Christianity’s Next Reformation — Jesus and Carl Jung
This is the latest article in a long series. In the most recent ones I’ve been discussing the ideas of the late John Shelby Spong, who was a passionate advocate for such a Reformation. I will return to that later, but here I’m going to take a break from it and discuss some interesting passages in the gospels which suggest that Jesus was something of a proto-Jungian; they can at least be interpreted in that way. I’ll also discuss what these and other passages suggest about our understanding of Jesus and his religion. As I will argue at the end of the article, all this is relevant to us in modern times.
Here is a simple example. At Matthew 7.3 Jesus teaches: “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye; but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbour, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye’, while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbour’s eye”.
Here we have a clear reference to what in modern psychotherapeutic language is called projection, criticising others for the faults repressed into the unconscious in one’s own self. The need to withdraw projections and acknowledge that perceived faults are parts of one’s own nature is an essential feature of Jungian psychotherapy.
This series was originally inspired by an article by Keith Michael, who is seeking his own Reformation of Christianity. In particular he would like to completely revise the contents of the New Testament, omitting anything to do with Paul, and possibly the gospel of John. He is trying to restore Jesus and his teachings to what he considers an original Hebraic version.
I’m not saying that anything which follows here is necessarily relevant to his thinking. I’ll leave that question open although, as you will see by the end, there are some clues in the gospels as we have them as to what Jesus’s original religion might have been. This may have some relevance to Keith Michael’s ideas.
I’ll return to the gospel of Matthew. This is generally considered to be the most Jewish of the four gospels. In this article Ralph Sherman, a Catholic writer on Medium, goes so far as to say: “For Matthew, Christianity continued what the Old Testament fulfilled and saw no reason to break away from Judaism. His gospel maintained Jewish tradition in a church swiftly becoming Gentile, standing on the margin between tradition and non-traditional values”. (If that is true, then it is interesting that this gospel still managed to find its way into a New Testament promoting a new religion.)
Be that as it may, it’s interesting that in the gospel of Matthew Jesus is vitriolic in his condemnation of the Pharisees, who represent (at least one strand of) Jewish tradition. Explanations (or attempts to explain this away) have been offered. Sherman says: “It reflected the struggle between Christ and other Jewish groups, like the Pharisees”. The scholar Géza Vermes, who wrote at least a trilogy of books on the theme that Jesus was truly Jewish, and that Christianity’s depiction of him is ‘theological’ (mythological?) rather than anything connected to the historical figure, goes into more detail. He believes that the conflict with the Pharisees was not anti-Jewish, rather the expression of a conflict between Galilean Jews and Jews elsewhere.
All this leads me to wonder, given the vitriolic condemnation of the Pharisees in the quotes which follow, what extreme and profound differences this ‘conflict’ reflected; it would seem to have been rather serious, if the gospels of Matthew and John are to be believed. We have to wonder what was so profoundly different about Galilean ‘Judaism’ that made Jesus so hostile to the Pharisees.
For example, in Matthew chapter 15 Jesus is strongly critical of their practice of washing hands before eating, saying, “it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles”. The text continues: “Then the disciples approached and said to him, ‘Do you know that the Pharisees took offence when they heard what you said?’ He answered, ‘Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. Let them alone: they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit… What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile’ ”.
At 16.6 he says: “Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees”, by which he obviously means their teachings. At 23.13 he says: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them”. At 23.15: “You cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves”.
Most interesting of all, at 23.25 he says: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence… First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may become clean… You also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness”.
Jesus is clearly referring here to what Jungians would call repression or denial of the shadow. By behaving morally, one may create a virtuous external persona and therefore appear worthy and righteous to others, but this has done nothing to transform the inner dark side.
It is well known that Jung was very interested in alchemy. He believed that the search to transform lead into gold was a symbolic allegory of the mysterious processes of psychological transformation. There is a possible reference to that idea when Jesus says: “First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may become clean”. Jesus, at the very least, is insisting that true religion is about inner transformation, not following external moral imperatives.
On that theme, Christians have always been somewhat perturbed that Jesus apparently chose to hang out with sinners rather than the virtuous, so much so that one editor chose to add ‘to repentance’ to the original text. Thus Matthew 9.13 in the King James version reads, “I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance”. Later, more honest, translators have noted this addition and removed it. Thus the NRSV version reads, “I have come not to call the righteous but sinners”. Perhaps Jesus was able to help and transform those who had acknowledged their shadow rather than denying it.
Moving on to the gospel of Luke we find the same theme, for at 18.9 Jesus tells the parable of a Pharisee and a tax-collector: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax-collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax-collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income’. But the tax-collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted”.
Again we note that Jesus is more interested in sinners, those who are honest about their faults, than those who are outwardly virtuous. Hypocrisy is here the cardinal sin as far as Jesus is concerned, just as it was in Matthew. In psychotherapy it of course goes without saying that total honesty, rather than denial, is required in order to make progress.
Turning now to a different theme, chapter 3 in John’s gospel opens: “Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God’. Jesus answered him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above’. Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?’ Jesus answered, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, “You must be born from above” … Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can these things be?’ Jesus answered him, ‘Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?’ ”.
Jesus is clearly saying here that a leading (Jewish) Pharisee has no understanding of what is required on the inner spiritual journey. We can assume that the teaching of Jesus’s school, according to John, knows about these things. I don’t want to overemphasise the possible connection between what Jesus is referring to here and Carl Jung, but rebirth is one of the fundamental archetypes in his thinking, therefore intrinsic to his individuation process. It’s also worth noting that in Jung’s book Four Archetypes, two of the four discussed are Rebirth and Spirit. Both these are emphasised in the story in John, so it’s possible that Jung’s ideas had at least some connection with those of Jesus.
In what follows there is less about Jung, and more about who Jesus might have truly been. Here is a somewhat strange passage in John. Having attracted his first followers, “Jesus decided to go to Galilee” (1:43). He first found Philip, who introduced him to Nathanael. Then, “when Jesus first caught sight of Nathanael, he said: ‘Here is a real Israelite; there is nothing false in him’ ”. What is Jesus actually saying here? We know, at least according to Matthew, that he is contemptuous and dismissive of the Pharisees and their religion, thus (at least one form of) Judaism. Yet Israelites have nothing false about them, therefore presumably subscribe to what Jesus considers to be the true religion. Is he making a distinction between Israelites and Jews?
The details of this meeting then become stranger. Nathanael asks Jesus how he came to recognise him as a true Israelite, and Jesus replies “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you”. This response allows Nathanael to recognise immediately that Jesus is the Son of God, the King of Israel. Jesus surely does not mean that anyone seen standing under a fig tree is a true Israelite; there must be an allegorical meaning. The fig tree is an image used elsewhere in the gospels, and it is always barren, and Jesus curses or condemns it (Mark 11.12–14, Matthew 21.18–19, and Luke 13.6–9). It is not difficult to work out that Jesus is referring to the religion that he is seeking to overturn, and replace it with his own true religion. If such a tree has become barren, there is obviously no hope for it. In the context of the meeting with Nathanael, it would seem that the ‘fig tree’ was some kind of code word which enabled true Israelites to recognise each other.
On that theme, there is another extraordinary passage in John’s gospel. Beginning at 8.39 there is a very feisty confrontation between Jesus and some Jews, whom Jesus accuses of following the wrong religion, and not recognising him as a true prophet. This leads them to suspect Jesus of being a Samaritan, which is, as far as I understand it, a member of an Israelite sect which rejected conventional Judaism, and “traces its origin back to the northern Israelite form of the Mosaic religion” ¹. They also accuse, or suspect, him of being demonically possessed. This goes to show how extreme the differences were between the religion of Jesus and that of the Jews, at least in the understanding of the author of John.
In the light of all this, as far as the gospels are concerned, can we take seriously the suggestion that we are merely witnessing some local difficulties between different strands of Judaism, as Géza Vermes would have us believe? Jesus clearly believes that the religion of the Pharisees is a barren tree which he curses or condemns in all three synoptic gospels. Is it possible that Jesus was actually an Israelite — whatever we are to understand by that — rather than a Jew?
What does all this mean for us in modern times?
It may now be impossible to uncover in its entirety the original religion that Jesus was advocating. Too much has happened which has obscured it. If, however, we can rely upon the passages that I have quoted here, then we perhaps have a few details. This is important because they are still very relevant in modern times.
We can assume that, as a spiritual teacher and someone who knew ‘the Mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven’, Jesus was familiar with the esoteric knowledge that is required on the spiritual journey, unlike the Pharisee Nicodemus. In terms of a Reformation of Christianity, it is therefore possible that it is not the writings and influence of Paul that need to be removed, as Keith Michael suggests, rather the insistence on correct moral behaviour, the surface layer of the human being. This is relevant because much Christianity still teaches that being outwardly good, apparently free from ‘sin’, will lead to ‘salvation’.
What Christianity should focus on and teach instead is the need for inner psychological transformation, self-knowledge, the acceptance of the shadow, and the need for rebirth as part of the spiritual journey, as advocated by Jung and his followers, and apparently also by Jesus.
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