In a long, systematic session, Bartholomew worked through a sequence of Gospel passages a correspondent had sent in — from the Prologue of John to the Sermon on the Mount — drawing from each the same underlying teaching: that Christ came to reveal a bridge home from the illusion of separateness, that "Son of God" and "heaven" belong to everyone and to the present moment, and that the whole of the law finally reduces to seeing only love.

Context: Recorded on June 1, 1978, in New Mexico, and channeled through Mary-Margaret Moore, this session was cast as a study: a correspondent had submitted a series of Jesus's sayings and asked Bartholomew to interpret them for the modern mind. After a brief opening in which Bartholomew encouraged Mary-Margaret and her husband to hold sessions of their own at home, the bulk of the tape moves passage by passage through the Gospels. It is among the longest sessions in the archive, and its later stretch — the Sermon-on-the-Mount material — comes from a rougher recording; this summary conveys the clear thread of the teaching where the audio allows.

The Word and the Light: Opening with the Prologue of John, Bartholomew read its "In the beginning was the Word" not as a statement about Jesus but about the very structure of creation. In the beginning, he said, there was only the One; when a part of the Source chose to experience itself as separate, the all-abiding love of the Creator answered that self-made breach with two gifts — the Word (which he identified with the Holy Spirit, speaking to anyone who asks) and the light (the inner light within each person, showing the next step to anyone who calls on it). Together these form the bridge back across the gap. The darkness that "comprehended it not," he explained, is simply the entity so gripped by the illusion of separateness that it cannot yet perceive the light; as the illusion thins, the light grows until the bridge is no longer needed and one stands again in the oneness. Only later, when the Christos walked the earth, did the light and the Word become manifest in a single being — so in that time the passage does describe him, though he created neither light nor Word but carried both.

"The Only Begotten Son"? — Christ Among Many: Turning to John the Baptist's testimony and the descending dove, Bartholomew described an actual crystallized form of light above the Christos, which John rightly perceived as the mark of the God-force. On the title "Son of God," he was firm: Christ was and is the Son of God — but so was John the Baptist, and so is everyone in the room. The phrase "only begotten Son," he said flatly, does not compute in the cosmic sense; it is the wholly human frailty by which a beloved teacher becomes "the one and only," and the early writers set it down out of genuine love and awe, which is beautiful but not literally true. He added that the Christos had begun preparing for his mission long before the events of scripture, since no vehicle could be readied in a single lifetime to absorb and transmute the sheer weight of negativity the work required.

The Virgin Birth, the Genealogy, and the Nativity: Asked about the Annunciation and the Immaculate Conception, Bartholomew affirmed it as true — and far more common than recorded, since it is the mind and the light, not the body, that truly create. In Mary's case the "impregnation" began as a word given to her mind, a conscious thought she was sensitive enough to accept, and from that belief the light took root; someday, he said, humanity will create in just this way, without the long bodily process. The genealogies he set aside entirely: in reality there is no lineage at all, for one chooses each incarnation by spiritual need rather than blood, and the mind merely seizes on family resemblances to keep proving the illusion that it is a body. The Nativity he treated tenderly — the manger and the wise men are not literally accurate, he said, but they carry so much love and compassion for so many that he urged the story be left untouched, teaching the doctrines rather than disturbing the events.

The Three Temptations: The wilderness temptations, Bartholomew stressed, were not the work of a red monster but symbols of the inner pull the earth exerts on any being who takes form here. To the demand that stones become bread, the Christos answered by choosing to be fed from a higher source; to the invitation to cast himself from the pinnacle, he refused to put God to the test, mastering his own doubting side; and offered all the kingdoms of the world, he chose the servant over the king — knowing, from experience, the far greater joy of being "a nothing and a part of God" than a ruler over matter. Better a trash collector, Bartholomew said; what matters is not one's station but whether one's consciousness rests in the light or the dark. Each temptation, he noted, was also a rebirth for the Christos himself, for every soul who serves others is at the same time growing in its own being.

The Beatitudes: Moving through the Beatitudes, Bartholomew read them as a portrait of the holy person. "Poor in spirit" puzzled him as wording — no one is blessed by being poor in spirit — but he took it to mean the humility of one who knows his own need for guidance and for God. "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy" he made into a law without exception: what you give out is what returns to you, so that the irritable clerks or the hostile feedback one meets are one's own radiance coming back. "Pure in heart, for they shall see God" he read almost literally — that a mind in harmony and emotions under control begin to "see with the heart," beholding God not as a face in the sky but in every manifestation on earth, and now, not in some future. And the blessing on the persecuted he turned into encouragement: to draw antagonism is a sign that one has begun to amass power and awaken, for "no one fights against a blob that's inert" — and the reward "in heaven" is here, since heaven is a present reality rather than a far-off place.

Fulfilling the Law, and the Work of Purification: On Christ's saying that he came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it, Bartholomew defended the laws of every tradition as more than social control: to become one with the light there must be a purification, begun with the obvious — the body and the mind together — and kept in balance, never so austere that it breeds a superior, righteous holiness of its own. Following the law is the first rung out of the pit; in time it becomes automatic, no longer even a conscious choice. But the law does not end there, he warned: at each new stage a subtler and more demanding set of laws appears, no longer written on any tablet — such as turning the other cheek while knowing that the hand which strikes and the cheek that is struck are one — and here a master teacher, called upon inwardly, becomes the guide to laws that can no longer be read in a book.

The Hard Sayings, and No Literal Hell: In the session's later, rougher stretch, Bartholomew took up the severe verses. Plucking out the eye or cutting off the hand he read as a vivid figure, never a literal command: it means dealing decisively with whatever in one's own consciousness is dark, rather than flattering oneself about the loving parts while ignoring it. The deeper movement of Christ's teaching, he said, was away from every intermediary — away even from the "older brother" and the father-and-son hierarchy — into a single, direct relationship of "father and friend," in which one seeks contact with the Source with no go-between at all. Of the creedal line that Christ "descended into hell," he said it holds no truth: the master had nowhere to descend to, being already one with all; there is no separate hell to enter. And divorce, he taught, is not a great sin — most egos are simply incompatible, and a parting that has served its purpose is painful but blameless, though the real resolution is always found by going within rather than moving from mate to mate.

Loving the Enemy, and "Nothing to Forgive": On "love your enemies," Bartholomew explained that one who truly rests in love no longer perceives an enemy at all — not by overlooking the wrong but by seeing only the divine, which calls a different response out of the other person; pity, he warned, is its counterfeit, secretly feeding the ego's sense of superiority and reasserting the very separation love dissolves. He closed on the Lord's Prayer, fastening on its warning that an unforgiving person will not be forgiven — and denying it outright. There is, he said, nothing to forgive: God has never needed to forgive, because the soul's plunge into the illusion of separateness was its own doing and never touched the Source, which is not something that loves but is love itself. The whole labor, he ended, is not to polish or justify the illusions one has made but simply to set them down and turn within, to become aware of the one Source and immerse oneself in it more and more.