December 30, 2008

This is Deepak Chopra's second book on Jesus in less than a year. Is Jesus becoming an obsession for Chopra? So much so, that he couldn't help writing his own Gospel account of Jesus' life?

Such attempts to rewrite the Gospel are nothing new. There is a tiresomely long-standing tradition of editing the Bible to get the kind of God we want. It began before the Bible in its entirety—Old and New Testament—was entirely written and put together.  In particular, the Gospels themselves were undertaken as written witnesses against those who were busily trying to reedit the life of Christ to suit their beliefs.

And so, against those who preferred a purely spiritual savior because they thought the physical world was evil and vile, we find Jesus as a real baby wrapped in swaddling rags and sleeping in a feed trough, beaten bloody and nailed to a cross, and eating fish after the resurrection. The simple message: we were with him; he was not a ghost.

Against those who would make him merely a man, Jesus claims "I and the Father are one," walks on water, and to make sure that he is not taken to be a merely political revolutionary, fires off clear declarations that his kingdom was not of this world.

In short, the Gospels were written, not just to tell who Jesus was, but just as strongly, who he wasn't. The four Gospels are like the four sides of a fence, keeping out predators who would drag Jesus off and make him a king of any and every fancy and fad, and keeping in believers so that they don't lose sight of the shepherd and wander away upon the paths of their own imaginations.

Hearing this, we might be tempted to complain, in a typically modern way, that if the four Gospels are four fences then they are certainly wicked constraints, taking away all our beautiful creative freedom to seek the truth unburdened by any boundaries. But that is the exact opposite of the real situation. Jesus Christ is not an idea but a person. Like any real person—whether it is Napoleon or your Cousin Fred—the boundaries of our knowledge are set by who the person actually was. The worst sin of a biographer is to become an autobiographer writing about another person as if he were actually a second self.

And that brings us to Deepak Chopra's Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment where we find Jesus slowly discovering that he is not a Jew but a Hindu, and one, we hazard a guess, not all that different from Chopra himself. The gist of Chopra's novel—and it is very novel since it has almost no connection to the Old or New Testament—is that Christianity was hijacked by those who didn't understand that God was everything and that everything was God. That is, neither the Jews themselves nor Jesus' immediate followers were Hindu pantheists. Unlike everyone around him, however, Jesus did realize this (in the novel, helped along by a mysterious man living in a shack in the snowy mountains, to whom Jesus is drawn as a Hindu seeker to his guru).

Well, why didn't he just tell everyone that he was a Hindu rather than cause such confusion? He did, so Chopra would have it, but they just wouldn't listen. He kept telling them that he was the light and that they were the light because everyone including Jesus, Mary, Judas, and Satan are the light—all are ultimately God because ultimately God is everything. The whole goal of salvation, of enlightenment, is to realize that one's soul (ātman) is not at all distinct from God (Brahman, the supreme soul). This realization, won through meditation, constitutes enlightenment. The Kingdom of God is within because our soul is God.

But the foolish Jews thought that he was only claiming divinity for himself, and so they had him crucified for blasphemy, and the foolish Christians likewise thought that he was only claiming divinity for himself, and so they worshipped him rather than everything including themselves. Nobody got the real message…that is, until Chopra provided the key "missing Gospel" covering Jesus' lost years from twelve to thirty.

How to respond to his efforts? One is tempted to write a biography of Chopra wherein (ignoring his evident sincerity, all the historical evidence, his Indian Hindu background, and his own writings) we find that he is not a selfless Hindu mystic but a self-promoting, talk-show hopping atheist riding the latest waves of new-age spirituality all the way to the bank.

That would obviously not be fair to Chopra, just as it is not fair to rewrite the Gospel biography of Jesus to make him something he was not.  There is more at stake here, however, than mere accurate biography. The Bible stands on one very solid point, from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation: God is not the world; He is the creator and redeemer of the world. When this distinction is lost, Christianity is lost in a fusion and confusion of creator and creature, redeemer and redeemed.