Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment
by Deepak Chopra
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Book Summary Information
Author: Deepak ChopraEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-11-04
ISBN: 0061448737
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Book Reviews of Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment
Book Review: A Fascinating Concept
Summary: 5 Stars
Now here's a fascinating concept: fill in the blanks for one of the largest figures in the history of Western civilization. As you probably know, there is very little written about Jesus between the time he was twelve and the time he came on-scene again in Galilee in his early thirties. The gospels are largely silent about this period, at least those that have survived to make it into print. And CNN wasn't around in the first century AD to record events in its more objective digital format. (Well, somewhat more objective, anyway; I'm not going to argue that point.) So... this period of Jesus' life is fair game for speculation, I guess...
I really enjoyed the book. The plot? It's more of a metaphysical journey, a chronology of how Jesus evolved from manhood to godhood, with doubts and questions all along the way. Traditional Biblical scenes are woven seamlessly into the storyline, but with some license taken; for example Mary Magdalene is named as the object of the incipient punishment that draws Jesus' challenge of "... let him who is without sin cast the first stone". The characters? Jesus is very human, with the usual foibles but also with a driven determination to seek out God. Mary Magdalene is an unwilling whore. Judas is a devious and unscrupulous zealot. They're both very human too. And they fit neatly into the settings Chopra describes for those times.
Chopra's story stops short of where the Gospels pick up, leaving Jesus to wander out of the mountains and back down into the Galilee of the Bible to meet his fate. It deals with those later events such as the Crucifixion only inferentially. This is a pretty smart move, I think: it allows the reader to mentally jump the gap to the modern era. Where, for example...
The Dalai Lama, by all accounts a most open-minded fellow, endorses a neurological study of Buddhist meditators. And where, yes indeed, objective scientific results (fMRI brain scans) indicate these monks have a much higher level of control over their minds and bodies (and presumably spirits) than the rest of us mortals. But that's control of themselves. Can they control externalities? The physical world? Turn water into wine? Chopra doesn't ask such questions of his fictional Jesus, he just goes with the flow of Biblical scripture, positing the miracles quite comfortably right alongside his very human characterizations of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and Judas and others. I loved it, the rationality and the ambiguity in contrapuntal doses.
Why write a book like this? As it turns out, it's not just a writer's whimsy, a fiction wrapped around a mythos; the book has a philosophical point. But that comes at the very end, after the epilogue. All through his Jesus story, Chopra scrupulously keeps his own philosophical views out of it. (Must've been tough, but I think that was appropriate; it would have detracted from the story.)
The philosophical point -- several points actually -- are in the Reader's Guide, titled Jesus and the Path to Enlightenment on the last few pages. In a nutshell, Chopra holds (among other things) that:
* God is within us, all of us -- Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jew.
* Jesus wouldn't be too happy to see his teachings about the above co-opted into what have become the formal traditions and structures of Christianity.
* We have the capacity, even as mere mortals, to transform and transcend to the God within, and indeed there are ways to approach that in this mortal life.
Now, these points may be anathema to the more orthodox Christians, but they're nothing really new in the modern world: Copernicus, Protestantism, Eastern-Western tradition blends, a Course in Miracles... they all had problems with the form taken by Christianity, and so chased its substance instead. With varying results, of course, but still there's been a pretty steady evolution of thought, and steadily more acceptance of divergent religious views. For example, not so many generations ago, Chopra, and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything), and Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code), and even William Young (The Shack) all would have been in deep doo-doo for their books. Today... they're best-selling authors.
And also today... a Pew Report (http://religions.pewforum.org/reports#) I just stumbled across says that most Americans who practice a religion reject the exclusivity principle -- they think that folks with beliefs other than theirs are still allowed into heaven.
Even atheists. Fancy that.
My, my. This is progress, n'est-ce pas?
Now that Chopra has filled in the blanks on Jesus, and on Buddha (in a prior similar book), I'm anxiously awaiting his take on Muhammad...
Denning
(aka Lee Denning, author of Monkey Trap and Hiding Hand)
www.monkeytrap.us
Monkey Trap (Nova Sapiens, Book 1)
Hiding Hand
Summary of Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment
The New York Times bestselling author of Buddha captures the extraordinary life of Jesus in this surprising, soul-stirring, and page-turning novel. Uncovering the transformational "lost years" that are not recounted in the New Testament, Deepak Chopra has imagined Jesus's path to enlightenment moving from obscurity to revolutionary, from doubt to miracles, and then beyond as the role of the long-awaited Messiah. As a teenager, Jesus has premonitions of his destiny, and by the end, as he arrives to be baptized in the River Jordan, he has accepted his fate, which combines extremes of light and darkness.
With his characteristic ability for imparting profound spiritual insights through the power of storytelling, Deepak Chopra's Jesus portrays the life of Christ as never before, ultimately leading us closer to understanding the nature of God and the soul. As the author shares, "I don't want the Jesus in this book to be worshiped, much less to push him forward as definitive. The events of the tale are pure fiction. But at a deeper level, the Jesus in this book feels real because we've gotten a glimpse into his mind. One flash of insight answers many prayers."
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