The Tread of My Soul (Part 3)
Coming of Age on the Pacific Crest Trail, 30 Years Later
This is Part 3 of The Tread of My Soul, a travelogue/memoir I wrote in 1994. Read: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. Or find the eBook at Apple Books or Amazon Kindle Store.
Day 16.
Walked fifteen miles.
More berries.
Talked about Jesus and the Bible.
Stopped at an obscure weather station and talked with Jackie who is writing a book there.
I picked berries and made my now infamous Huckleberry Trail Pie for Karl and I.
Our dinner was lovely, Karl playing his recorder.
More clear-cuts.
I feel tired and disconsolate this morning. I don't want to get up and gather my things together and I don't particularly want to write in this book. These things I've done every day and they have required stamina. This morning I have no stamina. I give up. I need to rest.
Have you heard it was good to gain the day?
I also say it is good to fall....
Battles are lost in the same spirit they are won.
- Walt Whitman, The Song of Myself
In fact; for all things there is a time for going ahead
and a time for falling behind
A time for slow breathing
and a time for fast breathing
A time to grow in strength
and a time to decay
A time to be up
- Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching
Two nights before at Snoqualmie Pass I took a bath and slept in a bed with a plurality of blankets and space to unfurl my legs. The experience was so refreshing, yet so compressed. I want it back. I want these creature comforts, but the closest approximation is to pull my sleeping bag over my head and hunker down. Better to walk 10 miles refreshed than 15 in a stupor.
• • •
Day 17.
Hiked fifteen miles.
Walked with few pauses to Snoqualmie Pass.
Saw several people.
Went to bed and breakfast popular to PCT Hikers. $15.
Bath, bed, wrote.
One day in my junior year of high school I happened upon a gathering of youth meeting under the name Young Life. It was an Indian summer night in late September, as I recall, and the meeting was in the primary school gymnasium. The one adjacent to our high school.
I walked in alone to find everyone, apart from one man sitting on the floor. Now, apparently, as far as I could gather, he had kindled some sort of story to the end that if he took his hand from the top of a cup the assembly would erupt in yelling, which became an exercise in coordination. I was at once struck with the influence demonstrated by this man: it seemed he commanded more attention than some teachers at school. By degrees, a transition took place where another gentleman spoke briefly and candidly about Jesus Christ using the lyric of a contemporary song to elucidate his point.
This appealed to me. Allow me to say why: foremost, there were intelligent people who I admired in attendance, and they wanted to be there unlike many church affairs. Second, it provided me with a long-awaited forum to obtain some insight into the bigger life questions I began to ask. Third, it was fun.
That entire school year I was a regular attendee at Young Life, and in the summer I went to a week-long camp set in fjords of British Columbia at a place called Malibu.
Malibu was inspiring, both for its natural beauty and its dynamic human community. Nightly, the camp speaker would talk about Jesus, whereafter we would often go out to have ten minutes alone with this message in our minds and hearts. Later, we would gather in our cabins and discuss openly the questions the talk raised.
At cabin time, I found I became a sort of reflective theologian.
Why did God make himself a man in the form of Jesus?
To show us in a symbol we could understand.
Why did Jesus allow himself to be crucified?
The ultimate act of grace is dying for someone you love. He loved us.
What about those who have never heard of Jesus?
Those who were not told about him will see and those who have not heard will understand.
Isaiah 52:15
How can a pragmatist believe in the miraculous events in the life of Christ, including the resurrection?
For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct Him?
Isaiah 40:12
Admittedly, God exceeds us. Science is our language, not His. God transcends logic. This last answer I clung to, for it was a logical premise that in the face of difficult questions, dispelled doubt.
Absolute answers are unknowable.
I know now. Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away.
- C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
And the peace of God which transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
- Paul, Phillipians 4:7
Such was the condition of my soul for a couple of years: as a consequence, I read the Bible more and eventually found myself giving talks, similar to the one I heard in the gymnasium not more than three years prior.
Day 18.
Hiked only 3 miles.
Woke up and wrote letters. Breakfast in bed.
Went to the cafe with Jean and talked for hours over a piece of apple pie.
She teaches first graders about art.
Wrote last letter in hotel lobby—#9.
Got on the trail late.
Lying on my blue foam pad on the pebbled shore, my head is propped up on a weathered log. Looking out, I see my feet, and I judge the small waves keep a steady yard away. I look over the surface of the water to the opposing shore, a mile off, where the green-black canopy rolls down from a horizon of dark, swirling clouds. In the gaping wound of that sky are orange and pink pillow clouds off in the distance scrolling obliviously to the gathering storm in the foreground.
A flurry of silhouettes darts and lurches into the cauldron of it all. What nimble and fanciful birds! No, not birds, not in this twilight. They are bats.
I always thought animals were closer to God: that every single creature was born a saint and died a saint. I thought they simply and joyfully lived out their God given instinct, free from the rotten apple humankind got stuck with: the knowledge of good and evil. I began to rethink this as I asked myself the question, what do you suppose it is like to be a bat?
People and bats share the same class in the animal kingdom: we are mammals. They eat bugs. We eat many things. What we have in common is mammary glands, among other things
The bats lurch and dart around in the cauldron of twilight— do you know why?
Most bats are blind. They navigate by their own high frequency squeaks and the reverberations generated in return. This perceptual phenomenon is called echolocation. A typical squeak or blip lasts only a thousandth of a second in which it spreads omnidirectionally. From the ensuing audible information, the bat locates objects such that it can navigate through branches while discerning a mosquito from, say, a falling pine needle. However, since the squeak is such a high frequency it only travels about a yard (high pitched noises don't travel as far as lows). Hence the bat compensates with agility, by lurching and darting.
Now, this information is somewhat provocative. As humans, we are completely dependent on light for navigation and observation. Perceptually, light creates our world. Moreover, biologically, it literally does. If the sun were to suddenly extinguish, life on earth would quickly die. (Theories of mass extinctions on earth invariably involve some catastrophic event diminishing the life sustaining energy the sun provides us. A worldwide dust storm caused by volcanic activity or a giant meteor collision. ) Because of this perceptual and biological link of light creating and sustaining life, our primitive ancestors were apt to deify the sun. And though theology becomes ever increasingly complex, light remains the dominant universal spiritual symbol. In the New International Version the word light is used 232 times:
The Lord is my light and my salvation...
- Psalm 27:1
By contrast, a bat's world is perceptually created by itself. It would be like humans navigating from their own luminous bodies. A bat's world is only 3 feet in all directions at any given instant. What would it be like to live as a bat? How is a bat most aware of the energy of the sun?
If I were a bat, I think I would most likely be an atheist. Neither saint nor sinner. Born a bat to live a bat, to die a bat.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.
- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
The light fades and I’m unable to make out the lurching shadows in front of the dark blanket of trees and sky. With the beautiful wound in the sky healed, I take my leave and lope off to bed.
• • •
Day 19.
Hiked fifteen miles through expansive landscapes.
Looked down glaciated valleys for miles.
The lakes are beautiful and range from teal to midnight blue.
Camped on a rock peninsula in one Spectacle Lake and swam to my own island there.
Cathedral Rock. The name itself is implicit. Its aspect is even more so. Its naturally eroded spires and portentous mass surpass that of St. Mark’s and Notre Dame. Cathedral Rock is a conspicuous landmark on the PCT. It rises 1100 feet above the pass of its namesake, vertically on most faces. On the horizon it looks like a ruin, a tower, a ziggurat.
Attracted to its singular dominance over the landscape and thinking, simply, the name might serve me well, I spontaneously decide to shed my pack for the afternoon and make a go of climbing it.
Geologists would call this rock a lava neck. Having once served as the duct for a volcano, the magma cooled to form an igneous rock, in this case, andesite. As years passed and passed and passed the mountainsides were stripped away by erosion to reveal the more resistant duct, now a column of rock. Michelangelo said of his sculptures that he released the figure from it’s marble tomb’. Just so, nature released cathedral from a mountain.
It is interesting to me that the exceedingly glorious cathedrals of our world are a product of natural entropy rather than human construction.
From below it would seem quite likely that you might find God up top, doing the sorts of things Gods do- looking down furtively perhaps? It has the appeal of Devil’s Tower made famous by the motion picture Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the uncanny feeling that something extraordinary happens up there.
Given the symbolism of this destination, I am filled with a journalist's anticipation of what I might find. From the trail and copious footprints leading up to its base I deduce that climbing it, or at least trying to, is not uncommon. I soon come to a fissure that rises steeply. There are plenty of foot and handholds that make the work easy. A slope leads to the south face where the mass of the rock splits to form a narrow and irregular staircase of stones and boulders. I look back and see the lake 2000 feet below. Again, relatively easy, but I go slowly and check myself due to the exposure.
Finally, I come to an impassable ten-foot boulder wedged tightly between the rock walls, so that the two tight cracks on either side rise at an angle past vertical and there are no foot or handholds to speak of. I try it nonetheless, jostling my weight and leverage from one side to the other, but it’s too difficult, and potentially dangerous.
I try again, another route, another technique. I even take my boots off and apply my bare, pink feet to the cold rock, that I might gain more traction. I lean precariously against the rock, barefoot, and look down. From there I could potentially take a fatal fall, or at least I imagine I could.
Death and pain. How one confronts these issues often depends on one's perception of God. If God is all powerful and he is good then he must choose to allow all the pain in the world to take place—to even the most righteous people. Therefore, the believer must conclude pain must ultimately serve some ignoble cause because God is good.
Pain is the classic philosophical problem. The book of Job, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Illych, and Camus' The Plague evoke pain and the human condition eloquently.
To be honest, I think I am divided. I think pain can both build me and destroy me. Admittedly, if we learn nothing else from pain, we learn to avoid it. No one wants to touch a fire twice.
So, I climb down. I did as well as I could.
As I walk down, I see one slight opportunity that surpassed me as I was ascending.
I climb here, pushing and pulling my body, and soon I see that I am above the former obstacle and another fissure will lead me to the top. I climb on.
From the top I look over the other side and survey the land. I take in the view and survey the surface of the rock. The top of the pillar is as ordinary as any other rock surface. No burning bush. No parted sea. The only insight it offers is that the aura of mystery we attribute to high places is seldom preserved at the summit. I’m nonetheless rewarded with the sense of accomplishment for solving the problem of ascending it, and a sweeping view.
Now Sinai, Nebo, and Olympus have long since become what mountaineers call cow pastures; and even the highest peaks in the Himalayas are no longer considered inaccessible today. All summits have therefore lost their analogical importance.
- René Daumal, Mount Analogue
From below it was a cathedral uniting heaven and earth. From above it was just earth.
I wonder: If there was an elevator with a key marked heaven, what would it look like when the bell rang and the doors slid open?
The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say 'Here it is,’ or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you.
-Jesus, Luke 17:20-21
• • •
Day 20.
Hiked fifteen miles.
Detoured around forest fire. Steep, steep hills.
Took time to stop at a waterfall and later a quiet creek.
Almost fell fording a slow creek with algae covered stones.
Camped at Waptus Lake and enjoyed atmospheric theatrics.
There is something difficult about teaching what you aren’t sure you believe in.
You invariably come off as condescending when you teach the single formula for eternal life. And yet it is the good teacher who teaches what he himself desires to know.
Though not ostensibly ecclesiastical, I was an evangelist, a Young Life leader. Young Life calls itself a relational ministry: “Preach the gospel. If necessary, use words.” Another motto along the same lines is, “Kids don’t care if you know, but they know if you care.” I thought well of these attitudes and still do. This philosophy is a small leap away from the church.
Still, words had their place and when I spoke them, even with a cleverness of C.S Lewis, I felt their weight. And just because a thing is heavy doesn't make it truth. Digression: Incidentally, Lewis himself found the bulk of his own Christian apologetic writings to be merely clever.
Lewis never attempted to write another work of Christian apologetics after Miracles. Even though this book and the argumentative works which precede it— The Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity— remain so vastly popular in the Christian world, and continue to sell in Christian book shops, he came to feel that their method and manner were spurious. There must be a way 'further up and further in'.
- A. N. Wilson, C.S Lewis; A Biography
As a result, he turned his talent to what he knew well: myth. This is why we have the Narnia series today.
Logic and Sermons never convince.
The damp of night drives deeper into my soul.
- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
I became more hesitant about my roles as counselor or speaker. I could no longer teach Christianity as a belief system with integrity. Instead, in our smaller core group I began to teach such lessons as Understanding the Bible where I had the kids color in a chart and key identifying the arrangement of the canon of the Bible—how humans saw fit to collect or reject the 39 books of the Old Testament and the 27 of the New, and the rhyme and reason to its arrangement. Furthermore, I gave them the speculative dates for when they were composed and the earliest extant manuscript fragment dates. And finally, I gave them a terse history of events throughout. Everything was new to them. I found then, and continue to find people who are ignorant to the structure of the Bible, as if it had nothing to do with what Jesus said.
I don't think you can begin to understand Jesus until you understand the context in which he lived. I don't think you can begin to understand the context in which he lived unless you know a little bit about the history of Judaism.
Furthermore, I don't think you can begin to understand the history of Judaism until you understand why we have a Bible.
Finally, I taught them about other world religions. I made a whole packet of information and spent three weeks on it. My hope in the introduction was "that our worldly vision would become clearer, and we could depart from Christian religio-centrism. (sic)" I taught it because I needed it myself. It became increasingly difficult for me to discern Christianity as truth and, say, Buddhism as misleading--particularly without knowing about it.
The kids in Young Life said, "All Mormons have vans and trampolines." This correlation comes obviously from hasty empiricism. It became clear to me that it is easier to observe the consequences of a belief structure rather than the structure itself, i.e. "There are lots of cows in India" tells us nothing about Hinduism. Yet the kids preferred this sort of information; it was interesting, if not strange, and noting the differences between Christianity and some other religion with this sort of approach galvanized them. Is it human nature to perceive differences more than similarities? I tend to think it is.
I think this: The human race is made of cultures. Cultures are made of beliefs. Beliefs are made of faith. Religions are belief structures, configurations of myth. They help us to perceive order. They give us identity. They give us culture. They pit us against each other. They show us how similar we really are.
• • •
Day 21.
Hiked eleven miles.
Saw two people.
Climbed Cathedral Rock that afternoon. Slept in the sun.
Made myself a fire, but was too weary to really enjoy it.
Camped at confluence of two strong flowing creeks.
The next morning the creekbeds were dry.
Meltwater.
I have to make a trip off the trail because I saw that I only had three days of food, where I needed seven. So I cut down to Highway 2, prop my big old red and black backpack up near the white line with one big, bold word, WEST, (obtained from a page in the back of my guidebook) affixed to the back for all the drivers to see. Then I sit down and read a book.
I don’t have to wait too long until someone stops, thankfully. Of course, we exchang the necessary information. His name is Jeremy and he is on his way to Mt. Baker. I tell him the essentials of my trip and he inquires simply,
"Why?”
Having the time frame of fourteen miles I opt for the laconic answer: “Because I can.”
On the ride back it’s the same story, only his name was Larry and the word was EAST.
I can.
I am only beginning to understand the beauty of these two words. As a child, my mother would often read to me The Little Engine That Could which was as good as, if not even surpassing the quality of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. At any rate, the story behind The Little Engine That Could is simple: There is this scrawny train engine—and I recall it being blue and not very sleek looking—and for some reason or other it offered to pull a line of cars over a big, big hill. Well, all the way up the hill she huffs and puffs, “1 think I can, I think I can.” And, well, she does.
My mother says facetiously that she regrets reading me this and Curious George because of my obduracy and wanderlust.
I have a friend who wrote her own credo at twenty-one. In it she says simply.
The difference between doing something and not doing it, is not doing it.
- Kate Maloney
I laughed when I read that. It's so obvious, and yet it frames doing something in a way that makes it seem more manageable, doesn’t it?
I can walk 500 miles. I can be alone. I can stop and pick huckleberries. I can walk fast and feel the crowding sub-alpine grass sweep across my legs. I can write about God and nature and my soul. If I don't know something and would like to, I can read, and I can ask. I never stop learning. I can swim in this lake here in front of me, but it's too cold today so I won’t.
There are few things in this universe that I feel I can't do that I would like to.
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
And there are things I know I can't do and I respect that. For example, I probably wouldn’t slaughter a chicken or a cow or a pig, unless I was starving. Since I'm not starving, I choose not to eat their meat, though it comes so conveniently wrapped in plastic at the grocery.
I can sew. I can cook. I can make music. I can dance. I can fix my car. I can make things with wood. I can paint. And I can write. And given that my life here on earth won’t amount to more than a mote in time's eye, why shouldn't I do what I can, while I can.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more and we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once to have been at one with the earth seems undoing. - Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
If you have children and you want to foster their sense of ability, read to them The Little Engine That Could.
• • •
Day 22.
Hiked sixteen miles.
Stopped at streams to sponge bathe, to write.
Swam in Deception Lake.
Spent most of the day in solitude until several folks converged at the lake.
Camped finally at Glacier Lake,
An idyllic spot near the boulder-strewn shore.
Right exactly now, warm bubbles are crawling up my legs like ladybugs. Right exactly now three quarters of me is submerged in a sulfuric hot spring; a five-foot deep, four-foot square pool blasted out of a rock. It is morning time now and not raining. I say this as an observation because it has been raining constantly for the last 36 hours. Let me tell you about it:
The sound of rain tapping on a tent fly can either be a lullaby or a menace. A misty atmosphere on the trail can either embrace or isolate you.
I can’t change the world
But I change the world in me.
- Bono, U2
Yesterday “the world in me” was feeling waterlogged and miserable. It rained constantly the previous night and the contour of the ground beneath my tent was such that I awoke with a puddle beneath my feet. This was, admittedly, unsettling.
Yesterday I hiked seventeen miles through mixed snow and rain—the fat, foamy kind of snow that falls on you like a leech, holding a quantity of water far surpassing any rain drop. To make it worse, the greater part of this trip was on a ridge so as to give me the maximum exposure to the elements.
I began to vent my frustration at the mountain. I was walking from the pass and the trail was a snake-like gurgling rivulet. The landscape was austere, rocky and lifeless. As the sappy snowflakes were falling, I was sure this is what the scriptures referred to in Psalm 23, so I yelled out, half in jest, half in disgust, "This is the valley of the shadow of death. I am in the valley of the shadow of death!”
Besides, often at difficult moments you will find yourself talking to the mountain, flattering it, cursing it, making promises or threats. And you will have the impression that the mountain answers you if you speak to it properly—by becoming gentler, more submissive. Don't think the less of yourself for that. Don’t be ashamed of behaving like those our specialists call primitives and animists. Just keep in mind when you remember these moments later on, that your dialogue with nature is just the outward image of an inner dialogue with yourself.”
- René Daumal, Mount Analogue
I’ve always wondered where nature begins and ends. Take this hot spring for example— the water comes from the ground bubbling at ninety-three degrees Fahrenheit, and this is natural. The water fills a cube-shaped pool carved in the rock. Does the spring cease to be natural now? The spring has been developed. Are the descriptions inseparable? Can we really call the mark of humankind unnatural? Animals build and dig. We call their holes and nests natural. When do our structures cease to be natural?
I want to think the expression of nature encompasses our farms, our mines, highways, architecture and technology. A car is merely one invention upon invention upon invention that began with agriculture. For thousands of years humans saw fit to hunt and gather. Their life was structured according to what nature provided them. Then, by degrees, they realized they could control what nature gave them when they began to cultivate crops. As more and more things began to take on resource value, and humans have come to hyper-manipulate the natural world, are we somehow deviating from “natural”?
Perhaps everything we do on Earth and to our Earth is just an outward expression of an inner dialogue with ourselves. The world of animals, minerals, vegetables and so forth is a forum that we quite naturally have come to engineer, exploit, dominate and despoil.
I think our collective consciousness is beginning to realize that nature is still an enigma that we will never be able to grasp despite our advances. It is a control issue. What is nature is out of control; be it a miserable walk on a mountain, a traffic jam, or the relentless progress of humankind to innovate and produce millions of cars.
When I look around and see how much stuff is out of control, including my species, I understand how a symbol of stability is a necessity:
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul.
He guides me in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil for you are there with me; your rod and your staff comfort me.
-David, Psalm 23:1-4
I have oft maintained we make sense of thing by metaphor. We use physical structures to create spiritual structures. Sheep need a shepherd. Humans need a God.
The Judeo-Christian God is thus a relatively new invention, on the heels of agriculture, on the heels of shepherding.
• • •
Day 23.
Hiked eleven miles. Hitch-hiked to Skykomish. Made few stops on the trail.
Enjoyed orange juice and ice cream cone in town.
Bought more food. Hiked 3.5 miles in again.
Thunderstorm.
Sheets of rain.
Could hear it coming as I hastened to put on my tent fly.
I rode my bicycle across the United States as a sort of bike-a-thon for Young Life. This trip marked the last of my involvement with this organization. In fact, that this trip was at all related to Young Life was circumstantial. It was entirely self-motivated with the primary purpose to seek:
Regarding the Young Life title on this trip-I’m not sure if it is as definite on my heart as it is on my commemorative T-shirt (which isn't saying much because I screen printed it terribly.) For me, this is an agnostic, searching trip more than any son of mission. I am seeking the God of the Bible and the God of America. I will read nothing apart from the Bible on this trip and have nothing to contemplate save the landscape and the people I encounter. (Journal entry August 2, 1993)
In the end I resented feeling misled. I was taught to believe the Bible was "God's Instruction Manual for Living" which, if you were to critique it as a manual, would objectively rate very poorly. The Bible is a long-winded, multi-faceted, multi-intended, self-contradicting, over-interpreted, over-translated, historically imperfect document. Not to say it isn’t worth reading. It is. Above any other, it is the book of our culture. It has driven the minds of countless men and women to do countless things that have shaped history. I’m drawn to it as such, on the heels of scholars, wanting to understand it in context: to know the intention and timeline of its assembly.
What emerged was a dualistic perception. I came to regard the Bible as an ultimately confusing document as my disillusionment grew. Simultaneously, I came to embrace it as a well-meaning charter for forging a community, charity and good will. I understood its history, power and magnetism as a source of inspiration for music, art and poetry. Above all, the universal teachings of The Gospels largely seem irrefutable, commonsense: Love your neighbor as yourself. The kingdom of God is within you. The meek shall inherit the Earth. Love.
The intellect can carry our beliefs only so far when it comes to God. At the end of the line, we encounter faith. In this framework, faith augments reason; it extends it. On the bicycle trip I was brought to a point--and it is not clear to me how, when or where--I could no longer extend my reason with faith. I no longer thought the information warranted a conventional response (be that baptism, a declaration of faith, confirmation, whatever.) I didn't think Jesus really said that through his life I could gain eternal life. I didn’t think Jesus was God. I don’t.
Let me work my way, as simply as I can, through my reasoning. We’ll start with the first five books of the Bible, called both The Torah and The Pentateuch. They constitute the foundation of Judaism, and put more simply, call God into being. The Torah personifies God as the creator of the world, and partial to the nation of Israel.
Here is my own terse summary of what happens: God creates the world, creates man, woman. Man and woman fall into an understanding of good and evil. The family line continues for 2000 years. Enter Noah. (Here there is some curious mention of the sons of God cavorting with the daughters of men’ [Genesis 6:4] which has continued to puzzle everyone)
The world goes to pieces and is corrupt in God’s sight, so He drowns everyone, save Noah. Noah has many offspring and the lineage goes on and on now till one Terah, who has a son called Abraham. They go to the holy land, Canaan, and then Abraham has a son, Joseph, who is sold as a slave by his brothers in Egypt. Ultimately all of them end up there, where they reproduce as a people until they find themselves oppressed. God gives Moses a miraculous staff and tells him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. So Moses does this: he parts the water. The Israelites travel through the desert until a new generation emerges years later in Canaan again.
The story is quintessentially epic. It is the story of a people and how they were struggled. My question is, since everyone seems to agree the books were written by one person, isn’t it possible, isn’t it likely, that the conveyance of history was skewed by one singular mind? It doesn’t matter if it was Moses who wrote the Torah or some person called J., female or male. It doesn’t matter for the argument. The argument is: when a historical account reaches back too far and reveals itself to be shortsighted and objectively improbable, why do we continue to embrace its tailored God? God, (Jehovah) doesn’t really fit our universe today. Jehovah fit 3000 years ago when someone, admittedly a creative and poetic author, wanted to explain his or her existence within the context of a struggling culture.
One thousand years later, a man realized Jehovah didn't quite fit anymore. His name was Jesus. Let me take up the story where I left off: Moses died. The Israelites were in Canaan. King and King and King. War and war and war. Israel splits: Israel to the north. Judah to the South. Both Kingdoms are taken captive, Assyrian and Babylonian respectively. 500 years before Christ the kingdoms are restored. Prophet, prophet, prophet.
Of these prophets, Isaiah proclaims the most prophecies regarding A Messiah, which Judeo Christians now believe to be Jesus. Thus, we have the Old Testament and the New Testament of the Bible. The Old Testament describes the struggling people and later the savior (Messiah) that would come. The New Testament describes the life and times of Jesus, and his first followers, who broke away from Judaism and came to be known as Christians.
Just prior to Jesus’ ministry was an age characterized by a building expectation for prophecies of The Messiah to come to pass. The Jews came to perceive Jehovah less as a national deity who governed the world with historic intervention as in the past, but a universal God who intervened with angelic mediators (The Messiah). It must be said however that the Jews could not agree upon who exactly, as a mediator, they were waiting for. To be sure, they were waiting for someone.
Both the Essenes— the sect responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls—and John the Baptist waited urgently.
I will send my messenger ahead of you,
Who will prepare your way—
A voice of one calling in the dessert,
Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.
-Isaiah 40:3
Both the Essenes and John adopted this quote as their own. (As a consequence, some scholars speculate John was an Essene.)
Jesus was drawn to John and his ministry of baptism, and went to him when he was around 27 to 30 years old. That the book of Mark—the earliest written in the Bible—does not include any infancy narrative calls into question the Christmas tradition and the idea that Jesus was born of a virgin. The book of Mark begins with Jesus as an adult who has a vision when baptized.
It seems more plausible to me that Jesus was a man with an intense conviction calling him to a revolutionary ministry. The success of this ministry was that it was an ethereal addition to Judaism—transference of belief was conceivable to his followers—but it was nonetheless revolutionary enough to warrant his execution in order to silence it.
It is certain Jesus lived and died and had followers. The impartial historian Josephus Flavius establishes this for us. Jesus was a historical person. Unfortunately, I have often thought, he did not leave an autobiography for us. We must piece together intricate and profoundly tainted records that have washed up on the shore of the Jesus tradition. The person who thinks that the story of Jesus is exclusive to the Bible is somewhat naive. Nevertheless, for simplicity’s sake (and because the gospels in the Bible are the most authoritative) I will limit my arguments to what information can be gleaned from the Bible only.
First an understanding of the sequence in which they were written is important. If Jesus died around 30 AD then Mark is supposed to have been written some 30 years later, 60 AD. Matthew and Luke are written as contemporaries 45 years after, in 75 AD, and John comes about 60 years later, in 90 AD. (Because John is so theological and personally reflective, conservative and liberal scholars alike do not group it with the others, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the so-called synoptic gospels. That John exists alone and is not as authoritatively historical calls into question some doctrines that Christianity depends on it for, such as Jesus claiming he was God [John 14:9].)
When comparing Matthew and Luke, material is seen to be taken from Mark and incorporated into both. What the conscious reader also finds is material common to Matthew and Luke but not found in Mark. As such, scholars have proposed the Gospel Q, which can be partially reconstructed from its antecedents (Matthew and Luke) as a book of sayings or aphorisms. Some scholars would argue that Q is what was heretofore called The Gospel of Thomas, for which there exists a Greek manuscript fragment from 225 AD, and a Coptic (admittedly altered) manuscript from the Gnostic scrolls unearthed in the late forties in Nag Hammadi, Egypt around the same time of The Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran. (The Dead Sea Scrolls tell us nothing directly about Christ) One other fact to note is that the letters of Paul were composed before all the gospels, save perhaps Q. It can be intuited, then, that the gospels were shaped by the ideas and theology found in Paul's letters.
We have Paul to thank for the many of the doctrines in the New Testament. Because we know that Paul had no direct experience with Jesus, the pragmatist must also ask, would Jesus have agreed with what Paul was saying about him? I have a proposal, an exercise: Read any, or all, of the synoptic gospels very carefully, then compose a letter to a group of unbelievers that summarizes Jesus's ministry, as Paul did in his Letter to the Romans. It is difficult to isolate Jesus's theology, if you read only the red letters that mark what he is reported to have spoken.
Moreover, if you had the audacity to finish, to write a letter being genuine to your source material only, I would think you would arrive at something far different than The Letter to the Romans.
Peter writes this: "His [Paul's] letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other scriptures..." (2 Peter 3:16) From this we can conclude two things: First, Paul's letters are compared to the scriptures; therefore, it isn’t presumptuous to say they influenced historical accounts. Second, the verse speaks of the instability, disagreement and derision Christianity was borne of. Likely the oldest writing in the New Testament is The Letter of James. In it, James maintains, "Faith without deeds is dead". Paul’s letters are characterized by his theology "Justification by grace". Though modern Christians presuppose James was merely saying that good deeds come naturally with a well-placed faith in Christ, it is very arguably presumptuous. I think it's rather clear that very, very early on men were interpreting the life of Jesus in different, contradicting ways— instability, disagreement, and derision. What is plausible, then, is that Paul, with the help of his friends Mark and Luke (all of whom were not with Jesus in his ministry yet wrote most of the New Testament), overshadowed everyone else. We know so much more about the psychology of Paul than we do of Jesus. That is why I say we have him to thank. That is why I say I wish Jesus had left us with an autobiography.
We have only biographies. Even with a fairly critical reading of the synoptics, I admit for the most part, they are in harmony. It is predictable, given the two-source theory (Mark and Q) I explained earlier. Where they are dissonant, however, is crucial. When we arrive at the resurrection narratives we find it is not clear who exactly witnessed the missing body, or in what order, or how many times the tomb was visited. Moreover, the descriptions are notably different:
As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe...
-Mark 16:5
When they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightening stood beside them.
-Luke 24:3,4
There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightening and his clothes were white as snow.
-Matthew 28:2,3
Where Mark has simply a young man in a white robe at the scene, Luke has “two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning," and Matthew has a big earthquake with an angel rolling away the stone and sitting atop. The argument I make is simple: If the details surrounding the event are in discord and the event is crucial to Christian theology, then one must further question the resurrection as a fact. I have good reason to believe Jesus was a man—and that he died and his body ultimately decayed to dust, that he was an intelligent and good man, that he believed in what he said and taught, and that people killed him for it. I do not propose to know where his body was that day, but I find it hard to believe, based on accounts written 30-40 years after, that the resurrection is a historical truth.
At this point we encounter the argument popularized by C.S. Lewis:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God." That is one thing you must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with a man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit on Him and kill Him for a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call him Lord and God.
- C.S Lewis, Mere Christianity
Well, clearly the Jesus that gave The Sermon on the Mount was not a madman, so must I fall at his feet and call him Lord and God by default? The whole argument is defeated by saying I don't accept that Jesus said He claimed to be God. I don’t think that idea came from Jesus; rather Paul superimposed it on him. Only in the book of John does he claim to be God and these are arguably not his own words. Furthermore, the idea of The Trinity is entirely a construct:
The Trinity. A foundational article of faith, the word itself 'trinity' is not found in the Bible. The doctrine that God is three inseparable identities; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a work of human interpretation. Admittedly, it can be well reasoned if you’re willing to concede that the Bible is ’God breathed’ and, in this sense, infallible. But even with this intellectual concession there is no verse that says the Spirit is one with God and Christ. And without it, the verse, John 10:30, "I and the Father are one." has the earmarks of an author penned polemic or early church redaction. In short, its authenticity is dubious. Another foundational passage used to defend this doctrine occurs in John 14, when Jesus says to Philip: "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father." This does not establish the doctrine as truth. I, Chad, am a likeness of my father. If Jesus said, 'I am God’ it would have been another matter; rather, he said and taught 'Abba' or Poppa in Aramaic. I am not convinced that Jesus would have needed to refer to God in these terms (Abba, Father), if he were God himself.
- Chad Crouch, letter to a friend
Jesus called himself the Son of Man and The Son of God. What he perceived these Titles to mean I am not sure, but it’s quite different from saying I am God.
The earliest written account, The Gospel of Mark ends here: “Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” This account says nothing about a resurrection.
Someone wasn't satisfied with that ending later and added ten more triumphant verses wherein Jesus reappears. Most Bibles acknowledge this redaction with a parenthetic statement that the "most reliable manuscripts do not include Mark 16:9-20". I ask: if the Holy Bible itself admits one obvious addition, does it not follow that there could be many redactions? 30 Years passed between the death of Jesus and the composition of the first gospel. A lot was decided in that time, surely. How accurate do you suppose Mark could have gotten it? How impartial do you suppose he wanted to be? It seems to me that Jesus’ martyrdom needed to be explained to early followers, so the resurrection story took shape in the decades that followed his death.
Jesus died because he was a revolutionary, not because He was God. As we are so prone to do with artists, writers, philosophers, and any people who had ideas just ahead of their time, we lift them up as heroes after they die. So it was with Jesus.
Because Jesus talked in terms of God, he quickly gained the title The Son of Man, and The Son of God, and because the Old Testament says The Messiah would be a "Suffering Servant" it is reasonable to believe his followers lifted him up past the position of hero, teacher, past prophet, past even Messiah to GOD himself.
His followers scattered upon his death and it is likely they searched the scriptures (The Old Testament) for meaning. They looked to the prophecies to affirm that Jesus was even greater than they imagined at first. Matthew, a disciple of Jesus, writes his gospel decades after Mark, continually using Old Testament Prophecies to support his implicit theology. And Paul, who didn’t even know Jesus, went further, referring to him as God. After 30 years, the influence of Paul’s letters could potentially have had as much if not more influence on the Gospels as the life of Jesus himself.
I can’t explain the many miracles attributed to Jesus. Nor can I explain the multitudes of healings reported to happen in contemporary churches. Neither can the believer. I do believe many miracles are myth that grew out of the Jesus tradition though, likely from exaggerations, or parables made literal. Jesus Himself asks, "Who am I?"
"Who do people say I am?
They replied, "Some say John the Baptist; others say Elisha; and still others, one of the prophets.”
"But what about you?” he asked, "Who do you say I am?
Peter answered, “You are the Christ [Messiah]"
Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him.
-Mark 8:27-30
I have told you I don’t think Jesus said he was God and why. Apart from that, I make no pretense to understand his motivations beyond what is obvious: he wanted to bring wisdom, common sense, and relief to a struggling people.
Read: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. Or find the eBook at Apple Books or Amazon Kindle Store.