"Cliff's Notes" to Christianity

From Jesus to Christianity and back

I have several substack entries on my experience of Jesus and the overall Christian context, but in conversations there seems to be a need sometimes to have a short version, which follows below, along with the links to a few previous posts that address certain aspects in more detail.

I will stick to a somewhat stylized timeline as far as the beginning, i.e. Jesus’ birth would be in year 1, and his crucifixion in year 33. There just seems to be uncertainty about the precise dates. For the rest I will just follow the accepted dating - there might still be some differences here and there, but most of it is pretty clear.I am following the orthography of ACIM here, in not capitalizing his and him referring to Jesus, and reserving the caps for God or the Holy Spirit.

• CE 1: Jesus’ birth (we used to call it AD 1 before for that reason).

• CE 30: The start of Jesus’ ministry

• CE 33: The Crucifixion

• CE 35-50: Gospel of Thomas

• CE 65: Gospel of Mark

• CE 75: Gospels of Luke and Matthew

• CE 100: Gospel of John

• CE 325: Council of Nicea, definition of the Nicene creed as the criterion for what makes one a Christian, established more or less at the point of sword by the emperor Constantine, who was making Christianity the state religion, but demanded a homogeneous definition of the bishops.

• CE 367: Bishop Athanasius defines the 27 book of the New Testament Canon

• CE 1054: The great Schism of Rome and Constantinople, of Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity, the Western and the Eastern church.

• CE 1517: Luther’s theses and the beginning of the Reformation.

• CE 1975: Publication of A Course in Miracles. Return to Jesus as Inner Teacher: the resurrection is in the Mind.

• CE 2003: Publication of The Disappearance of the Universe, by Gary Renard. Making the connection between the original teachings of Jesus as per the Thomas Gospel and A Course in Miracles.

In some gnostic traditions they were clear that Jesus knew he was not his body, and he was laughing under a tree somewhere while his body was being crucified. 156426

Notes:

1. As Bart Ehrman has argued (see Lost Christianities), up to the Council of Nicea, there were perhaps 25,000 “Christianities,” so the impatience of the Emperor Constantine could be understood. Big issues were such things as was the resurrection at the baptism in the River Jordan or at the Crucifixion?

2. As theologian G. J. Heering has pointed out in his The Fall of Christianity, the compromise of Jesus’ teachings started almost immediately, in spite of his statement to leave to God what is God’s and to give to the Emperor what is the Emperor’s. Eventually that became the path that enabled making Christianity into a state religion.

3. Another great resource was James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword, which relates the sordid history of how Christianity made itself different from Christianity.

4. I modestly add my own book here, Closing the Circle: Pursah’s Gospel of Thomas and A Course in Miracles, where I discuss how the formation of Christianity by the apostles, after Jesus’ death, immediately began compromising his teaching to some thing dualistic, and muddy up the non-dualistic message he had been trying to teach. Perhaps one of the most interesting things about that development is that the Thomas Gospel generally is being explained away by strongly church going Christians, because the contents clash with the Canonical gospels, and of course that is the reason why it was not included in the NT canon, even though the synoptic gospels (Mark, Luke, Matthew) liberally quoted from the Thomas Gospel, and thus it had to pre-exist them, and also stylistically, the Thomas gospel is also much simpler in that it contains only sayings, and the stories around them are clearly later additions. Thus a literary analysis makes it clear that Thomas came before the others.

5. As one funny autobiographical note, I will add that in my high school years, I became very interested in Judaism, exactly because it was clear to me that Jesus was just a teacher in a Jewish environment, and not at all concerned with or interested in starting any new religion. In those days it was quite normal to ascribe to a famous teacher what one wrote, think Plato, whose dialogues of Socrates were probably authentic at first, but at some point, it became Plato’s further developments of concepts, put into the mouth of Socrates. There were times I studied Judaic literature, and also in my Hebrew classes, I had a teacher who was a professor of Semitic languages, and knew both Hebrew and Arabic, and I began to be introduced to the Qur’an as well, and became keenly aware that Islam looks differently at Jesus, Hazrat Issa, which was interesting to me.
   I studied Hebrew and some Aramaic, until one night in the early seventies, I experienced Jesus saying to me (in Dutch): “If I am who you think I am, then don’t you think I could speak to you in any language?” Later, in 1991, that experience came back to me when I found A Course in Miracles, and I found myself becoming very clear that in it, Jesus was speaking to me, this time in English.

In short, the Gospel of Thomas marks the dividing line, ignoring a couple of very apparent corruptions, it reflects a non-dualistic teaching of Jesus that was later muddied up by the apostles who turned it into a dualistic teaching, and busied themselves with social functions and government relations, increasingly getting away from Jesus’ teachings.

Of course, past that momentary unification of “Christianity” at Nicea, it almost immediately started to fall apart again, first in the Schism of Eastern and Western church, and later the reformation and endless splits after that, to the point that today there are nearly as many “Christianities” as in the years before the Council of Nicea.

There have been many Christian mystics who did have a deeper relationship with Jesus and sometimes could express that very well, even if it was sometimes hampered by developments such as the inquisition, which did not make it easier to express oneself. However, with A Course in Miracles, it is the voice of Jesus himself as our Inner Teacher, who guides us on a contemplative path. It is clearly up to every person for themselves to decide on the authenticity of the document. For me, I have always had a strong feeling of who Jesus is, once I really sorted out where Jesus ends and where Paul and the apostles begin. And I had a dream experience about the Course when I encountered it in 1991, which for me was conclusive. The Course starts with this:

This is a course in miracles. ²It is a required course. ³Only the time you take it is voluntary. ⁴Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. ⁵It means only that you can elect what you want to take at a given time. ⁶The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. ⁷It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance. ⁸The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.

2. This course can therefore be summed up very simply in this way:

²Nothing real can be threatened.
³Nothing unreal exists.

⁴Herein lies the peace of God.

(ACIM, T-in.1:1–2:4)

The following two earlier substacks account for some other aspects of my personal relationship with this material.