Key of Knowledge

SR No.: 006702
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown
Publication Year: 1919
Total Pages: 1204
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 25 MB

Page 584

RESURRECTION.
way, act as if history was only meant to be topsy-turvy, on the other. The inference is plain: the narrators were anxious to guard against being understood in an historical sense, and took every precaution to set it at nought. The gospels, thus, constitute the records of the spiritual progress of Jesus,' the soul, rather than so many editions of the 'Life and Teachings of Jesus, the man,' written by so many writers.* That there was a
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* Cf. the following from "Christianity and Mythology," by the Hon'ble J. M. Robertson, M. P., page 276:
"If the foregoing pages in any degree effect their purpose, they have shown that a number of data in the Christian gospels, both miraculous and non-miraculous, held by Christians to be historical, or at least accretions round the life and doctrine of a remarkable religious teacher and creed-founder, are really mere adaptations from myths of much greater antiquity; and that accordingly the alleged or inferred personality of the Founder is under suspicion of being as mythical as that of the demi-gods of elder lore. ......Broadly, the contention is that when every salient item in the legend of the Gospel Jesus turns out to be more or less clearly mythical, the matter of doctrine, equally so with the matter of action, there is simply nothing left which can entitle any one to a belief in any tangible personality behind the name.
"Such a view, as scholars are aware, is not new in the history of criticism, though the grounds for it may be so. In the second century, if not in the first, the "Docetoe" had come to conceive of the Founder as a kind of supernatural phantom, which only "seemed " to suffer on the cross; and many Gnostics had all along regarded him as an abstraction. One or other view recurs in medieval heresy from time to time. A "Docetic" view of Jesus was professed by the secret society of clerics and others which was broken up at Orleans about 1022; and in England, as elsewhere, in the sixteenth century, sectaries are found taking highly mystical views of the Founder's personality. In the eighteenth century, again, Voltaire tells of disciples of Bolingbroke who on grounds of historical criticism denied the historicity of Jesus; and in the period of the French