History is a post-Biblical concept. Biblical stories suggest something more important than "history": the living power of Christ-consciousness embodied in a human life.
I always find it interesting that some people preach against the Bible as much as true believers preach in favor of it. But people who rant against the Bible must be attached to it on some level. If their unconscious were not entangled in the Bible, they wouldn't spend so much energy fighting it.
Preaching against the Bible is especially futile when one objects on the grounds that the Bible could not possibly be historically true. Ya' think? Of course the Bible isn't literal: it was never intended to be.
Do we object to Shakespeare because his plays aren't accurate journalism? We find profound psychological symbolism in ancient myths and tribal stories: do we object that they aren't literal histories? How about Tibetan mandalas: do we reject them because they aren't accurate photographs?
Objecting to the Bible because it isn't historical is no less silly than believing that it is. The Bible was not written as objective fact, but as an archetypal mandala of the human psyche. Here I speak of the value of its stories, as stories.
Like Tibetan mandalas, filled with deities both wrathful and benign, the Bible is a glimpse into the depths of our psyche, with all our inner conflicts, self-contradictions, and paired opposites. The Bible is full of contradictions because you and I are. And if you think your rational, linear, historical mind is in charge, just observe your dreams at night. Then observe what happens to perfectly normal people who are prevented from dreaming: they become psychotic within 36 hours. Like the Vedas, initiatory tribal tales, and Tibetan art, the Bible never happened on this temporal plane of linear history. The Bible eternally happens in the place where dreams come from...
The "God" of the Bible is the human unconscious. It rules. If we do not make it conscious, it destroys us. If we make it conscious, it is our friend. Jung pointed this out. Atheist Thomas Hardy regarded the Bible as a novelist's greatest model: he stated that nothing was its equal in the art of narrative and story telling. Yale literary critic Harold Bloom is not a believer, but he studies the Bible intensely: he deems it our first complete study of human psychology. We cannot comprehend Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Faulkner, Steinbeck or Camus without reading the Bible. The existential German novelist, Thomas Mann, author of Death In Venice, The Magic Mountain and Buddenbroocks, finally chose Biblical narrative as his model: he wrote seven novels based on the Joseph story in Genesis. No one can explore the development of Western art without encountering the psychological power of Biblical stories and symbols.
Literal/historical interpretation of the Bible is a recent phenomenon. Only within the last century have the uneducated and their ministers insisted on interpreting the Bible as historical fact. The early Church followed a much richer method of reading: the interpretive method of the Jewish Rabbis. They recognized multiple levels of meaning in each verse of scripture. While there are certainly archeological and historical facts embedded in Biblical narratives, just as there are factual details embedded in great novels, when a Biblical story is obviously not making historical sense, it is a sign to look deeper into the moral, allegorical, or mystical sense. Christian mystics call this method of reading "Lectio Divina": meditation on the word of scripture as mantra. The Biblical image or symbol becomes a doorway into unconscious and super-conscious realms.
It is fashionable these days to separate the "historical Jesus" from the mythic "Christ of faith," imagining that we can then find the man Jesus in history. But this is a futile quest. Dividing Jesus from Christ creates a false dichotomy. The Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are inexorably entangled, just as the particle cannot be disentangled from the wave-field. The mistaken dualism stems from our misconception that the historical Jesus preceded the Church. In fact, we only know Jesus through faith stories and symbolic myths handed down by the early Christian community, and eventually committed to writing a generation or two after Jesus died.
People who believe that the Gospel account of Jesus came before the Church have it backward. Faith in the mystical Presence of Christ came before the writings; then faith gave rise to the Gospels. This form of literature is completely alien to modern concepts of "objectivity," "history" and "journalism." In Gospel literature, each passage offers not a historical fact, but a moral and spiritual message. The same "event" may have different versions in different Gospels, depending on the faith-context intended. One version of the event may center on the theme of healing, another on a wisdom-proverb of Jesus, another on initiation into the spiritual life. Yet all three versions are variations of one archetypal scene. Only the ignorant call them contradictions, failing to comprehend their changing contexts.
History is a post-Biblical concept. Biblical stories suggest something more important than "history": the living power of Christ-consciousness embodied in a human life.
In truth, we have no eyewitness history of Jesus, and no original version of the Gospels. We don't even have copies, or copies of copies. We have hundreds of fragments of re-copied scribal texts, in which there are as many variants as there are words in the Gospels themselves. And non-Christian chroniclers of the Roman empire and Jewish kingdom evidently thought Jesus not important enough to record anything about him. There is simply no "historical Jesus" available to us.
Any attempt to present "the Jesus of history" will reflect the sociopolitical bias of the scholar, posing as objectivity. The Marxist scholar presents a political and revolutionary Jesus. The apocalyptic preacher presents an apocalyptic Jesus. The Catholic sees a sacramental Jesus. Those with Jewish interests see Jesus the liberal rabbi. Those interested in shamanism see Jesus the desert shaman and healer. A reader with lively sex energy gladly accepts the possibility that Jesus was married; one with repressed sex energy insists that he was single. Never underestimate the power of the ego to disguise its prejudice in the garment of scholarship.
Isn't our modern concept of history itself a myth? Who has ever written pure history? The oligarchs currently in power rewrite textbooks to reflect their economic advantage. The progressives answer them with reactionary polemics. "History" is just political diatribe, polished by academia. Surely, contemporary journalism gives the lie to our quest for "the facts." The same news item will appear differently on MSNBC, Fox and RT. We cannot determine what happened to a commercial jetliner that disappeared over a crowded nation one month ago, or what happened yesterday in the streets of Kiev. How can we possibly know what happened two thousand years in the past?
"History" does not exist. But story-telling is a perennial art, and a marvelous craft of consciousness.
No, we will never know the historical Jesus by studying ancient manuscripts, because those manuscripts are written by mystics of faith, not historians. We will only know Jesus by reposing in the depths of our hearts, dissolving this restless quest in pure consciousness, and meeting his subtle form in the Akashic space. There, as Christ-Consciousness, Jesus dwells eternally. And so do we.
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