This piece takes an initial broad brushstrokes look at Jesus, but it is expanded upon and gets more definition in subsequent writings
As the Fools’ Journey has a few references to Jesus and the Bible- both visually and within the text- it would be useful to have a bit of a ramble on my personal position on them outside of the body of the work itself.
I’ll start by saying I don’t personally believe in the historicity of the Jesus presented to us in the Bible. I am definitely not discounting the existence of a physical Jesus. There’s more than a reasonable possibility such a person existed, whether a wise man, a mystic versed in the arts of the magi, an enlightened or awakened individual, or even something more divine.
The Bible though is a work of fiction, constructed and revised dozens of times over the 1900 years since the accounts of his life were first recorded. Whole swathes of contemporaneous writings were discarded, deemed heretical by those with their own agenda to imposed. Right from Paul wresting the teachings of Jesus from Peter and James the rewriting begins to turn it into the religion of the gentiles.
For example, as we are expected to accept that the bible books of James and Paul were written by the actual Paul and James, the books imply at best a disagreement with each other, including many a contradiction. Or we can accept that one, both or parts of each aren’t the direct product of their attributions. Either way the gospels have to be treated with an amount of discretion. By the time of the Council of Nicaea, many of the Judeocentric aspects had already been expunged, and Roman pagan aspects had been syncretised into the narrative. The New Testament became more about Paul, who had no contact with Jesus, than it is with the disciples who were with Jesus at the time of his supposed ministry. Here Constantine made it official, and the Jewish Jesus was almost entirely exorcised. The process of politically astute revisions continued- and continues- to this day.
So, does this leave us with a wholly mythologised Jesus, an entity manufactured of allegory?
Possibly, but that would be ok too. Remember, this Jesus has been deconstructed and cogitated upon by some of the finest philosophers and theologians over centuries to cement those allegories within the collective consciousness of humanity. The task therefore is to understand what the allegory is of, and what we can do with the reality it extols, and the more esoteric possibilities it hints at.
As it stands, I am neither and both a mythicist or a historicist, and paradoxically both. I believe there was a person of great repute who found connection with his own divinity at that time period. I believe he came to it for himself, not as a unique godhead birthright derived from an angel infused virgin conception.
In the context of The Fools’ Journey, he was perhaps enlightened from birth (so Harlequin rather than Scarecrow), but otherwise no more a god than the rest of us.