To continue focussing on philosophy, another favourite ‘Greek Geek’ had a rather splendid name – Xenophanes. He lived in the 6th century BCE, mostly in southern Italy, which seems an eminently reasonable choice of location. He had things worth saying about truth …

“as for certain truth, no man has known it, nor shall he know it, neither of the gods, nor yet of all the things of which I speak, for even if by chance he were to utter the final truth, he would himself not know it, for all is but a woven web of guesses”.

That led on to other things worth saying about gods …

“If cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw, and could sculpture like men, then the horses would draw their gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and each would then shape bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of its own”. It sounds like each horse could then say it was “made in the image of (its equine) God”.

Here is some age-old wisdom suggesting we should recognise our human view of things as our own creation. Our “woven web of guesses” could be right or wrong, but without any absolute certainty on our part as to which – a humbling thought, for both science and religion.

This ancient “Xenophanian’ wisdom (having untwisted my tongue) reminds me of something said by one of the greatest of all scientists, Isaac Newton – “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” What a contrast to some (but by no means all) of today’s so-called “brights”. 

I’m also reminded of the 20th century philosopher, Karl Popper, who argued that all our so-called scientific ‘knowledge’ consists of conjectures, which should therefore be acknowledged as ‘temporary’, waiting to be replaced by something nearer to ‘the truth’ (but not the illusive ‘final’ truth – like the elusive black cat in the pitch dark room). 

Thinking about  such ‘ancient wisdom’ needing to be re-discovered, brings a final quote to mind from one of the most splendidly contrarian books in the Hebrew Bible. I don’t know how it engineered its entry, but an embarrassed editor added some final verses designed (failingly) to undo some of the damage. Here’s my quote from Ecclesiastes 1 …

‘What has happened before will happen again. What has been done before will be done again. There is nothing new in the whole world. No one remembers what has happened in the past, and no one in days to come will remember what happens between now and then. I was determined to learn the difference between knowledge and foolishness, but I found out that I might as well be chasing the wind”.

An overstatement, perhaps, but by how much?

One of my favourite writers about philosophy is the late Bryan Magee. He wrote and edited many books, ranging down from the comprehensively meaty, “The Philosophy of Schopenhauer” to the easily readable and beautifully illustrated, “The Story of Philosophy”, published by Dorling Kindersley (or “DK”).

In the latter book, he writes about Pythagoras, the philosopher, mathematician, musician, mystic etc etc. I still recall, after 70 years, that pestilential Pythagoras’ Theorem, and joining the rest of the class in rote repetition of “the area of the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares on the other two sides”, (and wondering why anyone should care!) The musical among us will also be aware that Pythagoras is credited with coming up with the octave, the fourth and the fifth, (which to others may be little more than ‘notable’ mysteries.)

In these days of ‘science versus religion’, (or perhaps militant scientism versus conservative fundamentalism), Magee, who was not a ‘religious’ believer, but refreshingly open-minded, has some interesting things to say about Pythagoras, described by him as ‘the first great thinker to bring mathematics to bear on philosophy” … 

“We are now used to the idea that mathematics plays an indispensable role in our understanding of the universe. The fact that the cosmos at every level, from the outermost galaxies down to the interior of the individual atom, is saturated with structure of a kind that is expressible in mathematical terms is so familiar to us that it is in danger of appearing obvious, but in truth it is not obvious at all, it is utterly astonishing. It is what has led so many of the greatest scientists of all, such as Einstein, to believe that there must be some sort of intelligence behind the universe, if not necessarily a God in the conventional Judaeo-Christian sense. The very first person to have this insight about the expressibility of the whole universe in terms of mathematics was Pythagoras.”

That makes sense to me, though I’m mathematically moronic. Modern science has demonstrated the fundamental validity of what it has called “the uncertainty principle”, which means that a degree of randomness has been built into the bricks of the universe. The suggestion, however, that all things that exist, including living, conscious, thinking beings such as ourselves, have emerged entirely from ‘mindless’ randomness is one I find rather hard to believe. 

Equally hard for me to believe, are the various propositions about, pictures of, and sayings ascribed to the ‘Gods’ who have populated the world’s sacred books since time immemorial. Their meaningfulness can only lie in their depths, not on their surfaces. Perhaps another philosopher, Aristotle, with his concept of “the middle way” gets it right, in which case Magee’s “some sort of intelligence” could fit the bill. I’d even be inclined to give it a capital “I”. Not, however, an all-powerful, all knowing ‘Intelligence’, but one continually finding its way perhaps, in part, through us.

A Zen master and his disciple were travelling along a road that led to their monastery. There was a point at which it reached a river but, fortunately, there was a ford where the water was just shallow enough to allow a safe, if rather wet, crossing.

The previous night, however, there had been heavy rainfall, and crossing the ford was much less easy due to the increased and fast moving water. When the monks came to the river bank, there was a young woman sitting there and weeping. She was desperate to make the crossing in order to visit her mother whom she had heard to be very ill, and in much need of her help, but she daren’t risk such an unsafe crossing.

Seeing the two monks, she cried out to them, and begged them to help her by lifting her up and carrying her across. The Zen master at once raised her up, and carried her on his back, and safely brought her over. She was, of course, so very grateful to him for his much needed help.

The two monks continued their journey, but the disciple was silent and was nursing a frown on his face. Eventually he had to come out with what was troubling him. He asked his Master why he had taken hold of that young woman and carried her on his back. The rules of their monastery, in order to guard against dangerous, forbidden temptations, forbade talking to women, let alone touching them.

The Master replied that one of things we are in this world for is helping other people when they are in need. As for the young woman, he had left her behind at the other side of the stream, but his younger companion, in his thoughts, was still carrying her on his back.

Troublesome thoughts are unavoidable, but best looked upon as dark clouds that enter our inner sky. What we must learn to do is recognise their arrival, and then allow them to pass away, as all clouds do. Why attach oneself to a passing cloud?

As a follow-up to my “The Human Jesus (i)” post, I’d like to offer a few more thoughts concerning the resurrection of Jesus. I have no doubt that a number of his followers did indeed see Jesus following his death. I’ve also no doubt that others were captivated by their persuasive fervency. How thrilling to think that a charismatic leader had not after all, by his enemies, been consigned to the waste-bin of history. 

There have, of course, been many for-and-against ‘theological’ debates about these followers seeing the risen Jesus, but I want to ‘look’ at this from a different angle. Our everyday human experience is that we ‘look out’ through our eyes at whatever is facing us. The fact of the matter, however, is that nothing ‘comes out of’ our eyes. Electromagnetic radiation ‘comes into’ them from our surroundings. The amazing structure and functioning of our eyes encode and transmit this information, by way of optic nerves, into the even more stupendous structure and functioning of our brains. To crown it all, we experience the results of all of this as subjective images which we ‘see’ in what we call our ‘mind’s eye’.

It’s perhaps unwelcoming news to some of us, but this means we do not have any direct connection with anything around us, but only with the images constructed in our minds. In addition, there are feedback loops in the brain which further process such images in accordance with inbuilt patterns and expectations based on our personal experiences including hopes, fears, desires and so on. Occasionally, therefore, we sometimes discover that what we thought we ‘saw’ was, to a lesser or greater extent, incorrect. 

In the case of the ‘risen Jesus’, it’s fair, I think, to distinguish between ‘delusion’ which has nothing corresponding to it, and ‘illusion’ which does have something corresponding to it, but not what we originally believed. Electromagnetic data may have entered the eyes of some of Jesus’ followers and been interpreted as a human figure. Further ‘feed back loop’ processing may have further interpreted that figure as the Jesus they’d known and feared they’d lost.

We may not like this idea, but it can’t be disdainfully dismissed, since it’s a well-established and well known human process, of which most, if not all of us, will have had personal experience. We’ve mistaken people ; the bereaved have seen their loved ones alive again ; hundreds have simultaneously seen ‘the blessed virgin Mary’ ; the lists are endless. People of other religions have had similar experiences. What gives any of us the right to say they are obviously mistaken in such beliefs, whereas we are right in ours.

Before taking me to task, please note that I’m not denying the physical resurrection of Jesus, though I don’t personally believe it happened. All I’m asking is, that what is written about above should be taken properly into account. Jesus is alive for me every-time I read his insightful words and reflect on his compassionate actions.

I regard my two recent posts about “Jesus and (his?) Church” as not so much advancing any particular “arguments”, as raising some questions that seem to arise from a critical (in the non-pejorative sense of) thoughtful reading of the biblical text. I, of course, can no more claim to have definitive answers to these questions than anyone else. They are however (though perhaps to a reducing number of people nowadays) worthy of pondering, and of reflecting on different possible points of view.

For myself, I see Jesus as being limited to human knowledge and understanding for the very simple reason that he was a human being, born into this world in the same way as the rest of us. Furthermore, having been born into a 1st century Jewish family he was, unsurprisingly, by birth and personal belief, a Jew of his time. To me, it therefore follows that the idea that he was the worldly incarnation of יהוה (probably pronounced Yahweh), the one and only God of Israel, would never have entered his mind. Indeed, in Mark 12:28, when asked “Which commandment is the first of all? Jesus answered, the first is ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one’.” This is, of course, a most central daily Jewish prayer, called the ‘Shema’ after its first word in the Hebrew.

The idea that the Jewish Jesus was the God of the entire universe embodied in human flesh is, to me, a later Christian ‘theological’ development, arising from the growing belief that he had been raised from the dead and ‘taken up into heaven’. This highlighted the obvious ‘numerical’ problem of how many ‘Gods’ there actually are, especially when the “Holy Spirit” also became deemed to be God. Eventually, in the 4th century CE, after many contentious, tortuous and abstruse debates, an ‘explanation’ was arrived at, known as the ‘divine trinity’ – the three that’s one, and the one that’s three – whatever that means ! 

The notion that he was the ‘second person’ of such a three-fold ‘entity’ would have made, I think, no sense to Jesus whatsoever. I have the thought that, as a devout Jew, he would have found any such idea “offensive”. When he prayed to his God, it’s hard to think that he was speaking to himself. And, rather than the Spirit of God ‘eternally proceeding’ from him, at the time of his baptism, it’s pictured as arriving to settle upon, or enter into, him. Confusion worse confounded comes to mind, although I recognise that there are many who find all this profoundly meaningful. 

I can’t avoid the thought that this philosophically inexplicable irrationality is actually a non-solution to a non-problem – one that was self-created, and generated a great deal of thinking, arguing, debating and writing that could have been more profitably employed. What appeals to me about Jesus is not that he was ‘perfect’, but that the best aspects of his lifestyle, and the best of his teachings, are of supreme importance and value.

There’s a story about a Zen master widely renowned for his supreme skills, and teaching abilities, in the arts of swordsmanship. One day a soldier, who’d survived many years of war experience, came to him and asked if he could become one of his students. 

The Zen master looked at him and, after some thought, suggested that the soldier must surely have already gained great expertise. What more did he need to learn?

The soldier said he still didn’t feel he had complete mastery of sword technique. The  Zen master then asked the soldier what were any of the lessons he felt he had learned from all those years of swords and warfare.

After taking a little time to look inwards, the soldier said he thought there were three things that he’d learned.

The first lesson was that although all life comes to an end, even for that very reason each individual life is precious, and worth living.

The second lesson was that since death will certainly come, there’s nothing to be gained in being afraid of it. It will come, in its own good time, whether worried about or not.

The third lesson was that, not only life as a whole, but each individual moment of life is itself precious, and deserving to be lived to the full. 

The Zen master, with a twinkle in his eye, said that perhaps it was he who should become the old soldier’s student rather than the other way round.

The mastery of practical techniques, of all kinds, is admirable, but arguably only take us so far. What perhaps matters most, and can lie beyond them, is life ‘techniques’ that they’re able to teach us, if our minds are awake and our hearts are open to them.

My previous post focused on how strange it may seem, if thought about, that a Gentile Christian Church claims as its founder, a believing, practising Jew, and has historically been in competition with the religion which Jesus himself embraced, even to the extent of establishing ‘missionary’ societies (not to mention pogroms) aimed at ‘converting’ Jews. Having considered verses in the Gospels in which Jesus appears to have an anti-Gentile bias, it’s only fair to consider others which seem to offer a different perspective.

In Matt.15:21ff, a Gentile “Canaanite woman” from “the district of Tyre and Sidon”, pleaded on her knees to Jesus to heal her daughter who, in the thinking of that time, was “tormented by a demon”. Jesus, after saying he “was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”, put her in her ‘canine’ place by adding ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs”. So much for ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’? How far, however, will a mother go to save her daughter? She takes hold of Jesus’ words and turns them back on him. ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table”. Well done her, and the healing of her daughter.

There are different ways of looking at this. The gospel writer says it was her faith in Jesus’ ability to heal that made the difference. On the other hand, some argue that it was also her acceptance of her status as a Gentile “dog”. One must make up one’s own mind.

In Luke 7:1ff, we’re told about a “centurion” with a slave who “was ill and close to death”. Centurions were non-commissioned officers in the Roman army, and so most unlikely to belong to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel”. This may be the reason why this Gentile centurion “sent some Jewish elders” to Jesus “asking him to come and heal his slave”. That this healing takes place is suggested by the gospel writer to be due to the Centurion’s recognition of Jesus’ commanding authority over life and death. As with the Canaanite woman however, it could also be linked to the Centurion’s recognition that (doglike?) he is “not worthy to have (Jesus) come under my roof”. It could also be the case that the slave “close to death” was a Jew, rather than a Gentile “dog”. 

What I’ve raised are questions emerging from a careful reading of these stories, which can suggest various answers. The point I want to make, however, is that what appeals to me about Jesus is that although he upheld the importance of the ‘rules’, he also upheld the importance of empathy and compassion in the face of genuine human distress and suffering, in which case it was legitimate for rules to sometimes be bent or even broken. I guess this is why I’ve more respect for liberal, flexible Christianity, than for the rigidly conservative or fundamentalist variety.

Here’s a question possibly not often thought about. How is it that, although Jesus was a believing, practising Jew, the Church which claims him as his founder is made up, almost completely, of non-Jews, otherwise known as Gentiles? After all, Jesus, sometimes seems to display an anti-Gentile bias. In Matthew 6:7, he warns his Jewish followers, “In praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do”. 

Jesus surrounded himself with 12 men, known as “apostles”, a word meaning someone sent out with a message and a mission. In Matthew 10:5, however, Jesus instructs them to “go nowhere among the Gentiles”. In Matthew 15:24, he explains his reason, which follows from his own understanding of his mission – “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”.  

The phrase “lost sheep” suggests the choice of 12 apostles was to represent the 12 tribes of Israel. Ten of these had been “lost” from history, defeated in war, exiled, and absorbed into new locations. Jesus seemingly believed the scriptural belief that, in the ‘last days’, God would resurrect the dead, and restore all 12 tribes in a new “Kingdom of God” centred on Jerusalem. So, in Matthew 19:28, he tells his apostles, “In the age when all things are renewed, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on 12 thrones, judging the 12 tribes of Israel.” – quite a prospect for these Galilean peasants! 

Before going further, we need to ask about the likelihood of Jesus’ reported sayings and doings having a factual basis, since he wrote down nothing, and the Gospels were put together around 40 to 70 years later. One indication scholars use is whether such reports, in the light of later thinking, might become awkward, and so likely to be left out, unless too widely believed, in which case a suitable way of incorporating them would be needed. 

In addition to antipathy towards Gentiles, another example is Jesus’ baptism. John the Baptist preached “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” but, according to later Christian teaching, Jesus had no sin! Additionally, a baptiser was ‘the leader’, whereas the baptised were ‘the followers’! The Gospel writers get over this awkwardness by having John say to Jesus “I need to be baptised by you, and yet you come to me”, and by having Jesus say to John, “Let it happen now, for it is right for us to fulfil all righteousness” (whatever that rather vague statement might mean). 

I’m not here in the business of ‘rubbishing’ the Gospels, on which I place the highest value. To do them justice, however, we must read them carefully and thoughtfully, and be prepared to ask ‘awkward’ questions, such as, if Jesus reappeared today, how would he react to the Gentile Church which bears his name, and to the history of its attitude towards, and treatment of, his own Jewish people?

How many of each kind of animal did Noah take into the ark? When we were kids, a nursery rhyme gave us the answer …

The animals went in two by two,

The elephant and the kangaroo,

They all went into the ark,

For to get out of the rain.

Unfortunately, the reality isn’t so ‘cut and dried’ (if you’ll forgive me for putting it that way.) In Genesis 6, God does indeed say to Noah, “You must bring into the ark two of every kind of living creature from all flesh, male and female .. Of the birds, two of every kind will come”. A few verses later, however, in Genesis 7, God says, “You must take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal .. and seven pairs of every kind of bird.” All these additional seven pairs must have put extra pressure on living space and food storage (and maybe a need for ear plugs). 

Those who believe in an “inerrant” Bible that contains no contradictions, have to hunt for far-fetched ‘solutions’, but theirs is a self-created problem. They’ve chosen to ignore 200 years of Biblical scholarship, which has shown that the final version of the Noah story was ‘stitched’ together from two sources, each from a different time period, with a different agenda.

There’s a ‘lay person’ source, which took it for granted that animal sacrifice had been a central part of religious ritual since time immemorial. So in their version of the Jewish ‘national story’, Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob all built altars for animal sacrifice. That’s why they have God telling Noah to take on board seven pairs of all “clean” animals. That doesn’t mean animals that had been given a good scrub, but those considered to be “ritually” clean. These were animals which, for a variety of reasons, were regarded as suitable to be offered up to God. If Noah had only had one pair of all animals, and had set up altars and offered sacrifices, for some there would have been no pair left to “be fruitful and multiply” and re-fill the earth!

Why wasn’t this an issue for the other, ‘priestly’, source? In their view, Israel had come into being at the time of the Exodus, and of God’s appearance on Mount Sinai. Only then was animal sacrifice established in the Law, and only then was a priesthood established as the legitimate sacrificers. There is therefore, in their version of the ‘national story’, no mention of any previous altars or sacrifices, and so no need for Noah to take extra pairs of any animals or birds. Two by two, male and female, would have been quite sufficient to get the ‘world show’ on the road again.  

I think it is to the credit of the final editors of the Hebrew Bible, that they showed respect for all of their sources, and so didn’t ‘get out the ironing board’ to smooth away and hide the inevitable patches, kinks, and creases!

Long ago, I completed a divinity degree specialising in Hebrew and Old Testament. In these (much) later years, this interest has revived. Despite grammatical and vocabulary deficiencies, I’m again reading the Hebrew Bible. My three helpers are, firstly, “A Reader’s Hebrew Bible” which, at the foot of each page, explains less common words and, secondly, the easily handheld “Langenscheidt Pocket Hebrew Dictionary”. To complete this ‘heavenly trinity’, is “Biblical Hebrew: A Student Grammar”, which limits its focus to essentials, mercifully leaving out exceptions and anomalies for another time.

When I did my degree, the set text was the formidable but magnificent chapters 40 to 55 of the book of Isaiah. Currently, however, I’m working my way through the more accessible book of Genesis. I’m mentioning this because it’ll give rise to future posts.

I read Genesis as ‘spiritual’ literature, and an outstanding ‘work of art’. As with all great art, through metaphor, symbol and picture-story, it contains depths of meaning below its surface so that, each time it’s revisited, there’s more to be discovered and thought about. Questions about its factual basis, fascinating as they are, can be left to textual critics and archeologists.

When I read the opening verses describing the ‘creation’ of the “heavens and the earth”, I like the neat little rhyming doublet of תֹּ֫הוּ (tohu) and בֹּ֫הוּ (bohu), which both suggest shapelessness. The breath, wind, or “spirit of God”, gives us the tongue-testing word מְרַחֶפֶת (mirachefet), [Scottish ch]. This is used elsewhere of a large bird, with beating wings, ‘hovering’ over its young, suggesting the power of energy, and the imminence of corresponding action. We also find the word ח֫שֶׁךְ (choshech) which means darkness. A few verses later, this darkness is dispelled with a sudden outburst of אוֹר (as in ‘oar’) meaning light. So we have Shapelessness, Energy, Darkness and Light.

This reminds me of modern cosmology’s latest ideas about the origin of our universe. In the beginning there was Shapelessness , a ‘point’ without any dimensions, but nonetheless already pregnant with all the ‘heavens and earth’ we now see around us. When the most massive stars in our universe run out of fuel, they collapse into unbelievably small ‘entities’, so dense that their gravitational power is of such strength that light can not escape from them, and they become ‘black holes’. 

It seems like our universe itself began as the ultimate, Shapeless, inconceivably tiny and dense, ‘black hole’ – a ‘point’ of absolute Darkness. But it was ‘bursting’ with Energy and, some 380,000 years after its ‘big bang’, it became possible for Light to escape, as if ‘switched on”, the remnants of that ‘illuminating’ event being still detectable as the ‘cosmic microwave background radiation’. So there we have our shapelessness, darkness, energy, and light. 

Genesis 1 did not, of course, predict the ‘big bang’, but isn’t it fascinating how, in great art, the human imagination can draw, from deep in our collective unconscious, ideas and images that continue to evoke contemporary meaning and significance.