Biblical Buddhism: Tales and Sermons of Saint Iodasaph. Robert M. Price

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      Biblical Buddhism

      Tales and Talks of Saint Iodasaph

      Robert M. Price

      illustrated by

      Lenny Blottin

      Copyright 2011 Robert M. Price,

      All rights reserved.

      Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com

       http://www.eBookIt.com

      ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0418-9

      No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

      Dedicated to Catherine Groves,

      Beloved friend and longtime colleague through thick (me) and thin (her).

      Acknowledgments

      The contents of this book originally appeared in the pages of The Christian*New Age Quarterly. Many thanks for editor Catherine Groves’s permission to reprint them here. Contact the The Christian*New Age Quarterly at http://www.christiannewage.com/

      “The Great Commandment” (Jan - Mar ’91)

      “The Koan of the Sheep and the Goats” (Jul - Sep ’91)

      “The Transformation Body” (Oct - Dec ’91)

      “The Man Beset by Robbers” (Jan - Mar ’92)

      “The Banquet Without Guests” (Apr - Jun ’92)

      “The Scripture is Fulfilled” (Jul - Sep ’92)

      “The Tree of Enlightenment” (Jan - Mar ’93)

      “The Dancing Corpse” (Jan - Mar ’94)

      “The Ferryman” (Oct - Dec ’94)

      “Temptations Must Come” (Apr - Jun ’05)

      “Gods in the Gutter” (Jul - Sep ’05)

      “Seeking for Signs” (Oct ’05 - Jul ’06)

      “Back in the Womb” (Aug ’06 - Apr ’07)

      “The Cross and the Raft” (May - Oct ’07)

      “Revelation of Nothing” (Nov ’07 - May ’08)

      "Invisible Light" (June 2009-Feb. 2009)

      “The Serpent’s Wisdom” (Summer 2009)

      “Blessed Are the Blind” (Winter 2009)

      Christian*New Age Quarterly: A Bridge Supporting Dialog is proud to have been the original publisher of “The Tales of Saint Iodasaph” — the collection of which you now hold in your hands — as a column spanning nearly two decades. Conceived for and engaging C*NAQ readers, the venerable old Saint expressed a wisdom ideally befitting Christian*New Age Quarterly, which provides a bridge supporting dialog between the Christian tradition and alternative spiritualities. To discover more of the works of Robert M. Price published by Christian*New Age Quarterly — as well as to explore C*NAQ’s other delightful writers — visit www.christiannewage.com.

      Introduction: Saint Iodasaph

      The Lesson and the Letter

      Historical-critical scrutiny of the legends of the saints, like critical study of the Bible, is a recent phenomenon. For many centuries the religious authorities seemed unable to distinguish between respectful loyalty to sacred texts and their teachings on the one hand and the historical factuality of their narratives on the other. Even today it is possible without too much difficulty to find people who misunderstand the nature of gospel parables, demanding that even they be taken literally. But most even of fundamentalists have gotten beyond that childlike literalism. Will the day come when they no longer recoil at historical criticism as if it were a hostile assault on the text? For it is not. Even hostile polemicist Robert Green Ingersoll (The Mistakes of Moses) made it clear that he bore no hostility toward the Bible, a wonderful ancient book like the Iliad and the Odyssey. His sarcastic dissections of scripture were merely the needful counterweight to those who would inflate proper veneration for the Bible into idolatry by christening the book infallible and inerrant. Today most critics (i.e., students, analysts) of the Bible find that a critical approach, stemming from the recognition that the texts are usually not factual in nature, opens up new riches in the texts, enabling us to see what the blinders of biblical literalism had concealed from us. The same is true of the legends of the saints, which appear to most readers as grotesque or comical in their pious extravagance. In their pages, religion and superstition interpenetrate in astonishing ways. How can we not smile, even guffaw, when we read the pious chronicle of Saint Wilgefortis, a beautiful girl who so prized her chastity that she asked God to repel her many suitors, a prayer he answered by causing her to sprout a full beard overnight!

      But surely the most remarkable and important saint-legend is that of Saint Iodasaph, the hero of a preachy novel of sorts that made the rounds of the ancient world in many languages including Greek, Latin (three different versions), Armenian, Arabic, Ghe'ez (pre-Coptic Ethiopian), Old Slavonic, Russian, Bielorussian, Serb, French, Occitan, Anglo-Norman, High German, and Norse. The oldest known fragments of any version of the tale are written in Turkomen. But the most famous version is the eleventh-century Greek Barlaam and Ioasaph credited to St. John of Damascus, though some now ascribe it to St. Euthymius the Georgian instead.

      Divine Deja Vu

      The scene is India or Ethiopia (which the ancients had trouble distinguishing!). There are actually some genuine African Ethiopian place names in the text, but the story seems to intend Asian India, where the Christian faith once planted by Judas Didymus Thomas, the apostle of Jesus Christ (as we read in The Acts of Thomas), has withered away. Its remnants are suffering persecution at the hands of a polytheistic wastrel of a king. The king has a strange dream which prompts him to consult an astrologer, who informs him that he will have a son who is destined to become a great king or to convert, after tasting of sorrow, to an outlawed sect and there attain other-worldly greatness. The latter possibility the king attempts to forestall. When his son is born, he arranges that the lad shall never leave the royal grounds, and that within he shall never experience sorrow. But years later, the young prince manages to leave the city briefly, and then he sees a sick man, an old man, and a corpse, three sights that speak eloquently of the sorrow shadowing the whole world.

      Soon thereafter, the prince encounters a Christian monk, Barlaam of Senaar (elsewhere called Balahver of Serendip), who has managed to preserve the interdicted Christian faith. He catechizes the prince at great length (the redactor has incorporated an eighth-century work of Christian apologetics attributed to John of Damascus, hence perhaps the eventual ascription of the whole work to him). And though he does take the throne for a brief time, he finally embraces the monastic life as a Christian (though some versions substituted the faith of the lands the story circulated in: Judaism, Islam, or Manicheism). СКАЧАТЬ