Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment (2008) by Deepak Chopra

Reviewed by John Murphy

Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment is a sincere but shallow attempt to trace Christ’s growing divinity during his young adulthood, before entering public ministry. Deepak Chopra outlines his good intentions in an Author’s Note where he describes his novel as “pure fiction,” but goes on to say that “I’ve gotten a glimpse into his (Jesus’) mind.” Chopra wants to restore to readers the “enlightened Jesus,” whose absence from the New Testament “has profoundly crippled the Christian faith, for as unique as Christ is, making him the one and only Son of God leaves the rest of humankind stranded.”

I’m not sure what to make of that sentence. The whole point of Christianity is that we are NOT Jesus, but that he is the way, the truth, and the light. So the more we try to accord our lives with his word, the more we become fully ourselves, not just Christ-clones, and certainly not “stranded” disciples. Yet Chopra asks, “What if Jesus wanted his followers — and us — to reach the same unity with God that he had reached?”

Well, that is what Jesus wanted, but not in the way Chopra sees it. God is God and “oneness” with God does not mean being God, but rather doing his will with humility and love. Jesus, as both God and Man, was uniquely able to show us how to do God’s will, and his humanity is the bridge to Heaven. Oddly enough, Chopra’s method for making Jesus’ holiness more accessible to our ordinariness is to bring Jesus down, instead of raising the rest of us up. Chopra’s Jesus cheats at miracles, breaks a soldier’s jaw, feels doubt and uncertainty about his calling, mixes with zealots, and generally behaves like someone who is not only not God, but not especially holy, either. I understand that Chopra wants to show Christ’s spiritual development, but there is precious little interiority to this Christ, little sense of the psychological process by which one becomes enlightened – strange, since Chopra has “gotten a glimpse into his mind.”

There’s a difference between glimpsing the mind of another (especially a divine other) and projecting your own thoughts and concerns onto another (especially a divine other). Chopra’s “Jesus” is more a mirror of Chopra’s own preoccupations as a spiritual guru and advocate for “consciousness” and mind-body awareness than he is a convincing portrait of an enlightened messiah. This book is clearly meant as a companion piece to Chopra’s earlier bestseller, Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment, as both stories involve walking the upward path from personal consciousness to collective consciousness to universal consciousness to oneness with the divine. But Chopra misrepresents Christian teaching in order to sound like he’s supplying a “missing key.” In a Reader’s Guide at the end of the book, Chopra writes: “Entering the Kingdom of God doesn’t mean waiting to die and then joining God. It’s an internal event here and now by which human nature turns into something higher.” Chopra writes as if Jesus never said, “the Kingdom of God is within you,” and as if the concept of love as a taste of the divine had never been articulated in Christian exegeses.

From a theological perspective, the most interesting element of Chopra’s novel is how he treats the traditional concept of “Satan” and “evil.” He has Jesus say, “Only someone who can see the demons as part of God is free. Good and evil dissolve. The veil drops away, and all you see is divine light — inside, outside, everywhere.” Later, when Jesus’ light begins to overtake the region and Satan is pushed back to the “last cramped corner of creation,” Jesus says to him, “Don’t you wonder why I didn’t kill you? I’m saving you for the day when you love me. It will come.” Again, this is not new or revelatory to the Christian tradition, as theologians have long since insisted that good and evil are not distinct combatants – rather, evil feeds on goodness like a leech, draining its shadow-life from it. Nonetheless, the concept is well dramatized in the book.

Whether one questions Chopra’s treatment of Jesus, the story is well-intentioned, and Chopra has an evident respect and reverence for Christ as a spiritual teacher and enlightened being. He is a competent if uninspired stylist and storyteller, but there are moments worth meditating on. The ultimate irony is that Chopra advocates ridding ourselves of ego, but he claims with this book to essentially understand the mind of Jesus and to restore to “crippled” Christianity its true self. It’s rather a vain attempt, in both meanings of the word.