Jesus Christ is the most famous individual in the world
apart from the four members of The Beatles; but for a man so widely known, his
life is shrouded in mystery and conflicting information. He was born in what is
today Israel at
the turn of the BC/AD ages; "Before Christ" and Anno Domini- "in the year of our Lord". The reason all
time is measured from that period is because of Jesus' birth. Popular awareness
of his life story comes almost entirely from the New Testament, the fundamental
text of Christianity. This was not written by Jesus or anybody who knew him; it is
Greco-Roman and is often attributed to the Piso family, a part of Roman
aristocracy who lived over three hundred years after Jesus died. This writing
was not done until the Fourth Century when Christianity was becoming the
established religion of the Roman world. It portrays Jesus as the son of God, the
third part of the Holy Trinity, born to a virgin on the twenty-fifth of
December. He had twelve followers and died to redeem the original sin of
mankind. Three days after his burial he was raised from the dead. This is not
an original idea; in fact Jesus is just the most recent of a dozen or more
deities with all those attributes. They are symbolic of the annual cycle of the
sun and a lot has been written about that. In modern times new texts have come
to light that portray Jesus very differently, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hamadi Gospel. The Jesus of those
documents was a spiritual seeker and teacher. He was married to Mary Magdalene,
who is mentioned in the mainstream Gospels as a fallen woman whom Jesus
forgives. She then anoints his feet and wipes them with her hair. They may have
had children and that led to the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery that has fallen out
of fashion in the Conspirasphere somewhat, but is still valid in my view, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/philip-coppens-dies.html.
My parents are Roman Catholics and I used to be a believer,
but now I am lapsed. I do not believe Jesus was the son of God, at least no
more than anybody else is. He was not born to a virgin mother; he was conceived
in the usual way and I expect Joseph was his father. The problem with the New
Testament is that it says nothing at all about almost all of Jesus' life story.
It begins with the Nativity, Jesus' birth in a stable in Bethlehem .
Then there is one single scene from his childhood; when he is about five years
old he gets separated from Mary and Joseph in the Temple
of Jerusalem and when they find him
he says: "How can I be lost in my father's house?" After that we hear
nothing at all until he begins his ministry a few months before his death by crucifixion.
By then he is in his early thirties; so what was he getting up to in the
meantime? Theologians generally assume he was living an average life, helping
Joseph in his carpenter's shop. That sounds rather boring, too boring to be
true; and a new study agrees. The story begins in 1887 when a Russian doctor
visited a Buddhist monastery in Kashmir , India .
He found texts about a man who travelled there from the west called "Issa"
and many of the monks knew all about him. He was identified as a prophet and a Buddha.
We all know about Gautama Buddha, the man known worldwide as "the
Buddha", but he was just one of many Buddhas. In the background article
below you will see that Buddhas drop from the sky on a regular basis and,
according to the Kashmiri monks, Jesus was one of them. This new study has been
produced as a BBC television documentary. It adds that Jesus did not die on the
cross in his early thirties, but instead he merely left Palestine
and returned to India
to begin a long career as a preacher. He visited the holy cities of Benares
and Puri. He finally died at the age of eighty and is buried at the Roza Bal
shrine in Srinagar . Source: http://ewao.net/2018/01/16/bbc-documentary-proves-jesus-was-a-buddhist-monk-named-issa-who-spent-16-years-in-india-tibet/.
This is to me a far more interesting and, indeed, respectful story about Jesus.
Even as a child the official story of Christianity didn't make sense to me. It
is shot through with logical and ethical flaws. Integrating these errors as an
adult led to my becoming a lapsed Catholic. One thing I like about William
Blake is his poem Jerusalem
which gave lyrics to the beautiful hymn which some want to make the national
anthem of England ;
it deserves to be. It tries to fill in Jesus' missing narrative by claiming
that he visited Britain
with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a travelling merchant. In the New
Testament he also organizes Jesus' burial. "And
did those feet in ancient times walk upon England's mountains green? And was
the holy Lamb of God on England 's pleasant pastures seen? And did the countenance divine shine forth
upon our clouded hills?..." Jesus may have come to Britain
to study the discipline of the druids, another sect of ancient wisdom. With
these new revelations Jesus is looking more and more like a man filled with
divine inspiration and a desire to learn, experience and share spiritual
practice and knowledge. He travelled far and wide for his whole life to
discover everything he could from the mystery schools of the world. Naturally
orthodox Christians will be horrified by this new study, but really they have
no cause to be. Far from debunking and denigrating their faith, the new study
elevates it to a higher level. We now know that Jesus Christ was a far greater
man than we ever knew before. I have watched that TV show and it is available
on the source link above.
See here for
background: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/messiah.html.
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