Ch. 9, On the Way to Rome
“Son of Man: Urantia,” 2nd edition
On the Way to Rome
The father and son from India who hired Jesus were named Gonod and Ganid. Jesus had learned the basics of their language while he was in Damascus helping to translate documents from the Greek. Their trip to Rome and around the Mediterranean Sea lasted almost two years, from April 26, A.D. 22 until December 10, A.D. 23. This period covered Jesus’ twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth years of mortal life. During the journey Jesus spent about half of his day tutoring Ganid and interpreting for Gonod, and for the rest of the day he would wander around meeting people. This journey to and around Rome gave Jesus first-hand experience of the best and worst of the then known world, and from Gonod and Ganid he learned about the cultures in India, China, and the Far East.
Jesus, Gonod, and Ganid made their way to Rome stopping at Joppa, Caesarea, Alexandria, Lasea in Crete, Carthage, Malta, Syracuse, Messina, Naples, and finally Capua. From there they traveled the Appian way into the heart of the Roman Empire. After their stay in Rome the travelers made their way to Tarentum, and then sailed to Nicopolis, Corinth, and Athens. From there they went through Troas to Ephesus, and then sailed to Rhodes, Cyprus, and Antioch. Going overland they went south to Sidon and Damascus where they joined a caravan going through Thapsacus and Larissa. They visited Babylon and Ur before journeying through Susa and finally arriving at Charax, which was where Gonod and Ganid said good-bye to Jesus and returned home to India.
At Joppa: The Talk about Jonah
While they were at Joppa, Gonod met with Simon, a wealthy tanner. Simon’s interpreter was a Philistine named Gadiah. This young man was a truth seeker, and without knowing it he had found in Jesus the actual truth then present on Earth. Gadiah came to believe in Jesus, and years later did much to influence Simon to become a Christian.
One evening as Jesus and Gadiah were walking by the shore, Gadiah pointed out the spot where legend said that Jonah had set sail on his ill-fated voyage to Tarshish; Gadiah asked Jesus if he thought that Jonah had really been swallowed whole by the whale. Jesus sensed that this story was important to Gadiah, and that it had already taught him that a person cannot run away from their problems.
Jesus told Gadiah that in a way we are all Jonahs: that each of us has a duty to live God’s will, and in doing so we are influenced by truth and righteousness. But whenever we shirk that duty and try to run away and hide in material pleasures, we are controlled by forces other than truth and righteousness. Our actions in this first life dictate the type of spiritual influence we receive. Our choice to do or not to do God’s will determines our success in attaining Paradise and eternal life. If our will is to do God’s will then the forces of truth and righteousness come forth to assist us in knowing and doing that will. But if we chose to shirk our duty that choice moves us away from God and we are then led by the personal demons hidden in the dark side of our personality. Over time these choices set a pattern hard to escape, and we lose the desire to return to God; for the sake of selfishness and short-term pleasure we lose our ability to create truth, beauty, and goodness. The whale that swallowed Jonah was not a real whale but rather his own selfishness, and it would have led to death and darkness had he not turned his heart to God.
No matter how far people fall—no matter what they do or how low, defeated, or discouraged they become—if they turn back to God with all of their hearts and open themselves to truth and righteousness they will be saved and enter a new life of unlimited service and potential: they will eventually attain paradise and eternal life. But beware. This is a slippery and dangerous slope: a person does not have to wait until they are in the stomach of the beast to choose God, and it is best that they do not because once there they may not want to return to God. In other words, our Father never decides to rejects us; over time we come to reject him.
The Talk about Good and Evil
Before leaving Joppa, Jesus and Gadiah talked about good and evil and how most people believe he created both. Gadiah was confused, and he wanted to know why God who is supposed to be only true and good would make us suffer evil? Why was there injustice in the world, he asked?
Jesus told Gadiah that God did not create evil—that not only is he pure truth, beauty, and goodness but that in fact only truth, beauty, and goodness are real. Evil has no existence on its own: it can only arise in the absence of truth, beauty, and goodness resulting from the fabric of cosmic reality being torn by an entity rejecting God—truth, beauty, and goodness. In other words, God does not create evil: it arises from human imperfection and our ignorance, immaturity, and outright rejection of life and light. Our free will creates the potential for error, which is evil, and then our deliberate choosing of evil after we know it is not God’s will makes that act a sin. Both the reality of truth, beauty, and goodness and the unreality of evil will exist side by side until the harvest at the end where only truth, beauty, and goodness continue to exist.
At Caesarea
Caesarea was the capital of Palestine and the home of the Roman governor. By the time Jesus, Gonod, and Ganid arrived in port one of the steering paddles for their boat had broken. During the day Jesus helped repair the boat, and at night he walked with Ganid along the top of the wall surrounding the harbor. Caesarea was built in such a way that the city used the ocean tides to flush the sewers and streets four times every twenty-four hours. Ganid had never seen anything like this, and he enjoyed Jesus’ explanations about how it all worked. There was a huge temple dedicated to the emperor Augustus, and Jesus and Ganid watched plays in the amphitheater that could seat twenty-thousand people.
Jesus met a Taoist merchant from Mongolia who was staying at the same inn as they were. This man believed in a universal God, and he never forgot Jesus’ belief that we should live every day in submission to God’s will. When he returned to Mongolia he taught this wisdom, and as a result his oldest son and his son and grandson after him became priests. Jesus’ mission was centered in Palestine, but it was these chance face-to-face meetings with people that first spread his teachings around the world.
One day when Jesus was helping to repair the paddle for the boat, a young man working with him spoke up and disagreed with Jesus when he heard him say that God cared for his children. This man’s name was Anaxand, and he argued that if God cared for him then why did he have to suffer so much under his foreman who was cruel and unfair.
Jesus responded by turning the focus back onto the young man. He told Anaxand that maybe the work foreman had been put there by God to learn from him. Jesus explained that since Anaxand knew how to be fair and kind that he could teach the foreman how to be the same by example—that Anaxand could act like the salt that would make this man more appealing by using the power of goodness that he, Anaxand, had in himself to win over the evil in his foreman. Jesus went on to say that a person’s decision to be a conduit letting spiritual light shine on someone else who is in darkness is the noblest of mortal adventures. Your responsibility, Jesus told Anaxand, is to use your blessing of greater truth to meet your work foreman’s need for truth: if you would save a drowning man’s mortal life from the sea, how much more important would it be to save a spiritually drowning man’s soul?
Again, Jesus’ teachings took root. Both Anaxand, a Greek, and his work foreman, a Roman, became important members of the church that Philip later founded right there in Caesarea. Anaxand became the steward of a Roman centurion named Cornelius, who himself then became a Christian through Peter’s preaching. Anaxand continued to spread Jesus’ message until he was caught up in a Roman slaughter of twenty thousand Jews and killed by accident.
Ganid was a keen student and he studied how Jesus lived. Like Jesus’ family, Ganid could not understand why he spent so much of his time talking to strangers. Jesus’ explanation was simple: he said that when a person knows God, no one is a stranger. If God is in your mind and God is in my mind and God is in everyone else’s minds then that makes us all siblings—and in a more real way than if we all had the same human parents. Our job, Jesus told Ganid, is to know our human family and to learn to love them. This, he said, is one of the most wonderful experiences of life on Earth.
As this night wore on, Ganid changed the subject to will power. Again he was confused: there is God’s will, but people also have free choice of will. He wanted to know the difference between them. Jesus explained that God’s will is the overriding force in creation that we experience as ultimate truth, beauty, and goodness—it is the power continually influencing everything that has the potential to become perfect. God’s will is the base of all being, the realm where all is one and from which all arises: the essence of nonduality. But a person’s free will is confined to that person and conditioned by the ways of the material realm: human free will demonstrates the sum and substance of what a person chooses to be. If a person chooses God’s will regardless of other options that person will become increasingly like God.
Jesus’ answers only resulted in more questions. Earlier that day Jesus and Ganid had been playing with a smart shepherd dog. People back then held various beliefs about animals having spiritual powers, and Ganid wanted to know if animals could also choose to become like God: did the shepherd have the will power to choose God’s will and could it have a soul?
Jesus said no, that animals do not have souls or spiritual power. He explained that people are moral beings: that we can chose God’s will or not. This is because we have the mental power to reflect on what is happening around us, and then determine the best choice based on our highest eternal and spiritual values. We have the ability to think, to determine what is of spiritual value, and to then make a choice based on that reasoning. But animals can only be taught to follow commands. They do not have the mental power to make spiritual distinctions or grow into an eternal soul. Humans are conscious that we are conscious—we are superconscious. But animals are not: they are aware that they are alive, but they are not conscious of that awareness. Animals can know people but they cannot know God. Jesus also said that other beliefs about humans incarnating into animals or transferring their souls into them are also false.
The next day Ganid’s father, Gonod, entered the discussion and Jesus more directly explained human will and eternal survival. Jesus said that people who only use their will to satisfy their material existence will eventually die off: the less their mind is on God the less they can look to God. We lose what we do not use. In time these people cease to be of spiritual value, and thus they cease to exist. This is not punishment, but rather the result of not using what they were originally given. But people who base their decisions on moral and spiritual values grow in their ability to identify with God. With the others each decision moves them away from God: with these people each decision moves them closer to God. Every moral choice increases the ability to make even greater moral choices, and this process eventually transforms the person into an eternal soul. To sum up the conversation, Jesus said that human free will expresses people’s creative desire to become Godlike by bringing forth truth, beauty, and goodness through their daily decisions.
At Alexandria
From Caesarea the three sailed to Alexandria, Egypt, the home of Pharos’ famous lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. This was the first lighthouse ever built, and it was on an island at the entrance to the harbor that was connected to the shore by an underground tunnel. Just like Palestine was the crossroads for the overland routes connecting the known world, Alexandria was the sea-going center for commerce across Asia, Africa, and Europe. As Jesus, Gonad, and Ganid approached this stunning city and saw its magnificent beacon of lifesaving light, Jesus told Ganid that when he returned to India he was going to be like this lighthouse and lead people from the darkness of death to the harbor of salvation and eternal life. Ganid squeezed Jesus’ hand and promised that he would.
Alexandria was a huge city: next to Rome it was the largest in their known world. It was also the home of the largest Jewish synagogue, and the seventy ruling elders of the Alexandrian Sanhedrin. After the three were settled in and had seen some of the sites, Gonod went about his business while Jesus and Ganid went to the library.
The Alexandrian library was the most magnificent in the world. It held almost a million writings from Rome, India, Greece, Parthia, Palestine and even as far away as China and Japan. Jesus and Ganid spent part of each day exploring the library and discussing the different religions in the world. Jesus taught Ganid the truth that each one contained about God, rather than what they held wrong about God. Jesus would always add that the Jewish idea of Yahweh as the Lord God of Israel, which came from Melchizedek and the covenant made with Abraham long ago, was closer to the truth of the Universal Father than any of the other religions at that time.
Jesus helped Ganid take notes and make a collection of the teachings in the various world religions. They kept the list to just those religions that recognized the idea of a Universal God over all others. They left out the Romans because their idea of religion was just worshiping the emperor, and they left out the Greeks because the Greeks had philosophy but no God, at least no personal God. As for the many mystery cults, Jesus and Ganid decided that they were just confused ideas from ancient religions. It was not until the end of their stay in Rome that Ganid finally organized these notes, and when he did he was surprised at how much they all agreed on the character and existence of an eternal God.
The museum at Alexandria was more like a university: it was the most important center of learning in that part of the world and it was filled with art, science, and literature; the best professors of the time gave daily lectures on a wide range of subjects. After a couple of weeks translating these talks for Ganid, the young man told Jesus that he, Jesus, knew more than these professors. Ganid went on to say that he was going to have his father arrange for Jesus to lecture here and teach the professors what he had taught them. Jesus enjoyed the idea but said no, that these men would not appreciate him trying to teach them anything. He explained that when people take too much pride in what they know about material things, that it can result in stopping them from learning more—or at least it stops them from thinking that they can learn more. A real teacher, Jesus told Ganid, was a person that always stayed open to learning no matter how much they already knew.
The Talk on Reality
Before leaving Alexandria, Jesus and Ganid had a long conversation with one of the government professors at the library. This man lectured on Plato’s teachings, and Ganid had many questions about the Greek’s philosophy. Jesus said that parts of Plato’s ideas were correct, but that most of them were not. He used this opportunity to teach Ganid the nature of reality in the universe.
Jesus said that the source of all true reality is the Infinite, which is the base of all being. Material things are just time-space approximations of the Paradise pattern in the universal mind of God. The reality of the Supreme Being projected across the universe combines the realities of the mental, physical, and spiritual realms—which are causation, self-consciousness, and progressive selfhood—all in divine and perfect order. While our universe is the ever-changing original source of causation, self-consciousness and the subsequent spiritual experience are always changeless.
When we keep God’s will foremost in our minds and hearts and we conform our finite will to God’s divine will in harmonious perfection, we reach our highest state of divinity in time and eternity. To achieve oneness with God we must integrate the causation forming the physical world with the self-consciousness arising from the divine gift of personality we received from God. Personality is what makes individual souls unique. Personality is the essence—or flavor—of our progressive selfhood allowing us to coexist with other entities in a universe that is both ever-changing and forever changeless. Our personality is our identity.
Life is adaptable, and always progressing toward God consciousness. Neither a singular focus on science nor a singular focus on spirit can help a person recognize the depth of true universe reality. To adapt to universe reality we have to continually struggle for higher values: to attain onement with God. When a person does not reach for God it causes a cosmic disturbance. That person instead moves away from God and becomes mentally segregated from the family of God. These people eventually lose their spirit guide because they lose any desire to know God. The final result is annihilation of their existence: their personality ceases to exist because their daily free will decisions do not increase their potential to serve God but instead destroy their reason for being until there is none left.
Jesus then told Ganid about the difference between truth and knowledge. He explained that knowledge comes from the mind; that it is not spiritual. Knowledge is knowing facts that you can tell to others. Truth is experienced: it cannot be known from study or explanation. Truth is not a thing, but rather the experience of a developing soul in a mind conscious of God. The knowledge we learn combined with the experience of living God’s will, is wisdom.
Jesus then spoke to Ganid about evil. He said that evil was imperfection—error—and that it happens when a person misinterprets universe realities. If the goal for the universe is to eventually become one with God in perfection, then anything not perfect is error, or evil, and has the potential to become sin. In the material realm this imperfection and misinterpretation of universe reality is seen through science and observation, and at the moral level it is known through our human experience. The possibility of error is an inherent part of learning in the journey from the temporal to the eternal.
Evil is not from God, it is anything that God did not create. The potential for evil exists because people are incomplete beings that gain wisdom through experience—by making mistakes. But evil becomes sin when we either do not learn or we deliberately make choices against God’s will. Since we are in a universe that is continually progressing, our thought must also continually progress. Any idea that remains static—whether in society, science, politics, or religion—eventually becomes false and potentially evil. We are expected to continually peel away the layers of our partial understanding of God and in the process continually refine our highest ideals.
The next morning Jesus, Gonod, and Ganid set sail for Lasea on the island of Crete.
On the Island of Crete
The three stopped at Crete to rest: they needed time to play and wander around the countryside. While on the island they talked to many people and planted the seeds of the fatherhood of God. These conversations with the Cretans made the island fertile ground for the first preachers who arrived after Jesus’ crucifixion spreading the gospel of Paul’s new Christian religion. It was on Crete that Gonod first asked Jesus to return to India with him and Ganid after they completed their journey to Rome.
Again Ganid asked Jesus why he was not preaching in public. Instead of just giving him his standard response—that it was not yet time—Jesus used the opportunity to explain why all things have to happen at their own pace. For example, Jesus said a child might be anxious to grow up, but no amount of impatience will speed up the process. Some things just take more time to come into existence, like fruit that can only ripen if given the time to do so. If not, it is still hard, green, immature, and inedible. Right now being here with you and your Father and taking this fantastic journey to Rome is enough—this is my time to ripen and become palatable for the people’s minds. But regardless, what happens tomorrow is in my Father’s hands not mine. To further explain why things had to wait their own time Jesus told Ganid the story of Moses waiting, watching, and preparing for forty years as his people ripened and they grew to trust God more than people.
One day when all three of them were out in the city, they saw a drunk man hitting a slave girl. Jesus ran over and pulled the girl away from the man. Then he held the drunk man off with a strong straight right arm until he wore himself out. Ganid wanted to rush over and help Jesus, but his father held him back. Later that evening Ganid wanted to know why Jesus had not hit the man at least as many times as the man had hit the girl. Jesus tried to explain his reasoning, but Ganid never did understand. Still, this episode caused Ganid to consider how he could change the caste system in India when he returned home.
The Young Man Who Was Afraid
Jesus, Gonod, and Ganid were hiking in the mountains one day when they came across a young man named Fortune. He had experienced difficult times in his life, the hardest being his father dying when he was twelve years old. As a result Fortune was afraid and depressed and he had shied away from people for most of his life preferring instead to hide himself up there on the mountain. When the three encountered Fortune on the trail, Jesus asked him why he was so depressed on such a beautiful day and if there was any way they could help him. Fortune just ignored him, so Jesus tried a second time. He said he knew that Fortune was up there on the mountain because he wanted to be left alone, and that was all right. But then Jesus asked Fortune if he would be kind enough to help the three of them find their way through the mountains to Phenix so they would not get lost. This request aroused Fortune’s attention because he knew all of the trails across the mountain by heart. By the time the young man was done he had drawn a map in the dirt with all of the paths leading to Phenix, and told Jesus everything they needed to know to make the trip through the mountains.
As Jesus, Gonod, and Ganid turned to leave Jesus stopped and looked back at the young man. Again, Jesus said that he knew Fortune wanted to be left alone up on the mountain in his misery. But this time Jesus also said that it would not be correct for the three of them to have accepted Fortune’s help without them at least returning the favor, and answering Fortune’s question on how to find the destiny in his heart. Jesus explained that he knew the way to the hopes in Fortune’s heart just as well as Fortune knew the paths to Phenix, and since Fortune had asked Jesus to show him the way he would not disappoint him.
Fortune was now in a predicament: he did not think that he had asked Jesus for anything and he managed to stammer that out in reply. But Jesus disagreed. He said that Fortune may not have asked him for help in words, but he did with the look in his eyes. Jesus then asked Fortune to sit with him as he explained how to joyfully serve God in heaven. After listening to Jesus the young man dropped to his knees at Jesus’ feet and pleaded for a way out of his grief. Jesus told Fortune to get off of his knees and stand tall like a man: he said that everything Fortune was afraid of was insignificant when compared to the real things that were on his side in the universe. Jesus explained that Fortune was trying to run away from his problems, but no one can do that. Our problems are not only real, but have to be faced when and where we find them. Jesus said that Fortune had a better mind and body than most men, and that he could do many wonderful things with them if he were not sitting useless on that mountain wallowing in self-pity—the sun rose on him every morning just like it did on those people who were rich or in power. Fortune could also train his mind to solve his problems and to have the courage to face adversity rather than submitting to fear, defeat, and depression. But for this to happen Fortune had to put aside his human fears and open himself to the divine sprit living inside of him. If he did this it would free Fortune’s spiritual nature to come forth as living faith that he is a child of God, and release him from the error—or evil—that results from inaction.
Ending his personal sermon, Jesus told Fortune that he was now reborn of the spirit in service to humanity for the sake of God; that by casting aside his fear and cowardice to serve God he would align himself with the universe and in fact be born again, but this time born of the spirit of God. Forevermore he would overcome obstacles and disappointments by serving God in eternity and humanity on Earth. Fortune was fruitful, and became one of the early Christian leaders in Crete.
The three friends, refreshed from their time on Crete, set sail for Carthage in northern Africa. On the way they stopped at Cyrene for two days. While out exploring, Jesus and Ganid happened on an accident where a loaded oxcart had flipped and injured a boy named Rufus. They gave the boy first aid and then took him home to his parents. Unknown to everyone, the father, Simon, was later the man that the Roman soldier would order to carry Jesus’ cross to his crucifixion.
At Carthage: The Talk about Time and Space
On the journey to Carthage Jesus talked with the others on the boat about almost everything except religion. He recounted all of the stories from his childhood in Galilee, which was when Gonod and Ganid learned that he was raised there and not in Jerusalem or Damascus. It was obvious to Ganid that people were attracted to Jesus, so he asked Jesus how a person made friends. Jesus replied that to make friends people have to be interested in other people—to learn to love them and when possible to do something for them—provided of course it was something that they wanted done. Jesus then repeated the Jewish proverb that if someone wants to have friends, they themselves have to be friendly.
After disembarking at Carthage, Jesus met a Mithraic priest from Persia who had been educated in Alexandria. This man was interested in Jesus’ teachings about time, eternity, and immortality. In response to his questions Jesus explained the following. In Paradise, which is the fixed center of all and where God and the Paradise Deities reside, there is no time or space. But everything outside of Paradise is perceived as time and space, or what seems to be a straight line of events moving one after the other through space. We see this motion of time through space when we contrast it to something outside of time and space. The only thing in the universe that can transcend that sequence of non-spiritual time space events is the human personality; that is because we are joined with the spirit of God that is outside of time and space. In other words, if God can transcend time and space and our personality is bound to God through our Thought Adjuster, then so can we. Our consciousness when paired with God does not require a physical brain to exist. Furthermore, as we grow in our spiritual understanding of time and space what at first seemed to be a succession of events happening in a straight line is later understood to be a whole and perfectly related cycle. Space is measured by time, and both evolve into the timeless and spaceless experience of ultimate reality.
On the Way to Naples and Rome
Jesus continued leading people to God as he met them along the way. On the island of Malta he inspired a man named Claudus to eventually preach the gospel. Claudus never realized that the Jesus he believed in later and the man on Malta who inspired him were the same person. Claudus was going to kill himself, but after talking with Jesus he vowed to quit being a coward: he went home, started over, and faced life like a real man. Claudus was with Peter in Rome and Naples, and later preached alone in Spain.
In Syracuse Jesus met Ezra, a backslidden Jew. Ezra owned the tavern where Jesus, Gonod, and Ganid were lodging. When talking with Jesus, Ezra said that he wanted to be a good Jew but he just had not been able to find God. Jesus replied that if Ezra wanted to find God, then that meant that he had already found him: or rather, that God had found Ezra. His problem Jesus said, was not that he could not find God it was that Ezra did not know God. But if he wanted to learn he could do so by listening to the voice in his heart. Ezra heeded Jesus’ words, and later went on to build the first Christian church in Syracuse.
At Messina Jesus bought fruit from a vendor boy. This lad never forgot Jesus’ kind look, his words to have courage as he grew into manhood, his advice to feed his soul just like he fed his body, and that by doing these things his Father in heaven would guide him. This boy took Jesus’ teachings to heart and later joined the Christian faith.
On arriving at Naples the three found a city filled with poverty. As they explored they gave money to many of the beggars on the street. At one point, Ganid became confused because there was one beggar that Jesus gave a coin to, but he refused to speak to like he had the other beggars. Jesus explained that it did not make sense to waste words on someone who could not understand them; that he sensed the man did not have a mind capable of receiving a Thought Adjuster and because of that the man could not respond to spiritual leading—he was not capable of sonship with God.
After the three left Naples for Rome they stopped at Capua for several days. From there they continued along the Appian Way to Rome with their pack animals. They were excited that they were finally going to see the most magnificent city in all of their world.