Does the book of Isaiah say anything about Jesus of Nazareth?

[intaglio]

49. There are literary apologists

there are Muslim apologists, there are Mormon apologists. The Apologia was originally a legal term for a statement of the defense case. It was adopted by Christians but it is used very widely outside Christianity.

You discard elements of Christianity and adopt the glittery parts of faiths outside the Christian tradition. You are not the first, Theosophy led by the splendidly misguided Madame Blavatski attempted the same. Saying that Jesus took items from the Vedas is speculation of the wildest sort especially as virtually all Jesus' parables were established tales in the Jewish cannon long prior to the gospel use and many can be traced to Egyptian and Babylonian or Zoroastrian roots. The ties that these earlier civilisations had with many others will have ensured that good stories would have had a wide currency. If there are similarities between the Veda, the Sutra and the Tao then these were added to the mix long before Jesus.

Travel and interchange were not as difficult as imagined; there was regular traffic along the Silk road and with the Monsoon Tradewinds If you doubt how rapid movement could be then consider that Alexander's campaigns from the Dardanelles into India (with a side journey into Egypt) was accomplished in 12 years whilst the Mongol Conquests of the 13C took less than 75 years of hard military campaigning; the ancient world was much smaller than you imagine.

There is even an additional difficulty that similar problems evoke similar responses so seeming duplication might even be accidental.

Now ecstasy, I've been there, literally. There were times during my practise of the forms when I was in one type of ecstatic state but the most extraordinary was during a game of chess. I was playing a man about 50 points better than me (BCS rating) so it should have been a walk-over. Then about move 15 I entered a state where the whole board and the pieces made a pattern stretching into the future; I was not seeing N moves ahead, I was seeing a tapestry of possible games and theory. To cut a long story short we fought to a draw over 60 moves partly because I "fell out" of ecstasy about move 50. If I had been of that bent I could easily have assumed I had been taken over by a spiritual entity because I was certainly not in myself

Now your teacher, concentrating on complex philosophical and theological problems enters such a state and begins to see such patterns. There are no guarantees the patterns are reality only that they are patterns that unite his ideas. Think on it.