Yule Greetings and Wishes for you and yours

As many folks know, the celebration of Yule, the winter Solstice predates "Christmas". Yule is a solstice holiday, for many of our ancestors in the northern hemisphere it was the "return" of the sun (from here on in til June the days will now get longer).

But, considering that the holiday is now known primarily as Christmas, I was thinking I should share the following.

A cousin of mine from Florida sent me a book recently: Beyond Belief, The Secret Gospel of Thomas by Elaine Pagels. It's turning out to be a great read. Here is the excerpt I wanted to post...

But don't the...gospels also say that Jesus is God? Don't Matthew and Mark, for example, call Jesus "son of God," and doesn't this mean that Jesus is virtually--almost genetically--the same as God? Like most people who grow up familiar with Christian tradition, I assumed that all the gospels say the same thing or, at most, offer variations on a single theme. Because Matthew, Mark, and Luke share a similar perspective, scholars call these gospels synoptic (literally, "seeing together"). Only in graduate school, when I investigated each gospel, so far as possible, in its historical context, did I see how radical is John's claim that Jesus is God manifest human form.

Although Mark and the other evangelists use titles that Christians today often take as indicating Jesus' divinity, such as "son of God" and "messiah". In Mark's own time these titles designated human roles. The Christians who translated these titles into English fifteen centuries later believed they showed that Jesus was uniquely related to God, and so they capitalized them--a linguistic convention that does not occur in Greek. But Mark's contemporaries would most likely have seen Jesus as a man--although one gifted, as mark says, with the power of the holy spirit, and divinely appointed to rule in the coming kingdom of God.

Now having posted that, I can in a clear conscience wish you and yours a very, Very, Merry Christmas!