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The Spirit-filled Heart of Judaism. What Jesus was, historically speaking, was a Spirit-filled person in the charismatic stream of Judaism. All that he was, taught, and did flowed from his intimate experience of the "world of Spirit."
(The world of Spirit is another dimension of reality in addition to the visible world of ordinary experience. This world is not simply an article of belief but an element of experience. It is not merely believed in but it is known. (its scientific reality has recently been demonstrated--see Innerface Vol. 11 No. 5.)
The knowledge that there are at least two dimensions of reality was the common property of virtually every culture before ours--constituting what has been called the "primordial tradition."
The Primordial, Biblical, and Modern Traditions.
The cultural tradition in which Jesus lived took for granted the central claims of the primordial tradition--that there are minimally two worlds, and the other world can be known. Language about 'the other world' is necessarily metaphorical. If anything is to be communicated it must be by analogy. Yet, though the language is metaphorical, the realities are not.
Moreover this other world is not literally somewhere else. God, for example, is everywhere present even as God is also transcendent. God and the world of Spirit are all around us, including within us. Rather than God being somewhere else, we, and everything that is, are in God. We live in Spirit, even though we are mostly unaware of this reality.
Those of us socialized in the modern world have grown up in a secularized culture with a one dimensional understanding of reality. For us, what is real is essentially the material, the visible world of time and space. Reality is constituted by matter and energy interacting to form the visible world--in short there is but one world.
This nonreligious one-dimensional understanding of reality makes the other world and the notion of mediation between the two worlds unreal to us. But the reality of the other world deserves to be taken seriously--for the modern worldview is no more a map of reality than any of the other previous images.
Within the theoretical sciences, the modern worldview in its popular form has already been abandoned. At both macro and micro levels, reality behaves in strange and incomprehensible ways. The "old map" has been left far behind. Though this does not prove the truth of the religious world-view, it does undermine the reasons for rejecting it.
The world-view that rejects or ignores the world of Spirit is not only relative, but is itself in the process of being rejected. (see Innerface Vol. 11, No. 5)
The Spirit-filled experience of Jesus: We know almost nothing about the boy-hood and early manhood life of Jesus prior to the commencement of his brief public ministry. This commenced with his baptism by one known as John the Baptist when he was about 30 years old and is described by Mark as, "Coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him. And there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." According to Mark, this experience was private to Jesus. But Matthew and Luke change the text slightly to make it more public. In doing so, they bring it into line with the post-Easter perception of Jesus' identity. As such their version must be historically suspect.
Whatever our judgment concerning the "heavenly voice," the story places Jesus in the Spirit-filled heart of Judaism, the vision being reminiscent of the "call narratives" of the prophets. Like them, Jesus' ministry began with an intense experience of the Spirit of God.
The course of Jesus' ministry--a person of Spirit
Jesus' ministry not only began with an experience of the Spirit but was immediately followed by a further experience in which the Spirit led him out into the wilderness. Mark's account says, "And Jesus was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan, and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him."
We do not know if Jesus had other visions. Presumably he would have only reported them if doing so served some purpose in his teaching.
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