I just finished reading The Breath of God, by Jeffery Small. I had talked about this book in an earlier blog post, so I won't go into detail on it here. However, the idea of Jeshua (Jesus) having traveled in the east during at least some of the years before his ministry is fascinating to me. So my ears perked up when I learned that in the Christian Ed that our church has after the service was on 'Who Was Jesus?'
The class is in several installments and this one dealt with the backstory of Jesus' ministry - the political and religious conflicts that were going on in the years up to about 70 CE, when the second temple was destroyed. It looked at the different sects involved, the Roman occupation, and other aspects of the tensions in the region at the time.
While the class, itself, had no really new information, it presented existing ideas in a way somewhat different from the way I had always heard it. It was pretty good at rolling the whole scenario together into a coherent whole, something I had not seen done so well before.
But to me, the interesting part came later, when I went up afterwards to ask the teacher a couple of questions one-on-one. He made it quite apparent that he had little belief in the story of Issa, common (I think) to Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim traditions, in which a man later named St. Issa studied in India in the very early first century. The teacher of this particular class, however was quite open to the idea of a more diffuse form of influence from East to West, i.e. Jewish thinkers being exposed to Hindu and Buddhist ideas. He also told me more about the spread of Christianity from Israel to India as Phillip, one of the 12 disciples, traveled into the east. But the idea that Christianity might actually be part of the Hindu/Buddhist family of religions was not very acceptable to him.
The other question I asked him was about his view of the meditation traditions that are common in most other religions, namely Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, etc., but missing in Christianity. Christianity has very little tradition of meditative lineage, while Hindu/Buddhist lineages are quite prominent, the guru principle, the tradition of teacher-to-student lineages. His answer was that some of the monastic orders have traditions like that, but not specific lineages per se. It is more at the level of students of a school. They don't continue the guru principle from predecessor traditions.
He was quite open to the idea that perhaps the gnostic branch of Christianity had originally continued that line. Perhaps teacher-student lineages extended into the west in a similar way to how Buddhism spread from India to China. That would be in keeping with the gnostic texts, several of which describe Jesus intuitively passing esoteric knowledge directly to his disciples in a way that couldn't be captured in print. This is at the core of the guru principle, that the most esoteric knowledge is passed intuitively from teacher to student, and that it cannot be written down.
Unfortunately, that branch of Christianity was pretty much killed off in the third century CE. Thus, it appears that Christianity lost much of this rich lineage of tradition. While there have been a number of esoteric movements within Christianity over the centuries, the original teacher-student lineage was lost. It wasn't until the late 20th century that such lineages have again returned to the west, beginning with the Transcendental Meditation, Yoga, the New Age movement, the Himalayan tradition, etc.
Thus, I have found myself studying the some of the Vedic-derived traditions of meditation (albeit probably not very diligently). It will be very interesting to see how this branch of spiritual tradition fits in with other mainstream (and not so mainstream) religions in the near future. In the mean time, for me, it was synchronistic that I attended this class so soon after reading a book on the Issa tradition, The Breath of God.
