 88. Jesus (His Truth) |
IV
There is, in the "New Testament" Gospels, a core story-line about the person called "Jesus". That story sits beneath and within all the overlays of institutional propaganda and institutionally self serving "interpretation". In other words, there is a story (or a kind of biography, including a collection of basic teachings) that seems to represent a core-tradition upon which the institutional writers of the "New Testament" Gospels were building their inventions of new religion. At the core of the stories about Jesus is a core tradition that precedes (or is the basis for) all the Gospel writings of the "New Testament" (all of which were written even many years after the lifetime of Jesus).
The "New Testament" texts that I have included (and, altogether, selected, translated, and elaborated upon) in this book (in the section entitled "The Spiritual Gospel of Saint Jesus of Galilee") are the parts of the Gospels that can be said to be true to the core tradition relative to the moral, devotional, and (encrypted) Spiritual teachings of Jesus (and, otherwise, relative to the esoteric tradition of the ancients). The core story is the "New Testament" Gospel story about the life, doings, and teachings of one who is usually called "Jesus of Nazareth", but who, more properly, should be referred to as "Jesus of Galilee". The core story transcends (or stands irreducibly apart from) the institutionalizing (and the grossly and publicly oriented, rather than Spiritually oriented) process of "official" Christianity.
The "New Testament" (as it is commonly presented in myriad translations and renderings) mostly contains the institutionalizing and non-Spiritual tradition of "official" Christianity. Nonetheless, the "New Testament" stories convey a thread of teaching-truths from the ancient world on the subjects of moral, devotional and Spiritual matters.
No actual individual who lived in Jesus' lifetime can be said to have communicated Jesus' doings and sayings, as Porphyry did about Plotinus (whom he knew), or as Motovilov did about Saint Seraphim (whose direct and personal Spiritual Transmission he experienced).
Baba Muktananda wrote first-person accounts about His Spiritual Teacher, Bhagavan Nityananda. Baba Muktananda knew Bhagavan Nityananda personally, and directly experienced His Spiritual Transmission, as well as His teaching. At the same time, however, it must be said that Baba Muktananda's writings about BhagavanNityananda convey not only facts about Bhagavan Nityananda but also many myths about Bhagavan Nityananda.
In the Indian tradition, it is common practice for people to tell (or even invent) stories about their own Masters that, characteristically, use (or repeat, and embellish, and revise) stories already commonly told, within the existing tradition, about "great persons" (or Saints, Yogis, and Spiritual figures within the Indian tradition altogether). Whatever that previous tradition already contained, people also "re-told" it about Bhagavan Nityananda. By doing so, they were, in accordance with the traditional understanding, acquiring "merit" - simply by repeating great things about their own Master. Such is the rule of "merit" in the traditional setting of India - and the same rule (or license) existed within the tradition in which the "New Testament" Gospels were made (or invented). Indeed, traditional stories about Spiritual Masters (including Jesus of Galilee) are rightly understood only when thus understood.
All "storytelling" is a poetic and fictionizing and propagandistic art. All "storytelling" is literature and theatre-not "news reporting" or any kind of effort to rigorously account for "facts". (Indeed, perhaps because this difference is self-evident to virtually everyone, even "news reporters" characteristically refer to their supposedly "factual" reports as "stories".)
Traditionally, whether through lore, or mythology, or imaginative storytelling, historical (or, otherwise, entirely fictional) personages are "artistically concretized" - for the purpose of establishing and propagandistically promoting the "authority" of exoteric religious (as well as all other cultural, social, and political) institutions. That process tends to produce accretions of a kind that are no longer what could be called "historical" in nature, except in so far as they represent the "history" of the institution itself.
For example, such a process can be seen exemplified in the earlier part of the twentieth century, in the institutionally-promoted stories about Shirdi Sai Baba'2-the stories about whom very quickly reached into the domain of super-myth, on the basis of very little reliable history. Because Shirdi Sai Baba lived within the last one hundred years, some historical reality for the stories must be granted. Yet, his life is far enough back in time that (through the "concretizing" process of storytelling) the reports and legends about him have been transformed into pure myth.
