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WHY JESUS?
What do Saul—aka St. Paul, a tentmaker from Tarsus, Turkey; Emanuel Swedenborg, a scientist from Stockholm; James E. Padgett, an attorney from Washington, D.C., and Helen Schucman, a psychologist from New York City, have in common? They all claimed to have been contacted by Jesus after his death and instructed to get his message on the nature of our ultimate reality to the wider world.
This book focuses on two twentieth-century works in which a spirit communicator claimed to be Jesus. Why Jesus? Because he is still one of the most influential and revered people in the world for Christians and non-Christians alike. He’s what some have called the high watermark of humanity—and for those who are prepared to accept communication between the spirit world and physical world occurs—why not from someone who claims to be Jesus?
The two works are the automatic writing of James E. Padgett, an attorney who lived and worked in Washington, D.C., and the widely read text: A Course in Miracles.
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Padgett was married to Helen, the daughter of a Methodist minister. They had three children. In 1910, the couple separated and in February 1914, Helen passed away, aged fifty-one. Padgett was distraught and visited Spiritualist meetings hoping to hear from her.
During one meeting, a medium claimed Helen was there and described her more or less accurately. The medium told Padgett that he possessed an ability to perform automatic writing, and that if he sat quietly holding a pencil over paper, eventually Helen would be able to communicate directly without the need for an intermediary. He was skeptical but at the same time very motivated to connect with her.
After a while and with practice, he wrote scribbles on paper which he described as fishhooks and hangers. Then one day, without any conscious effort on his part, he wrote a message ostensibly from Helen that said she was close to him. He was still skeptical, believing the words were from his subconscious, a trick of the mind, but it prompted him to start reading literature on life after death which was abundant at that time—and still is—and with perseverance he began to get more lengthy messages from Helen detailing events which convinced him she was communicating.
Helen told him she was in the second sphere, and now being familiar with the “spheres” that communicators sometimes report being in, and having a high opinion of her, he thought she should be in a more advanced state of existence. He suggested she try to connect with his grandmother Ann Rollins, who had passed away years earlier, which she did. It turned out that Ann was—and presumably still is—residing in the celestial spheres, beyond the levels of the spirit world.
Ann Rollins is described as a high spirit—someone In Christ. “High” doesn’t imply a hierarchical power over others but a deeper awareness of reality. She is portrayed as a radiant spirit, more beautiful than we can imagine, and according to their definition: an angel. An angel in this context is someone who has reached the celestial world—the kingdom.
During the next few months, messages came through purporting to be Padgett’s family members, including his mother, Ann, and father, John. Padgett’s confidence in the authenticity of the communicators grew, and his conversations became a nightly occurrence.
Automatic writing has been reported around the world for centuries. It’s as if a deceased human or nonhuman entity—a sender—tunes into a receiver’s brain, which acts as a filter, similar to a TV or radio, allowing the sender to transmit information to the receiver.
During the process, a person writes without being aware of the content being written. The receiver of the information is sometimes in a meditative or trance state, allowing their hand to write down words, phrases, and images without any conscious effort.
In Chinese folk religion and some Daoist schools, it’s known as spirit writing. In Mandarin, “笔仙” (bǐxiān) means “pen fairy” or “pen immortal.”
In the case of Padgett, he would mentally ask a question and the answer would come back through his hand. As a result, the messages don’t include his questions, so in some cases because they are obvious, I’ve assumed the question to avoid repetitive phrasing.
In early September 1914, another message came through, this one attributed to Jesus. Padgett didn’t know what to make of it; he certainly didn’t believe it was from Jesus and threw it away. The messages kept on coming, and later in September others came through from Jesus, which he kept.
Since Padgett was an attorney, one might infer that he liked evidence—evidence beyond a reasonable doubt—as close to proof as one can get. But it’s hard to imagine how a deceased communicator could convince Padgett he was Jesus, possibly the most famous person on the planet, and that he wanted to write through him. It wasn’t a unique event; people claiming to be historic figures occasionally drop in during séances and meetings of like-minded people who are trying to connect with the departed.
Famous communicators aren’t that interesting from an evidential point of view. Unless they are known to the sitter, they are unlikely to give personal evidence which can be verified, or tell us anything that’s not in the public domain. Nevertheless, what they say about their experiences after death—what their opinions, regrets, and hopes are—can be revealing.
For Padgett it must have been a big event and probably a confusing one. Having just gotten used to his deceased family and friends interacting with him and accepting them as genuine, he now had to decide whether to accept that Jesus was who he said he was. That didn’t happen right away. Family members came through who appeared to be as surprised as he was, but insisted it was Jesus communicating and encouraged him to accept the messages as genuine.
Like anyone who reads these messages, I don’t know if the communicators were who they said they were. But what we do know is that Padgett—a very accomplished man with a busy professional life—came to accept that the messages from deceased friends, family, and business acquaintances were genuine. They, in turn, insisted that Jesus and the other communicators were who they claimed to be.
Importantly, they said this was all happening because Jesus had identified Padgett as someone who could help set the record straight about the Bible—particularly the New Testament—and how it’s been interpreted and misinterpreted. As far as Padgett was concerned, he had been handed an important task, and he spent the last nine years of his life devoted to it.
Leslie R. Stone
An important character in the Padgett story is Leslie R. Stone. It was Stone’s first time at a Spiritualist meeting when a communicator who identified as his father came through. Having recently arrived in Toronto, Stone had seen the séance advertised on a notice board and was curious.
“Your father, who says he is William Stone, is here and is glad that he is able to greet you,” said the medium, pointing at Leslie. His father was indeed called William Stone and had passed away twenty years earlier in England when Leslie was seven years old, and receiving that message was a pivotal moment because no one present, least of all the medium, could have known that his father’s name was William Stone and that he had died.
Stone emigrated to Canada in 1903 when he was twenty-seven years old. He was born in Aldershot, a small town in Southeast England, coincidently, just a few miles from B.L., the medium mentioned in the previous chapter. He worked in his father’s saddlery shop and later in London, but making a living was not easy at that time, and the New World beckoned for adventurous souls. He asked his mother what she thought about his emigrating to Canada. She prayed and the answer came back: he should go to Canada.
Like many people who experience a communication ostensibly from a deceased person, particularly a loved one, he wanted to know more and began reading Spiritualist literature. He moved to Detroit, where cars were becoming popular, although demand for his saddlery skills was in decline. He continued to attend séances, where he received spiritual guidance, which led him to Buffalo, New York, where he worked in a hospital for seven years and trained as a graduate nurse, which sparked an interest in healing. Subsequently, he qualified as a chiropractor.
At a Spiritualist meeting in Buffalo, more evidence came through that convinced him of the reality of the spirit world. In his book, The True Gospel Revealed Anew by Jesus: Vol.1, he wrote, “I was seated next to a woman who happened to be a medium. She suddenly turned to me and said, ‘Your mother is here with you.’ I replied, ‘You must be mistaken, Madam. I had a letter from my mother quite recently, and she is in good health.’
“The medium shrugged and replied, ‘Your mother never lived in this country. She tells me she lived in England and died a short time ago.’ She went on to report what my mother presumably had died of, described the funeral, and mentioned the names of those present. She told me that I had a sister, Edith, from whom I would receive a letter confirming what she said. The letter arrived just as the woman had predicted, and corroborating her statements. If I ever had doubts then as to the truth of spirit communication, I lost them at that point.”
Stone started sitting alone, and with practice claimed he could achieve a trance or out-of-body state and enter the spirit world, where he met his mother, sister Kate, and brother Willie, who had passed away in 1908. “I knew I was in my spirit body and had left my mortal frame,” he wrote, “and indeed, I had no desire to return to it, but my mother and sister insisted that I had a spiritual work to accomplish in the earth plane and that I could not come permanently into the spirit world until I had accomplished that task.”
Eleven years after arriving in the New World, Stone opened an office in Washington, D.C. to do his chiropractic work. It was in Washington in September 1914, that he was introduced to Padgett and his colleague Eugene Morgan, and witnessed Padgett’s automatic writing.
Having experienced personal communication from deceased family members via mediums and during his own OBEs, he concluded that Padgett was an honest man and an authentic medium, and like Padgett and Morgan, he came to accept the messages as genuine. This was important because in the years after Padgett’s death it became Stone’s task to transcribe the thousands of hand-written messages and bring them to the wider world.
By the 1940s, four books had been published in the True Gospel Revealed Anew by Jesus series, which contained many of the messages, and in 1958 a church known as the “Foundation Church of the New Birth” was incorporated in Washington. D.C.
The trio, Padgett, Stone, and Morgan, became a communication hub for the seemingly endless number of people queuing up on the other side wanting to correspond with the living. During those nine years, approximately 2,500 messages came through Padgett’s hand from deceased family members, friends, business associates, and historic figures, of which more than a hundred purported to come from Jesus himself. Key figures include his grandmother Ann Rollins, his boss, Albert Riddle, who died in 1902, and Joseph H. Salyards, his college professor who passed away in 1885.
The overriding message from Jesus and other communicators is that many of the “truths” in the Bible attributed to them are not correct and that it’s important they are corrected if we are to be guided back to the right path.
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One of the most famous contemporary works purporting to be from Jesus is A Course in Miracles (ACIM), a 480,000-word channeled text that came through Helen Schucman between 1965 and 1972. First published in 1976, the book has sold millions of copies worldwide and has been translated into all the major world languages, including Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Arabic, and Hebrew.
Schucman was a clinical psychologist at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. She had been religious as a child. Her parents were Jewish—her mother was Baptist—father an atheist. As an adult, she rejected religion, and at the time of her revelation was agnostic leaning toward atheism—not an obvious person to suddenly start uttering what some might call “spiritual truths” that would change the course of her life. But that’s what happened.
On October 21, 1965, an inner voice, as she described it, dictated, “This is A Course in Miracles. Please take notes.” Prior to that day, she and her colleague William Thetford had been questioning their work; they were feeling dissatisfied and philosophizing that there must be a better way. She had been having vivid dreams for months leading up to October 21, in which someone whom she identified as Jesus communicated with her.
When the communication began, she told Thetford about the inner voice and was surprised that he was supportive. It doesn’t seem as if she had any affiliation with the information she was receiving. It was in complete opposition to her beliefs, and she found the content troubling.
Schucman was no New Age guru or religious devotee, and the teachings appear to have been outside of her conscious knowledge. Nor did she like the idea of it being a psychic experience. But despite being a “reluctant secretary,” as she called it, she took the inner dictation down in shorthand, which she often used for her psychology work, and Thetford transferred it to longhand. She said the voice appeared in her mind but not in an auditory way speaking English—no hearing was involved. The “voice” dictated quickly, but unlike Padgett’s automatic writing, in which he had to keep writing or lose the connection, she was able to pause it at any time, like starting and stopping a digital voice note or tape recorder, which was essential because she had a busy life.
As annoying and baffling as she said she found the experience, she took the task seriously and made a point of not editing it in any way. If a mistake or assumption about a word or phrase occurred, the voice would instruct her to rewrite. She was impressed with the consistency and coherence of the text, and when she talked about it in interviews, it’s as if she were reviewing someone else’s work.
Given that she was an atheist with no interest in the subject, it’s remarkable that the book exists. She could have just stopped the process at any time and carried on with her life; after all, she had no idea what it would become. But she didn’t. She saw it through to the end.
The revelation—if that’s the appropriate word—took seven years to come through. It’s a large tome consisting of three books: “The Text,” “The Manual for Students,” and “The Manual for Teachers.” Schucman was an educator so it’s reasonable to think that the style of the text was influenced by her—turning a revelation into a course is something an educator might do in the twentieth century.
There is no way of knowing whether Jesus communicated with Padgett and Schucman, but for the purposes of this book, I’m assuming that Jesus—and the other communicators—were who they said they were. I haven’t prefaced names with “allegedly” or “claimed to be.” When I use terms like “dead,” “death,” “passed away,” or “deceased,” I don’t mean dead as in “annihilation”; I simply mean no longer in the physical body.
These messages can be viewed in several ways: as fiction, as messages from impostors, or as genuine. Depending on the reader’s worldview, they can be ignored or taken as guidance from people who have gone before us—and used as a roadmap of the levels beyond death.
If all religions, scriptures, churches, mosques, and temples disappeared today, it would not alter the nature of our ultimate reality. The aim here is not to advocate for any particular religion, doctrine, or philosophy, but to explore the truth about what happens after death—what the consequences of our lives are—and whether the claims made by communicators, especially those who say they are Jesus, hold up in light of the evidence available in the twenty-first century.
There are thousands of religious denominations, each with its own version of what it believes is the truth. Even within Christianity alone, there are countless interpretations, all claiming to represent the true message on how to live our lives. But when it comes to the nature of reality—God, heaven, hell, the afterlife, and so on—there can be only one truth. This book is another contribution to that ongoing search.
Martin Luther is often credited with saying, “Every man must do two things alone: he must do his own believing and his own dying.” That didn’t work out too well for Luther—but more on him later.
