the middle eastern sage

January 15, 2019 

From the beginning humans have  perceived or imagined unseen powers and forces which spooked and awed them; and the humans tried to influence those unseen powers to be friendly.

 

Dying and rising gods and goddesses were already imagined way before the birth of Christianity.

 

Sagas of an ancient couple named Abraham and Sarah, and their descendants, also tell of a small clan of Semitic people held as slaves in Egypt. These people have a memory of being liberated from the tyranny of a Pharaoh by the power of their God, YHWH. They had stories of tribal leaders, then kings and prophets, followed by forced exile from their homeland in Palestine to Babylon. They eventually return to their homeland and rebuild.

 

The Christian religion has its roots in the Jewish story. A Jewish man named Jesus was born in Palestine in around the year 4 BCE (which is numbered as year ‘0’ by a historical slippage).

 

While some people in our time speculate that this Jewish man Jesus never actually existed, but is a mythical person invented to create a new religious movement, there are secular sources outside the Bible that reference this person. I suggest that if Jesus was not an actual historical figure, the correspondence of the man named Paul/Saul, along with the four Gospels and other letters that were written about his life—what he taught, how he died, and subsequent appearances—are an unbelievable hoax. Sure, there have always been gullible people looking for some kind of other-worldly favor, but intentional deception of the magnitude of the New Testament writings could easily be denied and rejected as such by those contemporary to historical setting of the Christian narratives.

 

What differentiates the four Gospels from the previous stories of gods and goddesses is the historical nature of the narratives. If we read mythic literature, then read the Gospels, the difference is unmistakable. The Gospels simply do not read like myths. Nor are they to be compared to modern day newspaper reports. They are somewhere between those two genres.

 

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (called the ‘synoptic gospels’) are mostly based on actual events surrounding Jesus. They are not exact word-for-word reports. Rather, they are faith-based retelling of those events. It is possible that the birth story of Jesus in Luke and Matthew have been invented as homiletical devices. Then again, they may be rooted in some facts of Jesus’ beginning. Mark, the earliest Gospel, has no birth story. Paul’s writing—earlier than the gospels—has no birth accounts. Only “born of a woman.”

 

The Gospel of John seems to be pure historical fiction. That is, “John” is writing a narrative about a real person, but his account presents Jesus through a mystical lens. The fourth Gospel wants the reader/listener to see a different dimension of Jesus that dips underneath the historical individual person named Jesus, into the depths of the Underground River that connects all religions and spiritual traditions. Jesus is the Oneness of God.

 

The prologue to John’s Gospel presents Jesus as the Human Representation of an eternal Logos/Word. As the embodiment of the eternal Logos, Jesus is the Icon of the universe’s Order, Source, and Goal. In other words, the life, teachings, death, and New Life of Jesus of Nazareth has manifested the Logic/Reason of Ultimate Reality (God).

 

A close reading of John’s Gospel will reveal a meta-narrative: On nine or ten occasions the Christ of the fourth Gospel escapes the grasp of his adversaries. Which is John’s way of telling the reader that there is more to Jesus than the historical person. The “Reason” of the universe cannot be grasped by the human mind. All our attempts to get hold of Christ will fail.  “He” has a mystical presence that is beyond our comprehension or explanation.

 

In addition to the nine or ten “escapes” of Christ in this Gospel are eleven dialogues between Christ and other person in which the words of Christ are shown to be “ungraspable.” I call these eleven dialogues “Trans-literal Triads” because each one has three elements. These Triads are also part of the meta-narrative of John’s mystical interpretation. John’s Gospel is a creative theological statement regarding the meaning of the “Christ Event.”

 

 

Christianity began as the “Jesus Movement.” A Jewish teacher drew large crowds. His teachings were both in continuity with his Jewish tradition and radically new at the same time. He drew the wrath of both the Jewish Establishment and the Roman government. He was seen as dangerous to the curators of the status quo. He taught mostly in the form of parables—extended metaphors. Those little stories had explosive implications. Some of his teachings rode on the waves of paradox. Being a middle eastern sage, Jesus cannot be turned into a Western rationalist. The original Christianity was not a philosophical system or a worldview.

 

At the center of Jesus’ pedagogy was a vision of a “kingdom.”