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Is man expected to create God and give it life in the reverse of the Genesis myth?
Two of the most antagonistic, opinionated people in the discussion group were arguing via e-mail about some woman who had written a book that attempted to sell the idea that Lazarus was not only Jesus's secret homosexual lover, but that he was one of the original disciples, and wrote one of the books of the Bible too.
The fundamentalist paper tigers roared, and Einstein's secret boy lover rushed to the defense of the rights of homosexuals, and that nobody had the right to judge men who love men. Lovely... eh?
Sam ignored the unpleasantries and wrote about the etymological roots of the careactor Lazarus's name:
El eazar [El izar] = God in disguise [God incognito].
Sam didn't clarify which language he derived this definition from. Usually ancient Greek or Arabic or some combination of both. The papyrus copy of the Gospel of Thomas this group discusses had been translated into Coptic language by the time it was found in Egypt in 1945. Some researchers claim it's older than the Catholic version.
If Sam is correct in his assessment of what the nayme "Lazarus" could possibly imply, then the biblical story of how Jesus raised Lazurus from the dead takes on a more enigmatic, mystical me-and-thee-ing (meaning).
The reason Sam's statement piques my interest comes from our mutual lengthy study of the 114 sayings in the Gospel of Thomas. Lazarus isn't mentioned in the sayings, but other "clues" are. Here are two of them:
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22 Jesus saw some babies nursing. He said to his disciples, "These nursing babies are like those who enter the kingdom."
They said to him, "Then shall we enter the kingdom as babies?"
Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom]."
29 Jesus said, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.
Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
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My introductory statement figuratively reveals my reaction to Sam's translation of the term "Lazarus". This metaphor seems to imply that each of us are responsible for creating God by raising it from the dead.
Whether such an idea has legs or not is too early for me to tell. I'm easy. I get excited about a lotta stuff that eventually proves out to be fool's gold. It's part of the deal. "You win some. You lose some. Some get rained out."
The part about creating God in our own image is an interesting direction. In my remembering vision the pearl was busily creating all sorts of physical beings and breathing life into them. Then, totally abandoning them when they didn't perform as expected.
After a couple of billion earth years of repetitiously doing that, the notion of attempting to create God might represent the ultimate challenge. The inherent problem for the pearls of great price is that their ability to create is limited to what they can imitate and/or mimick.
The only-est thing that matters, in that artistic regard, is what can a creative spirit that can only create by being a copycat use as it's model for God?
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
