Whitley Strieber's "new vision" of Jesus

Whitley Strieber is a one-of-a-kind thinker, and his book Jesus: A New Vision, published in January of this year, brings his unique approach to bear on the question of who Jesus is and what he did. It is a very exciting and stimulating book to read, full of surprising interpretations and insights. Unfortunately, in the end I don't think it really adds up to the coherent "new vision" of Jesus promised in the subtitle.

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Jesus the man

Strieber's foundational assumption is that Jesus was a man, and that everything he did is therefore within the range of human capabilities and would in principle be possible for others to do as well. This does not mean that Strieber tries to explain Jesus away as "just a man" in a secular way. He accepts many of the extraordinary things attributed to Jesus, including the resurrection -- but where a conventional Christian would see these as proof that Jesus was God incarnate, a sort of being fundamentally different from ourselves, Strieber sees them as proof that human beings have undreamed-of potential. Jesus did things no human being could do, says the conventional Christian, and therefore he was no mere human being but God. Jesus did things no human being could do, says Strieber -- and that proves that human beings can do such things after all.

This is broadly similar to my own assumption, that Jesus was a man who became divine, and that others may follow him and do what he did. He told his disciples on numerous occasions that they could be like him, even that they would work greater miracles than his own. The idea that Jesus was like Superman -- human in appearance but actually fundamentally different in origin and nature -- is incorrect. Jesus was not a God disguised as a man; nor did he have (as per classical theology) "two natures," human and divine; rather, he was and is living proof that human nature and divine nature are one and the same -- that "now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be" (1 John 3:2).

Strieber doesn't go this far. As I will discuss below, he holds onto the idea of an impersonal monotheistic God and therefore prefers to say that Jesus was not a god.

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Miracles

Strieber's approach to Jesus' miracles is a strange mixture of belief and secular explaining-away.

Jesus didn't literally turn water to wine because "that's impossible"; the story is symbolic. (By the way, Strieber reaches the same conclusion of Bruce Charlton, that the wedding at Cana was Jesus' own marriage to Mary Magdalene.) Most of his healings were probably just the placebo effect. When Jesus raised someone from the dead, what probably happened was that he revived a seemingly dead person with smelling salts, a trick he may have learned from the magicians in Egypt. Strieber accepts the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of James but goes Jefferson Bible on it -- "once the miracles attributed to him are stripped away," he says, it probably offers a pretty accurate account of his childhood.

Walking on water, though -- yeah, that probably really happened. There are many accounts of levitation, with multiple witnesses, in the historical record, and so gravity-defying miracles are credible. What Strieber does not mention -- he's trying to be Whitley the scholar here, not Whitley the weird-experience-haver -- is that he himself has experienced levitation and knows firsthand that it is real, and that that is his real reason for finding this particular miracle more credible than the others.

One reason for Strieber's seemingly inconsistent approach to miracles is his assumption that miracles are "not supernatural, but caused by natural forces that remain to this day little understood, but which [Jesus] did understand, at least well enough to make use of them." Jesus was not God, and his miracles are not proofs of his omnipotence. He didn't have the power to do anything, only some specific things, for specific reasons. Therefore, his working one miracle is in no way evidence that he could also have worked another, entirely different miracle.

For Strieber, Jesus' miracle fall into three categories: (1) those we can explain away, at least in principle (healings via placebo effect, smelling salts, etc.); (2) those we cannot yet explain away, but which are well enough attested that they probably did happen (walking on water, the resurrection); and (3) those which we can dismiss as "impossible" (turning water to wine, making clay sparrows come to life, etc.).

I guess I'm in broad sympathy with this approach, but I think Strieber is a little too quick to put things in the third category. As someone who has sometimes experienced six impossible things before breakfast, he really ought to be more willing to suspend judgment even on some of the less believable miracle stories.

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Hidden helpers

One interesting point Strieber raises is that Jesus seems in the Gospels to have had a group of people -- distinct from his disciples -- secretly helping him behind the scenes. He mentions, for example, that on Palm Sunday there was already a colt waiting for him to ride on, and someone had provided the people with palm branches in preparation for his entrance. Other mysterious figures -- the man in white who runs away in Mark, the woman who anoints him in Luke -- are also tentatively connected with this group. I made a similar speculation in my notes on John 1:

When John says, "he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me . . . ," I wonder if he is describing a direct communication from God himself, or John had some human master or teacher out in the desert, lost to history, who gave him these instructions.

Strieber reaches no conclusions about who these people may have been, but it's an interesting hypothesis.

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The sacrificed god

Many (beginning with Frazer in The Golden Bough) have noted the parallels between Jesus' story and those of other "sacrificed gods" who rise from the dead, such as Osiris and Tammuz. Believers see this as God inspiring the pagans to create myths that foreshadowed Christ; skeptics see it as evidence that the story of Jesus is fake, cobbled together from myths and not from history. Strieber's own take is unusual.

I think that there is another way to look at it, which is that Jesus was re-creating these earlier passions, using the same theory of sympathetic magic that had inspired the would-be messiahs who had come before him to recreate the Moses entry into the Land of Canaan. Having seen that this method had failed, he was attempting another.

Strieber elaborates on this at great length, explaining how Jesus "goaded the Romans into executing him" and deliberately did it in such a way as to echo various myths about "scapegoat gods," even when this had little to do with fulfilling the messianic prophecies of Judaism.

Strieber is not clear on what purpose this served -- or if indeed it served any purpose at all. He describes it as another instance of the same sort of "sympathetic magic" that had failed in the past. Did Jesus' resurrection somehow depend on enacting this mythological drama? Was it done to ensure that his story would resonate with the Greeks and Romans and be remembered? Strieber never really reaches a conclusion here; he merely proposes that Jesus was consciously attempting to be a second Adonis as well as a second Moses and David.

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The resurrection

Strieber discusses the Shroud of Turin extensively, seeing it as very strong evidence that Jesus' corpse was transformed in a blast of radiant energy into -- something else. 

When there is proper testing of the Shroud, what we are almost certain to find is that Jesus turned into a version of himself made of light. He may have appeared human to those who saw him, but he was no longer an organic being. What happened was that a rare energetic event occurred that projected him back into the world for a time.

This misses the whole point of the resurrection, which is that it was a resurrection of the body. There's nothing revolutionary about people living on after death as spirits or "beings of light," but the resurrected Jesus made a point of demonstrating that he had a body of flesh and bone. Strieber's weird non-explanation, that he "may have appeared human" because "a rare energetic event occurred" (what?), does not make it clear how Jesus' post-resurrection appearances were anything other than ordinary "ghost" apparitions. Ghosts, whatever they are, are commonplace and were accepted as such in the ancient world; appearances of the ghost of Jesus would not have led to the belief that a dead man had come back to life.

Strieber says that Jesus showed that resurrection is possible for all of us but isn't clear on how. At times he seems to suggest that we can find the key to resurrection by further scientific examination of the Shroud of Turin. At others, he says we can transcend death by "following the Jesus path" -- meaning, uh, living by the Beatitudes or something. At any rate, he doesn't think we need to actually follow Jesus or believe in him; the book's closing sentence is, "Belief or faith or none, it does not matter: Jesus is there." How he got that message from the Gospels is anyone's guess!

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God

Focusing on the burst of radiant energy evident in the Shroud of Turin, and on Jesus' appearance to Saul of Tarsus as a blinding light, Strieber connects these with other "incidents of light" such as the burning bush, the Transfiguration, and so on.

I think that there was a consciousness with high intelligence behind the resurrection event and all the other incidents of light that I have discussed. . . . I think that part of the message of the Shroud is that, by following the Jesus path, we all have the potential to enter the same state of light that he did.

Basically, he identifies this conscious light with God -- or rather, with his typical hedging, "a higher entity that, for want of a better word, we might as well call God." In what seems to me to be a remarkably obtuse misreading of the message of Jesus, he says that this God is entirely unlike a human being and that we need to stop anthropomorphizing it.

This conscious energy -- this light -- is concerned about us or it would not intervene in our lives. . . . But how can we relate to a consciousness that does not have a nature that we can understand or even a form that we can detect? . . . We have never in all our history had a concept of god that is not sentimentalized in some way like the vague idea of "God the Father," or personalized like the old gods of the Romans and the Egyptians. There is every reason now for that to change.

Strieber somehow fails to notice that the "idea of God the Father," far from being some "vague" and "sentimentalized" holdover from the infancy of our species, is in fact one of the central, and most revolutionary messages of Jesus. Even the notoriously skeptical Jesus Seminar (which Strieber references with depressing credulity) lists Jesus' calling God "Father" as one of his most undeniably authentic teachings. And this was a radical new doctrine, not a traditional Jewish idea. Jesus called us not to abandon anthropomorphism but to take it seriously. The vague idea which we really need to move beyond is the Hellenized view of God as an abstraction "that does not have a nature that we can understand."

When Saul asked the blinding light, "Who art thou, Lord?" the answer was, "I am Jesus whom thou persecutest" (Acts 9:5). If, as Strieber says, the "conscious energy" behind these "incidents of light" is to be identified with God, then Jesus had become God without ceasing to be Jesus, without ceasing to have a human nature. 

Moved by this experience, Paul was later to preach:

Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device. And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent (Acts 17:29-30).

We are the offspring of God, and therefore God is not like unto gold or silver or stone. What is he like, then? Like us. The impersonal, "non-sentimentalized" God promoted by Strieber is just another example of the ignorance that God winked at in the past, but which is no longer so excusable now that Jesus has come.

As so often, William Blake put it best: "God appears, and God is Light, to those poor souls who dwell in Night; but does a Human Form display to those who dwell in realms of Day."

To the ones . . .

M. C. Escher, Hand with Reflecting Sphere

Communion is subtitled A True Story, and almost the first words out of the author's mouth are "It is a true story, as true as I know how to describe it." Elsewhere in the book, he states flatly, "I don't lie." (Note: This statement may not be strictly true!) But the book begins with a curious dedication in verse, culminating in a dedication to "the ones who must lie."

To the ones who have slipped into the mirror,

And the ones who reflect it in their eyes.

To the ones who must hide everything,

And the ones who lose what they hide.

To the ones who cannot be silent,

And the ones who must lie.

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Let's go through this line by line.

To the ones who have slipped into the mirror,

Slipping into the mirror recalls Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-glass, in which this is Alice's way of entering a sort of dream-world.

"Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through --" She was up on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.

In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room.

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, she enters the magical world by falling down a rabbit-hole. Here, while talking to her cat, she begins pretending or imagining, and then somewhere along the line what was pretend becomes real, and she is in a mist, and suddenly -- she hardly knew how she had got there -- she is in another world. The parallel to Strieber's own story is obvious, and at one point he directly suggests that his visitors have something of Looking-glass Land about them.

A visitor once said to an abductee, "On is off and off is on. We confuse the language." There is something of the mirror image in all this . . .

When Strieber reports his hypnosis sessions with Dr. Donald Klein, he titles that section of the book "Hypnosis: The Uncertain Mirror" -- presumably because hypnosis is an unreliable way of looking into one's own mind, and the risk of "slipping into the mirror" of delusion is non-negligible.

"What had my life really been," Strieber asks, upon discovering that he had long been living a secret life with the visitors, "and how many other lives have been lived like mine, skidding the surface of this dark mirror?" The dark mirror suggests St. Paul's famous lines: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (1 Cor. 13:12). Given Strieber's evident interest in and knowledge of Aztec mythology (extensively referenced in Communion), perhaps there is also a hint of Tezcatlipoca, "Smoking Mirror," and the obsidian mirrors used by Aztec shamans to gaze into other worlds.

Why does the human mind wink back from the dark? Because there is something truly human about it, or because we are being fooled by our own reflection? When you look through a window, you see what is outside -- but when it is dark outside, the window becomes a mirror, and you see only yourself. Actually your reflection is there on the glass all the time but is drowned out by the much brighter stimuli coming in from outside, just as the stars shine all day but are visible only when the Sun has withdrawn.

When you study most things, you learn about the object of your study. But when you study a true unknown -- like the visitors, or God -- so little unambiguous information is coming in from "outside" that the bulk of what you learn is about yourself.

And let's not forget Anne Strieber' assessment of the visitor experience -- "this has something to do with the dead" -- and how that ties in with the window/mirror imagery with which Nabokov opens Pale Fire. (I'm sure Strieber is exactly the sort of guy who read Pale Fire at the age of 17, when it first came out.)

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure in the windowpane;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate

Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:

Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass

Hang all the furniture above the grass,

And how delightful when a fall of snow

Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so

As to make chair and bed exactly stand

Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

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And the ones who reflect it in their eyes.

Very clever double meaning here. One reading is "the ones who reflect in their eyes the fact that they have slipped through the mirror." When Dante walked the streets, passersby in their naïveté used to whisper to one another -- not, "There's the man who wrote the Comedy!" but, "Look, there's the man who's been to Hell!" People swore they could see it in his eyes. Some even said his hair had been preceptibly (and apparently permanently!) singed and curled by the heat. When someone has spent time in other worlds, it shows.

Look, there's the man who's been . . .
uh, someplace really strange.

The other possible reading is "the ones who reflect the mirror in their eyes." Imagine putting on a pair of mirror shades and looking into your bathroom mirror. You'd see your reflection in the mirror, and in the reflection's shades a reflection of your reflection, and in that reflection's shades . . . well, you'd have an infinite series of reflections, like one of those Yaoi Kusama "infinity room" installations. (Strieber is exactly the kind of guy who would have gone to see those when they first appeared, the same year as Pale Fire.)

Now take off the shades. You may not have all-natural mirror-shade eyes like a Gray, but your pupils are dark. They reflect. Look closely, can you see your face in there? Stare as hard as you can. You might want to get a little closer to the mirror -- closer -- careful now, don't slip!

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To the ones who must hide everything,

This is presumably referring to those of Strieber's fellow close-encounter witnesses (surely a large majority) who feel that they can never reveal their experiences ever, to anyone, for any reason. Thinking you've been abducted by aliens is a byword for kookiness. Reveal that particular fact about yourself, and you permanently brand yourself as a laughingstock, never again to be taken seriously by anyone who counts. You can see a ghost, you can have a near-death experience, you can experience astral projection, whatever, and still not take as severe a blow to your credibility as you would should you ever be so gauche as to be taken aboard a flying saucer. (If I were an abductee, I would deny it. And no, I'm not one.)

Another possibility is that this refers to the government and the military -- who, according to some popular theories, are being forced to cover everything up by what they view as credible threats from the visitors if they do not.

Or it could be the visitors themselves. They certainly do hide. Is that what they want to do, or do they accept it as an unfortunate necessity.

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And the ones who lose what they hide.

It's probably just a coincidence that I was reading a Whitley Strieber book -- his novel The Grays -- when my attention was drawn in a seemingly paranormal way (related in detail here) to this passage in Helaman 13 in the Book of Mormon:

O that we had remembered the Lord our God in the day that he gave us our riches, and then they would not have become slippery that we should lose them; for behold, our riches are gone from us. Behold, we lay a tool here and on the morrow it is gone; and behold, our swords are taken from us in the day we have sought them for battle. Yea, we have hid up our treasures and they have slipped away from us, because of the curse of the land. O that we had repented in the day that the word of the Lord came unto us; for behold the land is cursed, and all things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them. Behold, we are surrounded by demons, yea, we are encircled about by the angels of him who hath sought to destroy our souls. Behold, our iniquities are great. O Lord, canst thou not turn away thine anger from us?

(Do people still say "probably just a coincidence" non-ironically?)

One also thinks of the parable of the talents in Matthew 25.

Then he which had received the one talent came and said, "Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed: And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine."

His lord answered and said unto him, "Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed: Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury. Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents."

Yet another scriptural resonance is with the candle under the bushel (Luke 5, Matt. 11). If you try to hide a candle's light by covering it up, the light will go out.

Why do people lose what they hide? Well, in the simplest analysis, to hide something is deliberately to make it hard to find, and that also makes it harder for you to find. You might lose they key, forget the password, lose track of where you buried it. In Helaman 13 and Matthew 25, what is hidden is not so much lost as taken, by the Lord, as a punishment.

What is lost by close-encounter witnesses who hide their experiences? Do the experiences cease to occur? Do they lose their memories of the experiences they have already had? Or do they simply lose the thread? By hiding something away, compartmentalizing it, refusing to connect it with anything else you know or have experienced, you make it impossible to understand. Even more impossible, I mean.

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To the ones who cannot be silent,

And the ones who must lie.

You just have to say something, but you can't tell the truth -- largely because you can't admit it, even to yourself. Strieber describes this in Communion. He wakes up with "a very improbable but intense memory" of having seen an owl at his window during the night -- a memory he doesn't really believe himself but feels a compulsion to share.

I remember how I felt . . . when I looked out onto the roof and saw that there were no owl tracks in the snow. I knew I had not seen an owl. I shuddered, suddenly cold, and drew back from the window, withdrawing from the night that was falling so swiftly in the woods beyond.

But I wanted desperately to believe in that owl. I told my wife about it. She was polite, but commented about the absence of tracks. I really very much wanted to convince her of it, though. Even more, I wanted to convince myself. So intent was I on this that I telephoned a friend in California for the specific, yet unlikely, purpose of telling her about the barn owl at the window.

I have had a somewhat similar experience myself, which even involved a confabulated bird of prey. When I was perhaps 12 or 13, I was walking to Hell Hollow (a park near our home), going down a country road that gets very little traffic, when a Cadillac pulled up beside me and rolled down its window. Inside, an old woman with sunglasses held up her hand and beckoned with one finger. She looked really extraordinarily old and thin, and her fingers seemed unnaturally long, like those of an aye-aye. I was absolutely terrified and sprinted all the way home without looking back, running as fast as I have ever run in my life. Later I told everyone that while I was walking to the park, I had seen a red-tailed hawk perched on a telephone pole, and that it had flown down and landed on my shoulder. No one, including me, believed the story.

Later Strieber relates some improbable anecdotes he used to tell about his travels through Europe in the late 1960s, anecdotes that he now believes were never true, but may have served to cover up something even more improbable.

But why do I need these absurd stories? They are not lies; when I tell them, I myself believe them. I don't lie. Perhaps I tell them to myself when I tell them to others, so that I can hide from myself whatever has made me a refugee in my own life.

The apparent psychological purpose of this confabulation is to replace something deeply confusing and therefore distressing with something that, however improbable it may be, is at least clearly defined. Even after the fact of a close encounter has been admitted, the temptation remains -- the temptation to force the infinite strangeness of it all into some comprehensible frame, such as that of teams of alien scientists flying around in spaceships conducting experiments, or representatives of a galactic federation come to save us from global warming.

Among witnesses, Strieber is notable for his determination to resist all such temptations and to let the unknown be the unknown.

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Note added: On March 21, three days after writing this post, in which I tell a tangentially relevant story about a Cadillac I saw about 30 years ago, I was in Taichung with my wife (who doesn’t read this blog and has never heard the story), and a very old Cadillac drove past us. She said, “Wow, a Cadillac! I think the last time I saw a Cadillac was 30 years ago. From the looks of it, that might even be the same one!”

Incidentally, I never consciously thought of the car in my own story as a Cadillac until I wrote this post. I’ve never had the slightest interest in motor vehicles (except tanks), and I’m quite sure my 12-year-old self couldn’t tell a Caddy from an Olds. My visual memory of the car is still clear enough, though, that I can now say with confidence that a Caddy is what it was.