The Power of Popular Culture
Part #3
Appendix
The Lost Gospel
Autobiography of an Idea
The title of the purported Lost Gospel is taken from the name of one
of the disciples, Nathaniel, also called Bartholomew. He was a friend
of another disciple, Philip. There is no connection between Nathaniel
and the Arabs that I am aware of but he is portrayed as skeptical of
Jesus' claims and that is suggestive, more-or-less, of Muhammad's
views of Christ. However, this is only a literary device and should
not be taken further since the dissimilarities are far more pronounced.
The idea for the Lost Gospel came from an e-mail to a friend in which
I tried to explain some of the differences between Christian faith and
Islam.
It has always been frustrating to try and make these differences clear
because of the pervasiveness of the "mainstream" narrative to the effect
that Muslim religion is little different than Christianity, a view that is
made use of by policy makers both Right and Left, from George W. Bush
("Islam means peace") to Barack Hussein and his rhapsodies to Islam
and overtures to the Muslim Brotherhood.
There is also a religious dimension to the view that Islam and Christianity
"must be" similar. After all, some religions make it an article of faith
that all religions have a common divine source, or at least a common
source of some kind, which was Thomas Jefferson's view even if he
regarded Islam as unacceptable and inferior to Christian religion.
.
But there are religions per se and various Church organizations
that insist that differences are superficial. This outlook was basic
to the Baha'i Faith, for instance, of which I was a member in
the past, and of groups like probably most Sufis in America,
to the United Church of Christ and the Unitarians. However,
it became clear to me no later than 1987 that this view was
hopelessly contrary to the facts and had to be completely rejected.
.
NOT because of some sort of 'conversion' on my part to Evangelical
religion even though I am sincerely appreciative of such faith,
but because of my personal and deeply meaningful conclusion that
the best way to conceive of the Holy Spirit is feminine gender,
just as we find it in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. Hence
nearly all references to the Spirit are to "she" or "her," and the
Goddess-like comparisons with which the Holy Spirit is portrayed
in Proverbs 8 and 9 and elsewhere, and in the Wisdom of Solomon
in the Apocrypha. And, after all, the dove as it is presented in the
Gospels as symbolic of the Spirit, was a traditional representation
of Ishtar or other female deities of the ancient Mid East.
That is, to put it in such terms, this was the result of a personal
spiritual
journey that cannot be classified as either "liberal" or "conservative"
in nature. It does not matter to me that, so far, my view is not shared
by very many other people. What counts is the fact that I regard this
as a truth that cannot be argued with; Left and Right are irrelevant.
There is also criticism from both Left and Right, but I can live with that.
Since I once taught Comparative Religion a thought occurred not long
after concluding that to speak of the Holy Spirit as the Chokhma
("Wisdom") in Proverbs or as the Shekhina of Wisdom of Solomon,
or as Astarte in early passages in the Tanach, or as Ishtar, or any
other female divine presence, is an idea that Muslims reject.
At that time, ca. 1987, I did some fresh research to find out
exactly what Islam teaches on the subject.
The answer is that it regards any such belief as the worst of sins,
deserving death, as an affront to Allah who supposedly rules the Universe
as a unitary essence to be spoken of only in terms of the male gender.
That view, it seemed to me, was false on the merits. Indeed, the
truth was the exact opposite -just as Proverbs and Wisdom of Solomon
say, that with God at the creation there was his Wisdom acting as his
consort and companion.
Needless to say, since Islam condemns me to death, therefore
I return the favor and condemn Islam to death and hope to see
the day when Muhammad's religion is repudiated by all Muslims
as inspired by the Devil.
My outlook, which has a great deal in common with the Religious Left,
is condemned by the Left. Meanwhile, since my interpretation of the Bible
has a number of commonalities with "liberals," people on the Religious
Right
have their own criticisms to make. But, all told, my uncompromising stand
against Islam means that on this issue I am in complete harmony with the
views of nearly all Evangelicals, plus most Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and
various other Christians. This also brings me close to Hindus and Buddhists
and Jews and others who have been victims of violent and ceaseless
persecution by Muslim fanatics around the world.
In any case, as close as anyone can get to characterizing my faith in terms
that Americans might understand without doing a lot of study, is that it
is
similar in some respects to Assyrian Orthodoxy, the so-called Church of
the East, known to history as the Nestorians, and known for a mostly
positive outlook toward the religions of East Asia.
My highly critical views of Islam predate 9/11 by approximately a decade,
especially since some time in the late 1990s after reading Ibn Warraq's
1995 book, Why I Am Not a Muslim. Following 2001, however, it has
been possible to research the issue of Islam in much greater depth than
I had done in past years. What I found was proto-Fascism, a religion
based on heinous criminality proclaimed to be God's word to mankind,
a system of misogyny, of religiously sanctioned chattel slavery,
of extreme religious bigotry, of narrow-mindedness beyond belief,
and of uncompromising anti-intellectualism. Islam is anti-American
in character from start to finish, and is a moral monstrosity.
In so many words, if you examine the core texts of Islam, especially
the Koran, you get something very much like the sadistic values
of the Islamic State or Al Qaeda. At best -for want of a better word-
you get the utterly retrograde Saudi kingdom dominated by Salafists
and their own version of criminality, sadism, and bigotry.
The question simply is: How can you convince Americans, who by nature
want to think good about all people, to understand the facts for what they
really are? This, despite all the brain-washing to a totally different
effect
perpetrated by the mass media, by official Washington, DC, and
by opinion leaders in the United States, from pundits to educators,
and including any number of mainline Protestant clergy.
Moreover, American opinion leaders who do know Muslims are
most likely to work in fields like high tech or imports or petroleum
and so forth, where the Muslims in question aren't especially religious
and are approximately as ignorant of their own religion as Americans
are ignorant of Christianity. And this being the case, it makes sense
for Americans to regard Muslims they know as basically decent people
not much different than Methodists or Presbyterians.
The critique being made here is not about MINOs, Muslims-In-Name-Only.
At issue is what happens when Muslims start to take their religion
seriously.
What happens when they start to read the Koran, when they start to observe
Muslim rituals, when Muslim women wear the hijab and men
grow unkempt beards?
Nor is this a critique of Sufism as most Americans know it. There are
various
forms of Sufism in the world and the varieties that are best known in the
United States closely resemble the Baha'i Faith or even Unitarianism.
But there are other kinds of Sufism, all those forms that trace their
origins
to Al-Ghazali, and they can be as militant and violent as Hamas or
Hezbollah
or Lashkar-e-Taiba, but these groups have little or no American presence.
All of which says that pointing out structural shortcomings in Islam simply
may not register to many or even most Americans. They don't know what
you are talking about; it is beyond their experience.
Worse, most Americans, even those who have at least minimal understanding
of Islam, are disinterested in going further. By and large, Muslim religion
simply does not interest them, therefore, why bother learning about it?
The situation in terms of basic knowledge of the substance of Islam
is far better than it was on the eve of 9/11 but it is still far from
what it should be. At most maybe 20% of Americans have modest
knowledge of Islam and of that number not more than one out of ten
really comprehend Muhammad's religion in any depth. And this
generalization applies to people in the news media, not only to
the hoi polloi who purchase newspapers or watch TV news at night.
At issue is massive ignorance of the subject.
People on the Left pride themselves on how much they supposedly know
about issues of the day. In actual fact they know next to nothing about
Islam
and their grasp of the subject is a bad joke.
This does not say that people on the Right are much better; and some
may be worse. The point is that most people, because of anti-religion
bias in public education, in which religious illiteracy is regarded as some
kind of perverse "good," most people operate on the basis of ignorance
when any religious view is at stake. This applies full force to the
issue of Islam in the modern world.
What little many people do "know" is terribly misleading, moreover.
Perhaps the worst misunderstanding concerns the place of Jesus
within Islam. It is a fact that Christ is mentioned repeatedly in
the Koran and that his station is portrayed as second only to
Muhammad. Or to say this in different terms, Muslims look
at Jesus the way that Christians look at Moses.
Of course, because most Muslims are as poorly informed about their
religion as they are, and because Mid East popular culture is what it is,
many Muslims utterly hate Christians and regard Jesus as some kind
of ogre, but to speak of Muslim orthodoxy...
But even with the "good press" that Jesus receives in the Koran
there are vastly different versions of Jesus to take note of. Basically
the Jesus of the Koran is almost the diametric opposite of Jesus
as presented in the Gospels.
However, most Americans, to the extent that they are religiously literate,
to the extent they know any religion at all, reflexively make the equation
that both the Koranic Jesus and the Biblical Jesus necessarily are
pretty much identical. That (supposedly) being the case, what else
could Muslims possibly be besides people who really are a lot like
average American Christians?
Particularly when Muslims in America, outnumbered about 99: 1 by
people of other religions, mostly Christians, regard it as the better part
of valor to "do in Rome as the Romans do." Muslims are not especially
interested in being singled out for serious criticism, or worse, and they
often are happy to conform to American values -with the exception that
new immigrants from Muslim states in the Mid East or Africa may behave
like barbarians and fanatics until they have had run-ins with the police
sufficiently that they get the idea that their conduct is unacceptable
and may result in imprisonment.
Besides, these Muslims may know so little about Islam that they are willing
to conform to opinions about Islam purveyed by the political Left -which
make Islam out to be a version of Left-liberalism. or of "soft" Marxism.
Which was why the late Ayatollah Khomeini regarded Muslims in America
as counterfeit Muslims, not really Muslim in any meaningful sense at all.
In other words, the critique here is about "real" Muslims, it is primarily
about the 99% of Muslims who do not live in the United States,
it is about those Muslims who hate America and Americans,
who kill Americans and other people guilty of no crimes whatsoever
because their holy book tells them to do so as a "virtue."
It is also about an uncertain but significant number of Muslims in America
who are little different in attitudes, values, or behavior, than Muslims
from
places like Somalia, Libya, Yemen, rural Pakistan, etc., who, in fact, may
be
recent immigrants from Somalia, Libya, and so forth. And it is about
Muslims
in the United States who practice Taqqiya.
These are Muslims who know perfectly well what the Koran says,
who may be sympathetic to Muslim terrorists, who at a minimum
wish to impose Shariah law in America, but who choose to lie about
such things because Taqqiya doctrine says that it is perfectly OK
to dissimulate to others, to be misleading, to conceal one's motives,
to appear to share the views of non-Muslims, and so forth, if they
believe that there is some kind of danger to themselves. There is
no counterpart doctrine in Christianity -nor, as far as I know,
in any of the other major religions on Earth.
How many American Muslims are in these categories? No-one can say
for sure but a reasonable guess would be on the order of one out of
three or four. Which is to say that there is legitimate reason for
caution.
Especially because no-one can be sure when a perfectly normal seeming
"good Muslim" may start to take an interest in the Koran and begin
to take Islam seriously. Remember that veneration of Muhammad's book
is not supposed to be optional for Muslims. For them it is not just a book,
it is believed to be Allah's actual presence on Earth, something to
take literally as if every word came directly from God and is binding
in every detail on every believer.
---------------------
It was all of this that was on my mind when setting out to write
The Lost Gospel.
You may be interested in the original e-mail because it shows
the genesis of this faux Gospel. This was introduced by saying that
"here is a forgotten scripture which "now, for the first time,
is translated for all to see for themselves !"
"And Jesus went up unto Bethany where he slew ten Pharisees
because they insulted him. Verily the evil Pharisees had it coming."
"Then Jesus was questioned by Sardonis who did not believe what
the Lord had said. Jesus then smashed Sardonis with a cudgel and
put him to death, as he richly deserved."
"When Jesus saw the Sadducees approach he led the Disciples
toward them with drawn swords and caused much slaughter amongst
them, whereupon he instructed his followers to take the women
captive and do as they wished, enslaving them, but admonishing
them not to beat the damsels too severely."
This, in only a few sentences, captures the essence of the Muslim Jesus.
Obviously the point is made far better when details are spelled out and
Koran references are documented, but this short 'gospelette' gets
the point across.
Who in their right mind could possibly believe in the Muslim version
of Jesus? Answer: A billion Muslims.
Islam is a pathetic mess, in other words, unfit for human consumption.
This hardly says that the text of the New Testament is problem free.
Scholars have pointed out many problems with every scripture in it,
from the first Gospel written, Mark, to the last composition included
in the Christian canon, the Book of Revelation. For one, I enjoy reading
such scholarly material, whether written by John Dominic Crossan
or Elaine Pagels or Bart Ehrman, to name a few.
Probably most of their observations are true, or close enough. Which is
a lot to weigh and evaluate, acknowledging that there are many problems
of many kinds. OK, there are. But I will take the Jesus revealed by history
any day, any year, as did Albert Schweitzer and E. Stanley Jones and
many other Christians who respected the best of scholarship available
to them, nonetheless ending with faith in the living Jesus -which the
Gospels,
for all their limitations, give us an inspiring account. That Jesus, the
Christ of the Gospels, is someone to believe in with sincere good faith.
What about Acts 4: 12 ? In discussing Jesus it clearly says:
"There is no salvation in anyone else at all, for there is no other name
under heaven granted to men, by which we may receive salvation.' "
This has been a popular "proof text" for Evangelical believers for
many years and seems to exclude any other possibility. But does it really?
This passage comes near the beginning of a somewhat lengthy story about
the early years of Christian missions as the disciples and others went out
into society and sought to win others to Christ. Along the way there were
many adventures and difficulties to overcome. There is a story to be told
in the events being narrated and a climax occurs in Acts 10: 34. Once ag
ain
it is Peter who is talking, but now a wiser man after learning from his
various
experiences. A "virtuous Pagan" named Cornelius awakened Peter to
a truth about God that he then expressed in these words:
'I now see how true it is that God has no favourites, but that in every
nation
the man who is godfearing and does what is right is acceptable to him."
Who are we to set limits on what the Almighty may say or do? If someone
in further Asia is acceptable to God, or in deepest Africa or the distant
North,
far from any Christian community or even any Christian , exactly how does
this translate into God's rejection when he has accepted someone?
What this major part of the Book of Acts is doing as literature is similar
to what Plato did with his dialogues. And Plato was known and read
by many or most Christians in that era; indeed, scholarly articles
have been written about parallels between Plato and selected parts
of the New Testament, and this is one.
Plato's method was to start a dialogue with a strong statement that,
in the end, would be rejected. But first it had to be shown to be a weak
or indefensible case. Only after doing that, which could consists of most
of the dialogue, would Plato state the position he actually believed was
true.
This did not mean that the original position was 100% false, but it did
mean
that it was insufficient, or flawed, or otherwise could not be accepted
at face value. This seems to be the best reading of the extended pericope
in Acts from chapter 4 to chapters 10 and 11.
And doing so has the virtue of making an implicit connection between
Acts 10 and Deuteronomy 32: 8-9, "when the most high
parceled out the nations..."
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