Robert

Taken from just one day of WSJ reporting, these daily headlines point to an increasingly massive breakdown not only of legality but of morality in the highest (and lowest) levels of our country. Why is this occurring? How did so many get to the point of increasingly having to replace their inner spiritual void with the greed-ridden ingredients of power and money? In addition to countless answers to this question, I offer that we have simply lost our God, and one reason for having so lost, is that our religions are too often failing to provide a meaningful spiritual food for our starving souls.

This paper addresses recent discoveries of previously unknown Christian scriptures which predate the orthodox canonical gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John. Surprisingly, these earlier writings reveal a totally different kind of Christianity - one which could very well speak to the needs of the lost Christians of today.

I offer that the literal interpretation of this story, being a myth, represents an interpretation of a truth that constitutes one of the most powerful paradigms in history since it is the foundation of the entire Muslim and Judeo-Christian religions. And Paul’s allegorical interpretation (another myth) obliterates God’s justification for the existence of the Muslim religion - a monumental feat. So, which myth deserves to exist? Only the one that serves as a long-term bond to a civilization, which both do. Yet Paul’s myth interpretation of the Muslim faith did not take, while the Muslim myth did.

What I want to depict here is the question of whether these two kinds of people, as widely separated as they are today, could ever be so dedicated to each of their respective Christian faiths as to actually live together in harmony. The evidence proves the contrary, but that is what this article is about – can Jesus’ admonition to love each other possibly encompass these two extremes of Christianity?

I didn’t see him often because he was always moving about. But those few times we spoke together, were enough to last me a lifetime - maybe an accumulation of only four or five hours total.

I find it exciting to read Burton Mack’s book, “The Lost Gospel Q*, I find his account of the early days of Christianity fascinating, when, as a result of Jesus’ life and teaching, the discovery of God as being within was so vividly first articulated in the near-western world. And it is just as exciting to observe how this wonderful teaching almost immediately went awry – how it was so soon abandoned when early (and later) Christians returned to a largely external search for God. It would appear that in those early times there were not enough people devoted to moving forward in this search within to build and sustain an inner-searching Christian religion.

While this new/old religion of Jesus is now deep in the process of being more fully defined, its origin lies within the hidden Gospels of “Q” and of Thomas, discovered in the early twentieth century, and is continuing to be defined in archeological and theological research since. For me, the appeal of this current research is the realization that it is no longer necessary to abandon our intellect in order to believe the original truths. This freeing of our intellect from obedience to creed thereby renders it unnecessary to live a half-truth Christian life, which requires maintaining two faces to the public, and the potential for deceit and immorality that can go with it. Time is running out to speak up consciously and forcefully to reverse this trend, within us and outside us.

I find it exciting to read Burton Mack’s book, “The Lost Gospel Q*, I find his account of the early days of Christianity fascinating, when, as a result of Jesus’ life and teaching, the discovery of God as being within was so vividly first articulated in the near-western world.