Central Heating And The Historical Jesus
Jan. 11th, 2023 08:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloSergei rang just before lunch to say he was ready now to tinker with the heating system at the Meeting House so we drove down and let him in and hung around watching him do what he had to do and it was tea time before we ate. The Meeting House has a library- and while we waited I read a couple of essays about George Fox from a book published in 1924 to mark the tercentenary of something or other, and most of A Man Seen Afar- by Wellesley Tudor Pole and Rosamond Lehmann dealing with Tudor Pole's visions/dreams/memories of the Life of Christ. Tudor Pole was an interesting person- adventurous, wise, quixotic, silly. He restored the Chalice Well at Glastonbury and believed he had the Holy Grail in his possession...
Many, many people have had remote viewings of the Life of Christ and each one is different. No event is history has been so intensely contemplated, meditated upon, speculated about, painted, dramatised, novelised etc etc- and the result is that the historical actuality (presuming it to exist) has become so swaddled in later imaginings and wishful thinkings (which assume something like concrete reality on the inner planes) that I wouldn't trust any modern seer's attempt to get at it. Every new explorer brings his or her own biases to the swirly mass and carries back what they hoped to find there- which is as often as not, as Schweizer noted in his very funny Search for the Historical Jesus- an idealised self-portrait. Tudor Pole's Jesus is a handsome, clean-limbed, intensely virile but effortlessly celibate young man with brown hair and piercing blue eyes who loves nothing better than to be out doing woodcrafty things in wild nature. Altogether a late 19th century- early 20th century ideal, don't you think? Like something out of Baden Powell's Scouting for Boys....
Many, many people have had remote viewings of the Life of Christ and each one is different. No event is history has been so intensely contemplated, meditated upon, speculated about, painted, dramatised, novelised etc etc- and the result is that the historical actuality (presuming it to exist) has become so swaddled in later imaginings and wishful thinkings (which assume something like concrete reality on the inner planes) that I wouldn't trust any modern seer's attempt to get at it. Every new explorer brings his or her own biases to the swirly mass and carries back what they hoped to find there- which is as often as not, as Schweizer noted in his very funny Search for the Historical Jesus- an idealised self-portrait. Tudor Pole's Jesus is a handsome, clean-limbed, intensely virile but effortlessly celibate young man with brown hair and piercing blue eyes who loves nothing better than to be out doing woodcrafty things in wild nature. Altogether a late 19th century- early 20th century ideal, don't you think? Like something out of Baden Powell's Scouting for Boys....
no subject
Date: 2023-01-11 09:20 am (UTC)To me he's a dark skinned, dark haired guy of Greek ancestry (which coming from where he did he most certainly would have had).
I suspect he enjoyed women's company too much to be 'effortlessly celibate' :o)
no subject
Date: 2023-01-11 04:47 pm (UTC)I'm agnostic about the celibacy. There are those who want to marry him off to Mary Magdalen- and I've no objection to them doing so.
Distracted by the name
Date: 2023-01-11 01:46 pm (UTC)My immediate association was with the band Tenpole Tudors (this is the only song of theirs I know)
https://youtu.be/5AywIL5_eYM
Now that I've looked up the founder/lead singer (as of the late 1970s), I see that he is the grandson of Wellesley, of whom I had never heard. Everything relates.
This was a very common picture of Jesus in the US in my youth. Like a shampoo ad.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-reqEknaQ3Xk/U8p4S4dNcSI/AAAAAAAAGq4/QzH-0EwLVuI/s1600/g9.jpg
I haven't bothered to look up the artist's name. I'm amused at your Boy Scout association.
Re: Distracted by the name
Date: 2023-01-11 04:42 pm (UTC)I know that picture of Jesus. I think it has worldwide currency. It's pretty bloody awful isn't it!
Wellesley wouldn't have liked it either. His Jesus wore his hair short.