One afternoon in 1900, a religious teacher delivered an inspirational talk in Los Angeles entitled “Christ, the Messenger.” Echoing the closing verse of the Gospel of John, the speaker noted that the great acts and teachings of Jesus would “fill the world if they had all been written down.”Footnote 1 The “three years of his ministry were like one compressed, concentrated age, which it has taken nineteen hundred years to unfold, and who knows how much longer it will yet take!” Jesus saw deep intrinsic value in “every man and woman, whether Jew or Gentile, whether rich or poor, whether saint or sinner.” The secret to his great vision was his spiritual outlook: he had “no faith in this evanescent world and all its belongings.” In a passage infused with biblical references, the speaker explained how the one who wanted to follow Jesus's example had to give up attachment to the materialism so prevalent in modern life:
The rich young man asked Jesus, “Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said unto him, “One thing thou lackest; go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasures in heaven: and come, take up thy cross, and follow Me.” And he was sad at that saying and went away grieved; for he had great possessions. We are all more or less like that. The voice is ringing in our ears day and night. In the midst of our pleasures and joys, in the midst of worldly things, we think that we have forgotten everything else. Then comes a moment's pause and the voice rings in our ears “Give up all that thou hast and follow Me.” “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake shall find it.” For whoever gives up this life for His sake, finds the life immortal. In the midst of all our weakness there is a moment of pause and the voice rings: “Give up all that thou hast; give it to the poor and follow me.”Footnote 2
This talk was not unique. It was just one of several the speaker delivered that, as Stephen Prothero says, “glory in Jesus’ godliness.” They were given not by a Christian minister but by the world-renowned Hindu teacher Swami Vivekananda.Footnote 3
In the modern world, characterized by “transnational transcendence,” such large-scale syncretism is commonplace.Footnote 4 “We have to let go,” comparative religions scholar Arvind Sharma proclaimed several years ago, “of the attitude that only Christians have the right to interpret the Bible, that a religion belongs only to its followers.”Footnote 5 That right of reinterpretation has often included the adoption of Jesus, a figure susceptible to seemingly endless versions. Swami Vivekananda was the most influential pioneer of a Yogi Christ, illustrating well over a century ago how the life and teachings of Jesus might be incorporated within a larger Hindu worldview—and then presented back to Western audiences.Footnote 6 Appropriation of Jesus, one of the central symbols of the West, might be viewed as the ultimate act of counter-Orientalism.Footnote 7 In more recent years, so-called “New Age” groups and other new religious movements, many rooted in Hindu metaphysics, have also boldly incorporated Jesus as an important figure in their traditions.Footnote 8
This article begins by providing a brief biography of Swami Vivekananda and the modern Hinduism that nurtured him and that he, in turn, did so much to propagate. This biography is framed within the context of Christian missions and modern global religion. Vivekananda best exemplifies Sharma's description of the ways that “the very forces which brought Christianity to India imparted new vigour to Hinduism.”Footnote 9 Shaped partly in response to Christian critiques of Hinduism, Vivekananda articulated an inclusivist view of Advaita Vedanta as the most compelling vision of universal religion available. Next, the article turns to Vivekananda's views of Christianity, for which he had little affection, and the Bible, which he knew extraordinarily well. Despite his robust knowledge of Christian scripture, he infrequently cited the Hebrew Bible and even more rarely did so favorably. The article then systematically explores Vivekananda's engagement with the New Testament, revealing a clear hermeneutical preference for the Gospels, particularly John. Following the lead of biblical scholars, Vivekananda made a clear distinction between the Christ of the Gospels and the Jesus of history, offering sometimes contradictory conclusions about the historicity of elements associated with Jesus's life. Finally, the article provides a detailed articulation of Vivekananda's Jesus—a figure at once familiar to Christians but, in significant ways, uniquely accommodated to Hindu metaphysics. Vivekananda demonstrated a rich, robust understanding and discriminating use of the Christian Bible that has not been properly recognized. He deployed this knowledge to launch an important and long-lived pattern: an attractive, fleshed out depiction of Jesus of Nazareth, transformed from the Christian savior into a Yogi model of self-realization.
I. Modern Hinduism and World Religion
For the first half century of effective British East Indian Company rule, from 1757 to 1813, evangelical missionaries were kept at bay by company supporters concerned about the potential disruption proselytizing might cause. But the situation changed with the company's charter renewal in 1813, when lobbying led British Parliament to lift restrictions. Missionaries arrived shortly and, as their opponents feared, quickly began to criticize Indian religious traditions as irrational and superstitious, polytheistic and idolatrous. Protestant critics of Hindu practices routinely characterized them as analogous to Catholicism—ritualistic, hierarchical, and based on unquestioned priestly authority. True religion was rational, text-based, and democratically accessible to all.Footnote 10
Nineteenth-century evangelical conceptions of scripture played a central role in shaping educated Indians’ engagement with Jesus. On both sides of the Atlantic, but especially in the United States, many championed the “perspicuity” of scripture, the democratic notion that the Bible's meaning was plain to all through careful reading of the text.Footnote 11 Educated Indians, especially Bengalis, trained in English and familiar with the Bible, took up the challenges raised by evangelical missionaries by embracing the invitation to interpret the text—with consequences evangelicals had not foreseen. The first was Raja Rommuhun Roy (1772–1833), a social reformer and admirer of Jesus. In 1820, he published The Precepts of Jesus, a booklet that reprinted selections from the teachings of Jesus, in Roy's view the world's best moral exemplar. Though Roy was a nationalist, he conceded much more ground to European critics, particularly Christians, than later nineteenth-century Indian nationalist intellectuals who would never elevate Jesus above other religious figures, particularly those from India.
The Bengal Renaissance, launched by Roy, was led by a group of political leaders, theologians, writers, and artists who produced what one scholar has called a “revolutionary awakening of the Indian mind” that led to the formation of modern Hinduism.Footnote 12 These intellectuals conceded the outer domains of knowledge—science and technology—to European authorities but asserted that in culture India remained superior and unconquered. They articulated a form of Hinduism as a universal religion, unmoored to the South Asian landscape and the Indian people.Footnote 13
Swami Vivekananda thus came of age in a spiritual milieu deeply influenced by a world religions perspective. He was born Narendranath Datta, one of nine children, in Kolkata (Calcutta) in 1863, the capital of British India. His family was part of the Indian elite, as his father was attorney at the Calcutta High Court. Interested in spirituality from a young age, Datta immersed himself in Hindu religious and textual traditions, and he was well versed in Sanskrit by the age of sixteen. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1884 from Scottish Church College. A remarkably bright student, he voraciously consumed works in history, Western philosophy, social science, art, and literature.Footnote 14 According to the common narrative accepted by later disciples, Datta was won over to the teaching of a guru named Sri Ramakrishna, who purveyed an ecstatic brand of religion filled with visions and trances. Datta eventually decided to renounce family life and a career in his pursuit of God-realization. Upon taking his vows, he received the title of swami and chose the name “Vivekananda,” or “bliss of discrimination,” in reference to the discernment that separates what is apparent from what is truly real. After Ramkrishna's death in 1886, Vivekananda became the leader among his group of fellow disciples.
Vivekananda also became the most prominent spokesman for modern Hinduism to American and European audiences. His claim to fame as a global figure largely stems from his appearance at the World's Parliament of Religion, held in conjunction with the Chicago Columbia Exposition in 1893. By the late nineteenth century, globalization had begun to shape the self-perceptions of Christians in the United States and Europe. It was impossible to ignore the profound reality of religious diversity. In this context, Protestants organized the World's Parliament of Religions, the spiritual analogue to the Columbian Exposition. Both events were meant to showcase the diversity of the world's traditions while simultaneously highlighting the superiority of white Christian “civilization.” But the organizers of the World's Parliament could not control the tone of the event after it opened. Vivekananda argued in a letter to a friend that the Parliament aimed to demonstrate “the superiority of the Christian religion over other forms of faith,” but the “philosophic religion of Hinduism” was able to hold its own.Footnote 15 Scholars have come to see Vivekananda's rousing call to religious brotherhood and an end to religious bigotry as a symbolic turning point in American religious pluralism.Footnote 16 He introduced many Americans to Hinduism, Vedanta, and yoga for the first time, making a compelling case as an intelligent and winsome presenter for the attractiveness of his views.
Following the Parliament, he spent nearly two years lecturing in the eastern and central United States, founding the Vedanta Society in New York in 1894. After speaking tours in the United States and Europe, he returned to India for good in 1900. In 1902, he died at the Belur Math monastery he had established in Ramakrishna's honor and was cremated on the banks of the Hooghly River.
Vivekananda's view of religion is best defined as inclusivist. He often articulated an ostensibly pluralistic position, celebrating the proliferation of religions as different human attempts to grasp truth.Footnote 17 But his pluralism had clear limits, subordinated to his conviction that Hinduism was the wellspring of truth, within which all other religions found their true meaning.Footnote 18 Only Hinduism—specifically, his Vedanta-based philosophy—had the capacity to be a universal religion that met all human needs.Footnote 19 His vision of universal religion was founded upon Advaita Vedanta, a monistic Hindu philosophical tradition that viewed liberation as the realization that the Self was of the very essence of the one reality of Brahman.
In his most candid moments, he freely admitted that, despite his appropriation of the Vedanta label for Advaita, it was by far the minority tradition in Hinduism.Footnote 20 Unable to deny the minority status of his cherished Advaita, he made a virtue of necessity, arguing that Advaita's relative unpopularity paradoxically provided evidence of its validity. Like other Bengali intellectuals, Vivekananda was deeply indebted to the social philosophies of utilitarianism, positivism, and evolution, particularly the work of John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte, and Herbert Spencer.Footnote 21 Like Spencer, whom he cited more than a dozen times, Vivekananda was on a “quest for ultimate realisation” as he sought a unified theory of knowledge that explained all branches of investigation.Footnote 22 Evolutionary principles suffused every aspect of Vivekananda's worldview; he saw religion (though not the eternal Vedas themselves) as a human invention developing from more basic into more refined forms in a developmental process.Footnote 23 Advaita was superior to all other religious traditions, which could only be understood in its light.Footnote 24 Its supremacy stemmed, Vivekananda thought, from the sophistication of its view of deity. The difficulty the human mind experienced in attempting to understand a deity beyond personality and encompassing all of reality explained the modest number of Advaitans. In evolutionary terms, the rigor of this view was the very element that made it the apex of world religion. As human thinking became more refined, the appeal of Advaita would undoubtedly grow as well. Eventually all religions would mature into a universal Advaita form and converge with other forms of knowledge.
Vivekananda's two-tiered approach toward religion, both pluralistic and inclusivist, led to an ambivalent stance towards evangelism. On the (lower) pluralistic level, his insistence on the equal value of all religions drove him to protest that he was not a missionary and that one of Hinduism's chief virtues was that it had never been a proselytizing religion.Footnote 25 On the (higher) inclusivist level, the superiority of Advaita compelled its proponents to share the good news with the rest of the world—the “Evangel of Hinduism,” as his later disciples called it.Footnote 26 His fervent support for the abstract nature of Advaita was in part a reaction to Christian missionaries’ perceptions that most Indians were unable to “respond to Western forms of abstraction” as a “sign of ignorance of the deep levels of significance that religious practices embodied.”Footnote 27
He often offered a division of labor between the global vocation of the West, which he variously described as rationality, wealth, or politics, and the spirituality that India had to offer the West.Footnote 28 He was thus somewhat pessimistic about the prospect of widespread American conversions, but he nevertheless longed to see yellow-garbed monastics throughout the United States and England and expressed hope that the vast majority of England might be converted to Vedanta.Footnote 29 His language could be rhetorically quite martial, as when he considered aggression—“aggression in a religious sense only”—the “distinguishing feature” of his ministry.Footnote 30
II. Criticism of Christianity
Vivekananda appropriated distinctively Christian words to suggest parallels between Christianity and Hinduism and, often, the superiority of the Indian analogue. For example, he used “gospel” to identify his own message or sometimes that of another Indian herald, Buddha. Similarly, he sometimes called the Vedas a Bible. And although Christians had no monopoly on the use of the word “scriptures,” his Western audiences may have experienced some dissonance when he used the word largely in reference to Hindu texts. Given his conviction that India's religious traditions were superior to those of the rest of the world, it is little surprise that he viewed the Vedas as the supreme religious texts. He pointed out that in some ways, of course, they were similar to other sacred books. But they were older, wiser, and less superstitious. Most significantly, as eternal texts dealing with universal philosophical points, the Vedas were less “historical” than the Christian Bible, which had limited applicability because of its historical particularity. In making this case, he turned a common point of pride among Christians—the historical nature of the Bible—into a liability. The historically situated nature of the New Testament was only one of the weaknesses he attributed to it. He accused the Bible, for example, of being superstitious, like the lesser Hindu texts, the Puranas.Footnote 31 Indeed, the highest compliment he could think to pay the Bible was that its “insights were anticipated by Vedanta.”Footnote 32
Like Ramakrishna, Vivekananda had very little good to say about Christians or Christianity as such.Footnote 33 He conceded that some individual Christians were kind, decent, and intelligent people and that Christianity taught good morals. But for the most part—particularly before Indian audiences—he heaped scorn on Christians and especially on Christian ministers, who he thought were overpaid for essentially presiding over worship services for two hours every week.Footnote 34 He thought Christianity doctrinaire rather than practical. He routinely compared Christian metaphysics and reasoning to its Hindu counterpart and found it wanting.
His critique of Christianity was wide-ranging, encompassing its historical development, its present condition in the United States, and especially its role in India. Christianity's origins could be traced not to Judaism but rather to an amalgamation of Greek “energy” and Indian “philosophy,” as the Vedanta had influenced ancient Greek thinkers in Athens, Alexandria, and Antioch.Footnote 35 Not surprisingly, the purest form of Christianity was practiced in India, where Saint Thomas arrived in the mid-first century.Footnote 36 Christianity grew in the Roman Empire at first by “fanaticism” and then truly spread “by the sword” through Constantine's aggressive support.Footnote 37 To the undoubted delight of Protestants, he labeled “absurd” the notion that the pope was a descendent of Saint Peter, a convenient fiction the Roman Catholic Church employed to preserve the clerical hierarchy's power and perquisites.Footnote 38 Some of the “noblest Asian religious ideas” from Christianity's purported parent religion in India were not pursued by Europeans as Christianity developed there. For example, unlike Indian traditions that integrated religious truth with the arts and sciences, Christianity stifled science, legal jurisprudence, and true literature.Footnote 39
Vivekananda parried Western denigration of Indian culture with his own critiques of Western practices, for which Christianity was essentially a synecdoche in his mind. As questions he was asked make clear, “Vivekananda's Western audiences had in most cases little or no knowledge of India—less in the United States than in England, where the imperial connection provided some background knowledge. It was important that his discourse to them should not assume any such knowledge.”Footnote 40 Most Americans seemed curious primarily about three alleged practices in India, all of which involved death. First, they wanted to know about sati, the ritual burning of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres. In fending off critiques of sati masquerading as questions, he routinely argued that widows made this sacrifice voluntarily—over the protests of priests—in contrast to parallels in European history, where women had been legally burned at the stake as witches.Footnote 41 Next, he was regularly asked why devotees threw themselves under the wheels of the annual “juggernaut” procession of the deity Jagannath in Puri, which he explained happened on rare occasions and only accidentally. Finally, when asked why mothers tossed female infants to crocodiles, he replied derisively: “Probably it was because they were softer and more tender and could be more easily masticated by the inhabitants of the rivers in the benighted country.”Footnote 42
American Christians were subjected to Vivekananda's withering criticism for their own sins: intolerance, sectarianism, judgmentalism, avarice, and fervent nationalism with its consequent justification of violence. He had nothing but scorn for the consumerism that Americans easily embraced and seamlessly integrated with their Christian faith. Renunciation, he contended, was the appropriate practice for Christians who truly desired to grow spiritually.Footnote 43 He lambasted Christians’ citing of the prosperity of Western (“Christian”) nations as proof of their religious superiority. Sounding much like Marx, Vivekananda suggested that such prosperity actually reflected the exploitation of poorer nations.Footnote 44
The same oppressive pattern that governed foreign relations operated domestically as well. “The wages of labour are the highest in the world,” he noted, “yet the fight between labour and capital is constant.” This was a tremendous paradox. “No other nation applies so much machinery in their everyday work as do the people of this country. Everything is machine. Then again, they are only one-twentieth of the whole population of the world. Yet they have fully one-sixth of all the wealth of the world. There is no limit to their wealth and luxuries. Yet everything here is so dear.” The industrial economy created vast disparities of wealth. While Americans loved to criticize India's race-based caste system, “they have a worse one—that of money. The almighty dollar, as the Americans say, can do anything here.”Footnote 45 America's materialism had spiritual roots, a result of Christianity's “shopkeeper” view of religion, in which disciples worshipped God in exchange for obtaining something from him.Footnote 46
If American Christians were beholden to the almighty dollar, they were equally idolatrous to their nation. Indeed, for many, Christianity was not a sincere pursuit but a mark of identity, a kind of “patriotism.”Footnote 47 Not surprisingly, the easy link between national identity and religion became a sanction for violence in the name of Christ.Footnote 48 And on the topic of violence, few things disgusted Vivekananda more than American Christians’ enthusiasm for the eternal torment of non-Christians. One pastor he heard asserted that if people did not believe that Jesus was God, they would go to hell. “He is fit for a lunatic asylum,” Vivekananda declared.Footnote 49 He thought the basic Christian message a very confused one: non-Christians were brothers, but they were destined for everlasting torment. With macabre derision, he referred to Christians relishing people being “eternally barbecued.”Footnote 50 Vivekananda shared the view of other Indian contemporaries, like nationalist author Bankim Chandra Chatterji, that the Christian God was a “tyrannical, unjust oppressor” for so easily ordaining humans “to everlasting punishment for the slightest guilt.”Footnote 51
Despite his scathing denunciation of American Christianity, Vivekananda reserved his strongest condemnation for the practices of Christians in India, primarily missionaries from Europe and the United States, whom he viewed as bigots and hypocrites. When William Carey began, in the words of Philip Jenkins, “his fanatical campaign to convert India” in 1793, East India Company officials’ fears that evangelical critiques of Indian beliefs and practices would severely disrupt trade were shown to be well founded.Footnote 52 By the early 1800s, missionaries began to rail against polytheism. The practices that missionaries thought inevitably accompanied polytheism—frenzied ceremonies, animal sacrifices, and hook-swinging, where devotees hung suspended from a rope attached to a pole—became regular material for their reports home soliciting funds. In the half century between 1851 and 1901, which essentially encompassed Vivekananda's lifetime, the Protestant community in India, based largely in Kolkata, expanded tenfold.Footnote 53 From Vivekananda's perspective, the Christians in India were largely products of conversion by the sword. Early missionaries, he conceded, echoing the views of earlier Indian intellectuals like Roy, had been invited by Indians and had done some good.Footnote 54 But those presently in India claimed to care for Indian souls while neglecting their bodies.Footnote 55 Missionaries rarely imitated the Christ they claimed to follow.Footnote 56 Christians, for example, failed to practice the tolerance that Jesus modeled.Footnote 57 Indeed, many of the truths Jesus proclaimed, radical in their implications, had never actually been lived by those who professed to follow him.Footnote 58
While Vivekananda spared no criticism of Christians, his routine contrast between Jesus and his desultory followers suggests the esteem in which he held Jesus. It is in the twin contexts of the views he shared with other modern Hindu intellectuals of an emerging universal religion and Christianity's manifest failure as an unevolved and largely obsolete form of religion that Vivekananda's views of Jesus must be understood.
III. Vivekananda and the Bible
Vivekananda had a robust knowledge of the Christian Bible. So deeply ingrained was the text that he effortlessly wove paraphrases, echoes, and brief quotes into his discourse. He referenced God's “still, small voice”;Footnote 59 the “peace that passeth all understanding”;Footnote 60 “the letter killeth,” but the spirit gives life;Footnote 61 “perfect love casteth out fear”;Footnote 62 “a man reaps what he sows”;Footnote 63 “in him we live and move and have our being”;Footnote 64 “the tree is known by its fruit”;Footnote 65 “eat, drink, and make merry”;Footnote 66 and Jesus's rebuke of Peter, “Get behind me, Satan.”Footnote 67 Most of his recorded works were originally delivered as oral addresses, which makes his easy citation of scripture all the more notable. In some cases, he deftly used his biblical knowledge to chide Christian audiences by citing their own sacred texts against them. Once he rebuked Christians’ exclusivism by comparing them to the Pharisees in one of Jesus's parables.Footnote 68 But on other occasions, his citations occurred in private settings where he was not aiming to impress. In a letter to his friend D. R. Balaji Rao, for example, he provided consolation with a quote from Job: “Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither; the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”Footnote 69 In expressing sympathy, words from the Bible seemed like a natural choice.
He knew biblical texts well and the contexts of which they were a part. To take just one example, in an uncharacteristically harsh proclamation about the future destruction of the English people—the worst of many conquerors India had experienced, in Vivekananda's view—he quoted Romans 12:19 verbatim: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” He then predicted a future Chinese onslaught against Europe, in which the invaders “will not leave one stone standing upon another,”Footnote 70 an echo of Jesus's apocalyptic prediction in the Gospels of the judgment then coming upon Jerusalem, widely understood by modern scholars as the evangelists’ reference to the Roman sack of the Temple in 70 CE. Vivekananda's thorough immersion in biblical language enabled him to effortlessly allude to a saying of Jesus that was appropriate to the apocalyptic context of his speech and a future invasion.
Indeed, so thorough was his knowledge that in some cases he seems to have absorbed biblical language sufficiently to echo it unintentionally. When he said before an audience of fellow Indians in Kumbakonam, many of whom likely knew little of the Bible, that the caste system reduced fellow citizens to “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” he did not likely intend his audience to hear an allusion to Joshua, where the Israelites forced the Gibeonites into the role of drudges before their conquerors.Footnote 71 Such effortless absorption of biblical phraseology is striking. Many public figures in nineteenth-century America and Europe knew the Bible as a central pillar in the edifice of the Western canon, “a shared text from which to speak and anchor a common memory.”Footnote 72 But Bengal was not the United States, and even in the United States, the kind of easy familiarity with the Bible that Vivekananda demonstrated was in decline by the late nineteenth century.
Vivekananda's strong knowledge of the Bible is both remarkable and not easily explained, though there were a few places where he would have gained exposure to it. First, he was educated at Scottish Church College, an institution established by evangelical Alexander Duff in 1830. Although originally all students were taught by Christian faculty and received instruction in the Bible, by the time Vivekananda enrolled there most faculty were Indian, though the Bible was still probably on the syllabus.Footnote 73 Indeed, when asked once by disciples in India about possible Christian influence on his development, Vivekananda could only point to his Scottish Church College instructor, William Hastie, whose claim to fame was introducing Vivekananda to Ramakrishna. “I don't think you could say that he had Christianized me much!” he exclaimed in reference to Hastie.Footnote 74 If Vivekananda was immersed in the biblical text there, he never discussed it—indeed, he was reticent to talk about his college education at all.Footnote 75
Second, his guru Sri Ramakrishna was keenly interested in many religious traditions. “He went to all the sects he could find,” Vivekananda recalled. After experiencing spiritual realization from a Muslim under whom he had studied, he had a similar encounter with “the true religion of Jesus Christ.”Footnote 76 But the illiterate Ramakrishna largely absorbed his understanding of Jesus indirectly, impressionistically, and mystically rather than through formal learning.Footnote 77
Third, given the Brahmo Samaj's deep connections with Unitarian Christianity, he probably gained some knowledge of the Bible there. Apart from these limited sources, he must have undertaken a spirited reading campaign on his own.
An examination of the types of passages that Vivekananda cites provides a window into his “canon within the canon,” the texts that functioned as his actual Bible from among the sixty-six books of the Christian Bible. His hermeneutics reveals little interest in the Hebrew Bible. These texts largely disclosed a crude tribal god with little to offer the modern world, as evidenced by Vivekananda's censorious citation of “God is a jealous god” and the admonition not to take God's name “in vain.”Footnote 78 Along these lines, he cited the text that King David was not permitted to build a temple because of his bloodthirstiness. He mentioned Jonah only to say that, if fanciful myths were what a reader sought, the medieval Hindu Puranas contained many more outrageous accounts.Footnote 79 Vivekananda did offer limited and conditional praise for some Hebrew Bible notions. He commented on Adam a dozen times, evoking the Genesis creation narrative as a myth of innocence that hinted at the truth of a faultless prelapsarian human state.Footnote 80 He mentioned Moses in passing in a list of major religious teachers, such as Zoroaster, but only talked about the substance of his actions or teaching briefly. He described the burning bush incident several times, directly quoting the theophany.Footnote 81 But this incident primarily served as an admonishment to seek direct spiritual experience: “The fact that Moses saw God in the burning bush does not constitute your seeing Him, does it?”Footnote 82 Rather unexpectedly for one who often talked favorably of wisdom, Vivekananda found little food for thought in the Wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible, citing with disapproval only that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”Footnote 83 His strongest affirmation of the Hebrew Bible was of the Song of Songs, which he thought was badly misunderstood. It was not, in fact, a celebration of erotic desire but a paean to the soul's divine love.Footnote 84 His attachment to the book seems surprising at first blush but makes sense in light of his attention to bhakti, the devotee's affectionate attachment to a particular divinity, a topic he expounded upon hundreds of times.
Vivekananda's general disdain for the Hebrew scriptures reflected in large part his evolutionary view of religion, in which faiths that celebrated a “tribal god” were seen as primitive, doomed to be replaced by the universal religion of Advaita.Footnote 85 In Vivekananda's understanding of historical development, each individual Israelite tribe originally had its own deity. After conquering ethnically related tribes, “the natural result would be that the god of the conquering tribe would be placed at the head of all the gods of the other tribes. Thus, the so-called boasted monotheism of the Semites was created.” These petty, partisan deities were inevitably linked to religious violence. Jehovah, the Jews’ god, “would do anything to please his own people. If he killed a whole tribe not protected by him, that was all right, quite good.”Footnote 86 Vivekananda offhandedly referenced the conquest of Canaan, taking for granted his audience's familiarity with “the amount of bloodshed, of tyranny, and of brutal savagery that this religious conquest entailed.”Footnote 87
Given Vivekananda's denigration of the bulk of the Hebrew Bible, his interest in Christian scripture focused largely on the New Testament, to which he displayed an overwhelmingly favorable posture. He clearly knew the entire range of New Testament texts. Despite his manifest fondness for the Gospels, he occasionally cited Paul (1 and 2 Corinthians),Footnote 88 Acts,Footnote 89 and the Epistles of John.Footnote 90 Still, such references were quite rare despite his evident familiarity with these texts and the significance of Peter and Paul for the Christian tradition.Footnote 91 His relative neglect of Pauline texts is especially surprising in light of the size of the Pauline corpus, constituting roughly a quarter of the New Testament by volume. Several texts from the last portion of the canon were ignored altogether: Hebrews, 1 and 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation. The omission of Revelation is no surprise; Vivekananda's preference for abstract metaphysics and nonviolence undoubtedly led him to view apocalyptic narrative as crude and generally useless.
IV. Vivekananda and the Gospels
The Bible's greatest attraction for Vivekananda, who sometimes described himself as a “devotee of Christ,” lay in the life and teachings of Jesus.Footnote 92 Apparently, on one Christmas Eve when he was only twenty-three, he told his disciples about Jesus's life, death, and resurrection and then charged them to follow Jesus's example “and so aid in the redemption of the world; to realize God and to deny themselves as Jesus had done.”Footnote 93 He mentioned Jesus hundreds of times throughout his extant talks and writings, both in brief comments and in more sustained narratives. He calmly fielded a question about the man born blind in the Gospel of John,Footnote 94 made passing reference to the legions of angels Jesus claimed he could command to rescue him when he was on trial,Footnote 95 and echoed a number of pronouncements from Jesus.Footnote 96 As with Vivekananda's other biblical citations, his references to the Gospels were often allusive, aphoristic, and periphrastic.
He was interested in Jesus's teaching more than in the narratives of his actions. This preference did not derive from any lack of familiarity with accounts of Jesus's actions, as passing citations of many key Gospel narratives make clear.Footnote 97 He laid especially heavy emphasis on Jesus's arresting sayings, often phrased as contrasting pairs, typically found in the Synoptic Gospels. Vivekananda directly quoted: “the blind leading the blind”;Footnote 98 “you are the salt of the Earth”;Footnote 99 “the Foxes have holes, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head”;Footnote 100 “ye cannot serve God and mammon”;Footnote 101 “whosoever will save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake shall find it”;Footnote 102 “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”;Footnote 103 the flowers “neither toil nor spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of them”;Footnote 104 “ask, and it shall be given (to) you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you,” he pleaded;Footnote 105 and that every disciple must “take up thy cross, and follow Me.”Footnote 106 He was also quite fond of Jesus's pronouncements about the Kingdom of God.Footnote 107
He was drawn to the Sermon on the Mount, a discourse sometimes viewed—then as now—as a definitive statement of Jesus's distinctive instruction. In a backhanded compliment, he affirmed that the sermon had an elegant simplicity that “even a streetwalker could understand.”Footnote 108 He quoted from it both repeatedly and extensively, citing pericopes from throughout. He often quoted the Beatitudes, particularly “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God,”Footnote 109 as this jibed with his own understanding of the fundamental purpose of religious activity. He favorably cited “Blessed are the poor in spirit” as well.Footnote 110 His recollection could be faulty, as evidenced by the non-biblical Beatitude, “Blessed are the always cheerful and always hopeful.”Footnote 111
Jesus's teaching on nonretaliation in the Sermon on the Mount resonated with the Hindu monk's commitment to ahimsa, or non-harm. Vivekananda invoked the words of Jesus as he called on his own listeners to “turn the other cheek,”Footnote 112 “resist not evil,”Footnote 113 and “do good to your enemies, love those who hate you.”Footnote 114 Indeed, he criticized Christian efforts to evade the challenging implications of this teaching, arguing that to dismiss the literal meaning of the text was to deprive it of all meaning. Along similar lines, he cited Jesus's demanding call in the sermon to “judge not that ye be not judged” and the sermon's admonition to pray in secret.Footnote 115
Several times, Vivekananda also approvingly referenced the Lord's Prayer, which immediately follows Jesus's directive to pray in secret in the Sermon on the Mount. Focusing particularly on the invocation to God as Father “in heaven” that opens the prayer, Vivekananda employed an idiosyncratic interpretation that reflected his understanding that Jesus spoke in different ways to different audiences. In depicting God in terms of human relationships, Jesus addressed this “simple prayer, a child's prayer” to the crowds, reserving his more metaphysically challenging monistic notions for his inner circle of disciples.Footnote 116 The Lord's Prayer was thus a model for the “uneducated masses” who viewed the divine as a monarch in a separate realm. Vivekananda was convinced that for the wise and initiated, Jesus revealed the deeper truth that the Kingdom of God was within the individual.
Despite his respect for the Sermon on the Mount, his clear favorite was John's Gospel, with its esoteric theology and abstract pronouncements. He quoted Jesus's teaching that “I am the vine and you are the branches”Footnote 117 and the admonition to worship God “in spirit and in truth.”Footnote 118 He was especially fond of the book's majestic opening, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God,”Footnote 119 which he considered the “whole essence of Christianity.”Footnote 120 The Gospel's focus on abiding in the presence of God aligned with his own devotional approach to spirituality. Vivekananda routinely praised John's statements that described a union between Jesus and the Father.Footnote 121 He viewed Jesus's teaching on this subject as the articulation of an ideal for all humans to strive after rather than a revelation of the unique divine identity of Jesus. Nothing more clearly communicated the shared identity of devotional seeker and the divine.
The boldest conclusion Vivekananda drew from these Johannine passages was the understanding that the devotee was, in fact, divine. Jesus's “I am” statements, commonly understood as another means by which John communicated Jesus's unique divine identity, became for Vivekananda a way of understanding the preexistence and eternality of the human jiva, or soul, as well as the divinity of all humans.Footnote 122 Perhaps nothing served this purpose better than John's enigmatic statement, “Ye are gods,” which Vivekananda was delighted to cite.Footnote 123 If Vivekananda often drew different implications from the Gospel texts than their authors may have intended, he was nevertheless generally sensitive to their context and aware of their original meaning. He did not routinely impose allegorical meanings on the texts or readings fundamentally at odds with their first-century context.
Given his affection for the Gospels and his detailed knowledge of them, it is noteworthy that he ignored a few major themes found in all four.Footnote 124 First, Vivekananda had virtually no interest in Jesus as a teacher of parables, a remarkable fact given the prominence of parable-telling in the Synoptic Gospels. Compared with Vivekananda's other omissions, it is hard to know why this topic did not interest him, though it is possible that he classed parables as folksy wisdom unworthy of great a teacher. Indian teaching is no stranger to fables and tales that might be classed as parables. Indeed, Sri Ramakrishna was fond of parable-like utterances.Footnote 125 In Vivekananda's evolutionary schema, however, perhaps parables ranked lower on the list.
Second, Jesus more than once offers to forgive the sins of those he encounters.Footnote 126 In the Gospel accounts, this is a notable act that engenders controversy. Vivekananda may have thought forgiveness an unworthy element of Jesus's actions, as he did not believe it appropriate to identify people as such as sinners.Footnote 127 Thus, biblical passages that suggest that people carry a burden of sin or are inherently sinful were distasteful to him. Indeed, like Ramakrishna, he saw Christian fixation on sinfulness as one of its fundamental weaknesses, which stifled human evolution.Footnote 128 Only the follower of the Vedas, as one scholar puts it, “was able to move from perfection to higher perfection because Hinduism admitted of man's perfectibility.”Footnote 129
Third, Vivekananda did not hold Jesus up as a servant to other people or a model of humility. This theme is prominent throughout the Gospels and explicit at least once in each Gospel.Footnote 130 For Vivekananda, spiritual realization typically implied empowerment, and, consequently, he had little interest in humility. He occasionally acknowledged favorably the humility of a student before a guru or a devotee before the divine, but he never lauded a teacher for offering himself as a servant to his disciples. Instead, he worried that humility kept individuals from growing spiritually.Footnote 131
Finally, Jesus's frequent teachings on love find no place in Vivekananda's hermeneutic of the New Testament. Again, the reason for this lacuna is not immediately obvious. Jesus's commandments regarding love and his love for others, especially in John, appear repeatedly. At the same time, love was a topic that deeply interested Vivekananda. He discussed love hundreds of times, particularly the love of the devotee for God and the nature of the universe as love. In a number of biblical passages, Jesus's love is the motive for his willingness to suffer crucifixion. Anticipating a point that will be discussed later, Vivekananda's avoidance of Jesus's love may reflect his antipathy toward any doctrine that promoted Jesus as an atoning figure.
V. Critical Scholarship on Jesus
Beyond knowledge of the biblical text itself, Vivekananda demonstrated impressive erudition regarding higher criticism and the historical contexts of the Bible. He noted that the Bible was composed long after the events it describes, that the Flood described in Genesis is indebted to Babylonian cosmology, and that the patriarchs are fictional figures.Footnote 132 This deep knowledge is surprising in light of his negative comments toward various scriptures. He thought that religious adherents’ claims of revealed status for their sacred texts were self-referential and therefore futile in resolving interreligious disputes. His predilection for practical religion—and his favoritism towards the “eternal” Vedas—made him dismissive of the value of religious books and the study of etymology and syntax.Footnote 133 While this repeated assertion smacks of anti-intellectualism, it reflects a rhetorical critique of mere academic knowledge in favor of spiritual experience.
Vivekananda also showed great sensitivity to the historical context of Jesus's life, a principle that he asserted was essential to understanding the biblical text.Footnote 134 This included such basic facts, often ignored in the West, that Jesus was an Asian, a point made by a number of nineteenth-century Indian intellectuals.Footnote 135 He chided audiences for portraying the “Oriental” Jesus “with blue eyes and yellow hair.” Jesus's teaching could only be understood in the geographical context of southwest Asia.Footnote 136 Westerners’ lack of cultural understanding led them into fundamental errors as they read their own scriptures. The Last Supper, Vivekananda pointed out, took place not at a table with chairs, as pictured in much Western art, but as Jesus and his disciples “squatted” on the floor.Footnote 137 He accurately captured Jesus as a popular teacher at odds with the Jewish leadership of his time. His followers were fisherman and illiterates, but it was “the literate people [who] killed him.”Footnote 138 In particular, he noted that Jesus had conflicts with two prominent Jewish sectarian movements, the Pharisees and Sadducees.Footnote 139 In his portrait of conflict, Vivekananda did project his own criticism of Brahmin priests onto the Jewish leaders who imprisoned “the common subject people” in “the shackles of priestcraft” from which Jesus freed them.Footnote 140 For Vivekananda, “the violent superstitions of organised priestcraft”—Jewish, Christian, or Indian—represented the meaningless rituals that tradition required, which enriched priests by giving them a monopoly on a valuable commodity, a critique that was ultimately aimed fundamentally at Hindu priests.Footnote 141
But he often interpreted Jesus as in conflict with Judaism more broadly, not just with its leadership. Reflecting a common Christian sentiment of the time, Vivekananda asserted that the Jews rejected Jesus because they did not understand that he fulfilled the Hebrew Bible.Footnote 142 More idiosyncratically, however, Vivekananda also claimed that the Jews ultimately crucified Jesus because he preached about life after death, a tenet not found in the Hebrew Bible and not embraced by most Jews of his time.Footnote 143
In its most virulent form, these claims rivalled the worst antisemitism that Christians had to offer. Echoing Christian supercessionist claims, Vivekananda asserted that “Judaism failed to absorb Christianity and was driven out of its place of birth by its all-conquering daughter.”Footnote 144 More provocatively, he repeated the myth of the Wandering Jew.Footnote 145 Their wandering was divine punishment for being Christ killers: “The Jews denied the Lord Jesus and are since that day wandering over the world as homeless beggars, tyrannised over by everybody.”Footnote 146 He seems to have viewed this development as a simple, if unfortunate, historical fact rather than a judgment against Judaism. Other comments carry a more sinister tone. He described the Jews of Jesus's day as “vulgar beings.”Footnote 147 Vivekananda repeatedly asserted the puzzling claim that the tribal god who became Yahweh was originally one of the Canaanite deities, Moloch (sometimes translated Molech), reputed in Hebrew scripture to demand the sacrifice of human children.Footnote 148 On this basis, he claimed, “Human sacrifice was also a Jewish idea and one that clung to them despite many chastisements from Jehovah.”Footnote 149 Animal sacrifice was a fixation of the Jew, he insisted. He made the indefensible assertion that the practice was inimical to Indian belief, conveniently forgetting the prevalence of animal sacrifice at locations like the Kali Temple in his native Kolkata.Footnote 150 Vivekananda's view seems to derive from the German antisemitic author George Friedrich Daumer, a close friend of atheist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who espoused a belief in Jewish ritual cannibalism and equated Moloch and Jehovah (Yahweh) in his 1842 The Fire and Moloch Cult of the Ancient Hebrews.Footnote 151
Stephen Prothero's assertion that modern Hindu teachers, including Vivekananda, universally displayed an “utter lack of interest in the historical Jesus” is emphatically untrue of Vivekananda, who had keen awareness of and interest in the work of New Testament research and scholarship on Jesus, despite some imprecision in his claims.Footnote 152 He announced “the verdict” that the Synoptic Gospels were produced long after Jesus's life,Footnote 153 an inexact claim that echoes the work of biblical scholars who since the late eighteenth century had worked on various hypotheses regarding the sources from which the Synoptic Gospels were formed.Footnote 154 Vivekananda also commented that scholars disputed the historical veracity of the Gospel of John. Again, this suggests some familiarity with the work of nineteenth-century German scholars like David Strauss and F. C. Baur.Footnote 155 He also knew the scholarly consensus regarding the dating of New Testament texts, recognizing that Paul's epistles were likely written before any of the Gospels and that Paul was not an eyewitness of Jesus.Footnote 156 He offered a modest critique of the veracity of particular elements of the Gospels, articulating an accretive view of the Gospels as incorporating legends that had grown up over time regarding the life of Jesus.Footnote 157 Only stray sayings of Jesus, he thought, had been accurately preserved.Footnote 158 He was dismissive of Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus, “without question, the most popular life of Jesus ever written,” in the words of one historian of New Testament research.Footnote 159 He much favored the careful work of Strauss and commented enthusiastically on the “new science of research” that was revealing greater understanding about Jesus.Footnote 160
His evenhandedness is evident in the way he summarily dismissed the claims of Russian author Nicolas Notovitch, who maintained in his 1894 The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ that Jesus had spent his early adult years in India. This book was an “immediate sensation in the West,” translated into English four times and going through eight French editions within a year.Footnote 161 However attractive such a view might have been for an Indian nationalist like Vivekananda, he curtly pronounced the work of “our great Russian archaeologist” a “fraud.”Footnote 162 His view was in line with German Indologist and Oxford professor Max Müller, whom Vivekananda deeply admired and who had immediately challenged the veracity of Notovitch's account.Footnote 163 Still, he did occasionally allow his theories free rein in an effort to connect Jesus to India. He was drawn to ideas that Jesus's teachings actually came from Buddhism via the Essenes.Footnote 164 Similarly, he asserted, without adducing any evidence, that the rite of baptism was “of Buddhist origin.”Footnote 165 For an educated Indian of his generation, these were not unusual views.Footnote 166
Even more radically, Vivekananda from time to time echoed the doubts expressed by Christianity's most strident skeptics that Jesus never lived.Footnote 167 He claimed with some hyperbole that there was “great dispute” about Jesus's historical existence. He noted that the prominent Jewish historians of the era Josephus and Philo discussed “even petty sects among the Jews” but failed to mention “Jesus or the Christians, or that the Roman Judge sentenced him to death on the cross.”Footnote 168 He once offered the odd speculation that the New Testament stories about Jesus were combined from sayings of the first-century Jewish rabbi Hillel and the Apostle Paul, who simply invented the person of Jesus from whole cloth.Footnote 169
More common than a skeptical stance towards Jesus's historicity was an agnostic one: it was immaterial whether he was born in Jerusalem or Bethlehem—indeed, whether he lived at all.Footnote 170 This relative indifference to the details of Jesus's life reflected his primary interest in Jesus as a putative teacher of realization. In addition, the fact that questions could be raised about Christian origins provided an opportunity to undermine Christianity, whose legitimacy hinged on Jesus's identity. Many world religious traditions suffered the weaknesses of being based on historical figures and on the teachings attributed to them—texts Vivekananda found replete with interpolations and textual errors.Footnote 171 But despite some equivocation, Vivekananda's routine references to the teachings of Jesus and the example of his life throughout his speeches and writings suggest that his default assumption was that Jesus was a historical figure and that some semblance of his teachings had been accurately passed on.
V. Vivekananda's Jesus
Vivekananda offered a number of overlapping identities for Jesus that, on the surface, seemed compatible with Christian orthodoxy: renouncer of materialism, miracle worker, prophet, teacher, and object of worship as the incarnation of God. First, Jesus was a “renouncer.” Vivekananda identified Jesus and his disciples as sannyasins, the Sanskrit term for devotees who reject family, friends, and the comforts of settled life.Footnote 172 Vivekananda presented Jesus as an ascetic pursuing the life of the spirit whose single-minded devotion to God kept him from being interested in “this world.”Footnote 173 Vivekananda, however, pressed this widely accepted point further than most Christians would have felt comfortable. He cited Jesus's call to “sell all you have and give to the poor” more than once, insisting that this was a literal injunction, in contrast with Christian tendencies to spiritualize the message.Footnote 174 He also asserted, with a bluntness too awkward for many Christians, that Jesus was not interested in sex.Footnote 175 A renouncer himself, Vivekananda carried great authority when he made pronouncements about poverty and asceticism.
Second, Jesus was a miracle worker. Vivekananda forthrightly affirmed Jesus's ability to physically heal the sick, typically through touch.Footnote 176 But he ignored the many Gospel references to exorcisms and the more provocative claims that Jesus controlled nature by, for example, walking on water. He generally treated miraculous actions as essentially parlor tricks that “any fool could do.”Footnote 177 Since at least the time of Roy, Indian intellectuals had accepted the reality of Jesus's miracles.Footnote 178 Given the pervasiveness of miracle workers in the Hindu tradition, Vivekananda, like many fellow Indians, did not think that Jesus's miracles implied his greatness. All that mattered was seeking after God, which gave Jesus true spiritual powers.
Third, Jesus was also a prophet, one who “speaks forth” in the name of God—a view of Jesus well substantiated in all four Gospels.Footnote 179 But while Vivekananda was happy to affirm Jesus's prophetic status, he did not think this made Jesus unique. In calling Jesus a prophet, he routinely classed Jesus not with his Hebrew Bible forebears but with other saints and seers around the world—Mohammed, Buddha, Guru Nanak, Kabir, Chaitanya, and others.
Fourth, Vivekananda viewed Jesus as a teacher and preacher. Like many teachers of the ancient world, Jesus was an itinerant.Footnote 180 His central message, as Vivekananda understood it, was that the Kingdom of Heaven was within.Footnote 181 Vivekananda translated Jesus's aphorism about providing assistance to the “least of these brethren of mine” into an affirmation of the karmic principle of working without attachment to the fruit of one's labor.Footnote 182 Jesus instructed his disciples in true purity rather than the law.Footnote 183 He also taught people by example, modeling the spiritual realization of one who communicated devotion through prayer.Footnote 184 His authority as a teacher came from his accumulated good karma and the spiritual insight that accompanied it. As the Gospels hinted, Jesus's father Joseph was an unremarkable man, so Jesus's spiritual understanding could only have derived from tremendous accumulated realization. Footnote 185
Finally, Jesus was an appropriate object of worship.Footnote 186 Vivekananda distinguished clearly between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, as D. F. Strauss had a few decades earlier.Footnote 187 But whereas Strauss and other critical scholars thought the church made Christ divine, Vivekananda believed that he achieved superconsciousness and became the divine Christ at the transfiguration, which placed him in the rarefied company of perfected men like Buddha.Footnote 188 Consequently, Vivekananda bluntly affirmed that “Jesus of Nazareth was God come down as man.”Footnote 189
But if Vivekananda's views of Jesus ostensibly seem aligned to traditional Christian beliefs, a closer examination reveals a less congenial view. Vivekananda emphatically insisted that there was nothing unique about Jesus, whom he frequently placed in the company of other founding figures like Muhammad or Zoroaster, as indicated above in his assessment of Jesus as a prophet. Most commonly, he set Jesus and Buddha side by side, as both were renouncers whose profound spiritual awakenings led to renewal movements from within existing religious traditions. Indeed, despite their many similarities, Buddha often fared better in Vivekananda's assessment.Footnote 190 Vivekananda insisted that people should not only “find God” in “Jesus of Nazareth” but in others like him who were equally worthy of worship.Footnote 191
Vivekananda explicitly rejected the notion that Jesus could atone for human sin. This tenet, he claimed, developed from a misguided effort to fit Jesus's narrative into the Jewish theological demand for human sacrifice. The “cruel idea” of Jesus as “a human scapegoat” made “Christianity depart from the teachings of Jesus himself and develop a spirit of persecution and bloodshed.”Footnote 192 The stridency of his view is at odds with that of other Indian contemporaries. Ramakrishna seemed to accept the principle of vicarious atonement, acknowledging that he became ill because he took his disciples’ sins upon himself.Footnote 193 And Hindu modernist philosopher Keshub Chandra Sen considered Jesus's death on the cross an inspiring sacrifice on behalf of others.Footnote 194
On numerous occasions, Vivekananda adamantly rejected the notion of Jesus as an atoning figure. While Jesus points the way for his disciples, he does so only through his example of devotion to the Father, he explained.Footnote 195 The way to honor Jesus was to follow his teachings, not look to him as a deliverer.Footnote 196 He bluntly told audience that what Jesus did would not save them.Footnote 197 “How can you believe,” he asked snidely, “in someone's death?”Footnote 198 Returning to antisemitic themes, he explained the Eucharist not as a commemoration of the crucifixion's atoning sacrifice but as the vestige of a barbaric practice, an effort by later church leaders to force Jesus into conformity with Jewish belief.Footnote 199
Vivekananda's dismissal of the role of atonement explains his sparse references to Jesus's death by public execution, undoubtedly one of the most notable features of a major world religion's founder. The Apostle Paul famously said to the church in Corinth, “I determined to preach nothing except Christ and him crucified.” Vivekananda cited this passage once, not to affirm the centrality of Jesus's crucifixion to Christian faith but to point out the hypocrisy of Christian missionaries who spread violence in India and then preached about a Jesus who died a victim of judicial violence.Footnote 200 But given his general indifference toward Paul, it is little surprise that Vivekananda chose not to take his cue from the apostle. Even recognizing his fondness for the Gospels, this neglect of the crucifixion is still puzzling, given that, as Martin Kähler famously said long ago, the Gospels are essentially “passion narratives with extended introductions.”Footnote 201
On a few occasions, Vivekananda even borrowed a tenet from Islam, claiming that the crucifixion was merely a “mirage.”Footnote 202 Vivekananda baptized this view in Hindu theology by explaining this mirage as an act of divine lila, the notion that God engages in a playful relationship with humanity, sometimes deceiving them in the service of an inscrutable divine purpose.Footnote 203 But in the same way that he generally backed away from assertions of the non-historicity of Jesus, he did not seem to hold firmly to his conviction that the crucifixion never took place. Instead, he asserted that the crucifixion merely killed the physical body of Jesus but could not destroy the Self, which is eternal.Footnote 204 Needless to say, if Vivekananda found little to appreciate about the crucifixion, he was quite skeptical of the resurrection narratives as mere vestiges of mythical themes.Footnote 205
Even as Vivekananda studiously reduced the uniqueness of Jesus and denied the central role Christians traditionally granted him, he mostly remained respectful. But in a number of cases, he seemed intentionally provocative in pointing out weaknesses, limitations, and imperfections he saw in Jesus. First, in urging listeners not to expect salvation from Jesus's death, he bluntly and emphatically told them that Jesus was dead. There was no point in imitating him.Footnote 206 This counsel is remarkable in light of Vivekananda's own detailed commentary on the spiritual classic The Imitation of Christ. Jesus was also superstitious,Footnote 207 a “second-rate hero” compared to countless unknown great men,Footnote 208 and imperfect in light of his unwillingness to treat women as equals.Footnote 209 Vivekananda also declared the Golden Rule “excessively vulgar,” the foundation for a “horrible, barbarous, savage creed.”Footnote 210 Most provocatively of all, he proclaimed that there were many Christs,Footnote 211 including murderers and demons.Footnote 212 In an Advaita worldview that denies the ultimate reality of oppositions, this makes sense, but to most hearers it would have been quite offensive, as Vivekananda seems to have understood.
This assessment of Jesus's overarching strength and weakness leads to what would have struck American audiences familiar with the Christian tradition as his boldest claim of all. Views of Jesus as a great prophet must be tempered by the realization that “you are all prophets,”Footnote 213 at least potentially through achieving self-realization. If this was so, it was surely no logical stretch for Vivekananda to claim that he was the “soul . . . of Jesus.”Footnote 214 In Advaita, there is nothing wrong with recognizing one's ultimate identity with the Universe, Brahman, God. “We are the greatest God that ever was,” he pronounced.Footnote 215
VI. Conclusion
In the context of late nineteenth-century imperialism, relatively easy long-distance travel, and mass communication, religion became increasingly global. Orientalist critiques of Indian culture, instigated in part by Christian missionaries, shaped the Indian intellectual climate. In this milieu, Vivekananda crafted a modern, universal religion based in Advaita Vedanta and vindicated by evolutionary theory. This religion informed his view of Jesus, widely presented at the time by missionaries to India, at the World's Parliament of Religions and elsewhere as the founder of a universal religion. Vivekananda's worldview was fundamentally evolutionary and teleological. Evolution always tended from the lower to the higher and from the many to the one. This explained the Advaita revelation that all reality is one. Only Advaita disclosed the truth—at once ancient and modern—of a universal, non-dualistic religion in which spiritual growth was fueled by self-activated activities of meditation. If Advaita was revealed in the timeless Vedas, the obverse was that all other religions were particularistic and historically contextualized. Vivekananda's views of Christianity and Jesus must be understood in light of this overarching worldview. He knew Christianity and its Bible quite well. Due in large part to the aggressive activities of evangelical missionaries and the arrogance of European colonizers, he had little respect for Christianity or, in the main, Christians themselves. Using select tools from modern biblical criticism, he subjected the Bible to careful scrutiny, largely dismissing the Hebrew Bible and concentrating heavily on Jesus's teachings in the Gospels. While often offering praise of Jesus that most Christians at the time would have welcomed, Vivekananda systematically dismantled the notion of Jesus as the unique Son of God, his death as atonement, or his role as the founder of a genuinely universal religion. In exchange, he incorporated Jesus within his modern Hindu framework and presented him as a role model of non-dualistic self-realization through yoga practice. He was not the first Indian to interpret Jesus within the context of Hinduism, but he was the first to successfully present an Indian Jesus to a global audience. After the World's Parliament, he traveled throughout the United States and Europe, often commenting on Jesus in passing to his non-Indian audiences. Vivekananda's addresses at the World's Parliament, often seen as a watershed in the development of American pluralism, represent a related turning point: his presentation of Jesus reflects the moment when Christians lost interpretive control of Jesus in global dialogue. Well over a century after his death, Vivekananda remains arguably the most prominent exponent of modern Hinduism, revered by lay people and studied by scholars. Through his efforts, Jesus became an indisputably Indian religious figure, no longer just a Christian one. This adept counter-Orientalist makeover of Jesus's identity laid the foundation for later Hindu teachers—Paramahansa Yogananda, Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Swami Kriyananda, Deepak Chopra, and others—to appropriate Jesus as one of their own. The Yogi Christ remains a prominent global religious figure familiar to Hindus, Christians, and those of other faiths alike.
