Jesus and the Therapeut (Google search Ashoka and Therapeutae)

Can time step out of a grandfather clock and walk among us as a man? No, but we draw pictures of Old Man Time and Baby New Year and have them talk in cartoons, right? Every New Year cartoon artists put speech bubbles above these pictures of time and give them voice: Old Man Time says something cynical, Baby New Year says something optimistic. Yet time does not exist; it is only a concept useful to us, so we use it. Time is only real in us.

Are you a philosopher? You certainly have a philosophy--that qualifies you for this: Give your philosophy a voice. What would it say to someone with an opposing philosophy? Say maybe you believe that everyone should carry a gun. What would your philosophy say to a pacifist who believes all guns should be destroyed? Or maybe you think Gays should have the right to marry. If your philosophy met a person who believes Adam and Eve were the only acceptable arrangement, what would it say?

What if you were a philosophy student who traveled widely and learned great perspectives on truth from other cultures? You learned from the sages of India, Persia, Syria, Greece, Israel, and wind up in Egypt with a bunch of other philosophers . . . and some yahoos who believe only the Old Testament, literally. You know their scripture better than they do (as they seem to completely misread it), that it is about the truth of life and that it is in agreement with the core teaching of many other traditions.

You know, having been there, that there are two lines of tradition in Israel: the self-serving Pharisees and Essene lawyer-scribes, and the true-in-heart Jews that care for right-in-God's-sight action and for others, especially for the poor. So, being the good student you are, you arrange for your philosophy to talk to theirs through Joshua, the salvation that comes after Moses who will lead them across the Jordan into the Promised Land. He is Baby New Year born of Joseph the dreamer and Miriam the sister of Moses, and he knows all the truth that is knowable, from India, Persia, Syria, Greece, Egypt and especially the Hebrew scriptures your detractors seem to completely misunderstand--and you cram him full of it.

 Some catch that "Joshua" is, ultimately, God within themselves; and the self-serving see another bigot-lawyer-scribe track. But the ones that catch Joshua in them and learn from him, well, God bless them, God bless them.