The Myths of Jesus

Two religions, Christianity and Islam, have a particular focus on the life, supposed teachings, and significance of a preacher who (may have) lived in the Roman province of Judea during the early Roman Empire. Because both of those religions are based on myths that take the form of history, and that many of their followers believe to actually be history, the myths of Jesus get bound together with historical questions about his life and its effects, and it becomes difficult to extract the one from the other. For that reason, before plunging into a discussion of the myths of Jesus themselves, I’m going to take a paragraph to say something about the history of Jesus.

We don’t know for certain whether Jesus even existed. We don’t know how much of the Gospel accounts accurately describe his career. We know some things are inherently very unlikely (the miraculous darkness, earthquake, and tearing of the Temple veil when he died, for example) because there should be independent evidence of them if they happened, and there isn’t. Other things seem historically unlikely, such as the use of nails at his crucifixion, because that isn’t how it was usually done. (Crucifixion victims were normally roped to the cross, not nailed, as they lived and suffered longer that way.) Some of the miracles attributed to him seem plausible to me, knowing what I do of magic, while others seem ridiculously over the top (but of course I have no direct evidence against their occurrence, and my knowledge of magic is not absolute and infallible.) The historical Jesus is a big question mark. Most of the questions about him are simply unanswerable, including the question of whether there ever was such a person.

However, none of that matters for purposes of spirituality or religion, or anyway none of it should. Religion isn’t founded on history, but on myth. Jesus is an image of the divine impacting the world through a man. Connected with him are other images speaking of human potential, redemption, the universality of God, and the illusory nature of death. It is these images that matter, not any connection they may or may not have to history.

Having said that, I want now to explore the Christian and Muslim myths of Jesus (these are similar, but not identical) and then some cross-observations from the Gospels and from my own quirky understanding. For the remainder of this article, I’ll be speaking only of the myths of Jesus, and completely ignoring any historical questions for the irrelevance that they are.

The Christian Myths of Jesus

In Christian belief, the ancient Jewish prophecies of the Messiah to come foretold a time when God would be incarnate in human form, and would offer himself in sacrifice to himself to pay for humanity’s burden of sin. Jesus was the fulfillment of that prophecy. He was both God incarnate and the “son of God.” The latter, which seems to contradict the former at first glance, is resolved by a philosophical understanding of “the Son” as an aspect of the one God, as He is manifest in the world (where the Father is God in His transcendent aspect, and the Holy Spirit is God as He is manifest in the human heart). When he was crucified, the demand of the Law for blood sacrifice in atonement for sins was met and fulfilled for all time, rendering that demand null and void; he was both the working-out and the overcoming of the Fall of Man. When he rose from the dead, that was a sign that the power of death to destroy us is broken, and we are heirs to life eternal.

The Muslim Myths of Jesus

In Islam, as in Christianity, the Jewish prophecies of the Messiah foretold the coming of Jesus, but for Muslims the significance is different and a little less cosmic. The prophecies foretold a time when God would expand His covenant with the Children of Israel by entering into a new covenant with all of mankind. Jesus was God’s Messenger who brought the word of that new, expanded covenant. He brought the Word of God initially to the Jews, but the Jewish religious authorities rejected his message, as had been foretold, and by turning against God’s Messenger lost their special status as the chosen people of God. They arrested Jesus and condemned him to death, but God in His compassion and justice took the Prophet into Paradise and the traitor  Apostle, Judas Iscariot, was crucified in his place. Thereafter, Jesus’ disciples spread his message and the truth of the One God throughout all the world, but in time that message became corrupted with false ideas and the influence of power-hungry institutions, requiring that God send the Prophet Muhammad with a correction.

The Gospel Accounts

The three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) present a picture of a very holy and powerful man, but they also present some problems for the standard Christian view of Jesus (although perhaps not insuperable ones). They might also present some difficulties for the Muslim myths of Jesus except that Muslims don’t have the same reverence for the Gospels that Christians do and simply consider the accounts flawed and only partly true.

To begin, the Gospels have many passages which point to limitations of Jesus’ power and knowledge. He is depicted as neither omniscient nor omnipotent. For example, in Mark Chapter Six, Jesus returns to his hometown, and finds that the people there, who know him, are reluctant to accept him as a prophet. “He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them.” (6:5) The people’s lack of belief in him limited his power, which was much greater in other contexts. In Mark 8:22-25, Jesus’ first attempt to heal a blind man works imperfectly (“I see people; they look like trees walking around”), and he is required to make a second attempt, which works better. Another passage of this kind is Luke 8:40-48. In this passage, Jesus is walking in a crowd of people and a woman plagued with a vaginal hemorrhage touches him, and his power heals her. Jesus knows that power has gone out of him, but doesn’t know the particulars, and asks, “Who touched me?” His knowledge, like his power, is depicted as having limits.

There are also a number of passages in which Jesus expresses opinions which he then changes as a result of others’ arguments or persuasion. For example, in Mark 7:24-30, a Greek woman asks Jesus to “drive a demon” from her daughter. Jesus’ haughty reply is that he is come to the Children of Israel, and “it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” She replies that “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s scraps,” and Jesus changes his mind and heals her daughter.

There is also at least one passage in which Jesus implicitly denies being God. That is found in Mark 10:18 and Luke 18:19, where someone has referred to him as “good master” or “good teacher,” and Jesus responds, “Why do you call me good? No one is good — except God alone.”

On the surface, these passages might seem to uphold the Muslim myth of Jesus over the Christian one, in that Muslims see Jesus as a great and holy Prophet but not God incarnate. However, there are other passages in which Jesus seems to imply that God dwells within him, and also within others, and that is not in accord with Muslim beliefs.

Again, though, questions of who or what Jesus “really was” are not the point here. We can’t answer such questions. The point, rather, should be about the power of myth to prevail even over contradictions from what is supposedly holy writ. The Gospels (particularly the synoptic Gospels) were composed a long time before the Imperial Church was formed in 325, or the Nicene Creed articulated. The most logical interpretation of these passages is simply that their authors had a different idea of Jesus than the Church later taught. They did not try to depict him as God incarnate because the idea simply hadn’t occurred to them. Yet this idea is central to the practice of Christian religion, which involves the worship of Jesus as an image of God. And so, passages in the Gospels which are troubling for the idea are simply glossed over and ignored.

Jesus as an Image of God

Devotion to Jesus as God incarnate is similar to the Hindu practice of Bakhti Yoga, in which some image of God (perhaps a mythical God such as Vishnu or Shiva, but often an Avatar of Vishnu, which bears even greater resemblance to the Christian practice) is the focus of love and prayer. This brings the devotee closer to the divine. It creates an association, and so a magical link, between the devotee and a large part of the cosmos, ultimately the cosmos as a whole, seen through a mythic lens.

The important thing here is not Jesus’ divinity but that of his worshipers. Through love and devotion to Jesus as an image of God, the Christian worshiper makes a connection with his or her own inner divinity, and allows that divinity to manifest in his or her life and heart.

This is a powerful method of spiritual magic. There is nothing wrong with it as far as it goes. The potential problem arises when the devotion to Jesus as an image of God gives rise to a factual belief that Jesus was God in any historical sense — the usual claims of standard Christian theology. When that belief is self-focused, it acts benignly, opening the worshiper’s heart to the divine and facilitating the raising of consciousness. When it becomes other-focused, however, it turns diabolical, giving rise to claims that non-Christians are worshiping false gods, and, when conjoined with political power, to witch-hunts, inquisitions, and crusades.

Can Christianity in some form survive to form a part of the spirituality of the advanced civilization we are evolving into? If so, it will be through recognizing the value of myth, and the fact that myth is precisely what Jesus is. As myth, he is a part of our spiritual heritage and should be a treasured part. The problems only arise when the myth is falsely — and irrelevantly — asserted to be history.

Logos and Mythos

I mentioned the two ways of thinking referred to as logos and mythos in earlier posts, but the concept needs more exploration, I think. It lies at the heart of myth-making and therefore of both fantasy writing and spirituality.

Logos and mythos are both types of thinking that employ symbols: language, pictures, and mathematics for the most part (although mythos also employs music, and for some very limited purposes so does logos). A symbol is one thing that refers to another thing. For example, the letter T in English refers to a sound made by snapping the tip of the tongue against the palate just behind the upper teeth while exhaling voicelessly. The word “cloth” is also a symbol. It refers to a type of material made from woven plant, animal, or synthetic fibers and used to make clothing and other items. Both logos and mythos employ symbols to think with. They manipulate symbols, put them in different combinations allowed by the rules and from this generate new ideas.

As far as symbols are concerned, the main difference between logos and mythos is this. In logos, each symbol has one and only one referent. The more formal the logical discipline, the more perfectly true this becomes. In science and mathematics, which are the most formal of all logical disciplines, each term must be explicitly defined so that there can be no ambiguity about exactly what it is referring to. As long as you understand the definitions and can follow the reasoning, there can be no fuzziness, no way to misconstrue what is said. Even if it’s something like imaginary numbers or quantum mechanics that defies intuitive comprehension, you can still follow the mathematical reasoning and understand what is being said that way. For the purposes of logos, this one-to-one correspondence of symbol with referent is very important. It’s a large part of what allows logos to function.

In mythos, each symbol has more than one referent. In fact, each symbol has an infinite number of possible referents. The goal in mythos is not to communicate simple, linear truths precisely and without ambiguity as it is in logos, but to open the doorways and windows of the imagination and expand the mind. The truths with which mythos is concerned cannot be communicated, they can only be discovered, and discovery requires that the mind be pushed out of its accustomed, habitual pathways. In mythos, a symbol is not a tool for precise, unambiguous communication of easily-comprehensible truth, as it is in logos, but rather it is a tool for connecting ideas that may have no logical and obvious connection and so causing a person to think, feel, and imagine in new ways.

Why these two radically different ways of using symbols? Because each serves a completely different purpose. The purpose of logos is, in the end, technology. All of its questions are of the nature of “how does it work?” What is the best way to describe this or that natural process, so that we can effectively alter it if we want to without making a ghastly mess of things? (I realize that in applying knowledge gained by logos we often have made a ghastly mess of things; however this comes from acting before our logos-acquired knowledge is sufficiently complete. It’s a problem caused by a deficit of mythos, not by an application of logos per se.) The purpose of mythos is not technology but understanding, and that in terms of meaning more than mechanics. Logos asks how. Mythos asks why. The two should never be in conflict, as they aren’t approaching the same questions and therefore can never provide conflicting answers.

I can best explain how mythos functions with examples, and I’m going to choose three from three different religions.

First, from Islam, the phrase in Arabic pronounced (roughly) “la ilaha ila Allah” and usually translated as “There is no god but God.” Part of this is straightforward enough, but what precisely is a “god”? Clearly the shadada or testament of faith is proclaiming that there is only one of these entities, whatever it is, but “god” could mean any number of different things. We can begin the way most Muslims think of this phrase, as saying that people should worship only one deity, and on this basis they object to polytheism, but even orthodox Muslim thinkers take it a step further and say that one should not worship or revere anything above God — money, pleasure, and power being among the most common “other gods.”

The phrase can also be interpreted to mean that however different the deities worshiped by various religions and cultures may seem at first glance, all of them are One — literally, there is no god but God, and all (seeming) other gods really are God. This is of course not an orthodox Muslim interpretation of the words, but it is one that follows from their possible meanings.

Finally, let’s recognize that, as Muslim teachers observe, anything in the world can be worshiped as a god. That being the case, all things really are God (as there is no god but God), and God is all the world. (This by the way is how the Sufi usually interpret the phrase.)

Which of these is the “real” meaning of the Shadada? There is no one “real” meaning; that’s the point here. To assign it one “real” meaning would be to improperly subject it to the rules of logos, when it properly belongs in mythos.

Second example, from Christianity, words attributed to Jesus: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.” Now, the way that Christians have often interpreted this is to say that only by being a Christian can one find God — a claim that is of course absurd, and easy enough to disprove — and in fact Jesus made no mention here of Christianity (which did not yet exist) nor of any other religion; he referred only to himself. Setting that aside, Jesus is clearly saying here that nobody comes to God except “by me.” What does that mean?

“By me” could mean, “by following my teachings.” Or, it could mean, “by devotion to me as the Son of God.” Or, it could mean, “by what I’m going to do for you — it’s not something you do.” All of these are meanings appropriate to the words used.

Here’s another possibility. In other statements, Jesus often emphasized that what he was, others are, too; that we are all children of God, all one with God, all capable of the same miraculous feats as Jesus himself and more. Also we should recognize that this was a spiritual teacher much given to being cryptic. And so another possible meaning of “by me” is “the way that I have done,” with “me” here referring to the union of God and man which Jesus was — as are we all, the difficulty being to become aware of this.

As with the Shahada, this claim of Jesus does not have one single meaning, but all of the ones listed above and more.

Finally, from Wicca, the words of the Goddess in the Charge: “I have been with you from the beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of desire.”

Most simply and simplistically, the Goddess is here proclaiming her eternal nature and promising to be with us to the end and beyond. But look at the words chosen: “end of desire.” And consider the words from the Charge that come before these: “If what you seek you find not within yourself, you will never find it without.” This gives a different depth to “I have been with you from the beginning,” suggesting that she is within us, not merely with us.

“At the end of desire” carries a possible meaning of death, but also of attainment of the same goal as in Buddhism, the overcoming of desire. The Goddess is what we find when we achieve “the end of desire.” But what is that? Without desire, there is no action, not even the act of perceiving, and without perceiving there is no world. So “I am that which is attained at the end of desire” can also mean, “I am what the world is when it comes to its end.”

As with the Muslim and Christian examples above, there is no single “right” interpretation of these words from the Charge of the Goddess. The point is not to discover a meaning which can then be conveyed to others in different words. The point is to make the journey of discovery yourself, allowing your mind to be opened and expanded. That’s the way that mythos works, and in all cases the process of discovery is more important than what is discovered.