truths about who we are and what we are meant to be begin with a story. The story, or (to use the Greek word) mythos, is almost always, he said, a fictional account of the adventure(s) of a hero, someone who does daring and dangerous things for a cause, someone who goes out to speak and act courageously and then returns bearing his reward, whether material or spiritual. In the nearly universal god-man myth, the hero meets death or is swallowed by a monster only to experience rebirth and triumph at the end.
Each of us, Campbell argued, can learn from the hero’s adventure because we are all likewise called to the going out and the coming back of the unique adventure that is our own life, from the moment of birth through maturity to death itself. The myriad myths of humanity can differ enormously from one another, and yet there are certain universal themes running through them all. The various trials and revelations experienced by the hero invariably call for a denial or “losing” of his or her own lower self, or ego, as the hero’s consciousness is expanded and transformed. In Campbell’s words, the important dimension of the story is the “interface between what is known” and the true source of all life and being. The myths, he declared, are meant to bring us eventually to a level of consciousness that is spiritual. Like dreams, they use the language of symbols and other imagery because they flow up from the depths of the unconscious and draw us ever upwards towards an ever-greater light. Greater light means fuller awareness of who we really are, and with that comes deeper appreciation of the presence of the divine light in other people around us. We become more sensitive to their hopes and longings, more compassionate to their struggles and their grief.
Given an approach like that, it is easy to see why Campbell, who died in 1987, called himself a “maverick” and why he had such difficulty with organized religions. Religion, ideally, should lift us into that greater light; it should connect us ever more solidly with the source of our very being and with one another. This is what people everywhere hunger and thirst for today. Yet history makes plain that religion has not always functioned that way. Carl Jung said that in a real sense religion has been humanity’s creation as a defence against a genuine encounter with Transcendence or the Divine. To be quite specific, excessive literalism and the historicizing of that which was meant as metaphor and myth has too often led to religion as the great inhibitor of human growth, as the great oppressor of human freedom, a prison rather than a source of healing. Thus religion, Campbell said in a now-famous aphorism, can be defined as “mythology misunderstood.”
The Pagan Christ taught that the Christian story is based upon an eternal myth of the gift of Christ consciousness, or of the divine flame, to every one of us. However, tragically, it is a myth that well over a billion people on Earth today still see as the literal story of a single individual who lived long ago in Palestine, who alone can be called the “Only Begotten Son of God,” and who alone, by his death and Resurrection, can save us from the penalties of sin and death.
While the eternal mythos of the Christ within unites and binds all humanity together, this latter, exclusivistic, literal reading, and the insistence on an extremely questionable history, continues to rupture and divide Christians from other religions, from those of no religion and very often from one another. It’s one reason why there are at least four hundred different competing Christian denominations and sects today. The return to the deeper, much more universal, mythological understanding is imperative as a condition for world harmony and peace. It is also, I deeply believe, the key to the survival of Christianity as a viable faith in the future.
I have found that the mythic approach to the Gospels, and indeed to the whole of the Bible, has enriched my faith and deepened it in ways I had scarcely imagined when I was a parish priest or a professor at the seminary. Nature is more alive to me—or I sense that I am a deeper part of it. Prayer, while much more informal and conversational—or more often deeply silent—seems more connected, more real. Trust in the mystery we call God is keener, more alive. The mythic way is the genuine path towards the goal of a renewal of faith in our time.
The question we will attempt to answer here, then, is: what do the Gospels themselves look like or “feel” like from that mythic and symbolic point of view? What happens when we drop the pretence that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are varying complementary biographies of one man called Jesus of Nazareth and see these ancient texts for the allegories, parables, word pictures and myths I believe they were originally intended and understood to be? If sheer literalism leads to “blind faith,” what kind of understanding and raising of consciousness flows once a mythical, metaphorical principle of interpretation is applied? The time has come to test this hypothesis and see.
Before I attempt to do so, however, let me be absolutely clear. This book is aimed at helping modern men and women to see the Gospels in a new light. In no way is it an attack upon Scripture or on other interpretations. In the Hellenistic world, sacred writings were widely interpreted as having an allegorical meaning. The literal sense was important in its limited way, but only as a “minor mystery” compared with the greater riches beyond. Another way of putting this is to say that sacred texts were understood to have both an exoteric and an esoteric meaning. The exoteric sense, the literal, was for beginners, those not yet ready to comprehend the real message. The true, or esoteric, meaning lay within or beyond the text itself.
There is abundant proof of this fundamental distinction in the pages of the New Testament, and in particular in Mark, the earliest of the four Gospels. In chapter 4 of Mark, after telling the very first of the parables—the parable of the sower, which is found in every Gospel—Jesus is asked about the meaning of the parables in general. The Gospel says: “When he was alone, those who were around him along with the twelve asked him about the parables.” Jesus is then made to reply: “To you has been given the secret [in Greek, mysterion] of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables . . .” In case we miss the point, the author/editor of Mark repeats it a few verses later. Verse 33 reads as follows: “With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.” Matthew uses the same word as Mark for the secret but makes it plural—ta mysteria, the secrets or mysteries of “the kingdom of heaven.” In other words, like all the other Mystery Religions of that period, early Christianity was based upon an inner or esoteric mystery teaching(s), which held the key to all the rest. The parables, then, are meant to communicate that essential mystery, while at the same time protecting it from being too readily seized upon and profaned by those of ill will.
When I was growing up in Toronto’s east end, I attended a Bible class for youngsters of about ten to twelve years of age. There was one game we played at each session that gave me a gift that was to benefit and last me all my life; it was called Sword Drill. Each class member had a “sword,” which was in fact a bible. You held it tightly in its “sheath” (under your arm) until the teacher called out a Bible reference. Instantly there would be a furious searching and turning of pages until the first to find the passage leapt up and read it aloud. Points were awarded and the competition was very keen indeed. It now seems simple or perhaps even naive. But it taught me how to find my way around in what can be a very difficult book, or rather, collection of books. It gave me a thorough knowledge of the literal text I can never forget. However, although it’s a great place to start, one very soon longs and looks for something more. The vision that now follows has helped me as nothing else has done to find that something more.
There is one last thing I’d like to clarify before we go further: when I speak in this book of matter and spirit, or of the “spiritual” in contrast to the “material,” I am not expressing or espousing some kind of ultimate dualism. Dualism holds that there are two essential (ontological) realities of good and evil, darkness and light, physical and spiritual. Zoroastrianism, for example, seems to be an expression of this. So was Manichaeism. That would mean that the body is evil (and some Gnostics went that far, affecting Christianity in the process) and only the soul is good. Ultimately, there is but one final reality, from which all else emanates. This Monad, another name for God, permits a cleaving into two realms so that, in the tension of opposites, Creation
