Enlightened Jesus
Enlightened Jesus
I would have to say that if there is one book that most displays the distortion of the thinking behind the New Spirituality, it is Deepak Chopra’s most unfortunate book The Third Jesus. It is a book that ought never to have been written. I will have to beg indulgence here because it is not often that I react as strongly to another’s point of view, but it has been a long time since I have read such an ill-directed work on so lofty a theme. He is outside his league here. Frankly, time and again he betrays his ignorance of both the text and the context, and I dare say of the languages of the text. One has to wonder whether he had surrogate writers because the references often reveal more of how little he actually knows on the subject than of what he knows.
But before we even get into his text, I have some questions. First, the book is dedicated to “the Irish Christian Brothers in India who introduced me to Jesus when I was a little boy.” Is the Jesus they introduced him to the Jesus of his text?
Next take a look at the endorsements in the book. There is not one author in that long list of names who actually believes the Bible is the Word of God. I may as well write a critique of Hinduism and ask Muslim scholars to endorse it. To have Bishop Spong endorsing a book on Jesus borders on comedy. And if Spong’s endorsement of Chopra’s Jesus means anything, then his own thesis on Jesus in the books he has written is wrong.
But all of this is part of the packaging of Chopra. So let’s get on with the substance. Why does he title the book The Third Jesus? According to Chopra, “The historical Jesus has been lost… swept away by history.” He says that “the first Jesus was a rabbi who wandered the shores of northern Galilee many centuries ago.” According to Chopra, the first Jesus is less than consistent in his teachings, “as a closer reading of the gospels will show… And yet,” he says, “the more contradictions we unearth, the less mythical this Jesus becomes…. As one famous Indian spiritual teacher once said, ‘The measurement of enlightenment is how comfortable you feel with your own contradictions.’ ”6
What is Chopra saying? He demeans the actions and sayings of Jesus by calling them “contradictory” while inferring that this is a positive attribute. The New Spiritualists are the ones who accuse those who are rationally driven of holding too narrow a view of life, but they are not slow to hurl the charge of contradiction at Christianity. And Chopra doesn’t mean it to be something positive when he accuses Christianity of contradictions. But once again, he gives himself an escape hatch by throwing in the quote: “The measurement of enlightenment is how comfortable you feel with your own contradictions.”
One can only shake one’s head and ask how it is even possible to think in these terms. But this is vintage Deepak Chopra. And supposedly, he understands what he is talking about. So he continues:
Millions of people worship another Jesus… who never existed, who doesn’t even lay claim to the fleeting substance of the first Jesus. This is the Jesus built up over thousands of years by theologians and other scholars… the Holy Ghost, the Three-in-One Christ, the source of sacraments and prayers that were unknown to the rabbi Jesus when he walked the earth… the Prince of Peace over whom bloody wars have been fought. This second Jesus cannot be embraced without embracing theology first.
The second Jesus leads us into the wilderness without a clear path out. He became the foundation of a religion that has proliferated into some twenty thousand sects [that] argue endlessly over every thread in the garments of a ghost…. Yet in his name Christianity pronounces on homosexuality, birth control, and abortion.7
I cannot resist a comment here. Such arrant nonsense from the pen of an educated man is unfathomable. It is actually deplorable and manipulative. “The Holy Ghost, the Three-in-One Christ.” I am not at all sure what he is referring to. Who made Jesus the Holy Ghost? Christ never claimed to be three-in-one. Chopra doesn’t seem to understand that they are distinct personages. I might add that if he is criticizing the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, as he seems to be, and he finds it difficult to believe in “three-in-one,” how is it that he has no problem believing that all of humanity is One? And when he ran into problematic explanations of certain behaviors in the gurus, he tells us that each of them is actually three-in-one. (This is relayed in more detail in Chapter 13.)
Further, is it reasonable to suppose that Chopra, a medical doctor, an ethicist, and a person who believes every human has the spark of divinity within them, has no pronouncements on abortion? Coming from a country with such a huge population, he has nothing to say about birth control? You can be absolutely sure, without a shadow of a doubt, that Chopra knows exactly what he is appealing to here. Does he not know the difference between Catholic and Protestant doctrines? These comments are stabs in the backs of his “Irish Christian Brothers.”
The intellectual side of his statement is empty. Mr. Chopra is blatantly resorting to cultural provocation while disguising irrational deductions in vacuous meaning. What has this theological Christ got to do with these issues? He knows exactly what. These are the issues that prompt those who do not want any view on sexuality or abortion brought to bear on their own private choices to despise Christianity. What better way can he find to make his thesis sound plausible to them than to introduce a caricature of that which is the source of their rejection? For a man positing Sanatan Dharma, there is a heavy dose of hate-provocation at work underlying his pronouncements. I would like to hear him instead respond to the famed Indian guru Swami Ramdev, who pronounced homosexuality as a mental illness and declared he can cure cancer through yoga. Interesting that these swamis and gurus get a pass on such pronouncements. Don’t be fooled by Chopra’s use of serene terminology. It is obvious what communication skill he is utilizing.
According to Chopra, these two versions of Jesus that he has invented, what he calls the “sketchy historical figure and the abstract theological creation,” have stolen from the world “something precious: The Jesus who taught his followers how to reach God-consciousness.”8 It is appalling to even think that an honest scholar would denude the Christ of history of his authenticity and then complain that those who believe in that historical Christ have stolen something precious from him.
But in the introduction of his book he laid the groundwork for his deduction, categorically declaring that Jesus did not physically descend from God, nor did he return to heaven to sit at the right hand of God. He states that what made Jesus the Son of God was that he achieved God-consciousness, which, he says, Jesus himself affirmed over and over again by declaring that he and the Father are one.9
Such a thesis presented in the name of scholarship would never have been taken seriously in a school that respects the integrity of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation that seeks to wrestle honestly with the text from its history and grammar. Let me just posit three things for starters, to show how uninformed Dr. Chopra is.
First, Chopra comments that Jesus said “over and over,… ‘The Father and I are one.’ ” He uses this text to sustain his claim that Jesus “attained” God-consciousness. Really? Did Jesus use this phrase “over and over”?” He stated it once and only once, in the Gospel of John. Not only that, the context in which he said it was that he (Jesus) is the only way to the Father.
Chopra’s manipulation of these texts to make them say what he wants them to say is no different from his manipulation of Hinduism, borrowing from its underpinnings to make his Sanatan Dharma appear eclectic and uncategorized. But there is more. To sustain his thesis that this “third” Jesus attained enlightenment, he misuses scores of passages from the New Testament, the very source he has already disparaged by denying that we really know anything about the historic Jesus. So which is it? Are these passages true or not? If they are true enough for him to use as references for his theory, why does he insist their context is not true in what they say about Jesus? Let me put it differently. It would be like me saying that the Vedas are historically suspect and unreliable and then using those same Vedas to prove that Jesus is the truth.
His inaccuracies continue. His description of Jesus as the Son of Man betrays a total ignorance of the technical nature of that title. In short, the new Sanatan Dharma spirituality that he espouses by reducing the Jesus of history to his own distorted hermeneutical mold is reflective of a dishonest scholarship that cannot have it both ways. He cannot use the text to prove his point and reject the text in order to create his book.
Then he hides inside a universal solvent ideology that can’t be stored anywhere. This is typical of the New Spirituality writers when they like to suggest that their teachings also incorporate the Bible. He begins his chapter on “Karma—Sowing and Reaping” by saying that finding out how much Jesus has to say about karma was a great surprise to him in writing this book. The primary tenet of karma, he says, is that every action works like a seed that sprouts and brings fruit in the form of a result. Once again, Chopra plays with doctrines. That “primary” tenet of karma is not merely a connection between sowing and reaping, but is woven into the systemic belief that every birth is a rebirth. Into the belief that every birth is a rebirth, the karmic cycle is introduced. He ends his section on karma by first quoting Matthew 11:30: “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light,” and then saying that Jesus promised his followers there would be no work in heaven, the greater implication being that karma would no longer exist, based on his own experience in heaven, and on Chopra’s belief that the English word yoke comes from the same root word as yoga… “union with God.”10
This is such pathetic nonsense I’m surprised he didn’t say that this is a demonstration that Jesus also believed in a weightloss program, since his “burden is light.”
Second, Chopra engages in a classic misuse of sources. He intermixes apocryphal writings with Gnostic writings, and, frankly, I’m not sure what some of his sources are for what he says. A quotation he claims is from the “Gospel of Thomas,” which has 114 verses, he footnotes as “verse 144, 172 et al.”; some of the other quotes he uses find no parallel in any translation. There are no such verses. Unless he has his own version, there is none that matches these quotes, even remotely. It could be, of course, that some research person gave him this information and Chopra didn’t even know that there are only 114 verses in the so-called “Gospel of Thomas,” which is actually not a Gospel and most certainly is not by Thomas.
Third, Chopra is most distorted in his interpretations when he comes to the hard passages. In John 14:6–7, Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on you do know him and have seen him” (NIV). Jesus said these words in the context that he was preparing heaven for his followers and his followers for heaven. Chopra’s comment on this verse is that the Gospel writer was trying to confirm Jesus as Messiah beyond dispute, as the resurrection was a fading memory after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.
Where does he get the idea that the resurrection was a fading memory? Does he not realize that the message of the resurrection was about to conquer Rome when this Gospel was written, to say nothing of its impact over the entire region? In effect, he is saying that Jesus never spoke these words, that John manufactured this verse. Chopra is all at sea here. It seems to matter nothing what Jesus says or affirms or declares; in Chopra’s vocabulary, “higher consciousness” is the escape button, because that’s where he wants to take us. He does the same thing again with the most familiar passages, such as John 3:16, which says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (NIV). Chopra changes the context and makes it a pretext again to reduce the truth into something that can serve his intended ends.
I wonder if he would do such a thing with the Koran? Call it intellectual cowardice or hypocrisy or both, but his tactic of distorting the New Testament to prove his point is actually self-stultifying. Unfortunately, he attains his goal of deceiving those who don’t know any better. His is not inductive or deductive reasoning. It is fuzzy logic garnered to suit an end in view.