Buddha

The image that stays with me at the end of Karen Armstrong's Buddha is Ananda's tears. Ananda was Siddhatta Gotama's cousin and one of his earliest followers, accompanying Gotama through his long career. But Ananda did not reach enlightenment during the Buddha's life, and he openly wept when he realized that his friend Gotama had finally laid down to die. "When the Buddha heard about Ananda's tears, he sent for him. 'That is enough, Ananda,' he said. 'Don't be sorrowful; don't grieve.' Had he not explained, over and over again, that nothing was permanent but that separation was the law of life? 'And Ananda,' the Buddha concluded, 'for years you have waited on me with constant love and kindness. You have taken care of my physical needs, and have supported me in all your words and thought. You have done all this to help me, joyfully and with your whole heart. You have earned merit, Ananda. Keep trying, and soon you will be enlightened, too.'" So why, in a book about the Buddha, is it Ananda that I most admire? Why does he feel more fully human?

This is my third time through Buddha, and even though it is a slender book trying to capture the life of Siddhattha Gotama, it spoke more to me now than through my first two readings. Of course, trying to judge the accuracy of the book when Gotama's life is shrouded in even more legend and mystery than most biblical characters is virtually impossible. The first written accounts come at least 400 years after he died, and estimates for the dates of his life range from as early as about 570 to as late as 400 BCE. A number of historians question whether he even existed. From what little I know, however, Armstrong's take on his life seems a good place to start.

I especially appreciate her characterization of the social and intellectual milieu of the “Gangetic plains” around the time of Gotama's life. Developing iron age technologies allowed for the cultivation of more land and the production of surplus grains, stimulating trade and an increase in wealth. New social conditions called for increasing specialization, a growing merchant class, and a much more mobile society. These conditions set in motion a growing dissatisfaction with the established Vedic tradition that emphasized social caste, animal sacrifice and Brahmanic domination of ritual. "Since [the] new men fit less and less easily into the caste system, many of them felt that they had been pushed into a spiritual vacuum."

Two main trends began to fill the void. Along the western areas of the Ganges, thinkers reinterpreted the Vedic texts and ideas as emphasizing individual spiritual realization. These ideas eventually coalesced into the Upanishads, giving rise to Vedanta and other schools of Hindu thought. In the forests to the east of the Ganges, more emphasis was put on spiritual liberation through renunciation of the householder's life, living in small communities (sanghas) of beggar monks, and engaging in extreme ascetic or yogic practices.

The spiritual anomie caused by disillusionment with traditional answers reflected a much broader spiritual crisis and awakening during the first century B.C.E. that Armstrong, following Karl Jaspers, calls the Axial Age. Traditional ritualistic religions gradually yielded to ideas of individual responsibility, guilt and salvation in different areas of the world from about 700 to 200 BCE, giving rise to Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, the Hebrew prophets and the Ionian enlightenment. "The Axial Age marks the beginning of humanity as we know it. During this period, men and women became conscious of their own existence, their own nature and their limitations in an unprecedented way. Their experience of utter impotence in a cruel world impelled them to seek the highest goals and absolute reality in the depths of their being.” This concept of the Axial Age has been roundly criticized by a number of historians as overlooking too many differences between the different traditions and encompassing too broad a span of time to be meaningful, but a number of other scholars, notably Robert Bellah and Jurgen Habermas, have found the idea to be useful in exploring the nature and evolution of religious practices.

The Buddha's message, then, begins with the "inescapable reality of pain"--dukkha. It is the first of the Four Noble Truths--"suffering...informs the whole of human life." The cause of our suffering comes from desire, which "makes us grab or cling to things that can never give lasting satisfaction." These were common assumptions among the forest monks, but Gotama said that the way out--Nirvana--was not through the extreme ascetic or yogic practices which he had tried and eventually abandoned but through a "middle way"--the eightfold path--that emphasized morality, meditation, and wisdom. Gotama taught techniques of mindfulness and awareness that stressed intense examination of thoughts, emotions and actions, leading to realization of the truths of anicca (impermanence), anatta (non-self)--the ego and the self had no reality but were just streams of sensations and thoughts held together out of fear. Contrary to other schools of thought, Gotama did not posit an eternal Self or soul or any other kind of metaphysical entity. (One recent commentator stated, "The Buddha was an atheist. There's no getting around it.") Nor did he insist on the infallibility of any of his teachings. His Dhamma (instructions or methods) were to be judged only by their consequences--how well they worked. But he felt that the monks who followed his path would find that "by meditation, concentration, mindfulness and a disciplined detachment from the world...it was possible to live in this world of pain, at peace, in control and in harmony with oneself and the rest of creation."

Which brings me back to Ananda’s tears. Since all living beings suffer, Gotama extended his compassion to the four corners of the universe, but it was a “wholly disinterested benevolence, “an attitude of total equanimity,” which “demanded that he abandon all personal preference.” Here was the one man, Ananda, who had accompanied Gotama on his journeys for over 40 years, shedding tears for the loss of his beloved companion and teacher, and the Buddha chided Ananda for his grief, in essence saying to him, you still don’t get it, do you. Gotama could not deal with his best friend’s sorrow (well, ok, he did not allow himself to have a bff), and that’s where Mr. Gotama and I begin to part company.

I have been a fellow traveller with Buddhism for, what, close to 45 years now. I have had a great affinity for the ideas of Buddhism, especially the radical agnosticism that seems to underlie much of Buddhist thought. Anatta and anicca seem to be truths that fit comfortably with the findings of science and can even accommodate the weirdness of quantum mechanics. As I keep track of the current debates over personal responsibility with the current findings of neuroscience, Buddhism made the same points about 2500 years ago. Gotama could have agreed with Michael Gazzaniga's "left brained interpreter that is coming up with the theory, the narrative and the self image, taking the information from various inputs, from the neuronal workspace, and from the knowledge structures, and gluing it together, thus creating the self, the autobiography, out of the chaos of input." And, certainly, as I grow older, the concept of dukkha fits with the decay and the suffering of old age.

But I never took my Buddhism to the next level, to that of practice, and as Armstrong really makes clear to me this time, it don't mean jack shit until then. Ideas don't mean nothing in the Buddhist scheme of things until they have been thoroughly and totally assimilated through the full acceptance and practice of the eightfold path and the incorporation of samadhi, jhana, and prajna--meditation, concentration, and wisdom. Only those people who have taken the vows to triple refuge--to the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha--can hope to get there. "The full Dhamma was possible only for monks---the Noble Truths were not for laymen; they had to be "realized" and this direct knowledge could not be realized without yoga, which was essential to the full Buddhist regimen....the laity were never able to graduate to serious yoga." The "full Buddhist regimen," then, eventually means "going forth" (taking the vows) and renunciation of the self--a renunciation of who I am and what I have stood for. That ain't going to happen.

I guess when it comes down to it, my Buddhism has been more about self actualization rather than self renunciation. It's been more related to sports psychology or the path of achievement than to the eightfold path, more about trying to remove limitations, doubts, negativity than about acknowledging suffering and seeking release. I want more tools in my mental arsenal to help me deal with my own problems. I don’t want to give up my best friends, my goals, my values, my personality

Perhaps it’s my inability to accept the centrality of suffering as the main fact of life. Armstrong begins her narrative of Gotama's life with the premise that, "the spiritual life cannot begin until people allow themselves to be invaded by the reality of suffering, realizing how fully it permeates our whole experience, and feel the pain of all other beings." Or as paraphrased by Diarmaid McCulloch in his review of The Great Transformation, "Life is a bastard, and then you die."

Well, frankly, I've spent the better part of my life trying to hide that little nastiness from myself. You would have thought that wallowing around in my own shallow mediocrity would have driven that point home by now, but somehow I've managed to keep hold of the hope that life is good, still trying to escape the limitations that time, place, age, and circumstance have laid on me, trying to be better than I am even though the energy and the physical presence have inevitably started draining away. It's kind of like what Waldo (Mr. Emerson) said as he came towards the end of his life, "One of these days, before I die, I still believe I shall do better." Probably it's all delusion. Or as my man Michael (Mr. Montaigne) might have said, I'm really pretty fucking lucky to have gotten this far, I guess, without undue suffering and hardship. It doesn't feel very noble or heroic, but well, it’s all I’ve got. "I grow old...I grow old..."

So, I guess I'll continue to be a fellow traveler, and maybe even spend more time on my zafu, waiting for my meditation app to tell me that I've done enough for the day. But I have no hopes about reaching any kind of enlightenment, and a whole lot of doubts about how desirable it even is. I'll just kind of muddle along and grow older and suffer, as confused as ever. So be it. I'm thinking that's about as good as it gets.

Author: Armstrong, Karen

Date Published: 2001

Length: 187 pp

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To a Mountain in Tibet

The most telling moment in Colin Thubron's To A Mountain in Tibet comes just before he reaches the summit of Drolma pass while making the kora or circumnavigation of Mount Kailasa. At 18,000 feet, he is struggling with each step to reach the high point of his journey, and pilgrims come zipping past him in their quest for redemption. This is the month of Saga Dawa, when Tibetan Buddhists and Indian Hindus come to the mountain to "dispel the defilement of a lifetime." For Hindus, Mount Kailas is the home of Shiva, the dancing god of ceaseless change and destruction, while for Buddhists, Mount Kailas is "the mystic Mount Meru," the axis-mundi, the center of the universe, inhabited by numerous buddhas and bodhisattvas. For Tibetans it is also the center of the old kingdom of Zhang Zhung, where Tibetan kings descended from the sky and where Padmasambhava ousted the ancient Bon worship and established the domination of Buddhism in Tibet.

As the pilgrims hurry past Thubron, "They look unquenchably happy...what they are seeing, I cannot tell...Buddhist lore claims that if the eyes are purified, the land transforms." Yet so little of this happiness or this transformation comes through in Thubron's description of his trip. He spends days trekking to the mountain, describing, sometimes in exquisite detail, the land, the people, the temples and shrines that he passes, and everything seems bleak and depressing. Now on the high point, both literally and figuratively, of the kora, the final image of his journey is neither joy nor remdemption, not even accomplishment, but depression: "a shadowy melancholy descends: the bewilderment when something long awaited has gone."

Of course, that feeling that something long awaited or cherished has vanished is the essence of Buddhism. The central tenet, the first of the Fourfold Noble Truths is the truth of suffering--dukkha. All existence is empty and impermanent (anatta and anicca), and suffering arises when we try to hold on to the past or even the present. There is no there there, and suffering arises when we try to grasp what is not there. Thubron perceives this, I think, although he doesn't mention it explicitly. Much of it arises when he thinks of his recently deceased mother, or his long-dead father and sister, knowing that they live only in his grief and his memories: "You cannot walk out your grief, I know, or absolve yourself of your survival, or bring anyone back. You are left with the desire only that things not be as they are."

Thubron chooses not only to make the kora, the 34 mile circumnavigation of Mount Kailas but to spend ten days trekking along the Karnali River to get to the mountain. Along the way, he describes the poverty and the hopelessness of the lives he passes through: "And what happens to the villages?...they become the ghetto of the unenterprising, the sick, the old." But this deterioration of village life is nothing compared with the devastation of Tibetan culture by the Chinese. "In a land maimed since 1950 by Chinese occupation, by mass killings and displacement, the Cultural Revolution, with its wholesale destruction of things old, struck at Tibet's heart." He stops at the shrines and the temples on his journey, describing the monks, the statues, the deities in a confusing welter of details where Hindu, Bon, and Buddhist stories compete for attention. It is a cold and dismal place full of alien beings in an alien culture. It is a world pervaded by chortens and prayer flags and trash--and death.

"Perhaps, as some say, the Tibetans' is a death-haunted culture. Certainly their death cults haunts others." At one point Thubron visits a durtro on the side of Mount Kailas where Tibetans take the bodies of their dead to be hacked into small pieces and left for the vultures. It is also a place where some Tibetans go to lie among the remnants of the dead and enact their own passing. Thubron is sickened by the site and rushes away: "Only a belief in reincarnation might alleviate this bleak dismay. Without it, the once-incarnate dead become uniquely precious, and break the heart." Even at the top of Drolma pass, Tubron finds another cemetery not for physical corpses but pieces of memory of the dead. "This cemetery, for all its squalid aspect, is for many the heart of their kora."

This is also where Thubron finds the contradiction inherent in Buddhism, for "the Buddhist living cannot help the deceased, whose souls do not exist...nothing cherished or even recognizable endures...nothing of the individual survives." That becomes the lesson that Thubron finds so hard to bear: "From all that he loves, a man must part." Thubron has ben lugging the memory of his mother, his father, his sister up and around the mountain with him, but what he really mourns is the loss of himself. It's not only regret for lost chances and all that he has not become but also for what has been and will never come again. Not just the life unfulfilled but the life fulfilled as well. It's all gone now. All that is left is "pure loss: the loss that mourns the tang of all human difference, of a herdman's impromptu song, perhaps, the lilt of a laugh in Grindelwald, or the fingers that caress a favourite dog." It is the universal feeling of a life that has come and gone, forever, never to return. That is the lesson of the Buddha, and it is a bitter, bitter pill to swallow.

Author: Thurbron, Colin

Date Published: 2011

Length: 227 pp.

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Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages

What would it be like to put Richard Dawkins, probably the foremost atheist of our time, and Pope Benedict, "God's Rottweiler," in the same room and tape their conversation? In a recent interview on NPR, Dawkins was "unapologetic about his willingness to label as ridiculous beliefs rooted in faith rather than evidence," calling those beliefs "self-deluded ways of thinking." Meanwhile, in a recent Easter week sermon, Benedict blasted disobedience among a group of priests who had been calling for the ordination of women, the end of clerical celibacy, and the right of divorced parishoners to celebrate mass. Benedict criticized the priests as "driven by their own preferences and ideas and should instead turn toward a 'radicalism of obedience'...Christ's concern 'was for true obedience as opposed to human choice.'" As I read these two articles, I thought, "Holy crap! We're back in the middle of the twelfth century."

In Aristotle's Children, Richard Rubenstein traces this split between science and religion, reason vs. faith, back to the twelfth century and an attempt to incorporate the newly rediscovered works of Aristotle into western thinking. Most of Aristotle's thought was lost to the west with the decline of literacy in the former Roman empire and the dominance of the Church over all intellectual activity. After all, Aristotle "felt himself to be part of a living, integrated, self-sufficient universe--a place whose basic principles could be understood by reasoning." The thinking of the Church, especially after Augustine, saw man as a corrupt being who was incapable of knowing the truth without divine illumination. Reason and scientific knowledge were irrelevant and possibly harmful to salvation. The emperor Julian thought so in 527 when he closed the Academy in Athens: "Philosophical speculation had become an aid of heretics and an inflamer of disputes among Christians."

Julian's order marked the official end of pagan thought in the empire, but many of its former philosophers and scholars had already found a more welcoming environment in the Persian empire, taking their libraries with them. When Islam conquered the Persians and spread throughout the Middle East and across north Africa into Spain, many of its scholars and theologians struggled to incorporate Aristotle with the Qu'ran. Toledo, in particular, became an important library and learning center in Al-Andalus, the Islamic empire in Spain. The fundamentalist revival of al-Ghazali, however, brought an end to independent thinking in the Islamic world, and Aristotle appeared headed for oblivion again.

In the meantime, the Reconquista or "recovery" of Spain from its Islamic rulers brought Christian thinkers into contact with the Islamic translations and commentary on Aristotle, especially in the works of Avicenna, Averroes, and Moses Maimonides. The Archbishop of Toledo, Raymund, encouraged and sponsored the translation of many of these works into Latin. As these manuscripts began to find their way into the rest of Europe, the material and social living conditions started to improve, leading, in Rubenstein's eyes, to a more optimistic world view that had a higher regard for man's ability to understand nature. With this came "a new demand for understanding--a demand to 'know' the truths of religion in addition to believing them." The so-called Medieval renaissance was underway, and its development led to massive tensions in western thinking over "the extent to which European intellectuals would commit themselves to the quest for rational understanding and how they could do so without losing their religious and cultural identity."

Church intellectuals hit a major crisis point in the Albigensian crusade. The Cathars, steeped in Aristotelian logic came to the conclusion that "God cannot be simultaneously good and omnipotent." Orthodox thinking had placed the problem of evil off limits to human thinking; some things can only be known by faith: "Reason must yield to revelation and logic to faith." The Pope promulgated the first Inquisition in 1184 to ferret out heresy, especially among the Cathars, and eventually preached a Crusade against them in 1215. The groups charged with administering the Inquisition, primarily the Dominicans (the Dogs of God) and Franciscans, soon found that they needed their own "preachers skilled in Aristotelian dialectics" to stand a chance in intellectual combat with the heretics.

This time also saw the first appearance of universities in Europe--the University of Paris was chartered in 1200 although it had been in existence as a cathedral school for quite some time--and one of the major issues that dominated the faculties at these schools was the incorporation of Aristotle's thought. Peter Abelard, for example, pushed the buttons of quite a few Church officials when he drew large crowds by debating issues like original sin and the trinity. Church authorities made various attempts to place Aristotle's works off-limits, but they failed to curb the influence of his thinking. Eventually, Thomas Aquinas achieved his great synthesis of Aristotle and theology in the Summa Theologica. He placed only three doctrines outside the realm of human reason: "the creation of the universe from nothing, God's nature as a trinity, and Jesus Christ's role in man's salvation." All of the other truths can be discovered by the use of natural reason, including the "moral standards that God requires of us." Thomas' system of natural theology--scholasticism--did not sit well with church conservatives, but in the end, he was canonized and his thought shaped subsequent Catholic theology.

The next generation of thinkers disagreed with Aquinas, however, and pushed Aristotle's thought to the breaking point with church doctrine, with William of Ockham flourishing his famous razor to sever the ties between science and theology. "The patterns that we discover by reasoning abstractly about created things are the product of our mental processes, not evidence of divine intentions." Knowledge of the world was pursued for its own sake, divorced from having to support theological conclusions. Even as Aristotle's thought began to inform church thinking, the validity of his science was called into question. In time, thinkers like Francis Bacon vehemently rejected scholastic thought as Aristotle's thought became "an obstacle to all those who wished to break the power of the Catholic Church."

The big picture behind all of this are the questions of what we know and how we know what we know--the epistemic questions. Is it enough to use evidence based reasoning to discover the world and our place in it? Or is there more to heaven and earth than is in our philosophy? Richard Dawkins, of course, would tell us no. The conclusions of science are based on evidence that is rigorously examined in public inquiry and yield far and away the best knowledge of the world. Other thinkers, whether post modern theorists or fundamental creationists or radical skeptics are not so sure. The philosopher Alvin Plantinga, for example, argues that "from a naturalistic point of view, we have every reason to doubt that our cognitive faculties are reliable. Therefore we can't seriously believe naturalism....Our cognitive faculties have evolved to maximize our fitness, not to represent the world accurately." So, is the quest for the Higgs boson really worth the billions of dollars that we have poured into research when only theoretical physicists can comprehend what's going on? Or are faith, dogma, and authority equally valid responses to finding the meaning of life, the universe and everything? If so, which faith, which dogma, whose authority? Or, is there a point where, like Montaigne, we throw up our hands and cry, "What do I know?"

Rubenstein is skeptical of science's ability to answer the big picture questions: "Scientific rationalism emerged from the wreckage of scholasticism strengthened in technique but greatly impoverished in scope, unable to command the fields of metaphysics, ethics, and politics." It's the same point made many times over by Karen Armstrong--when logos dominates our thinking and our knowledge, we ignore mythos at our peril. Like a repressed dream or memory, mythos will re-emerge in some fairly ugly and misshapened ways, resistant to change and closed to dialogue. Richard Rubenstein thinks that by looking back to the twelfth and thirteen century we might be able to reopen that dialogue: "Answers that make sense require the sort of dialogue between a rationally influenced faith and an ethically interested reason that took place a few centuries ago in the medieval universities....A world hungry for wholeness yearns" Frankly, I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

Author: Rubenstein, Richard

Date Published: 2003

Length: 384 pp

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Empire of the Summer Moon

The whole concept of a homeland is total bullshit. I don't care if it's the Nordic race, the Jewish people, the Serbs of eastern Europe, the Hispanic southwest, or the Comanches of the Comancheria, from the staked plains of New Mexico to the Arkansas River. It was also taken from someone else a bit earlier. Towards the end of S. C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon, Quannah Parker is asked how the Comanches came to lose their "ancestral homeland." He responds by steadily pushing his questioner down the log that they are sitting on until that person falls off the log. That's how, he says. Yet that's how the Comanches themselves came to be the "Lords of the South Plains." They came down out of Wyoming sometime between 1625 and 1750, breaking off from the main Shoshoni tribe, and pushed the Apache and all other tribes off the southern plains until they had it all to themselves.

The Comanche were an ugly people, not only or even primarily physically ugly--"short, dark-skinned, heavy-limbed, squat-legged and ungraceful"--but culturally and spiritually ugly as well. Gwynne describes them as the most primitive of the primitive. Prior to their emergence on the south plains, they were culturally impoverished and pushed into marginal living conditions by the more powerful tribes of the northern plains. But then they became the baddest bad-ass motherfuckers on the block. Gwynne ties this transformation back to Pope's rebellion in 1680 when the Spanish hightailed it back to Mexico, leaving most of their horse herds behind. Somehow the Comanche developed the skill and the culture to become better horse warriors that anyone else. "Few nations have ever progressed with such breath-taking speed from sulking pariah to dominant power."

The Comanche became so powerful that they chased the Apache off the plains and out of Texas. They kept the Mexicans from expanding further from the Rio Grande River, and they kept the Tejanos from venturing east of what is now Interstate 35 from San Antonio to Dallas. Even that was risky, as the Parker clan found out when they tried to homestead over 10,000 acres on "the absolute outermost edge of the Indian frontier." They were soon raided--in 1836--by a Comanche party that left five men dead and five women and children captured. One of the kidnapped girls was Cynthia Ann Parker who was adopted into the tribe, became the wife of the powerful leader Peta Nacona, and gave birth to Quannah Parker, the last of the great Comanche leaders.

The Comanche were a warlike and vicious people who employed brutal tactics against their victims. Anyone who has read the Lonesome Dove saga, especially Dead Man's Walk or Comanche Moon, knows the detail: torture, rape, murder, mayhem. It worked. The Comanche stopped western expansion in Texas until a new technology changed the balance of power, again. With repeating revolvers and eventually repeating rifles, first the Texas Rangers (under John Coffee Hays) and later, after the Civil War, the U. S. Cavalry (under Ranald Mackenzie and Nelson Miles) learned to take the fight to the Comanche. More importantly, the annihilation of the southern buffalo herds starved the remaining Comanche into submission.

Empire of the Summer Moon is a sordid tale. The savagery of the Comanche was matched on numerous occasions by the anglo culture determined to wrest the land away. It was in retaliation to the Council House treachery in 1840, when 25 Comanche leaders were killed and another 30 taken hostage (later to be killed) in San Antonio under the pretence of peace negotiations that Buffalo Hump led his famous raid through the heart of Texas to the Gulf of Mexico, vividly described in Comanche Moon. In any case, after the Civil War, the Comanches had a few tricks left, such as Quannah's eluding Mackenzie's forces in the Palo Duro with his whole village, but it only became a matter of time until the remaining Comanche were competing for space in Oklahoma with the other tribes that had been removed there. And the whites eventually took most of that land as well. How soon will it be until another people arise and dispossess the culture that claims the land now? Really, it is only a matter of time.

Author: Gwynne, S. C.

Date Published: 2010

Length: 15h 4m

Narrator: Drummond, David

Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation

Why did the book of Revelation make it into the New Testament? After all, it is a strange nightmarish tale of the end of life, the universe, and everything, and it wasn't based on anything that Jesus said or did. He certainly thought that the end of the world was coming very soon, as did Paul a few years later. But the end of the world didn't happen very soon, and then here's John of Patmos writing of the imminent destruction of the world 50 or 60 years later, telling how it was all going to come down. So, if John didn't get his info from Jesus or any of the other apostles, where did it come from? He had a vision: "The gospel I have preached is not of human origin…I have received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ." How is John's vision, then, different from that of Wovoka, the Paiute prophet who had a vision of white men leaving America and Paiutes reclaiming their ancestral lands? Or from the mathematical calculations of the end of times worked out by Mayan priests? Or of Marshall Applewhite's receiving messages from the Hale-Bopp comet and convincing the members of the Heaven's Gate cult to commit suicide in a posh San Diego neighborhood?

As the findings from Nag Hammadi make clear, there were a lot of competing manuscripts vying for usage by the different Jesus movements in the decades following Jesus' death. Many of these manuscripts had very different messages than those have come down to us through the centuries. Why did a few of these books make it into the New Testament while most did not? I think Elaine Pagels makes it clear that it comes down to a couple of early church bully boys that were seeking to consolidate their own power and their own vision of the gospel. Not only did they get the Revelation of John into the New Testament, but they managed to stand his message on its head. Pagel's book on the writing and inclusion of the Revelation of John makes for a marvelous tale of intrigue and politics in the early church.

John may have thought that he was actually experiencing the end of the world when the Romans destroyed the temple at Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and then burned the city down. The center of Jewish culture and religion was gone, and Jews began to scatter about the Mediterranean either voluntarily or as slaves. John was a practicing Jew who believed that Jesus was the long sought Messiah, and he was convinced that he was watching the pollution of the Jewish culture and religion from two different sources. Jews were increasingly being forced to pay homage to the foreign gods of the dominant Roman empire, an act which destroyed the integrity of Israel's status as a chosen people. But John also saw the spreading of the Christian message among the gentiles, as begun by Paul, as equally repellent.

In trying to answer the eternal question of why good people suffer while the wicked flourish, John projected a fairly tale future in which the Roman Empire—the infamous Whore of Babylon—would be destroyed and the righteous eventually triumph. (It only took another 1400 years or so for the Romans to finally pass from the scene.) And no, the number 666 does not refer to Barak Obama, Saddam Hussein, or John F. Kennedy (as W. A. Criswell told us in 1960). It's pretty clear that the Emperor Nero, who used Jews and Christians as human torches shortly after the burning of Rome, is the intended designee. John also makes clear in his messages to the seven churches that those who have listened to the false prophets Jezebel and Balaam—those in the churches who had fornicated with gentiles and eaten unclean meat which had been sacrificed to the foreign gods—were going to get it in the end as well. Since Paul was one of those who ate unclean meat and who relaxed the requirements for circumcision, his followers, the "spiritual Israel" were among the doomed. "Those whom John says Jesus 'hates' look very much like the Gentile followers of Jesus converted through Paul's teachings."

So not only did John's revelation not come through Jesus' teachings, it attacked the very group of believers that became the mainstay of the Christian church. Of course, Pauls's message also depended on his own "revelation" of what Jesus taught, so you have another line of teaching that lies outside the direct apostolic lineage as. But then, so much of what is "apostolic" comes from the 40 days of Pentecost after Jesus died, so there are at least three different "vision quests" at work in determining the "authentic" message of the Jesus movement. But that's just based on the material that actually made it into the New Testament. It doesn't include most of the Nag Hammadi material nor the "New Prophecy" movement of Montanus or Valentinus that was inspired by John's revelation. So who gets to decide what is right and what is bogus?

Into the breach step at least two of the most unpleasant but also most influential of the early church fathers, Irenaeus of Lyons and Athanasius of Alexander. Somehow they found a way to cobble together the seemingly contradictory messages of Paul and John to a few of the gospel stories and manage to tell everyone else what is acceptable and what must be tossed. At the same time, they managed to close down any further revelation or direct contact with the divine spirit except through what became the Catholic church.

It really comes down to politics. Skip back to Ignatius, who styled himself as the Bishop of Antioch (ca 67-108 AD) and is given credit by Pagels for being the first person to call himself and his followers "Christians." He begins to enforce the power structure of the "apostolic" church with the emphasis on bishops, deacons, and priests. At the same time, he elevates Paul's letters into a central pillar of the church: "Ignatius declares the primary sources are not the Hebrew scriptures but what he finds in Paul's letters: 'for me, the primary sources are [Christ's] cross, his resurrection, and the faith that comes through him.'"

Irenaeus of Lyons picks up on Ignatius' message in the late second century—he may have been one of the first of the church fathers to insist on the authority of the Bishop of Rome--and begins to formulate what we now accept as the New Testament canon, although a number of the other bishops and priests were also pushing for inclusion or exclusion of certain texts as being "scriptural." In attacking the Gnostic messages of Valentinus, Marcion, and the "new prophets," Irenaeus condemned many of the documents that were in circulation among the different churches, such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Secret Revelation of John, the Revelation of Ezra, the secret Revelation of James. Whereas many of the other bishops condemned the Revelation of John in response to the "new prophecy" movement, Irenaeus insisted that the spirit of God was speaking through the book. First off, he believed that both the Revelation and the Gospel of John were written by John of Zebedee, one of Jesus' original followers. But Irenaeus also saw that the vision of the horrific end times gave him a handle on making sense of the increased prosecution of Christians in the middle of the second century. Then he went a step further and interpreted the Revelation of John as an attack on heretics, that is, anyone who disagreed with him. In fact, as far as we know, Irenaeus is the first writer to use the word "heresy" in connection with Christian doctrine. What counts for salvation from the horrific ending is right belief: those disagree with Irenaeus will be destroyed along with the Romans who are prosecuting the Christians. This includes those messianic Jews to whom John of Patmos directed his message.

Irenaeus also coupled the Old Testament concept of the anti-messiah to John's Revelation, calling the beast of the Revelation the AntiChrist, an idea not found in John's Revelation. "By linking 'the beast' with 'AntiChrist'—namely that 'the beast' who embodies alien ruling powers is also inextricably linked with false belief and false belief in turn with moral depravity, Irenaeus makes a crucial interpretation of John's prophecies. Irenaeus wants to show that God's judgment demands not only right action but right belief…'the beast' works not only through outsiders who prosecute Christians but also through Christian insiders, the 'false brethren' whom he calls heretics."

The real villain in this piece, for me, even more than Irenaeus, is Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria (328-373 AD). Athanasius came to prominence during the Arian crisis that led to the formulation of the Nicene Creed. Since Christianity had just been declared the favored religion of the emperor Constantine, those Christians who did not espouse the particular relationship of the Father and the Son, designated by the term homoousia—that Jesus was of the same substance, coeternal with the Father—were decreed heretics by Constantine. They could have their property confiscated and be expelled from the empire. Athanasius won the battle against Arius, but he had a long war ahead of him.

After essentially stealing the election to become the bishop of Alexandria, Athansius sought to consolidate all of the power of the Egyptian church under his control. John's Revelation became one of his favorite tools to bust the heretics' chops. It took him 45 years to accomplish his mission, but when he was done, the New Testament canon was set, the rebellious desert monks had been brought to bear, and the central doctrine of the church was the Nicene Creed. "Athanasius interpreted John's Book of Revelation as condemning all 'heretics' and then made this book the capstone of the New Testament canon where it has remained ever since. At the same time, he ordered Christians to stop reading any other 'books of revelation' which he branded heretical and sought to destroy—with almost complete success." By 367, Athanasius had determined what Christians could read and what must be censored, and most of the censored books were destroyed. He also condemned "original human thinking" as evil so that nothing could be added or changed from his list of books.

And so, we can ultimately thank Athanasius every time we hear some two-bit preacher on the radio who characterizes Barak Obama as the AntiChrist or listen to Harold Camping tell his followers to sell their possessions and gather in the desert for the "Rapture" or even remember a James Watt who declined to protect the environment because "I don't know how much longer we'll be around." His personal politics have become the widespread beliefs of so many.

Author: Pagels, Elaine

Date Published: 2012

Length: 256 pp

electronic print