After a near-death experience, many people say that they have become strangers to themselves in their lives. And that again is comparable to Plato’s allegory of the cave.
If you have realised through a near-death experience that you are in the cave, so to speak, and that your home is actually somewhere else entirely, namely outside the cave, then you have to make friends with this cave all over again. You will be able to say “yes” to the world in a different way than before.
Gunter Friedrich (LOGON) interviews Prof Dr Enno Edzard Popkes (Kiel University, Germany)
G.F. Mr Popkes, I am delighted to have the opportunity to interview you. You are a professor of the history and archaeology of early Christianity and its environment and you also conduct research into death and dying. A number of your publications deal with Platonism, the Gospel of Thomas and near-death experiences. What prompted you to research this trinity?
E.E.P. I’ll start biographically. The first topic that moved me very strongly in my youth was the subject of near-death experiences. I was about 13 or 14 years old and came across Raymond Moody’s book by chance in a Christian bookshop and was immediately enthusiastic about it and asked my friends what they thought of it. They said: “It’s all hallucinations, it can’t be true. And it doesn’t agree with the Bible either”.
That spurred me on so much that I decided early on to study philosophy and theology in the hope of getting to know the subject better. But nothing came of it. I then started looking into areas that were close to it. In early Christianity, there are many phenomena that are comparable to near-death experiences. I approached the subject indirectly, so to speak. Today I can say that the topics of near-death experiences, Platonism and early Christianity fit together wonderfully and open up the possibility of discussing what happened in the history of early Christianity at that time.
G.F. What significance does this have for our time?
E.E.P. We have a great anniversary ahead of us, the two thousandth anniversary of Jesus’ ministry. Many interpretations of the figure and message of Jesus that were in circulation at the time were condemned and suppressed, including the Gospel of Thomas. As a historian, I see it as my task to draw these testimonies and the discoveries that have been made in the meantime into the history of early Christianity. In my opinion, it can only be valuable for theology and the church to hear those voices that were suppressed at the time. After all, we live in an age of enlightenment, which means that we should decide for ourselves what is plausible and convincing. We can take a look: Has something valuable been lost that we should be discussing today? And I say quite clearly: Yes. Valuable voices have been lost.
G.F. What do you find most exciting about the Gospel of Thomas?
E.E.P. The most exciting thing is the contrast between what I dealt with in my doctoral thesis and my post-doctoral thesis. My doctoral thesis was about the Johannine writings and in particular the Gospel of John, and my post-doctoral thesis was about the Gospel of Thomas.
Both works are linked to the idea that Jesus says: I am the light. This word of Jesus exists in two versions, in John and in Thomas. The main difference between the two writings is the consequences. The Gospel of John says: Jesus is an incarnation of God, but only he. The Gospel of Thomas says: Jesus is an incarnation of God, but all are to attain to the incarnation of God. This is the core difference between the contrasting interpretations of the figure and message of Jesus. My colleagues who deal with this and I myself are convinced that the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of John are not related to each other by chance, but that they arose in some kind of connection with each other. However, the discourse between these two works was broken off. Today we can take it up again and revitalise it.
G.F. The Gospel of Thomas formulates a profound realisation: the kingdom of heaven is within you. That is a statement of universal significance.
E.E.P. Absolutely. The Gospel of Thomas is a Christian text, but the term Christ does not appear in it at all. The text has a universal claim. Jesus says there in Logion (Jesus Word) 77: I am the light that is above all. I am the universe. The universe has come forth from me and the universe strives back to me. Pick up a stone and I am under it and split a piece of wood and I am in it. In other words, it is omnipresent and is therefore naturally also present in every human being. It is a universal claim.
G. F. Whether you call that which underlies every human being spiritually and mentally Jesus or something else is irrelevant. The message is just as valid for a Buddhist or a Hindu or anyone else as it is for someone who calls themselves a Christian.
E.E.P. I see it the same way. As a Christian and as a scientist, I stand in the Christian tradition. The very concrete figure of Jesus is a human point of reference for me,
to which I connect in my research. I do not thematise God as a metaphysical, impersonal principle, but as a concrete figure.
The fascinating thing is that the Gospel of Thomas, just like Plato’s world view, for example, has a highly reflective concept of transmigration and soul growth. Jesus is then an example of a perfect incarnation of God that is possible.
G.F. Now you could say: Wonderful, I’ll study this scripture and then I’ll come to a deep self-knowledge. But this scripture begins with quite an imposition. Right at the beginning, as an introduction, it says: ” These are the secret words spoken by the living Jesus. And it continues in Logion 1: Whoever finds the interpretation of these words will not taste death. There is not a single scripture in the Bible that says anything like this. How should we deal with this?
E.E.P. As an historian, my first task is to describe the concept behind it, and only in a second step do I come to the question of what consequences it has. The fact that there was a secret and a public message is thematised in various texts. The Gospel of Thomas says: ” These are the secret words of Jesus, and it is also understandable why they were secret. Because they were life-threatening in the truest sense of the word. When the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas describes himself as the divine light, this was enough for the Jews to execute him for blasphemy. Incidentally, this is also explicitly emphasised in the Gospel of John: Immediately after the Johannine Jesus’ statement that he was consubstantial with God, according to the narrative, Jesus’ fellow Jews are said to have tried to stone him (John 10:30-31). What is even more offensive, however, is that Jesus not only says: I am the light, but that he says: This light is in all of you. The divine is in every living being.
The statement: Whoever finds the interpretation of these words will not taste death is easy to understand. Man can recognise that at the moment of his death he does not die at all, but leaves the material body. Platonically speaking, the immortal part of the soul leaves the body. This is exactly what we see in near-death experiences.
G.F.: Could the reference to the “secret words” and the emphasis that you become immortal when you understand them be interpreted differently? The secret words could be messages from one’s innermost being that one cannot express in their actual depth and meaning, words that lead into the mysterious, the secret of one’s innermost being and emerge from it. When it says: … he will not taste death, it could mean that man is transformed by approaching that which is deepest within him. The words are spoken from the sphere of the immortal and they want to cause the consciousness to turn towards it and allow itself to be seized by it.
E.E.P.: Yes, certainly. I would add another concept from the Platonic tradition here, namely memory. According to Plato, the soul is actually omniscient and has only forgotten its knowledge here and now in this life. However, the closer it gets to its divine home, the faster it can remember. And this is probably also the phenomenon that was triggered in Jesus. We can ask ourselves how it actually came about that Jesus began to work as a healer and missionary at around the age of 30. I think he must have experienced something that gave him this self-confidence that enabled him to say: I am the light: I am the light. In my opinion, it was the desert experience. Because after that he began his missionary work. He was able to remember the state of perfection of his soul and proclaimed his message on this basis. Jesus never wrote anything down. It was only written about him, and this is partly comparable, partly different, partly contradictory. We can discuss the contrasting interpretations of the figure and message of Jesus right up to the present day. I do this full-time with great pleasure. Valuable voices were lost back then that we need to reconsider today.
G.F. Could it be that something was realised in Jesus that had already emerged in Plato? Plato spoke of the inner man, the aspect of the soul that is perfect.
E.E.P. I agree with that.
G.F. Is the Gospel of Thomas perhaps a scripture of initiation? Right at the beginning, Jesus formulates the steps that lead to the immortal and wants to take the listener/reader there, as it were. He says: ” First you must seek, then you can find. When you have found, you will be amazed, or, in another translation: shaken. And when you are shaken or amazed, then you will reign and find peace, in another textual tradition: then you will reign over the universe. These are the deep steps of a soul that is on the path of remembrance.
E.E.P. Exactly. By discussing this anew today, we have the opportunity to approach the mystical tradition of early Christianity in a completely new way, and we can see how this enables new ways of interpreting the message of Jesus. This can result in new approaches to Christian religiosity.
G.F. And now there is a second point: It is not only about understanding, but also about seeing. Right at the beginning of the fifth saying, Jesus talks about opening your eyes to the immortal: Recognise what is before your face and what is hidden from you will be revealed to you. This could mean that the innermost being gives the strength, indeed the memory, that it can be seen.
E.E.P. Logion 5 says: Recognise what is before you. What do we actually see in front of us? It is the material environment. Our perception relates to it. If you see through the external in the truest sense of the word, i.e. look beyond matter, you enter the spiritual dimension, which is so important in this work.
G.F. Later it says: The kingdom of the Father is spread out over the whole world and people don’t see it. Plato says: First look at things on the outside and examine their characteristics. Then you can take the next step towards spiritual perception.
E.E.P. To explain this to the reader: Plato says that we have to distinguish between the images and the archetypes. In the allegory of the cave, he explains that we only see the shadow images of reality, as if on the back wall of a cave, and that we believe these shadow images to be reality. But they are actually only projections of things that are outside the cave. There they are multidimensional and, as it were, “coloured”, while we can only perceive them as shadowy and, as it were, two-dimensional. For Plato, this applies to the entire world in which we live.
G.F. But you can only perceive yourself and the world as shadows if you already have spiritual eyes.
E.E.P. That would be the next distinction. In the Platonic tradition, a distinction is made between young, middle-aged and older souls. Depending on how far a soul has developed, it is able to understand and comprehend.
G.F. Is it possible to see things as they really are through near-death experiences?
E.E.P. No, that is only one approach. Anyone who has a near-death experience is quite surprised at what they perceive. After these experiences, people often have problems understanding their experiences and categorising them correctly in their lives. With a platonic view of the world, near-death experiences become more comprehensible. It is easier to categorise them. This is an important element of my pastoral work. I offer ways of thinking.
G.F. People then realise that the soul lives on. But now comes the big difference. The Gospel of Thomas tells us what actually has to take place for the soul’s heavenly nature to emerge, the form with which it can enter the kingdom of heaven. And this form is not created by discarding the material body. In the 22nd logion Jesus says: “The heavenly body (in its invisible, very fine structure) is characterised by the fact that the duality in which we now live becomes a unity, the inner becomes like the outer, the upper like the lower, the male like the female. The spirit-soul body has new eyes, new hands, new feet, and we become a new image in this heavenly body. Now we are a kind of image of an archetype, but then we are a likeness.
E.E.P. This is a central motif in the Gospel of Thomas. Jesus’ word no. 108 speaks of becoming like Jesus. It is a Christian adaptation of a Platonic world view. According to this, every soul has the goal of becoming as equal to God as possible. In the Platonic-Christian tradition, this means becoming like Jesus. According to the Gospel of Thomas, every human being can become one with Jesus.
G.F. But that has to happen first.
E.E.P. That is a long process. Meister Eckhart is important in this tradition. He definitely couldn’t have known the Gospel of Thomas because it had long been lost at that time. A good friend from the philosophical tradition, who unfortunately died far too early and who had a chair in Heidelberg (Jens Halfwassen), said when I gave a lecture on the Gospel of Thomas: ‘This is clearly the Gospel of Meister Eckhart.
G.F. The soul spark that Meister Eckhart spoke of is the immortal being in the soul. It is also the inner God of Ibn Arabi, the Sufi master. He is called the greatest of the Sufi masters. And that is the exciting thing, that these depths move through all religions on the same level.
But how does the heavenly body come into being? In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus speaks sentences that point to the transmigration of souls. You do not have to and cannot make it in one incarnation. Soul growth takes place with the help of incarnations.
Lessing reintroduced this into the Western tradition.
E.E.P. Lessing was one of the first to try to re-establish the idea of transmigration of souls in Europe. It is completely undisputed that we had a highly reflective theory of transmigration in ancient Europe, especially in the various Platonic schools. And there are analogies with near-death experiences. I know many people who, as a result of a near-death experience, say: I have not only realised that my soul lives on after the death of my body, but that it also lived before my present existence. They suddenly start using platonic images of their own accord to reflect on their own situation. The idea of transmigration as soul growth is very strong.
G.F. If you look in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it says that when you die, you come into direct contact with the primordial light. When you are mature enough to absorb this primordial light, you leave the cycle of incarnations. But normally souls do not go in this direction. The light is too bright and they turn away. Hölderlin also writes about this in his epic Bread and Wine. So you need soul growth and the purification that goes with it. But how does this harmonise with Christ’s act of redemption?
E.E.P. My task as a religious historian is to show first of all that there were very different ways of understanding what the act of redemption was supposed to have been, and therefore also very different interpretations of Jesus’ death. There is the highly reflective interpretation as an atoning death for the sin of the world and mankind. The Gospel of Thomas does not recognise this idea and instead says that redemption is mediated by the realisation that we are part of the divine primordial ground. It is a matter of unfolding that divine primordial ground, namely in becoming like Jesus (Gospel of Thomas 108).
G.F. For those who believe exclusively in historical events, it is quite a challenge when the incarnations come into play. Because faith, which is seen as the essential thing, does not necessarily mean soul growth.
It does not yet guarantee that one is ready and able to enter the primordial light.
In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says: ” Whoever is close to me is close to the fire. The soul must purify itself in order to be able to live in the fire of the kingdom of heaven.
If – in addition to the historical view – the path of Jesus in the Gospel of John is seen as an inner process, the healings and the sayings “I am” become the expression of an inner transformation. The heavenly invisible body emerges and develops. And believing in it becomes an inner awakening process. Then the contents of the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas come closer together.
E.E.P. It is very important to me to say that it is not either John or Thomas, but both together that should be brought into the dialogue. This is very important for theology and the church. At Kiel University, I am as neutral a historian of religion as possible, but in my voluntary church work I am very specifically interested in anchoring the theological elements in the soul.
I work with the hospice movement. Many hospice workers, but also people who accompany a loved one as they die, realise that the dying have so-called deathbed visions. These are perceptions that change the dying person. They describe relatives who have already died coming to collect them. The accompanying person, for example the family member, does not see this, but they can recognise that the dying person perceives something like this.
G.F. And this requires the soul’s ability to distinguish whether it is already the kingdom of heaven in which the relatives of the dying person are located, or whether they are still preparatory spheres in which purifications take place and which lead to a further incarnation, because there are still many earthly remains in the soul.
E.E.P: One of the differences between near-death experiences and biblical expectations is that one does not enter a final judgement, but that the life one has led is perceived in a kind of life film. There is no judgement, but rather a self-assessment of the soul. This can be very practical in life. The main criterion is almost always whether my actions were characterised by love, kindness, justice and such virtues. So it’s not about how much money I’ve earned or how famous I’ve become, but about living a virtuous life. If I organise my life in such a way that I can contribute to the growth of love, I am on the right path.
I then know how to honour and make the most of every single day.
If, in my work as a scientist and in my voluntary work in the church, I can encourage my fellow human beings to consciously deal with the phenomenon of death and with phenomena close to death, then for me this is a form of charity in action. You can give people comfort and hope in the face of transience and death. And you can consciously prepare yourself for the last great journey of this life, i.e. death.
G.F. Is there such a thing as being a stranger in the world?
E.E.P. After a near-death experience, many people say that they have become strangers to themselves in their lives. And that again is comparable to the allegory of the cave. If you have realised through a near-death experience that you are in the cave, so to speak, and that your home is actually somewhere else entirely, namely outside the cave, then you have to make friends with this cave all over again. You will be able to say “yes” to the world in a different way than before. You are a stranger, but the important thing is to fully embrace life in the here and now.
G.F. Thank you very much, Mr Popkes, for this interview.
