“he is enabled to see at last how impoverished his collective self is”
The Christian Bible was originally written in Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Aramaic then translated many times. The King James Version (KJV) published in 1611 was widely accepted but it too was revised. At the beginning of the 19th century, the 1769 Oxford version of the KJV was thought to be the most widely printed book in history.
Tom Harpur, a biblical scholar and Anglican priest, formed The Jesus Seminar in 1985 and made some strong statements about the Bible and Jesus. “Some twenty gospels of various kinds have come down to us either in whole or in pieces from the first three centuries of the common era, but only four ended up included in the New Testament. Much of the Sermon on the Mount, comes from a common store of ancient wisdom literature that was widely circulated in the Middle East and eventually found its way into Jewish Talmudic and Midrashic (imaginative) commentaries. Many of them [the Gospel stories] were pre-existent, pre-historic, and therefore pre-Christian. They were collections of Egyptian, Hebrew, and Gnostic sayings, and therefore cannot stand on their own as evidence that the Jesus of the Gospels ever lived as a man or teacher. These sayings were all oral teachings in the ancient Mysteries ages before they were written down.”[i]
We generally reference the KJV in our essays. Jesus may be a myth or he might have walked the earth and died on the cross, but in any case the teachings attributed to Jesus are worth our reflection.
In the New Testament Jesus warned his followers that they could not serve both God and mammon (wealth/money). Mammon was regarded as an evil influence and it encouraged devotion to materialism.
Yet today in the U.S. materialism has reached unprecedented heights, including wealthy Christians. A book review of The Meritocracy Trap (2019) reveals: “The middle class, broadly defined, is of course an outcast in the meritocracy, left behind in … ‘a staggering, depleted and shrinking world.’ Once, perhaps, America’s elite professional class served the general public, but today its members figure out how to replace local bankers through mortgage securitization and come up with clever ways to de-skill retail supply chains. With just about every recent meritocratic ‘innovation’ … the winners turn out to be—surprise!—people already at the top of the heap.”[ii]
The Bible parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15) is, on the surface, about materialism and the wicked influence of “mammon.” It begins with a son demanding his share of his father’s estate, which the father gives him. He then runs off and squanders his inheritance in “wild living.” He ends up destitute, hungry and dirty, and eventually returns home. His father forgives him and plans a feast to celebrate the return of his “lost son.”
In our insight below, Jung offers a deeper understanding of this parable.
Insight # 39 comes to us from C. G. Jung (1875-1961). He was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung’s work was influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy and religion.
“The money he receives from the father is an image of the talents he has been given by life and the story tells him that far from hoarding these talents, which the New Testament has already warned no one must bury, far from being thrifty about them as the brother left at home is, it is the duty of the young to spend them utterly—in other words, to use his talents until they consciously seem worn out and he is enabled to see at last how impoverished his collective self is, how inadequate and provisional the world and the social realizations demanded by it.”[iii]
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Additional Reading:
- Bible, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
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[i] Harpur, Tom. The Pagan Christ. New York: Walker and Company, 2004, pp. 138-141.
[ii] Frank, Thomas. “Unfair Code.” The New York Times Book Review. November 17, 2019, p. 13.
[iii] Jung, C. G. The Portable Jung. New York: Penguin Books, 1971, p. 187.
