I always found it frustrating that
Jesus, unlike Mohammed, appears to have done nothing to assure a verbatim
transmission of his teachings. As a result, Jesus’ words and deeds have
only been written down decades or even centuries after his death, in a
different language, by persons who most probably have never met him. Because of
the socio-political context at the time of writing, selection and rephrasing of
the gospels was strongly biased.
The obvious question is therefore on
how much has this error-generating transmission affected the message of the
historical Jesus?
To find out, I did the following: I
bought the Complete
Gospels (which contain also fresh translations of non-canonical texts,
such as the Gospels of Thomas or Mary, or the Q and Signs Gospels) and selected
sentences that I found particularly touching. I then rephrased these sentences
to some extend, and put them in a different order, so to obtain something like
a suggestive little story line.
The result of my little experiment
(which took me two years, and resulted in a short manuscript) were twofold: 1) there is a particular message and
spirit of the Gospels that is reassuringly robust to manipulation. 2) By
chewing on the texts for long to produce a distilled and personal version, I
felt I understood Jesus' message - and maybe Jesus himself - much better. In a
way, it almost felt like I got to know this Yeshua
personally, at least a little bit. Bottom line: If you want to understand
Jesus, you have to rewrite the Gospels; you have to wrestle with the available
texts, take them apart and write your own, personal Jesus.
A little later I read that Buddha
advised followers to question and chew on his teachings...
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