewitness then he is describing Jesus and the perception and assumption of Mark is that Jesus is a man. No. I am not saying that Jesus is a woman. But if a person is writing history later, it is possible that you do not know 100% about who or what your history subject is about.

So if you take the Gnostic concept or poetic license of the Beginning of John 1:1-5 -

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

- You can look at Jesus from a different angle, like looking at a work of true art in a museum. I see some perfections and flaws of the artist so to speak.

That in real time, with a real Jesus preaching a real gospel, Jesus was neither male nor female. Jesus the logos, the word, the reason was standing right in front of you not unlike a space alien and you see, hear and perceive what you want to see, hear and perceive. Or what you are capable of perceiving in matters possibly divine.

If you are a male, you see a male. If you are female, you see a female. Jesus and his grouping of followers were both male and female. In God there is no male or female. In Jesus there is no male or no female as well?

It was not until after he dies or disappears from the scene that petty human traits arise. Suddenly is it not possible that Mary Magdalene was an apostle. Suddenly the gospels or Paul’s obsessions and petty male hang-ups become the things put into stone, into words on paper, a translation. The true and original urban legend fades into obscurity.

The miracle of God’s presence among us in the form of a future man, a humanist man, a divine male/female presence in our midst gets lost in translation.

I do not want to get into the logistics or the semantics of the Trinity which is really a stone age version, interpretation not suited to today’s modern scientific urban global person to deal with in a credible pattern or sense.

Without going much too deeply into this theory of mine which is already probably a half a dozen heresies rolled into one, I look at something rather symbolic of things, of teachings and urban myths and man and his engineering.

I look at the Hagia Sophia, or Santa Sophia, the primary center of Christianity for a thousand years. While this building, this church and the Eastern Rome flourished for a thousand years, they probably were herding domestic animals into the decrepit old Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome in the winter time for shelter throughout the dark western ages while this magnificent building was the one true Church to the civilized worlds in the east. Here too Islam had one of its grandest buildings for close to five hundred years.

Hagia Sophia is related to the word logos or word or reason or touching the purpose of man in response to God and his prophets to the human race. Hagia Sophia is holy or sacred wisdom. The eastern Roman empire would have seemed to have been more attuned into a feminine sense of wisdom, or understanding, and coming from God. This as opposed to the western male view coming to us to the modern day.

The western church is scared shitless of the feminine and the womb - it is where we all came from - figuratively and literally.

When I look at the image above, (click for a larger image), I see wisdom written in stone, in concrete, in mosaics and the “Allah is Great” Quran plagues. I see mankind reaching out to the universe before science or man had a clue or sense about what the universe truly is.

Click on the image above of the Hagia Sophia. It was the center of Christian faith, the premier center for a thousand years. It was a major center of Islam, its grandest mosque, for close to five hundred years. It is the most sacred spot on planet earth to all faiths of the one God concept.

Sacred wisdom, sacred knowledge, the word, the reason, the logos – no matter how you translate it – here is the spot where heaven touched earth directly for fifteen hundred years.

Look at the enlarged image. What do you see? Is it a museum? Is it a basilica, a church? Is it a mosque?

Look deeper. What humankind has left here for all generations to see is the myth of God, the myth of the Prophets like Jesus among others. I would see a cave if I were a caveman.

I see a womb, perhaps the womb of God. I see great mystery. And then I am transported back to reality and it is just a building.

The perception of man toward - God, Jesus, Science, Art are all in their own way part of a formula, a plan, a logos, a reason, a whisper from above and a meaning for all things.

The purpose of life is a mystery. To an artist, life is poetry.

A Real Jesus and Simon Bar Kochba

I have mentioned The Jesus Seminar in several of my articles. At first I was reluctant to accept that this long term scholarly deconstruction of the faith was necessary. In many ways, the future Christian church and it will exist in the centuries to come, will be based on a new foundation. The old foundation gave way not unlike the old St Peter’s in Rome that had stood there a thousand years and was torn down around 1500 C.E. to make way for the present structure.

Besides the crumbling foundation being examined and the engineers of The Jesus Seminar trying to determine how to best assess the damage, there is also separate from scholarly review the cancer setting into the Christian Faith from a worldwide RC hierarchy covering up priest abuse and the whole question of celibacy as a major factor in that abuse issue.

Another part of the cancer on the faith is the rigid thoughtless absolute bible hugging notion that the Bible is the unerring word of God as in the unerring opinion (tin god punditry) of fundamentalists. Yeah right.

The Jesus Seminar has moved on from the five gospels (Thomas for the sake of argument was included) and is now dissecting The Acts of the Apostles.

Seminar on the Acts of the Apostles

I invite you to read some of their reports and their blackballing of Acts as more of a second century document than a reflection of first century Christianity as we think of it and or have come to know it.

I eagerly await their seminar on Paul.

In my own amateur studies of esoterics and religion I feel confident to move on with my own brand of Cultural Christianity.

When looking at the Gospel of Mark recently and in a new format, line by line -

Bible, King James Version (KJV)

It struck me that Jesus if he ever existed did not live on the timeline they claim that he did. In my opinion, Jesus and or his ministry happened after the destruction of Herod’s temple in 70 AD.

I say this because I already believe that the Gospel of John is at least two small gospels welded together in the middle to suit a political agenda and claiming legitimacy of the Peter Clique of Christians as the one and only authorized Jesus name brand.

That looking at Mark I see road directions, markers that want the reader to believe in these events occurring in a certain time period. That the beginning of each synoptic gospel has different timeline markers designed for different intended audiences. Mark has John the Baptist. Matthew has Herod the Great and the Persian Magi. Luke has a census ordered by Augustus, with a timeframe not easily found or reconciled anywhere else in writings from antiquity.

And looking at Mark the whole Pilate marker is an amateur writer in the early second century wanting to use a recognizable figure such as Pilate in that he on a verbal or oral scale was somebody the Jews were still talking about decades after his transfer out of Palestine.

The trial with the high priest in the gospels is so phony. An orthodox Jew says he is the messiah and the high priest tears his clothes. In real life the high priest would have most likely said something like “Of course you are the messiah, and so is my nephew and half the people I meet everyday”.

The amateur nature of Jew on Jew and noble Roman letting Jew kill Jew is not early first century drama but early second century drama. Simon Bar Kochba and his Revolt and recycling of Hadrian’s Temple of Jupiter as the new Third Temple was a very short lived but real drama. There are coins of this two, three year era when the Jews almost broke the back of the whole Roman army and deserved a Josephus Flavious to write ripe propaganda about it.

Alas there are no records, very few about Hadrian bankrupting the Roman Empire in his desire to subjugate a foreign people and destroy a unique belief system. Who would want to keep records of the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Jews?

Jesus and or his sayings as in the Gospel of Thomas got written into a post apocalyptic script and backdated to be in the old antebellum Temple before 70 C.E. and to fulfill a hundred real or imagined prophetic conditions of a messiah. A simpler setting in a simpler time was needed to explain the teachings of Jesus and not with the backdrop of the chaos and thunder of the collapsed Jewish Dream in 135 C.E..

A simpler setting but the anger and rancor and political Jewish State infighting appear not to be disguised. The Pharisees as a class were a far more important factor in every day Jewish life after the destruction of Herod’s temple in the year 70 that before its demise.

After Bar Kochba and the total destruction of the Jewish State, some had to backtrack and decide or fabricate who the real messiah had really been if not Bar Kochba. Jesus of Nazereth?

We live in a wonderful age. The words of Jesus, the real words of Jesus and their love, humanity and quest for justice will echo through the centuries to come and not be filled with the hate and anti-Semitism of the hack spec writer scripts of the synoptic gospels.