The Secret Gospel of Mark

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 31 of 54

The Secret Gospel of Mark
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, July 16, 1985

Transcript:

This tape was made on Tuesday, July 16th, 1985 at Roger Ware Lecture. Secret gospel of Mark. The reason that we're jumping to mark leapfrogging over 70 years of development is to highlight and contrast the the difference in a very real way. John the Baptist was the Messiah. He was the culmination of the Jewish tradition. He was the last culminating apex of the Jewish tradition. And Jesus begins a different tradition. There's no way to soften that contrast and that distinction. We have seen that there is a massive continuity. There are structures carrying the meanings and values over this period. But unmistakably, there is a difference. There's a watershed. There's an earthquake of meaning that happens. Probably, to put it in a nutshell, as, um, wisely, Morton Smith, the great professor who found and spent his lifetime trying to understand the secret gospel of Mark. The difference between John the Baptist and Paul is monumental. It's a difference in qualitative capacity. John the Baptist is in the scene, and Paul is a mystical Christian. And there's only about five years difference between the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist and the revelation to Paul out on the road. There's only about five years difference in time. But the jump is monumental. And so we're going to try to understand that somewhat tonight. The second gospel in the traditional order is always Mark, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But in fact, Luke is written very late.

Luke is not written until about 85 or 90 A.D. and although Matthew is comprised of five. Remembered. Teachings, sequences of teachings by Jesus. Those who are familiar with the Buddhist Nikayas will recognize that Matthew is very much like the Buddhist Nikayas. Rather like the Majjhima Nikaya there about about that size. And there are five of them instead of the 151 that are there in Buddhism, and they are collected. After those who are waiting to deliver these oral testimonies realize that they have either misunderstood the time scale or they have misunderstood the events. And so they were committed to writing. Somewhere after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman troops in 70 AD, so that Matthew is actually put down on paper, probably around 75 AD, but Mark is prior to this. In fact, Mark is written in Alexandria and is written in Alexandria, probably around 66 A.D. Mark was the secretary of Peter. And he kept all of the, um, traditions. In his mind and his memory. And after Peter was killed. Mark went to Alexandria to put together the gospel. Which was the beginning of a new covenant. The gospel according to Mark is very mysterious. It's usually the most mundane of all the documents. And in this naiveté, centuries of Bible classes for children have done much to convey the impression that Mark is very simple, and actually Mark is extraordinarily difficult. In fact, the gospel of Mark. Towards the end when speaking of the resurrection.

Has this in the translation. Please come and sit down. Please come and be at home. This is from chapter 16 of Mark and be attentive. Now this is a saying something very unusual. And yet it has been used in the most mundane way for centuries. Nothing added here. This is the Cambridge Bible. English Bible translation. Very normal, very nominal. When the Sabbath was over, Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James and Salome brought aromatic oils, intending to go and anoint him. And very early on the Sunday morning, just after sunrise, they came to the tomb. They were wondering among themselves who would roll away the stone for them from the entrance to the tomb. When they looked up and saw that the stone, huge as it was, had been rolled back already. They went into the tomb, where they saw a youth sitting on the right hand side, wearing a white robe, and they were dumbfounded. But he said to them, fear nothing. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised again. He is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go and give this message to his disciples and Peter, he is going on before you into Galilee. And there you will see him as he told you. Then they went out and ran away from the tomb beside themselves with terror. They said nothing to anybody, for they were afraid.

And they delivered these instructions briefly to Peter and his companions. Afterwards Jesus himself sent out by them from east to west the sacred and imperishable message of eternal salvation. When he had risen from the dead early on Sunday morning, he appeared first to Mary of Magdala, from whom he had formerly cast out seven devils. She went and carried the news to his mourning and sorrowful followers, but when they were told he was alive and that she had seen him, they did not believe it. That's what it says. That's a very literal, nominal, normal translation of the gospel of Mark and is so filled with mystagogical imagery. That the only thing that one can say is that the reason that this is not like lightning. To our minds, is that our minds are full of delusion. We have been told a cosmic mystery here in the plainest, simplest terms, and we do not understand it. We do not understand the language. But what is more crucial? We do not understand the imagery and the symbolism with which within which the language ties the bows of meaning. And further, we do not have a background, a spiritual background that allows for it to penetrate and touch our nature. For all of these levels, three general levels of ignorance we suffer is because we do not understand. We do not understand personally. We do not understand in a communal way, and we do not understand in an archetypal way.

Even when we are told sacred truths, forthright in basic imagery, this gospel of Mark, poignant as it is and filled with mystagogy, is only the external surface. There was an internal, much more energized message called The Secret Gospel of Mark, which was for the inner circle, which was much more potent than even this. And we who cannot even appreciate the exterior anymore, the quality of imagery and symbolism that was given to children. We are in bad shape. We do not understand. Our minds are brutalised and magnetized and hypnotized by metaphysical systems, and we do not see the spirit in nature directly. So these clouds have to be dispersed before we can hear the simplest, much less the complex. Now, Mark has been around for over 1900 years. But it wasn't until 1958 that there was any indication that there was an esoteric gospel, that even on this level, this is mundane. Even with its tremendous symbolism, for instance, two things occur in here right away that are astounding. The tomb is not empty. Jesus is not there, but the tomb is not empty. There is a young man. In that tomb. Who is he? He certainly isn't a disciple. In fact, the disciples are shown graphically to be non-believers. They're not Christians at all. There are still Jews. There are still, in fact, Pharisees and Sadducees and Essenes. They have the kind of commitment which would encompass John the Baptist, but they have not understood Jesus at all.

In fact, he does not appear to the disciples. He appears first to Mary Magdalene. She goes to the disciples. She who has been cleaned out of seven devils, seven levels. And she, as a prism of his light, shines that message to the disciples. What is that message? He is risen! No, they say no. Can't be. Death is a final. Now you can be purified in the temple while you're alive. And there may be some way to be with God after you are dead. But you cannot come back across that threshold. It's not a quality of disbelief as in terms of miracle. It is according to Jewish law that the strongest of all the Jewish laws was against impurity. And once someone has died, that corpse is impure, and any contact with that corpse contaminates one's self, and one must go through ritual purification. In fact, it is so strong that one has to go through a ritual purification for seven days. It's in the Mishnah. In Rabbinic Judaism, the law based on Deuteronomy and developed through all of the Targums, gives us the seven day, um, period. You must be purified. This study, which came out just this last year, the concept of Purity at Qumran and in the Letters of Paul, published by Cambridge University Press. Life within the community. The Maintenance of Purity at Qumran. Purificatory washings at Qumran.

Much interest was generated as a result of the finds at Khirbet Qumran by, among other things, references into the scrolls to frequent washings and the discovery by archaeologists of large cisterns, many of which had steps leading down into them. And of course, they assumed that these walk in cisterns must have had something fundamental to do with the sect that was there, a kind of a proto initiatory baptism, was the consensus. The cisterns themselves were unexceptional. There was no symbolism on the cisterns. There are no symbolism on the steps in Purificatory rituals. The actual baptism is a a renewal and was used by the Essenes as a a renewal of purity, a re achieving of a purified balance. One is returned back to a purified normalcy. And we will see that with Jesus that this whole practice comes to an end, because baptism does not return you back to normalcy. It takes you radically out of the world that you are in, so that you are in a different dimension called the Kingdom of God. And it was different. It was not being adjusted back to how you were before. It is a suture in time space where you have been taken out and put into another realm. Now, the seven days in the Mishnah are required by the type of impurity that a proselyte brings with him. Somebody coming from the external world is assumed to be contaminated, and they have to go through a ritual purification.

Now there are two kinds of levels to this. One is a seven day process for the individual, and the other is a two year process for the community. The time honored tradition was that there is no way in less than two years, because there are two annual cycles, there's one annual cycle to go one way, and there's the second annual cycle to carry it back through, just like our Saturday educational process, which is a timeless, archetypal structure of purification. It is a radically different thing from education, as a pedagogic exercise is a purification that is efficacious, like laws of physics. And laws of spirit and laws of physics are efficacious. They work. So this two year process of purification was for the community, but the seven day process was for the individual. Now the traditional seven day period was prescribed, especially if one came into contact with death. Death itself. It's not the corpse that is unclean, but is the fact that the corpse carries death. Remember now that this is very, very powerful, because if life is real is a quality, death also is equally real and is equally equality. And so it is death that mysteriously contaminates. And the ritual of purification is to bring oneself wash one's self away from death. Recall the phrase the wages of sin is death. If you follow through that process, the function of that process is to generate death so that one is dead in an impure state.

This whole process is focused and was focused by John the Baptist, who was the greatest teacher of righteousness, and in all of the synoptic Gospels. And in John, when Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist, there is a qualitative difference. For most people who are baptized are returned back to a state of purity in terms of the normalcy of human beings, so that one is a good member in good standing of the community. One is a good person as a human being, as a good person. But when Jesus was baptized, he was radically changed. He was of a different order and his work. His mission begins with that baptism. It's the starting line, and the symbol that is used is that of white dove appeared over his head. Well, this is a perfectly universal, archetypal hermetic symbol of the Holy Spirit. He does not carry a halo. He does not have a nimbus and a halo. He does not have a crown. Where he goes, the Holy Spirit, um, goes with him. It's a quantum jump from the Horus image that someone would wear with the wings of Horus and the sun, the eye of the sun, which is the Eye of Horus. This is a qualitative jump, a radical jump. This mysteriousness. Has been illuminated not so much by the Dead Sea Scrolls, and not so much by the Nag Hammadi material, but illuminated by a little scrap of paper that Morton Smith found.

And the monastery of Mar Saba, about 12 miles outside of Jerusalem. Morton Smith is about 70 years old now. In 1941, when he was 26, he was studying in Jerusalem and the Second World War broke out and he couldn't get out of Palestine. So he was committed to stay there, and his professor took him. Please wake Elizabeth. His professor took him on a vacation because he realized that the student was having a rough time. So he took him out to this monastery. It was a all day horseback ride in 1941. When he would go the second time in 1958, 17 years later, it was a 20 minute drive by car. But when he went there the first time as a young man, there was no electricity. And he describes in his public book The Secret Gospel, a vision which he had. And we have to understand now that he is, um, a mystery play is happening. The Second World War is beginning 1941, and in Jerusalem, just outside of Jerusalem, Mar in Arabic means Saint Saint Saba. It was one of the very powerful monasteries. In fact, in the Greek Orthodox Church, Saint Catherine's on Mount Sinai and Mar Saba outside of Jerusalem are the two main pilgrimage places. Saint Catherine's on Mount Sinai was the spiritual center for transformation of feeling, and Mar Saba was the spiritual place for transformation of mind consciousness.

And it's out on one of these desolate wadis. They're called canyons. In California that goes down towards the Dead Sea, and Mar Saba is built along the edges of one of these so that it drops off in towards the canyon, which eventually goes down to the Dead Sea. So he got there. And he was told that he would have to join the ritual of the monastery, and from midnight till six in the morning there was a constant non-ending of prayer ceremony in the great hall of the monastery. And because they had only candles, there was the, um, distinct feeling. He said that as one sat around with the monks, and there was constant chanting in Greek. The candles were very weak and up on chandeliers that were hung down from the ceiling, so you couldn't see very much of the ceiling. The only thing that you could make out were the shadows of the saints painted on the inside of the dome. Just vague shadows, and the candles were reflected in the polished marble floor. So he said it looked like they were down under the floor equally as under the floor as they were above the floor, so that here you were suspended in this darkness between two flickering constellations of prayer candles, and behind them, moving the unmoving the shadows of the eternal saints, the disciples. And this service went on every day from midnight in the darkness till six in the morning.

And of course, the rest of the day was spent in monkish preparation. He was totally moved by this as a young man. And he says that he realized that this discipline took one out of the world. You were no longer in the world when he went back 17 years later in 1958. Everything was different. There was electricity. There was a road. There were cars out there. It was a boring and turntable, kind of a situation. And he couldn't stand to be in there. Something had been desecrated. Something which he had felt as a young man had been desecrated. And so he excused himself from participating in the monastery. He couldn't do it. It was no longer sacred. He went there to catalogue the library. What was left of the library? Most of the library had been moved after a huge fire to Jerusalem, but there were scraps left. And he went through all these books in the scraps. And the 65th scrap that he found was written in a fine scholar's Greek uncial on the last two pages of an old manuscript that dated from about the 1660s. And as he translated it briefly, he realized that it was a saying that this was a fragment of a letter of Clement of Alexandria, who was the most mysterious personage in the whole history of the Christian Church, because Clement of Alexandria is the key to the mysteries. He is the last one who understood those mysteries in such a way that he could pass them on in an integrated way.

A hundred years after him would be Origen and Plotinus, and they already understood that Christianity had completely changed its presentation and was no longer the real way. But in Clement's time, around 150 A.D., Christianity was the real way. It was exactly the real way. This document that he found, these pages surprised him, and he began to work on this manuscript. Um, he made a complete translation of it. And I think maybe now we should just read this translation so you can hear, um, what it says. I'm going to use the Yale, uh, or the Harvard University Press. Harvard University Press edition of this. And, um, I think, uh. I think you'll be quite surprised at what you hear. The. Difficulty with this letter is that when you first hear it, um, it seems to have, uh, elements in it which make people uncomfortable because it begins to, uh, pull out, in fact, of individuals, an eerie sense that, uh, uh, something is not quite right. This is not the this is not quite the Jesus that we're used to. And there's there's something in here. Um. See if I can find it here. From the letter of the Most Holy Clement, author of the Stromateis. Stromateis means miscellany in Greek, and it's one of Clement's great works, one of the few surviving works.

You must understand that when the power structures came into possession of this mystagogical technique, they denuded the tradition of its spirituality and co-opted into a metaphysical politics. To Theodore, we do not know who Theodore was. You did well in silencing the unspeakable teachings of the Carpocratians, for these are the wandering stars referred to in the prophecy, who wander from the narrow road of the commandments into a boundless abyss of the carnal and bodily sins. For priding themselves in knowledge, as they say, of the deep things of Satan, they do not know that they are casting themselves away into the netherworld of the darkness of falsity and boasting that they are free. They have become slaves of servile desires. Such men are to be opposed in all ways and all together. For even if they should say something true. One who loves the truth should not even so agree with them. For not all true things are the truth, nor should that truth which merely seems true according to human opinions, be preferred to the true truth. That according to the faith now of the things that they keep saying about the divinely inspired gospel, according to Mark, some are altogether falsifications, and others, even if they do contain some true elements, nevertheless are not reportedly and reported truly. For the true things being mixed with inventions are falsified, so that, as the saying goes, even the salt loses its flavor. As for Mark, then during Peter's stay in Rome, he wrote an account of the Lord's doings, not, however, declaring all of them, nor yet hinting at the secret ones, but selecting those he thought most useful for increasing the faith of those who were being instructed.

But when Peter died as a martyr, Mark came over to Alexandria, bringing both his own notes and those of Peter, from which he transferred to his former book The Things Suitable to whatever makes for progress towards Knowledge or Gnosis. Clement, of course, in Alexandria in the first century second century AD, uses the terms gnosis all the time in his writings. It is after Clement that the word gnosis is pried loose and taken out of the context, and substituted for it are terms that connotate belief or faith, not knowledge, but belief or faith. That after Clement of Alexandria, there was a move in the Christian hierarchy of a political, theological and metaphysical nature to make dogma rather than gnosis, the basis of transformation. What in a human being transforms by belief? By faith? A human being's interpretive capacity. His hermeneutical orientation, his belief structure is a mental aspect. One is convinced Clement is talking about gnosis. He's not talking about believing or having faith in what one does not know. Different. Totally. So Mark came over to Alexandria, bringing both his own notes and those of Peter, from which he transferred to his former book, The Thing suitable for whatever makes progress towards Gnosis.

Thus, he composed a more spiritual gospel for use of those who were being perfected. Nevertheless, he did not divulge the things not to be uttered, nor did he write down the prophetic teachings of the Lord, but to the stories already written. He added yet others, and moreover brought in certain sayings of which he knew the interpretation would, as a mystagogue, lead the hearers into the innermost sanctuary of that truth, hidden by seven veils. Seven veils. Jesus had cast out seven devils from Mary Magdalene, and she had become purified, not purified, just as another good woman, but purified in the perfected sense of gnosis. So much so that she was the one who conveyed to the disciples the message of resurrection, which they did not believe. Would she not only was in a capacity to understand and see, but because of the unbelief of the disciples. The Pistis Sophia in its structure has her teaching the disciples how to wean themselves away from mere belief, from mere faith, and to have Pistis Sophia perfect wisdom, perfect understanding. This is different. This is as different from exercise as yoga for spiritual attainment would be. It's the difference between good health and nirvana is a radical difference. The one is an objective which even an adolescent could have. The other is the culmination of reality. Different. Totally different. Thus, in sum, he prearranged matters. Mark did neither grudgingly nor incautiously in my opinion, writes Clement of Alexandria.

And dying he left his composition to the church in Alexandria. Mark died in Alexandria, and he left to the church in Alexandria. Two documents, two Gospels. One is the gospel according to Mark, which we have here. The other was a secret gospel of Mark. But besides the two documents that he left, he left a living tradition which was transformatively alive, and which Clement was the inheritor. Clement was the. Let's use a simile here to make it more clear. Clement was like a Zen patriarch who had learned first hand and was able to pass on first hand. He neither needed the gospel nor the secret gospel. Personal gnosis able to show someone exactly so that they see exactly for themselves that the transformation is a transformation that penetrates death. To such an extent that one can come back into life. To such an extent that life and death are no longer polarities. No longer qualities which make this tension. So that that tension no longer makes a phantasmal world. Clement is writing to Theodore and saying he left this to the church in Alexandria, of which he was the patriarch, and where it is even yet most carefully guarded, being read only to those who are being initiated into the great mysteries. Have who's ever in there? Come in, will you? It's distracting. Please go out and ask her to join the class. When we're talking of things in this level, it's no sense in being a bystander.

This is the whole point of what we're talking about today. Jesus refused to let anybody be a bystander, and he criticized the temple for encouraging people to be bystanders. It wasn't because they were using the wrong currency at the money tables. It was because this had nothing to do with it. We'll wait until she comes in. Please come and take the seat over here. Helen. Come in. Come and be part of the community. This is just what we were talking about and we might as well have Zen lesson. Jesus was talking about how to make a community which was real, not a community based on law, not a community based upon manipulative techniques of purity, but one based on reality. John the Baptist Baptizer could purify you in this life as a human being, in this life according to the law. He had no powers beyond death. And Jesus is a zero because he starts a whole new sequence. Were the. The power is extended through the veil of death. It's not a question of adjusting one to what was not of acclamation, but of transformation to what never was before. What did RFK say once some men ask? About restoring the world to what it was. But I seek a newer world that never yet has been and ask, why not? This sort of an emphasis. So this letter that Martin Smith found is written in the back of this book, this manuscript, and it's supposed to be this letter from Clement of Alexandria.

The letter was written in 1665, 1670. How did it get in this book? Who put it there. Who in the Western tradition had access to these letters of Clement of Alexandria. That never surfaced. There is no mention anywhere in patristic studies. Anywhere. This is a question that has not been answered, but the obvious. Implication is that the secret tradition was kept on unbroken into the 17th century. Somebody knew all that time. There was a tradition of people who did know and did understand. And Smith makes a great deal out of the secrecy aspect, he says. It is amazing thing that for John the Baptist it was a public ceremony baptism. But for Jesus, baptism was a secret ceremony. Do not tell John the Baptist baptized thousands in public in broad daylight. Jesus baptized individuals at nighttime in the most secret way so that it was almost never talked about. In fact, in this letter we have an account of a very strange circumstance. Clement goes on to say that there are persons who are using the secret gospel in an absolutely evil way, because it was a copy was stolen from the church in Alexandria, and it was taken and read and it was read with a profane mind. And because it was read with a profane mind, even though the ceremonies were efficacious in a magical way, they were efficacious magically for evil purposes.

And so that's what he's writing to Theodore. And he will say. These were guarded and kept in the Church of Alexandria. It was the only place they were. Because in Alexandria was the only chance to keep the sacred tradition together in the Western world. Remember that Clement is writing this probably about 125 A.D.. The world was a mess by that time. It had been haunted 200 years before, and by 125 A.D. it was an literally an ungodly junkyard, a mess. Um. A psychotic tidal wave had hit the Earth. It's the only way to put it. So Clement writes, but since the foul demons are always devising destruction for the race of men, carpocrates instructed by them and using deceitful arts, so enslaved a certain presbyter of the church in Alexandria, that he got from him a copy of the secret gospel, which he both interpreted according to his blasphemous and carnal doctrine, and moreover polluted, mixing with the spotless and holy words. Utterly shameless lies from this mixture is drawn off the teachings of the Carpocratians. To them, therefore, as I said above, one must never give way, nor when they put forward their falsifications, should one concede that the secret gospel is by Mark, even should deny it on oath. For not all true things are to be said to all men. For this reason, the wisdom of God.

Through Solomon advises, answer the fool from his folly, teaching that the light and the truth should be hidden from those who are mentally blind. Again it says from him who has not. Shall be taken away and let the fool walk in darkness. But we are children of light, writes Clement, having been illuminated by the dayspring of the Lord of the spirit of the Lord from on high, and where the spirit of the Lord is, it says, there is liberty, and there all things are pure to the pure. Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. A very poignant, truthful utterance and phrase. It's not a political liberty. It's not a theological liberty. It's not a metaphysical liberty. Wherever the spirit of the Lord is liberty. The liberty is a natural concomitant of the spirit of the Lord and the spirit of the Lord, which was in a man in a human being, is now cosmically true, wherever it will be. As different, as totally different. It's not a truth in a text. No matter how esoterically hidden, no matter how Esoterically designed, it's not in the text on any level. It's not in the mind that would interpret a text, that would interpret wisdom, that would have an understanding. It's not there at all. That the fulcrum of reality has been lifted off the page, pulled out of the mind has been put into the spirit of the Lord. And wherever that is, there liberty occurs is a radical doctrine.

So Clement writes, he's writing to Theodore and he says, where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. All things are pure to the pure to you. Therefore I shall not hesitate to answer the questions which you ask, refuting the falsifications by the very words of this gospel. For example, after it says, and they were in the road going up to Jerusalem, and then what follows, until after three days he shall arise, brings the following material word for word, so inserted in mark, which is not in this gospel of Mark, but was in the secret gospel of Mark. What was left out of here? One of the passages that was left out, that was in the secret Gospel of Mark. And so Clement quotes from it to Theodore. And this is the most sacred fount of transformation. And they came into Bethany, and a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And coming she prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him, Son of David, have mercy on me. But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was. Being angered is rather a colloquial translation in the Greek. It actually reads literally. He was fuming in himself. Jesus was fuming in himself. And went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway. A great cry was heard from the tomb.

And going near Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightway again, straightway, straightway, and straightway going in. He's fuming in himself. Out of the way! Like that! Out of the way! What is he pushing? Out of the way! He's pushing out of the way! The metaphysical doubt, the theological, um, quavering and belief structures the physical world. He's pushing it all away. Because what is moving? What is moving is what in Hebrew is called the the holy wind, the Holy Spirit. That is what is moving out of the way and straightway going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him up, seizing his hand. You know where that image is? That image is on the commitment of the ancient Hermetic tradition. And it used to be engraved with a man up to his chest in a hole, and raising the caduceus with the left hand, the right hand reaching down to pull him out, and the winged, uh, helmet and the winged feet also, and speaking the winged words. Clement says. And straightway going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth looking upon him loved him, and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do, and in the evening the youth comes to him wearing a linen cloth over his naked body.

And he remained with him that night. For Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. And thence arising he returned to the other side of the Jordan. And this was all a quotation from the secret gospel. There's a tremendous, powerful, transformational fulcrum that's been delivered. Clement then writes, after these words follows the text and James and John came to him, and all that section, but naked man with naked man. And the other things about which you wrote are not found. And after the words, and he comes into Jericho, the secret gospel adds only. And the sister of the youth whom Jesus loved, and his mother and Salome were there, and Jesus did not receive them. But the many other things about which you wrote seem to be and are falsifications. Now the true explanation, and that which accords with the true philosophy. Dot, dot, dot. Here it breaks off. And that was it. And Morton Smith found that in 1958. And he couldn't believe. He said he moved around with elation and doubt for months, doing his scholarly work, his archaeological work. There was something in the document which got to him. When he says years later, as an old man, he didn't realize that he had been set up as a young man in the monastery of Mar Saba, in exactly the way that the ancient tradition set people up, prepared a spiritual transformation.

And he didn't know that he'd been prepared and he'd forgotten all about it. The 17 years he became a famous professor at Harvard and everything, and he had forgotten. It didn't even occur to them that he'd been prepared. And then the document came, and he was the one. He was the one that had to bring it out, but it stuck to him and he couldn't understand it. This is very poignant, poignant material. This is not easy. What is going on there? And it took him a long time. It took him five years to get it far enough away so that he he could begin to work with it in a practical way. So he did the best thing he could. He sent 14 copies off to 14 of the world's greatest scholars in this area to ask them, do you think this is authentic? And all but two thought it was authentic, and the two that thought it was inauthentic made up arguments which Smith and the others could could see through. So it was authentically Clement of Alexandria. So it meant there was a secret gospel. But the quotation from the secret gospel here is very peculiar. And it wasn't until 1963 that a friend of Morton Smith's finally wrote to him and said, I've been thinking about this and thinking about this, and what occurs to me is that you have a very mysterious document on your hands, which obviously is talking about something different from what we thought.

And he says that the parallels with Mark are really not so much with Luke and Matthew. They're called the synoptic sin altogether. The synoptic gospels, they're supposed to accord with each other. And in fact, excuse me if one looks at the gospel according to Luke, out of the 84 or 8500 words in Luke, 7000 of them appear in Mark. But the tone of Mark is different from that of Luke. The tone in Luke is actually setting up a sequence of a double manuscript, because the Gospel According to Luke was only the first half of the book delivered the second half of the Gospel of Luke. The natural sequel was the book that we now call the Book of Acts, and Luke and Acts were one document. And Luke was a template and acts was the expression of it. Luke was the symbol and acts was the magic. Of this symbolic consciousness coming into being. So the gospel according to Luke and the book of acts go together. They're one document. They're written in the same place at the same time. If you finished Luke and begin acts, they flow exactly right, because they were meant to be unified. But Mark, curiously enough, is almost exactly like the last half of the Gospel of John, which at first seems so totally different.

And it's only after Smith butting his head for years and years and years to try and find out. He laid down the sequences of Mark and John, which are almost never put together in columnar comparison. And there they were, and they fit together, and they formed a very mystical kind of a transformational sequence together. And the secret gospel paragraph that he got from Clement was the key, because it was like the keystone that allowed for this arch of meaning, this royal arch of understanding to come together and be put together. And the core of it was the transformation of raising from the dead and purification by baptism. It is Lazarus who is raised from the dead as Lazarus, who, after six days of preparation, is brought in in the midnight to six in the morning ceremony to show him the transformation, but not by ritual purification according to the law, but by the spiritual physical transformation of the body, so that one enters the kingdom of heaven here and now. It is illogical. It is ridiculous to think that one needs to wait until you die to enter into the kingdom of heaven. This is believing in the difference between life and death. There's no difference at all. It's effective threshold. It has nothing to do with anything outside of theology, outside of metaphysics, of the mind, outside of psychism. Death and life are not different. There's no difference whatsoever.

What is different? From the mundane opinion of deluded human beings, their polarities night and day. So that what was being talked about here, the young man is coming in after six days of preparation. He is the young man who has been raised from the dead, and he couldn't be given baptism until the purification had gone through. And then the baptism was not to purify him in terms of the law, but to transform him in terms of the spirit, so that the legalism of the Old Testament covenants comes to an end with John the Baptist. He is the last real Jew, and Jesus is the first real Christian. And the watershed that is there happens with Jesus's own baptism, because that's the culmination of the Jewish law. The disciples are not Christians. They don't believe him. They don't believe in the resurrection. They believe in the suffering. They believe in the crucifixion. And the Christian symbol for the monastic orders became the cross that he is crucified, and he cleans the suffering of people through his acceptance of death. But that misses the point entirely. No one is purified by someone else's death. What is the real scoop there? What is a headline's on page one in the cosmos is that there is no such thing as death. That the veils have been pulled aside. Where is it? Where is it? Where is the differentiation between heaven and hell now? There is no differentiation at all.

There is no more Gehenna. There's no more Paradise. There is only the delusion that there is something other than the Kingdom of God. This was powerful. This was so different and so startling that it wasn't hurt. The only person who heard that was Mary Magdalene. Because she had gone through this baptism. And the only other person that heard this was Lazarus who had been purified. He was the young man in the tomb when they went in. He was the young man that was there. What does it say in Mark? Let's go back. When the Sabbath was over, Mary of Magdala, Mary, the mother of James, and Salome brought aromatic oils, intending to go and anoint him. And very early on the Sunday morning, just after sunrise, they came to the tomb. They were wondering among themselves who would roll away the stone for them from the entrance to the tomb, when they looked up and saw that the stone, huge as it was, had been rolled back already. Wait a minute. What tomb? The tomb with a stone in a garden. This is a very, very big, uh, sepulchre. This is not the sepulchre that some, uh, poor Jewish vagrant is buried in. This is the tomb of a rich man. You go to a cemetery. Who can afford a huge, uh, vaulted tomb with a stone in front of it. This is the very tomb that Lazarus was in.

They put Jesus in the very tomb that Lazarus had been in. This is the same tomb when he raised Lazarus from the dead. It was from this very tomb. This was a rehearsal of his own cosmic transformation. He is fuming in himself, not from anger, but from this energizing of one's self out of the mundane reality to a level where one sweeps aside the distinction between life and death, between law and prophecy, between history and reality. There are no differences. This is the very same tomb. They went into the tomb, and there they saw a youth sitting on the right hand side, wearing a white robe, and they were dumbfounded. It's Lazarus again. He says to them, fear nothing. You're looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised again. He's not here. Look, there's the place where they laid him. But go and give this message to his disciples and Peter. This is the message he is going on before you into Galilee. There you will see him as he told you. What is the message? The message is that we're just continuing. Nothing has happened to stop it. We are continuing as before, but it's the disciples who cannot continue as before because they cannot believe it. The 12. The 11 left cannot believe it. Who believes it? It's not anyone who believes it. Because it's not a phenomenon that is believable. It is a noumenon that is known.

And only by gnosis does one know it. There is no way in which belief can stretch itself to include this phenomenon. It is only the spirit that can participate in this reality as a gnosis. A Lazarus and Mary Magdalene. And they see. They know. And they are the ones who carried the tradition on. They're the ones who carry the, um, oral secret teachings on. What did the disciples carry on? The disciples carry on the healing techniques. They can heal. They carry on the message. They carry on the belief in the aspiration. But they don't know. They don't really know. They would like to believe, but they don't really know. This is the peculiarity and the whole tradition. The church is founded upon Peter, who doesn't know, denies him three times. He is constantly trapped in his belief need in his belief structure. He's got to write it down. Keeps notes. He's got to preach. And he makes a community. And he finally accepts crucifixion for himself is martyred. And he dies. He dies. What kind of a disciple was he that he accepted death? That he believed in death? The church is founded on someone who didn't know, who believed that he could die. Well, what Jesus was talking about. There is no death. It does not happen. As long as you are trapped in that belief structure, you will never know. And that's what you have to be extricated from. You have to be pulled out of that tomb, because that is the tomb that is a more deadly tomb than any rock structure that could hold you.

That acclimates you to this psychic realm where there are demons. In fact, they have infested the psychic realm to such an extent that it just, uh, wall to wall disease. But for the spiritual, all things are pure. It doesn't affect them, has no contact with them whatsoever. It's not a purity abstracted from the world. It is a purity amplified to include the entire universe. So much so that the impurity is a fiction, is an illusion, is a delusion. This is an enantio drama. As Jung said, this is pulling the skeleton of the universe out through the mouth of the patient and turning it inside out. This is Jesus the Magician, showing big cosmic magics. This is different. There's a whole radically different message. When Smith went on to realize that John and Mark fit together, he set the secret gospel passage from the letter of Clement of Alexandria and set it in and showed that John and Mark tell us this story that I've given to you today, and that the implications were that the church structure that is being set up is a falsity and is a creation, in fact, of demonic forces. Since she's broken our community, we have to stop. She'll have to learn to stay and sit. And until she does and not continue. We're not talking about fiction. It's not incidental. And as long as it is, it negates everything.

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