Magi [antikvár]

* T his world is full of mysteries, some large and some small. Even the most simple of people have their secrets and so too, on a larger scale, does history. Possibly the greatest mystery in the world surrounds the origins of the Christian religion. Who was this man Jesus? Where did he come from? What really was his mission? Unhke the Buddha or Mohammed, whose lives were well documented and who left writings of their own, the historical Jesus Christ continues to be an enigma. The Biblical story is extremely fragmentary and even if we treat the Gospels as genuine biographies, the Hght they throw on the historical Jesus is surprisingly limited. Between the ages of twelve and thirty that is, his most formative years, we lose sight of him altogether. If Matthew, Mark, Luke and John knew what happened to him during those critical years of adolescence and young manhood, they are remarkably silent and so indeed is the Church founded in his name. Many people assume, not surprisingly given the context of the Gospels, that Christianity is simply a reformed and updated version of Judaism. After ail Jesus was a Jew and indeed, if the genealogy given in the New Testament is to be believed, he was a direct descendant of the legendary King David. His three year ministry was conducted for the most part among the Jews and he was hailed by his followers as the expected Jewish Messiah, why then, one may ask, is what he taught so very un-Jewish? As a prophet one would expect to read of him haranguing people in the fashion of a Jeremiah or Ezekiel, exhorting them to abandon false gods and to adhere to the Law of Moses. Whilst there are many references