Since it's come up on a couple of friends' journals, I've reluctantly decided to stick my neck out with a more Gnostic reflection on Easter, at the risk of sounding like a complete nutcase or of riling people up. I almost never talk about religion here but of late I've been reflecting on how fortunate I am, in the historical scheme of things, to have a right to say these things in relative safety. Only a few short centuries ago, it was a swift death to say the things I'm about to say and even now there are still people in many parts of the world who will kill you for it.

First of all, I guess theologically you'd call me an adoptionist (i.e. given to the idea that Jesus was an ordinary mortal possessed by a divine presence and that this condition can be and has been achieved by others). The view just makes sense to me in ways that the orthodox view (which draws its theology from a number of Roman cult religions such as the Cult of Hercules) never did.

Second, I see the crucifixion as an aberration and not as a miracle. The world, though a flawed thing that was itself probably a product of an accident, nonetheless has a certain robustness about it. Like a well-developed computer system or a body with a functioning immune system, it can detect elements that are foreign to the system and attack them. In much the same way the Cathars evoked a violent reaction from the Roman authorities 1200 years later, Jesus of Nazareth was simply too foreign to the culture to survive.

But I also believe that we become what we know and learn, and that the memetic reproduction of an idea changes our mental composition the same way a virus changes our genetic makeup; part of us becomes the new idea and we are never the same. If we take in TV commercials, our life becomes a TV commercial but if we take in ideas that enlighten, then our lives become enlightened. The very idea that "there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, and there is nothing buried that will not be raised" (Thomas, verse 5) is a glitch in the system that proceeds from the Logos and attaches itself to a mortal mind, ennobling it to seek deeper mysteries through learning and reflection.

In that sense, the resurrection for me is not the literal, physical resurrection of a messiah but the survival of a great idea in spite of every attempt by a frightened world to silence it. It's the [i]Ruah El[/i] hacking into our world through a program that hibernates, but can't be killed.

In 1945, a cache of Gnostic texts was found in the desert of Nag Hammadi, emerging from the earth as if from a tomb. Among them was a text called "The Second Treatise of the Great Seth." It has a quote that I think sums up my view of the whole affair nicely:

Yes, they saw me; they punished me... But I was rejoicing in the height over all the wealth of the archons and the offspring of their error, of their empty glory. And I was laughing at their ignorance.

And now, how about some fitting music, Mahler's Second Symphony, "Resurrection":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bdc5n562zZg