| by Jagath
Asoka
( December 25,
2012, Washington DC, Sri Lanka Guardian) Religion has been a fascinating
subject that has intrigued me for many years. Recently, my nine-year-old son
Rocco said something about Christianity that made me think of the diversity and
controversies of early forms of Christianity. Like my son, nearly two thousand
year ago, early Christians also struggled with the basic tenets of
Christianity: birth, life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
 |
The modern search for spiritual knowledge, which is not satisfied by faith alone, is becoming more important than ever. Like Rocco, most of us are not believers, and will not settle for dogma without questioning the veracity; the old stories are less effective, and we want to know and understand; therefore, must be referred to our own experience.
Christianity has
never been a monolith. There were widely different views of Christianity; for
example, what one thinks of
Christianity—God as a personal or
impersonal being, like the Hindu god Brahma, a life force that lies behind the
creation of universe; resurrection as a literal or symbolic act; Hell as a real
place or a metaphor for life apart from God; Baptism as a divine ritual that
removes the original sin or as a symbolic act of circumcision that brings
children into the covenant of God;
Eucharist as a literal act of eating the body and blood of Christ that has been
mysteriously transformed during the Mass or as a symbolic act that commemorates
Jesus’ last supper; and the Bible, as the literal and precise words of God or a
human book loaded with spiritual insight but contains false opinions, mistakes,
and discrepancies—depends on which Christian group one belongs to. Like Rocco, early Christians struggled with
the basic tenets of Christian faith; the differences were more pronounced then
than today, and that struggle, diversity, and controversies continue even
today. Even though Christianity means and meant different things to different
people, today Christianity is one of the great world religions, the dominant
religion of the western world, and a religion centered on life, teachings,
death, and resurrection of Jesus as a way for salvation.
There were many
forms of Christianity, a plurality of Jesuses, during the first through fourth
centuries; these early forms of Christianity—the Jewish Christian Ebionites,
the anti-Jewish Marcionites, and variety of groups called Gnostics—did not
survive against the forebears of orthodox Christians who eventually came to
dominate the Christian religion toward the middle of the third century. These
early Christians were called heretics by the orthodox Christians. All these
different kinds of Christianity had their own scripture and claimed to
represent the religion of Jesus, but they had fundamentally different beliefs
that seem completely aberrant to contemporary Christians.
Ebionites were
Jewish Christians that originated in and around Palestine in the first
centuries AD. Unlike other Jews of the first century, Ebionites—monotheist who
followed the Jewish law, observed Sabbath, and adhered to Kosher dietary
restrictions—believed that Jesus was a Jewish man, not a divine being, who was
adopted by God at his baptism; Jesus was the messiah because God chose Jesus to
fulfill the expectation of the messiah; Jesus died for our sins, and as a
reward God resurrected Jesus. In Judaism, Jesus is not thought of as a divine
being, the Son of God, or the Messiah prophesied in Jewish scriptures.
Marcionism was
based on the teachings of Marcion of Sinope in Rome around the year 144.
Marcionites were not monotheists. They believed that there were two gods: A
creator god of the Old Testament and a superior god who sent his son Jesus
Christ to save us from the material world. The Marcionites rejected the Old
Testament and its inferior god of the Jews, god of justice, who was the Creator;
they regarded Christ as the messenger of the Supreme God of goodness. Paul was
their chief apostle.
Gnosticism is perhaps
one of the most fascinating forms of Christianity, which represented the
religion of Jesus, that came to be lost; had its own sacred books—Gospels, Epistles,
and Revelations—but its points of view seemed completely aberrant to orthodox
Christians, so orthodox Christians labeled Gnostics as heretics. The Greek term
for knowledge is gnosis. Gnostics
believed that knowledge—secret, esoteric knowledge given by revelation from the
divine realm—was necessary for salvation. This knowledge was available to those
who were chosen. The secret, esoteric knowledge was the knowledge of yourself: Where
you came from and how you got here; most importantly, how you can return to the
divine realm. This material world is a place of imprisonment, and matter is
evil and emancipation comes through gnosis. Gnostics believed that the world
came into being when a cosmic disaster took place. Human bodies are just traps
of sparks of divinity. These divine sparks need to be liberated and can be
liberated from this evil world by learning their true identity. This secret
knowledge is essential for salvation, as opposed to salvation through faith or
dogma.
The Swiss
psychologist, Carl Jung, a renaissance man of the
twentieth century, was the first modern scholar who took Gnostic
teachings seriously; Jung was interested in all manifestations of mankind that
directly come from the unconscious. Jung was one of the first modern thinkers
to trace the spiritual thread which connects the ancient quest for gnosis
“knowledge” to our times, finding a parallel of his own efforts to explore the
unconscious. To Jung, gnosis was not the intellectual wisdom but the wisdom
that expressed by the unconscious. Gnosticism, through its images, visions, and
symbols, provided clues to find out how our unconscious mind functioned. Jung
began to study Gnostic ideas around 1910 while he examined the dreams of his
patients. He revived the Gnostic term “archetype” to describe the mythical and
mystical symbols and images that lie below the everyday conscious life but
erupt from the unconscious in dreams. His analysis of dreams led him on to a
profound study of the archetypes, and he got more and more interested in archetypes.
When Jung realized that only the Gnostics were concerned with the problems of
archetypes, he regarded the Gnostics as his predecessors.
With
Jung’s interests in archetypes we are confronted by the problems of collective
unconscious, which have not changed during the last two thousand years.
Gnosticism is not philosophy, speculation, or heresy but just an experience of
the soul: life is a nightmare until you get gnosis which is an inner
experience, an experience of the soul. For Jung, our unconscious mind is deeply
religious; religious experience was the center of all human experiences, which
requires individual quest, effort, and recognition, not the mass acceptance of
religious dogma.
The
modern search for spiritual knowledge, which is not satisfied by faith alone,
is becoming more important than ever. Like Rocco, most of us are not believers,
and will not settle for dogma without questioning the veracity; the old stories
are less effective, and we want to know and understand; therefore, must be referred
to our own experience.
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