Did Jesus Worship Yahweh? | The Question That Changes Everything...

I've been a follower of Jesus for more than 40 years. What did Jesus really think about the controversial biblical figure of Yahweh?

Jesus never used the word Yahweh anywhere in his teachings. When Jesus talked about God, he used the Greek word theos, which people understood to mean the creator, the source of the cosmos and everything in it. And in fact, the apostle Paul gives that as the Christian definition of theos in the book of Acts.

So Jesus refers to God as theos. He also refers to him as the Father. And in his famous prayer, he says "Pater hmon hento urano." Father, the one in the skies, the one in the heavens, just to distinguish from any other potential father. So we've got theos, Pater, and then he addresses Pater as Abba, which is a word that could mean daddy or dad, or could mean sir. That's the language that Jesus uses.

Now, some might say, well, he quotes Yahwist texts, and yes, he does. But almost every time he does that, he does it to find a prophetic meaning or an esoteric meaning. He almost never goes to the Yahwist texts for their plain meanings. And he distances himself from Yahweh law. All the gospel writers present Jesus as a successor to Moses and a replacement of Moses. And Jesus's laws as a replacement of the Yahwist laws.

So Jesus says, "You've heard it said, but I say this." He also distances himself from some of the Yahwist stories. He doesn't use the word Yahweh. He uses other language. He doesn't endorse the Yahweh stories. And this was clear to the primitive church. In Acts 15, they make a decision that Christianity is not going to be built on the Yahwist stories or the Yahwist laws. In Colossians 2:14, it talks about the cancellation of those written laws. So, the early Christians were very clear that Jesus had moved on from Yahweh.

And Jesus also said, "You do not know me, nor my Father. If you love my Father, you would also love me." He says this in the Gospel of John. So he's separating himself and his Father from the Jewish stories of their Father, Yahweh.

So the second part is interesting. If Jesus didn't regard these as divine stories, how did he regard them? Um, in the early church, we had church fathers who sought to teach the church to read the scriptures the way Jesus read them. And key figures would be Origen and Clement of Alexandria. And so when they went to the Yahweh stories and the Elohim stories, they didn't regard them as God's stories. And they said, "If we read these as God's stories, we would have to believe of God such things as we would not believe of the most savage and unjust of men."

They also identified that there was some other kind of entity washing around in those texts, which they called the craftsman or the demiurge. And this is language from Greek culture. And they never quite say what they think this being is, except it's very powerful. Powerful enough to do terraforming. It's not human. It's not divine. It's something else. Now, we might have other language for that kind of being. We have the language of alien or extraterrestrial or interdimensional. They didn't have that language. They talked about the demiurgos, the craftsman. And when they gave that teaching, they believed they were being true to Jesus's handling of those texts.

Now, Paul knew Plato, knew Greek thought like the back of his hand. And again, Origen, Clement of Alexandria believed they were continuing in Paul's tradition. Origen encouraged people not to read the plain meaning because that would be monstrous. Clement of Alexandria did the same. And the school of interpretation that resulted from that is often called the Alexandrian school. And it's the mainstream approach to interpretation to hermeneutics in the Eastern Orthodox Church. And it's built on the idea that you can't take those stories at face value as God stories.

So, did Jesus regard the Elohim and Yahweh stories as stories of extraterrestrials? Well, that might be adding two and two together and getting four and a half, but it's not far beyond. If, like Paul, he understood that these texts had to be handled differently, and that's why he always handled them differently, we have to ask then, what did he think these beings were? Not human, not divine, something else. Our language is extraterrestrial, but I think it's safe to say Jesus regarded certainly that those entities were something else, otherwise he would have handled those scriptures entirely differently.

I've been a preacher for more than 30 years. I've studied and taught through the book of Genesis many, many times in churches all around the world. And I've trained pastors in the skills of interpreting texts. And it's very clear they're not stories about gods. They're stories about the powerful ones in the Bible and the sky people, the Anunnaki, in the Sumerian tablets. The Elohim and Yahweh stories of the Bible are based on ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Akkadian narratives of Dingir and Anunnaki, figures which today we would describe as ETs.

But are there references to ETs and contact experiences in the New Testament? I think if you're looking for that, there are probably five places you would go. The Annunciation, that's the story of when Mary, the mother of Jesus, is told she's going to have a baby by some unusual means. The second would be the Epiphany. That's the story of when the Magi, the wise men, come from the east to pay homage to the infant Jesus. The third would be the Ascension narrative. That's the story in Luke-Acts of when Jesus is taken up into the sky and into the clouds after his death and resurrection. The fourth would be the Apostle Paul's vision, which is described in 2 Corinthians 12. And the fifth would be a very interesting moment in the book of the Revelation of John.

Now, the Annunciation is a very interesting moment in the Gospel of Luke at which his mother Mary, who is a virgin, she's never had sex with any man, although she's betrothed to Joseph, has a close encounter with a being described as an angel. And she's told she's going to have a baby, even though by any natural explanation, that is impossible. And of course, she does have a baby who turns out to be very famous, Jesus.

Now, Christians tell this as a unique story to illustrate the uniqueness of Jesus. But even within the gospels, it is not a unique story. The story begins with a close encounter and it results in an anomalous pregnancy. We think we've been told what kind of being she has encountered. It's an angel. But that word just means a messenger or a person on assignment, a person on a mission. It hasn't told us the biology or genus of the being who's delivering the message. So, it really is a close encounter with a nonhuman figure, but it's not even unique within the gospel. Almost exactly the same thing happened to Mary's cousin, Elizabeth. She also is not going to have a child by natural means because she's post-menopause. And then she has a close encounter with a nonhuman being and now she's pregnant also with somebody very important. So these two stories are very clearly and deliberately paralleled in the Gospel of Luke. We're supposed to notice it's virtually the same story. And it's a story of something that at that time would have been described as a supernatural pregnancy. Although today we might have other language for it, but I'll come to that later.

Those two stories are clearly modeled on the story of Abraham and Sarah and their anomalous pregnancy because Sarah is post-menopause. In the Hebrew canon, Abraham and Sarah are presented to us as a story of Hebrew origins. But I argue in my book, The Scars of Eden, that we actually have a story of at least two layers. Yes, there is a Hebrew origins story there, but it's interwoven with a human origins story as well, but it's the same basic pattern. Here's a couple. They're not going to have children by any natural means, and then they have a close encounter with three powerful nonhuman entities, and the anomalous pregnancy follows. And it is a new beginning in the story of humanity in the Hebrew canon. So we have three figures in the Bible whose conception and arrival is announced in very similar fashion.

But these stories are not unique to the Judeo-Christian tradition. If you listen to the stories of the birth of Lao Tzu, it too is an anomalous conception. It's there in the conception story of Vipassī Buddha, the 22nd incarnation of the Buddha before Siddhartha Gautama Buddha. It is also there in the conception narrative of the Yellow Emperor.

Now, what's interesting about some of these Eastern stories is that we're given a different description of the contact phenomenon that preceded the anomalous pregnancy. It was a phenomenon of light being shone onto the mother from something in the sky. I find it curious that Carlo Crivelli in the Renaissance period depicted the Annunciation in exactly that way. There is the beam of light shining onto Mary from, well, what is that in the sky? A flying saucer. A UFO, at the very least. Why would Carlo Crivelli tell the story of the Annunciation that way? It's nothing like how it's described in the Gospel of Luke. He's painted it the way it's described in these stories about Lao Tzu, the Yellow Emperor, the Pac Buddha.

The story of an anomalous conception in which the mother is human and the father is God is actually an echo of a pre-Christian story. The story of the conception of Alexander the Great. His human father is reluctant to lie with his mother because there has been a conception by Zeus. Zeus has manifested himself in some physical way and has impregnated his wife, and the result is this history-changing figure, Alexander the Great. So by the time people are reading the Annunciation stories of John the Baptist and Jesus, they're somewhat familiar with this kind of story. It is a trope that is used to give an explanation as to why this figure is so powerful, so extraordinary, so history-changing.

Is it more than a trope, though, in the case of Jesus? Did it really happen? I lean to suggesting that it is a trope that Luke is using to make a theological point so that any Greco-Roman readers will know straight away he's making a powerful claim about Jesus. And I lean in that direction because it would seem extraordinary if this really was an historical narrative about Jesus. It would seem extraordinary that Matthew, Mark, John, Thomas, and the other extracanonical writers seem to know nothing about it. I think Luke has used a trope to make a theological statement about Jesus. But where has that trope come from? Why is this expected to be a resonant story? Anomalous conception, anomalous pregnancies. The fact is, this is not the exclusive preserve of great historic figures. You can find families all around the world today who will talk about indigo children or star children who will tell you maybe they have four children, but one of them is extraordinarily developed, very quickly, is at genius level, is very sensitive, has psychic abilities, has memories of other lives. This one of the children is different, and they will tell you there was something anomalous about the pregnancy that led to that child.

Now, you might say that's ridiculous. There's no evidence to support that kind of claim. That's not proof of anything. That's fair comment. All I am saying is that this kind of story is not just confined to the legends of great historic figures. It is part of the human experience. And families today who talk about having an indigo child or a star child, they don't go around using those stories to try and get their kid into a better school or into a better job. These stories are very tightly held because people know how ridiculous that sounds. People know they're going to be judged and ridiculed if they share such an idea. And these stories are held very, very tightly. It has become a trope for some reason. And clearly, Luke has used it to make a statement about the importance of John the Baptist and the importance of Jesus.

Now, I want to quickly address an elephant in the room because I know people will be asking, do I believe in an historical Jesus? And if so, why, since there is no contemporaneous evidence of his existence or John the Baptist's, for that matter? And look, that is a fair question because what we do have is evidence of the beliefs and practice of the very first Christians. And so in Pliny, Suetonius, Tacitus, Josephus, we have the record of the beliefs and practice of the very first Christians. But what we don't have is any report contemporaneous with Jesus and John the Baptist saying, "Oh, there was a ruckus down the road today because of this preacher," or "Something extraordinary happened in this town because of this wandering healer." We don't have anything like that. And even if you go to the Holy Lands and you're shown places, "Oh, this is where he was born. This is where he lived. This is where he preached this sermon." What you're being presented with are narrative traditions. There is no object that we can touch, point to, and say, "Here's the proof of the stories of Jesus that we read in the canonical gospels."

The reason I lean to believing there was an historical Jesus is because it is so easy to track the distortion of that story by the Roman Empire. As Christianity became the imperial department of religion, you can see how the Jesus story is distorted. Certain things are forgotten. Jesus's teachings about feudalism, the money system, the tax system, not emphasized. Christianity is morphed into a religion of worship and obedience, turning Christians into good, compliant citizens. And the way Jesus is depicted is changed so that he becomes more and more European-looking, and by the sixth century is being portrayed in Roman military uniform, a foot soldier serving the interests of the imperial army and imperial conquests. And of course, earlier than that, with the rebranding of Constantine as a Christian emperor, we have Jesus rebranded as the supporter of imperial war. And the armies will now fight under the banner of the cross, which incidentally was a symbol of the sun that Constantine was already using in the religion he was into before his great rebranding. So because we can find all those stories of distortion, to me, that's evidence that there was an original Jesus tradition that was inconvenient to the empire. Inconvenient because it was at odds with feudalism, and inconvenient because it had great momentum. So I take that as evidence that there was a real, authentic Jesus tradition in the beginning.

But are the stories Luke tells about his conception and birth history, or are they tropes? I would say that the Annunciation story fits Jesus in this global family of stories about star children and indigo children. A family of stories that says very often there is some kind of an intervention in human development to ensure that we have a very advanced person who can progress human knowledge, wisdom, social wisdom, who can move the human story forward in a positive way. And that certainly seems to be the claim of Luke in his telling of a story totally unknown to Matthew, Mark, and John. But that is based on the original close encounter story of Abraham and Sarah. If you want to read it closely, if you want to take it as history, then I would flag the question, what kind of entity is that that has affected this anomalous pregnancy? And back in the day, we might have called it supernatural, divine. Today, we have the language of artificial insemination. Today, we speak about in vitro fertilization, and we realize we could be looking at a story of advanced technology rather than supernature, if we read the stories in that more literal, historic way. But for the reasons I've said, I lean to the idea that Luke is using a trope.

The Epiphany is found in Matthew's gospel. It appears to take the place of Luke's presentation of Jesus, first as a baby to the lowly shepherds, and then as a boy of 12 to the teachers of the law at the Jerusalem temple. In this way, Luke presents a coming out to the world from the bottom to the top of Jewish society. Matthew doesn't have any of that. Instead, he has a story of Magi, wise men, coming from the east to see the birth of this new king. Now, if they're coming from the east, immediately we're thinking, what are they looking for? They're not looking for a Jewish Messiah. Does this story fit within the traditional searches for the next Bodhisattva? Is that what the Magi were looking for? These Magi come because they are following a light, and the word in the gospel is aster, traditionally translated as star, and that's the obvious translation of it. But of course, at that time, when people talked about the stars, the lights in the sky, they made no distinction between what we would call a star, a planet, an asteroid, or any other light moving through the night sky. And to state the obvious, a star can't move through the sky with such precision that it can identify a suburb, a street, and an individual house. So, I would suggest that the light they're following in this story has to be a lot closer to the ground in order to point out where the young Jesus and his family are now living.

Once again, it's a very dramatic story given to show the global significance of Jesus. And yet, it is a story completely unknown to Luke, Mark, John, Thomas, or any of the other extracanonical gospel writers. How likely is it that this is an historical story if the other gospel writers were completely ignorant of it? So what is Matthew doing in this story? Well, all the gospel writers seek to present Jesus as a new Moses coming with new laws that will delete and replace the old laws of Yahweh. And that is why Matthew tells the story of the Epiphany in a way that mirrors two of the stories concerning Moses. So firstly, Moses has to be rescued because the murderous Pharaoh wants to get rid of all the Hebrew babies. And so we have the story of the slaughter of the innocents. And Moses is put in a rush basket into the river so that he can be saved. And of course, he's found by a daughter of Pharaoh and grows up in Egypt in the royal household. As a result of that, there's the other moment when the adult Moses is wanting to extract his people group from the country of the cruel Pharaoh. And now the angel of death, the violent Yahweh figure, comes along, and there's another slaughter of the innocents. Only this time, it's not the Hebrew babies missing out, all the Egyptian babies. It's flipped the other way around so that it's the babies of the Egyptians who are attacked, and the Hebrew people escape with Moses. And so we've got a sort of inversion of those stories. Now, it's the wicked and murderous King Herod who pronounces this demand for a slaughter of the innocents. And so Jesus has to be taken to Egypt, where he's going to grow up for a couple of years before it's safe to bring him back to the Holy Land. So, it's a story inverting the earlier stories again to make a claim about Jesus, a new beginning, a new Moses, a new people, a new king. Once again, for that reason, I think we may be looking at a trope rather than a piece of actual history.

But if we take it more literally than that, what was that light? It was not a star. It was not a planet. It was not an asteroid. It was something that was intelligently steered so close to ground level that it could identify a house. So what exactly did Matthew think he was telling us when he told that story? Was it just a magic light, or did he have something more developed in mind? Once again, just like with the Carlo Crivelli painting of the Annunciation, or the Et de Gelda painting of Jesus's baptism, or the stories from the East, the Yellow Emperor, Lao Tzu, the Pac Buddha, what we have is an anomalous encounter with light associated with the infancy narratives of Jesus. Clearly, we're being told this is a significant moment. But where does the expectation come from that a close encounter with a nonhuman entity or an anomalous experience of light will precede these kind of experiences?

I think the Ascension story in Luke-Acts is one of those stories that probably most believers would say, "Okay, something is being described to us that can't have happened in exactly that way. There must be something figurative about this story." And there surely is. This is the moment where Jesus is taken up before the crowds, up into the clouds, and now he's among the gods. Now, if you read that in a literal, historic kind of way, you have to ask some questions. What exactly took him up? And how was he breathing as he left the atmosphere and entered into outer space? It's a story that's stretching if you want to read it that way. But if you do, you might pause to ask, is this a trope? Is this a repetition of, say, Elijah being taken up into the heavens? In his case, we're told how it is, in a craft, a smoky, fiery craft, a chariot of fire that comes down through an opening in the sky, through a whirlwind, wind, or what we might call a wormhole, lands, takes Elijah, and off it goes. And Elijah's never seen again. Is Luke building his Ascension story on the story of Elijah so that we can know that just like the great prophet Elijah was taken up into the heavens, the same thing happened to Jesus? Or is it something else? Is it simply a repeat of the classic Greco-Roman trope of a body not being found because the hero is now among the gods? Has Luke simply dramatized that same story so that any Greco-Roman reader will come to the story of the Ascension and say, "I know exactly what he's saying. This is the apotheosis of Jesus. Jesus is now a God, and everyone knows it."

The Apostle Paul's vision in 2 Corinthians 12 is a very interesting moment in which the Apostle Paul is wanting to tell his readers, "Look, some remarkable things have happened to me. That means I really know what I'm talking about." And he talks about a time when he was caught up into what he called the third heaven, where he saw and heard things that he's not allowed to repeat. Now, the third heaven, if we accept the cosmology of the day, was really their way of talking about beyond the sky. We're talking about the great beyond. We're talking about deep space, outer space. Suddenly, he's in this place, and he says, "I don't know how I got there. I don't know if this was in the body or in spirit." He's saying he doesn't know if he was abducted or if this was astral travel, to use more familiar language. And then he says he saw and heard things that he is simply not allowed to repeat. Now, today we would use the language of astral travel. We would use the language of outer space or deep space. We would use the language of abduction. And of course, it's not the first time that something like this happens in the biblical tradition. It happens to Enoch. It happens to Elijah. It may have happened to Ezekiel. Is this a repeat of that for the Apostle Paul? He's describing it as an experience. So he's not saying, "Let me tell you a story in a familiar way. Let me reach for this trope." He's saying, "This happened to me, and I will tell you as much as I am allowed to."

Can anyone say close encounter? The senior astronomer for the Vatican Observatory is the Reverend Dr. Guy Consolmagno, and he has argued there is another moment in the gospels that may hint at a populated universe, and it's the moment in the Gospel of John where Jesus says, "I have others not of this fold who I must also bring, so that we may be one together." And he argues that this may be a reference to extraterrestrial people. I take a different view. I actually think there Jesus is talking about Gentile believers, and he's foreshadowing a movement that gathers people together from beyond the Jewish world, that it's Jews and Gentiles, that it's an international family of humanity. So I don't take that as an ET story.

The Revelation of John, chapters 6 and 21. Here the writer describes a city. It's the New Jerusalem, except it's not city-shaped. It's a giant cube. And in that cube are streets and habitations. He describes the textures by likening them to metal and precious stones. He's fascinated by the artificial light that means it's perpetual daylight inside this cube. He talks about how everything that is needed to sustain life is in that cube. You've got food supply, you've got water supply, you've got medical supplies. And then he talks about how the cube comes down from the sky, that it can take tens of thousands of people. And he describes an extraordinary moment when he says he sees the stars fall, the sky move backwards and roll up, and then he sees a new heaven and a new earth. And let's not read that word heaven as if it's something religious, because back in the day, it just meant sky. He's saying that after he's seen the stars fall down, the sky roll up and move backwards, he's now seeing star systems he doesn't recognize and a planet he doesn't recognize.

Now, you put all that together, and to the 21st century mind, it's a coherent picture. We look at the cube, we might think that's a Borg cube, only a little bit nicer. It is a place to carry a breakaway civilization from Earth to some other region of space. And of course, the writer is at pains to say that the tens of thousands of people carried by the cube are only the very best kinds of people. There has been a harvesting of Earth, and this cube is now going to move off with the best people, with all the resources it needs to sustain life. If you picture the stars falling, the sky moving backwards, being rolled up, and now you're in a new part of space, wouldn't we call that portaling? Wouldn't we call that traveling through a wormhole? Wouldn't we talk about breakaway civilization? We have all the language we need to describe that story today. A story that's baffled people for generations. And I just wonder what it was that John saw in that revelation.

When he describes a place with artificial light, food supply, water supply, medical supply, it is an echo of what Ezekiel said he saw. Now, on the one hand, Ezekiel describes the ruach, the cavod, which is a craft that seems to take a couple of people, and he describes how it flies and moves around. He describes the feeling of it when he says, "The hand of the Lord is heavy on me as it launched." He describes the sound of the motors like the roar of a waterfall, which is very descriptive of the sound of a rocket. He describes the rotor blades, which move at voice commands. He describes the wheels in such detail that NASA has a patent on them. The engineering drawings were produced originally by Josef Blumrich in the 1970s, and that design at wheel is used to this very day. So we've got that technology in Ezekiel. And then in another place, he describes a far bigger structure again, food supply, water supply, medicinal supplies. He calls it a temple. We might call it a mothership, a giant craft. And when we look at how it functions in Revelation, if it's a similar thing, again, we've got other frames of reference by which to understand these visions that these ancient people saw. And of course, we call it a vision. It simply means this was something they saw and did not understand. But they've described it as faithfully as they can so that you and I, in ages later, can puzzle over it in a very similar way to which they did. And I love the fidelity of apocalyptic writings in that way.

Now, I'm convinced that the Elohim and Yahweh stories in the Hebrew scriptures are actually ancestral memories of paleo contact. That's contact with other civilizations in the deep past. Visitors who came sometimes to exploit, sometimes to colonize, sometimes to assist and nurture the progress of humanity. In the New Testament, I would say there are no strong claims to ET company. But what I would say is this: I think the writers are telling the story of Jesus using tropes which say this man was divine. This man was important. This man is now to be found among the gods. Tropes which would have been well understood by any Greek or Roman reader, especially when we come to the birth and death narratives surrounding Jesus. I think what we can say is that these stories belong to a global family of stories. That's why those early hearers knew what the stories meant. But the content and language of those stories are curious. Today, we wouldn't talk about Annunciation. We would use words like artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization. We wouldn't talk about meeting an angel. We would call it a close encounter. We wouldn't talk about a light or a star. We would say a UFO today. We wouldn't say caught up into the third heaven. We would talk about deep space and abduction. We have the language of craft, wormholes, motherships, breakaway civilizations. If we retell the stories using language like that, of course, we hear it differently. It doesn't make the stories more historical or add any information in terms of whether or not these things happened. But what it does do is make us hear these stories in a different context, realizing that they belong to a global canon of story, Eastern and Western, ancient and modern, and it really is a global story.

Whether we listen to Nigerian stories, the stories of the Efik people about Abassi and Atai. If we listen to Mesoamerican stories about the feathered serpents. If we listen to the Norse stories of the Æsir. If we listen to the Celtic stories of the Sith or She, Mesopotamian stories of Anunnaki, ancient Armenian stories of Dingir, or Hebrew stories of Elohim, these themes recur: artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, lights, craft, close encounters, deep space, wormholes, abductions, sky armies, or whole cultures of advanced beings who come to our planet, govern over our ancestors, and then leave. When we find these correlations in stories all around the world, stories which reflect in these familiar themes and tropes in the Jesus story, we have to ask why.

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When we talk about ideas of Christianity, I think it's really helpful for people to recognize that Christianity wasn't always how it appears today. Christianity was something else before it became the doctrinarian, institutional, dogmatic religion that we see today. Before the Roman Empire concretized Christian orthodoxy, when in 381 of the Common Era, Emperor Theodosius illegalized heresy. Before all that, Christianity was a kaleidoscope of ideas and experiences and theologies. And that kaleidoscope shines a very different light on questions that we might have today.

When we go to the earliest Christian sources, and I would suggest that we're looking at Q, this is the common material between Matthew and Luke. And when we look at Thomas, for instance, we are looking at wisdom sayings. If you go to the Gospel of Thomas, which I believe is very early, it is not an action gospel. It's not stories about Jesus doing this, that, and the other and having these miraculous experiences. They are wisdom teachings. And I'm leaning to the view that if we're looking for the original, authentic Jesus, that's probably the nature of the teaching that we're looking at. And then as Christianity continued and other documents were written to flesh out this Jesus tradition, I think then you have the stories of Jesus being added to those teachings.

If you read the Gospel of Thomas, those sayings are very enigmatic and are clearly intended to leave the reader going away puzzling. And that is certainly an approach that would suggest they are ascension teachings aimed at helping us to become more than we are: more intelligent, more conscious, understanding the cosmos better, knowing how to live our lives better. And that's a tradition that continues beyond those very early documents. We find it in the Gnostic Gospels. I would suggest it's one of the distinctives of the materials that we call Gnostic, that it's really aimed at the ascension or personal development or spiritual development of the reader. And it didn't disappear with what we consider the Gnostic period. I think if you read spiritual teachings in the Eastern tradition, I think that's where Gnosticism went. Because if you go into Eastern Orthodoxy, you will find writers talking about theosis, which is a process of transformation in which we begin to participate in the principles of the cosmos, gain divine attributes. That word theosis is really Eastern Orthodoxy's word for ascension. And so I think there's a very broad pattern of ascension teaching in early Christianity. We see it in all three of those places. And I think perhaps in the West, we've become more distracted by questions of apologetics, what really happened, of the battle between science and religion, who's got the real account of the origins of the cosmos. And we miss these other layers that I think were so important to the early Christians, which are about you and me, and about how you and I can evolve, the kinds of lives that we can have, our understanding, our consciousness. And so that's how I would see it.

And as for religion, what do we mean by that word? Because religion usually refers to a pattern of devotion and belief and behavior that is directed towards a god. And when I look at Jesus's teachings, whether that's in Thomas, Q, the canonical gospels, the Gnostic Gospels, he's not really presenting himself as an object for that kind of worship. In the canonical gospels, Jesus said, "I did not come to be served." And yet, we've organized Christianity around serving Jesus, whether that's worshiping him in praise and adoration or going out on a mission field. So, I think we've missed something of the original emphasis. Um, I don't find when I look at the teachings of Jesus that I'm really looking at a lot of teaching about religion. I think his teachings are very much about life and how we live this life and how we avoid creating problems for ourselves and for others in this life. And certainly, there's the theme of connecting with God in his teachings. But as to religion, I mean, he didn't hold church services. He didn't tell us to do the same. I think what emerged in his name in imperial Christianity was really very, very different from what I find in the gospels.

And part of my reframing of Jesus in my own research path has been to discover a far more interesting Jesus than I thought he was. And a lot of that comes from translation work, going to the root meanings of his key words, and finding that he's talking about something that gets translated as basileia ouranōn, which we could very legitimately translate as the cosmic realm. And when he teaches about that and calling on us to understand what it means that we have access to the cosmic realm, I think that's an incredibly broad invitation to explore. And those sayings to me sound like ascension teachings. When he says that the kingdom of heaven, the basileia, is inside you, it to me is another of those almost Gnostic sayings that is asking us to go on a journey of discovery and exploration, not the journey of painful religious compliance.

For one, I am very comfortable discussing my beliefs and ideas around religion and spirituality and esoteric knowledge. But in general conversation, the word "God" is one I tend to avoid, just because it's so layered with cultural accretions and associations, and I have no idea what buttons I might be pressing in your mind, for instance, when I use the word "God." Certainly, growing up in Great Britain, the word "God" is layered with religious ideas that we've received from institutional Christianity through the centuries, and they are ideas that I might not want to endorse or reinforce. So sometimes I will use different language and try and say exactly what I mean rather than using a word as vague as "God." I am comfortable with the word, and sometimes I feel it is the only word big enough to discuss ideas when we get into questions of the ultimate source of the cosmos, the primordial source.

If I go to the Apostle Paul, he's very helpful in Acts 17 when he defines the Greek word for God, theos. And if I conflate a couple of phrases from his speech, he says, "By theos, I mean the source of the cosmos and everything in it, that in which we all live and move and have our being, of which we are all offspring." And if I use the word God, I always try and clarify it and say that's what I mean. I don't use the word God for anything other than that. But it is a very difficult word to avoid, especially when we get into deep questions about the nature of reality, the nature of space and time, and beginnings.

Space, the final frontier. The question of what space is and where it came from is one that has baffled human minds since time immemorial. The vastness of the cosmos and the vastness of the concepts concerning the origins and evolution of the cosmos are such that the language of God has often been reached for through the ages in order to describe it. But is the language of God a help or a hindrance?

In recent decades, the language of God has made a surprising return to the worlds of cosmology and physics. Stephen Hawking, in his book, A Brief History of Time, follows the quest for a unified theory, arguing that if we reach it, then we will see into the mind of God. Cosmologist Leon Leman goes even further in his 1993 book titled The God Particle. In 1994, Frank Tipler, an expert in general relativity, published a book entitled The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead, in which he claimed to have found a purely scientific theory from omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, evolving, personal God. But what is the name and language of God doing anywhere near physics or cosmology? Does it help us or hinder us in understanding the way things are?

In 1992, astronomer George Smoot discovered ripples in the cosmic microwave background radiation, ripples that are echoes of the Big Bang. In one of his first statements to the press, Smoot said it was like seeing the face of God. Of course, the language of God has long been associated with the beginning of all things. Is that language helpful, distracting, or inevitable?

We used to talk about the cold, dark emptiness of space. And now we discover it's not dark. It's full of light. It's full of energy. It has mass. And we find this mind-boggling to understand that the fabric of space actually means something material. Way back, we thought that time was the prime organizing principle and that the cosmos had always been there and would always be there. Then comes Einstein, and with his elegant sequence of equations, shows us that no, time had a beginning, space had a beginning, the same beginning. And that energy had a beginning, the same beginning. And that the prime organizing principle is not time, is light and the properties of light. Now, this is mind-boggling because now we have to think in terms of time having a beginning. So what was before time? What was outside of space? Before there was energy, what was the force that threw it all into motion? And it's so mind-boggling that scientists today begin reaching for rather godlike language.

And as physicists search for a unified theory or a theory of everything, the word "God" starts cropping up in their writings. Now, people with a religious belief in God suddenly get very excited and they say, "Ah, look, now Einstein has put God back in the equation, and you have to talk about God now, don't you?" Well, yes and no. What a physicist means in reaching for the word "God" isn't necessarily the same as what a religious teacher might mean in reaching for the word "God." And the reason that a lot of scientists, whether they're looking at quantum physics, the study of the very small, or cosmologists, the study of the very large, are a little bit wary of using the word "God" because of all the cultural associations that are layered on top of that word. When we use the word "God," it's certainly a word that's big enough to allow us to think about before time or outside of space or before energy, but it's a word that implies a personality or personhood. And a physicist doesn't necessarily want to go there. And yes, it may be a point at which religious thought and scientific thought has to do a bit of a dance and intersect in a certain way. But there is a reason why I like to use the word "source" or why others like to talk in terms of divine intelligence, but hold back a little bit from using the word "God." The word "God" does imply a personality, I think, to most hearers. And you use that word, and all of a sudden, all your entrainment from religious backgrounds or even secular societies that have roots in a religious background, all sorts of associations suddenly get layered on that may or may not be helpful.

In our studies of quantum phenomena, we're learning that consciousness has an impact on how material phenomena shape themselves. That you can have something going on that will behave in a certain way while it's observed by a camera, but as soon as you have a conscious eye observing it through that camera, the material phenomenon changes. And so quantum research is pointing to the possibility that consciousness may be a prime organizing principle, and that when we reach for a theory of everything, we may need to factor consciousness into that equation.

Now, two and a half thousand years ago, Plato went even further than that, arguing that the material universe must have been preceded by consciousness. And he does that by applying logic to the things he observes. And step by step, he takes the reader through that process in his books Philebus and Timaeus and Critias. And it's an absolutely mind-boggling idea that consciousness or intelligence could precede the material universe. But that's what he argues for. And so in his mind, there's this pivot where we go from consciousness into materiality. And so he again believed that there was a zero point to that materiality. That's really as close as Plato comes to defining what he means by God. And it's intriguingly close to how the Apostle Paul of Christianity defined God.

Now, he's standing one day in front of a non-religious audience, so he can't appeal to Jewish ideas or to Christian ideas. He has to define God from scratch. And so he says, addressing this crowd in Athens, he said, "By God, I mean the source of the cosmos and everything in it, that in which we all live and move and have our being." It is so all-inclusive. It is a vision that says our consciousness comes from source consciousness. That's only logical. Our intelligence comes from source intelligence. Our being is a participation in the being of the source. So it's kind of unarguable if you see it in those terms. But then he says that God is that in which we all live and move and have our being. There he's saying there's no separation. We couldn't be more intimately connected with each other and with source. That's interesting because religion often trades in separation. Anxiety often comes in with a message.

of you are separated from God. You need to claw your way back into his presence. And we the religious leaders would tell you how. Well, in Paul's vision, there's no need for that. You live and move and have your being in the source. And so, [music] taking that anxiety away, I think, is incredibly empowering. And in that speech, he mocks the idea of sacrificial religion. The idea that the source would need us to provide it with anything, he says, is a joke. And so, it's profoundly affirming, exciting, all-inclusive. I find it quite an inspiring vision and I like the language he uses. I find it easy to have conversations if I'm talking about the source or if I'm talking about consciousness or intelligence. We have problems when we use the word God because of these cultural layers and what they mean to us.

Now, you might say, "Oh, it's a shame that that bit of Paul's teaching kind of went missing and Christianity seems to have run with this very anthropomorphic vision of God instead." But it didn't get completely lost. And in fact, you could point to a theologian like Paul Tillich writing in the 20th century who argued that it's very misleading to talk of God as a person or a personality and that it would be better to think of God as the ground of all being. And so he is reaching for language similar to Paul's there, that in which we all live and move and have our being.

Plato's works provide an amazing summary of the thought world into which Jesus and his apostles stepped as they began their teaching. Well, the Gospel of John suggests that Jesus and those who wrote for him may have had a rather similar vision of God to the one Plato described. So Plato has this idea that in the beginning was consciousness [music] and then consciousness fractalized to form the material universe and our consciousness comes from source consciousness individuates. We have this individual experience, a separate conscious entity on [music] this planet and we're here to learn something. And then after this life, we go on to a more cosmic relationship and presumably we pull what we've learned along the way. So that's Plato's version of the hero's journey that the cosmos is on and each one of us is on our own hero's journey as part of that.

The Gospel of John maps that out for Jesus. It says in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Then the word became flesh became human became material and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory as one full of grace and truth. And then towards the end of John's gospel Jesus is speaking to the source, addressing the source as father and saying, "Father, now I'm about to return to you, back to the glory we enjoyed before the foundation of the world." And so there's that hero's journey mapped out in the life of Jesus as a way of enabling us to understand our own journey. So I think in that way John's gospel reaffirms Plato's vision of in the beginning was a unified field of consciousness and intelligence. And that then somewhat finesses our understanding of what the writers for Jesus had in their minds as an understanding of God.

Now I argue in Escaping from Eden and The Scars of Eden that the Elohim stories of the Bible are not stories about God at all. They are stories about a totally different kind of entity and a plurality of entities. Elohim means powerful ones. The powerful ones. And [music] there are stories of all kinds of powerful beings through the Hebrew scriptures. Now, this is what was believed by church fathers like Origen, [music] Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and the hereticized Marcion. They all believed the Elohim stories were not about God. They're about something else. And so, you've [music] got stories of, I believe, extraterrestrials. You've got stories of alien visitors who look and sound human, but they've got advanced tech. You've got stories of entities that sound like dragons, and they all get translated as God stories. And then the holy name Yahweh, the holy name for God in the Jewish tradition, has been pasted over all these stories to make it look like a seamless story of Yahweh from the get-go. But those stories are not Yahweh's stories.

And so this then raises the question of how did Jesus read the Elohim [music] stories? How did Jesus read the Yahweh stories? Did he believe Yahweh was God? Did he believe the Elohim were God? Well, we can certainly say that Jesus did not read the Hebrew canon in a fundamentalist way. He and his apostles almost never reach for a plain reading of those texts. They would always go for mystical and [music] esoteric interpretations, never for the plain meaning. If you look through the gospels, count up the number of times Jesus says, "In the past you've heard this, but I say this." And when he says "in the past," he means the Hebrew scriptures. Or he'll say, "Moses said this, I say this. Moses allowed you this, I say this." And so you know straight away that he is not endorsing the Mosaic teachings and laws. Far from it. He is repudiating them. Moses said this, but I say this, and then he'll say something different. So as to that layer of redaction that was done on these ancient texts, and we know there were a series of redactions where work is added to the earlier text, then it's harmonized, more is added, then it's harmonized, and there was a moment when the Pentateuch was produced and harmonized to authenticate the Mosaic law. Jesus doesn't endorse that edit. There's a moment when more scriptures are added and it's harmonized to endorse the monarchy, the priesthood, and the Yahwistic law. Jesus does not affirm that. He repudiates that edit.

Now, it was so clear to the apostles and the early church that Jesus had repudiated the Mosaic law and the Yahwistic law that when they got to Acts 15, they came to a decision of saying the laws of the old covenant, the laws of the Hebrew scriptures are no longer binding. They are not relevant to international Christianity moving forward. We're not bound by those teachings anymore. They came to that conclusion because in the end it was clear that Jesus had distanced himself from those writings, had repudiated them. Now, he had said other things that did not make that immediately obvious because he had pointed to those scriptures and said, "Those are the scriptures that testify to me." And so the early church felt they couldn't simply jettison the Hebrew scriptures if they are the ones that testified to Jesus. But then how do you handle them? How do you interpret them? And these early church fathers said, "Well, look at how Jesus and the apostles handled them." They went to them for prophetic meanings, for esoteric meanings, not to teach the plain story and not to say that the Elohim were God.

What did Jesus think about the Elohim story? There's a moment when he says, "All who came before [music] were thieves and robbers. The thief comes only to steal and kill and [music] destroy." And that's a pretty good summary of what the Elohim did when they came, colonized our planet, and governed over our ancestors. And Jesus sets himself up in contrast to people who've treated humanity that way.

Do Jesus's "I am" sayings mean that he sees himself as an expression of the "I am" of Yahweh? Did Jesus regard himself as an expression of Yahweh or as a counterpart to Yahweh? Did he believe Yahweh was God? Well, here's an intriguing moment. Jesus is encouraging people to engage with the source, to address the source as father, and to expect the source to provide them with things. And so, there's a moment in Luke and Matthew's gospel when he says, "Which of you fathers, if your child asked you for food, would give him a snake? If your children asked you for bread, would you give them serpents? Now, [music] if you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask?" And the other gospel says, "How much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask?" So, he's saying, go to the source and expect good things. The source is not like a wicked father who would give serpents to children hungry and asking for food. What's he talking about? Why on earth would he come up with that image? Well, the answer is that that image comes from the Hebrew scriptures. There is a moment when the people of Israel are starving in the desert. And so they come to Moses and they [music] say, "Please, can you get Yahweh to provide us with some food?" And instead of providing them with food, he sends serpents, fiery serpents, to go in and attack the people. It's a horrible story. The people are starving. Their children are starving. They've asked for food and Yahweh says, "You're not going to get food. You're going to get serpents. You're going to get snakes. You're going to get dragons. And then you'll learn to worship me." And Jesus says, "What father, if their child asks for food, will give them a serpent?" Now, that to me suggests he is strongly distancing himself from that vision of Yahweh, that vision or understanding of God.

Now, Jesus believed in God and he had an intimate relationship with God. And the gospels say he spoke to God as if God were his father. He spoke to the source, as if the source were his father. And so I think we can see clear daylight between Jesus's concept of God and his concept of the Yahweh stories and the Elohim stories of the Hebrew canon. [clears throat] So from that, I would say that God cannot be equated with the character of Yahweh in the Hebrew stories. God cannot be equated with the Elohim of the Elohim stories of the Hebrew canon. I'm comfortable using the name God. I'm happy to say I believe in God, but then I always want to define what I mean. And I love going to the Apostle Paul's definition: the source of the cosmos and everything in it. That in which we all live and move and have our being. I find that source language [music] more useful.

And another reason that I think the God language can be a little bit unhelpful is if there is such a thing [music] as zero-point energy, then we want to tap it technologically. Now, Ed Mitchell, [music] the sixth man to walk on the moon, was a fierce advocate for the US government to [music] declassify its UFO files and come clean about being in contact with ET civilizations. And one of his motivations for that was that he believed technology is available to us from our ET contact. And he would talk about zero-point energy, free energy, tapping the energy that generates the cosmos. And he spoke in scientific terms. He didn't believe that to tap the energy of the cosmos you need to do religious rituals. He talked about it as a technological thing. And I so I think if we use the language of source or zero-point, it's more helpful if we're going to ask questions about how do we tap that energy, whereas if we're using the language of God, the idea of using technology to tap God's powers, there's a "will not compute" that goes on, I think, when we use that language. I don't find that irreligious because many of the great [music] mystics through history, if you go to someone like Simeon the New Theologian writing in the 10th century of the Common Era, or if you go to someone like Meister Eckhart, they spoke in terms of learning to operate with the divine energies, learning to tap the divine energies in order to heighten our consciousness, in order to achieve greater insight, in order to heal and transform our bodies. And so if mystics can speak in those terms, and if scientists can speak in those terms, then again I think we see a [music] confluence of thinking that is using language that's a little bit less anthropomorphic [music] about God. And so you had Meister Eckhart who would talk about the Godhead or divinity rather than Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It's not that he didn't believe in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit because he was a good Catholic. Think it was a Dominican friar, but he rather cleverly said, "Divinity has revealed itself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Let me tell you about divinity. Let me tell you about the divine energies. Let me tell you how we can tap the divine energies." And I like that language. And it's certainly the case that mystical and shamanic traditions have existed for hundreds, thousands of years that are all about tapping the divine energies. But I'm also interested, Ed, from a more scientific viewpoint, of how can we tap zero-point energy? Because if we do have access [music] to free energy, then it changes the history of our planet. It changes the footing of our economics and allows us to have a better human [music] experience on this planet.

The reason I think it's helpful to break open some of our thinking that revolves around the word God is that the word God has been hijacked by religions. So that I say the word and you immediately think of religion and rules and who's in and who's out and heaven and hell, sin versus obedience, worship versus idolatry, and all those binaries and exclusivities. And one of the things I argue for in The Scars of Eden is that it would be helpful to go back to the root meaning of certain words in the Bible. Translate Elohim as "the powerful ones." Translate ruach as "craft," not "spirit." Translate [music] gehenna as "Gehenna" or "the rubbish tip" instead of "hell." Use the Greek meaning [music] of the word we translate as "repent," which sounds like a terrible warning, and translate the word metanoia, which means "beyond the mind." "Go beyond the mind," says Jesus. "Go beyond the mind," [music] says the Apostle Paul. And if we go back to the message that Jesus toured with, it's summarized [music] right at the beginning of Matthew's gospel. If we go to the root meanings of those words, peel off all the centuries of religious associations layered over the top of those words, you see the way it's translated at the moment, it says, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Well, that sounds like a warning, doesn't it? Repent. Sounds like it's saying, "You get your life cleaned up because God is about to turn up, and you wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of him." That's what it sounds like. Translate the words by their root meanings. Metanoia. Go beyond the mind. Change your thinking. Go beyond your thinking for the kingdom, the realm [music] of heaven, of space, of the cosmos. He's [music] saying, "Go beyond the mind. Transform your thinking. Go beyond your thinking because the amazing power of the realm of the source, the amazing power of the cosmos is available to you." Now, that's an invitation to explore possibility that's [music] open to all. The amazing power of the cosmos is available to all of us. And it echoes in Paul's words when he says, "The source of the cosmos, that in which we [music] all live and move and have our being." I can't think of a more powerful invitation to explore what is possible for human beings in this material life than that. It's a vision that's inclusive, that has no boundaries, no boundaries between scientific exploration [music] and mystical and shamanic exploration. We want to know what's real. We want to know what's possible. And that's why I think reframing our language around God is so helpful. Empire reframed the whole of Christianity as a religion of compliance where being a good Christian and [music] being a good citizen became indistinguishable because Christianity was a feudal order. It was a religion of obedience and worship. And I think that's a distortion of what Jesus was on about. Do some of this re-translating and a far more life-affirming, all-embracing vision emerges. One that I find deeply interesting and amazingly motivating. So, I don't want to get caught up too much in the word God and whether we should stick with it or whether it's unhelpful. I just think it's good to ask more open questions of what is going on, where did everything come from, who are we, where do we fit in this great puzzle, [music] and be willing to explore together and follow whatever the white rabbit leads. And for me, the white rabbit is what our ancestors had to tell us in our world mythology and our ancestral [music] texts, including the text of the Bible, when translated [music] a little more clearly with root meanings in plain sight, because that is when this whole other story of us emerges.

In my study of ancestral stories of paleocontact around the world, one of the things that's changed for me since my days as a very mainstream orthodox Christian believer is that I've learned to listen with respect to ancestral story and indigenous narratives of other cultures, and I've been very enriched in the process. When in the West we talk about Christianity, we are generally talking about the Jerusalem to Rome canon of narratives, the orthodoxy that emerged as the Roman imperial department of religion. But what do we do with other ancient narratives of Jesus? The pre-canonical narratives of Thomas and Q, as I would argue, the extranonical narratives of the Gnostic Christians, and ancient narratives concerning Jesus carried by other cultures. Claims about Jesus from ancient religious communities who claimed to have had contact in the absence of objective material evidence. How do we weigh one narrative tradition against another? That's why I love talking about the questions raised by ancient stories of Jesus in India.

The Himalayas, the rooftop of the world, spanning the territories [music] of China, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Straddling the Chinese and Indian regions of Tibet and Kashmir are some of the most rugged and majestic mountainscapes on planet Earth. This forbidding terrain provides the perfect place of seclusion for communities of monks and pilgrims, practitioners of ancient [music] pathways of enlightenment. I've had the privilege of traveling all around the world to some incredible places, but I have to say that horse trekking as a boy in the foothills of the Himalayas has to be one of the highlights of my life so far. Kashmir is absolutely stunning country, and I can see why it's disputed over, quite aside from the religious and geopolitical differences, it is absolutely beautiful country, ethnically diverse, fertile, spectacular, and it's a part of the world with very deep history. In the deep history of Kashmir are narratives which point to a controversial revision of our understanding of one of history's most significant and enigmatic figures, Jesus of Nazareth. Deeply historical claims maintained by the communities of Hemis Monastery in Ladakh and the founders of the shrine at Roza Bal in Srinagar. In the written records of the monastery at Hemis, near the town of Leh in Ladakh, are references to a figure by the name of Issa, a young man in his 20s from the Levant who stayed there for a couple of years on his travels during the first century of the Common Era. And the records say that this was perhaps the third monastic community in India in which this young Issa had stayed. The other claim is from Srinagar, the shrine at Roza Bal, and there we find the [music] burial place of a man from the Levant in the first century of the Common Era, a pilgrim who became a healer, a teacher, and the leader of the community of the healed by the name of [music] Yus Asaf. [music] [music] [music] And he's buried there in an interesting fashion because it's not done according to local custom but according to ancient Jewish custom, with the body facing from west to east. And the story goes that he lived in this community until the age of 80 when he died of old age. The other interesting detail there is that there is a bronze relief giving more information about who this Asaf may have been. [clears throat] So not only was he from the Levant at the same time period as Jesus, but the bronze relief shows through the markings in the feet that this was a man who had survived a Roman crucifixion. Now, it's not physical proof of anything. It's a narrative tradition. But again, it sounds some very familiar notes.

Christian orthodoxy has struggled to respond to these ancient narratives whose implications would appear [music] to strike at the very foundations of mainstream Christianity. But do they? What are the issues created by the stories of Jesus's presence [music] in India, and in particular by the claims of Hemis and Roza Bal? The Hemis story doesn't conflict in any way with the canonical orthodox stories about Jesus because there is that huge missing section in the story of Jesus's life. The challenge is really to the authority of the church because the church really wants to be the single sole repository of all reliable information about Jesus. It speaks for Jesus in the world. And the church is uncomfortable with other communities and other countries belonging to other cultures saying, "Oh, well, we know some other things about Jesus." That's really not allowed because it is a challenge to the monopoly that the church wants to have on the histories and stories of Jesus of Nazareth. The narrative claim of the shrine at Roza Bal is rather more seismic because there they are claiming to have the body of the deceased Jesus. And that runs totally against the mainstream orthodox view of the resurrection of Jesus. And for a long time, Christianity has run on the proposition that the credibility of Jesus as a teacher and a savior and the divine Son of God rests upon the historicity of his resurrection. The claim at Roza Bal challenges the orthodox story of Jesus dying at the age of 33 and resurrecting by a supernatural act of God, then ascending to the right hand of the Father in the heavens. Those narratives conflict with one another. Both cannot be true.

For centuries, Christians have taught that the credibility of Jesus as a spiritual teacher rests upon the historicity of his resurrection. The stories of Jesus's later life in India and his death in Kashmir at the age of 80 [music] would appear to be incompatible with the traditional Christian understanding of his resurrection. But is that really the case? It really depends what you mean by resurrection because at the beginning of Christianity, resurrection meant more than one thing. And not all Christian believers believe the same thing about the resurrection of Jesus. So if you go to the writings of the Apostle Paul, for instance, when he talks about the resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15, he's talking about the nature of Jesus's resurrection. And what should our expectations be concerning life after death? "So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body and there is a spiritual body." 1 Corinthians 15:42-44. What Paul puts forward in 1 Corinthians 15 is really very close to the mainstream Greek view of that time, which you can find unpacked in the writings of Plato, for instance. And so that view is that we are primarily beings of consciousness and that we existed as beings of consciousness before we individuated and incarnated as material beings. Now we're having this material experience, and then when our bodies expire, we continue as beings of consciousness and go on to an experience that's unimaginably different, or maybe we go around again. That was the Greek idea. And in 1 Corinthians 15, that's really the notion that Paul is putting forward. He says that we have a corruptible body that dies and decomposes, and that what goes on is a spiritual body. In other words, we continue as spiritual beings or beings of consciousness. Paul's view of resurrection does not require a dead body to be reanimated and then made indestructible so it can then carry on for eternity. That's not his view. His view is a spiritual one. And when he talks about his own encounter with the risen Jesus, he doesn't talk about encountering a reanimated dead body that's now indestructible. No, he describes a subjective experience of light and love and a changed life purpose and a voice that spoke to him. It's a spiritual experience that he describes, very similar to my own experience and the new birth experiences of countless believers from that time to this. So that's very different from encountering a reanimated body. And remember, he's talking about our resurrection and the resurrection of Jesus.

Now, the Apostle Paul tells this story because he's reflecting on the Christian story which appears to end with a dead Jesus. And he's wanting to say, "No, the story doesn't end at death. The story is longer than that. Jesus transcended death, and so will we." And if we can't believe it of Jesus, how can we believe it of ourselves? So Paul is really preaching for that kind of a view, reflecting on a Christian story that, without what he's saying, ends with Jesus's death.

If we go to the first and earliest iteration of Mark's gospel, which we find in the Codex Sinaiticus, it ends with the empty tomb and a promise of resurrection appearances. So Mark doesn't go into what those resurrection appearances mean. And he could mean exactly what Paul means. They're writing at about the same time as each other. Matthew, Luke, and John tell a different story. Their stories are of Jesus post-crucifixion as a reanimated dead body, Jesus come back to life from death. He can eat, he can cook food, but something is different about him that means he's going to go on for eternity. So there we have these different views of resurrection. The gospel writers use two words, one of which means "he got up." And it's the same word you would use for someone who gets up in the morning, wakes up, and has breakfast. So he's had this crucifixion experience. He's been put in the tomb, and then he got up. And then the other word that is used means "he was again." He got up and was again. And so some suggest that this doesn't mean resurrection in the classic orthodox sense of a dead body that is supernaturally brought back to life. This is, in fact, a survival story.

When we go to the Gospel of Mark in its earliest iteration, which we find in the Codex Sinaiticus, it ends a little earlier than the one that might be in your translation of the Bible, with an empty tomb and the promise of resurrection appearances. And so that gospel leaves open the [clears throat] question of what kind of resurrection this is, what kind of resurrection appearances these are. But Matthew, Luke, and John really nail everything down. Written a little bit later, they come along and they talk about resurrection as a reanimated dead body that's now indestructible and will go on forever. And that's the view that became orthodoxy. And that view is incompatible with a story such as from Roza Bal that says that Jesus survived the cross and then made a journey to Kashmir where he lived out the rest of his life as a teacher and the leader of the community of the healed, to die of old age at the age of 80.

Within the tradition of Christian esoterics, some believe that [music] hidden in plain sight within the canonical texts is another understanding of the resurrection of Jesus. >> [music] >> Narrative hints that perhaps Jesus did not die as a result of his crucifixion [clears throat] but survived and escaped. This is also the teaching of another Abrahamic religion, Islam. There are these tantalizing clues that there's something else going on in the canonical story that you can pull together to find a different explanation of Jesus's life after the cross. And the first is Pilate's dream. So Pontius Pilate is told by his wife, "You must not be responsible for this man's death," because she's been warned about the consequences in a dream. And so we have Pilate who's trying to find some way out of killing Jesus. So there's one little clue. [snorts] And then we have the fact that Jesus's body comes off the cross between three and six hours after going onto the cross. Now, Roman crucifixions were absolutely brutal, and part of the torture of them was that it would usually take people days to die on the cross. So, coming down after no more than six hours ought to get our attention. If the bodies had to come down early, the legs would be broken to prevent the poor victims from being able to push up and breathe. And this wasn't done to Jesus. So, this attracts our attention. Jesus loses consciousness after he's given some mysterious mix to drink. This also gets our attention. Jesus's close associate, possibly his uncle, is on the Jewish ruling council, the Sanhedrin. This is Joseph of Arimathea, who has such access to Pilate that he can go in and say, [music] "I want Jesus's body. I'm going to place it in my family's tomb." He then has the authority to go up to the Roman guards guarding the crucifixion site and saying, "I'm having that body. I'm placing it in my tomb." And they're so impressed with either the letter from Pontius Pilate or because they know who he is that they hand the body over. All this should be catching our attention. And then there's the mysterious treatment that the body is [music] given by the women when it's taken into Joseph of Arimathea's family tomb. These are all very odd things that are not the usual run of a Roman crucifixion. And some would argue, Christian esotericists would say, these are all references to a survival story that Jesus was crucified. And the miracle is that what should have killed him didn't kill him. And they would relate this to words Jesus had spoken when he said, "Just as Jonah was three nights in the belly of a whale, so the Son of Man." And what's interesting about that is Jonah didn't die in the belly of the whale. He survived something that should have killed him. And this is the prophecy that Jesus makes about himself. And the final clue I'd mention is that to make sure Jesus was dead, a spear is thrust into Jesus's side and blood flows out of him. And I think the gospel writer may be putting a puzzle before us. What does that mean? Do dead bodies bleed? What kind of issue of blood was this? All these details raise these questions as to whether the canonical story is a story of one layer or two layers. Is it the story of a miraculous intervention by God bringing a dead body back to life? Is it a miraculous survival of a crucifixion? And why in the earliest testament to Christianity that we can find in the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel sayings of Q is there no mention of the crucifixion and resurrection at all? Evidently, there were Christian communities for whom that was not part of the story. But how could a religion have grown up around a miracle that didn't really happen?

Many Christians object to the idea that Jesus could have escaped a hostile Jerusalem, retired to northern India, and allowed a whole religion to emerge on the basis of a misunderstanding of events. Well, firstly, that's ridiculous because of course many narratives grew up in the name of Jesus. The orthodox view grew up. Various Gnostic views grew up. Heterodox views grew up. We've already seen there were various resurrection narratives that grew up. Christianity wasn't a single thing from the beginning. It was a kaleidoscope of ideas and theologies and experiences and traditions. Does Jesus endorse all of those, 'cause they're all done in his name? I mean, think of all the things that have been done in Jesus's name throughout history: the enslavements, the misogyny, the imperial conquests. All these things have happened, but they've happened in Jesus's absence. Orthodoxy grew up in Jesus's absence. It became the imperial department of religion for the Roman Empire. In Jesus's absence, the orthodoxy of the church was militarized by Emperor Theodosius in 381 of the Common Era. In Jesus's absence, the canon of the New Testament was decided in Jesus's absence. You cannot point to things that emerged in Jesus's name and say, "Would Jesus have allowed that?" He wasn't there. And you would have to apply the same logic to these questions of Jesus's resurrection. Would Jesus have allowed a false narrative of his resurrection to have grown up? Well, yes, if he wasn't there. Yes, if he was in another country. Christianity has been the construction of communities of faith and then traditions of the Roman imperium in Jesus's absence. So I think the question really misunderstands the timeline of the formation of Christianity. Jesus didn't lay down the blueprint for an institution or for church services or for orders of bishops and archbishops and prelates or anything like that. All those things, all the traditions of Christian worship grew up in Jesus's absence. Jesus in the gospel said, "I did not come to be served." And yet a whole religion has emerged that seeks to serve Jesus. So you can see that something's gone awry in the name of Jesus. So that's how I would respond to that question. >> [music] >>

The Gospel of Matthew asserts that Jesus began his life as an Israeli refugee living in Egypt, returning to Roman Palestine after the death of Herod. But what of Jesus's growing up years, of which we see only one moment at the age of 12 at the Jerusalem temple? What did he do with the intervening 30 years? Did he, like those who wrote for him, make himself a student of international thought? Did he follow the well-established trade routes and travel the world on his spiritual journey? How credible is it that Jesus could have traveled as far as India? International travel was relatively easy at the time of the Pax Romana. The world was so travelable that the Roman Imperial Army would dispatch soldiers from Italy to the very north of England, its border with Scotland, for a two-year posting. So clearly, it was easy enough to get to and from Hadrian's Wall that you'd send a soldier there for only 24 months. There were well-established trade routes from east to west, and Jerusalem was superbly placed for [music] international travel. There was regular trade along the Red Sea, and trade across the Indian Ocean was well-established. The trade routes were well-established, and Jesus could easily have traveled in that way and [music] made international forays through that 30-year missing period in his early life. So yes, it's entirely possible that Jesus could have traveled. He has a 30-year gap in his timeline if we follow the canonical stories. That's plenty of time for him to see the world. Is it not possible that Jesus was every bit as much a scholar of world thought as were those who wrote for him? It is possible that he was as studied and well-read as somebody like the Apostle Paul, who knew Plato like the back of his hand. Jesus traveling from Jerusalem to Kashmir is entirely feasible.

The claim at Hemis Monastery near Leh in Ladakh is that Jesus spent as much as 15 years during his teens and 20s living in India and studying at various monastic communities [music] including at Hemis Monastery, where his presence was documented in the community's written records. >> [music] >> The claim at Hemis is of written records. The record in that documentation recalls him as a bit of a rebel, a bit of an anti-authoritarian, but very sincere, very devout, and loved and respected for that. The tantalizing aspect of this story is that the written records have never been made public. Yet, they are not without historical witnesses. Now, this documentation in the records of Hemis has been cited by a number of people through the years. In the 1930s, Nicolas Notovich and Elizabeth Caspari, who were spiritual scholars, traveled to Hemis. They saw the documents and they took a photograph of one page of the document, modeled to them by the local monk. I would love to apply some AI to this photograph and see if we can work out what's written on that text. They had made that trip to see that document hot on the heels of another spiritual leader, Swami Abhedananda, who had made the trip in the 1920s. Again, he had asked to see the records to see this documentation concerning this ancient pilgrim Issa, and he was shown the same documents described by Elizabeth Caspari and Nicolas Notovich. More than that, he was allowed to translate portions of what he was shown. Also in the 1920s, the Russian artist Nicholas Roerich made a visit to Hemis Monastery, and he too was shown the same documentation that had been translated by Swami Abhedananda and witnessed by Elizabeth Caspari and Maud Gas. These witnesses all confirmed what had been written and published in 1894 by Russian explorer Nicholas Notovich. Nicholas Notovich was the first scholar in modern times to bring Hemis' narratives about Issa to world attention. [clears throat] He translated the Hemis record and showed its correlation with Jesus's missing years, and he researched and found other Punjabi and Gujarati traditions which confirmed the Hemis narrative. Unsurprisingly, Notovich experienced significant pushback when he showed his research to two cardinals in Rome. Both strongly urged him not to publish, either out of a pastoral concern for Notovich or because the implications of his work were simply too controversial. One of the cardinals offered to buy Notovich's research in exchange for Notovich signing an NDA, promising never to speak of what he had found. Notovich politely declined. The same offer was repeated by the Russian Orthodox Metropolitan [music] of Kiev, but once more Notovich declined and published. And he published his findings in the book *The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ*. The British establishment really pushed back against this narrative, and Max Müller, who was a German-born British scholar from Oxford University, he was a noted orientalist and philologist, and he contacted a friend of his who lived in this part of India and asked her if she would go on his behalf to verify or falsify these claims made by Nicholas Notovich. Now, this was in the time of British India, and so his friend went with a delegation of British military/military police because India was under British power at that time, and you can imagine why the dynamic of the conversation might have been slightly different when a British delegation with British military turns up at the door of Hemis Monastery and says, "We want to see the records. Was Jesus Christ ever here? Is there written proof? We want to see it." And the answer they were given was, "Oh, no. There are no records of that kind here at all. And no, we don't know anything of a story of Jesus having been here. We don't remember having met Nicholas Notovich, so we can't confirm or deny that story either." It's not difficult to see why they might have been a little bit more defensive of the traditions they were maintaining when confronted with that kind of a conversation. Unfortunately, that meant that the report that went back to Max Müller was, "No, there's nothing in this." And Max Müller, then with all his authority, put that story forward, which was very damaging to Nicholas Notovich's reputation. It wasn't until later decades when Nicholas Roerich, Swami Abhedananda, Morasque, and Elizabeth Caspari were shown the same documents that he had seen, translated parts, and even photographed a part of it. So in the long run, Notovich's story was borne out, but he had to suffer a lot of so-called debunking and pushback in his lifetime.

Clearly, conflicting narrative traditions [music] cannot all be true. Turning to the [music] narrative claims of the canonical gospels, what is their credibility over and against conflicting [music] claims from the East and West of India? I think the first thing to remember is these are all narrative claims. It's not that the orthodox story of Jesus has all this physical evidence lining up and supporting it, and these other narrative traditions, or there's no proof for them at all. No, there's no proof for any of them. They are all just narrative traditions. Even if you go to Jerusalem and assume, "Well, this is the hill where he was crucified," or you go here and they say, "Well, this is the place where he was born," or "This was the synagogue he attended." You might be looking at physical places and artifacts, but they are all stories. They're all narrative traditions. The question is how we weigh one narrative tradition against another. Is it corroborated by others? How old is the story? And I find stories of Jesus's travel to corroborate one another, especially when we get to India and find a number of monastic communities who will corroborate one another's account that, "Yes, Jesus was here. Jesus was here when he was younger. Jesus was here when he was older." What we have at Hemis is a claim of contemporary documentary evidence of Jesus. Documents from the time of Jesus talking about a figure that sounds like Jesus. We don't have anything like that for the canonical orthodox stories about Jesus. Now, I find that Christian apologists and evangelists often pull a bit of sleight of hand over this issue. "Oh yes, we say there's plenty of evidence, contemporary evidence of Jesus. I mean, think about Josephus, Suetonius, Tacitus. Plenty." The problem is none of those were Jesus's contemporaries. Josephus was writing two to three generations after Jesus in the first century of the Common Era. Pliny was writing three to four generations after Jesus in the late 1st century of the Common Era. Suetonius was writing in the second century of the Common Era. Tacitus was writing in the second century of the Common Era. And all he's doing is reciting the emerged Christian Orthodox story that had solidified by that time. There's no one from the time of Jesus telling a story about him, unless what the monks at Hemis are saying is true, and they have a contemporary written account. That's what makes this so interesting.

But what is the nature of the canonical stories of Jesus? Is it possible [music] that the whole Jesus story is an invention? A sequence of religious tropes sewn together to convey new religious ideas and philosophies? Because of the lack of contemporary evidence of Jesus that I mentioned before, I totally understand people saying this is a made-up figure. I mean, the gospels are full of well-worn tropes from Greek or Roman literature, and it wouldn't be difficult to look at them and say, "Well, this is just a new version of some very old stories applied to the Christian hero." The missing body at the end of the Gospel of Mark, that's a trope which we will find in the hero story in many Greek or Roman stories, or the supernatural birth where the mother is a human being and the father is God. Well, there are many stories like that. Think of Alexander the Great. And so I can understand why people say this is just an amalgamation of old tropes that's been recycled and applied to the hero of the Christian story, to Jesus. It's all made up. Those tropes are used, but it may be they're being applied to a real historical figure, just as Alexander the Great was a real historical figure.

The reason I believe there was a real historical Jesus is firstly, he's a very inconvenient figure to have invented. Inconvenient to the Jewish religion, which had quite a comfortable relationship with the Roman imperium. Inconvenient to the easy governance of the Roman Empire if people are taking on the views of Jesus. Jesus's teachings about the money system, the tax system, leadership, feudalism made him a very inconvenient figure to the Roman Empire, wanting an easily governed, compliant people. He's not the kind of figure you would invent. He is too inconvenient. And the distortion of the Jesus story reflects that. The fact that Jesus had to be changed and distorted in order to fit the Roman agenda. To me, it suggests there was an earlier Jesus tradition that was inconvenient. I mean, an example of how it's distorted is, of course, Eusebius's story of the cross in the sky, through which Jesus endorses the violence of Constantine's armies and endorses the legitimacy of all Constantine's invasions and military campaigns, endorses him as emperor. That's clearly a distortion of the Jesus of the Gospels. Or when you find Jesus portrayed in Ravenna, Italy, in I think it's the sixth century, there's a beautiful mosaic presenting Jesus in Roman military uniform as a foot soldier. So there he's now under the authority of the Roman emperor, about to be dispatched in violent campaigns against other people's countries. It's a very, very clear distortion. You can see how the church was brought into the feudalizing structures with the bishops being accorded this kind of senatorial rank. These grand buildings being constructed for huge [music] pompous displays of power. All the ranks of society represented in the processions of those religious activities. You can see the change. You can see the distortion. And I think the distortion would only have been necessary [music] if what first emerged in the name of Jesus was inconvenient to what the empire had in mind. So for those reasons, I believe there was a real historical Jesus about whom stories were then written. Orthodox stories, heterodox stories, stories which became orthodoxy and stories which didn't. Stories in the Jerusalem-Rome tradition and other stories in other parts of the world. Christianity has always been a kaleidoscope of ideas, theologies, stories, and experiences. >> [music] >>

Is this a weakness in the world of religious thought or a strength? Why has mainstream Christianity been so defensive towards these international claims concerning the life of Jesus? Christians often react to these stories such as the Hemis story and the Roza Bal story because it raises questions about evidence. What is the evidence for the narrative you believe over and against this other narrative with which you might be less familiar? And I think orthodoxy prefers everything to be cut and dried. Doesn't want the uncertainty of "this could be true" or "this could be true." It

wants a story that it regards as proven, unassailable, cut and dried. This is how it is. And orthodoxy doesn't want this kind of confusion. So I think that's one reason.

I think another reason is that it's such a clear reminder that in the early days, Christianity was a number of different narratives. I actually find that very interesting and very empowering. I want to know what the first Christians believed. I want to know the full spectrum of it because I think it creates very interesting and motivating avenues of study. I find there's a very strong ascension teachings tradition when we go back to the full range of Christian literature in the early days. The Gospel of Thomas, I think, is like that. The Q sayings, I think, are like that. Some of the early Gnostic literature that is at the same time as the canonical literature is like that. It's about personal evolution. It's about human potential. It's about what can life be if we understand our unity with the divine, our unity with the source. It's an invitation to explore. And I find that invitation in the canonical gospels such as Luke and the non-canonical such as Thomas. When Jesus says, "The kingdom of heaven is within you," that is an invitation to explore. When he says, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand," that is an invitation to explore. And when you get to the root meanings of those words and you realize "kingdom" could be translated "realm," "heavens" could be translated "space" or "the cosmos." Now we're talking about the whole cosmic realm being at hand. I can't imagine a greater, more profound invitation to explore than that. And that's what I find when I look at the full spectrum of those early stories. That's why I think it's good to recover the full breadth of what comprised Christianity in those early days.

What difference does it make whether people prefer the Jerusalem-Rome narrative, which has become Christianity's mainstream, or the claims of Rosabal in Shinagar or the monastery of Hemis in Ladakh? In the final analysis, what difference does it make whether Jesus died in Jerusalem or in Kashmir? The place really isn't the issue. I think the real issue here is the nature of the resurrection. Did Jesus die? And then was his body reanimated, made indestructible, and then translated into space where it will exist forever? That's the Matthew, Luke, John story. Is that the case? Or is what Paul wrote closer to the mark, that we are all beings of consciousness on this interesting journey as beings of consciousness, material beings, beings of consciousness? We find it actually in the prologue of John's Gospel, where the writer says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." He was with God in the beginning. Then the Word became flesh and had this material experience and dwelt among us. And then towards the end of John's Gospel, we hear Jesus praying to his Father and saying, "And now, Father, I'm about to return to you, back to the glory we enjoyed before the foundation of the world." So that life cycle that John gives to Jesus, Greek thought said is true of all of us. Resurrection is something that will happen to all of us because it's just the natural cycle of life. A being of consciousness becomes a material being. And then it's the great repose, a return to the pleroma, a return to source after this material episode concludes.

And I think what's different about that is that with the Matthew, Luke, John story, resurrection is something you can't be guaranteed. It's a miracle. So you'll have to be on the right side of God for that to happen to you. Better stay on his right side if you want a resurrection. Whereas if the Platonic story, the Greek story is true, resurrection is just part of all our experience. It's something we can all look forward to. We've come into this material world to have material experiences, to be enriched by them, to have as good an experience as [music] we can, and then we'll go on to something unimaginably different. And I find that to be a more compelling, more empowering story. The one that says, "Better stay on the right side of God," leaves us very open to manipulation by religious authorities. And it's not difficult to find examples of that through the ages. And so that's one of the reasons why I love talking about Jesus in India, a reminder that there are these other Christian narratives that have been there from the beginning. Narratives that are not designed to manipulate and [music] terrify, but to inspire, to invite us to explore, and to have the most extraordinary human experience possible.

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