Historical Jesus and Christianity
Adi Da Samraj, September 2004
DEVOTEE: Thank You, my Divine Heart Master for Your Darshan.
Beloved Lord, in your recent considerations of such matters as Shakespeare and the shroud of Turin, you gave a very summary instruction which I found extremely helpful: “Evidence rules”. And it’s been amazing instruction to hear Your consideration of what constitutes evidence and, in other words, what can establish that which is true rather than merely somebody’s idea. And you also told us in one of the earlier gatherings that part of the reason “The Basket of Tolerance” study is so significant, is that we have to undo our culturally inherited presumptions and for most of us who have come to you so far, that entails undoing some of the Christian presumptions.
Recently I have been reading two books by J. M. Robertson. One of them is “Pagan Christs” which you have placed on “The Basket of Tolerance”; another one which we recently just acquired is called “The Jesus Problem” and it covers somewhat the same territory by Robertson and if I may I’d like to read one short quote from “The Jesus Problem” which relates to the matter of whether there is any historical evidence for Jesus’ existence whatsoever.
For the sake of everybody listening, Robertson was a proponent of the view that Jesus was not an historical person, but a myth that was presented as being historical. In his book, “The Jesus Problem,” Robertson quotes from another author who’s talking about the different gospel stories of Jesus and pointing out that the earliest- the gospel that is generally considered earliest-the “Gospel of Mark”, is the least human depiction of Jesus and that they gradually become more human as they become more distant in time from his supposed lifetime.
This author says, “The received notion that in the early Markan narratives, the Jesus is distinctly human and that the process of deification is fulfilled in John, is precisely the reverse of the truth. In Mark there is really no man at all. The Jesus is God, or at least essentially Divine throughout. He wears only a transparent garment of flesh. Mark historicizes only. Matthew also historicizes and faintly humanizes. Luke more strongly humanizes, while John not only humanizes, but begins to sentimentalize”.
For some reason that particular quotation really got to me and this whole point of view that Robertson and others are presenting, that Jesus is not an historical figure at all, that the impact of it really struck me very strongly although I had read some of his point of view earlier, it didn’t altogether get to me that maybe the entire edifice of Christianity is literally built on a myth and even if it isn’t a myth, the amount of evidence for Jesus is so slight that it, in a certain way, might as well be a myth.
So part of my question, Beloved, is You have pointed out certain Christians who were genuine esoteric practitioners and realizers such as Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, but it seems amazing to me that they could operate in a tradition where we don’t even know for sure if the realizer was really an existing person or being.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, there are similar situations, for instance, with the tradition associated with Krishna.
DEVOTEE: Yes, exactly.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: There is no evidence, really, whatsoever, of an historical individual by that name or historical individual on which the Krishna could have been based. Some people want to suppose that maybe there was some kind of a figure or other who was a kind of chieftain kind of character or person or a warrior, a (shatria?) in that tradition, perhaps, and long before the writings were done, in fact and of course there is a vast difference between the Bhagavad Gita and the Mahabarata and the Puranas and other devotional literature. They talk in very different terms about Krishna, just as there are different kinds of writings about Jesus and yet there are realizers of one degree or another in the traditions associated with Krishna and Rama, a similar situation.
One major difference between the traditions associated with Rama and Krishna and others and the Jesus tradition, which is largely Western, is that people want to insist that Jesus was an historical figure and everything depends on that having been the case, whereas in the Krishna and Rama traditions it doesn’t really make any difference to people whether it’s true or not whether they were historical figures or not. To some people it makes a difference, of course, and they want to take a kind of a literalist, fundamentalist kind of approach to these traditions and believe them as a historical figure and at the same time also believe in them as Divine figures transformed from human to Divine or from myth to actual Divine or whatever.
The figures themselves are used in many different ways, many different philosophical orientations and traditions have been built on these characters or myths, but most people don’t mind them being symbols or ideas in story form representing concepts about the Divine. The highest percentage of people don’t insist on believing in the historicity of Krishna and Rama and yet they readily believe in the Divine, somehow pictured or philosophically considered in the texts that refer to them.
The difference between that and the official Christian tradition, what became the official tradition, is again, insistence on the historicity of Jesus because the Christian tradition that became official asserts a myth of salvation that’s based on the actual birth, life, and especially the death and resurrection and then ascension of Jesus, the Master. If that is not an historical fact, then this myth of salvation or presumption, if you like, of the salvation of the world, is clearly nothing but a myth and as such it’s like the traditions of Rama and of Krishna, a kind of a story illustrating God ideas from the perspective of one philosophical point of view or another, depending on which tradition of interpretation you associate with.
There are other Christian traditions and were other lines of Christianity functioning as organizational institutionally existing Christianities before the formalization of official Christianity which is based on the historicity of Jesus and the salvatory nature or effect of his death and resurrection. And if you familiarize yourself with all the literature, all the other gospels, letters, stories, traditions, philosophies, and so forth, they coexisted with the one that became official Christianity.
We find there are many very different kinds of Christianity and they do not all depend on there being an historical Jesus. Even the Gospel of Mark which you mentioned, the earliest manuscript that has been found, in other words the earliest copy of it as a manuscript ends with the empty tomb. There are no happenings afterwards that are elaborated in the other gospels in the form of stories about Jesus’ appearances to people and so on and Mark is considered the oldest of the texts.
This suggests that the earliest tradition was not associated with any concrete stories about the appearance of physically resurrected Jesus, but only his absence from the tomb and it was all stories built on this absence, presuming he was a human actual historical figure. And why wasn’t he in the tomb? A simple explanation is that Joseph of Arimathea, who was said to have provided this fresh cut tomb owned by him (he was a man of wealth and so forth), a man like Nicodemus who appears to have been associated, according to the stories, with Jesus in a more secret and special manner, not with the other twelve or any such individuals, that he moved the body secretly.
He and Nicodemus both are mentioned around the tomb, empty tomb story in John. Joseph of Arimathea is mentioned in all the gospels as being the one who had him buried. He went and got permission from Pilate to have him buried there. Where was everybody else? Where were all these other disciples, Peter and all the rest? They were all in hiding and it didn’t even occur to them to bury the body? Even given the stories about Peter, that he disclaimed having anything to do with him, disappeared from the scene. Joseph of Arimathaea took care of it and there is a kind of a cover story there for what potentially may have happened, secret burial, and that is that Pilate and the Romans were told or the temple heads or whomever were concerned that the disciples would steal the body and claim that he rose from the dead. There was no reason why either the heads of the Jewish temple or the Jewish leaders or the Romans would have had any notion whatsoever that anybody was ever going to say that this man rose from the dead, you see?
So they wanted to prevent the disciples from stealing the body. The disciples didn’t even see to it that he was buried. They had nothing to do with him. They left, they disappeared. Joseph of Arimathea is said to have buried him. The officials were concerned that the disciples were going to make up this story so that they put soldiers in charge to keep watch over him to make sure the body wasn’t moved, you see? Well, that’s not likely, at all.
So it’s a cover story it would seem, perhaps, for what actually did happen. Joseph of Arimathea not only took the body and buried it in a tomb somewhere, unknown to everyone, but then even moved it from there so that, because he was wanting to treat Jesus honorably and not a criminal. There was a rule as to what you could do with a person who was treated as a criminal, crucified, and so forth – the body had to be left alone and on and on, all kinds of rules. He wanted him treated honorably so it is very likely then that he secretly took the body away, perhaps with Nicodemus or whomever. He is the only one who had anything to do with the burial.
No one else had anything to do with it except suddenly three days later some women show up to anoint the body. Why would women show up to anoint the body which, for one thing, was naked and they discovered that it was missing? Well maybe there was a situation where he was missing – I would say that’s a possibility, but that’s it. End of the story. Missing and Joseph of Arimathea didn’t tell anybody why. And he disappears from the narratives from that point.
It is very likely then, that the Christian tradition, such as it is, the official Christian tradition, is based on the secret burial of Jesus, and all the rest of it is made up, so to speak, made up. I am speaking to you about what scholarship indicates. There are large numbers of documents and other kinds of Christianities that coexisted with what became the official one declared by the Roman emperor. They all contained different kinds of stories than the ones in the New Testament. Why is it presumed that the ones in the New Testament are the true ones? If such a vast number of people felt completely free to make up all the other stories, why do the ones that wound up in the New Testament have to be presumed to be true stories? They ARE stories and they are the product of an interaction among factions that were like political parties, in some sense, in their opposition to one another and, as in politics, all the tricks and misrepresentations and threats and all the rest of it, even the killing of opponents – all these kinds of things took place in that early history, historical period in which, from which, what eventually emerged as the official church four centuries later. Four centuries – whew!
All these different kinds of traditions are loaded with all different kinds of stories different than the ones in the New Testament. The tradition that won out is based on this salvation scheme or salvation myth associated with there being an historical Jesus of Nazareth and his death and resurrection are of universal significance to mankind, saves everybody based on a mythology of a fall and all the rest of it.
What about all the people who lived before he did? Why didn’t he tell people while he was alive, walking around and preaching to people, that he was going to die and that’s what was going to be what their salvation depended upon? Why did he give some other teaching while he was alive if the real teaching is, resurrection saves you?
These books are very complicated. They weren’t simply written by one person. They are the product of struggles, interactions, propagandizing between different kinds of groups who had different points of view and this salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus is largely an form of exoteric or public or social religion whose books, gospels and all the rest, were prepared, reconstructed, gathered, made up, all the rest of it, in order to counter essentially a spiritual tradition which is – the principle tradition that it was trying to counter with its dogma of physicality of Jesus – is gnosticism, called gnosticism as a general term.
There are other variant traditions that also lost out in the making of an official church by the Roman emperor, Constantine,who had apparently no significant religious reason for becoming Christian and really didn’t function in any sense according to its principles except that he made sure on his death bed that he confessed his sins and that meant he would be okay after that.
He gathered a council to put together a version of Christianity to make it the official one. Now do you think he was going to approve an official religion for the Roman Empire in which everybody becomes an ascetical mystic or even a mystic of any kind, you see? No. [Laughter]. Emperors or heads of state do not choose mystical religions to be the official religions of the people. They choose religions that are basically about social morality and that coincide with the interests of the state which is social order, social behavior, control over masses of people, and so on.
So this is a major reason why what became official Christianity has the form that it does. And its proponents before then were concerned about exoteric matters, largely social matters of peoples’ behavior and so on. And so when they falsely, as it turned out, criticized the gnostics, they claimed that they were prone toward misbehavior and that the doctrine they were preaching, therefore, was heretical or not to be chosen, because it would be opposed to the proper development of social morality. And they accused the gnostics of being involved in all kinds, as a general rule, being all kind of licentious and so forth, as they say, guilty of all kinds of things, and then in the ’40s of the 20th century, just passed, a number of manuscripts were dug up at Nag Hamadi, or found in a cave there and these turned out to be original gnostic documents and they are all about asceticism.
The early church fathers who criticized these people misrepresented their teachings and their habit which was otherworldly rather than licentious, so to speak. There were, of course, all kinds of people at that time, as now, some in all sects were less inclined toward conventional sexual behavior than some others, but fundamentally gnosticism is a tradition about secret knowledge, the secret of true knowledge about the nature of human existence and the world. They had various myths also used to support their view, but fundamentally it is a spiritual philosophy that what must be realized is that human beings are spiritual in nature and this world is not fit altogether for spiritual existence and therefore they were prone toward asceticism and not merely puritanical or moralistic sexual behavior, but no sexual behavior, you see, and so on.
The characteristics of gnosticism are largely those of esoteric teachings in general and they are about spirituality, about the truth of reality being spiritual and not material. It corresponds to some of the things that are still somehow in the New Testament like Jesus saying to Nicodemus, “Ye must be born again in the spirit” – or “of the spirit; “that which is born of the spirit is spirit”. What does all that mean, you see? It sounds like a spiritual teaching. It is a spiritual teaching. It’s a gnostic teaching, but it’s still there in the midst of all the rest of it and surrounded with other counter-sayings that fit with what became the official church position associated with this salvation myth which is, Jesus is a messianic figure who died and whose death saves the world and so on – it wasn’t even for the world at first.
He was Jewish, his followers were Jewish, his disciples were Jewish from the beginning. They were Jewish when he died, remained Jewish. They were associated with all of the participation in the life of being Jews and followed the essential obligations of Jews of the time. So they didn’t divinize Jesus. There is another major form of early religion associated with Jesus, a form of Christianity then, none of these movements was called Christian at the time, that’s a later description, generally referred to as the Ebionites. Now nobody knows exactly why they are referred to as Ebionites because they don’t know where it came from. But there is this reference they are Ebionites and it means those who interpreted the Christian or what became later Christianity as a story about Jesus strictly within the terms of Judaism.
Then there were those headed by a man named Marcion and their point of view was that nothing of Judaism applied to the new message, the Christian message, so the Old Testament and so forth didn’t apply to the Christian revelation. There were even ideas like the Old Testament God is not the true God; there is a new God or true God rather than a dark God independent of this world, and so forth.
There was all this kind of mythology mixed in with gnosticism too – good gods and bad gods and all of that, but otherwise Marcion appears to have maintained a teaching that was similar in many respects to the writings of Paul and his general message without the references to Judaism and the Old Testament and so forth, so he illuminated those from his versions of the texts. And there are many, many other texts. There were different texts known for centuries that are now becoming a big picture for scholars.
People don’t seem to want to come out and say it because there are a lot of vested interests in this tradition, of course, but when Protestantism entered the picture, instead of ecclesiastical heads and traditions being the basis for Christian authority, the Book became the basis for it and that gave, then, the Book special prominence and the next thing you know scholars started dealing with the Book and now there are centuries, especially the last couple of centuries, of research into the Book itself and now there is all this uncovered information that show the true world picture, a lot of it anyway, in which Christianity appeared and on same level with Judaism. There is a lot more known about that tradition now and it’s filled with stories that are fundamentally inventions too. They have stories about a people– mythologizing a people–just as Christianity mythologized a man. And there are some men, some human beings mythologized in the Old Testament just as Jesus is in the New Testament.
There are some different stories in different of the gospels that are in the New Testament, completely different versions of the same story. Well, how can both versions be true? Well, they can’t [laughter]. Well then what went on there, you see? People felt free to make this up, to make stories. It was a form of story-telling or literature from that period. It’s religious fiction made all right to say because it honors what is sacred or Divine and it also, by telling stories a certain way, enables you to beat your enemies or your opponents in opposite or other schools or traditions. The New Testament books were written in different parts of the world in that era, the early first century or so and they were rewritten and added to and modified, ultimately completely tailored to fit the time of Constantine when it was all decided what the canon of scripture was going to be.
By then pretty much the social religion of the exoteric faction had become dominant and so basically everyone else was anathematized and eliminated along with their teachings and their literature. Some of it, however, was buried and has been re-discovered since and scholars who are dealing with this straightforward without any ax to grind or hopefully keeping their ax out of the way, [laughter] have generated a picture of the time and the whole process in which the Christian movement actually appeared and developed and how it became what it has become.
Was there an actual historical individual? Truly there is absolutely no way to say so with any certainty whatsoever. There is virtually no documentation outside of the Christian literature itself and most of the Christian literature is intentionally storytelling that has nothing to do with having taken a Polaroid or given an interview to anybody, Jesus or anybody else. They are figures in stories and people felt free to write stories or if that were not so, there wouldn’t be so many different stories.
And the stories are told as they are told based on what kind of point of view of belief or philosophy that particular sect upheld, so they told those kind of stories. They told stories in that manner. People, in other words, felt completely free to make it up [laughter] and somehow or other that was not, at the time, wrong to do. It wasn’t about wrong, it wasn’t about falsehood. It’s a curious way of thinking and perhaps it’s impossible for you to understand, although you have believed all kinds of things in your life without the slightest evidence, so why do you think that’s okay?
Anything about the Divine nature of existence or supernormal matters, yes or no about them, rests on the actuality of evidence or not. Mankind is the inheritor of a great tradition full of experiences and full of stories. What is experienceable now, able to be demonstrated now, able to be demonstrated in the experience of at least serious people, authenticates itself now.
People of course are free, at least in some general sense, to believe traditional religious messages. Most of it is enforced through social and political means, however. Most of you are Westerners. Many of you have been Christian or brought up in some kind of association with Christianity where you have perhaps even gone to churches and belonged to some Christian church tradition.
But how did it get to be so? Until Rustam appeared, I used to often say, “Where are all those Zoroastrians? Why have you all been Christians and Jews, you see? [Laughter]. Now there’s someone who is a Zoroastrian, you see, finally, [laughter], only because he came from a part of the world where there were Zoroastrians, you see? He didn’t get his Zoroastrian revelation walking down the street somewhere in Iowa [laughter] and you all didn’t get to be Christians by examining them so thoroughly you found out the claims were true – or appeared to be anything much at all that you are, as a matter of fact, that you think.
You’ve inherited your minds in a rather casual manner through associations that persuade you and that have influenced you at a time when you were relatively unconscious, without discrimination, as children and so on. You absorbed it, more or less, then it becomes yours and you’re wondering about it or not wondering about it, just affirming it. Look at how many millions of people affirm religious belief with absolute certainty. They insist on it, [laughter] and are always getting incredibly angry, in fact, when what they are affirming is not accepted by somebody else. They are giving all this doctrine which is supposed to be about love, Divinity, and all the rest of it, but if you don’t like their particular belief, they get angry right away! Their immediate first reaction is to get angry with you. Where is the religion part? It’s clashes of culture, clashes of sex and all that’s gone on all over the world, you see, because mankind has come all together all at once real fast and the internet has made it move at virtual light speed now and war and terrorism is erupting all over the world based on religious conflicts , often that just a few years ago seemed to most people who had [inaudible]bothered to get a serious education or taken their education seriously were impossible, just absurd. Mankind had civilized itself beyond that kind of thing and there wouldn’t be any more of this kind of thing.
Now the whole world’s about to come to an end like in a grand Armageddon or something for some theater about religion.
So it’s no small matter. There is no evidence for the physical existence of Jesus. The official tradition is only one among many other traditions that didn’t survive except in the form of some things that have been dug out of the ground, but variations, new sects appear all the time too. There is a lot of gnosticism around now. Christian Science, for one thing, as I mentioned is a kind of gnostic tradition. So is most esotericism gnostic in some sense; in other words it’s about esoteric, secret, esoteric means secret, knowledge or a spiritual understanding somehow, in some mode or other, philosophy, of the nature of existence that sets you free by associating you with the truth. That sounds like a good idea, in fact, Jesus was supposed to have said it. It’s a gnostic saying. It doesn’t mean he said it, but there’s a gnostic influence being reflected there.
The New Testament is full of different strains of stories and ideas and phrases added to something else to turn it into a different sounding something. The book of John, the Gospel of John is a very gnostic kind of a book in some ways and yet it is anti-gnostic in its effort as a text. The gospels are all anti-gnostic tracts. They are told specifically as they are told to counter gnosticism. They are not Polaroids. They are not merely historical stories. They are propaganda, anti-gnostic propaganda, propaganda for a particular point of view that is non-gnostic, that emphasizes certain things because of the existence of other kinds of ideas that they anathematized and called heretical and were very much in conflict with–those who became what eventually became official Christianity. They were precursors of that official Christianity, along with lots of other forms of Jesus-oriented teachings and traditions and stories – all kinds of stories.
But there is no historical evidence of Jesus’ existence. It’s not that he was a well-known historical figure at the time and had lots of references. There are almost no references and what ones there are are even suspect as being later editions and so forth. And most of the writings are after the lifetime of Jesus and even after the lifetime of anybody who was supposed to know Jesus. It’s a heavily propagandized religion and people are free to believe it and I am reflecting, not merely a negative attitude toward it, whatever is true is true. I am not opposed to one thing or the other about it being true. All I’m reflecting to you is the actual nature of the history of the time and what scholarship has demonstrated about it and what some of the consensus that is developing among scholars suggests about that tradition.
Similar things are being done about virtually all traditions, in fact. We are speaking about Christianity at the moment, but we could just as well be talking about other traditions. They were all generated on very much this same popular basis and dominant religions are fundamentally exoteric traditions that exist to serve purposes of a social kind, the same purposes that the state is interested in, serving or having to be served. It supports the purposes of the state. It is basically intended, exoteric religion, is basically intended to make human beings behave well socially. Behave well, meaning behaving in such a manner that it’s conducive to order, productivity, and so forth in society. And exoteric religions serve that purpose, have always been associated with the state in one manner or another for this purpose.
Esoteric religions have not been communicated to the masses. That’s why they’re called esoteric, which means secret. They were supposed to be secret. They were for the few. Sufism, for instance, is associated with the tradition of Islam. Many Islamists oppose it because of its esoteric tendencies and so forth, and even consider it heretical often, but it’s there within the tradition, associated with the tradition of Islam. So in many countries there are Sufi schools. Often they function quite openly and in coincidence with the exoteric general tradition of Islam.
In the Christian world there are mystics and they generally are given a hard time by the official ecclesiastical authorities to whom they are subject and have to struggle and even keep their writings secret and so forth. Teresa of Avila you mentioned is now a Doctor of the Church. In her lifetime she was very much suppressed, controlled by her confessors and so forth, because mysticism is always suspect, you see.
Gnosticism, spirituality, is suspect from the exoteric perspective because it suggests some kind of universal truth and one that’s not really just about social behavior, maybe even leads people out of the social domain into ascetical practices and makes them too ecstatic to work [laughter] and so on, so there are concerns of this kind and so there is a lid kept on it, you see.
In India there is a lot of esotericism. It’s always known to be there. You can go to a master if you want and so on. On the other hand, it’s a society that has been traditionally more alpha-like in its orientation and allowed for people to be poor. It was part of what the world is, so people could not only be poor by accidents of birth, they could be intentionally poor and you wouldn’t miss a few thousand ecstatics [laughter] to put on robes and go begging, you see. That was okay as long as it doesn’t catch on like wildfire and everybody gets ecstatic. So most people are waving incense around an image, you see, and so on like everywhere else in exoteric traditions. And those who get especially serious about things somehow find that living an ordinary life it is paradoxically not about the ultimate. They get discouraged, you see, with karmic life devoted to being productive in some conventional sense and so they become interested in an ascetical life, perhaps, or at least one that does not carry on the social obligations that people ordinarily expect to uphold.
Even then, in India, if somebody decides they want to go be a swami and wander, can often get bothered by their families and Maharshi is an example of that, in fact. His family tracked him down. The only way he could get them off his back was to make them his devotees and put them in charge of the ashram![laughter, Adi Da Samraj laughs].
No, he didn’t approve of Me going into ecstasy as I would spontaneously. My eyes would turn up and so forth and he told Me I shouldn’t do that, it would make Me go crazy [laughter, Avatar Adi Da Samraj laughs].
So there is no definite proof based on evidence that Jesus of Nazareth exists. Some people, many people, of course, want to definitely affirm there is no doubt about it, you see, but actually, in terms of evidence, it is simply overwhelmingly beyond a doubt or even beyond a reasonable doubt that there is no such evidence and the picture is much more complex than people presume who haven’t studied the matter.I have just covered something of it as I have on a couple of other occasions recently.
I have given you tools for understanding these things, you see, what all these different traditions became what is truly a great tradition, the entire tradition of mankind all mixed together. I have given you tools for understanding this, for appreciating it positively and for overcoming your provincialism and uninspected beliefs and thoughts and habits of life and mind.
I have indicated to you the anatomy, the real structure, of human beings and how that is represented through different modes of tradition and how that then can be applied to the historical traditions and you can see how they all fit into this very straightforward structure of understanding the nature of human endeavor in all time.
So if you will study this formally, using the means I have given you, including the Basket of Tolerance, then your practice of this Way serves[inaudible] your understanding of it and its uniqueness will be served by it. You will be, hopefully, purified in your mind and relieved of your provincialism or relieved of your lack of understanding.
Why do people go to universities? For the same reason. The university I went to, Columbia, was very much interested in simply teaching people how to use the mind as a tool, not merely how to use the mind as a kind of a file cabinet [laughter]. You see, it wasn’t about being indoctrinated in any one or another kind of believing about anything, it was about exercising the tool that is the mind.
Of course, that university, like similar schools elsewhere, was associated with modern tendency, the disposition associated with scientific materialism and the like. It was all rather tacitly presumed. But on the other hand, there was a free examination of everything and you were free not to take that position and I didn’t. I had to speak directly to professors. It wasn’t just big classes – one on one with Professor [inaudible]I had to be able to speak fluently and write fluently based on massive amounts of material and argue points that he would just bring to me when I sat down[inaudible] in a room with him. It wasn’t like just exams and formulas of rote learning and so on.
And so he would make some proposition or other and I would have to argue it and bring all the relevant historical and literary evidence that I had studied to bear on what I said and then he would give me a grade, express his pleasure or his displeasure. He did not like my insistence on the indivisible oneness of existence [laughter] as an obvious, as a given, just so, you see? So Pastor Kaiser didn’t like[inaudible] my eyeballs rolling up [laughter], those at Columbia didn’t like my philosophical stand, so I just kept on going [laughter].
DEVOTEE: Beloved, one of the things that the books about early Christianity often mention is that there were many other dying and resurrecting God religions at the time, but as far as I know Christianity is unique in claiming it was an historical event, whereas in other cases it was …
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, that’s what was said, of course. On the other hand, in Egypt they believed this all actually happened to the Pharaoh.
DEVOTEE: Right, yeah.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: A similar story told about the Pharaoh becoming identified with Osiris, [inaudible], the ancient, very ancient, more ancient than Egypt, walk-about religion based on astrological myths, and you can find those same astrological myths in The New Testament and The Old Testament. But why did they even go to all the trouble to build those pyramids and so forth if they weren’t thinking there was something that was a machine for a literal purpose that had to do with a literal Pharaoh and achieving something for the purposes of the people altogether. It was connecting to the great dome up there in the same manner as Jesus going up into the sky …
DEVOTEE: So the pyramids …
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: …resurrection machine…
DEVOTEE: Uh-huh.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: … the great pyramid, you see. It could be described as such and it is about a man going through the underworld and overworld and various dimensions of his person and so forth, achieving a status that supported the wellbeing of Egypt after that.
So that is an example of a presumed historical individual being associated with the same kind of death and resurrection mythology or a version of death and resurrection mythology. In fact, it’s fundamental mythology from the ancient world. It’s all over the place and it’s not just in Christianity and it’s no more or less literal in Christianity than it is in any other religion. It’s a ritual of beliefs and belief through rituals and it’s full of mythology, but mythology is all right, you see, unless you must believe it’s historical, then you get problems and conflicts with others. But if the basic Jesus story is a myth, that’s fine. It still represents what could be called religious and spiritual truths and, just like the Bhagavad Gita and other texts. It’s not any less a representation of truths or God ideas for not being historical. It’s just that the official tradition insists that it is historical.
DEVOTEE: It insists …
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: It’s so confused now, there’s been so much making it up and so much of it has been found out now, even making relics and everything else, vast number of them– faking it, you see, that unless you are just part of that tradition and need to believe it. But if you examine it on the basis of evidence this is what you have to look at, fundamentally a mythologized religious tradition like religious traditions fundamentally are. And they’re there to serve, generally speaking, ordinary people, masses of people, within the context of a state. Something else you wanted to ask?
DEVOTEE: I’m just wondering how this became a characteristic of Christianity as opposed to other religions that they absolutely insisted on the historicity and at the same time I’m feeling like perhaps it’s only because of that quality of Christianity, it was able to survive into the modern era whereas, you know, Egyptian and other Middle Eastern religions …
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: There are historical reasons why …
DEVOTEE: Yes.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: … other religions stopped and that was because the state stopped as it was and so on. The sources for this insistence in official Christianity and the tradition on which that official Christianity is based, that stream of tradition. There are so many causes that can be referred to and different scholars would argue various points about it. Obviously it, being rooted in Judaism is a fundamental reason why. And being essentially a form of Judaism initially, it was just Jews who believed in Jesus as the Messiah. Other Jews didn’t. Most of them didn’t.
They believed various other kinds of Judaism, but there wasn’t just one form of Judaism either. There wasn’t even a fixed canon of scripture, of Old Testament, among Jews any more than there was among Christians until a later time. Judaism has very much an orientation toward the human scale of things and of people. That means people who are alive and people, among other peoples, and therefore had to do with their political and social conditions. The expectation of a messiah came out of that tradition, but it’s the expectation of essentially someone who does something political and social and as a human being and that was the first presumption about Jesus. That was the initial tradition, not other kinds of interpretations that got developed sooner or later and alongside this one and in conflict with it. And in fact that tradition wasn’t the one that lasted.
As you know Christianity started to move among the Gentiles after not too many decades, supposedly Paul, presumably, dubious again – if you presumed him to be an historical figure, made that acceptable. He had to argue it and he was threatened and so forth by the other disciples and so forth and he didn’t see Jesus as a physically resurrected person. He saw him as light.
And also those who insist on the fact of Jesus being resurrected, physically and ascending physically –the stories of the New Testament describe him walking through walls and physical bodies don’t walk through walls. So what’s the physical body about that? See, well it’s a paradoxical bunch of beliefs, you see. They’re [inaudible] statements. They don’t all fit together. They contradict one another. But Judaism is definitely a fundamental reason. The anti-polemic trend or Greek philosophical and Roman philosophical trend based on this original situation of roots in Judaism and its orientation toward the human, the physical, and so on, carried with it an inherent disinclination toward abstract spiritual notions.
Asceticism wasn’t particularly a trait among Jews, although there were ascetical practitioners among Jews, there are all different kinds of Judaism. But it didn’t come out of the traditions of the Gentiles; it came out of the traditions of Judaism and so it has that characteristic embedded in it and that’s largely the reason plus exoteric inclinations in general.
They still go back to things like the laws of the Jews and so forth and what is considered necessary morality and how does a religion justify necessary morality. Well, you have to have some way to have the religion affect peoples’ social behavior. And any kind of philosophizing or secret knowledge kind of trends that were somehow separated out from the flesh were suspect and suspect for philosophical reasons, because of roots in Judaism, and otherwise suspect because they didn’t fit with the requirements for exoteric religion in general, which means it must be a religion usable within a state, a social state, nation, a political state and coincident with its purposes are social purposes and so on, and so exoteric purposes in general coincided also with the philosophical predilections associated with humanness and physicality.
But there were other forms of tradition who associated themselves with the Jesus story and they didn’t take that position at all. They were more Gentile in their form or in some cases more Jewish in their form. This one strain that became the dominant one was favored by some and eventually was found to be the most acceptable to the Roman state. Constantine considered some other religions too [laughter] he just decided on this one, made a deal for this one [laughter] and then he had to find one that suited his purposes.
DEVOTEE: Mom had something to do with it, didn’t she?
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: His mother was supposedly more pious about it than he or something or other about it. She traveled to Jerusalem which at that time was in ruins or otherwise restructured on ruins, and declared certain places to be original sites associated with Jesus’ life and so forth, but they’re all just traditional, tradition-based on locations. It’s not provable, really, it’s just common piety to believe it.
RUCHIRADAMA NADIKANTA: Beloved, are there gospels or texts related [inaudible] about Jesus [inaudible]are there documents like that that …….. John the Baptist that represent or [inaudible] his teachings [inaudible]?
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, I’ve heard of some that make reference to him certainly. I don’t even particularly know of any that are entirely about him or that give something like a summary of his teachings, kind of thing. There may be some such texts, but I’m not aware of any. He’s another individual about whom [inaudible]all kinds of stories that have gotten told and there are different presumptions about him and different strains of the different sects from the period. But again no historical evidence otherwise; no evidence outside the tradition itself for him actually existing other than the stories told within the tradition. So it’s not that he was known by others, Romans and non-Jews, who were contemporary with him who wrote about him extensively and so forth, so all that exists are stories about all of these people. The New Testament writings were not written at the time of Jesus. They were written later and they are collections of stories and sayings and so forth that are just part of the talk of the time, or just made up on the spot.
DEVOTEE: Beloved, one thing I read in one of these books is that, at least in the view of Robertson, Paul’s letters, he says, do not indicate knowledge of the gospels as we have them and they are, I believe, are generally presumed to be older than the gospels, though he was saying that the gospel stories as we now know them are not something that Paul was familiar with.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Right. There was no New Testament. All kinds of whatevers presumably. Where did these letters come from? Was there somebody named Paul who actually wrote all these things?
DEVOTEE: And kept copies in a file folder? [Jonathan laughs].
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: There are no original manuscripts and it seems evident to scholars that there’s all kinds of changes that have been made in them, written into, between the lines, and changed in one way or another over time. Perhaps they come from various hands or a single hand and had a totally different point of view than is now encapsulated in the letters as they are presently known. There was nobody looking over anybody’s shoulder there, you see, and demanding evidence.
DEVOTEE: And no one looking over the scribes’ shoulders either when they copied things.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Right, copied, so to speak. There was more than copying about it [laughter]. They rewrote it and changed words, interpreted it while supposedly copying it, and would wind up amending it. They didn’t like the way it spoke, so they wrote it a little differently–threw in some stories of their own![laughter]. This is perfectly acceptable behavior and commonplace. It is commonplace today. There are stories told about Shirdi Sai Baba and Nityananda that never happened. They’re the same stories that have been told about other people. They are the stories that everybody tells about their master because you gain merit by saying great things about great men or Divine figures. So they will bless you if you attribute this story to them, you see?
So the tradition around Shirdi Sai Baba is full of made up this and that, this, that, and the other thing. What of it is true? How does anybody know? Where’s the evidence? There are contemporary stories or stories since that time of people experiencing unusual or supernormal phenomena, but you hear that happening at Lourdes too and Fatima, so that’s just part of how people work, you see? People have visions and dreams and imaginings and fears that make them want to believe and affirm things, and change things, and struggle and suffer and so on. People are consoled by these traditions and they don’t want any kind of hard look to be taken necessarily, you see. That’s why I repeat again I’m not just making up my own version of all this, this is what scholarship is demonstrating.
I’m pointing you to the Basket of Tolerance. You will find this view in the Basket of Tolerance. Read the books there if you are to study this formally. I have provided the material there for you to look at if you care to. This is what current scholarship has developed as the evidence associated with this tradition.Aand I similarly, in that bibliography, placed literature about virtually all traditions.
So if you’ve been a believer because of your childhood upbringing or whatever associations later in your life, in Christianity or any other tradition at all.read the materials on the Basket of Tolerance and get familiar with the rest of the Great Tradition, you see and learn how to use the total body-mind, not just the mind. Learn what this Way is about in its uniqueness and learn to practice it and cease to be provincial in your mind, ceasing to believe merely because it’s hanging around in your mind forms, which is simply an immature characteristic of human beings. There’s no justification for it and why uphold it then?
Unlearn your prejudices and your childish believing. “When you were a child you spoke as a child, believed as a child”, and so on and this suggests that when you grow up you put away childish things. You get an adult’s education by formal study and also by attending the university my father said he graduated from, called the school of hard knocks. [Laughter].
DEVOTEE: Thank You, Beloved, for showing us exactly how to understand this and for giving us what really is the revelation of Truth. Thank You so much