“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The idea of man’s survival of death was not new. The idea of a god’s “descent” to earth was ancient. The old religious myths fit a different kind of people, however, and lasted for as many centuries in the past as Christianity has reached into the future.² The miraculous merging of imagination with historical time, however, became less and less synchronized, so that only r-i-t-e-s (spelled) remained and the old gods seized the imagination no longer. The time was ripe for Christianity.

The imagination always seeks expression. It is always creative, and underneath the frameworks of society it provides fresh incentives and new avenues for fulfillment, that can become harnessed through fanatical belief. When this happens your institutions become more repressive, and violence often emerges as a result.

At the same time, Jane and I checked a number of biblical references on the New Testament — and discovered that Seth’s passage seems to be a case where he shows a knowledge we don’t consciously possess. For we learned that of the four Gospels (according to Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, in that order), some scholars believe that Luke and John can be read as stating that Christ’s resurrection and ascension took place on the same day. Yet in Acts, Luke postulates the 40-day interval between the two events. (Originally Luke composed his Gospel and Acts as one treatise; the two were separated early in the second century.) Out of such contradictions as those implied in Luke’s case, however, confusion and opposing opinions reign when one studies the Gospels and related material. Christ himself left no written records, nor are there any eyewitness or contemporary accounts of his life.

In the 591st session for Seth Speaks, I noted claims for an earlier date for the origin of the first Gospel, that according to Mark; nevertheless, most authorities still believe that the Gospels were written between A.D. 65 and 110. Since Christ was presumably crucified around A.D. 30, this means that some 35–40 years passed before the advent of Mark’s account. There are many consistencies in the Gospels, but also inconsistencies that cannot be resolved. Even the authorships of the Gospels according to Matthew and John are now being questioned. A study of the New Testament books alone can quickly lead one into a maze of questions: Why isn’t the resurrection itself described? Why are there so few references to the ascension? Matthew doesn’t mention it at all in his Gospel, for example; and Paul alludes to it only once (1 Timothy 3:16) in his writings. Is the Gospel according to Luke merely schematic, rather than chronological? If time (as much as 40 days) did elapse between Christ’s resurrection and ascension, where was he physically during all of that period, other than on the few occasions cited in the Gospels and in Acts, when on various occasions he revealed himself to the women who discovered his empty tomb, to the apostles, and to some others? Sometimes Christ appeared as an apparition — but as Seth commented in a private session: “You could not have a world in which the newly risen dead mixed with the living. An existence in a spiritual realm had to follow such a resurrection.”

“It was the Jewish tradition that nourished the new religion in its early stages. Christ, as you know, was a common name, so when I say that there was a man named Christ involved in those events, I do not mean to say that he was the biblical Christ. His life was one of those that were finally used to compose the composite image of the biblical Christ.” (In Chapter 20 of Seth Speaks, see Session 586 for July 24, 1971.)