Chapter 7: Revisioning Jesus

Fundamentalism is by its very nature a very legalistic approach to faith. In such a religious system, there is always an extensive list of prohibited activities. In the faith community of my youth, going to the movie theatre was on that list of prohibited activities, and I almost went all the way through school without ever seeing the inside of a theatre. . . almost.

When I entered my senior year of high school, I had begun to question the wisdom behind a number of things on the “list,” and the prohibition to go to movies was one of them. One day in November, I told my mother that my friend Karla and I had been kicking around the idea of going to see a movie on Saturday night. Perhaps she heard the determination in my voice, or perhaps she realized that since I had just turned eighteen, she could hardly continue to “forbid” me to do things. Whatever the reason, she shocked me with her response. “Well, you’re old enough now to make your own decision; but you know how your dad and I feel about it.” That’s all she said; and I assumed that she meant just what she said, that it was my decision. I decided to go.

I lived in a small rural town, and the nearest movie theatre was at the Lake of the Ozarks, more than 30 miles away. Karla and I went to the movie, and then stopped for ice cream before coming home. When I finally got home, it was almost midnight and my mother was waiting up for me.

I remember the scene as if it were yesterday. The house was dark, and my mother didn’t even bother to turn on the light. She had been laying on the couch. When I walked in, she sat up and spoke to me from the shadows.

“Where did you and Karla go tonight?”

“We went to the Lake and saw a movie --- “

She didn’t let me finish. She wasn’t interested in what movie we saw or how the experience was for me.

“So you went to a movie, huh?”

Uh-oh. In that moment I realized that I had misinterpreted her consent to let me make my own decision about the movie. It hadn’t been consent, it had been a test. . . and I had failed. For the next few minutes, I stood there while she expressed her disappointment. Something about wondering where she and my father had gone wrong. Something about how she thought she had taught me better than that. There were tears. And then, those words that I will never forget: “you always have to be the black sheep of the family.” Ouch. Those words hurt like the heat from a branding iron. I don’t remember a lot of what was said that night, but I remember those words; and I’m sure they have shaped my perception of myself and of my family relationships in ways that I can’t imagine.

When I graduated with my Doctoral degree 20 years later, my parents came down for the celebration. My mother was saying something about being proud of me, and from somewhere deep inside, the words came tumbling out –catching me and my mother both by surprise. “Not bad for the black sheep of the family, huh?” My mother looked at me with a confused look on her face. “What are you talking about?”

I then took her back to that night 20 years earlier, and recounted the events – and most importantly, those soul-searing words that she uttered, “you always have to be the black sheep of the family.” I supposed I thought that I would now be vindicated; that she would see what her words had done and would apologize for the wounding that occurred so long ago. . . but it didn’t happen that way.

She simply looked at me with consternation and said,” I never said that. In fact, I don’t even remember the night you’re talking about.”

I was stunned. How could she not remember such a pivotal moment? I went over the story again, trying to jog her memory. She was persistent.

“Well, if you went to a movie with Karla that night, I sure don’t remember it; probably because it wasn’t that big of a deal to me. But I KNOW I didn’t call you the black sheep. I’d never say that about one of my kids, especially one of you girls. You were always the good ones.”

I use this story in my interpersonal class to illustrate the unreliability of our memories. I am absolutely sure of how it happened; but my mother is absolutely sure of how it didn’t. Who is lying?

Neither one of us is lying. The exact “script” of what was said that night may be lost forever; but our perceptions are clear. Between actual events and our memories of events is a whole system of personal filters involving our past experiences, our attitudes and motives, and the story of ourselves that we have constructed from the feedback we’ve received from others. Our memory doesn’t work like a video camera, storing all the events in our lives as raw footage. We are meaning-making creatures; and the “memories” we store are more akin to commentaries about specific scenes from our lives. We can only “see” life events as they come to us through our personal filters. That is why Aristotle suggested that, in the art of persuasion, our arguments become more important than the “objective facts,” since “objective facts” can never really be determined.

The point of the story is that history is in some sense always a fiction; a statement of meaning rather than fact. This concept is pivotal in trying to understand who Jesus actually was and how far we can take the Gospel narratives in trying to get to the “facts” of his life.


We have no documents in which Jesus explained himself or what he taught and believed. The only way that we can know the historical Jesus is through the eyes of others in the Gospel accounts. Yet, with the possible exception of Mark, the Gospels are not first hand accounts of his life. These documents were written years after his death, and recount what people thought about him and what his life meant to them. The Gospels are not objective descriptions of the “facts,” they are rather, in the words of Borg, “testaments of devotion” (p. 31).

In trying to piece together the reality of that late night conversation with my mother, both of us have very different memories. Our memories, though, tell us more about what the conversation meant (or didn’t mean) to each of us than they do about the actual events. Neither of us are “lying;” we are both very accurate concerning our perceptions; but obviously, we are both a bit unclear about the actual facts. To assume that the Gospel accounts are an historically accurate accounting of “facts” is to ignore a basic truth about human nature.

The “Quest for the historical Jesus” as it has come to be known is an attempt to get as far as we can behind the layers of meaning and perception that color the accounts of Jesus in the Gospels. Various criteria have been established over the years to guide this quest, criteria based in critical methodology from history, the study of literature, and even sociology. While the goal of this research is always to get at a more pure and honest picture of who Jesus was, the scholars work under the constraints of their own personal filters just as the Biblical writers did. The result is that in the search for the historical Jesus, there are a number of different pictures that have emerged. Some of the most acclaimed (and also controversial) images have been presented by Sanders, Meiers, Funk, Vermes, Crossan, and Borg. David Gower (2007) has written one of the most recent and abbreviated overviews of this body of scholarship.

If we are forever bound by our own filters, is there really any “value” in searching for the historical Jesus? I believe that we must continue striving to look through the layers of mythology, always trying to get a glimpse of the Jesus of history. To “give up” the quest is to assert that the truth of who he was doesn’t matter. This I am not prepared to do.
Perhaps the value is in the search; in the act of confronting, again and again, the questions behind the search, attending to the “ideological bridge that is built during the process of interaction between voices, past and present” (Gowler, 30). Citing Crossan, Gowler suggests that
Therefore, it is incorrect to speak of the ‘quest’ for the historical Jesus; we should speak of our own “reconstructions” of Jesus that ‘must be done over and over again in different times and different places, by different groups and different communities, and by every generation again and again (Gowler, 29).

Through the process of studying this body of research and rereading the Gospel narratives, I have tried to reconstruct the “essence” of who Jesus was. In my opinion, Jesus can be best described as a passionate visionary and a compassionate mystic.
Before I explain these two designations, I think it is important first to discuss who, in my opinion, Jesus was not.

Who Jesus was Not

One thing that seems clear to me after my own personal quest is that Jesus probably never assigned the same meaning to his life that the developing church did. Somewhere after his death, Jesus the man became the firstborn son of God and savior of the world in the mind of the early Church. As a result, in writing down the “testaments of devotion” known as the Gospels, the writers provided the commentary that would make his divine origins and mission more explicit. Most Biblical scholars agree that much of the elaboration in some of the birth narratives is just such commentary.

The idea of the “virgin” birth seems to be one of those editorialized ideas. Not only do I believe that Jesus never saw himself as being born from a miraculous “virgin birth,” but neither did anyone else around him during his life. This idea is a post-Easter creation, and was probably created to “legitimize” his role as messiah and divine son of God. So what was he? Some Eastern religions teach that he was an “avatar” – The incarnation of a highly evolved being or divine ideal. Others say that he was a human who, by whatever means, had either come into the world with or somehow achieved a much higher level of consciousness – or in modern terms, a much higher vibrational energy field. He exhibited, I believe, a level of spiritual evolution that was atypical for his time. Was he the “son of God?” Yes, in a universal sense. Yes, in the sense that he represents a more complete expression of the god-image that lies undeveloped in all of us. Was he the “son of God” in a physical, virgin birth sense? On this point, I am skeptical.

Another idea that is widely held by the Christian church today but is not evident in the historical Jesus is the idea that he saw himself as the savior of the world, or as the “substitutionary atonement’ for the sin of mankind. This idea – the “blood mythology” as I refer to it, didn’t actually appear in the form we know it now until the eleventh century A.D. Borg ( 1989) attributes this idea to Anselm, the Bishop of Canterbury, and reminds us that “strikingly, Mark’s story of Jesus’ death says nothing about a substitutionary sacrifice” (pg. 268). If Jesus had no concept of himself as a savior of the world, he certainly held no view of himself as the “only” way to God. This doctrine of exclusionary salvation is totally out of character with his broader teaching, and is a construction of the later church (a teaching motivated more by politics and power than truth). This doctrine is based on a single passage, John 14:6: “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (KJV). Most scholars question the authenticity of this saying as coming from Jesus. Borg suggests that it is an editorial comment on how the early church saw the mission of Jesus; but even as that, it need not be interpreted as we interpret it today:

Is it really possible that nobody other than Christians can be saved? That the God
of the universe has chosen to be known in only this one way? But within John’s incarnational theology, the verse need not mean this. Incarnation means embodiment, becoming flesh. For John, just as Jesus is the word of God become flesh and the wisdom of God become flesh, so he is the “way” become flesh. For John, what we see in Jesus is the way – the incarnation, the embodiment of a life radically centered in God. This – the way we see in Jesus – is the way” (222).

What about the greatest claim of all – That Jesus experienced a bodily resurrection from the dead, and foreshadowed this miraculous event in his teachings?
On this point, there is widespread disagreement. Not surprisingly, fundamentalist scholars insist on this point and refuse to consider any other viewpoint. Yet, Vermes (1973) tells us that the idea of a “bodily resurrection” is not an idea to be found in the teachings of Jesus, and that “it is generally held, even by academic orthodoxy, that the references to the resurrection at least constitute prophecy after the event” (p. 37).

Crossan also doubts the resurrection narrative, and suggests that the historical record as well as the cultural practices at the time make it quite likely that the disciples never knew what happened to the body of Jesus. Probably, according to Crossan, he was buried in a shallow grave by the soldiers or his body eaten by wild dogs.

At any rate, the story of the “empty tomb,” though present in the Gospel of John, is not mentioned in the writings of Paul that predate the Gospels. This is a painful consideration for fundamentalists, since the faith of fundamental Christianity is built squarely on the idea of the bodily resurrection. But did Jesus ever suggest that the “kingdom of God,” the central focus of his life and teachings, was in any way dependent upon his own immortal physical body? There was never such a claim, or even suggestion. As we will see, Jesus message was not about himself, but was about God’s kingdom; a kingdom not based on material realities. While I believe that we cannot be dogmatic about this point, the evidence suggests that the Easter narratives may be mythological statements about the meaning of Christianity rather than statements of historical fact. At least, we should suspend judgment on the matter.

Jesus reconstructed: The Passionate visionary

Philosophers and psychologists have long noted that we all have an interior time orientation that is independent of “real” time. Einstein refers to this individual time orientation as “I-time” (1955, pg. 5), while Bruneau (1988) calls this “existential time” and contends that our inner thoughts are constructed within the framework of a personal past, present, and future; and that our thinking style arises from the habits of mind we develop within this framework.
According to Bruneau (1989), our time-related orientation plays a big role in how we approach the world. Based on this observation, Bruneau has identified three distinct types of thinkers: Déjà vu thinkers, who tend to base their understandings and perceptions on the way things have happened in the past, Presque vu thinkers who tend to maintain awareness in the moment, and Jaimas vu thinkers who are able to think outside of the constraints of the past and see the world in terms of an “existential future”.

While we all find a stable sense of identity by crafting a “personal story” out of our past experiences, Déjà vu thinkers tend to live from and within those past experiences to a greater degree. For the Déjà vu thinker, present experiences and future possibilities are interpreted and conceived within the framework of past meanings. What is going on right now finds meaning only as it is related to what has gone on before, and expectations for the future are crafted out of past experiences.

According to Bruneau (1989), this type of thinking is typical of people who are routine oriented and schedule dependent. Bruneau observes that “Many dogmatic people anchor themselves in simplistic and exacting historical beliefs and the rigid sequencing of events (1989, pg. 69). This type of thinking is often automatic and unconscious, and can come to be characterized by “dullness, boredom, and dull gray lines of ennui.” (Bruneau, 1989, pg. 69)

For De javu thinkers, even the future is based in the past. Nothing new is ever envisioned; the future is expected to be a repeat of all that has come before. It has been said that what happens in your life next week is largely dependent on what is going on in your mind right now. Since Déjà vu thinkers dwell in the past, the future is bound to repeat this past. In the Prometheus story we referred to earlier, the Déjà vu thinker is represented by Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus and the protector of orthodoxy and tradition. This is the world of organized religion.
The second type of thinking identified by Bruneau, Presque vu thinking, is the ability to live in the moment; being consciously aware of what is happening without casting it on a framework of past experiences or future expectations. Great teachers of meditation tell us that by learning to be fully present, we can become more conscious. Through meditation, we can learn to recognize the quiet, fully aware thinker behind the myriad of thoughts that bombard our minds constantly. This consciousness is the self behind our crafted personas and our socially formed ego. For many, Presque vu thinking can help to clear the way for Jamais vu thinking.

Jamais vu thinkers do not live within the haunted halls of the past, and have the rare ability to see beyond the present. The Jamais vu thinker is that odd sort of fellow who follows the beat of a different drum; and this drumbeat is the pulse of growth and evolution . For the person who lives in this personal time, the future is likely to be something novel and original, something that has never been seen except in his or her visionary dreams.

Jamais vu thinkers talk to themselves about new ideas, things that have never been done before. This type of thinking “implies novel selfhood, difficult thinking, or creative thinking. . . full of flashes of insight, puzzlement, paradox, and other forms of enlightenment about to occur or occurring” (Bruneau, 1989, pg. 70). In our society, we tend to think of these thinkers as visionaries. They stand on the edge of the known world and peer into the depths beyond; and as a result, they talk in ways that often seem unintelligible to the De ja vu thinking majority. While some may recognize these thinkers as innovative and forward thinking, there will be plenty of others who will see them as mad scientists or out of touch “crazies”. Many people, especially those locked into cycles of Déjà vu thinking, find the new and unknown to be frightening; and Jamais vu thinkers have historically been ostracized or viciously targeted by such people. The Jamais vu thinker is the archetypal Prometheus, bringing “new fire” down from the Gods. But the Gods of organized religion do not accept new fire easily; and just as Promethius had his liver fed to the buzzards, human visionaries often meet untimely deaths.

Jesus was such a person. It seems that he was able to envision a world and a way of living in the world that was radically different from the way things were and had been in the past. This vision of a new way was his passion, the grand idea that was central to his message; but it was more than a grand idea. This vision of a new way of being in the world was the code he lived by.
How or when this vision developed we are not told, but there are clues. We first encounter Jesus in his adult life as a follower of John the Baptist, another visionary within Judaism at that time. This association in his twenties, according to Borg (1989), suggests a “deepening religious passion” (pg. 117). Jesus seems to have been deeply drawn to the message of John; but his vision of the Kingdom of God eventually took on a different shape that that of his early mentor.
Sheehan (1989) tells us that

"Jesus’ preaching was as riveting as John’s, but different in tone and substance. Whereas John had emphasized the woes of impending judgment, Jesus preached the joy of God’s immediate and liberating presence. A dirge had given way to a lyric” ( pg. 57).

Like John, Jesus taught repentance; but it was not repentance as we tend to think
of it in modern day fundamentalism – an experience resonating with the low level energy of guilt and shame. The repentance of Jesus was about experiencing a total reorientation; turning around and seeing from a completely new perspective. The repentance of Jesus’ teaching was about transformation, not dodging condemnation.

This vision required new ways of relating to God as well as new ways of relating to others in family and society, and he embodied both in his actions. This vision may be best understood in the simple elegance of Luke 10:27: 27: “And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself” (KJV). He called this vision “The Kingdom of God” and he became the flesh and blood manifestation of this Kingdom.

Loving God. The act of “loving God” was, in the message of Jesus, more than just a feeling. In the kingdom of God, “loving God” was to participate in a certain kind of relationship. Athough this idea was not necessarily innovative, since it was also at the heart of Judaism, the way in which it was to be practiced was radical.

In Judaism, “loving God” was accomplished through the outward practice of the law. God was in heaven, and one was to honor him by observing the commandments that had been handed down. In Jesus’ conception of the Kingdom of God, God moved from “out there” to “in here.” The spirit of God was the “bread of life,” the “living water” that springs from within. God was not just in heaven, but here in the midst of us right now, this moment. In the Kingdom of God, God is not wholly other, but intimately and personally related to us; we are his children and he is our father.

Because of this immanent, personal, and inward presence, we need not look outside anymore for his wisdom and guidance. Jesus taught of a wisdom and knowledge that would spring up within us, channeled through us by the power of the Holy spirit.(Luke 12: 11-12, Mark 13:14).
Because of this immanent, personal, inward presence, Jesus taught that we all have direct access to God. In the kingdom of God, the “spiritual hierarchy” is no longer necessary. “But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren. And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.” In the kingdom of God, each individual stands in direct relationship with God; and therefore, is directly responsible to God.
Since the Kingdom of God exists within each individual, definitions of purity were radically changed. In the Kingdom of God, we are longer set right with God by what we do; but a right relationship is evidenced by what we are inside. This inward transformation then necessarily changes our outward behavior. In the Kingdom of God, right living originates first in the life of the mind. Jesus taught that evil begins in our thoughts (Mark 7:21) and that it is not what we put into our mouths (referring to Jewish purity laws), but what comes out of our mouth (the words that originate in our heart) that defiles us (Mark 7:21).

The kingdom of God is within us. This is a message of personal freedom and responsibility – responsibility that is removed from the institutionalized religious structure. The coming of the Kingdom of God was the ultimate leveling of all men before God. The inward, immanent God made the institutionalized priesthood superfluous, an indictment that did not go unnoticed by the religious power brokers.

As well as leveling all mankind before God, the Kingdom of God that Jesus envisioned called for a leveling of the social structure as well.

Loving my neighbor. Just as loving God required relating to God in a radical new way, loving one’s neighbor required relating to all human beings in a radical new way. Middle Eastern society in Jesus’ time, like most societies, was one of hierarchy and class. Crossan tells us that it was a “brokered society” in which the poor peasantry had to cultivate relationships with the privileged “power brokers” of the culture in order to advance in class or status. It was a world of clients and sponsors, and one had to play the political game and curry favor with powerful people. As a result, hosting a banquet was a strategic event in which the host could invite powerful people and cultivate social and political currency. The Jewish religious institution, rather than being an island of equality in a very stratified society, was itself very stratified according to class, with priestly powerbrokers and moral outcasts; and pubic meals were a time when it could be made clear who was who within the system. According to Borg, “ in the ancient Mediteranean world in general and the Jewish homeland , sharing a meal was a form of social inclusion, and refusing to share a meal was a form of social exclusion” (pg. 159).

Into this society Jesus came, teaching a message not just of equality, but of a social system turned upside down. In the Kingdom of God, the first would be last and the last would be first. In a society where one’s seat at the table was determined by one’s status, Jesus admonished his followers to seat themselves at the end of the table. He must have shocked his listeners with the story of the rich man who threw a banquet, but invited the poor, the powerless, and the outcast to attend. In a society where the moral purity of the religious depended on staying clear of the “unclean” people of society, he told a story that turned that practice on its head. No doubt the crowd would have been stunned by the story of the good Samaritan; a story where an outcast of society is shown to be more righteous than the priests themselves in his act of serving the helpless. The ethics of the Kingdom were radical, because they “entailed always taking the side of the weaker or disadvantaged party and therefore, the side of the poor and oppressed—including those whom the religious establishment declared to be outcasts” (Sheehan, pg. 64).

Not only did Jesus elevate the weak in his teaching, he brought down the strong. Even today, people are sometimes baffled by the strong warnings Jesus had for the rich, as in the passage credited to him in Matthew 19:24: “And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (KJV). Such indictments of the rich, according to Borg, were directly aimed at the class stratified social hierarchy. These indictments were “critiques of the domination system. In his world, how did people become rich? Only by collaborating with and perpetuating the domination system” (p. 244).

If Jesus had just been telling stories, then perhaps his “kingdom” rhetoric would not have caused such a stir. But Jesus was a different kind of visionary. Jesus was the embodiment of the vision he talked about. Time and time again in the Gospels, we find Jesus smashing social conventions, ignoring the “purity laws” of the Jewish faith, and eating with the likes of tax collectors, prostitutes, and other “sinners.” What they all had in common, according to Borg, was that the people that Jesus ate with on a somewhat regular basis were all marginalized groups within the broader society. Jesus didn’t just talk about equalizing the social structure, he reached down and pulled up marginalized people to his level.

Women, another marginalized class, were also embraced in the Kingdom of God. Throughout the Gospels, we meet women who played significant roles in the Jesus’ life and ministry. What is clear, according to Borg (2006), is that

"First, God’s kingdom is for the earth. . . not about heaven. Second, it was a
political as well as a religious term. . . as a political-religious metaphor, the kingdom of God referred to what life would be like on earth if God were king. . . Third, the kingdom of God. . . involved a transformed world. . . it means the end of injustice and violence" (pg. 187).

Jesus was a visionary. He saw a world and a way of living in the world that was
radically inclusive, where everyone had equal and unbrokered access to God himself. But more that that, Jesus was the most dangerous kind of visionary; he was a passionate visionary who believed in his message, lived his message, and in the end, was willing to die for his message.

Jesus death was not about substitutionary atonement. Jesus death, according to Borg, was simply a “human inevitability. This is what domination systems do to people who challenge them, publicly and vigorously” (pg. 273).
Jesus Reconstructed: the compassionate mystic

It is true that in the body of literature generated by scholars in the search for the historic Jesus, there are few points upon which most agree. Some scholars have suggested that the picture of Jesus seen by each scholar tends to reflect that scholar’s own ideological and psychological profile. While it is true that it is impossible for any of us to escape our own filters and be truly objective, there are a few points on which most scholars agree when they look at the historical Jesus. Perhaps the most striking and consistent characteristic in all the modern portraits of Jesus is that he was widely known as a healer, and that he was seen by his contemporaries as speaking with a power and authority that was not typical of other teachers. It is also clear that Jesus attributed the source of his power to God. This evidence puts Jesus into the category of the great mystics.

Mysticism is a concept that is widely misunderstood by most Americans in this day and age. Borg ( 2006) suggests that the difficulty in using this term is that to many, it is a vague term that has negative connotations, and seems to suggest “fuzzy thinking or something that need not be taken seriously. . . an otherworldly orientation that has little to do with the dailiness of life” (pg. 132). This is unfortunate, since mysticism is at the heart and soul of all great religions, including Christianity.

According to W.T. Stace (1960), mysticism is about a higher level of consciousness that perceives the “undifferentiated unity” in all things. William James (1958), in the Varieties of Religious Experience suggests that the consciousness of the mystic is characterized by 4 essential qualities: Ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, and passivity.

“Ineffability” refers to the utter transcendence of the mystical experience, in that it cannot be described in words, or comprehended through intellectual concepts. The mystical consciousness is beyond description, and can only be known through direct experience. The mystic speaks of this consciousness in parables and metaphor, if she/he speaks of it at all, because there is no direct way to speak of his/her experience with the divine. For this reason, mystics see their experience as being a direct, unmediated experience with a transcendent force, a force that we understand as “God” within the Judeo-Christian worldview.

“Noetic,” according to Webster, means “pertaining to the mind; apprehended by reason.” James attributes a noetic quality to the mystic experience because it seems to be related to knowing things:

"Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority. . . "(pg. 293).

This “curious sense of authority” is what is reported in the Gospels; people often seemed surprised by the way Jesus spoke, and judging from the crowds that were reported to have followed him everywhere he went, they were at least curious about it. Borg expands on this characteristic quality of the mystic consciousness:

"People who encountered Jesus sometimes experienced a spiritual presence in him. Rudolph Otto speaks of a numinous presence that is frequently reported in or around those who have decisive experiences of the sacred. There is a sense of otherness in them that evokes awe, amazement, or astonishment. . . The Buddhist tradition speaks of a “Buddha field,” a “zone of liberation” around the Buddha and subsequent Buddhist saints, or Bodhisattvas; . . . in Christian tradition, the followers of St. Francis in the thirteenth century spoke of a similar presence in Him" ( pg. 126).

The quality of transiency, as identified by James (1958), refers to the occasional quality of the mystic experience. This level of consciousness is not sustainable for long periods at a time. I believe that the “glimpses” we get of the historical Jesus in the Gospels is a glimpse of Jesus in “flow,” speaking and acting from the mystical state of consciousness. What is left out is the day to day activity that connected the times of teaching, healing, ministering. Anyone who has ever gotten “into the zone” in teaching, ministering, writing, or other avenues where divine inspiration is felt knows full well that while it is an incredibly fulfilling place to be, it is also quite physically draining. It is only reasonable to expect that Jesus experienced the same peaks of inspiration and valleys of fatigue, and that is why we often see him withdrawing from the crowds or going into the desert.

The last quality of the Mystical consciousness, according to James, is the feeling of passivity. “When the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power” (pg. 293). This is consistent with what Jesus said about himself. Jesus pointed to God as the source of his power, and the way in which he characterized that relationship was one of intimacy and direct access. God was his “father,” his “abba.” It is reported in the scripture that Jesus spoke of himself and God as being one. This fading of the self into union with the divine is at the very heart of mystical consciousness.

This “fading of the self” is an idea that can be found in mysticism throughout the ages. In the high middle ages there were a number of Christian mystics who wrote about this experience, some of the more recognizable ones being Hildegard of Bingen, Julia of Norwich, John of the Cross, and St. Theresa Avila. For these people, the mystical experiences were at the center of their lives. They were passionate about God. But passion is the vertical state of mysticism. The Mysticism of Jesus was also marked by compassion, which is passion turned horizontally and extended to those in the word. To be sure, Jesus felt a divine union with God; but rather than being a mere container of the divine, he was a conduit for divine power. Jesus was touched by the condition of those around him. While we can’t be sure of the exact words he spoke to the crowds, it seems clear that he spent a lot of time with the crowds; teaching, ministering, touching the people. And the effect of his compassion is undeniable. No matter how much one may want to write off the miracle stories as myth, the record shows that a central theme of his life was healing the sick.

Borg, Vermes, and other critics tell us that although unusual, possessing the ability to bring about physical healing was not unheard of in the day. There are records of spiritual healers, magicians of a sort who used potions, chants, and rituals to restore health. But Jesus didn’t seem to be of this variety. Except for a couple of instances where Jesus used mud or spit, he did not rely on potions, recitation of “spells” or chants, or carrying out prescribed rituals. Jesus healed primarily through two means; a simple touch or a simple word. Jesus compassion seemed to make him a conduit of divine power that amazed people. This simple and effective way of restoring health in those to whom he ministered created a sensation; a sensation that characterized his ministry and drew huge crowds wherever he went about him wherever he went.

That the historical Jesus was born of a virgin, the only begotten Son of God, the substitutionary atonement, and the resurrected savior is mythical truth at best. At it’s worst, this idea is a misunderstanding that diverts our attention away from the Kingdom of God, which was the heart and soul of Jesus message. That he was an extraordinary man with a highly evolved understanding of the divine, that he lived his life at a level of unity with the divine that we should emulate today, is closer to the historical truth.

In this revisioning of Jesus, does he lose the distinction of being Jesus the Christ? Not so. The term “Christ” means “the anointed of God.” As a highly evolved incarnation of the divine consciousness, it can be accurately said that he was anointed by God. We cannot however, take this to an extreme position in which Jesus is the only incarnation of the divine consciousness and the exclusive mediator between mankind and God.

In this revisioning of Jesus, we can no longer stop at his life and teaching as the “final word.” It is the power of the transcendent God that we are to seek; and in this quest, Jesus is but the guide.