NON-DUAL MUSINGS ON EASTER

Image (c) Tim Langdell 2014, 2020

SOME NON-DUAL MUSINGS ON EASTER

At this time of the year I miss Marcus Borg. I dearly miss his writings and the talks he gave when he came to our Southern California city of Pasadena. But I am also deeply grateful to him for having the bravery to write about what many of us were discussing, but perhaps were too scared to write about. That is, the disconnect between what Christ actually taught and what ended up in the Christian canon, preached from pulpits on Sundays.

Borg wrote about what he called the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus. The pre-Easter Jesus is a charismatic, wise teacher in the Jewish first century Wisdom Tradition. He is human, like you and I, born probably around 4 B.C.E. and died around 30 C.E. The post-Easter Jesus, by contrast, is divine, infinite, a spiritual non-material reality, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, the Messiah, and becomes that Face of God as the second person of a Trinity. 

Attending Seminary was a life-changing, eye opening experience for me. I dreaded it since I had all but dismissed the Old Testament as depicting an angry God I could never connect with, and New Testament classes I presumed would be like attending a revivalist evangelical tent rally. To my immense surprise and delight, I attended classes where professors related in simple factual tones what we know about when the gospels were written, how much of it reflects what Jesus actually probably did or said, and how much was added later by scribes reinventing Jesus in their theology, not his.

So one of the first things many of us are taught at seminary is that Mark is the oldest of the NT gospels, perhaps written around 65 C.E. or so. And that the oldest writings in the NT are some of the letters of Paul. What we also learn is that originally Mark ended with the discovery of the empty tomb: no resurrection, no sightings of a risen Christ, etc. Somewhere in this period after Jesus' death around 30 C.E. and around 70-90 C.E. a movement came into being that had transformed Jesus the Wisdom Tradition teacher (the pre-Easter Jesus) into a divine being who had risen from the dead, and who suddenly was now reported to have been seen (briefly) post-death on the cross (the post-Easter Jesus). 

Now, you may say even so the original ending of Mark has the young man (man, note, not angel) in the tomb saying "He has risen!" so isn't that sufficient support of contemporaneous reporting of the resurrection? That conclusion is sadly flawed and there is general acceptance that this section containing this phrase was added to Mark 16:6 at a later date, too. If we consider what this earlier ending of Mark actually says, it makes no sense: 

6 “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. 

7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’ ” 

8 Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

Note "They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid." That none of them said anything is supported elsewhere by no text reporting they mentioned anything to Peter or the other disciples, no account of meeting up with a risen Jesus in Galilee, etc. But, the writer states they didn't mention this to anyone. If they didn't mention it to anyone, how could the writer of Mark know about it? He couldn't, of course. And this is a common device use by writers of this time period where they are adding to a story 'facts' they know are not actual facts, but what the scribe would like the reader to believe happened. There is evidence, then, that not only is Mark 16:9-20 a fiction added many years after Mark was first written, but that the rest of Mark 16 was probably either all later added fiction, or at least heavily amended and added to long after the first version of the text was written closer to the time of Jesus' death.

One of the most unfortunate consequences of the invention of the post-Easter Jesus by those writing decades after his death is that it sidelines what Jesus actually taught. Worse, it pedestalizes Jesus making him "non-human," "other," renders what he was "unobtainable" to mere humans, and so on. There's a meme that was going around the Internet not too long ago:  "It's not difficult to imitate Jesus. First, you need to get yourself born of a virgin. Second, you need to die and come back to life three days later..."

And, yes, the same solid scholarship that proves the new invented ending to Mark, also shows that the stories of virgin birth, being born in Bethlehem with wise men finding the child by following a star, etc, were all also later inventions added to the original gospels decades after the death of Jesus. Again, all part of a reinvention of Jesus as his post-Easter self, pedestalizing him.

Christ's teachings were deeply non-dual, or as non-dual as they could be being rooted in a monotheistic society and culture. During his lifetime--and thank goodness large parts of the gospels came through to us relatively unscathed--he taught that by adopting a state of consciousness that is beyond thought (metanoia) you can enter what he called heaven within. Like most Jews of the time (indeed even still of this current day), Jesus did not believe in a life after death, a place called 'heaven' that one goes to in an afterlife. He spoke of how the death and resurrection you need to experience is right here, right now, in this moment. He described it as being born again of water and the Spirit. He teased the benefits of following his teaching as including the fact that if you are born again in this way you gain eternal life. This eternal life, he says, is realization of your true self that is not (like God) subject to life and death, but rather is eternal. This is your Christ-Nature, essentially the same as what we call your Buddha-Nature in Zen. 

But more about that in future writings. My book on the parallels between the teachings of Christ and Buddha will be released soon. Stay tuned.