"I have it, I know it, I saw it, I read it."

The Christ Myth and the Vicissitudes of Nerdity

The Compassionate Christ Jesus of the Sacred Heart

In my personal faith, the teachings of Jesus have certainly played a role and given me hope and comfort in the trials I have faced.

And yet, I find many of the churches and organized religions that have sprung up in his name worthy of disdain.

I have tried to maintain a certain positivity in this blog. And so I have avoided disdaining the religious points of views of organized churches, out of respect.

And yet, there is a limit to tolerance. When we tolerate intolerance we run the risk of being crushed.

As I have tried to cleave to the teachings of my guru, I have faced innumerable attacks on my faith by well-meaning “Christians.” Mostly I ignore this sort of thing and go on with my business. But every 50 years or so, one is entitled to a well-considered response.

I’m not really interested in Jesus.

I’m sorry if that offends you.

But before you try to convert me to your view, please respect mine.

My own particular perspective has been informed by scholarship, experience, and introspection.

I live 50 yards away from a church, and even now the church-bells are ringing in preparation for the Holy Week celebrations of the resurrection of Christ.

But I am not a follower of Christ.

I like Krishna.

The idea of God dancing in infinite joy, surrounded by his loving devotees as he intones a divine melody on his transcendental flute moves me much more than the notion of an Angry God throwing thunderbolts of justice. The compassion of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu who made animals dance to the holy name in the Jharikhanda forest inspires me more far more than the lonely Christ, brutalized and bloody on the cross.

I find childish the idea that I have one chance to mortify the flesh and take shelter of Jesus in this lifetime or face eternal hell at the hands of a compassionate but just God.

In the end, Christ offers liberation from the material world.

When I was initiated as a devotee by Śrīla Prabhupāda, he gave me the name “Mukunda Mala Das” after the book of prayers by King Kulashekhara: the Mukunda Mala Stotra.

I liked the name. Mukunda means “giver of liberation.”

But when I asked my guru Śrīdhara Mahārāja about the meaning of “Mukunda” he said, it means, “One who gives something that makes liberation look poor by comparison.”

Devotees of Krishna are not interested in liberation from this material world, while this might appear externally to be the goal. What the devotees of Krishna are after is divine love of the highest order. They are prepared to sacrifice liberation for divine love.

So, if by ignoring Jesus Christ, we run the risk of going to hell, so be it.

We are ready to go to hell for Krishna.

We would rather go to hell for Krishna, than hover around with angel-wings for Jesus.

So please don’t send me any emails threatening me with death or castigating me for not “understanding” Jesus.

I’ve done all the “understanding” of Jesus that I’m prepared to do.

Furthermore, the good Christians who try to inform my spiritual life with their interpretations of the Bible know that any real relationship with Jesus should be “personal.”

So, if you’re interested in having a conversation with me about my “personal relationship with Jesus,” be you Baptist, Anabaptist, Methodist, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, or Urantia Book People, I recommend that you read this blog carefully before asking me to consider your point of view and my eternal life with Jesus.

I remember when I used to distribute “Back to Godhead Magazine” in Calcutta in 1978. I went from one cloth shop to the next, dressed in my orange brahmachari dhoti and armed with a heavy bag filled with magazines.

At one shop I hit a wall. Before I opened my mouth, the kindly gentelman who ran the shop smiled at me and said in rapid-fire English...

“I have it, I know it, I saw it, I read it.”

I tried, “Excuse me sir...”

“...I know it, I have it I saw it, I read it.”

“Yes,” I said, “but...”

“I saw it I have it I know it I read it.”

There was no penetrating his defense. He had it, he saw it he knew it, he read it. I went to the next shop. I never came up with a good refutation to his argument.

So, in dealing with Christians, I submit:

“I know it, I have it, I saw it, I read it.”

To buttress the above point, in preparing this series  let me just say that I’ve been through a number of scholarly books and articles on the historical Jesus. If your interested in further information on the subject, you can go through them. I found Zealot by Reza Aslan a well-written popular treatment of the Life and Teachings of Jesus in his historical context. For a skeptical account of Christian Mythology, there’s The Christ Conspiracy by Acarya S. whose thesis is basically that Christianity was fabricated from a conglomeration of different myths and mystery cults and propagated by Rome as a way of consolidating control of their empire.   

Christ in Egypt, by D.M. Murdock continues the theme, attempting to prove that Christian mythology recapitulates the Egyptian Book of the Dead. How Jesus became God by Bart D. Ehrman is a less strident approach than Murdock’s that attempts to reconstruct the Apotheosis of Christ from the Synoptic Gospels and concludes that the Christ cult is really based on early Christian belief in resurrection. He concludes that there is no historical evidence for resurrection. Four Portraits, One Jesus by Mark L. Straus is a kinder and gentler look at the historical Jesus for the faithful, softening the criticism of the Gospels while relying on their version. I re-read Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigen, Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln. This book was the basis for the wildly popular Da Vinci code. Without wishing to spoil the book for anyone, the thesis of Holy Blood, Holy Grail has to do with the idea that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, that he had children with her, and that this bloodline (The “holy blood”) of the title flowed from the womb (or holy “vessel”--the cup or “Grail”) of Mary.

Here’s a representative quote from Holy Blood, Holy Grail: “Modern scholars are unanimous in concurring that the Gospels do not date from Jesus’ lifetime. For the most part they date from the period between the two major revolts in Judaea--66 to 74-- and 132 to 135--although they are most certainly based on earlier accounts. These earlier accounts may have included written documents since lost--for there was a wholesale destruction of records in the wake of the first rebellion. But there would certainly have been oral traditions as wel. Some of these were undoubtedly grossly exaggerated and/or distorted, received and transmitted at second, third, or fourth hand. Others, however, may have derived from individuals who were alive in Jesus’ lifetime and may even have known him personally. A young man at the time of the Crucifixion might well have een alive when the Gospels were composed.

The earliest of the Gospels is generally considered to be Mark’s, composed sometime during the revolt of 66-74 or shortly thereafter--except for its treatment of the Resurrection, which is a later and spurious addition.”

I went through “The Birth of Christianity--discovering what happened in the years immediately after the execution of Jesus” by John Dominic Crossan. He concludes that the most important attribute of the Christian God is Justice. He adds that the justice of Yahweh, the God of the Tetragrammaton, is tempered by the compassion of Christ, and that the balance between compassion and justice is the essential thesis and antithesis of Old and New testament as synthesized in the person of Christ.

“Yahweh is a God not only of justice but also of compassion. ...It is impossible to have justice without compassion, but it is possible to have compassion without justice. Where there is justice without compassion, there will be anger, violence, and murder. A thirst for justice without an instinct for compassion produces killers. Sometimes they are simply believers in a Killer God. But compassion without justice is equally problematic. Compassion cannot substitute for justice. Those who live by compassion are often canonized. Those who live by justice are often crucified.”

I took a look at Annie Besant’s “The Jesus of the Gospels,” where she questions the “reliability of the views of the Christian Fathers.”

Annie Besant founded the Theosophical Society and later promoted the career of J. Krishnamurti. Her translation of the Bhagavad-Gita is helpful in decoding the Sanskrit word for word, and helpful for students of that great book. She began her career as a “freethinker.”

In debate with the REV. A Hatchard on Nov., 25th, 1880, Besant remarks, “I am obliged to dissent from the view to which my opponent has given utterance, viz., that exactly the same Bible is in the hands of both Protestand and Catholic. The Douay Bible differs in many respects from the Bible received in Protestant Churches; and nothing is more common than for a Roman Catholic to warn his hearers on the peril of their souls not to read the Protestant Bible, while on the other hand the Protestant cautions his followers that the Douay version of the Scriptures is misleading and therefore not to be received.”

Little has changed since this statement made 136 years ago. If anything, modern scholarship as evidenced by some of the above-quoted authors has demonstrated even further the unreliability of the Gospels and early church fathers. Their testimony for such miracles as the loaves and fishes, raising Lazarus from the dead, walking on water, or the resurrection can hardly believed with any authority. And while, according to the stories that were told about Christ, the lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised and demons were expelled, there is absolutely no objective historical reference to this anywhere, apart from the Gospel stories written down nearly a century later.

At the same time, the Romans kept careful records and wrote extensive histories of the period. We have preserved the works and letters of Cicero who wrote in the half-century before Christ, and whose books are filled with the current events of the day. Were the Romans sublimely unaware of these important events?

The Victorian Edward Gibbon, writing in the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” expresses his wonder at this sin of ommission: “the sages of Greece and Rome.[during the age of Christ]..appeared unconscious of any alterations in the moral or physical government of the world. Under the reign of Tiberius, the whole earth, or at least a celebrated province of the Roman empire, was involved in a preternatural darkness for three hours [during the crucifixion]. Even this miraculous event which ought to have excited the onder, the curiosity, and the devotion of mankind, passed without notice in an age of science and history. It happened during the lifetime of Seneca and the elder Pliny, who must have experienced the immediate effects, or received the earliest intelligence of the prodigy. Each of these philosophers, in a laborious work, has recorded all the great phenomena of Nature, earthquakes, meteors, comets, and eclipses, which his indefatigable curiosity could collect. Both the one and the other have omitted to mention the greatest phenomenon to which the mortal eye has been witness since the creation of the globe.” [Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. 1808, pp. 178,179]

One Roman historian does mention Jesus: Tacitus. Publius Cornelius Tacitus was a senator and historian of the Roman Empire. The surviving portions of his two major works, the Annals and the Histories, examine the reigns of the Roman Emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero and others who reigned from the death of Augustus, the successor of Julius Caesar in 14 AD to about 70 and the Jewish-Roman War. He is considered one of the greatest Roman historians, especially by Edward Gibbon himself, author of the above-quoted Decline and Fall. Tacitus mentions only that among those convicted of treason to the Roman state, Jesus was put to death as a criminal. He makes no mention of miracles, eclipses of the sun at the time of the crucifixion, or resurrection. The brief mention of the execution of Jesus by Pontius Pilate by Tacitus is all the evidence for the historical Jesus that may be found in the voluminous writings of different Roman scholars and historians writing within a hundred years of the crucifixion.

Having been through the above-mentioned literature as well as the Bible and its Gospels, I would still assert that the lack of evidence for a historical Christ is insufficient, in my opinion for a complete denial of the Christian faith. While history has its uses and scholarship often illuminates, there is still something to be said for transcendental experience itself.

Leaving aside the whole historical question about the biographical nature of Jesus, let me shift focus for a moment.

At this point, I must confess that I have little patience for the trivialities of Christology. I’m more interested in my own personal enlightenment to invest any more time in the history of ancient Jerusalem and the opinions of the Sanhedrin and the Saduccees.

As someone who spends too much time reading, I understand the vicissitudes of nerdity.

Too much scholarship tends towards skepticism. Intelligence functions by way of negation. In Sanskrit, this is called neti neti, not this, not this. We filter things. We arrive at truth by saying, “This is not it. This is not it.”

Scholarship of this sort, then, tends to destroy faith. The more one analyzes the historical Jesus, the more loses faith in his life and message. Analysis and scholarship destroys devotion.

We see this in the writings of Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura.

The incredibly learned Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura authored hundreds of books. His deep scholarship is evident in his writing, and yet he was critical of erudition.

In his Śāraṇagati, or “Journey to Surrender” that great Vaiṣṇava teacher and poet laments the time he had spent acquiring useless and trivial knowledge through scholarship.

Bhaktivinod’s critique of mundane learning is meant to be applied to ordinary study, but it might just as well apply to study of the historical Christ.

From Śāraṇagati:

(১)

ৱিদ্যার ৱিলাসে, কাটাইনু কাল,

পরম সাহসে আমি

তোমার চরণ, না ভজিনু কভু,

এখোন শরণ তুমি

(1)

vidyāra vilāse, kāṭāinu kāla,

parama sāhase āmi

tomāra caraṇa, nā bhajinu kabhu,

ekhona śaraṇa tumi

1) I spent my youth in the joy of study and never worshiped at your feet. Now, O Lord, You are my only shelter.

(২)

পোডিতে পোডিতে, ভরসা বারিলো,

জ্ঞানে গতি হবে মানি’

সে আশা বিফল, সে জ্ঞান দুর্বল,

সে জ্ঞান অজ্ঞান জানি

(2)

poḍite poḍite, bharasā bārilo,

jñāne gati habe māni’

se āśā biphala, se jñāna durbala,

se jñāna ajñāna jāni

2) When I was young, I worked hard at school.

I thought that learning would make me happy.

I read and studied; my prospects were good.

My hopes grew and grew for a brighter future,

for I thought learning was the goal of life.

But My hopes were empty,

and my knowledge was in vain:

Now I know that knowing is not knowing.

(৩)

জড়-ৱিদ্যা জত, মাযার ৱৈভৱ,

তোমার ভজনে বাধা

মোহ জনমিযা, অনিত্য সংসারে,

জীৱকে কোরযে গাধা

(3)

jaḍa-vidyā jata, māyāra vaibhava,

tomāra bhajane bādhā

moha janamiyā, anitya saṁsāre,

jīvake koraye gādhā

3)O Lord,

Earthly learning is a snare of māyā

that bars the path to your worship.

Love of scholarship makes a fool

of a poor soul

and traps him on the wheel of death forever.

(৪)

সেই গাধা হো’যে, সংসারের বোঝা,

বহিনু অনেক কাল

বার্ধক্যে এখোন, শক্তির অভাৱে,

কিছু নাহি লাগে ভালো

(4)

sei gādhā ho’ye, saṁsārera bojhā,

bahinu aneka kāla

bārdhakye ekhona, śaktira abhāve,

kichu nāhi lāge bhālo

4) Here is one such fool:

who like an ass has carried on his back

the burden of that wheel since time was born.

And now I’m old; No power for earthly joy,

I find no satisfaction; nothing makes me happy.

(৫)

জীৱন জাতনা, হোইলো এখোন,

সে ৱিদ্যা অৱিদ্যা ভেলো

অৱিদ্যার জ্wআলা, ঘটিলো বিষম,

সে ৱিদ্যা হোইলো শেলো

(5)

jīvana jātanā, hoilo ekhona,

se vidyā avidyā bhelo

avidyāra jwālā, ghaṭilo biṣama,

se vidyā hoilo śelo(5)

5) This mortal life is only pain and sorrow.

My wisdom was folly:

My ignorance a shaft that pierces my heart

with burning pain.

(৬)

তোমার চরণ, বিনা কিছু ধন,

সংসারে না আছে আর

ভকতিৱিনোদ, জড-ৱিদ্যা ছাডি,’

তুবা পদ কোরে সার

(6)

tomāra caraṇa, binā kichu dhana,

saṁsāre nā āche āra

bhakativinoda, jaḍa-vidyā chāḍi,’

tubā pada kore sāra

6) But now I know, there is nothing more than shelter at your feet.

My dear Krishna: Bhaktivinoda now leaves his useless scholarship, and makes your feet the essence of his life.