That is understandable, but when you have spent years reading the teachings of other Avatars, the words or Jesus give a good deal of insight into what He said
But of course, you are reading Jesus with the presupposition that He’s “another Avatar.”
Jesus was nonetheless a man of the orient
But is there such a thing as the Orient? Isn’t the Orient simply an invention of Western colonialism?
and His teachings show that His thinking was very much like an Indian Sadhu. John the Baptist was certainly like a Sadhu.
Can you name me professional scholars of the New Testament/Second Temple Judaism who agree with this assessment?
No one is trying to pull a clever reversal on you.
I think Vivekenanda was–quite appropriately and reasonably. I wasn’t complaining about this as dishonest. I simply think that it’s wrong from the start to lump the Middle East, India, China, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, etc., all together as “the Orient.” I’d say that there are at least four major cultural spheres there (Middle East, India, China, and Central Asia), though with lots of overlap around the edges.
It would however make sense that Jesus had exposure to eastern thought. Many feel that between the ages of 12 and 30 He traveled the silk roads to India and Pakistan to learn the truths He taught in His ministries.
Do any serious scholars hold this view? I haven’t encountered any. Not that I think only credentialed scholars have valuable insights, but when you find a certain view being confidently asserted by people who have certain agendas, but accepted by no or almost no professional scholars of the field, then I think it’s fair to wonder whether there’s much substance to the view in question. (The same goes for a lot of things conservative Christians believe.)
No one can prove that this is the case, but no one can prove that it is not.
Right, but that doesn’t mean that the two suppositions are equal. We don’t know of any other Second Temple Jews, as far as I know, who made such a journey. The idea that Jesus did seems to arise from purely theological motivations rather than historical considerations.
For some reason, stories about the visit of the Son of God to India abound in native folklore. They go so far as to talk about His having been killed by His own people upon His return to Palestine.
I’d like to hear more about that last claim. I tend to put down the Indian stories about Jesus to Islamic influences–the Ahmadis in particular put a lot of emphasis on this. But orthodox Muslims think Jesus never died, and the Ahmadis think he died in India. So this is a new twist for me.
I have only read Paul on my own, without much guidance on what Protestants see in him vs. what Catholics see.
It’s hard to believe that you haven’t been influenced by the standard Protestant narrative–it’s everywhere in our culture. I’m extremely skeptical about anyone’s claim to have read any part of the Bible “on their own,” because the Bible is the kind of text that no one in our culture can approach without presuppositions (we approach everything with presuppositions, of course, but the Bible is more loaded in this respect than many other texts).
I’m not speaking primarily of a Catholic interpretation of Paul, but of a scholarly trend among Protestants in recent decades, which challenges the traditional Protestant reading and on the whole supports Catholic doctrine. Leading figures include E. P. Sanders, N. T. Wright, and J. D. G. Dunn–all of whom are Protestants. You can easily find information on it on the Internet. The New Perspective folks differ a lot among themselves, but they agree that Paul is more Jewish than he was previously thought and that his primary concern is the relationship of the Christian community to Judaism rather than the torment of conscience Luther reported experiencing 1500 years later when trying to love God with all his heart.
Edwin
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