Who was Jesus?
By Mark Vernon on Friday, February 5 2010, 07:16 - Religion - Permalink
Debate going on at Cif Belief's new book club, discussing A.N. Wilson's book, Jesus.
Mark Vernon
The blog might be thought of as the first draft of what I've been thinking about, seeing, hearing and reading.
I am an English writer, journalist, and author, used to be a priest in the Church of England, live in South London, and am an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck College, London. I am a founding member of The School of Life.
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Comments
Mark, An excellent essay in the Guardian.
But consider this criticism of the limitations of all the modern scholarship re Jesus.
The dominant trends of professional scholarship are not based on any presumption that Jesus was Spiritually Awakened, and that he taught an esoteric Spiritual Way. Indeed, there is virtually no participation in esoteric Spiritual life and practice within either the tradition or the scholarly field of "official" or exoteric Christianity that would enable, or even permit, the staightforward and detailed understanding of Jesus of Galilee as an ancient example of a Spiritual Master, or an esoteric Guru--a type of human manifestation that has appeared in all traditions, and everywhere in the world, since ancient days.
There is, to now, no full professional scholarly presentation of Jesus, and the "New Testament" Gospels, on an entirely, and authentically, SPIRITUAL basis---stated with full awareness and experiential understanding of what is thus being suggested. Instead, "modern" scholars, in general, tend, because of their own ignorance relative to Spiritual matters, to reduce everything to the gross physical dimension of existence. Therefore, any evidence of a subtle or Spiritual or mystical or ESOTERIC nature is, rather automatically, presumed to be myth, or a manifestation of the mind of popular magic. In other words, what is Spiritual tends to be dismissed in favor of either what is simply biological, or biographical in the sense of the life-person, or, otherwise, what is merely political, social, and "objectively" cultural.
Jesus, as a presumed actual historical figure, was an authentic true Spiritual Master--and not a merely social-morality teacher. However, Jesus is only one of many such Spiritual Masters who have appeared throughout history, and, therefore he is NOT unique. Indeed, the real importance of Jesus is not his presumed uniqueness, but in his AUTHENTICITY, as a SPIRITUAL MASTER. It is only the institutional mythologizing of Jesus as a kind of iconic idol, made of words, that made made Jesus SEEM unique, and thus demanded that he be uniquely "believed about"---and, as a result, the significance of Jesus as an authentic Realizer and Teacher of a spirit-breathing Spiritual Way of life has been lost and forgotten.
John, You can't have read all the scholarship on the gnostic texts and accompanying scholarship, which are packed with the kind of esotericism I imagine you'd like.