Last week, we explored together my understanding of the nature of God.  As you saw in that essay, the Divine is not a thing like the other things we experience.  Most people understand God as an object, another thing – something to be experienced like all other things.  This is simply not true.

The Divine can be experienced, but it cannot be captured by words.  This kind of knowledge is no longer about God; it is an immediate and direct awareness.  While words can point to the experience, they can never adequately describe or capture it.  And this suggests, quite strongly, that God has a pretty serious problem!

The problem is this: how can the Divine communicate its nature to humankind?  How can God direct and encourage us?

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I think there are multiple answers to this question, and that they are all valid and true.  These multiple answers are the avatars – those great spiritual souls who have experienced the Divine directly.  They include Shankara and Patanjali from Hinduism, Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, Lao Tsu, Moses and Elijah from Judaism, al-Ghazali and al-Ansari from Islam, and Jesus from my own faith tradition.

On hearing this, many of you might be shocked to your core!  Christianity has taught that Jesus is the only way to God.  The clearest exclusivist statement in the New Testament comes from the gospel of John, where “Jesus said, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”  

What most Christians miss is the context. The phrase, “no one… except through me” is logically restrictive, and it would seem to exclude all other faith traditions.  But it is located within the context of Johannine theology, which is the most theologically developed system in the New Testament.  

You will notice that John does not define what “through me” means.  Does it mean the person of Jesus – the traditional Christian interpretation of exclusivity?  Does it mean the teaching of Jesus – which suggests that the same teaching in other contexts is also an avenue to the Divine?  Or does it mean Jesus as an avatar – a great spiritual soul, a teacher who shares with us a particular experience of the Divine?  That both his teaching and/or the spiritual power of his presence could move one into the Divine?

Sadly, all of the faith traditions have elements that insist that their way to God is the only way.  What these elements seem to miss is that this kind of insistence takes them to dead ends.  When you believe in this way, while there may be an initial period where there seems to be some internal spiritual movement, if you look closely, you’ll see that the apparent progress quickly comes to a halt.

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So this brings us to Jesus.  There are an array of assumptions and questions which need to be addressed before we go any further.  Did Jesus actually exist or was he a made-up character?  Did he actually perform miracles?  Was he resurrected from the dead?

I think all of these questions can be answered in the affirmative.  Jesus was a real human being, born from Mary, in what is now known as the state of Israel.  There are so many contemporaneous accounts of Jesus that to deny his physical existence seems ridiculous.  We have more written documents referring to this carpenter, Jesus, than we have of the more ‘significant’ people of that era – people like the Roman emperors, the governors of the various Roman territories, military leaders, and so on.

Did Jesus perform miracles?  Again, there are too many accounts of his miracles and other supernatural or paranormal events occurring in his presence for us to simply discard them out of hand.  Our present scientific worldview tends to dismiss any accounts of miracles.  What our scientists have steadfastly refused to entertain is the possibility that these accounts are true.  That said, I believe my recent book, Inside the Invisible, provides clear evidence for the existence of miracles, why they arise when they do, and their place in the spiritual journey.

Was Jesus actually resurrected from the dead?  Again, there are so many independent accounts of his resurrection that to deny it seems absurd.  Imagine what would have happened to his followers if they had falsely maintained that Jesus had come back to life?  They would have been ridiculed and laughed out of town.  

For the sake of argument, let’s look at what would have happened if Jesus did not come back to life.  There were at least 16 individuals who saw the resurrected Jesus: the three women at the tomb and the 11 remaining disciples, and the two travelers on the road to Emmaus.  Do you really think that 16 people could make up the same narrative and maintain it over time?  Of course not!  Discrepancies would have arisen that contradicted each other and the truth would have come out.  Eventually, if you keep at it long enough, the truth always seems to emerge and lies are revealed for what they are.

That doesn’t mean that there weren’t plenty of contradictions and confusions about Jesus.  As we have explored in previous essays, there were at least four major schools of thought – four distinct theologies – about the nature of Jesus.  These schools often had conflicting opinions and very different understandings about the nature of their Lord and the nature of his teachings.

Let’s look at the first of these theologies, the Jewish Christian one.  This means that we have to start with something that might shock you – Jesus was not Christian, he was Jewish.  Christianity as a distinct religious faith did not emerge until decades after Jesus’s death.

The evidence in the New Testament strongly suggests that Jesus understood himself as an observant Jew who believed in the Torah and all of the laws contained within it.  That said, he also seemed to believe that the last days were upon us – that the world and all humanity were in danger of imminent destruction by God.  If taken literally, as many do, this was clearly a mistake.  

After Jesus ascended into heaven, his brother, James the Just, became the principal leader of Jesus’s followers.  To quote from a previous newsletter, “They emphasized observance of the Torah, including circumcision, the Sabbath, dietary laws, and reverence for the temple before its destruction in 70 A.D.  They saw Jesus as the Davidic Messiah and emphasized his humanness.  They stressed Jesus’s ethical teaching, especially material such as his Sermon on the Mount.  According to Acts, they practiced communal sharing and lived in poverty and simplicity.  Authority was located in the ‘brother of the Lord,’ James the Just.”

We see from this that Jewish Christianity was the original matrix for the Jesus movement.  As nearly as we can tell, from a divide of some 2000 years, this flavor of Christianity was as close to Jesus’s actual teaching as we can determine.

Now let me show you why these Jewish origins are important to our understanding of Jesus’s life and teaching.  One of the great mysteries of the Church is the discrepancy in the narratives surrounding Jesus’s birth.  Two of the Gospels, Matthew and Luke, go into great detail about the miraculous events surrounding his birth.  Let me list them:

• The divine insemination of Mary 

• The journey of Joseph and Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem

• Jesus’s birth in a humble stable

• The angelic announcement to the shepherds

• The three wise men bringing gifts from the East

• Their encounter with King Herod and the slaughter of the innocents, and

• The flight into Egypt

These events, if true, have extraordinary drama.  One must ask, “Why do only two of the Gospels include them.”

The Gospel of Mark, widely accepted to be the first of the canonical Gospels to be written, starts with Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan River.  Why would this early gospel omit such an extraordinary birth narrative?  It’s certainly not because of the supernatural aspects, since Mark incorporates the supernatural in his opening account, with the Holy Spirit descending like a dove and the voice of God saying, “This is my son…”

And how about the gospel of John, the most theologically sophisticated of the four?  John starts off with a cosmic declaration, declaring that Jesus is the Son of God and that all things came into being through him.  Following this extraordinary series of statements, John cuts directly to the Jewish priests questioning John the Baptist, again omitting any mention of the birth narratives.

Why would they do this?  The narratives surrounding Jesus’s birth are great attention–getting stories.  If you are trying to convince people that Jesus is someone special, someone sent by God to lead them to a promised land, these narratives grab your attention.  This is exactly what the founders of a new religion need.  Yet, in the case of Christianity, half of the canonical Gospels omit this.

Even more, the Gospel of Thomas, arguably the earliest of all of the Gospels, omits the birth narratives.  Thomas is a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus and it has no mention either of Jesus’s birth or his crucifixion, death, and resurrection.  Why would the earliest account of Jesus omit these extraordinary stories?

The answer is found in the Jewish origins of Christianity.  The earliest followers of Jesus were all Jewish.  They believed that Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies and was the promised Messiah, sent by God to restore the covenant between God and the people of Israel.  This meant that the circumstances of Jesus’s life had to fit the messianic prophecies.  And this is where things get screwy …

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I’m going to leave you here this week.  I know this leaves you hanging, but I promise we will go even deeper into the contradictions inherent in the Church’s understanding of Jesus next week and in the weeks following.  I would encourage you to come back to this essay and reread it over the coming week.  Much of the information here contradicts what we have been taught.  It goes against the grain – I know this because, despite my familiarity with this material, it goes against my grain too.  

I cherish our Christmas traditions.  I delight in the traditional Christmas carols, the Advent services leading up to our celebration of Christ’s birth on December 25.  The quiet mass on Christmas morning.  The tender sweetness of God sending himself to us in the person of his son, Jesus.

That said, I also believe in truth.  I believe it is worthwhile to sort through the specifics of our faith because I believe the process has the power to free us from our delusions and our self-centeredness.  These challenges do not shake my faith in the person of Jesus or my faith in his teachings to transform our lives.  They do, however, separate the nuggets of truth from the fear-driven neuroses of our forebearers.

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Please take time this week to sit with yourself in stillness.  Just as Jesus had to withdraw from the crowds and take time for himself, so we too need to withdraw.  Perhaps the most difficult withdrawal is learning to leave the constant self-talk that afflicts us.  For me, that simply indicates the absolute importance of our periodic daily withdrawals.  We draw closer to the Divine in stillness, when we let go of every other object so that we can rest with God.

I hope you have a splendid week and I look forward to continuing our discussion in the next newsletter.

May God make his face to shine upon you, this day, and always!

P.S.  These newsletters were written in a particular order, but due to the limitations of our email delivery system, we cannot send them in the order in which they were written.  We can send out the first five in order, but then the system sends out the next one, whatever that happens to be.

So, if you are suddenly moving from issue #5 to issue #whatever, it might be a little jarring.  If this sounds like you, I would encourage you to go back into our archives and do your best to read them in order. 

Humility as a Tool  → Letting go → Fear → Openness →  Acceptance & Growth

If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible:  The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇

To access the other newsletter editions of the “Inside The Invisible Newsletter,” or if you’d like to read ahead or go back.

Please Note: These newsletters are meant to be read in order.