Who is Maria Magdalena from SY perspective?

[Guest guest]

, " veni_grig "

<veni_grig wrote:

>

> Dear Violet, and All,

>

> Who is Maria Magdalena from SY perspective?

> Is She the author of the 4th Gospel of The New Testament (so called

> Gospel of John?

> Thank you for your explanation.

>

> with unconditional love,

> veni

>

 

 

Dear Veni and All,

 

i have not heard or read that Shri Mataji ever mentioned who may/or may not be

the author of the 4th Gospel of the New Testament--the Gospel of John. However,

Jeffrey J. Butz in his book titled 'The Brother of Jesus and the Lost Teachings

of Christianity' in Chapter 8 - Orthodoxy and Heresy, gives an understanding of

the general direction from which this material may have come from.

 

regards,

 

violet

 

 

 

 

Orthodoxy and Heresy - Part 1

 

(p.142) " ...'believe no teacher, unless he brings from Jerusalem the testimonial

of James the Lord's brother'... "

 

St. Peter Preaching at Tripolis, 'Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions'

 

 

The historical and apocryphal works we examined in part 3 present us with two

possibilities:

 

1. The Jewish Christian writings accurately portray Jesus' earliest followers as

thoroughly Jewish in their beliefs and opposed to Paul's interpretation of

Jesus' teachings.

 

or

 

2. The Jewish Christian writings are merely the attempt of a later generation of

Jewish Christians to portray the apostles in a Jewish light in order to support

their own Jewish understanding of Jesus.

 

 

The latter interpretation has, for obvious reasons, been the belief of the vast

majority of Christian scholars. The mainstream Christian view is that the Jewish

Christians painted their hero James as superior to Peter and pictured the

apostles as strictly Law-observant and opposed to Paul because they had an axe

to grind with him. (p.143) In actuality, the mainstream theory goes, James and

the apostles agreed with Paul about abandoning the Law for the Gospel of Jesus

Christ. In support of this traditional understanding, we do know that a similar

development occurred in the Johannine Christian community, which produced the

gospel and epistles of John, a development that it would be enlightening to

survey before we attempt to draw any final conclusions in our investigation.

 

 

A Parallel From John

 

It is well known that the Gospel According to John portrays Peter negatively in

relation to the anonymous " Beloved Disciple " who is portrayed as Jesus'

" favorite " --the disciple who rests his head on Jesus' bosom at the Last Supper.

This disciple is obviously the hero-founder of the Johannine community, for he

appears only in John's gospel. Most significantly, in John it is the Beloved

Disciple who is the first to believe that Jesus has risen from the dead (John

20:8). Yet, the Beloved Disciple is curiously absent in the synoptic gospels,

although there have been many theories as to the Beloved Disciple being John the

Son of Zebedee or another of the apostles.

 

John's gospel clearly demonstrates that there is a precedent for the sort of

later reinterpretation of tradition (specifically in regard to the elevation of

a particular apostle) that most scholars believe is at work with the elevation

of James in the Jewish Christian literature. John Painter explains the

correlation:

 

We are reminded of the subservient role played by Peter in relation to the

Beloved Disciple in the Fourth Gospel. Many scholars see in that account a

struggle between the Johannine community...and emerging " Catholic "

Christianity...the Beloved Disciple is also portrayed as the repository of

secret tradition...The Johannine tradition was harnessed by the Great Church

through the reconciliation of the role of Peter and the Beloved Disciple in the

epilogue to the Gospel and through the acceptance of John as one of the four

canonical gospels. [1]

 

As Painter points out, the gospel and epistles of John reveal the struggles of

one particular Christian community whose beliefs and practices were in tension

with other early Christian communities. (p. 144) Raymond Brown has written the

most enlightening account of this in his magnificent work, 'The Community of the

Beloved Disciple'.

 

It is also well known that the distinctly Gnostic flavor of John's gospel caused

it to be scrutinized for its orthodoxy before it was allowed to join the

synoptic gospels in the final canon of the New Testament. It was only in the

late third and fourth century, when Christianity grew to the point where it

became the official religion of the Roman Empire, that what was once a

smattering of separate churches with differing, and oftentimes competing

theologies and christologies, began to be pressured by political circumstances

to circle around a common creed. Thus arose the impetus for the convening of the

first church councils, such as Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451), where Western

bishops and Eastern patriarchs, and their delegates from major cities around the

Empire, hammered out which beliefs about Jesus were " orthodox, " and which were

to be forever after condemned as " heresy. "

 

Long before these official councils, the theology expressed in the gospel of

John had been unofficially declared orthodox by a majority of Christians simply

by its popularity and increasing usage, and by the mid-second century it was

accepted alongside the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke as canonical. Like

John, the synoptic gospels were also written by and for particular Christian

communities. Of the four, Matthew's community was the most Jewish in nature.

Only Matthew records these words of Jesus, which we looked at previously when we

noted the Pharisaic character of Jesus' teaching:

 

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law...I have come not to abolish

but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one

letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law...Therefore, whoever

breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches other to do the same,

will be called least in the kingdom of heaven...For I tell you, unless your

righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter

the kingdom of heaven. (Matt. 5:17-20)

 

These are some of the most debated words of Jesus in the New Testament. Both

conservative and liberal scholars have tried hard to avoid their

implications--liberal scholars declaring that these words were put into Jesus'

mouth by the Jewish Christian Matthean community, and conservative scholars

interpreting the passage as Jesus " preparing the way " for the Gospel by showing

the impossibility of upholding the Law perfectly. In other words, Jesus didn't

really 'mean' what he said about the Law--he was simply using hyperbole to make

the opposite point. These are attempts, by both liberals and conservatives, to

avoid taking the implications of these words at face value--Jesus was more

thoroughly Jewish than Christians throughout history have believed. If, in fact,

we attribute these words to Jesus, and take them at face value, they are surely

evidence of Jesus' alignment with the Pharisaic party, as a growing number of

contemporary scholars are now beginning to accept. [break Quote]

 

[Note]: Jesus was talking here about the 'Law of Dharma'. Shri Mataji has

clarified through a Sahaj context, what is Jesus' meaning about how the truth is

greater than the Dharma, and fulfills the Dharma:

 

" Also, I have seen some Sahaja Yogis who start new methods in Sahaja Yoga: 'You

do like this, so it will be alright; you do like that, and it will be all

right'---because they are stagnated at the point of dharma, so they start

telling people: 'you do this way, you do that way'. But when you rise to the

point of truth, then you don't do any rituals, you don't need any rituals. You

are not bothered, because you are in Dharma and you are standing on the truth.

And truth is much greater than Dharma. "

 

Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi,

Sahasrara Puja, Cabella, Italy - 04 May 1997

 

In the same way the truth that Christ brought fulfilled all the requirements of

the Laws of Dharma. It could be said that the Pharisees remained stuck at the

Dharma stage, and had not yet arrived at the truth that is greater than Dharma

and more importantly--fulfills the Dharma. This is Christ's meaning therefore,

which was not easily understood. Thus again, Shri Mataji has clarified Christ's

teachings, when She says that the truth is greater than Dharma. [End Note]

 

[Resume Quote]:

 

(p.145) Even more than John's gospel, the epistle of James was debated and its

orthodoxy thoroughly analyzed. Well into the fourth century, James remained one

of the most disputed of the popular Christian writings because of its obvious

Jewish Christian theology and its apparent opposition to Paul's teaching of

salvation by faith alone. This opposition doesn't get any more plain than James

2:14: " What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but

do not have works? 'Can faith save you'? " This passage gets my vote as the most

explained-away verse in the New Testament. Once again, theologians of every

stripe have devised clever exegetical and hermeneutical tricks* to avoid taking

this passage at anything but face value. But Martin Luther wasn't fooled. Luther

knew 'exactly' what James was saying. Given his preference, Luther would have

excised the book of James from the Bible forever, along with Hebrews, Jude, and

Revelation (the other thoroughly Jewish Christian books in the New Testament)

and gladly tossed them all " into the Elbe River. " In fact, when Luther

translated the Bible into German, he relegated these four books to a separate

section at the end of the Bible, not considering them of equal worth with the

rest of the New Testament writings.

 

* Exegetical (from the Greek 'exegesis', literally " to draw out " ) and

hermeneutical (from the Greek 'hermeneutikos', " to interpret " ) refer to methods

of interpreting the meaning of scripture. Hermeneutical refers more specifically

to interpreting a passage for preaching.

 

But the emerging Catholic Church had declared early on that the gospel of John

was orthodox and had accepted it into the canon. So, too, the church finally

accepted the epistle of James. (p.146) John Painter explains that just as the

emerging church needed to incorporate the views of the Johannine community for

the sake of political unity, it also needed to co-opt the views of the

communities centered on James--but James's leadership role needed to be

suppressed:

 

There is evidence, in the tradition from Clement transmitted by Eusebius, of an

attempt to harness the authority of James to the benefit of the emerging

Catholic Church by rooting his authority in that of the apostles and by making

him a co-recipient of the revelation with Peter and John....

 

Pauline opposition to the authority of James, the disappearance of the Jerusalem

church [after the Roman invasion in 70], and the emergence of Peter as a more

ecumenical transformation of the James tradition seems to have led to the

suppression of James in the emerging catholic tradition. This was made easier by

Luke's attempt to obscure the conflicts within the early church in his account

in Acts. His harmonization obscured the leadership of James by assimilating the

roles of Peter and James, but the cracks in this treatment appear when his

account is read in the light of the letters of Paul. [2]

 

To be fair in weighing the evidence before us, because of the example of the

Beloved Disciple in the gospel of John, we see that it is not unlikely that the

Jewish Christian communities, in their struggles to retain their beliefs in

response to the increasing dominance of Pauline Christianity, would have

exaggerated the role of James and the importance of the Law in their writings.

And while there is clearly a tendency in the later Jewish Christian literature

to exalt James that sometimes borders on the unbelievable (and that might seem

to dim the credibility of these writings), we must not forget that it is not

only in the Jewish Christian literature that we see James elevated over Peter.

'We also see this in Acts and in Galatians'. And it is also in Acts and

Galatians that we see so much of the evidence for the thoroughgoing Jewishness

of James and the apostles. So the leadership of James, and the strict Jewishness

of the apostles, are clearly not total fabrications by the later Jewish

Christian community. They may indeed be somewhat exaggerated, but they surely

have a solid basis in fact.

 

When synthesized, the witness of the Jewish Christian literature and the

evidence of the New Testament itself powerfully impel us to abandon the

traditional understanding of the " heretical " nature of the Jewish Christian

literature in favour of the first of the two possibilities enumerated at the

beginning of this chapter: The Jewish Christian writings are indeed basically

accurate in their portrayal of James's apostolic leadership and in their

portrayal of James and the apostles as thoroughly Jewish in their beliefs and

opposed to Paul's interpretation of Jesus' teachings.

 

(p.147) Obviously, this is a revolutionary theory on the origins of

Christianity, yet once one accepts this understanding as the inevitable outcome

of an unbiased reevaluation of the evidence, the seemingly mismatched puzzle

pieces in the New Testament suddenly fall into place and a bigger picture comes

clearly into focus. The picture which emerges may shock many traditional

Christians; for many it will be absolutely blasphemous. It is, moreover, a

picture that has the potential to tear apart many cherished " truths " and to

shatter a paradigm that has been in place for almost two millennia, but in its

place, it is possible to see a truer and nobler picture emerging.

 

The Brother of Jesus (And the Lost Teachings of Christianity)

Chapter 8, pg.142-147

Jeffrey J. Butz

Inner Traditions - Rochester, Vermont

ISBN 1-59477-043-3

 

Notes:

 

[1] Painter, 'Just James', 177-178.

 

[2] Ibid., 178.

 

[3] Of Schonfield's many works, see in particular 'Those Incredible Christians'

(New York: Bantam, 1969).