The "Historical Jesus" Fallacy Revisited

Recently, I blogged some pieces about the issues to do with the historical Jesus, pointing out why in essence the whole concept is a distraction.

The topic keeps coming back up, because with my interest in the Thomas Gospel, the whole question of why Jesus sounds so different in Thomas than in the later gospels keeps coming up, and the historical time line of how things happened at the time is the most practical way of explaining that, and sorting out Jesus's teachings from the theologies that were later promulgated in his name.

However, the real way of understanding it all is only internal, never mind how difficult that may seem at times. This is one reason why A Course In Miracles is so helpful, because it puts us in touch with the resistance we all have against Jesus.

For the careful reader it is very evident how "fresh" the sayings from the Thomas gospel sound, it is really like it was recorded by someone live, and then collected into a bundle, so it is almost as if you can hear the spoken word vicariously through the scribe, listening through him. This experience is similar to what people experience with A Course In Miracles, and even with some of the sayings in the New Testament tradition, the inner recognition results from having an experience that results from a sincere attempt to follow him, by practicing what it is we hear him say. Only in that attempt do we come to grips with the meaning of the words, and does the meaning of the teaching reveal itself. References to that are to be found throughout the literature. His teachings are thoroughly practical, and not at all meant as a topic for a thesis in theology, but for daily practice.

Once we begin to fathom the holographic nature of this perceptual universe of time and space, "the world," it is evident that Jesus is speaking to us from outside that world of separation, from a reality of wholeness, where truth is one, and one is truth, and no separation or differences exist. He is thus the personification of our own deep understanding that the Kingdom is actually our reality, and, as Jesus says repeatedly in the Thomas logia, the Kingdom is all around us, we just don't see it. Ultimately, the reason we don't see the Oneness, is because we have chosen at the level of the mind to take seriously the notion of a separate identity, and on the abstract level, it is that choice of the mind, where we place ourselves outside the all of spirit, which we are a part of, that we then reciprocally no longer perceive that all as oneness, but as a multitude of individuals and individual entities. One is a logical consequence of the other.

Therefore when we follow the accounts of Jesus, there is a temptation of trying to identify him as what he looked like and what he said or did, and which individual he was, so we can point him out, as Judas did, and we do not even fathom that this in itself is the betrayal, not of Jesus, but of ourselves. The Judas principle denies the living, spiritual reality of Jesus, and hands him over to "the authorities of the world," so that he ends up being crucified. Like Judas we do not comprehend that we are simply so drunk with the perceived "reality" of time and space, that we don't realize the consequences of our action, but we won't learn until we finally are able to stop choosing form over content, and let the spirit direct the form, instead of trying to force it into a mold which kills it. By setting him up as a person of history, we now relegate Jesus to being one person in particular, who we can then crucify, or idolize, or both, but at the very least we have then successfully killed off his living reality as the manifestation of the Holy Spirit (as A Course In Miracles calls him). At that point we have seemingly managed to pull him down to our level, instead of following his call to rise up to his level and follow him to the Kingdom, which is the reality of our oneness, which we cannot see as long as we look from the vantage point of individuality, with our physical eyes. The idea of his teaching is instead to come up to his level, and see the world with the spiritual vision of oneness, so that we see it like him. However, as long as we limit him to a historical person, we have then established him to be like us, as a specific individual, whom we call Jesus, and to make it really safe, he lived 2,000 years ago. And again, psychologically to put him in the past symbolizes nothing but repression. We have thus distanced ourselves from him, by imagining we live in a world in which he lived, and died, that long ago.

So the way to recognize him for what he is, including understanding the true and the false of the historical traditions about him, lies in practicing his teachings in our own lives, at which point we find ourselves moments of sudden understanding of some of his sayings, which might otherwise remain obscure. We see this in contemporary writers such as Eckhart Tolle and Jeff Foster, and we've seen it from many spiritual people (regardless of if they were sainted or not), who suddenly along their path experience a deepening of understanding his words, when experientially they come in touch with the same issues of spiritual development as Jesus spoke about. That level of understanding, which is a dynamic growth process of its own, is altogether different, and more solid than the form-based argumentations of philology, hermeneutics, and theology, which will invariably shut us off from that living reality of experiencing Jesus in the present.

Another tip-off about the problem is to realize just how many historical Jesuses there are. As many as there are students of him, for we all have different images and understandings of the past, which after all is not a reality per se, but just a way of speaking about our experience, and our own belief system of who and what we are. There is no better way than that to realize that none of them are true. The only thing about him that is true, is the essence, is what he represents. Historically it is the Acts of John which is the tipoff, for there we find the apostles discussing how differently they each experience Jesus.

The above is why I found myself recently saying to someone that the whole historical Jesus "thing" is some sort of a hoax. Jesus told us he would be with us whenever we call on him, but by limiting him to a personage of history, we safely shut the awareness of him out of our present awareness.