“With most of us the requisite intensity of passion is not forthcoming without an element of resentment, and common sense and careful observation will, I believe, confirm the opinion that few people who amount to anything are without a good capacity for hostile feeling upon which they draw freely when they need it.”
–Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Augsut 28, 1749 – March 22, 1832) was a German polymath and writer, who is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a profound and wide-ranging influence on Western literary, political, and philosophical thought from the late 18th century to the present day. Wikipedia
How often I do not notice the miracles all around me, or honor all the kindnesses shown me, or allow myself to fully embrace the good that’s already in my life. Today I remember that every day is precious, every heart carries within it the Spirit of God, and every event contains the platform for a miracle. May I not be blind today to the awesomeness of life.
May the days be gone when I took for granted all the blessings in my life. May my eyes be open, that I might see more beauty; may my ears be open, that I might hear more truth; may my spirit be open, that I might feel the tender touch of God.
Today I see through a different set of eyes, that I might recognize the miracles all around me. I see the sparkle of light that surrounds all things and the yearning for love that exists in everyone. I see the innocence beyond guilt and the love beyond all fear. Thus I am reborn into the truth of who I am.
Of our three bodies, the physical body seems, at first glance, the easiest to observe. Its movements and postures are physical, and therefore, traceable. If I take a step forward, it is my physical body that coordinates this action; if I move an object from one place to another, it is my physical body that accomplishes this task. But along with this capacity for movement, there are many subtle nuances also rooted in our physical body that deeply influence our psychology and will be the focus of our May and June labors.
When we presented the physical body in February, we mentioned that its function was movement. However, to observe its more subtle nuances, we must further divide the manifestations of our physical body into two: a moving function and an instinctive function. The first is responsible for the body’s capacity for movement, the second for maintaining its well-being. Neither of these two functions is exclusively physical; they influence our entire psychology. The labor of May will span the moving function; that of June, the instinctive function.
The moving function in the physical body enables us to walk, type, dance, play sports, and perform a wide range of external motions. It also grants us the ability to imitate and automate complex actions, such as riding a bicycle or driving a car, which at first require our concentrated attention, but through repetition become automatic. This ability of automation calls for deeper examination, because it permeates the other functions and enables their fluidity. For example, the moving function enables the intellectual function to connect words and meaning seamlessly and master the ability to speak. It enables the emotional function to match reactions to stimuli and gives it the ability to respond with ease to social customs and expectations. In effect, our moving function operates like a rolling wheel that enables fluidity not only for itself, but also for the other functions.
This rotational nature correlates our moving function with time, because time is also rotational; it is determined by the rotation of physical orbs—the rotation of the earth around its own axis marking a day, the waxing and waning of the moon marking a month, the earth’s orbit around the sun marking a year. In fact, it can be said that our moving center is under the law of time, although the full implications of this claim may require a more lengthy explanation. Our moving function is influenced by physical time the way a tiny cog is forced into rotation by adjacent, massive mechanical wheels. It cannot resist time; it ‘believes’ time and correlates time with progression and accomplishment. The task at hand is always a means to an end, a ‘now’ pointing to a ‘later’. But being relegated to perpetual rotation, when ‘later’ eventually comes around, our moving function cannot but perceive it as a new ‘now’ to be sacrificed for an even later ‘later’. As a result, through the influence of our moving function over our psychology, we are prone to falling into repetitive mechanical momentums: continually daydreaming random scenarios, continually replaying interactions with others, continually humming randomly recalled tunes, and many more such repetitive sequences that color our internal landscape against our will.
That these automations are powered by momentum, rather than our own will, is simple to verify, provided we are sincere with ourselves: they do not stop when we want them to. It follows that any conscious effort to jam the wheels of our psychological automations will help us observe our moving function.
An effective area in which to apply this is our habitual usage of the cell phone. When the fluidity of our moving center is impeded—as happens, for example, when we are forced to wait in line, in traffic, or in an elevator—our moving function seeks alternative ways to perpetuate movement, and will often revert to checking our phone unnecessarily. Therefore, a good exercise for interrupting automation is the discipline of checking our phone only when seated. Any time we must use our phone, we find the nearest place to sit down , and only then pull it out.
This type of exercise reveals the influence of our moving function over our psychology. It also represents a meaningful step towards establishing inner government. In spreading automation indiscriminately, our moving function tyrannizes, as it were, the other functions into subordination. By restricting its influence over the other functions, we force it back to its rightful place.
The farmer who labors in this way has begun clearing the land from the invasive weed of unnecessary movement and has fulfilled the obligations for May.
U.S. Rep Mike Collins (R-Ga.) on May 3, 2024 reposted a video in which University of Mississipi students racially abuse a graduate student because she’s a Black woman defending Palestine.
(Photo: screen shot/X)
“This is not about Israel, Palestine, or Gaza. This is old-fashioned American racism and misogyny,” said one observer. “These are the types of young white men who will grow up to be Republican governors, senators, and members of Congress.”
Republican Georgia Congressman Mike Collins came under fire Friday over a social media post applauding video of white University of Mississippi students racially abusing a Black woman participating in a campus protest for Palestine.
Collins posted the video—in which numerous people can be heard grunting like apes and one young man is seen jumping up and down like a monkey in front of the Black woman—with the caption, “Ole Miss taking care of business.”
Collins—or whoever’s in charge of his social media accounts—sparred with Black leaders who called out his racism. When former Democratic Ohio state senator Nina Turner said the video showed “anti-Blackness,” the congressman shot back, “*Anti-terroristness.”
When Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) accused Collins of “fueling white supremacy,” the Republican retorted, “Don’t take down any more signs at our workplace, please” along with a photo of the Democrat triggering a fire alarm in a House of Representatives office building last year.
Representative, that is a white man making monkey gestures at a Black woman. And these protesters are NOT terrorists.
Around 30 protesters were rallying in support of Palestine in the Ole Miss Quad when counter-protesters gathered near the demonstrators. Some booed and chanted, “We want Trump!” Others singled out the Black woman—who NBC Newssaid is a graduate student at the school—chanting “Lizzo, Lizzo, Lizzo,” “take a shower,” “your nose is huge,” “fuck you, fat bitch,” and “lock her up!”
The counter-protesters also sang the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Republican Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves shared a separate video of the singing students on social media, captioning his post, “Warms my heart” and “I love Mississippi.”
No racist language can be heard in the video shared by Reeves.
This is not about Israel, Palestine, or Gaza. This is old-fashioned American racism and misogyny. And it’s not just Ole Miss. It’s everywhere. These are the types of young white men who will grow up to be Republican governors, senators, and members of Congress. pic.twitter.com/BFw0VHSsJv
The Daily Mississippianreports the demonstrators were escorted off the Quad after counter-protesters threw water bottles at them.
Collins is no stranger to accusations of racism. Earlier this year, he suggested murdering migrants by throwing them from helicopters into the sea, in the manner of U.S.-backed South American dictators in the 1970s.
He also introduced the Restricting Administration Zealots from Obliging Raiders (RAZOR) Act, which would ban the federal government from removing or altering “any state-constructed barriers installed to mitigate illegal immigration,” such as the razor buoys installed in the Rio Grande by Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
Collins was also accused of antisemitism after he amplified a social media post by an avowed neo-Nazi targeting a Washington Post reporter for being Jewish.
Ole Miss said Friday that “statements were made at the demonstration on our campus Thursday that were offensive and inappropriate.”
“We cannot comment specifically about that video, but the university is looking into reports about specific actions,” the school added. “Any actions that violate university policy will be met with appropriate action.”
A Black Woman was victim to pandering, racist remarks and gestures, and hateful speech with the hope of breeding fear, isolation, and retreat.
The Ole Miss incident comes amid rapidly spreading campus protests across the U.S. and around the world in response to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, which has killed, maimed, or left missing around 5% of the embattled strip’s 2.3 million people, most of them civilians, while forcibly displacing nearly 9 in 10 people and driving hundreds of thousands to the brink of starvation.
While numerous Ole Miss students said they did not understand what the pro-Palestine protesters hoped to accomplish, others voiced support for the demonstrators—and for Palestine.
“As we’ve seen throughout history, time and time again, the student movement is never wrong. Time and time again, anytime there’s a student protest, and you’re against it, you’re on the wrong side of history,” Xavier Black, a junior majoring in international studies, told The Daily Mississippian. “So I would like to be on the right side.”
One Palestinian American Ole Miss student was teary-eyed as she thanked the protesters.
“Hey guys, I know that what just happened was really intimidating, and it was a little scary, but I just want to say I’m so proud of you guys,” the student—who gave only her first name, Jana—said, according toMississippi Today. “This wasn’t going to happen… without all of you guys. Palestine was being heard. And I just want to thank you guys so much.”
“I know that was such a big risk, but this is the most that people have ever thought for us, so don’t give up,” she added. “I know that was really hard, but we need to keep fighting. This was just the start of it, okay?”
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Image from wikicommons.org — A young Carl Jung is pictured bottom right
I remember it well.
A girl at school was laughing at me because I had walked into class with my zipper down. She began whispering to her closest friends who also began to stare and laugh. This went on until the whole classroom was laughing at me and I was red in the face without knowing what I had done.
What she didn’t know was that I hated being the centre of attention, I carried a lot of body shame, and I was living with social anxiety. So, although I walked to my seat looking cool, calm, and collected, I was dying of shame inside.
For a long time after that, I never spoke to her. She was the source of my pain and I was going to punish her for it.
Even years later, when I saw her in the parking lot of a supermarket with her two young children, I gave her a snarky comment to continue my passive-aggressive revenge.
Apart from being childish, it must have also been confusing for her. We hadn’t seen each other in years and my moment of shame had well gone, yet there I was, being awkward and confronting for no good reason.
At the time, I felt proud and strong but now I look back and see a very different story.
Now I see that her younger self was just touching a part of me that was deeply hurt inside. She didn’t know it, of course. She was just doing what most school kids do and that’s make fun of each other.
The trouble is we never know what another is going through because “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.” As Robin Williams so accurately said.
It was only years later when I realised that my anger and shame were running my life and preventing me from having deep connections that I changed my approach.
This aspect of self is what Carl Jung called the shadow. And whether we project our shadow onto others or take full responsibility for it is the kind of social change Carl Jung wanted to see. That’s why he said:
“The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.”
How do we withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others?
My shadow side stems from a fear of being seen and heard. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve suffered from social anxiety for 20+ years.
At around the time I realised my anger and shame were running my life and preventing me from having deep connections, however, I tried to understand it and accept it better, and ultimately alchemise it in my life.
A huge part of that was learning to take full responsibility for my own well-being and not give other people the power to influence my mental health.
In other words, not project my pain onto others and instead see the gift it presents to understand myself better.
This is why I believe, like Carl Jung, that the best social, political, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw our shadow from others because once I learned to stop projecting my fear, anger, and shame outwardly, I became more curious as to why it was within and what it could teach me. This allowed me to go deep into my psyche, look at the root cause of my trauma, and integrate more lovingly into my life. I then stopped blaming people and instead started thanking them.
Before that, I would either react out of anger or hide in shame and neither did anything to support my growth or anyone else’s.
“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” — Carl Jung
Seeing the opportunity of pain
As someone who lived with anxiety for 20 years, the easiest thing for me to do was remove the thing(s) that made me anxious.
However, that seldom worked. Instead, I found that I held myself back from doing what I wanted to do or stopped myself from experiencing what I wanted to experience.
So, for me to grow and evolve, I had to learn to face my fears so I could understand them better.
It was scary (and still is) but I found that getting out of my comfort zone is where the magic happens.
This is the opportunity that pain and challenging relationships now present. On the surface, they can be hurtful and/or frustrating, but after digging a little deeper I find there’s often something inside that’s unresolved or not at ease and because of that, I can get to know myself better.
As someone who is deeply invested in personal development as much as I am, this is an exciting prospect!
“By not being aware of having a shadow, you declare a part of your personality to be non-existent.” — Carl Jung
Closing Thoughts
Whenever I think about philosophical topics like I am today I often turn toward nature.
Today’s musings have got me thinking about the moon because it also has a dark side. It too goes through cycles of emptiness and fullness, darkness and light, and both are welcomed as just a part of life.
There seems to be no judgment or shame or suffering on the Moon’s behalf. Instead, it passes through each cycle with the knowing that “This Too Shall Pass.”
That’s where I’m at today in my life. I have finally come to accept what Carl Jung so brilliantly said near the end of his own:
“I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.”
The theory that consciousness is epiphenomenal is pretty much assumed by much establishment science today. In spite of the fact that no one has ever proposed the faintest inkling of a solution to David Chalmers Hard Problem that points out that even if we mapped every atom in the brain we would not actually arrive at consciousness, the view that we will inevitably stumble upon a feature of the brain that offers us an explanation for consciousness remains strangely persistent.
In spite of apparently banishing metaphysical speculation there are ironically metaphysical reasons for this, which is to say that science has siloed much of its work in a materialist position from which other kinds of solutions to the problem of consciousness sound far too much like spirituality to be taken remotely seriously.
The question though is still one that science has to have some role in considering. And there are some fascinating insights into which we can shed light into an alternative way of viewing consciousness.
The epiphenomenal view of consciousness essentially assumes that the brain “emits” consciousness. That is to say the material of the brain contains a set of processes that somehow conspire to produce consciousness ‘upwards’ causally, like air coming out from an air conditioner vent. This seems like the default position, especially to those who are materialist or scientifically minded, but it has some significant problems.
The first is what consciousness itself is actually doing if the brain itself exists on a level of unconscious processes, but more importantly it has the basic problem of failing to explain where out of reality consciousness comes from. Since consciousness seems to be virtually by definition a reality different in kind, almost ontologically different, from what we class as material or natural reality, how does a biological process simply come to produce it unless it is already a property of the material it has to work with?
So this takes us to a second way of viewing consciousness, not as something the brain “emits” but as something the brain “permits”.
In this way of viewing consciousness, consciousness itself is a fundamental substance of reality, perhaps the fundamental substance of reality, and the brain rather than emitting consciousness like a lightbulb being turned on and generating it permits consciousness in your particular experience in the same way a voice constrains air in order to create your particular voice.
Is there any evidence for this? One of the most reliable ways to elicit at the very least a feeling of this intuition is psychedelic drugs, in fact many of those early pioneers of psychedelics in the twentieth century who experimented with psychedelics were convinced of consciousness as primary and universal after the experience of egoless consciousness that drugs such as LSD or psilocybin can elicit. One of these was Aldous Huxley whose book The Doors of Perception was named after a quote by William Blake:
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
Interestingly studies of the brain on psychedelics seem to show something in common with the brains of experienced meditators. Although it remains mysterious to some extent, most significant seems to be a reduction in blood flow to an area of the brain called the default mode network, something that is interestingly the inverse of those experiencing rumination and depressive disorder which are associated with increased connectivity in the DMN.
It seems that this is a part of the brain that operates as scientist Robin L. Carhart-Harris has put it as something like the orchestra conductor, constraining, inhibiting and limiting other parts of the brain. By shutting this down psychedelics seem to unconstrain cognition allowing an increase in connections across the brain that explain the synesthetic and hallucinogenic qualities of the psychedelic experience.
The DMN seems to be associated with something like the ego. It is not present in early childhood and seems to be a later evolutionary development, and its deactivation is associated with the loss of self experienced by meditation practitioners and psychedelic trips.
Yet the loss of self does not reduce consciousness, rather it seems to expand it. In a paper The entropic brain Robin L. Carhart-Harris and others suggest that the brain is essentially balanced between ordered and disordered states, from high-entropy, which they associate with infancy (essentially Harris seems to see the expansive love of the psychedelic trip as a return to the state of consciousness on your mother’s breast) to low entropy such as depression. (1)
Part of what, say, a psilocybin trips seems to be able to do is shake the snow globe of the mind by turning off the DMN enough to allow some resetting of those low entropy states the mind can become encased in, in other words it at least temporarily lets down the prison walls of the ego.
Naturally though this theory, while fascinating, still has a kind of problem with consciousness. It begs the obvious question, why is there this infant conscious that seems to essentially not be created by the self but constrained by it? In other words what the DMN seems to be doing, or what the self or the ego or whatever is doing is actually limiting consciousness in order for us to function properly in the world.
So do the experience of meditators, mystics, poets, visionaries or psychedelic trips allow us to witness a more universal consciousness unconstrained by the mind? It seems to me the alternative is eminently less likely, which is that consciousness is emitted by the brain from childhood and the rest of life is spent constructing a functionality that constrains it increasingly restrictively as we get older. Why does the consciousness need to be there? What on earth is it doing?
Interestingly poets and artists have had this insight long before science wrestled with these ideas. Wordsworth in his poem Intimations of Immortality wrote of the loss of an apparent sense of joy or transcendence as he moved away from childhood:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light…It is not now as it hath been of yore; — / Turn wheresoe’er I may, / By night or day. / The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
Wordsworth sees this as a reflection of hints of a pre-existence that has a strange resonance to the theory that the mind increasingly constrains a more universal infant consciousness:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: / The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, / Hath had elsewhere its setting, / And cometh from afar: / Not in entire forgetfulness, / And not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home.
This idea is found elsewhere in literature, in Ben Okri’s 1990 Booker Prize winning novel The Famished Road the narrator is Azaro, a ‘spirit child’, who in the African tradition is a child who comes from the blissful world of spirits and is reborn countless times in the world, always wishing to die young in order to return to this happy realm of love where there is no suffering. A quote from the first chapter echoes Wordsworth’s poem “There are many reasons why babies cry when they are born, and one of them is the sudden separation from the world of pure dreams, where all things are made of enchantment, and where there is no suffering…to be born is to come into the world weighed down with strange gifts of the soul, with enigmas and with an extinguishable sense of exile.”
More recently in his 2018 book The Poem, poet Don Paterson suggests that part of what poetry itself can do is enable us to relate to the form of our consciousness that emerges in early childhood, before language. Poetry for Patterson allows us for a moment to take language to its very limits, find momentary glimpses of higher unity, of the universe as it is. Paterson, drawing on the word of Chilean psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte Blanco, describes this “atemporal and infinite connection” as something that still exists, “like an operating system upon which the more recently acquired software of perceptual category and language sits.”
All this seems to cry the suggestion that viewing consciousness as “permitted” by the mind seems to offer far more space for actually accommodating both a material conception of the brain as well as allowing for an explanation of how consciousness could have any role in something that can be objectified, and the nearest answer to the hard problem it seems like we can produce. Unless the materialist position can offer some serious explanation for how the brain produces a non-objective substrate objectively, it seems the most obvious, elegant, and familiar to experience.
For the scientist, this poetic speculation is naturally unhelpful. But it is worth the observation that at this stage the idea that consciousness is a pure epiphenomenal product of the brain is one that falls far short of possessing any explanatory scope. The poets are and have been observing their experience far longer than our clumsy instruments have been, and to my mind nothing we have found contradicts them. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.Or as Blake put it, again:
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
It isn’t every day that a biblical text is found, but it does happen. In 2004, two passages were found from a lost text of early Christianity, a dialogue attributed to the ‘Luke’ of the New Testament.
I was reading about it in a 2021 paper in the Harvard Theological Review. After two millennia, there’s new information about Jesus? If you didn’t notice that in the news, you didn’t miss it.
Christianity hasn’t wanted to talk about what it says.
A “lost” work is mentioned in early Christian writings—unknown for over a millennia.
Sometimes it was called The Dialogue of Jason and Papiscus and sometimes The Dispute of Jason and Papiscus About Christ. Several descriptions survive. Two men were said to be talking, a Jew and a Christian, discussing, at times testily, the meaning of the Old Testament.
The Christian, Jason, was probably the Jason of Thessalonica who is seen in Acts 17. He had a different way of reading the Old Testament (or Hebrew Bible). He didn’t see it as non-fiction.
He said it was a “messianic prophesy.” He saw the stories as being ‘allegorical’ of Christ. He saw even the Creation story this way.
But Jason seemed to have a different Bible.
Ancient Christian sources quote him quoting Bible verses in unexpected versions. He seems to havequoted Genesis 1:1 this way:
“In the beginning God created a son…”
It seemed mystifying. Surely Genesis 1:1 said:
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
But there was a problem. The “weird” version of Genesis 1:1 was cited by many early Christians. Was it possible early Christianity was working off a quite different version of the scriptures?
A ‘church father’ seemed to know who wrote “Jason and Papiscus.”
Sometime around 170 A.D., Clement of Alexandria said it was written by Luke. If anyone would know, it’d be him. Clement knew people who’d known the apostles.
Near the end of the fifth century, however, a monk named John of Scythopolis noted the belief it was by Luke—then he added that he supposed Jason and Papiscus was written by Ariston of Pella. This was a second century Christian writer usually thought to have no importance.
How had John of Scythopolis known this fact, centuries later? He doesn’t say. One might have to recall that, by then, the “allegorical” reading of the Bible was toxic. In the logic of the time, to assign such views to Luke would’ve made a biblical writer the author of ‘heresy’.
Into the 19th century, “lost” Christian texts were being found.
And many strange “variants” of the Bible were found with them—especially around Genesis. Just as Jason and Papiscus had suggested, there seemed to have been a different version of the Creation.
In 1844, a single copy of a once-well-known text called the Epistle of Barnabas was found, and it had more quotations from a “different” Genesis. The Creation became an interaction between Father and ‘Son’.
When God says, in Genesis 1:26: “Let us make humans according to our image and likeness” — the words are said to the Son.
When God says “Be fruitful and multiply,” the words are again said to the Son.
That’s not how it goes in the usual version in Genesis 1:28. There, God seems to be speaking to the newly-created humans.
Another line was quoted, as said by God:
“Behold, I make the first things as the last”
This line was also found in another early Christian text that was recovered a few years later, called Didascalia Apostolorum. Except the line was quoted in a longer version. As it went:
“Behold, I make the first things as the last, and the last as the first.”
This line was said after God created the humans. The story then would be that the Son was the first creation. Humans were the last. The Father is saying: they are alike.
But many “church fathers” said that the Creation story was not non-fiction, but allegory.
In Genesis 1:27, we read that “male and female” are created. Clement of Rome, the 1st century Christian, writes that didn’t mean a man and woman were created.
In 2004, a fragment of “Jason and Papiscus” was found in Egypt.
In the archives of St. Catherine’s monastery, a homily of Sophronius of Jerusalem had been unnoticed for over a millennia. This bishop lived from c.560 to 638 A.D. On Sunday, January 1, 635 he’d risen to speak about an unusual subject: why Christians meet on Sunday.
It’s a difficult issue. Jews worship on the Sabbath, which is Saturday, the seventh day of the week. This is commanded in the Ten Commandments. So why did Christians prefer Sunday, the first day of the week?
The New Testament does not address the issue, and Christians likely have no idea why they disregard the Sabbath and meet on Sunday. So Sophronius reaches for another text he regards as authoritative. He quoted from Jason and Papiscus, as Jason speaks from across the ages.
The reason Christians meet on Sunday, Jason explains, goes back to Creation.
It’s there, he says, when God says: “Behold! I am making the last things just as the first!”
The same line found in the Epistle of Barnabas and Didascalia Apostolorum is heard again. Jason says it is from the ‘scriptures’.
He goes on to say that the first ‘word’ of God at Creation, “Let there be light,” was not the appearance of ‘light’ in physical terms.
He says that was Christ. He was the light, and, Jason adds, “the son of God through whom all things came to be.”
Is that saying that Jesus was created?
Apparently in this text he was ‘born’ as a spirit, then as a man on earth. And each event, Jason explains, happened on Sunday. Then Jesus was crucified, then resurrected—also on Sunday, the day of births and rebirths.
That’s the cosmic meaning of Sunday. The idea seems to be that, in the Bible, history is chronicled in vast stretches of time that are called ‘days’. Each ‘day’ is marked by a different divine action.
On Sunday, everything is beginning again.
Jason offers a glimpse of Jesus’ return to the earth to “raise up the righteous” in the Resurrection. After that comes the Kingdom, which he calls “the eternal light in the eternal.”
The discovery was reported in scholarly literature as a minor find of a work by Ariston of Pella.
The Lukan attribution was dismissed without really any analysis. But a Bible scholar named Harry Tolley was thinking about it all.
He had the unusual status of being the only expert on Ariston of Pella who has ever lived, having written his 2009 Ph.D. thesis on the subject.
He didn’t think that Jason and Papiscus was by Ariston. In 2021, he published the paper in the Harvard Theological Review that laid out the surviving evidence of the work, leaving open the question of its author. But I had the feeling Tolley thought it might really be by Luke.
That turned out to be true.
In support of the idea, he makes a range of points. Clement of Alexandria and Sophronius of Jerusalem both said the work is by Luke. That’s persuasive, he suggests. “Sophronius is regarded as a much more reliable source than even Clement of Alexandria.”
I asked: Does he think the newly-discovered text suggests the style of Luke?
He replies: “I do, but it would be difficult to prove Luke had a style.”
The Luke of the New Testament doesn’t speak in a personal voice.
He researched the life of Jesus for his gospel. He followed the apostles and wrote the Acts of the Apostles. There’s been a regular idea that he edited the book of Hebrews, perhaps from a speech by the apostle Paul. Many voices flow through him, but he never speaks in his own.
Was Jason and Papiscus his next ‘Act’? It doesn’t seem too odd to think he was listening to early Christians and Jews talking, and wrote it up as a dialogue. Tolley was prepared to analyze the vocabulary of the fragment found at St. Catherine’s monastery as ‘Lukan’. The fragment has words found, in the New Testament, only in Luke’s writing
There wasn’t much interest in that subject. Scholars avoid the evidence of Luke’s authorship, he suggests, “just to avoid controversy.”
I queried scholars who mentioned “Jason and Papiscus” in recent publications.
“The dialog is certainly later, more likely to be from the time of Justin’s dialog or later, so it cannot be by the author of Luke’s Gospel. Perhaps there was another Luke who is not otherwise known? But that all remains speculative.”
I asked if she could say how she knows that Jason and Papiscus is “certainly” a second-century work.
“Well, all researchers agree about this,” she replied, citing a 2019 discussion of the text that is unaware of the 2004 discovery. To the scholarly mind, it seems, the fragment was never found at all.
“With Jason and Papiscus, the trouble is the lack of solid evidence (not to mention the lack of the text itself!). From an a priori standpoint, I don’t think it’s impossible that Luke could have written it. However, if this were the case one would expect to find significantly wider attestation to Luke’s authorship within early reception (think figures like Irenaeus, Origen, Eusebius, Jerome, etc).”
So I guess I’m left adding up the numbers. Is Clement of Alexandria and Sophronius—two venerated saints—enough mention of the Lukan attribution? Or is John of Scythopolis the deciding voice?
What I know for sure is that this isn’t why Christianity would accept or reject the text. It was rejected without such debate.
Christianity likes the Bible that tells a true story of God’s favorite people…leading up to them.
I grew up with that idea pounded into my head. We’re God’s favorites. Everyone else is going to Hell.
The religion, or the men in the religion, likes a Creation story that sets men above women, and somehow manages to read Genesis this way.
Early Christianity tells a different story.
Around 700 C.E., a monk named Anastasius of Sinai had studied the subject of early Christian views of the Creation story. He cites texts no longer in existence and concludes that most early Christian teachers—Papias, Clement, Pantaenus, Ammonius, a lineage tracing back to the apostle John—taught the ‘allegorical’ view of the Old Testament.
They had, he writes, “understood the whole six-day creation as referring to Christ and the Church.”
But if the ‘Church’ is created in Genesis, then isn’t “the church” just another word for humanity?
That wouldn’t be a reading the religion would want to explore.
So Jason and Papiscus was ‘lost’. And when a fragment was found, there was another effort to lose it. 🔶
Jeffrey Mishlove took this photograph of the Whirlpool Galaxy (Messier 52) with his 4″ refractor telescope. This galaxy is located 31 million light years away near the handle of the Big Dipper. It is approximately 80,000 light years in diameter. It was the first galaxy to be classified as a spiral galaxy. It is interacting gravitationally with the smaller companion galaxy (NGC 5195) that is situated somewhat behind it and to the right on this image. (jmishlove@newthinkingallowed.com)
New Thinking • May 3, 2024 This video is a special release from the original Thinking Allowed series that ran on public television from 1986 until 2002. It was recorded in about 1988. It will remain public for only one week. There is a new global emphasis on the inner life of the mind. Willis Harman, PhD, suggests that a new set of values, emerging spontaneously in many social strata and in different parts of the world, is having an impact in the world of business and corporate training. Willis Harman was President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. He is author of Global Mind Change, An Incomplete Guide to the Future and Higher Creativity.
Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more
