The gospel according to some guy's wife

After the transfiguration, one of the disciples (not a named one, just one of the other guys) came home and tried to describe the experience to his wife.

"Yeah," he said. "I saw it. Jesus is God. It's very hard to describe, but his body just opened up, and all of eternity was contained inside one moment, and we saw the past and future, and how time is an illusion, and the universe is just one big bright object, and Jesus is God."

"One of those experiences," his wife said.

"Yes, one of those. An experience of the divine. Jesus is divine. He's the whole thing. He can do magic. There is a cosmic plan–his existence is some kind of intervention.

"So...what does it mean?" she said. "Does he want sacrifices? Should we build a temple?"

"He says that he is the sacrifice?"

"What does that mean?" she said.

"No idea," he said. "It's magic. It's god-logic."

"Why can't Gods just do whatever they want, without all of this sacrificing and ritual and strange esoteric symbology."

"It...it makes sense," he said. "The universe is fixed and finite, it has a certain form, and, you know, within that form, things need to be done in a certain way. A God needed to be born who was human. It...there's a sense to it. Trust me."

"Oh I trust you," she said. "Well...I'm...I suppose I'm glad. I liked him, you know that–I found him very charismatic! And I liked the message! And he could do miracles! I was very fond of Jesus."

"Undoubtedly," he said.

"But one could imagine that he was just a magician or perhaps even a prophet. This...this experience of yours–it sounds different."

"Absolutely."

"So...in concrete terms, what does that mean to you?"

"I think there'll be some pressure to renounce him? I think that I have to convince other people that it was a real experience."

"Hmm," she said. "And is there a reward?"

"There's a Kingdom of Heaven. He'll rise again. I think we'll be rewarded. He wasn't specific."

"Does anyone ever just pin him down and ask if he could explain the plan in words? A god should surely be able to explain things without all this vagueness–he might get angry, but he wouldn't smite."

"He'd get angry. He has a temper. But no he won't smite. Still, when he's angry it's really unpleasant."

"I'm going to ask."

So that very night the disciple's wife went up to the Mount of Olives, and she found all the disciples sleeping in a big drunken mass, and she found Jesus sitting in a doorway looking into the embers of a fire.

And she said, "Do you know why I'm here?"

"Yes," he said.

"I believe," she said. "I believe in the whole thing, but–"

And then he turned around and unhinged his jaw like a snake, and she saw inside his mouth all the stars and galaxies and nebulae, and all the planets, with all the various beings, saw them all concentrated in a pinprick, and whatnot, in a moment that went on for eternity.

But as she returned to corporeal form, she said, "I would still like an answer in words!"

"Why?" he said. "You believe! You no longer doubt! You know that there is a plan."

"I just think you could explain it in words, if you wanted."

"Very well," he said. "But you can't tell anyone."

"Of course."

"No you really can't tell anyone," he said. "I've been telling people that I am a God and telling them not to tell, and in most cases I know they'll actually tell, but you really can't tell. Nobody. Except your husband, I suppose. Nobody else."

"Agreed. Nobody."

"It's not actually very complicated," he said. "The universe is vast in extent–it goes far beyond even the visible and perceptible world. Concepts, forms, ideas, these too are part of the universe, with their own plane of existence. Mankind is a creature that operates in one plane of existence, but other creatures, with their own natures, operate in other planes–the conceptual, the mythological. And there's mixing between planes, that's how you get legendary heroes, etc. And there are parts of the universe that don't even touch upon mankind. With music, with language, with art, you can access some parts, but you don't even have the tools to access other parts, and yet those parts are just as real as yourself."

"This is all making perfect sense, given what you've just shown me, please continue."

"Okay," he said. "So...think of me as a stitch, connecting mankind to a different plane of existence. I'm not a myth, I'm not a legendary hero, I'm something very different from the Gods you've known. There is a sort of inner essence to the universe–the essential whyness of things–a force that determines why we have mankind, why we have art and music, etc. Why killing is bad and loving is good, etc. And mankind really has no access to that why'ness. Through my existence, I create a conduit from the lowest to the highest."

"Mankind is the lowest."

"Yes," he said, "definitely."

"Lower than grass?"

"Grass is infinitely higher than mankind. To condemn grass as evil would be foolish. Only man is evil. Man is the only part of creation that can willingly choose evil. It's disgusting, quite frankly. But it's necessary, don't get me wrong! Man assimilates and processes the evil. But it's still absolutely filthy–most of the intervening planes of existence want nothing to do with it. When Apollo seduces, it's graceful, beautiful, powerful; he passes the filth down to mankind, and when man attempts a seduction, it is both bestial and knowing. Just absolutely horrific. Worthy of the utmost in punishment. But...it's necessary."

"So then...to what end do we live?"

"You don't even live," he said. "You're no more alive than a stone–you only seem different because you move yourself through space with what's seemingly an inner volition. The universe is unmoving, eternal, a rock of existence lying at the bottom of a sea of nothingness. The universe yearns to die, to open up a hole from which the evilness–mankind–can bleed away. But in doing so, it would expose itself to nothingness, and its existence would terminate. The universe only continues to exist through an act of will–the act of embracing evil (while still reviling it), rather than destroying it. And I represent that stitch, keeping the universe from instinctively rejecting what is vile and wrong."

"So why shouldn't I tell people?"

"It's a truth they don't need to know," he said. "The world needs to know of me–I need to be alive within it–the world must be shaped and pervaded by me–but I don't need worship. There is no salvation, no release. Time doesn't exist. The past cannot stop existing, the future cannot stop existing, this conversation cannot end–you've seen all of that, I think. It will always continue to exist, forever. I will be on the cross, forever. You will writhe on a bloody bed, forever. Your husband will drown at the bottom of the sea, forever. We hope! Or someday the Will might collapse, and all of existence will disappear. I appear higher than you, but I am not–I have no more freedom, no greater a span of life. Actually, I suppose you could tell this to people. Some I told to keep the secret of my divinity, some of them kept it quiet, some did not. In the end, it amounts to...it amounts to whatever it is...amounts to the operation of mankind, achieving its strange, terrible purpose."

"Thank you," she said. "I knew that you could explain, if you tried."

He nodded to her, and he turned back to the fire, and she went to her husband and begged him to write down everything she'd said (for she was illiterate), but he would not. He absolutely refused. She died of the flux several years after the crucifixion of our Lord, but not before relating this tale to me, her son.

Afterword

I’ve written before about my interest in metaphysics. To put it briefly, I’m not really convinced by materialism: the idea that human consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the functioning of our biological brains. For a long time, the assumption amongst philosophers was that materialism and lack of free will went hand-in-hand. Now neuroscientists have done quite a bit to rehabilitate the idea of free will! But I still think consciousness is the most mysterious amongst the world’s phenomena—it’s something we all know exists, but which we cannot see and measure. Schopenhauer said that human consciousness was our only working example of the thing-in-itself, the reality that underlay and determined the structure of the world that we see (which he and the other German idealists called the world of appearances).

I dunno. Just seems like there could be more. Maybe time doesn’t exist! Maybe the appearance of time is some secondary illusion caused by processes beyond our ken. I think we are all here together, experiencing some common reality, but the nature and purpose of that reality still seem very mysterious to me.

Anyways, as I’ve written about a few times before, I do not think Hinduism and Christianity are very similar. And one of their dissimilarities is that the underlying religious experience seems to be quite different. The core Hindu religious experience arises from asceticism—extreme personal privation, which gives you a direct vision of the Divine and of the oneness of reality (some Hindus are also dualists, but let’s leave that aside). This is a less common thing in Christianity: the Desert Fathers in the 3rd and 4th century and the anchorites in the 14th century practiced this form of asceticism, and some monastic orders hold to some version of it, but if you read through the Bible, there’s just very, very little (in terms of direct, unmediated encounters with the Godhead) that reads anything like what you’d see in the Mahabharata.¹

The only thing in the Gospels that seems similar to a Hindu religious experience is the transfiguration, when the prophets appear on the Mount of Olives to Jesus and his three top apostles. This is very similar to a number of episodes in the Mahabharata where the Pandavas ascend mountains and catch glimpses of the Divine. It also strongly resembles the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna responds to Arjuna’s entreaties (Arjuna asks why they are bothering to fight this war) by giving him a dazzling vision of the ultimate reality.

What I like about Jesus, by the way, is he seems very approachable. The archetypical Jesus story is when someone does something other people think is stupid or unclean, and Jesus is like, “Don’t condescend to this woman” (e.g. when the woman anoints his feet with the oil that could’ve been used for the poor). I do feel like you probably could’ve pinned down Jesus and asked him to explain his existence in words, and there’s a chance he would’ve done it.

I also think there are a lot of women in the Bible! It’s true that they aren’t the authors of the books, nor even major characters, but in the Gospels in particular we see women who have a fair amount of agency. When we read the Great Books, we often want to see women who do manly things, heroic things. We want a Boudicca or a Joan, but I think the unnamed woman who anoints Christ’s feet is no less a hero, no less a part a history than Peter or Paul were! Women were always present, women were always part of history. Women were right there, if we only allow ourselves to see them.²

Source

1. On the other hand, Gnosticism (in its various forms, right up to the 13th-centuru Cathars) does have a strong resemblance to Hinduism, and my understanding is it was indeed strongly influenced by Persian, Buddhist, and “Gymnosophist” ideas. Definitely keep meaning to read the Gnostic gospels and just haven't gotten around to it yet.

2. I realized I should look up whether the woman actually doesn’t have a name, and I think she does! Mary of Bethany. She’s unnamed in Mark and Matthew and named in John—so I was both right and wrong.