Friday, 24 August 2012

Getting Jesus Wrong.

I’ve just been listening to Vaughan Williams’s Dives and Lazarus in YouTube. I’ve long been intrigued as to the way in which Dives should be pronounced, and it seems there’s some dispute between Dye-Veez  and Dee-Vays, depending on whether you subscribe to the modern or traditional approach to Latin pronunciation. To somebody who didn’t go to a posh school and learn Latin, that’s interesting, but nothing to get too strung up about.

What I find more interesting is the parable itself. It strikes me as yet another reason to suspect that Jesus was teaching a version of Vedic spirituality (in this case, the doctrine of karma,) and that European – as well as Jewish – ignorance and narrow mindedness led to a wholesale misinterpretation of his ministry.

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