I briefly decided, several years ago, to learn more about Reiki. This healing touch concept was moving swiftly through the new age community and it seemed to me to have a natural – but calmer – connection to the laying on of hands so common in Christian Communities.
Most good teachers will start with a bit of history regarding their craft and this was no exception. Except the history behind Reiki isn’t particularly clear. In the process, I stumbled upon accounts of a young Jesus who had traveled east with his parents as a young adult where he studied with wise masters of various arts, including what would later on become known as energy healing.
The ancient world was far better traveled than many people realize, with trade routes that spread from the western tip of Europe to the eastern edge of China. Some anthropological evidence exists to support travelers between the northwestern tip of North America (in particular what is now known as Washington State) and the northern part of Japan. Given the gospel account of the Wise Men coming from the east to visit the young Jesus, the possibility that Jesus might have traveled eastward into what is now known as Iran, Iraq, and even Pakistan/India isn’t that far fetched. Furthermore, we know that Christianity spread into the middle east largely unstopped for the first 600 years. So it is possible that the “Missing Years” as the years between Jesus’s appearance at 12 and his re-appearance at 30 are often called, were years spent studying outside of what is present day Israel. Luke 2:52 gives the only brief account of this time, saying that “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.”
Luke’s account says clearly that Jesus returned to Nazareth with his family following his time in temple – but it does not say he stayed there.
Jerusalem today is about 90 miles south of Nazareth. Baghdad, which was not yet founded as a city but sits centrally in Iraq, is about 600 miles east of Jerusalem. For nomadic cultures, this would be a not unheard of traveling distance and trade routes between Israel and ancient Mesopotamia, located even further East, were well established.
When Jesus asks in Matthew 15:15 “who do you think I am?” and then, to Peter’s response in Matthew 15:16 “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” he answers ““You are blessed, Simon son of Jonah, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father in heaven!” we deduce his deistic nature. But it wasn’t until the 1st Council of Nicaea in 325 AD that Jesus was formally declared to be God when the Christian idea of the Trinity was codified and the sacred writings used to form the foundation of the modern day Bible were selected.
Bart Ehrman, a biblical scholar, discusses thoroughly the issues with translation of the scriptural texts in his book “Jesus, Interrupted”. He presents fairly solid evidence to suggest that taking the bible literally is unwise.
Much of what we know about Jesus is presented to us in the 2,000 year old texts we know as the Gospels and the New Testament. But what if we could learn more about Jesus by understanding the possibility of his life outside of those texts? What if we opened our minds to the idea that he might have been a student of the world who traveled among the wisest of his time and learned from them? What if what he was teaching us was that we are all children of God as he is a child of God? What if what he was teaching was learned from centuries of being willing to connect the divine in us to the divine in the universe?
What If Jesus...? 