Jesus

But any preacher knows there are issues here; every preacher knows there’ll be dragons.[7:22] That’s part of my motivation in writing the Eden series—to say let’s get real, let’s talk about what’s in the texts, let’s talk about the problems of believing that God is the way Jesus says he is, and then trying to square that with what’s in the Old Testament.

It was from that footing that they then understood Jesus.[22:10] Whereas I had come into a church that believed that the Old Testament and this angry God was the footing on which we should understand Jesus, and that never quite worked.

The real name of that entity is Enlil.[45:50] It’s been made deliberately confusing in the 6th century BCE when they pasted the name over the whole of the Bible so that you wouldn’t see there are different kinds of entities—you’d think it’s all the same one.[46:03] Put all that together, and you will begin to realize this is why Jesus never talked about Yahweh.

If Jesus really was the continuation of the story of the Hebrew scriptures, he would have talked about Yahweh, wouldn’t he?

That’s Jesus’s concept of God.[46:27] He makes a very clear separation between him and the Yahweh stories in one moment in the Gospels when he says, "What kind of father?" Because that’s how he understands God.

You evil lot know how to give good things to your children—a father who gives a stone and a snake is no father."[46:48] That sounds like a really perverse scenario for Jesus to come up with—the father who gives a stone instead of food and drink, who gives snakes instead of food and drink.

Unless they kowtow to the image of the dragon or the serpent, they will die.[48:06] That is the story Jesus is identifying, and so he’s cutting himself off from the dragon stories, from the Yahweh stories, and talking instead about God who is our Father, God who is our source.

The only way they could come to that decision was because they realized that Jesus had distanced himself from that whole interpretation and translation of those books.[49:24] I think knowing that ought to give us the freedom to say the same thing.

I’m a fan of Jesus, and that’s precisely why I reject those stories as God stories and regard them as stories of other kinds of entities.

Had Jesus come to continue the Hebrew tradition and improve it or not?

The reason they had to have that council in Acts 15 was because he had said some things that sounded like he was affirming the Hebrew tradition, and they had to talk it through before they realized, "No, he wasn’t," and come to the decision they did in Acts 15.[50:33] There’s a moment where Jesus says that the law would remain until everything was fulfilled, until everything was accomplished.

That was the decision Jesus’s brother and the early apostles came to, and that’s a decision I affirm.

Jesus would often use the theology of his audience against them.

In that regard, we’re all hybrids—Jesus the same.

He was born because his mom, who was not going to have a baby because she was post-menopause, had a close encounter with the same entity, and then she’s pregnant with a very powerful and intelligent person, someone who Jesus described as the greatest human being who ever lived.[1:00:35] Those stories are not unique—the same thing happened to Abraham and Sarah.

Jesus’s story is part of a huge family of stories within the Bible.[1:03:08] It doesn’t stop there—go to the stories around the mother of the Yellow Emperor in China, or the Pasi Buddha, the 22nd incarnation of Buddha before Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, or to the stories around the mother of Laozi.[1:03:26] Again, close encounter, anomalous experience of light shining upon them from an object in space, and then they have a baby who’s very significant and highly intelligent.[1:03:40] Some people might say, "Look, these people needed a story like that.

The third one is different—highly intelligent, has always been advanced, very sensitive, pre-cognitive, telepathic ability.[1:04:23] There was something different about his conception and birth—it was an experience of light." It takes me back to years ago when I was a teenager studying Renaissance art at school, and we were shown a painting by Carlo Crivelli, which was supposed to be the Annunciation—that’s the moment when Mary is told she’s going to have a baby and the baby is going to be Jesus.

This suggests a whole layer of story about star children that says, "Yes, we’re all hybrids, but there is ongoing contact that is fine-tuning our progress as a human society and responsible for very particular people having heightened intelligence or heightened consciousness who then make a contribution that can move the whole experience of humanity forward."[1:05:14] That is the wider context into which the story of Jesus fits.

It’s been the world in which you’ve lived—you’ve had an idea of God, of Jesus, of our place in the cosmos.[1:06:07] I certainly can remember a couple of moments when I felt like the floor was falling away from me as I realized that story didn’t quite add up anymore, didn’t match with what’s really in the texts.[1:06:13] I would just want to encourage people that on the other side of the reframing is a far more exciting, intimate sense of connection with the source.[1:06:20] I have a better opinion of Jesus than ever before.

I still love Jesus and Jesus’s teachings, and I continually go back to re-understand what he was really about.

The most amazing invitation to explore what is real and to explore what is possible.[1:06:25] I believe that what the stories say about what Jesus did so amazingly with his life is told as a wonderful example of what a human life can look like when we take away all the aspects of fear that keep us limited, that keep us to our familiar scripts, and give ourselves the permission and encourage one another to explore what’s out there and what’s in here.