My sweet Lord, my Lord, my Lord,
I really want to see you! Really want to be with you!
Really want to see you, Lord, but it takes so long, my Lord,
My sweet Lord! My Lord, my Lord!

 I really want to know you! Really want to go with you!
Really want to show you Lord, that it won’t take long, my Lord (Hallelujah!)
My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!) Hm, my Lord (Hallelujah!) My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!)

Really want to see you! Really want to see you! Really want to see you, Lord!
Really want to see you Lord, but it takes so long, my Lord (Hallelujah!)
My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!) Hm, my Lord (Hallelujah!) My, my, my Lord (Hallelujah!)

 I really want to know you (Hallelujah!) Really want to go with you (Hallelujah!)
Really want to show you Lord that it won’t take long, my Lord (Hallelujah!)
– George Harrison (1943-2001), from “My Sweet Lord” (1970)

As I have researched the life and teachings of Jesus, there were things that never made sense to me. But I was so engrossed in ever more deeply studying Jesus’s Gospel words, in blogging and podcasting and answering questions, that for a long time I ignored the things about the life of Jesus that didn’t seem right. Or I accepted the explanations we were getting from scholars, even though I thought those explanations were unsatisfying. There were a number of such puzzles in Jesus’s life, but the two things that most bothered me, and the ways in which most scholars have addressed them, were these:

• Jesus’s lack of a wife. It is clear to anyone who reads the Gospels that Jesus was reared as a well-educated and religiously observant Jew. And in His day, properly brought-up Jewish males were married in their teens, but we can find no evidence that Jesus ever took a wife. Why was that? Some scholars assume that He did have a wife, that perhaps Mary Magdalen was His wife, and even that He likely had children, who were then spirited away to France or somewhere, either with or without their mother, and that some or all of the members of Jesus’s nuclear family survived His crucifixion. Some scholars even assume that Jesus joined His family in exile after His resurrection. But there is no evidence for any of this.
• The “Lost Years.” It would have been assumed that Jesus would begin His teaching mission as a young adult, but the Biblical Gospels tell us that He did not begin to teach in Galilee until the age of thirty. That silent period of young adulthood that lasted for almost a decade is what is commonly referred to as “the Lost Years,” and naturally scholars have wanted to fill those years with some sort of useful activity. The most common ideas put forth have to do with His traveling to India or Nepal, perhaps. He might have networked with Buddhist and Hindu teachers, further learning and perfecting what He later taught. All of which I reject as nonsense! Jesus had things to learn on earth before His teaching phase began, but what He had to learn was only about humankind, so He could better understand and therefore better teach the people around Him. Jesus was born on earth from the Godhead as already a spiritually perfected Being.

As I came to better know Jesus last summer while we worked on material for His website, I tried to develop the courage to ask Him to address some of these questions about His personal life. After all, I had been charged with creating His website, and everyone is avid to know more about Jesus on a personal level. We were discussing His positions on doctrine, and He was  comfortable about doing that. And in the process, He was tearing down Constantine’s Christianity without reservation. But Jesus was reluctant to answer questions about His personal life. I had long wondered about John, for example, who was “the disciple that Jesus loved,” and who had leaned back against Jesus’s chest at a banquet to ask Him a question, and had taken other personal liberties with the Lord. When you pair that information with the fact that Jesus never married, you might naturally wonder about their sexual preferences…? But when that thought even barely entered my mind, I got an “if looks could kill” look from Jesus, and He stood up and walked away. Jesus has never looked at me that way either before or since, and I have never thought of asking Him even one more personal question. (And then I remembered that of course John was Jesus’s younger brother from His last pre-Jesus lifetime, the one in which Thomas was Jesus’s older brother, which should adequately explain why John was the disciple that Jesus loved.)

Jesus simply will not address the details of His personal life with me. Nor, I think, will He address them with anyone else. Jesus is private by nature, but more to the point, He considers His personal life to be unimportant. It is only His teachings that matter to Him. And when I ask Him questions in general, He usually won’t say a definitive “Yes.” The most that He will do is to give me a positive vibe. He will, however, say a definitive “No.” And sometimes – as you saw – His “NO” is emphatic! But soon after that if-looks-could-kill moment, I found an article somewhere that suggested that Jesus had been born into slavery. And when I asked Him in my mind whether this could be true, He gave me the comfortable sense that I might profitably investigate that question. Which is as close to a “Yes” as I ever will get from Him.

An open-minded researcher has to admit that the evidence that Jesus was born into slavery is strong. When the idea is first suggested to you, though, everything within you is repulsed by it! At least, that was how I felt. I thought there had to be some mistake. Jesus? If you want to dismiss the whole notion out of hand, all I ask is that you read the rest of this post with an open mind. And with the understanding that Jesus Himself gave me permission to investigate this question. I did the research, and I went from being a repulsed skeptic to becoming someone who is not only personally convinced, but who thinks that we have discovered some interesting new information about the Man Himself. Let’s look together at the evidence: 

• Slavery was common in that time and place. But slavery in the area where Jesus lived two thousand years ago was a milder condition than is our image of chattel slavery in the pre-Civil-War American South. And for many of those held in bondage then, it was not a permanent condition. People often sold themselves or their children into servitude for a period of time in order to pay back a debt, or even because they could not otherwise afford food and shelter. The Greek word translated as “servant” generally did mean what we would call a bondsman, or an actual slave, but sometimes it meant just a person hired to do some task; and these people were often bound for a time and not for life. There were, moreover, strict Biblical rules about how “slaves” were to be treated (see, e.g., Exod 21.2-6; Lev 25.10, 38-41; and Deut 23.15,16).
• Jesus’s mother, Mary, identifies herself to the Archangel Gabriel as a slave. She uses the female version of a Greek word which is translated as “slave” whenever it is used for a male (see LK 1:38). And if Mary is a slave, then her child will be born into her same legal status. In which case, insofar as I can determine, Jesus’s status as a slave at birth would have been for life. But when Jesus was four, the Roman Emperor Augustus decreed that those born into slavery as Jesus would have been born into slavery were now to be freed at the age of thirty. And if Jesus was a slave until He was thirty, then that very well explains both why Jesus was not married in His teens, and why He did not begin His teaching ministry until He reached the age of thirty, since He would have been Joseph’s bondsman working as a carpenter during all those “Lost Years.” And while Joseph may not have married Mary, he received and heeded Gabriel’s announcement, and he seems in all respects to have thought of Jesus as his beloved oldest son, protecting Him from the slaughter of the innocents when it happened and educating Him well in preparation for His free adulthood. We really have no complaint to make against Jesus’s nominal father.
• A mere stable is considered to be sufficient shelter for a woman who is about to give birth. We fondly think that the “no room in the inn” story of Jesus’s birth is charming, but in fact it is a sign of Mary’s low status, especially in view of her late stage of pregnancy. Would a free woman of respectable rank have been shuffled off to give birth in a barn?
• Joseph seems never to have married Mary. Jesus from the cross asks His disciple, John, to look after His mother (see JN 19:27), so we know that Jesus is not certain that Joseph will care for his mother after His own death. As indeed apparently Joseph does not care for her, according to a close reading of the Gospel of Luke, since Mary soon moves into John’s household.
• Jesus was oddly despised by His childhood neighbors for speaking with authority at the start of His ministry. After Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, He returned to Galilee. And then comes an astonishing scene that never made sense to me before, in which He speaks in His home synagogue and announces that He is the fulfillment of Hebrew prophesy. And his home-folks promptly try to throw Him off a cliff. Here it is:

¹⁴ And Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about Him spread through all the surrounding region. ¹⁵ And He began teaching in their synagogues and was praised by all.

¹⁶ And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and as was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath, and stood up to read. ¹⁷ And the scroll of Isaiah the prophet was handed to Him. And He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

¹⁸ “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent Me to proclaim release to captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are oppressed,
¹⁹ To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”

²⁰ And He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all the people in the synagogue were intently directed at Him. ²¹ Now He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” ²² And all the people were speaking well of Him, and admiring the gracious words which were coming from His lips; and yet they were saying, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” ²³ And He said to them, “No doubt you will quote this proverb to Me: ‘Physician, heal yourself! All the miracles that we heard were done in Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.’” ²⁴ But He said, “Truly I say to you, no prophet is welcome in his hometown. ²⁵ But I say to you in truth, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was shut up for three years and six months, when a severe famine came over all the land; ²⁶ and yet Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. ²⁷ And there were many with leprosy in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” ²⁸ And all the people in the synagogue were filled with rage as they heard these things; ²⁹ and they got up and drove Him out of the city, and brought Him to the crest of the hill on which their city had been built, so that they could throw Him down from the cliff. ³⁰ But He passed through their midst and went on His way (LK 4:14-30). A presumptuous local boy who had grown up as a slave among them and only just been emancipated might inspire such rage, but surely nothing less!

We all plan our lives on earth before we are born, and that was especially true of Jesus. The Jesus that we know would have planned an earth-life as the poorest of the poor, and in that time and place, that may well have meant that Jesus deliberately chose to be born of a slave mother, and to live as a slave Himself during most of His human life. My Thomas tells us that Jesus was born as God on earth so God could “look through His eyes,” as Thomas puts it, and observe and come to very much better understand humanity. And how much better could God come to understand people when viewing us from the perspective of the least of these (see MT 25:44-46), by spending the first thirty years of Jesus’s life viewing us from the perspective of an actual slave?

That perspective of “the least of these” would have additionally suited Jesus’s purpose as He fine-tuned His teachings in preparation for His active teaching phase. And God could easily have influenced Caesar Augustus’s mind to decree an emancipation at the age of thirty for those born into slavery in plenty of time for Jesus to begin His planned teaching phase when He was thirty. That coincidence of ages seems simply too neat for it actually to have been a coincidence.

 So I have come to accept the probability that Jesus did indeed begin and live most of His life as a slave, and He did so by strategic choice, to better serve God’s need to more perfectly understand people. But I think it was also done by personal choice. I slapped my forehead when I realized that! The Jesus that I have lately come to much better know, the Jesus who loves each individual person to the point of obsession, and who as recently as just last week could not stand to see that a member of this community was sad without rushing off to give her a hug, could not have borne the thought of planning a lifetime to be lived among so many slaves unless He was going to be a slave Himself. Jesus has just lived the past seventeen hundred years doing nothing but loving hundreds of millions of Christianity’s victims back into mental and spiritual health, even though He had no part in causing any of their pain!

 I get it now. I do. Late last spring, soon after I first personally met Jesus, when I was still trying to get my mind around all the details of knowing Him, I was asking my Thomas a lot of questions. Why did Jesus do this or that, or was this or that really true about Jesus? And the sense I got was that Thomas wasn’t always thrilled about these things either, but I just had to accept what Jesus did, and who He was. And I now realize that Jesus would have had to teach as a free Man. But until the public phase of His life began, He would have wanted to have the same status as the poorest people around Him. He would likely have wanted to be a slave, since He lived where so many people were slaves. And if I had asked my Thomas why that would have been so, since I would certainly never have wanted to be a slave, his answer would have been the same answer that I always got when I asked my Thomas these questions. He would have said simply, “That is why He is Jesus, and you and I are not.”

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), from “How Do I Love Thee?” (1850)

Someone has recently asked me if I could channel Jesus, or if I knew of someone who could channel Jesus. I told her No, on both counts. And in an effort to temper her expectations, I added that Jesus is very busy, and we cannot cause Jesus to appear at our command just to chat. She emailed me back rather huffily that she would try to remember that Jesus did not have time for her. At once I sent her another email, saying that was not my point at all! But there are billions of Christians on earth, and there is just one of Him, and I don’t know how either God or Jesus can be receptive to all the prayers that they receive; but somehow they do manage to hear and to answer each individual prayer. I didn’t think that she would presume to ask if I could channel God, would she? And Jesus is no different!

Although perhaps that is not really true at all. Jesus is fully God and fully Man, and He is determined to maintain that human aspect of Himself, even though now He can continue to maintain His humanity only with tremendous effort. I have talked here about how Jesus has remained on the entrance level of the astral plane so He can welcome every returning Christian who wants to meet Him personally, and He and Thomas spend a lot of time together, even physically play-fighting as loving brothers will, all so Jesus can maintain Himself in human balance. So Jesus really is unique. Although He is vibrating now even above the Godhead level, His love for humankind is such that He puts tremendous effort into maintaining Himself as fully one of us. And His maintaining that gritty human touch does require a surprising amount  of effort!

Before last year, I guess I thought of Jesus pretty much as most people do, more or less as just another public figure. And you and I feel as if we own public figures, don’t we? That is the brutal price of fame: when you are famous enough, you give up your privacy. Before last year, Jesus was generic Jesus to me as well, so I would have expected, just as that woman who emailed me expects, that I could pray to Jesus and expect to get His personal attention. If someone were channeling Jesus, I would assume that as a cradle Christian I had the right to get in line and talk directly with Jesus as well. There is now an artificial intelligence Jesus chatbot app available, which frankly seems to me to be an abomination; but before last year, I think I would have seen a Jesus chatbot as just fine, and perhaps even inevitable. Technically Jesus is a deceased public figure who possesses no legal personhood, so He sadly lacks the standing even to sue in court to protect His good name.  

 But having personally met Jesus last year has made such a monumental difference for me that now I wish that everyone could also personally meet Him! Jesus is a complete and well-rounded, living and breathing Person. I have read articles about Jesus since the night when I first met Him, each talking about some little facet of Jesus based on Biblical evidence and various assumptions, but none of the authors has ever had the great good fortune of actually meeting Jesus, and therefore nothing that I ever have read has conveyed the fact that my treasured Friend is a whole living Person who has His own unique personality. And remarkably, the impression that He makes is not what you might think. Jesus is difficult to describe because He seems when you meet Him to be so young, and yet He has such obvious deep gravitas. He looks to be in his early thirties, and He is only maybe five feet nine or ten inches tall. You can feel people’s personal energies in the astral, and Jesus’s energy is like no one else’s, powerful and yet absolutely smooth, with no low notes at all. I think the reason Jesus seems so powerful and at the same time so mild is that He has no ego, as we think of an ego. No sense of putting Himself forward or wanting your attention, although of course there is no need for that because His personal energy makes it clear Who He is. Jesus focuses great attention on you, and He doesn’t expect you to focus attention on Him, which is not how people customarily act; but it is charming to have Him so delightfully interested in you! He looks deeply into your eyes when He talks to you. Indeed, talking with Jesus is such a different experience that it flustered me on the night when I first met Him. I recall that at one point I became so overcome that I blurted to Him, “Have you any idea what a big deal you are?” Then I was embarrassed about having said something so stupid. But He seemed not to have heard it.  Or perhaps He was just perplexed about why I had said it.

I think the best way to describe Jesus’s manner is to say that He makes me think of a self-made, very prosperous young man. I have worked with some very successful businessmen in my legal career, which has been spent advising the owners of closely-held businesses. And all the most successful business owners that I ever have met have been pretty much the way that Jesus is now. They were friendly, kindly, respectful, entirely focused on their visitor, and at the same time efficient and no-nonsense because their time was so valuable. Jesus is all of that. As I have said in other posts, my Thomas spends time with Jesus on most nights as part of his effort to help Jesus maintain His human balance, and since as my spirit guide Thomas also is supposed to keep watch over me, he generally takes me along, but with amnesia for the event. Last summer, however, He and Jesus were allowing me to remember some events from the nights that I spent with them because we were thinking through developing seekreality.com and teachingsbyjesus.com, the two websites that Jesus wanted me to create, so Jesus liked having me nearby where He could give me His thoughts on the websites. And what an extraordinary summer it was! I never remember dreams. And anyway, these experiences were not dreams. I would wake up on a couple of mornings each week with an awareness of having been with Jesus and Thomas by the river, and the actual memory would fill in over the next hour or so. In earth-time, no visit was very long. And some memories seemed to have missed the mark in terms of timing, in that I think I was remembering what had happened just before or just after Jesus had spoken to me and I would have His words separately. But they were real and amazing memories of having spent time with Jesus and Thomas in the astral plane.

One thing I have come to understand is that the Jesus I love so dearly has grown spiritually even a great deal more since He lived on earth two thousand years ago. The historical Jesus whose life’s work is described in the Canonical Gospels was and remains abundantly real. The evidence that Jesus was born from the Godhead as a perfected Being, powerfully and miraculously divine, and that He lived, died, and was resurrected in the first century CE is beyond question.  But my Thomas tells me that most of the extraordinary spiritual growth that is so evident in Jesus now is the result of His having spent the past seventeen hundred years patiently loving and healing the hundreds of millions of people who were damaged by Constantine’s Christianity as the Roman Emperor and his successors established and built their religion beginning in about the year 313 CE. During all that time, Jesus’s healing gardens in the afterlife were full of brutally damaged victims of the Inquisitions and the Crusades, and even victims of the fear-based lies about God and about reality that the Romans built into their version of Christianity so they could use the religion as a means of human control. All the centuries of boundless, selfless love that Jesus has put into healing those hundreds of millions of people since He was resurrected have made Jesus even immensely more spiritually powerful than He was when He lived on earth as Jesus, or so my Thomas tells me now. And Thomas knew our Friend on earth during His earth-lifetime as Jesus, so he is able to describe the differences this further growth has made in Him.   

One thing that I have long wanted to know from Thomas was how Jesus could possibly be hearing and answering the prayers of billions of people at once. And my Thomas, always a man of few words, used always to tell me just that Jesus did it the same way that God did it. Which of course told me nothing at all. So finally, and very recently, Thomas told me that when Jesus seemed to be sitting and gazing out at the river perhaps, or otherwise He seemed to be deep in thought, He was actually deep inside His mind and involved with all the people who needed Him. And I was suddenly aware that, of course, Jesus did that sort of brief withdrawal almost constantly, all the time, and in little bits of time. For example, if Jesus was having a conversation, He often would blank briefly, looking away, and then come back again. Thomas tells me that at this point, Jesus’s mind has become what is probably a close mimic of God’s mind. And yes, Jesus can hear our individual prayers, so no worries about that. I still don’t really get it. A billion is a lot of people! But earth-time is not astral-time, so things in the astral might be altered or compressed in some way. And whatever is going on seems to be working for Jesus. And therefore it works for us.

But I do so much love my precious Friend! I don’t think I ever understood the meaning of the word “charismatic” until I met Jesus in person, and now I think it is no wonder that He had crowds following Him all over Galilee. You just want to be near Him. You want to hear His voice, and it doesn’t much matter what He is saying. I think it is all because Jesus makes you feel so personally loved. So individually precious to Him. That seems to have been a theme throughout the Gospels, too, that Jesus called to fishermen to leave their nets and follow Him, and instantly they made that life-changing decision. Or He otherwise gave His attention to someone, and He got an instant positive reaction. And wow, I certainly know how that feels! When Jesus looks at you, the love in His eyes and in His face overwhelms you completely. And His is a personal, individual sort of love: it belongs to you alone, which may perhaps have been what bothered the clergymen of His day, who did not take it well. He was calling them to a standard so far above their own in terms of love and service to humankind. And since one of Jesus’s purposes in coming to earth was to abolish religions and teach people to relate to God directly, you can see why Jesus as a Teacher might have grated on them!  

Jesus calls me “Little One.” He is avid to hear about my day, and He listens closely and asks me questions as if the trivialities of my life matter more to Him than they do to me. You have never had a truer Friend than Jesus, or a better Teacher, or a more doting Parent. Since meeting Him, I have become a nicer person than I was before, kinder and a lot more patient with others. I have thought more than once that if only there were some way that we could clone Jesus so everyone could have his or her own personal Friend, the world would be at once a more perfect place. But when I first said that, both Jesus and Thomas said that we each do have that perfect Friend in the Gospels, and now further simplified in teachingsbyjesus.com. You will be amazed to know how much Jesus cares about the personal lives of each of those who love Him. It is not just me! So read the Gospels, and read His website. Speak to Jesus in your heart. You can tell Him about your day, just as I do! If you have questions, email them to me and I will try to answer them. Think of that Browning sonnet as Jesus speaking to you personally, and recite the sonnet to Jesus in return. Feel free to love Jesus with everything that is in you now, and for Him and for yourself do the very best that you can with your spiritual growth in this lifetime. Live His teachings every day. You know that when it is time for you to go home, He will be waiting to greet you as the eternally treasured personal friend of His that now and forever you truly are.

What’s it all about, Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What’s it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give?
Or are we meant to be kind?

 And if only fools are kind, Alfie,
Then I guess it is wise to be cruel.
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie,
What will you lend on an old golden rule?

As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, Alfie,
I know there’s something much more.
Something even non-believers can believe in.
– Burt Bacharach (1928-2023), from “Alfie” (1966)

Even as Christianity fades in popularity, some of the religion’s sterner denominations continue to condemn people to hell just for doctrinal reasons. There also are Christian denominations whose views of God, or views of roles for women, or thoughts on communion formalities, or rules about making amends for sins are seen by some believers to not hit the right doctrinal notes to make others happy, even within the same denominations, so as to cause sometimes bitter debates. So it is no wonder why at this point there are more than forty-two thousand different Christian denominations worldwide! If I were advising the churches, and even putting aside the fact that afterlife researchers have found that there is in fact no hell, I would advise all versions of Christianity that all this hell-condemning and policing of the minutia of people’s various beliefs amounts to a set of terrible marketing choices, for heaven’s sake!  As Jesus Himself said, “You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions…You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!” (MK 7:8-9) It is time now for those who are still trying to preserve what little is left of that old-time religion to take the Lord’s point, and to stop all this fussing over divisive doctrinal nonsense. The marketing optics of it all are frankly god-awful!

One might even ask where the whole hell idea comes from, when the afterlife reality itself as we have come to know it pretty well through communications from the afterlife’s residents so notably lacks any mention of a hell. Even Jesus in the Gospels never mentions a hell beyond the gloomy fire-free outer darkness, which does in fact exist as the lowest afterlife level; but it is a place to which only we ourselves might temporarily condemn ourselves. Or Jesus mentions the Gehenna garbage dump outside Jerusalem, whose references don’t look very hellish either. A couple of what look like references to permanent divine condemnations in the Gospels are clearly later suspect additions that were added at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. And, well, simply put, I just don’t get it! When fewer and fewer people are attending churches every year, why are those churches chasing ever more attendees away by instilling in them terror of a hell for which there is no evidence? And when fewer and fewer Americans are mustering any kind of belief in God with each year that passes, why make that problem any worse by insisting that only a God of a certain specific description can somehow win the right to reign on high?

There is no real cure for what ails Christianity now, other than a return all the way back to its true First Source. I have been reading a variety of Christian bloggers, looking for ideas about how we might begin to shape a viable post-all-schisms Christian movement, and over and over we see most modern Christian thinkers making the same key mistake. To their minds, “going all the way back” means reading just the early church fathers, all of whom lived and wrote after First Nicaea in 325 CE. By then, the pure thinking of Jesus Himself was not even a distant memory.

To his great credit, the modern Christian thinker who tries to hew closest to the Gospels’ true First Source is Father Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation.  Father Richard believes that when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it lost the essence of the Gospels themselves as what he calls “good news for the poor.” And of course I agree with him, although I consider that Gospels good news to have been not just for the poor, but for all of us! I do get his point, though, and I want to give him the chance to make it to us here. Father Richard says:

“In the early Christian Scriptures, the message of Jesus seems to have been heard in great part by people on the bottom. We see clearly in Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s Gospels that people who are poor, in need of healing, or viewed as sinners tend to get the point. Those who are outside or at the edges of the system understand Jesus, while those who are inside or at the center are the ones who crucify him.

“We can date the turning point to the year 313 CE, when the Emperor Constantine established Christianity throughout the Holy Roman Empire. The Church thought that linking up with power was a good way to spread the gospel message. In truth, it became embarrassed by Jesus, the powerless one. Most churches do the same, in their own way. We feel more comfortable with power than we do with powerlessness. Who wants to be like Jesus? Who wants to be powerless? It just doesn’t look like a way of influence, access, or one that is going to make any difference.

“After 313, Scripture interpretations do a 180-degree turn. Take the issue of war: a hundred years before 313, it was unthinkable that a Christian would fight in the army. Jesus’s teaching on nonviolence is self-evident. As Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) observed, ‘I am convinced that [Christianity] has distorted the message of Jesus…. When it had the backing of a Roman emperor it became an imperialist faith as it remains to this day.’ Jesus taught nonviolence, lived nonviolently, and died nonviolently, but this goes right over our heads! We can’t see it because we’ve spent seventeen hundred years interpreting Scripture from the top. Reading Scripture from the bottom is the key to what liberation theology calls the preferential option for the poor. I just call it the bias from the bottom. Apart from conversion and until the ego is transformed, everybody wants to be at the top. Apart from grace, we don’t see anything valuable on the bottom.

“By the year 400 CE, the entire Roman army is Christian and we are killing the ‘pagans.’ After the Empire becomes Christian, there is a whole section of the Bible that we are structurally unable to read. We can’t read anything about nonviolence, powerlessness, or not being ‘winners.’ We can’t see what we can’t see. We can’t hear what we are not ready to hear. And if we are on the top, any critique of the top is un-hearable. This is where action and contemplation are linked together. In the contemplative journey, unless we see this necessary humiliation of the ego and defeat of the false self, we don’t undergo basic transformation.”

The gentle, kindly, and perfectly spiritual Man who is Jesus Himself was forced to watch the perversion of His pure Gospels message by the Roman Emperor Constantine beginning late in the third century. And Jesus understands people so well! He knew precisely what Constantine’s seizure of His burgeoning Jesus Movement was going to mean, and it breaks my heart to think of Him having to watch it happen. Simply put, love and forgiveness, kindness and peace, all those stellar virtues of the least of these, do not sell well among those who lust only for absolute power and control. Constantine cared not at all for the very teachings which were central to the love-based movement that Jesus had so well begun.

But what Jesus had taught was beautiful! He said, “Love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36). And Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect!” (MT 5:43-48). When Peter asked Jesus, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). And Jesus said, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and it will be given to you. They will pour into your lap a good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return” (LK 6:37-38).

Sadly, though, none of that was of any use to Constantine, who needed a fear-based way to control the masses as he conquered them. So as he built the Roman Christian religion that is our Christianity of today, Constantine suppressed and destroyed all the peaceful aspects of the Jesus Movement. He built the entirety of his new religion around what was a minor idea that had developed as an aspect of that Movement, an idea based in ancient Hebrew religious practice that proposed that Jesus had died as a pure sin-sacrifice to God. And Constantine thus built his whole religion around the notion of Jesus as the ultimate pure sin-sacrifice, which of course then imposed deep fear and penance upon us all. He did include Jesus’s Gospel teachings in the Christian Bible as He assembled it, but none of that was emphasized. Or even really taught. So all the fear- and guilt-based aspects of modern Christianity came from Constantine. None of that came from Jesus.

And since history is written by its winners, Christians down through all the generations have been taught and have lived our lives knowing things which never have been true. We were taught that Constantine was a hero! He had saved and protected and built the church, and done wonderful things for us and for Jesus as he spread Christianity throughout the world. I can recall how rudderless it felt to be a young Christian even in the nineteen-sixties, simultaneously reading the Bible over and over with an emphasis on the Gospels while I also attended Christian church services. Being taught to love and also to fear, not knowing which beliefs were right, and yet if you guessed wrong about what you believed, your soul might wind up in hell. Could that really be true? Oh my goodness, you never saw a more seriously devout religious seeker than I was as a teenager! But for someone who naively took Christianity as seriously as I took it then, the competing beliefs of Constantine’s fear-based religion and the earlier Jesus Movement still buried inside the Gospels simply never could be reconciled.

What fixed it all for me was the wonderful professor who was my college advisor. Miss Corwin was at the end of her long career, and growing bitter about the fact that her strongly negative view of Constantine’s role in Christian history, while factually correct, was going to remain a minority position. But she taught what was true, and she answered my questions, and while she wanted me to become a minister, I realize now in retrospect that she could see even then that I lacked the fire in the belly that entering the clergy would have required. But perhaps my doing what I am doing now is even more effective at spreading her point of view?

All I know is that the most famous Being Who ever lived came to us from the Godhead two thousand years ago to free us from all religions, and to give us the easiest method for achieving rapid spiritual growth ever devised. If we will follow Jesus’s simple teachings, we can achieve enough spiritual growth in one lifetime to make this our last necessary earth-lifetime. And Constantine has only delayed, but he has not ended the moment when The Way of Jesus can prevail. As my Thomas tells us, Constantine did perform one service for us all. Now everyone on earth knows the name of Jesus! So now we need only to help the world to better understand what Jesus taught, and the true Jesus Movement can at last begin.

I believe in love, Alfie.
Without true love we just exist, Alfie.
Until you find the love you’ve missed, you’re nothing, Alfie.
When you walk, let your heart lead the way,
And you’ll find love any day, Alfie, Alfie
– Burt Bacharach (1928-2023), from “Alfie” (1966)