It's all about the Book

I think Jesus, as He looks in the mind's eye of our culture, is an attractive figure. Most of what I hear from people looking at the Book is that Jesus is great, but the other characters writing stuff about and for Him change and distort His ideas.

The real problem is that we've reached a point in Western Civilization where the idea of absolute truth has been repudiated, and Christians not only affirm Absolute Truth, but they affirm that it is contained in a 2000 year old written document. How old are the oldest manuscripts? How many errors have been included through bad transcription? Why aren't all the books written about Jesus in the canon? Has anything reliable been written about Him at all? What about the other holy writings? Buddhism? The Hindus? Tao? Islam? What about the verbal traditions of animist groups?

I did not have to grapple with post modernism's commitment to the conclusion that truth was relative in 1971. Some absolutes were supported by those in Western Culture then, and the paradox of saying that it was absolutely true that there was no truth was the foundation on which Christian philosophers embarrassed modernists.

I read the Old and New Books (Testament) through the thirty hours after a bolt of Jesus lightning seared my insides. I came out of that time convinced of the authority of the New Book and the supremacy of that book over the other sacred writings I had read (all of them).

I left the Jesus House (called the Lord's House) 11 days later, wanting to follow Jesus and the things in the New Book. The 10 commandments were out; the Sermon on the Mount in. I was broke, busted, mistrusted and disowned, but the psychedelic maze was gone. I was on a different path, but I felt optimistic for the first time in a while.