THE BIBLE

 --- Dear friend, do you believe in the Bible?

--- Well… this word “Bible” is very vague. It can mean the most heterogeneous and even contradictory things. Therefore, I cannot answer you with a yes nor with a no. Moses, for example, orders the adulterous women to be stoned (but does not order the adulterous men to be stoned!) - Jesus managed to convince the mob that Magdalene should not be stoned. In general, Moses and the Old Testament approve personal revenge, sectarian and nationalist egoism, the killing of men, and even innocent people - but Jesus does not accept any of these things!

The Old Testament recognizes the law of retaliation: “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”; command “to love the friends and to hate the enemies”; in Psalm 137:8:9, calls blessed are the ones who cast against the rocks the children of the Babylonians who persecuted and deported the Jews - but none of this is approved by the Gospel of Jesus. Now, if he did not accept the Bible from “cover to cover” but only certain eternal truths proclaimed by it - how could a disciple of Jesus accept what he himself did not accept?

The Bible is not a kind of letter or a standardized message that God has dictated to the human race of all time - but it is the fragmentary reflection of experiences that certain men had of God and the invisible world. Now, as “the known is in the knower according to the capacity of the knower”, it is obvious that the idea that the various authors of the Bible had of God varies greatly, according to knowledge and the experience of each. Wanting to level all the ethical-spiritual values of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation is eminently absurd. The law of retaliation, for example, was the highest ethics that was conceivable at the time of Moses - but the Gospel of Jesus goes far beyond when it commands to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

It is absurd to want to adopt the Bible as a rule of faith and life after the promulgation of the Gospel of Jesus; would be decadence and a return from the heights of the Gospel’s messages to the lowest or to the contaminated interpretations of humans. Even the remaining books of the New Testament does not have the same ethical-spiritual value as we find in the Gospel. All the rest of the Bible, both Old and New Testament, has to be interpreted under the wisdom of Jesus’s words, as he said: “I came not to abolish the law and the prophets, but to lead them to perfection.” It is impossible to bring to perfection that which is perfect; therefore, Jesus recognizes that the doctrines of the Old Testament are imperfect because imperfect were their human receptacles, which imperfectly received and interpreted the perfect revelation of God.

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In all the so-called sacred books of all religions, creeds, cults, and other written forms of revelations received from divine sources, as soon as they land in human hands, they immediately suffer the contamination of the human element, with its convenient interpretations appropriate to its stage of spiritual evolution. Only the man who lived the direct experience of God could know the Reality, which reaches man only after the experience of absolute silence, interiorization and deep intuition; then he will comprehend that within him lies the true guide. This intuition is revealed only in its plenitude when a man works the knowledge of himself, which is the invasion of the cosmic wisdom in the Self. After this stage comes self-realization, and then all the so-called sacred books will become superfluous.