A depiction of Jesus meditating in the desert.A blog I follow called Quaker Pagan Reflections carries an interesting post on the question of reading the Bible. It reminded me of this quote from the late Indian mystic Osho in his Art of Tea book. Here he’s talking about “meditations to awaken your spirit,” and I quote:
All of the great scriptures of the world are written in sutras, aphorism ~ because the people who wrote them went through this flood of catharsis. When the catharsis was complete, then diamond-like, small sentences ~ simple, aesthetic, beautiful, complete ~ started bubbling in the consciousness. It is from that consciousness that the Vedas were born, and the Koran. And it is from that consciousness that the beauty of the language of the Bible arises. Never has it been surpassed.
Jesus was illiterate, but nobody has ever surpassed that clarity, that penetrating reality of his assertions. Behind it is great meditation. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali or the Brahma Sutras of Badrayana or the Bhakti Sutras of Naad ~ small sentences, the smallest you can conceive, almost telegraphic ~ but so much is pressed into them that each sentence has atomic energy. If you lovingly take it into yourself, to your heart, it will explode and you will become luminous through it.
3 comments:
I would redact that Osho quote because Jesus was almost certainly not illiterate according to the highest quality biblical scholarship. There is too much mention of his command of the Holy Books. He would have to have had that command or he could not have collected disciples capable of carrying the message further. His disciples had to rely on other things after he was gone, risen or not, and among them was the reinterpretation of the messianic literature. He had to be in accord with that literature in some fundamental way and could not have done it without also knowing it.
Further, there is a minority view that as he came from Nazareth, there was a Hellenic influence that he could easily have encountered because Hellenized Jews lived just down the road from him. It is a minority guess that he may well have had some acquaintence with Greek which was the lingua franca of the time.
It is not wise of Osho to call Jeshua bar Joseph illiterate unless he can somehow know the past better than the scholars.
In the final analysis, Christopher, it's all speculation. The bare-bones truth is that there is no evidence that Jesus lived at all, despite numerous scholarly attempts to document the "historical Jesus." I'm not saying he lived or didn't live, but ~ given the lack of actual evidence ~ you can give no more credence to the statements of the Biblical scholars you mention than to anything Osho said.
It's not my intent to defend Osho in this. His comment, as you note, was highly speculative. However, I do agree with his statements about the highest spiritual literature being simple, concise, concentrated wisdom, capable of bringing a glow to one's life. That's the point.
Beautifully put, Gregory.
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