Bruce Chilton is certainly unique among the contributors of Voices of Gnosticism
. Not only is he an reputable scholar of comparative religion,Chilton is also a perennial best-selling author and devout liberal Christian theologian. His works are not only prime educational resources but in addition are inspirational to religious-minded and even secular-minded readers.In this excerpt, Chilton begins laying the groundwork on the rich, mystical tradition of both the Jewish and Aramaic world-views that would equally influence early Christianity and Gnosticism, comparing many of their aspects to other religions. His ideas on what prophecy was meant to be in the times of Jesus could certainly be considered part of the bedrock for the concept of Gnosis. Perhaps most striking, if not shocking, is the reality that the Jewish and Aramaic traditions that Jesus and his followers drew upon held the similar outlook of many Gnostic schools in that immortality is not a given but must be earned.
From Voices of Gnosticism Pg. 23:
MC: Bruce, your book is broken down into what are truly seven spiritual
practices. You break them down into soul, spirit, kingdom, insight,
forgiveness, mercy, and glory. It seems to me that cultivating these seven
grants one the power of prophecy, not in the archaic notion of being
a forecaster of God, but in the way that the New Testament intended.
Could you explain what this true gift is, and the culmination of actually
having prophecy?
BC: This is a very helpful question and brings us to actually the core of
the book, the understanding of what prophecy involves. There’s been a
tendency in western understandings of religion to become superficial
in the understanding of prophecy, to see it merely as a matter of forecasting
what is going to occur in human events which, as a matter of
fact, in anyone’s hands is no more reliable than trying to forecast the
weather. Even the prophets of Israel are not fundamentally understood
as prophets because their predictions turned out to be exactly accurate.
More often than not they prove in fact not to be entirely accurate. For
example, the prophet Isaiah famously insisted that the city of Jerusalem
would never be taken by a foreign enemy. That turned out not to be
true. And after him the prophet Jeremiah forecast that the people of
Judaea would be in exile for 70 years before they returned. Fortunately
that was not true either.
So why were these prophets remembered if as a matter of fact their
forecasts were not entirely reliable? It is because they did manage to
develop an insight for how God deals with Israel. In their insight they
were able to offer the people of their times an orientation into how
they should act. And most importantly it’s because the prophet showed
people around him—or around her, because there were female prophets
as well—what it would be like to be in contact with a world beyond the
world, with the world of the divine. And it’s because the prophet could
provide evidence of contact with the divine that he or she was accepted
as a prophet; and his counsel for the people of his time also became a
matter of a program of ethics that could be followed. So it’s a matter, at
the very heart of it, of showing to people around one that there is a God
and he has an intention. None of us can really gather that intention and
yet by concentrating on that divine source of all of us we can in fact live
better and find resources to face up to the challenges that confront us.
MC: And that seems to have already been happening even before the
times of Jesus. Suddenly every man could touch God without going
through the temple. The Gnostics were able to do that and they called
it Gnosis. Saint Paul obviously talks a lot about prophecy. So isn’t that
one of the central messages of Jesus, that each one of us has the power
of prophecy?
BC: It certainly is. He is looking forward to the power of our spirit to
be shed on every human being, and in having that vision of there being
a universal access to the spirit, Jesus was reaching deep into the prophetic
tradition of Israel, especially going back to Ezekiel. But also he
was tapping into an impetus of humanity as a whole. Because the concept
of the shaman, as this figure is referred to among anthropologists,
who is able to have contact with the divine world in order to reshape
and make more human the world in which we live is basically inherent
in human culture.
MC: You juxtaposed Gandhi with Jesus in your book in several parts. Is
one of the reasons the fact that both Jesus and Gandhi’s gift to humanity
wasn’t just a message but to teach us how to interpret holy scripture
to give that insight you write about into God’s plan? In a way, it can
suit our modern issues. I like this quote by Gandhi, “What cannot be
followed out in day-to-day practice cannot be religion.”
BC: Yes, isn’t that a wonderful way of putting a fundamental truth?
Gandhi understood that when we read the scriptures of our individual
religious traditions, we are not simply dealing with texts. We are also
dealing with instruments that convey to us how God wishes to interact
with this world. And for that reason Gandhi insisted that we should
not become enslaved to a literal reading alone. We really need to read
through the text to the intention behind it. And it was for that very reason
that he could read the Bhaghavad Gita, which is in terms of topic a
war poem, and find within it the principle of non-violence. And he did
that because he saw that in the advice that Krishna gives to the warrior
there’s an intent focused on the issue of coming to a place of self-control
and serenity. And he believed that that was much more important
than the particular conditions in which the advice was given. And in a
similar way, when Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was
in the Torah, he refused to limit himself to just one, but he said it is to
love God, and to love one’s neighbor. Both of those commandments are
already in the Torah, there’s no question about that whatsoever. Jesus’
particular insight was in putting them together and in saying that until
you understand that love of God is truly not realized unless there’s love
of neighbor, and vice versa, you can’t fully understand the intention
behind the Torah. So both of these teachers are showing us something
about the necessity of having an incisive grasp of the scriptures and not
merely mastery of the topics that have to be covered.
MC: And the famous line of Jesus saying, “Turn the other cheek” has
been used as a clarion call for non-resistance or non-violence, but don’t
you write that it’s far more powerful than that?
BC: It works in the hands of Jesus in a much more interesting way because
the intent within the context that Jesus was living in is to show to
the person who is oppressive that there is in fact a better way, a more effective
way than oppression. Who is it that has the capacity to slap you
on the cheek and compel you to act? That’s referring in Jesus’ context to
a particular kind of figure, namely to a Roman soldier. Roman soldiers
around the time of Jesus were in fact authorized to compel people to
hand over their possessions and to work often at very hard labor without
any kind of recompense. And so Jesus’ advice is when confronted
with that kind of legalized oppression is to go along with it to the extent
that it’s legal and then to go beyond it in order to demonstrate to the
oppressor the nature of his immorality. It’s a matter of retaliating with
goodness in order to show a way forward that is better for all those concerned.
It’s vitally important, I think, and it was correctly understood
by Gandhi and by Martin Luther King to see that the purpose of Jesus’
teaching is always to demonstrate to the oppressor that there is a much
better alternative available.
MC: Bruce, how did the teachings of Jesus about the soul actually differ
from the Stoic view we’re accustomed to help us find and sustain lasting
humanity?
BC: Jesus taught understanding of our basic human selves, which we
can also call souls, such that they are basically limited. The ancient Israelite
conception is that human beings are dust and that they return to dust.
Now, to be sure, the mortal nature that we bear is alive as long
as we can breathe, and yet Jesus insisted on the notion that as created
we are finite, and that we have to learn the ways of eternity. We
cannot simply assume that they are given or are a part of our nature.
That’s what distinguished him from later Stoic teachings. Within the
teaching of Stoicism there was the conception that every human being
had within him a divine spark. Jesus’ view was that we were capable
of learning to apprehend that divine spark, but in fact it wasn’t merely
latent within us, it was a matter of our having actively to enter into a
movement which would bring us to that eternity.
MC: So when Jesus talks about, what shall it cost a man to gain the
world and lose his soul, or blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, he wasn’t
exactly whistling Dixie, was he?
BC: No, he was not, he was grounded in the thought that, because we
understand that we are mortal we are finite. We can truly lose ourselves
if we do not discover a way that connects us with the divine. There’s
nothing within us which is inherently immortal, and therefore we must
not feel secure with ourselves. The sense of being secure to oneself was,
to Jesus’ mind, one of the most dangerous sentiments that a person
could have.
MC: And can you tell us how understanding spirit in its original context
can grant us a better relationship with the divine?
BC: Take what we were just talking about, the nature of the limits
of the human soul. That makes clear the difference, not only in the
Hebrew Bible but also in Jesus’ mind, the difference between soul and
spirit. Often English speakers confuse these two, because I do think
that we have been too much influenced by Stoicism and not enough
by prophecy. In the world of prophecy the distinction is this, that the
soul, as we were just saying, is finite. The soul is a matter in Hebrew of
nephesh, of breath, and therefore we know very well that when a person
or an animal stops breathing then that is the end of that being. But
spirit is infinitely powerful, and it might be helpful to keep in mind that
the word in Hebrew for spirit, ruach, also means “wind”. So soul relates
to spirit in the same way that breath relates to wind. That is, breath is
finite, wind is, functionally speaking, infinite.
Within the book of Genesis, the reference to ruach, to spirit, that
opens the book is of the spirit of God hovering over the face of primordial
waters. It imagines the entire universe as being a form of abyss,
and within that what brought about shape and ultimately dry land and
the possibility of life was the powerful and shaping force of spirit. In
Jesus’ understanding then, and the understanding of the prophets, it
was exactly that primordial force which they entered into contact with,
in such a way that they could understand the ways of God for humanity.
MC: And as you explained, the whole concept of Satan is simply that
which attempts to break you from your conception with God, isn’t it?
Nothing more nefarious than that really.
BC: In a profound sense, trivial, because Satan has no power of its own.
It is rather that it can interrupt power, that it gets in the way of our
understanding of the eternal. It leads us into false loyalties that get us
away from the most primordial loyalty of them all, which is to spirit.
After all, spirit is the very source of life. That is the point of view of the
opening of the book of Genesis. And therefore everything in us that
can enable us to make contact with that source is of prophetic value.
And everything that causes us to forget it, and to fall into the delusion
that we can live separate from God, and separate from one another, is
Satanic.
The rest of this interview, as well as other interviews with the greatest experts on Gnosticism and Early Christianity, can be found in Voices of Gnosticism
, available at several retailers and formats that can be found at our Voices of Gnosticism Homepage. Or you can just download the audio for this specific interview, Aeon Byte #159--The Power of Prophecy.Bruce Chilton is the author of Abraham’s Curse, Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography, God in Strength, Rabbi Paul: An Intellectual Biography, Judaic Approaches to the Gospels, Mary Magdalene: A Biography; Revelation, and The Way of Jesus, as well as Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Religion and chaplain at Bard College, New York.
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