Analogue 10: The Spiritual Ontology of the Messiah

 ANALOGUE 10

The name “Yeshua” is the private name, and “the Christ” is the public or revealed name. “Yeshua” does not occur in other languages, but “the Christ” is “Messiah” in Aramaic, “Christos” in Greek, and it is equivalent for “The Anointed One” in the languages of different peoples. He who has been revealed as the one consecrated to God, however, is the real secret, and as the Anointed One, he contains everything within his heart: the human, the archetype, the mystery, and the Father. Some say that first the Master died and then was raised, but they are confused. First he was resurrected, and then he died. Those who are resurrected first are like God; they are already alive and can never die.

Video Introduction to Analogue 10

SYNOPSIS

• Analogue 10 appears to be part of a longer discourse that begins here and ends with Analogue 13 (or perhaps extends through Analogue 17). Here Philip returns to the concept of the overarching divine power to assist humanity which was introduced in Analogue 7.
• The analogue begins with a teaching on the significance of Yeshua's names: Yeshua Messiach. (Jesus Christ) and the semantics of the name: how to understand it in its original language. (The topic of Yeshua’s names and titles will be revisited in Analogue 29.) It ends with the spiritual ontology of the Messiah—the divine qualities of his being and character, which is his Christological nature from Philip’s perspective. • The point is made that Yeshua’s consecration to God was not simply a change of name but a change made in his inner being. This change (or metamorphosis) was the secret of his Messiahship.
• The term for consecration nazar has two meanings: “crowned” and “a filled hand” (for example, as with a deck of cards containing a “full hand”).” Yeshua has come to us with a full complement of things in hand; he is not empty-handed. Or we can say, with what is he crowned? What is his fullness; what does he have in hand?
• The analogue offers deep insight into the inner experience and reality of Yeshua as an Anointed (Enlightened) One and into the deep mystery of his power as a Messianic figure. The inner secret of his Messiahship are unveiled to have in hand or be crowned with these:

1. Consecrated to God 
2. Kardial content -- the four features which fill his heart: the human, the Angel-archetype, the mystery, and the divine Source or Presence. 
3. Resurrected -- anastasis ... He was "standing up" before he died. 
4. God-like, filled with the life-form of God. Deified, theosis, and thus he can never really be killed.

• "Some say...." Another theological argument or debate was going on as to the meaning of the death and resurrection of Yeshua. In Pauline theology: he died to save us from our sin and then rose again back to God. From Philip’s perspective, he rose in life in order to die to his smaller self in an act of self-giving, becoming the greater Self.
• Emphasis is put on the spiritual principle of anastasis (a three-fold process of waking up, turning and standing) before physical death. 
  

COMMENTARY

The Names and their Meanings 

This complex and compelling Analogue shows another contrast between the western tradition and early Jewish Christianity as it explores the inner meanings of Yeshua’s names and titles and what they indicate about his being and character. It begins to outline what, in theology, we might call a nascent Christology. The analogue opens with a semantic and etymological explanation of the various names used for Yeshua. It ends discussing his inmost being —the ontological nature of who he was beyond the titles, below the names. Yeshua is, of course, the central Agent in this Gospel through whom the divine purposes are working themselves out. How these divine energies work (and to what effect) is described in vivid and perhaps even visionary detail here and throughout this text. The name by which we identify the Messiah, given to him by his family, is Joshua (pronounced Yeshua in his day). The meaning of that venerable name (originally that of Moses’s companion) is “God saves or restores”—God as the restorer of humankind. (The name Jesus that we typically use in the West is the Greek version of that name). “Christ” or “Messiach” is not, of course, his last name, but a title, meaning the Messiah, the Anointed One (Christos in Greek, as this Gospel explains).

The Powers Bestowed with the Anointing 

The rite of Anointing is an act of consecration—the setting aside of someone for sacred duty followed by the giving of the Spirit to enable the fulfillment of that duty. This text sees anointing as a spiritual act primarily directed at the interior of a person. As the outer oil saturates the head, the seat of consciousness is touched, descending over the whole being; the entire nature of the individual is seen to be involved. In the famous scene at the Jordan river, Yeshua was baptized, received the anointing of Spirit, and sent out into the world — but not before passing through the desert wilderness of southern Judea. Perhaps we could say that experience in the wilderness was the gateway to (as well as the very definition of) the world he was passing into. These rites of baptism and anointing were both the outer act as the hidden Presence within was empowering and compelling his mission out into the fierce landscapes he would encounter throughout this sojourn. 

What was primarily consecrated (and perhaps concentrated) in him through the Spirit, however, is revealed in this text to be the inner secrets resident in his heart. It appears these were already latent within and they became revealed with sudden clarity to him (or alternatively as in the western tradition, these were a singular donation unique to him). Using the following Analogue 11 as an interpretive guide, however, we could understand these to be the “hidden treasure” which, at his baptism were made known. Philip appears to take this interpretation of the treasure within being revealed seriously. These four elements were concentrated at his kardial center: the full or completed human, its angel archetype, the mystery (or the unveiling of the mysteries), and Abba, as their Source.

In greater detail, starting with the last on the list, we are told that the Source of all being and reality was residing there in his heart. The ultimate Reality out of which everything unfolds is resident imminently at the core of his being (and by implication every human being). We can say that Yeshua was the paradigmatic figure in whom we come to understand the deep relationship between the inmost part of ourselves, and the secret transcendent heart of the Universe. There is a non-local connection and the two are not in different places but are one in each other.

Yeshua experiences his own Father-in-residence as an inner intimacy. That one shared place in his heart became the place where the veils that normally occlude the universal mysteries were lifted so that he had access to understanding them from this inner space of visionary encounter.

It was also there that the archetypal form of his original being appeared and made itself known to him. This was the manifestation of the Angel of his being, the Angel which carries the original form or design of each individual person, and then subsequently helps to imprint that design upon a life well-lived. The outer forms and experiences of a human become an analogue of what has been imprinted as an inner mystery or truth. Each soul has just such a configuration, but not all souls express these in the same mature form of a completed human. Yeshua, however, did and thus became a human template for the rest of us. All these realities Yeshua held inwardly beginning from the moment of his anointing and consecration, and as he lived, they unfolded throughout his experience. This is the secret that Philip knew about him and which he describes as the life-long process of resurrection well before Yeshua experienced his own physical death on the cross.

Anastasis and Theosis 

At the moment Yeshua “died to himself” (his former self) at his consecration, he began to stand up along the vertical axis—he died in one way and in another he also became newly alive. He was resurrected into something far larger than his small ego-self. By means of Spirit he stood up (anastasia) vertically (from horizontal death) which is the true meaning of the terms metanoia and resurrection. All this happened before his crucifixion, not just afterward as the western tradition understood it. In the view of this author, others are obviously confused about the temporal and historical sequence because he had already died before he died, and he was being raised up long before the physical resurrection. This may make no logical sense, perhaps, but it is the paradoxical truth of Spirit that Philip is presenting here.

The true meaning of Resurrection is awakening and standing up out of the horizontal realm and into the vertical—coming alive to transcendent Reality through a deep and intimate relationship to God (another form of paradox is this transcendent-immanence). This is the God-like human form talked about using the term theosis—being made like God. The Gospel of Philip understands the steps in the progression that makes divinization (or deification) possible. It sees it coming into fulfillment in and through Yeshua. He is fully alive (saturated with divine Life) before he physically dies. In that deep mystery, first, he dies fully and authentically to his own self-interests, and only later then does he die in his physical body to the outer world itself. This is another revelation of the deep mystery of Yeshua’s being and work. He became a model for the rest of us and a manifestation of Eternal Life, despite what happened to his physical body. This is not to say he was not physically resurrected after his biological death, but that he was already living in the power of that resurrection before it— he was living vertically in life all the while he was on the horizontal plane. According to Philip, he had experienced theosis before the events of the last days of his life on Earth. This is the mysterious truth that was being revealed to humanity through the short life of Yeshua. We are invited to follow him down this same path into these very processes before leaving the planet physically—this is the Way, the Truth and the Life that was manifest in Yeshua. This is the secret of his consecration and his enlightenment.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION 

1. The Gospel of Philip provides an alternative to the way we (in the West) have traditionally understood Yeshua. The very names that seem so familiar to us have meanings beyond the surface of things, revealing their interior significance. Journal your sense of what Philips explains and how he describes Yeshua. 
2. Beyond the names, there is the deep significance of the Messiah, the Anointed One and how he became consecrated to God and what that meant for him. Philip describes an interior reality that differs from the traditional western Christian view. How do you understand this difference? 
3. What does human mean? What does Angel-archetype mean? What are the mysteries? Who is the Source? All of these questions continue to be probed in this text. Has this Gospel changed any of these definitions for you so far? 
4. You are, of course, familiar with the what is called “the historical Jesus” whose life is portrayed in modern texts as well as in the narratives of the canonical Gospels. Philip, in a kind of deliberate reversal of that narrative, stands the relationship between death and resurrection on its head, moving from a literal historical progression to an inner progression, or process of change, involving more than the body and the historical timeline. We are taken from outer history to inner history. Describe your understanding of this reversal. 
5. This text introduces the God-like form that is the end result of resurrection. Theosis was the term for deification or divination (to be made divine) in early Christianity, and it has been almost entirely lost in modern Christian teaching. It needs to be recovered and understood to probe the mysteries Yeshua and this Gospel are teaching. These sapiential doctrines will come up in the Gospel more than once. What is significant for you at this point? How would you describe in your own words what you understand so far?
6. In your view, how is or was Yeshua paradigmatic? How might he be a template for you?

Notes for Reference and Study 

1. Leviticus 21:10 is a central historical and biblical reference to anointing and its spiritual purpose from the Hebrew Scriptures: And he that is the high priest among his brethren, upon whose head the anointing oil was poured. He is consecrated to put on the proper garments. He shall not uncover his head, nor rend his clothes.
2. The person we have come to know in the West as Jesus appears to have been a bi-lingual, multi-cultural person of first century Palestine. Growing up in the Galilee, the region of northern Palestine, meant that he lived among Greek-speaking people in a place where many cultures of that day met and intermingled. He and is family were craftsmen, supplying services (primarily building construction and carpentry), to Greek-speaking people living in towns nearby. Sophora was a major Greek enclave near his own home village of Nazareth, and Yeshua and his father were no doubt employed in that town to build and renovate homes where they would have needed to speak the Greek language in order to make transactions and do business. In Greek, Yeshua would have been called iesous or Jesus.The name Yeshua was, of course, Aramaic and Hebrew, which would have been the original name used in his home and society. This analogue is aware of this linguistic and cultural diversity and is trying to help other followers of Yeshua who were also from Aramaic and Oriental cultures to understand the Greek terms that were being used by Greek-speaking Christians in the West. This analogue reflects the rich cultural diversity of the first and later centuries and the divergence of his Greco-Roman followers from the early Jewish and Semitic culture foundational to early Christian tradition. That same Semitic culture spread east and south and later came to be known as Oriental Orthodoxy (different from what we know as Eastern Orthodoxy which was part of the Roman Empire and its evolution into later Latin and Byzantine forms).This is all part of a complex history largely unknown by many Christians today.
3. The term resurrection, based on the Greek word Anastasia, is a fundamental idea in the Abrahamic faiths. It involves multiple teachings that entails humans who have been asleep, awakening, rising up, standing, and walking with a new orientation as they move from a horizontal (prone position and perspective) to a vertically awakened one. The history of this spiritual teaching concerning resurrection (and its physical analogue in the bodily resurrection of Yeshua after his crucifixion) was central in early and later forms of Oriental Christianity. What is often overlooked, however, is that the full force of resurrection is not centered in the body but in the soul and spirit which receives life from the vertical domains, as the soul awakens, and stands up. This is the exact position taken by this analogue which describes how Yeshua knew resurrection in its transcendental form long before his crucifixion.
4. There are many other cultural, religious and Jewish traditions as context behind the explication of this analogue. One is the practice of the consecration of a male child to specific religious practices related to temple worship. A young baby could be set aside early in his life to act for his family in service at the temple. This practice was called nazar and it is apparent from this analogue that the author has this tradition in mind. If Yeshua was been consecrated in this way by his father and mother at his temple anointing, then he was also reconsecrated by his heavenly father for an even more intense service for the world at his baptism. Perhaps with “heaven opening” he was given access to the inner practices of the first temple and its mystical tradition concerning the heavenly Temple. These are of course interpretive assumptions based on many other aspects of this text, but they appear to be warranted not only by the history that we know so far, but also by the hermeneutical intent of the Gospel of Philip to reveal the mysteries that Yeshua was teaching out of his own experience. It is clear that these analogues are a transmission of a deeper first-Temple mystical tradition of his own century and day.
5. The use of the word theosis was quite universal throughout the patristic period of Christianity (the first early centuries up until the time of Maximus the Confessor). This designation appears here, however, in this earlier text, indicating that there is a thread of mystical and sapiential teaching that already expresses this profound new step in the spirituality of early Christianity. It concerns, of course, the evolution of humanity towards the human and the divine being joined in perfect union and harmony. Later teaching described it as the act where God became human in order that the human might become divine (See Olivier Clement’s The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 2013). This theological perspective is clearly a radical departure from the notion that humans are not and cannot be divine and that they must simply stay as they are. There is already in Jewish tradition an ancient visionary understanding of the anthropos, the divine-human united to God, filled and fully clothed with light and shining, seated at God’s right hand in the heavens. This was the term used in Jewish thought for the term Son of Man (child of humanity) in its ultimate and rightful place in the heavens (see Daniel 7:3, 10:5) and appears to be the antecedent of this further unfolding in the Gospel of Philip.

Notes to the Translation 

• ‘Secret’ or ‘private’ is one word in the original, which could also mean ‘hidden’.
• ‘The Consecrated One’ could literally be ‘the Nazar’, a first-century Jewish ascetic who was consecrated to God.
• ‘The heart’ could also be understood to be ‘Mind’ or ‘nous’, sometimes also called ‘the Eye of the Heart’.
• The word ‘human’ is often the code word for ‘the Anthropos’, the full or completed human being.
• The word ‘archetype’ translates the word “angel” which refers to the angelic and archetypal dimension and source of a living human being on earth.