The Evolution of My Teaching on The Neurological Basis of Hamartia - Part 3, the Origin of the Ego or Self-Identity

      So far I have covered not only that Hamartia is physical in nature, but how and what part of the human brain it affects, as well as how this abnormality in the human brain produces the distinctly human concepts of “good” and “bad,” that is, human morality. After I examined these questions, I then turned to asking how this abnormal amygdala and the overreactive survival responses which result could have anything to do with what is often called the human “ego” or “self,” as this is frequently implicated where Hamartia is concerned and even associated with Hamartia. How could the human ego be produced as a result of these things?

     In order to answer this question, I have to introduce a concept which is squarely within the realm of theology or even philosophy. This is the concept of the "imago dei," that is, the “image of God.” This is a concept that Christian theologians and philosophers have debated endlessly as far as what it actually means. We first encounter it in Genesis 1 where Moses writes that humanity was created in the image of God both male and female. Was it referring to a literal physical image? Was it referring to a moral quality, character, or personality? Origen, writing in the third century CE, and equating it with spirit described it in Greek as the νοος, that is, the "mind or intellect." As God is described as a consuming fire in the Scriptures, so also Origen saw the human νοος or spirit as being at the very least made in the image of this same fire.

     The other significant place in the Scriptures where the imago dei is mentioned is in the letter of Paul the Apostle to the Colossians, where Jesus Christ is specifically called the "image of the unseen God," and this is where I want to focus. Here I want to draw from both Paul's writings and John's, and I think you'll see why. John records Jesus as saying, "If you've seen Me, you've seen the Father," and also "The Father and I are one." In the beginning of John's Gospel, he explicitly identifies Jesus Christ using the Greek word λογος (Logos), which in their cultural worldview was enormously significant. In his letters, where John uses the word "Logos", Paul uses the word translated as "Christ" as virtually interchangeable with John's usage. And so it is not a stretch to identify the Logos as in fact the image of God. But how does that help us here? The ancient Hellenistic worldview was heavily influenced by Greek philosophy, and in particular in the first century, the Stoic philosophy and ethics which became as ubiquitous within the Roman empire as Protestant Christian ethics and worldview are within American culture. Far from originating as a Christian concept, the idea of the Logos as being identified with the God and "firstborn of all creation" was foundational to the pagan Stoic worldview long before its entry into 1st century Jewish thought, and then into Christian thought. This is significant because along with this was the idea that every human being contained a piece or, literally, a shred of that same divine Logos within them. Epictetus in his discourses is adamant that all human beings are, in this way, born from the God and could be considered children or sons of the God (and thus should start acting like it). Paul, in his letters, echoes this very same idea when he talks about people being members or "parts" of the "Body of Christ" joined together with one another and connected to the Head, as the one governing the whole, which is Christ Himself, or the Logos. And so, just as the Logos is the image of God, so also every human being contains the image of God, being a part of the Logos. Without spending a lot more time on this subject so that we may return to the problem of the ego, I want to add that this same concept can be found in other philosophies and major religious thought as well, such as Hinduism where there is the idea of the universal Atman from which all human beings possess a part, an atman. There is also the many, many testimonies from people who have had Near Death Experiences who, upon being resuscitated have reported experiences confirming a oneness between their own conscious awareness and a universal consciousness. Given that this image of God, according to Scripture, is the state in which human beings were originally created, and the example of this is the Logos incarnate who declared, "if you have seen Me, you have seen the Father," it stands to reason that the image of God as exemplified by Jesus Christ is the original, natural, functional state for all human beings.

     So then, if every human being is, in some way, a piece or part of the Logos, or a piece or part of God, why then doesn't every human being automatically follow the same example that Jesus Christ set? If this is our natural state, being one with the God in some real way, why are we not immediately aware of it? Why do we not have access from birth to it like Jesus, the Logos incarnate, did? The answer is Hamartia.

     From the purely theological or philosophical, I want now to return to what can be observed and studied. Some time ago, a friend recommended a book to me, Healing The Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors, (Fisher, Janina. New York: Routledge, 2017), which talks about the neurobiological basis of compartmentalization of the mind. The fascinating premise of Dr. Fisher is that rather than just a response to extreme trauma in childhood such as produces Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder), the brain actually uses either total or partial fragmentation, or "self-alienation," in order to cope with trauma as a rule. While DID is the most extreme version of this, and the easiest to see as the "personalities" are distinctly compartmentalized and separate from one another, partial compartmentalization can be seen in people who might otherwise appear on the surface to have a fully integrated personality. In the book, which is incredibly well documented, she describes people who are able to put on a separate "self" in order to function with relative normalcy in work, school, and social situations, but internally remain broken and traumatized from past wounds often succumbing to self-destructive behavior and addiction in order to quiet that still hurting "self." In other words, this person, even though a single identity, can operate as two separate personalities because the brain compartmentalized the core personality to protect itself while creating another to take the trauma in a similar, though milder way to DID.

     As I had previously stated, the brain's survival system was only meant to deal with physical threats. It was meant to react to the threat or survival need by taking control, dealing with it, and then go into standby, so to speak. But the primary driver, if you will, was to be this image of God consciousness, fully aware of and in communication with its governing "person," the Logos, or the God. But with the amygdala enlarged and restructured from its original parameters, the human brain is constantly in a survival response to varying degrees, and so the system can't or won't go into standby and allow the image of God consciousness to resume full control. Because our survival response system is always active due to the abnormal amygdala, it reacts with fear, aggression, or a craving for things like food or sex to nearly everything. This results in a total disruption of communication between the Source of our consciousness and our brain. This can only be traumatic to the brain which was not originally designed to function without it. Being then blinded to the genuine source of identity and control, the brain panics and devises its own in order for it to continue to function. The human brain is reacting to the trauma of fear induced separation from that Source of consciousness. That is, the person we identify with from birth, our core personality, is itself the brain's first and original compartmentalization in response to the trauma of being "blinded" from the Source of consciousness due to the malfunctioning and overactive survival response. The "self" we identify as is itself a fiction created by the brain in order to continue functioning in its perpetual, emergency panic state. This "self" is what we call the "ego." One author, R.J. Spina, uses the acronym EMI which stands for Ego/Mind/Identity when referencing the brain produced ego or self, and I find it a very useful description.

     With what then does the brain create this compartmentalized personality, being unable to communicate with its original governor? It turns to those things which trigger its survival threat or need response, that is, those things that please or displease it specifically, and those things within its physical, sensory environment. I wrote at one point regarding this, "Furthermore, our assignation of "good" or "bad" to those things which please or displease, what the brain's fight/flight/feeding/sex response system mistakenly registers as survival necessities or survival threats, further reinforces those things as a part of our personal identity with which the ego uses to define itself, being a product of that malfunctioning fear survival response." and also, "The things which please or displease us we latch onto as what we identify ourselves with. I like chocolate cake. Me liking chocolate cake is a part of my identity. I was born in America. If this pleases me, then it becomes a part of my identity which I treasure. If it displeases me, it becomes a part of my identity I am ashamed of, but still a part of my identity. I write rambles, and it has become a part of my identity that I do so. Being a Christian has been a part of my identity for a long time. But the point is that the ego builds the illusion of identity around those things which either please or displease, which it either agrees with or disagrees with. This is why it can be so psychologically threatening when something which is agreed with or disagreed with is challenged. Even something as inane as fictional stories or characters. My agreement with, for example, that 'Han shot first' in the original Star Wars becomes a part of my identity, and who I consider myself to be. Thus, when it is changed by the film maker, it threatens that identity (in reality, I don't personally care; I figured that was George Lucas' call and he can do whatever he wants with his film), and thus threatens me psychologically." Much to my own surprise, I discovered that I was not the first to recognize the connection between the EMI and the survival responses. Thich Nhat Hanh writes in The Art of Living (New York: HarperCollins: 2017), "In Buddhist Psychology, the part of our consciousness that has a tendency to create a sense of self is known in Sanskrit as manas. ... Manas manifests from deep in our consciousness. It is our survival instinct, and it always urges us to avoid pain and seek pleasure. Manas keeps saying, 'This is me; this is my body; this is mine,' because manas is unable to perceive reality clearly. Manas tries to protect and defend what it mistakenly thinks is a self." (p. 31) The EMI clings to various things in order to form a personal identity to define itself, even though it in itself is an illusion or delusion created by a brain which is not functioning according to its original parameters. Furthermore, because the ego or self-identity is compiled or aggregated from what the brain recognizes as needs or threats, likes or dislikes, attachments or aversions, and those things become integrated into the self-identity, any threat to the object of that attachment or aversion is seen as a threat to the ego or self-identity. Hence, the survival response is triggered when the object is perceived to be under threat just as if the person themselves was under threat.

     This is all well and good, but there can't possibly be any proof to this hypothesis of the formation of the ego, right? Absolute proof, no. But there are some interesting corroborations from spiritual writings and practices. The first, again, is Jesus Christ Himself. Paul, in his letters, was insistent that He was without Hamartia, and it has been the continuous teaching of Christianity that He was born without it. As He was born without it, He was identified with God as the Logos and image of God. As I wrote at one point, "It occurs to me that without the inherited malfunction, when Jesus Christ was born, His brain would not have been born in the same "panic mode" which the rest of us are born with. His brain would not have jury rigged an "emergency OS" so to speak. It wouldn't have needed to. He would have been born with His own name, His own free will and intellect, His own set of experiences, preferences, biology, and so on, but without the malfunctioning EMI which plagues the rest of us. He would have been born with full connection to, submission to, and cooperation with that Consciousness of I Am which is also the Foundation, the base upon which all of creation is coded or shaped. He would have been born enveloped in His Father's presence and love from the start without any kind of resistance to it. His personality, aside from the clearly human experiential and biological component, would have been otherwise entirely shaped by this unbroken connection with the Father, the Source. And these two non-competing components of His individual personality, Human and Source, if you will, can be observed from the Gospel writings. Jesus Christ represents a human being the way a human being was meant to function, with full connection and cooperation with the Source Consciousness, if you will, the Father from the start." 

     The second is that, in every spiritual and mystical tradition, one's ego or self-identity must be somehow set aside or disengaged from in order to experience a unity with God (or in the case of Buddhism, Nirvana). This includes Paul's writings as he writes at length in the sixth, seventh, and eighth chapters of his letter to the Romans about the need to die to one's "old man," synonymous with "the flesh," in order to function or operate by means of the Spirit. There is also where John says in his first letter that "The person who doesn't love doesn't know the God, because the God is love," and also, "love brought to completion tosses fear out." Paul writes as well, "Walk in the Spirit, and you will not bring the desires of the flesh to completion." And so there is this continuous understanding through the writings of the New Testament that either the flesh, corrupted by Hamartia, is in control, or the God is in control via the Spirit, but they are not in control at the same time, and cannot be. When the brain and body are under the control of the original governor, then the ego or self-identity produced by the malfunctioning amygdala cannot be because the love that God is will send the constant panic response of the amygdala into standby. When the amygdala is in control, it disrupts communication with the original governor and the ego or self-identity takes control. This can also be seen in the testimonies and reports of people who have experienced Near Death Experiences where the ego has been severely affected, and they report an increased love and compassion towards everyone else.

     While this post is longer than I intended, I hope it explains my evolution of thought regarding how Hamartia could produce the ego or self-identity.

The Evolution of My Teaching on The Neurological Basis of Hamartia - Part 2, Morality

      In my previous post, I went over how I came to the conclusion that Hamartia as Paul describes it in his letters is in fact neurological in nature, that the human amygdala was adversely affected, and that because of this the human survival or threat response system in the brain is overreactive in comparison with other animals. In this post, I want to discuss how this error, what I would describe as an abnormal amygdala in comparison with other primates, has produced what we know as human morality, that is, a distinction between what we call good and evil, or right and wrong, which, according to Genesis 3, is the immediate result of this error occurring.

     Morality is one of those subjects which is a fascinating study from the perspective of cultural anthropology. From this perspective, when all cultures across the world are taken into consideration, there are almost no universal tenets of morality. That is, there are almost no prohibitions or proscriptions of behavior which exist within every culture. In some cultures, rape is an atrocity, for example. In others, it's legal justice (believe it or not). In some cultures adultery is punishable by death, in others it's normal practice. In some cultures, retributive murder is considered justice, in others, it is a serious crime. In some cultures, nudity is considered shameful or even criminal, in others, it's considered normal, and what constitutes nudity varies between cultures. There are degrees, exceptions, and variations to all of these things and many more. The only two possible exceptions to this lack of universal cultural moral tenets are the killing of an innocent human being in cold blood, and incest. Though this latter practice does have its own exceptions under very strict rules depending on the culture.

     In Psychology as a discipline, there are what are called the "Stages of Moral Development" originally laid out by Lawrence Kolberg. In his scheme, human beings progress through six successive stages of moral development: Avoiding Punishment (I will do what I'm told or I will be punished for it), Self-Interest (I will do what I'm told because it benefits me), Good Boy Attitude (I will do what I'm told because I will be seen as a good person), Law and Order Morality (I will do what the law says), Social Contract (I recognize that the law is not always right, and I will follow what is right when the law is not), and Universal Ethical Principles (Society is not always right, and I will do and work for what is right even if society is against me) . The first two are seen roughly from the ages of 3 to 7. The second two are seen from the ages of 8 to 13, and the last two, should they be reached, are considered to develop during adulthood. It should be noted that Kohlberg himself said that not everyone reached every stage, regardless of physical age, and that many people became stuck at Law and Order Morality. Very few, in his opinion, ever reached the stage of Universal Ethical Principles. It was also his contention that everyone advanced in each stage in succession. No one skipped a stage, or took them out of order.

     When looking at the stages of moral development, a theme or a pattern begins to emerge, and we can see that, from the very earliest childhood, morality is based on what the person perceives as a threat or a reward. When we go back further than three years old, and look at newborn infants up to the age of two, from a moral viewpoint, they generally only express what they either like or don't like. What pleases them, or what doesn't please them. For those two year olds who are verbal by that point, they will often declare what they don't like as "bad" and what they do like as "good." When a parent does something they don't like, it isn't unheard of for the child to declare "Bad Mommy!" much to her dismay. When an infant receives a food which it finds unpalatable, it will frequently treat it like an adult might treat poison and try to get rid of it in some way. In contrast, a food or a toy that the child likes is treated as though the child cannot survive without it and much crying and screaming may ensue if it is not given. And so, what we see from infancy in human beings is that the very beginnings of morality appear lie with what the person dislikes or likes, and the infant's reactions are indicative of these dislikes or likes being seen as either a survival threat or a survival need by the child's brain.

     With all of these things in mind, I would argue, based on observation, that human morality, the concept of "good" and "bad/evil," is a direct result of the overreactive human amygdala treating nearly everything as either a survival need or a survival threat, even if there is no actual physical threat. As we progress through infancy and into later childhood, the amygdala interprets what pleases and what displeases as a need or a threat and treats it accordingly. As the child gets older, this extends to what the child agrees with and disagrees with, the former being seen as "good" and the latter as "bad." This fundamental basis of morality then extends into adulthood as the person is raised in a certain culture with certain societal expectations which that person deems in his or her best interest to conform to (and what is in that person's best interest must also be in everyone else's best interest, or so the human brain tends to interpret it). As the person is educated and begins to think about what is actually in everyone's best interest, they agree with that, and the survival of others is then placed on a similar plane as their own survival. Another way to interpret this is that the person identifies with the principles or ethics which they have agreed with so much that it is the principles which must survive at all cost even if the physical body does not. That is, the survival of one's self-identity is considered the priority over the survival of one's body.

     In general, the human brain tends to collect or even hoard those things that please it, and tends to push away or try to destroy those things that displease it. A person may form an attachment to something or someone they see as a necessity in their lives, and an aversion to something or someone they see as a threat (to whatever degree) in their lives. A person may crave chocolate, but green beans disgust them and are avoided. A person may crave money, but poverty must be avoided at all costs. A person may crave the companionship of certain people, but actively attempt to avoid others. This behavior, as can probably be seen, can grow more and more detrimental and harmful as someone may commit theft because they believe they need what they stole, or murder because they believe a person was a threat to them in some way, or rape or adultery because they believed they weren't going to have their sexual drive satisfied any other way. With the amygdala sorting everything we encounter, every thought, every person into needs or threats, harm to others and ourselves is the inevitable result.

     Consider how arbitrary human morality actually is as I discussed at the beginning of this post. Consider how arbitrary, even ridiculous, the very first thing which is recorded that human beings declared "bad" or immoral. They were naked. Why is this arbitrary, even ridiculous? Because every animal on the planet is naked. To this day, human beings are the only animal on Earth to make and wear clothing voluntarily. Every other animal without exception seems perfectly fine with wondering around completely uncovered and unclothed from the day they are born to the day they die. Prior to the introduction of Hamartia, this was also the case with human beings as the Genesis account records. Then, suddenly, they develop an error in their thinking and they begin to try and cover themselves up for no reason apparent to anyone else observing as though they had gone mad. What had been a perfectly normal state was suddenly seen as a threat that they had to deal with.

     But what about compassion and empathy? Isn't this a part of human morality? Yes and no. Compassion and empathy are the ability to feel what another person is feeling. From my understanding, this is at least in part due to what are called "mirror neurons" in the human brain which act to "mirror" the other person in such a way so as to interpret how they are feeling or even what they might be thinking without them having to verbalize it. Compassion and empathy allow the person to see themselves in the other person, to emotionally step into their shoes and, at least to an small extent, allow themselves to be that person and experience what they experience. These things are what allow human beings to relate to one another as human beings. This seemingly independent system becomes a part of human morality when the person sees it as a survival need, and therefore something to accumulate.

     In conclusion, human morality is based on the human brain, afflicted with the error of an overreactive amygdala, sorting everything: people, possessions, ideas, likes, dislikes, things agreed with and things disagreed with into survival needs or survival threats and assigning the labels of "good" or "bad" to them accordingly. 

The Evolution of My Teaching on The Neurological Basis of Hamartia

 Back towards the end of 2015 or so, after having translated through Romans from the Greek for the umpteenth time, a rather profound thought came to my mind as regards what the Apostle said in Romans 5 and 7 about hamartia or "sin" being passed down from Adam and located in the flesh. My thought was simply this, what if Paul meant exactly what he said? What if he wasn't talking about some spiritual reality which had no physical basis, but instead when he said "flesh," he actually meant flesh. 

     The word he used to locate hamartia was in the "sarx," which in constrast to "krea" which means, essentially, "cooked or uncooked meat," sarx refers to the soft tissues of a physical animal or human body. It refers to the muscle, certainly, but also the organ meat, the skin, the tendons, brain matter, etc. Knowing this, it was a matter of asking the question, which part of our flesh could possibly be the culprit. Hamartia as a concept means "error, mistake, flaw," and generally gives the idea that something happened that wasn't intended. In the context of Paul's writings, it always refers to an error or flaw in behavior. From there, it wasn't a hard leap of logic to look at the human brain as the source of human behavior, and so if there was a physically based error causing the erroneous and harmful behaviors, then it must be located in the brain. This then means that the error in question is neurological in nature.

     The problem was, at that time, I didn't know enough about the brain to take it any farther than that. My training was in Bible, theology, computers and electronics, lasers, and other sundry trades, but not in neurology or anything having to do with the brain. As a result, when my wife, who had recently gone back to school at Orange Coast College asked me what major I might pursue should I follow her, as my query involved something psychological in nature, and for other personal reasons, I said, "psychology." 

     And so for two years and eight or nine courses, I completed all the psychology major requirements at OCC, being especially interested and attentive to the Psychobiology course, that is, the course on the biological basis of psychology dealing specifically with the brain, its regions, the neuron, and the disorders arising from neurological dysfunction. As I compared my studies with the descriptions Paul gave in his letters, I was able to narrow down the region of the brain which might be the hamartia affected culprit.

     When going back through the lists of the works of the flesh, I realized that everything that Paul listed, no matter which list, could be condensed down to being motivated either by fear, aggression, bodily cravings, or the sexual drive. Another way to say this, especially for psychological purposes, is fight, flight, feeding, and sex. All of these things are governed by the hypothalmus specifically, and the limbic system in general. Interestingly, in women, the hypothalamus also governs childbirth, which should be of note to anyone who remembers the text of Genesis 3. At first, I thought I had my culprit, but another part of the limbic system kept coming up over and over again, the amygdala.

     The amygdala, meaning "almond" in Greek, is so named because it is roughly the size and shape of an almond, and along with the hippocampus, the hypothalamus, thalamus, and to some extent the frontal cortex comprises a part of the aforementioned limbic system. For the purposes of this discussion, it might be small, but it's significance to this topic really can't be understated. It is associated with several different functions with memory and emotional regulation, but the one that interests me most is that it appears to act as a kind of gatekeeper for the hypothalamus regulating the fight/flight/feeding/sex responses. This alone is enough to take it into consideration. What really made it stand out for my query into hamartia though was how it responds when a person lies. Specifically, on a brain imaging scan, the amygdala lights up and goes crazy when the person being scanned lies, and it does so in a way that it just doesn't do when they tell the truth. To my understanding, the amygdala lights up with any kind of cognitive dissonance, that is, with any kind of behavior or thought of behavior the person believes to be wrong. Another really interesting fact about the human amygdala is that it is disproportionately larger than the amygdala found in our closest living genetic cousin, the chimpanzee. Added to this, a recent study performed within the last ten years discovered that it is structurally different from the amygdala of every other species of primate, yet those amygdala between different primate species are strikingly similar to one another. (There are several good resources online to research this. A quick overview can be found in Morphometrics of the Amygdala authored by Nicole Barger and Katerina Semendeferi) The implication here is that something happened to radically differentiate the human amygdala from all other primate species.

     It is speculation, but given the above it isn't unwarranted, that the changes in the amygdala may have resulted in the human survival responses to become overreactive. In an unaffected animal, their survival responses activate when their physical survival becomes threatened. The threat is dealt with using one of the four responses, and then it calms down and the animal continues on its way. In human beings, our threat responses can activate for presumed physical or psychological threats. It can activate for imagined threats. It can activate when remembering a threat, or imagining a future threat. In short, it can activate and does activate with nearly anything and everything which comes our way. In comparison with other animals, this constant overreaction is clearly a disorder or malfunction from its original purpose and is the cause of most of our suffering and harm.

     Taking all of this into account and applying it to my query, I believed and still believe I found my culprit in the human amygdala which regulates emotional and, in some way, moral behavior because it regulates the survival fight/flight/feeding/sex response governed by the hypothalamus. And so, my initial hypothesis, that Paul meant it when he said that hamartia was located in the flesh, was not only rendered plausible the more I studied the matter, but it was strengthened when the actual components of the human brain were looked at and compared to our genetic cousins who, according to the Scriptures, should be differentiated from human beings as human beings should have been the only ones affected if we take Genesis 3 even remotely literally.

     With these things in hand, I continued to test my hypothesis against all the known features of hamartia. According to Paul, it was located "in the flesh." It was also passed down from Adam as all human beings are descended from Adam, according to Paul. The most natural conclusion from this is that it is hereditary, and thus genetic in nature. There are no human beings currently in existence, even during Paul's time, which do not possess it. According to Paul, if someone dies they are "set right" from hamartia, suggesting that the death of the physical body, and presumably the brain, negates it entirely. When set against all the ways in which Hamartia is described in Paul's letter to the Romans, and indeed in every letter, my hypothesis that it is in fact biological and therefore neurological in nature continues to hold up without fail.

     Then I turned to the question of what caused this universal human neurological error of an altered amygdala. According to Scripture, it was when Adam and Eve ate a piece of fruit they were warned not to eat. Then the question became, could this make that kind of a permanent, hereditary alteration to the human brain? And the answer, surprisingly, is "yes." How? We know for a fact that there are certain compounds and chemicals which can alter human epigenetics and genetic structures. We also know that certain chemicals when introduced to the human brain can cause damage as well as changes in brain chemistry and structure. We also know that certain fruits, especially stonefruits like peaches, almonds, and so on contain cyanogens. Other plants which might be otherwise edible contain THC. Still others contain other toxins which are capable of causing both birth defects and brain alterations. Once again, it's not that much of a leap to suggest that our ancestors, at one point, consumed a fruit that contained a toxin which caused permanent alterations to their brain chemistry and genetics. And so once again, my hypothesis stands up at least for now.

     Since that first "aha!" moment almost ten years ago now, I have continued to refine my hypothesis to include a basis for the human ego, the psychobiological origins of human morality, the root causes of most psychological disorders, and more. And every time, when I apply my hypothesis, based on the criteria given by Paul, it stands up and continues to stand up under scrutiny. Maybe one day it finally won't, but with every journal article I read, every data point I consume, and every new study which comes out, my hypothesis on the physical basis of hamartia as a kind of universal human brain disorder continues to align neatly.

     I am well aware that many, if not most, disagree with my hypothesis, and find arguments against it, though most of them tend to be personal, theological, philosophical, or emotional in nature. To these arguments, I can only point back to what Paul said in his letters about it, and go back over what I discovered and how it lines up. I cannot help if someone's personal theological worldview does not allow for it. For me, if my theological worldview cannot allow for evidence staring me in the face, it is my worldview which must be altered, not the evidence. For now, I stand by what I teach and how I apply this understanding to what the Scriptures teach, and I hope it brings light to otherwise difficult to understand passages and concepts found therein.

Understanding Paul

     I was watching a recently released episode of a deconstructionist/New Age podcast that I occasionally throw up on YouTube because I have respected the host’s insights and Biblical knowledge in previous episodes. I don’t always agree with her, but I do respect her and the love and non-judgment she has tried to convey over the last several years. This last episode however I had to turn off within a minute, maybe two of it starting because the guest, a person she described as her spiritual mentor, described the Apostle Paul as being a heretic and in schism from the other apostles, and rejected by them. This is something which is a blatant falsehood, as anyone familiar with the New Testament should recognize. This person clearly didn’t understand Paul, who he was and what he thought and wrote, as many today demonstrate that they don’t.
      For me, Paul is like an old friend. I’ve gone through both his story in the book of Acts and his letters in the New Testament in the original Greek so many times over the last thirty years that I can’t help but feel like I knew him personally as someone very dear to me. So, I want to tell you about my dear old friend, Paul.
      Where do I start?
      We first get introduced to him as “a young man named Saul” in the book of Acts. This is clarified as “Saul of Tarsus.” Saul, or “Saulos” was a Hellenization of the Hebrew name, “Sha’ul.” Tarsus was a city in Asia Minor, what is now Turkiye, though I’m not convinced this is actually where he was born or raised. We are introduced to the name Paul or “Paulus” later on. Being a Roman, he likely would have had three names, a praenomen, a paterfamilias, and a cognomen. I tend to think he went by Sha’ul in Judea to hide or minimize his troublesome and somewhat dangerous Roman heritage from his Judean Pharisee peers. In this case, Paulus (meaning “short” in Latin) was likely his cognomen, that is, the Roman name by which everyone knew him. Paul was first and foremost a man of his time period, raised in a distinctly multicultural society as both an educated Roman and an educated Judean.
     He describes himself as being raised at the feet of Gamaliel, a well known and incredibly wise, respected, and celebrated Jewish Rabbi and Sanhedrin member in the first century according to history. According to his own account, he was a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin, and describes himself as a “Hebrew of Hebrews,” strictly adhering to the Jewish Torah as a Pharisee. I tend to get the sense that he outdid his peers in his sheer Jewishness as almost a means of protecting himself from them as a young man. It was dangerous to be Roman in Judea in the first century, and he likely would have felt like he had to prove himself as Jewish as possible in order to just survive and not be seen as a foreigner and an outsider.
     But a Roman citizen he was, and by birth at that. So much so that the Roman soldiers and city leaders who mistakenly beat him later in life were terrified upon learning that fact. He demonstrates that he could not only read and write in Greek, but also had a good grasp of both the classical Greek poetry as well as incorporating Greco-Roman Stoic philosophy into his worldview. The wide Greek vocabulary he uses in his writings bears this literary education out. Although, according to his own admission, he wasn’t the best of rhetoricians, he did know how to build an argument (a cornerstone of Greco-Roman philosophy training) as was demonstrated in his letter to the Romans as well as his other letters. It stands to reason, given his knowledge of philosophy and Greek writings and the culture and society of the first century, that Paul likely attended a grammaticus, a Roman “elementary school”, or had a private tutor as a boy until the age of twelve or thirteen, and him so doing suggest that his early nuclear family was likely financially secure or even well off. This coupled with his Roman birthright citizenship might suggest that his father was a wealthy Roman proselyte to Judaism who married a woman either native to Judea or descended from family native to Judea.
     This suggestion might further be strengthened by his very familiar address in his letter addressed to the Christian community at Rome to a man named Rufus (a distinctly Latin name) where he warmly greets both him and “his mother and mine.” Indeed, none of his warm addresses to individual people mentioned in the letter would make any sense if he had never been to Rome and didn’t already know them like he did Priscilla and Aquila, whom he also greeted and whom he clearly already knew well from Corinth and Ephesus according to the book of Acts. It is not then a stretch to suggest that, while he never mentions his father (possibly out of habit for his own safety while training with Gamaliel in Judea, or possibly because he died while Paul was still young), the man and his mother Paul greets are actually Paul’s surviving nuclear family and he spent at least some time in Rome, probably as a boy, prior to where his story begins in the book of Acts. This would give further personal reasons as to why he was so keen on reaching, or possibly returning to Rome as he expresses in his letters. In his letters, he was also keen on reaching Spain, a heavily Romanized region, as well with no explanation really given except that he wanted to go there. It isn’t out of the question that his reasons were personal here as well. Significantly, he makes no mention of having family members in Tarsus of Asia Minor.
     Paul was likely quadrilingual, being fluent in Greek (the language of education and philosophy in the first century), probably knowing Latin through his father as well as being trained in Hebrew by Gamaliel, and also probably having at least a passing familiarity with Aramaic from being educated in Judea.
      My dear friend Paul was a man with a brilliant mind, but he had a deep insecurity about himself and being accepted by others from the time he was young and for most of his life. As I mentioned before, this is what drove him to excel in his studies and his practice of the Torah, but even if he didn’t let it show, it also hurt him deeply when his world was shattered by what happened on the road to Damascus. He couldn’t go back to “his people” in Jerusalem, and joining the Christian communities was a non-starter at first because they all knew his name and feared him. It was the most alone he’d ever felt in his life. He took off for the desert of Arabia where he knew no one and no one knew him not knowing what would happen or where he would end up, only returning to Damascus a few years later resolving to follow what he knew to be true, regardless of what else it might cost him. He was eventually accepted by the Christian community in Damascus after he began preaching about Jesus as the Christ in the synagogues there and putting himself on the hit lists of his former comrades, but he always wondered if they really trusted him or not. When he came to see the Apostles in Jerusalem, he had been expecting them to distrust him at first, but it still bit at his insecurity and he resolved to earn their trust by doing the same thing in Jerusalem that he did in Damascus, plunging into the synagogues of his former colleagues and peers and telling them in no uncertain terms that Jesus was the Christ and their leaders were responsible for His death. He became a man marked for death by every Judean zealot and extremist from the border of Egypt to the border of Syria, and nearly caused riots in his quest to redeem himself in the eyes of the twelve and the Christian communities. Just when he thought he had, they sent him out of the region altogether north into Asia Minor and Tarsus where everyone knew he was from. And there he sat for almost ten years with no one, no friends or family, and no Christian community. There’s no record he tried to start one there either. It’s likely that it was here he learned tent making as a trade. Left to his own devices, there’s every chance he would have stayed there had Barnabas not come to find him and bring him to Antioch where he was given the chance to heal a bit as part of that Christian community.
     By his own admission, Paul was never trained as a disciple by the twelve, or really by anyone. As he himself says he wasn’t taught the Gospel by human beings, and his teaching didn’t come through a human being. He didn’t stay with Ananias in Damascus for long after he baptized him and his sight was restored, and he didn’t meet any of the other apostles until years after his conversion. They had heard about what had happened to him, but they hadn’t met him. As far as he was concerned, he received his teaching from Jesus Christ Himself, and he implies that it was largely during his three years in Arabia that this occurred.
     Consider for a moment what happened to him on the road to Damascus and how it might have impacted him. His experience might have been similar to many stories of people with Near Death Experiences who encounter Jesus in the afterlife and have their entire belief system upended. When they return, they are profoundly changed and are never the same people they were. Many who talk about it with friends and family are ostracized. Many leave their religious communities because they no longer fit in and can no longer go along with what is taught because it doesn’t line up with what they experienced and were taught during their NDE. Atheists become devoutly religious or spiritual. Paul’s account of his experiences and how he descibes learning what he taught follows this pattern very well. While Luke’s account never says Paul literally died and was resuscitated on the road, metaphorically speaking, the man he was died the minute he fell off his donkey and was struck blind, and the man who received his sight after being baptized was someone new entirely.
      There was never any doubt in Paul’s mind as to what he had experienced or who had given him his teaching, but it was still another thing that set him apart as an outsider from the other apostles. While they eventually did accept him as both the book of Acts and his own letter to the Galatians confirms, it was something that was used as a constant attack against him and his insecurities about being accepted, and it sometimes incited his own defensiveness when he was questioned on this account. In spite of this, Paul felt absolutely compelled to preach the Gospel which he was taught during his extraordinary experiences with Jesus Christ. These were the two things that drove him especially in the beginning, the teaching he received and experience he had with Jesus Christ, and his insecurities about never doing or being enough for people.
     My friend Paul could build an argument. He could preach, but he wasn’t trained in rhetoric. He didn’t really have any skill with speech or speaking, and was secretly terrified of doing so to groups of people every time he did it. He tended to “infodump” on people, and could talk for hours on the same subject, and sometimes didn’t know when to stop talking. He had a brilliant mind, but his people skills were distinctly lacking, and he often didn’t understand his mistakes with people until it was too late. He could honestly be very awkward around people. In spite of this he had a deep affection for those friends he had (seeing them as the only real family in his life for a long time), and other people in general, and felt deeply, deeply hurt when they appeared to leave or betray him. His falling out with his dear friend and sometimes mentor, Barnabas, sent him into a depression that took a while for him to come out of, especially when he realized it was his own fault. You wouldn’t know it most of the time, but Paul was a deeply vulnerable man, and occasionally you would see the little boy underneath everything else in him needing to be mothered but afraid to reach out. It’s not that much of a stretch to suggest that he had what we would call “Asperger’s Syndrome” today to some degree.
     I’m not sure the twelve or James the Elder knew what to do with Paul, to be honest. They heard what he taught and couldn’t add to or take away anything from it, but he hadn’t been with them for those three years being taught by Jesus. There was no denying that he too had been called and gifted as one of His apostles, displaying the same supernatural powers that they did confirming it, but they couldn’t really explain that. In their judgment, it was best that he keep doing what he was doing up in the north, in Asia Minor and Europe, while they tended to things there in Judea and the south, and he left them with their blessing to do so, whether others understood that or not. Jesus Himself had taught them not to reject someone performing miracles in His name if they weren’t a part of their group. They remembered that lesson with Paul. Paul himself understood that lesson very well, denouncing schism of any kind and praising those who preached Jesus’ Gospel regardless of who they were or why they did it.
      My dear friend Paul was doing the best he could with what he was given. When he realized he was wrong on something, he did his best to change course and correct it. The man he became towards the end of his life was not the young man who held the coats for those who stoned Stephen. He wasn’t even the man who had been thrown off his animal on the road to Damascus, or the man who had to escape Damascus and run for his life from assassins intent on his blood. He couldn’t fix the mistakes he had made, but he did his best to never make them again once he recognized them.
      This is the Paul I have gotten to know and care about over my years of interacting with him in the pages of his letters and Luke’s history. Anyone who accuses him of heresy or schism needs to point the fingers at themselves first.

Thoughts on 1 Corinthians 12 and the Operation of the Charismata

 Stop for a minute and consider how profound and controversial, even subversive and confrontational to modern Christianity, 1 Corinthians 12:3 is, "Therefore I am making known to you that no one talking with the Divine Spirit says, 'Anathema Yeshua,' and no one is able to say, 'Lord Yeshua,' if not with that holy Spirit." 

     Of course this applies to professing Christians of any denomination or sect, but consider everyone else to whom this applies. Offhand I can think of Thich Nhat Hanh who unabashedly and unashamedly addressed Yeshua, Jesus Christ, as Lord right alongside the Buddha whose teachings he followed. I can think of scores of New Agers, and practitioners of Eastern religions who, while disagreeing with traditional Christian theology, will absolutely address Yeshua as Lord. I can think of at least a few Muslims in the Sufi tradition who would have no problem, at the very least revering Yeshua as a Divinely sent guide if not addressing Him as Lord though never anathematizing Him. They may or may not be addressing Him as "Yahweh," which the word "kurios" should only be understood to mean in specific contexts, but in the strictest sense of the aforementioned Biblical text, they will all address Him as "Lord Yeshua" and none who do would anathematize Him. 

     But think on that very fact! If we take what Paul said literally, then they all must be speaking with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit must be speaking through them in order to accomplish this whether or not they claim to be Christians or want anything to do with being called one. According to Paul, and, if we take what the apostle said as being God-breathed, according to God Himself, this people who address Him as Lord are also speaking with the Holy Spirit, possessed of the Divine Spirit. And this very fact must radically alter our perception of who is operating with the Divine Spirit and who is not, as Paul uses this as a kind of acid test as he leads into the various manifestations of spiritual or paranormal abilities. 

     What is also telling is when we see love, joy, peace, patience, trust, kindness, courtesy, and self-control being displayed among these people who do not identify as "Christians," but do not see them among people who do. Clearly, it is not everyone of either camp. Clearly, it depends on the person. But adherence to a particular tradition, title, or religion does not apparently equate to whether or not someone is actually operating by the Holy Spirit, at least according to Paul. It is whether or not we can observe all of these things from that person which are clear indicators of the Holy Spirit operating. And the first is whether or not that person is able to say, "Lord Yeshua/Jesus."

"And there are differences of charismata, but the self-same Pneuma; and there are differences of ways to serve, and the self-same Owner; and there are differences of operations, yet the self-same God who operates the everything within everyone. Yet to each person is given the manifestation of the Pneuma with a view to what benefits."

   In these verses in 1 Corinthians 12 you see the entire Trinity represented. One might replace the word "kurios" or "owner" with "Logos" and it would still hold the same concept as there was no difference between the Logos and the Kurios/the Christ in Paul's mind. Paul's point here is that while there are different roles and manifestations of the Divine, regardless it is still the self-same Father God, Logos, and Pneuma operating within and producing those manifestations for each person. 

     I think too much emphasis is put on the lists of charismata which follow these verses and not enough emphasis is put on the concept Paul is actually trying to get across which is, "And all these things operate with the one and the self-same Pneuma dividing to each his own just like It wills. Because just like the body is one thing and has many body-parts, yet all the parts of the body being many are one body, so also the Anointed; and because with one Pneuma we were all baptized into one body, whether Judean or Greek, whether slave or free, also all were given to drink the one Pneuma." 

      Again, one might insert "Logos" for "the Anointed" and it would still convey the same concept. We are all of us a part of the Logos, and each of us when disengaged from the flesh produced ego will produce some manifestation of that truth regardless of what that manifestation looks like. Those manifestations, those charismata are driven by the same Pneuma, not different identical Pneumata, but the self-same Pneuma, the one Pneuma just as there is only one Logos of which we all share a part. And all of these are operated by the one, self-same God who works within or operates everything within everyone or everything. 

     Thing is, I'm pretty sure the Stoics would not have disagreed with what Paul said here. While baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Anointed and the Logos incarnate, is meant to induce the disengagement from the ego and clear the way for this, all of what Paul said is still true for every human being, and every human being is still capable of it should the ego be disengaged from or shut down because every human being, every human consciousness or soul is still a shred, a fractal, or a part of the one Logos who is the firstborn of all creation and identified with the God and Father.

On Accusations of Disagreement Between the Authors of the New Testament

 Those who believe that Jesus, Paul, John, and Peter disagreed with one another don't understand any of them. Those who believe Paul and James disagreed with one another understand neither. Just because someone uses a different set of semantics doesn't mean they're saying different things. Even in the Book of Acts, and in Paul's own writings, it was said that Paul, Peter, James, and the rest of the Apostles were in agreement, and that the twelve had nothing to add or take away from Paul's Gospel.
     Before a person accuses them of schism or disagreement (something which Paul was particular in writing against), they need to really understand what these men were saying and teaching. They need to step outside of their theological boxes and modern worldviews and step back into the multilingual and multicultural society of the ancient eastern Mediterranean. They need to forget about the Ecumenical Councils, the Reformation, and everything that happened after the first century and take these men where they were at, in the time and place they were at, and in the culture, society, and worldview they lived in.
     Yes, Jesus Christ was and remains the Son of God, but He was also, humanly speaking, a product of the society in which He was raised just as much as James and Peter were. Yes, Paul was ethnically Judaean (at least in part if not the whole), but he was also a cultural Roman writing to other cultural Romans. And no, they were not speaking English when they taught and wrote, neither Elizabethan English nor modern, which means if you really want to know what they were saying, you have to learn their language and cultural worldview.
     Paul was no more a misogynist than anyone of his time period, for example, but you have to understand the position of women in Roman or even Judaean culture to understand that what he wrote was well within the societal norms (norms which do not exist in modern Western Society). It was even progressive in some respects for the time and place, and it was meant to keep those he was writing to safe if anything. Would Paul write the same things today about the role of women had he been a product of the late 20th and early 21st centuries? No, of course not, because the societal expectations and the laws are different. The same is true when he writes about slaves and their owners. He isn't advocating for or against slavery, he's not making any judgments about it at all, instead, he's working within the society that existed at the time and trying to teach how to be a disciple of Jesus Christ under any conditions one might find themselves.
     Finally, sometimes people remember the same events or lectures differently. With twelve different people, you're likely to get twelve slightly different versions of what happened, or twelve differently worded versions of what was taught depending on how the individual person understood it. Recently, I've heard the same events retold by the people who lived them (regarding the CIA's Project Stargate). Every time it's just a little bit different. Someone forgets something. Someone mixes up a date. Someone says one person was present while another person says it was a different guy. Even the same guy will retell the story he previously told just a little bit differently every time. The core details of the stories they remember are the same, but all of these men are trying to recall events from thirty and forty years ago, and are working with memories affected by age. Not everyone has a photographic memory. We see the same thing in the writings of the Gospels and the New Testament in general. We see the same stories told slightly differently each time by different eyewitnesses. That's okay. It only lends credibility to their authenticity. Were they word for word identical, you'd know someone was making it up. As it stands, they ring true as recollections of people who were there.

1 Corinthians 11:4-12 and Women Veiling Revisited

 I've been working through 1 Corinthians on and off, translating it for my morning devotions, and I recently came to chapter eleven where Paul talks about what is normally translated as "head coverings." I'd like to retranslate it in different way with some cultural explanation. What may not be obvious to the modern reader is that married Roman women wore what was called the "palla." This was a cloth which was wrapped around the body and draped over the head. A married woman wasn't considered either respectable or modest without it, and it symbolized her husband's authority over her. Refusing to wear it could result in a divorce. Virgin Priestesses also wore a head covering, presumably as a symbol of their god's authority over them.Young, unmarried women were not expected to wear it until their wedding day. Slave women and prostitutes also did not wear it. What is interesting is that even Greco-Roman goddesses wore it, hence "Pallas Athena." With this in mind, let's revisit 1 Corinthians 11:4-12:

"Every single man praying or prophesying having something down over his head disgraces his head. Yet every single wife praying or prophesying by unveiling her head disgraces her head (i.e. her husband); because it is one and the self-same thing with being shaved. Because if the wife isn't veiled, let her also be sheared; and if it is shameful for a wife to be sheared or shaved, then let her be veiled. Because the man is in fact not obligated for his head to be veiled starting off as an image and reputation of God; but the wife is a reputation of her husband. Because a husband isn't of His wife, but a wife is through her husband. For this reason the wife is obligated to have a sign of authority on her head because of the envoys. Except neither a wife is separate from her husband nor is her husband separate from his wife with the Lord; because just like the wife is of the husband, so also is the husband through the wife; and the everything is from the God."

What Paul is writing here pertains to the Greco-Roman culture of the period and people in which and to which he was writing. An unveiled woman was either expected to be an unmarried child, a slave girl, or a whore because that was their culture and society. While women did have some rights under Roman law, their husbands or fathers were their legal protection and were legally responsible for them. An unveiled married woman was refusing to recognize her husband's legal protection and authority over her, and he had every reason and right to divorce her for it in their society and under Roman law. If she didn't want his authority, he didn't have to give it. This is what Paul is speaking to.
     So then what "Christian" principles can actually be taken from this passage then? Paul is operating from the perspective of "love the person next to you like yourself" and "treat others like you want to be treated." In this case, the wife loving her husband by respecting his societal authority over her. He's also operating from the perspective of following societal norms as much as was possible for a Christian to do. Does it automatically translate to modern societal norms? Not really. Should we be implementing ancient Roman societal norms as Biblically mandated? No, not unless you want to bring back slavery and the right of a father to reject his own offspring and leave it by the side of the road to die or be picked up by slavers. But the principles of "love the person next to you like yourself" and" treat others how you want to be treated" are transferable into a modern context, even between husbands and wives.