Fully Human ... Fully Divine ...

It’s hard to come up with a new heretical teaching. When I first read a Borges short story in which Judas was the good guy, I thought, “This is blasphemous, but original!” Until I saw Jesus Christ, Superstar. And read the Gospel of Judas. We have Last Temptation of Christ, we have The Da Vinci Code, we have Gnostic heresies, but they all start sounding the same. (Mary Magdalene had a special relationship with Jesus? Been there, done that.) Given the bigness of difficulty in coming up with a genuinely, never before thought of, weird heresy about Jesus, it has struck me that an even bigger challenge would be to come up with a new Christological heresy concerning the natures of Christ. I mean, there’s really not much there that you can come up with that hasn’t been tried: He wasn’t fully human! He wasn’t fully divine! The heresy novelty factor is not very high.

So, skimming some of the Gnostic gospels on the web, it strikes me that I have a Christological heresy that may actually be new. (Drumroll, please.) Christ is fully human … fully divine … and fully monkey. See, other heresies fail because they always shortchange one of the natures, so why not just supercharge them by throwin’ in a little monkey action? After all, according to William Lynch in Christ and Apollo, imperfect man "was once, and still is, a bit of a monkey" (97), so should not the perfect God-man be much more than just a bit of a monkey, yea, fully thereso? Now, half the fun of creating your own Christological heresy would surely be in writing your own gospel and pretending that it is thousands of years old and claiming that “the church” represses religious expression. I would like to call my particular religious expression “the Gospel of Bobo,” and I’d like to pretend that a bunch of disenfranchised Gnostics got surly and drunk one night and wrote this. (I have used the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Philip as my model.):

One day, while Jesus was in Judea, he sat down while his disciples were in prayer and began to laugh. “Master, why do you laugh while we offer a prayer to God? Is it not just and right to do?” The Lord replied, “I do not laugh at you, but I laugh because of what I am: the indwelling of the enlightened divine self-generated monkey.” And the disciples became angry and blasphemed in their hearts, but he rebuked them. “Why are you angry? Is it not because you are unlike the monkey? Was not Zaccheus counted more righteous because he climbed the tree, and the snake more wicked because he dwelt in dust? Behold, while the serpent spoke clearly he was all of falsehood, but the monkey who grunts in words of mystery is all of truth.”

And the disciple whom Jesus loved, Mary Magdalene, asked him, “Tell us, are there many monkeys, or only one?” And Jesus answered her, “I tell you, the aeon of the Old World Monkey is rapidly passing away, to be replaced by the great and boundless realm of the New World Monkey. Yet what is ‘the New World Monkey?’ For names given to the worldly are very deceptive. While some have called you ‘Mary,’ because they perceive you only as Mary, I proclaim you ‘Monkey,’ as I see within you a luminous fluffy cloud, and lo, it is anthropoidal.” When the disciples saw Mary thus set apart for glory, they said to him, "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Savior answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you like her? Because, duh, you are not a woman, and I have monkey needs!”

A clarification comment: I realize that some might be scandalized by the last sentence of this entry, so I want to clarify my purposes. In the Gospel of Philip, after Jesus kisses Mary Magdalene on the lips, the disciples get jealous and basically ask him, "What's she got that we haven't got?" and, well, the disciples couldn't be so stupid that they couldn't guess. (Dan Brown certainly did.) My point here is not to play with the idea of a sexual relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene so much as to say that the Gospel of Philip includes some incredibly stupid dialogue.