Word: jesus
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...Bible. In the Bible, you have Jesus as a child in the nativity scenes, then at age 12 at the Temple in Jerusalem, and then you don't see him until he's 30. Where was he for those 18 years...
There's a lot of mythology, some of it involving the East. There was a German scholar who claimed in the 1940s that Jesus traveled the Silk Road, lived in India and may have visited a monastery in Lhasa where there were Buddhist texts. The church of St. Thomas in India's Kerala state is the only place where Christ is not pictured on a cross but in a meditative samadhi posture. I also researched that period in history for Jesus's religious context, political and cultural contexts, the Jewish sects at the time, the occupation by Rome. Then...
Your version of Jesus' "missing years" is heavy on his search for enlightenment, on both external and internal journeying. Is that an area in which you felt the Gospels needed supplementing...
When I was growing up, I went to an Irish-Christian missionary school. I was totally fascinated by the New Testament. I must have read it a few thousand times. One day I was reading the Gospel of John 10: 30, where Jesus says, "I and God are one." The crowd immediately wants to stone him for blasphemy. But he quotes a psalm that says "You are Gods, sons of the most high," which he tells them was addressed to "those to whom the word of God came." He clearly sees himself as equivalent to that group...
...interpreted this as "those who have knowledge of God are God." In Eastern philosophical systems there's an established idea of a path through personal consciousness to a collective conscience to a universal conscience, which people call the divine. I concluded that Jesus must have experienced this consciousness, and that he must have followed a path. The story is about that evolution...