About Pastor Steve

Where did all this come from? 

I enjoyed a very normal secular upbringing in a university town where my step dad was on the faculty.  As a teenager I began experiencing a mystical attraction to ancient texts.  In college I began learning Greek and Latin.  I was privileged to have some amazing instructors, only a few of whom are listed here.  These include Norman O. Brown at UC Santa Cruz and Henri J.M. Nouwen at the Yale Divinity School.   Nobie taught me to love the text, and to to make it part of myself by memorization.  Henri taught me to be a pastor and to love the people first and foremost, above and beyond any of the dogmatic rules and prescriptions of the church.  R. Lansing Hicks taught me Hebrew at YDS.  Bonnie Kingsley taught me archaeology and iconography at UCSC.  She taught me how to read an ancient object as a text.  My career in the ministry has allowed me the time to delve deeply into the ancient texts of scripture.  I get to spend every week writing a sermon and applying a Biblical text to the situations we all face every day.    

In 1999 I discovered the work of Robert Eisenman by reading his book James the Brother of Jesus.  I felt strongly that Eisenman’s interpretation of Christian origins could not possibly be right, and so I set about reading all his sources in detail, a process that took years.  I read the Dead Sea Scrolls, Eusebius, Josephus, the Pseudo Clementine literature, and the Nag Hammadi gnostic texts.  I had to conclude that Dr. Eisenman is not only correct, but his work leads us to an essential recognition of the connection that exists between a correct interpretation of the historic Jesus and the tragedy of Eurocentric supremacy, antisemitism, and racial supremacy.  Eisenman led me to see the roots of Christian antisemitism.  His work has changed my life and the work presented here would never have been written had I not been privileged to read his books.  I have never met Dr. Eisenman, but if I could, I would “fall at his feet.”  (For the textual critics of the future, that is an inside joke!)   

I also have enjoyed the privilege of being a faculty member at a community college teaching world religions, religion in America, geography, critical thinking, reading, writing, and whatever else I was asked to teach.  In that capacity I was free to gain insight from other holy texts, including the Quran, the Upanishads, the Rig Veda, the Zohar, and the Dhammapada. I have been blessed to work with students whose lived experience has been diverse and different from my own.   

I stumbled upon Arthur Schopenhauer, and he inspired me to labor through Duperron’s obscure rendition of parts of the Upanishads.  He also led me to read Berkeley, Bergson, and Sarte.  Then there was Proust, Derrida, Whitehead, Jung, H.P. Lovecraft, and Philip K. Dick.  

Since my time at Santa Cruz when many of my friends were physics students I have been a student of Chaos theory in its various manifestations.  I am indebted to Herbert Shaw in his amazing work entitled Craters, Cosmos, and Chronicles, a New Theory of Earth.  I spent many an hour with Douglas Hofstadter’s monumental work Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.  Stephen Wolfram A New Kind of Science occupied several months of my life.  

Finally, and as a crucial bottom line, Susan Sontag opened a crucial door for me with the posthumous publication of her journal entitled As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh, for which I will be forever grateful.   

All of this scholarly material has been stewing in my brain for years now, leading to the creation of this website.  The world we live in has many attachments to doctrinal systems of order, many of which may be challenged or even feel threatened by this broad project.  I have chosen not to use my full name or to supply a lot of specific identifying information here for two reasons.  I do not wish to face the wrath of fundamentalists on the Christian right, and I do not want to cause difficulty for the institutions where I am employed or have been employed.  Also, I feel strongly that we discredit ourselves when we struggle with each other to climb up the great ladder of public recognition.  I am happy to remain “Pastor Steve” for the duration.

Thank you for reading this! 

I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think. – Socrates