Water Into Wine. Tom Harpur
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or eight? Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons around 190 CE, said there had to be four because there were four winds and four directions. This usually draws an indulgent smile from scholars, but there was a solid, though esoteric, reason behind the choice. For the ancients the number four was fundamental to the entire structure of life and the universe. The square, with its four sides, was the basis for any further elaboration in all forms of building, even the Pyramids. There were four major stages in evolution: the mineral, the vegetative, the animal and the human. Also, there were the four basic elements of water, earth, air and fire. This is the esoteric reason why the Egyptian sun god Horus had four sons. It is also behind the account of Jesus’ choice of four fishermen as his chief disciples: Peter, Andrew, James and John. It was perfectly natural, even necessary, then, that this fourfold order of nature be followed in structuring the Scriptures for the new movement, Christianity.
John’s Gospel
The last of the four Gospels, John, was probably composed around 95–100 CE, and is in a classification by itself. The vast differences between the Gospel According to St. John and the first three Synoptics have been commented upon by Christian scholars all the way back to the latter half of the second century. John may have followed some of Mark’s outline, especially the Passion narrative, but his Gospel is so different that we are in an almost completely other world. From the very outset, John’s Jesus is the Son of God in all his glory.
The differences between John and the Synoptics simply cannot be reconciled, much as some conservative scholars have tried. There are no parables in John. The account of the institution of Holy Communion, or the Mass, is missing completely, replaced by the washing of the disciples’ feet on Maundy Thursday, as it has come to be called. Like Mark, there is no nativity story and no virgin birth. Instead of a birth narrative, we are told Jesus was the divine Logos with God, and part of God’s being from eternity. The cleansing of the temple comes right at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in John, and not at the end, where the others all have it. The amazing story of Lazarus is unique to John. In general, John’s Gospel has been called “the spiritual Gospel” because of the various extensive and unique dialogues where the deep things of the Spirit are discussed.
At the same time, the Gospel of John is undoubtedly the most quoted of the four Gospels. It contains the famous text, John 3:16, which is so often held up on a card by that person who always manages to get a seat in the ball park right behind the catcher or in the part of the arena where the TV cameras zoom in most frequently. The same text is found on signs of every size all along the roads and highways of North America. It begins with the familiar words “For God so loved the world . . .” It’s the same chapter that tells the story so loved and quoted by the more conservative wing of contemporary Christianity, about the need to be “born again.” They misunderstand it completely in my view, but they certainly use it a lot.
In discussing what is meant by being born again (or better, in view of the Greek, “born from above”), in chapter 3 John makes it abundantly clear that what is being talked about is the fact that all humans are to have two births—the natural birth from “water,” as a human baby, and a second birth, which is spiritual. The “born again” experience is that of recognizing one’s true nature as a spark of the Divine—the light that gives light to everyone coming into the world. It has nothing whatever to do with what evangelicals describe as recognizing one’s status as a sinner and “accepting Christ as Saviour.” There is nowhere in the Gospels where this condition for “becoming a Christian” is ever laid out in the manner, for example, in which the famous Evangelist Billy Graham presents it. The traditional church teaching that we all, by our very nature as part of the human family, are contaminated by “original sin,” that is, by the sin of our mythical forefather Adam—Paul says that “in Adam all died” (because of his sin)—and that we add to this by our own sinful acts, has been the basis for clerical control all down the ages.
It’s important to remember that the idea of having a second birth is by no means unique to the New Testament. It was widespread in the cults and competing philosophies flourishing in the Greco-Roman world of that day. It even had its own term, palingenesia. In the Hermetic Literature (Corpus Hermeticum—recorded in the second and third centuries, but based upon Egyptian wisdom going back many centuries before that) the subtitle of chapter 13 is “On Being Born Again” and includes the “Hymn of Rebirth.”10
Significantly, John’s portrayal of Jesus and the whole story is, in fact, so different from the others that there were parts of the emerging ecclesiastical organization in Rome and elsewhere that wanted it rejected from the official canon of sacred scripture. One vivid way of describing this situation is to say that John’s Jesus “walks about four feet above the ground.” In other words, while this Jesus never categorically claims to be God (incidentally, this claim is not explicitly made anywhere in the New Testament), his status is one of great personal exaltation from the very outset. There is no Markan “Messianic Secret” here: there is no command not to tell anyone who he is. The Christology—the view of who Jesus is—is far “higher” in John than it is in Matthew, Luke and Mark. John’s Jesus moves and speaks with the total authority of the central figure of the ancient mythos or mystery play, with no attempt to cloak or veil the fully allegorical nature of the drama. (For more on the differences between John and the Synoptics, see Appendix A.)
What are we to say to all of the above? The implications, it seems to me, are quite clear. While each of the Gospels is a mythical rendition of the Jesus Story, the Fourth Gospel is to my mind the most conspicuously so. Read literally, it is, with some brilliant exceptions, a laborious and quite unbelievable task. Taken fully in its deeper, spiritual sense as the drama of the soul in matter, it is a virtuoso piece of illumination and inspiration full of joy and glory and hope for all. I suggest that with all of this in mind, readers might want to get a good, modern translation—I prefer the New Revised Standard Version myself—and set aside the time to read John through. Don’t do it in bits and pieces as if you were in Sunday school or church, but as a whole. Read it as you would any other book, remembering that the chapters and verses are artificial divisions introduced many centuries after the book first appeared. Read it allegorically as a parable about your own life’s journey, and feel it come alive as never before. The message of this book is that Christ’s journey is a metaphor for our own spiritual journey through life. Read as myth and allegory, the Gospels speak powerfully to that theme.
St. Paul
This book is concerned with the mythic meaning of the Gospels, but it must be kept in mind that the earliest writings of the New Testament are those of St. Paul, who was the major force in the establishment of Christianity as a universal faith. He wrote his epistles around 50–65 CE, about twenty years before the earliest Gospel. He knew only a mystical Jesus, and his approach is wholly mythical—that of the Christ within. Paul’s knowledge of Jesus comes from visions and revelations; from the Old Testament (Paul viewed the whole of it as prophetic and as elucidating facts about Jesus); and from what was being said about the Christos in the Christian communities already in existence.11
The silence of Paul over the putative historical Jesus is virtually ear-shattering. But, because he does speak of Jesus Christ some two hundred times, the true nature of the problem escapes the average reader. He calls Jesus Lord and Son of God, but such titles already existed within both Judaism and the surrounding Pagan religions, and of themselves prove nothing. Paul presupposes that Jesus existed as a supernatural being before “God sent him into the world to redeem it.” Such pre-existence on the part of the Logos and Sophia, or Wisdom, was part of Judaic thought at the time. It was also part of Gnostic thinking, and there is considerable evidence to support the view that Paul was a Gnostic. According to Paul, Jesus assumed flesh (mythically) sometime after the reign of David, from whom Paul says, following what the Old Testament prophesied, that Jesus, as a man, was supposed to have been descended.12 In the myth, he was “made of the seed of David according to the flesh.” This, of course, was part of the traditional view of what or who the Messiah had to be. In Romans too he terms him a Jew “according to the flesh” and, later, the scion of Jesse to govern the Gentiles.13 As Professor G.A. Wells points out in Did Jesus Exist?, however, there were many centuries intervening