Is Faith a Part of Buddhism?

Buddhism is often identified with personal effort. I would go so far as saying that the attractiveness of moving Buddhism out of the supernatural and into the natural has more to do with the secularization of the West then with the factual nature of the development of Buddhism narratives, which, like their Western counterparts, are diversified by various beliefs and opinions.

I certainly understand the need for spiritualism. We hypothesize root causes. Personal effort appeals to a certain type of spiritual person who does not identify with naming a God and all the baggage this carries. It removes the responsibility of defending doctrinaire accounts of the faith and allows them to move fluidly through the tradition without having to deal with what they dislike. I get it.

Buddhism, at least in the form it is often received in the West, may siphon out factors that are not necessarily testaments to human effort. However, it is important to note that other forms of Buddhism do not. I was reminded of this in an exchange I had at the regional American Academy of Religions meeting. As I was speaking with Dr. John Thatamanil (Union Theological Seminary), he spoke of a kind of “protestant reformation” that occurs in Buddhism in about 9^th-12^th century and becomes the standard expression in Japanese Buddhism. It was something that I have been connecting now for some time. By "protestant reformation," we were of course thinking of the move from a works-based form of religious expression to one of confessional form. This is perhaps not the greatest expression of all the reformation addressed and leaves room for expansion, but it does get at a similar concept in Shin Buddhism: the ordering of jiriki and tariki.

There are three narratives that come to mind that suggest Buddhism is not consigned to the bank of merit it has often been romanticized in.

Shin Buddhism is the most obvious expression here. Here, the name of Amida Buddha is venerated. By recitation of the name, strength is found in the other (the practice known as tariki) as opposed to jiriki, the practice of inner-self concentration.

A second example is the story of the Buddha who comes to his friend Gopala. The latter begs the Buddha not to leave him for fear he will fail in his sadhana (spiritual exercises) and return to adharma. So the Buddha leaves the imprint of his shadow on a cave wall. This is supposed to infuse righteousness that makes Gopala’s ability to keep dharma possible.

A third form found in Tibetan Buddhism is the Sutra Pagpa Chulung Rolyay Do. It is a mantra that was written by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, and it is thought that merely casting one’s gaze upon it purifies one of negativity for many eons. There is a resemblance to the nehushtan in this manner of “faith” (the story of Moses and the bronze serpent). Certainly John thought it a faith-act, as the gospel writer records, “just as Moses lifted up the serpent, Jesus was also to be lifted up.” (John 3:14)

 

How You Should Read Matthew 26:11 in Relation to Deuteronomy 15:11. An Easter Reflection

The soon coming of the Lord Jesus beacons our attention as Easter is just around the corner! So I was thinking today on Jesus’ use of Jewish Bible passages relevant to his own teachings and Deuteronomy came to mind. The verse comes in the context of how to deal righteously with debts, debtors, and the poor. In Deuteronomy 15:11.

There will always be poor people in the land.

Jesus reported spoke similar words, “The poor you will always have among you, but me only for a short time.” (Matthew 26:11 - notice the fact that this comes as the 11th verse in both bibles is just coincidence!)

It is an interesting theological exercise to try to imagine what the writer of the gospel was thinking when he wrote these words. We know the verse occurs in the context of a woman anointing Jesus’ head with expensive perfume and the disciples arguing that it was a wasteful act. But the author reminds us that such things were done as a preamble to Jesus’ own burial.

The plain exegetical sense of the statement is hard to resist, especially when compared to its counterpart in Deuteronomy 15:11, another verse about money, the poor, and generosity.

Both verses tell us there will always be poor. And if we interpret this literally, always means always.  Really? But what about the age of the messiah, when all wrongs will be righted and all people will come to worship the one true God? Jesus doesn’t answer in this context, and so as some Christian scurry to claim that the last part of this verse is only in reference the end of his physical body (because, after all, Jesus is God divine), they conveniently do some interpretive gymnastics with the first part of the verse, consigning the always to the course of history…but not Jesus whom they parcel out in two natures!

Again, it is helpful if we go to Judaism and get an idea of what the Tannaim or Amoraim may have been thinking at the time when they also read such a verse. An early tractate in the Talmud called Berakhot, has an interesting take on the verse. Folio 34B reads:

There is no difference between this world and the days of the Messiah except the oppression of the heathen kingdoms alone, as it is said, “For the poor shall never cease from the land” (Deuteronomy 15:11)

So here we have the verse read as a gemara in a messianic context, precisely the kind of thing we’d want to see if reading about Jesus the messiah.

Yet the tractate specifically says, even in the time of them messiah, the poor will still be around. So is inequality, injustice part of the messianic reign? They are other verses that talk about an age of peace, but clearly the interpretive trend here was to read the verse literally. It means that Jesus too read the verse literally, and so to tag onto the second part of the verse, some rather forced sophistication about the separation of the two natures of Jesus, the body and soul, feels contrived to say the least. Jesus thought his end was coming. He thought he would die. End of story.

 

But now we are free to return to our theology!

If I interpret both ends of the verse faithfully, Jesus would be saying that the poor will indeed always be here insofar as the messianic age is concerned, and I will not. So, is he denying his messianic call? Denying is a strong accusation. If you are believer and looking to preserve the integrity of a faithful understanding of the verse in the tradition of a systematic theology that avoids problematic exegesis, one may simply plead that Jesus in the gospel is ignorant of the incarnation. In the garden he seems to be rattled. He seems to give up hope in various places, and in others seem sure about himself and his mission.

Furthermore, this story is shadowed in John at precisely the same time of his betrayal! In John, however, it is Judas, not the disciples who talk about wasteful acts of charity and giving. In both gospels Jesus rebukes them. John, where we would expect Jesus to say something like “you will have me for a short time, but I will rise again” – at least I this context, does not. I have a much easier time reading Matthew 26 without doing exegetical stunts, then say if it had occurred in the gospel of John the intermingling of Jesus’ two natures is obvious much more developed.

A Review of Exodus: Gods and Kings and Why You Should Watch

So I finally had a chance to see the Exodus: Gods and Kings movie starring Christian Bale. While I know the story was wrecked in the media and Hebrew bible scholars no less had a field day pointing out all the inaccuracies contained within the movie, I found it fresh and enjoyable.

If you’ve read my blog for any time, you’ll know I am not a classic liberal, who demands historical continuity at the expense of the miraculous, or an orthodox thinker, who demands faithful renderings to a biblical script that upon closer inspection is often not faithful to itself.

[Spoilers from this point on]

What I liked:

The reviews I have read all noted the unique way in which God was featured. I very much admired the way the story depicted God as a child, the innocence of whom was constantly undermined by his own unapologetic demand for Egyptian blood. There was one dialogue in which Moses and the child god go at it. Moses argues that it is insensible to seek revenge on the Egyptians and cruel (a point Rameses makes later when all the firstborn of the Egyptians are murdered). God argues that justice must be served and reminds Moses that 400 years of oppression the backdrop to his violent answer to the Egyptians who care for no one but themselves.

Exodus definitely goes beyond the biblical narrative, and this was the part I very much enjoyed. When one reads the story of Moses there are questions we all want answered but are hard to come by.

Exodus attempts to answer questions such as: How could Moses so seamlessly turn on his own people (the Egyptians) to take up the cause of his true people (the Israelites). The story does a great job holding these two aspects in tension. Moses was not easily convinced he was doing the right thing, so much that even with God, he argues about it. His loyalty towards Rameses and his family is constantly wracking his every decision, even in the final episode during the Red Sea passage where he tries his hardest to save him.

I liked the exchange between Moses and his wife Siphra. At one point, he tells her he is going to free the Israelites and like Rameses later, she questions what kind of God would take a husband away from his family? It’s interesting because it brought me back to my readings in Hegel, who also critically questioned the fidelity of Abraham as a loner who would leave his fatherland to drag his family into alien lands. Hegel was critical in the context of the German Zeitgeist which celebrated nationalism. Siphra’s question might seem more banal, but it was a thought I found important.

Perhaps what I liked the most was the way Moses was portrayed when having conversations with God. At one point he is seen having a one-way conversation. He appears quite mad, and rightfully so. But it appropriately blurs the line between madman and prophet. Any time we are asked to follow the vision presented to us of the divine by another, we are suspicious in our modern age of science. For all the lunatics who claimed to hear from God, are there some in the group who are more worthy to listen to than others? That’s the question Exodus teases. And I think it does it quite effectively.

As a post-conservative, I especially liked the way the plagues were handled. Would it be supernaturally fantastic, I wondered? And of course, they were not. The Nile turning to blood, for example, was not an entire river, just what was central to the civilization. Even those instances where the downplaying of a miracle was impossible was done mysteriously and without too much fanfare, for example, during the killing of all the firstborn. At the end of it all, you did not necessarily find a God worthy of worship and love, but perhaps fear and obedience.

The creating of the Ten Commandments was great. There was no Charlton Heston standing clenched while a lightning bolt carved in the words of the Decalogue. There was simply a madman once again who fled to a mountaintop where he painstakingly chiseled out words to a stone tablet.

 

What I disliked:

In some instances, while the story is conscious of transitioning too fast from the Egyptian Moses to the Jewish patriot Moses, there is only so much a 2.5 hour movie can do. At times, the dialogue between Moses and Rameses is wooden. You don’t believe Moses really cares about the Israelites (and in fact there is this important part towards the end of the movie where, after declaiming them to God, admits they are his people). So when Moses is speaking with Rameses, you still get the sense he is fighting blindly and without purposes for a people he doesn’t believe in. That’s not the biblical Moses, but  it is this human element that does a much better job.

After Rameses permits the Hebrew exodus, he had a change of heart. This is done without any kind of reflection and felt a bit forced. One moment we see him looking towards the ground. The next he is mounting chariots to chase the Israelites to the sea.

Some of the cast of characters surrounding Rameses were just odd and felt more like Greco-Roman advisors out of time then Egyptians.

Finally, the Israelites themselves were simply just a backdrop. This story was really about Moses’ break with his Egyptian relations and roots. Because of this you never felt any empathy towards the Israelites even though you should have. You never really got to feel the pain of slavery, say like I did in watching the movie Twelve Years a Slave. This is because the people being depicted were largely a rabble with no purpose. Even Ben Kingsley, who is an excellent actor, was diminished to a poorly cast Hebrew rebel leader with whom you could not sympathize or care about.

Some Final Thoughts

A lot of people criticized this movie because of the casting in general, saying that the roles were primarily taken up by white Westerners. From a purely technical point-of-view, I agree this is problematic. Sigourney Weaver was horribly out of place. But on the other hand, Rameses played by Joel Edgerton, at least in my opinion, pulled it off.  On a side note, it puzzles me a bit that Michele Rodriguez (an Hispanic actress known for her role in the Fast and Furious series) comes under fire last month for suggesting that minorities create their own comic book mythologies instead of taking the roles of characters not their own, but when Caucasians are cast in roles as in Exodus not their own, they draw fiery criticism. Double standard? Sure. But I didn’t find it made the movie any less unwatchable than seeing the way Marvel has developed the Nick Fury character in the Avengers movies, changing him from a white male in the comic books for many, many years to an African-American played by  Samuel L. Jackson.

And then there was the problem of taking liberties in the story. The dogmatists came out of the woodwork on this one. One such example, the one that was supposed to get Moses in trouble in the first place was when he killed an Egyptian slave master beating on a Hebrew. This never happens in the movie. Instead, Moses is mistaken for a slave after meeting with a hidden enclave of Hebrews who tell him he is really a Hebrew himself. He responds by murdering two of his Egyptian accusers. But there is no context, except perhaps for Moses to feel what it might be like to suffer discrimination. Yet, the episode does not really effective advance Moses’ transformation as a character.

Nevertheless, speaking as a student of Jewish studies, I find that the transformative re-telling of the Exodus is very much in keeping with the spirit of Rabbinical Judaism. The Rabbis constantly transformed well-known stories in an attempt to draw out the human element. The questions left unanswered such as “what was Moses early life like” all have constitutive answers in the Rabbinic literature. Even in Christianity, the unspoken years of Jesus’ early life are addressed and given shape in some non-canonical works. Still, much more in Judaism than Christianity, the idea of canon is much more malleable. And so reading this from a Jewish perspective, not a Judeo-Christian one, I didn’t have much of a problem with the recreation of the text to answer those existential questions that we’ve all asked when reading and contemplating the Exodus account.

So did I like the movie better than the book? There’s an old Rabbinic statement that says there are 70 faces to Torah. The way I approach the canonical text is different than someone else. One who approaches the movie needs merely to see that this is one director’s interpretation a text that has many interpretations throughout history. And unlike Christianity, I feel there is a call from deep within Judaism to experiment texts. Mission accomplished? Maybe.

March updates

Star Date March 11, 2015….The snow fell hard in Maryland on March 5, Thursday, and as a result, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Meeting of the American Academy of Religion had to consolidate its normally two-day event into a one day event. So on March 6, I presented both of my scheduled papers, rather than over the course of two-days. Attendance was smaller due to the snow, and in one of the sessions the moderator failed to show and didn’t notify anyone, so I had the opportunity to stand in.

The first paper I presented was an argument for a positive and affirming theology in support of homosexual unions using the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I presented a similar paper at last year’s session where I looked at important passages specific on the topic of marriage that Bonhoeffer addressed and then examined the use of his concept of responsible marriage while in conversation with Bernd Wannenwelsch. This new paper focused primarily on three conceptual themes that also support a broader and affirming position on homosexual unions. These were:   the use of de-genderized language in Bonhoeffer’s theological writing, the use and misuse of procreation as an apology for marriage, and the ontological argument for sin as opposed to a deontological one.

My second paper was presented on a shift in the ethical language used to determine candidacy at Yad Vashem’s Gentile Holocaust Memorial. I looked at Dietrich Bonhoeffer once more, whose petition was denied on multiple occasions, to understand what reasons may have been motivating such decisions. It was my argument that this change in ethical language is largely to blame since the principle of pekuach nefesh (saving a life) – in this case a Jewish life was a guiding principle that replaced the ethical groundwork upon which the concept of the ger toshav was built. A second examination looked at how the Germans became the embodiment of evil immediately following Nuremberg, and that any association with them had to be challenged. I ended up moderating this session as well, and the papers were as diverse as they were engaging.

This coming month includes a lot of writing as well, including a very long paper on theodicy in Jewish theology for my independent studies class. More reading and writing for my Hindu Studies class.  And finally, this week I had my thesis proposal accepted. So the next phase of my writing journey begins. I promise to get to my Bonhoeffer manuscript soon as well.

Why is Kelly Gissendaner’s Spiritual Conversion so Important in Her Upcoming Execution and What it Means for the Church

As I sit here waiting to hear news on the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that could spare the life of Kelly Gissendaner, I am thinking about some of the words spoken in the last attempts made by her supporters and lawyers to save her life. Usually, this hinges on the lack of evidence or the credibility of a witness. But this case is different because this person’s life hangs in the balance because of a deep theological issue, one that, though recognized by the court, is hardly the place of the court.

As Ms. Gissendaner waits to be executed, her life depended just hours ago upon whether her lawyers could have convinced the court whether she had a conversion experience or not. It’s quite unique because I don’t recall ever following similar cases where spiritual issues were used as a point of contention in a stay of execution appeal.

I’m also interested in an issue that perhaps no one will think or care about: the efficacy of theology and the reality of doctrine. While prosecutors at this point will focus on justice and supporters of clemency will use theological languages of love and forgiveness, both have already seemed to not pick up on what is already in the rearview mirror: the spiritual lifeblood of the church seems to have already been judged.

No one would doubt that theology is a bizarre and strange place to build an appeal. But perhaps no more bizarre than a system that while based on Judeo-Christian ethics ignores the broader brushstrokes of the theological background out of which those ethics come. So in one article, we hear through Ms. Gissendaner’s bishop  that Kelly was a transformed person, her actions, her receipt of a theological degree, and her genuine attempts to change herself all tell the story of a converted Christian. Somehow this diligence also shows her experience to be more authentic than others of her inmates who made similar attempts, perhaps with less success, and therefore in the defense of her lawyers were not of the same kind as Ms. Gissendaner’s experience.

Yet in her defense’s defense, there is theological precedent for such a claim. After all, Jesus says “by their fruits you know them”, and Kelly’s fruits, at least insofar as all who knew her following her crime, blossomed voluminously in the testimonies of the people she touched. I do not doubt this. The practical spirituality preached by Jesus accords well with the empirical evidence required of courts to make difficult decisions.

On the other hand, we have a different story; this one comes from the prosecution, who rightly I might add, points to Ms. Gissendaner’s baptism in 1996, a year before the commission of the heinous crime. You can listen to that interview here:

http://www.11alive.com/story/news/local/2015/02/27/episcopal-priest-gissenbaner-murder-death-row/24159959/

So as a student of theology, we might ask what is conversion and what is baptism? According to the church and Ms. Gissendaner’s tradition, conversion is baptism. It is a transformative experience one in which the individual receives grace that both purifies and sanctifies. One is supposed to move out of darkness and into light, from ontological wrongness to rightness. The Catholic Catechism declares:

Through Baptism we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God; we become members of Christ, are incorporated into the Church and made sharers in her mission: "Baptism is the sacrament of regeneration through water in the word.

Likewise, the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (Gissendaner’s tradition) describes baptism as “the full initiation by Water and the Holy Spirit into Christ’s Body.”

So those who are asking why Ms. Gissendaner’s conversion is efficient now but was not in 1996 are working under a valid assumption and exposing some of the ways in which we excuse the logic of the doctrine because quite frankly not many of us live up to the expectations that are said to occur in baptism. And that’s the real theological issue here. If the doctrine initiates us into the body of Christ, if we are brought from death to life, and regenerated, then it is not at all unreasonable that one’s life would accord with such a decision.

In 1996, Kelly Gissendaner was an adult who made a decision that was consistent with her conscience at the time.  She was baptized. In 1997, Kelly Gissendaner as an adult made a decision that was consistent with her conscience at the time. She had her husband murdered. While the public at large instinctively recognizes that baptism is only as meaningful as the person who makes it, this is not the position of the Episcopal, Protestant, and Catholic Churches. The issue here really is theological, and more than an indictment of Gissendaner, it is an indictment of theology.

Why Do Humans Die When They See Gods?

In a recent blog, I posted about the comparison between Jesus and Krishna (in the Mahabharata) with regard to the divine power to procure their own deaths. I want to talk a little bit more about some theological/divine parallels that one can find when reading the gospels and the Ramayana.

Towards the end of the Aranya-kanda, a sadhu (ascetic) by the name of Shabari encounters Rama and his brother Lakshmana. It is revealed that Rama is an avatar to Narayana, and Shabari graciously gives him only the best fruit and nuts. After seeing him, she casts off her body and is spirited to a higher spiritual plane of existence.

Likewise, during Jesus’ presentation at the Temple as a young infant, a holy man named Simeon sees the child and proclaims:

Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace,
according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation,
which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,
a light for revelation to the Gentiles
and for glory to your people Israel.    – Luke 2:29-31

Or consider the words of John the Baptist when he first sees Jesus at the river Jordan.

He must increase, and I must decrease. – John 3:30

These words set the wheels in motion to a narrative that culminates in the Baptist’s death.

So far as there is a common theme of dying upon seeing the deity, there is no doubt that the New Testament removes much of the fear and trembling one experience upon seeing YHWH, which also resulted in death. The kinder, more gentler, Jesus does not scare people to death (literally) and while this feature has been diminished in the New Testament, I believe the tension is still there because the writer wants us to know that the implication of Jesus’ divine nature is just as important as that of YHWH who no man or woman can look upon. Certainly during the transfiguration nothing happens, but we should not be so quick to set about finding one-for-one correspondence parallels, especially since we do not demand that level of scrutiny even where the internal narrations of the gospels disagree on the details.

These divine appearance narratives are often termed darshana.

Darshan is a Sanskrit word used to convey a heavenly vision, one granted to those who see the true nature of the divinity in the avatar who often is not revealed except to those who are in his counsel.

We see this in the post-Resurrection appearances of Christ where Jesus tells Peter:

When you were younger, you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you  and lead you where you do not want to go. Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him “Follow me.” (John 21:18,19)

When one says that there is nothing like the Resurrection in ancient Jewish history, or that the belief of bodily resurrection is firmly established as an original Christian thought, people forget that Christianity and its development could hardly be called a faithful conveyor of true-to-detail Jewish theological awareness. Rather, its reinterpretation, as well as a combination of elements from other cultures, for example, the concepts of logos and krasis in Stoicism, fit very nicely into the Jesus as Word-of-God concept and the hypostatic union of the God-man.

Certainly, at the close of the Ramayana, the khishkanda of the monkey god Hanuman and all his warriors are raised from the dead and brought with Rama to a heavenly abode.

So why do people die when they see the deity? One possibly answer is that such instances are suppose to reveal the transcendent difference between human virtue and divine virtue. Christians call it sin. Hindus call it dharma. Skeptics perhaps call it convenient.

 

Does the "Gap Defense" Matter in Assessing the Virtue or Truthfulness of a Religious Document

This blog follows up on a post I made a few days ago. Here, I only want to look at one way to address what I call the "Gap Defense" used by Fundamentalist Christians to defend the superiority of their scriptural heritage. One may pose the question as such:

Does the claim that the gospels were written close to Jesus’ life make them more reliable than sacred writing in traditions that were not close to the life of their central figures?

Of course, one will immediately want to know what the question suggests by "close" or "reliable," for example, but let's pretend we know what they mean as much as Fundamentalists pretend to understand. One apologetic strategy used by Fundamentalists is to point to the fact that the gospels were written very close to the actual time of Jesus, not hundreds of years later. This is supposed to work in proving that time lapse or time gap contributes considerably to the veracity and integrity of the transaction that occurs between an oral tradition and its composition.

I remember reading Evidence that Matters, Josh McDowell’s magnum opus on defending the integrity of Christianity. In making this claim, he added that unlike versions of Homer’s Illiad that appear hundreds of years later, the gospels maintain their integrity. How do we know this? One reason is because we have four versions of Jesus’ life that all agree. What Fundamentalists fail to do next is to tell us what the four gospels should look like, they simply believe that what they look like in relation to one another is reasonable criteria.

For stories occurring 50 to 150 years after the death of their subject, should we expect to see a large margin of factual error, confusion over chronology, and inconsistency or omission of detail?  Never mind the fact, that in a court of law first-person witness testimony often varies (I think about the details concerning the Ferguson shooting of Michael Brown most recently), the criteria of acceptance for the gospels is largely based on an assumption that because there is so much agreement in the stories that the details of those stories don’t matter as much. This is a point that Bart Ehrman constantly makes when debating evangelical scholars. His questions often look something like this:

The gospels are nothing BUT the details they contain. So how do we know what matters? And if the details don’t matter, why does? Folks like Craig Evans, in debating Bart Ehrman, will usually go to a place that looks something like this:

There is a core unit to the story that each gospel faithfully recalls. So while  the details may differ, where they count, there is consistency.

What this means, however, is unclear. The identifiable core (the passion narrative, or to use a more technical term approximate to this idea, the  kerygma) is supposedly NOT simply a mass of details as well. It is something more…something that we can continue to latch onto without too much concern that what we are doing is creating categories of meaning. But what that more is, no one quite knows from where the authority comes to create such a valuation of meaning. All of this makes more sense when we do some comparative thinking.

In Hindu culture, the Ramayana has multiple versions. Among the two most important are Valmiki’s 4-5 BCE and the other Goswami Tulsidas’ 16^th century Ramacharitmanas version. They both agree in many places, i.e., they get the basic structure of the story, plotline, and characters correct. All have Rama chasing after Ravana in search of Sita. All have Hanuman intervening of Rama’s behalf and leaping across the ocean to reach Lanka where he confronts Ravana. Oddly enough, just like the accusations made against Mark, the earliest of the gospels where the original copy has no resurrection account, we see some of the same problem occur in the Ramayana in which the versions do not agree on the first and final chapters and so in some versions Sita is put out and exiled after her rescue and in others Rama takes her back. Hinduism is not interested in soteriological history, but dharma. And so this is about as important to Hindus as the resurrection or lack thereof is important to Christians. Three of the four gospels believe that the resurrection of Jesus is important.

Unlike the gospels which share a range of a few centuries, Ramayana versions occur between two millennia.

The point is it does not seem a particularly unique or strong argument in favor of the truth claims about Christianity’s story that because a shorter amount of time passed between Jesus’ death and the first composition to appear that Christianity’s truth is more secure.  Both the millennia separating  the versions of the Ramayana and the 50 to 150 years separating the gospels show the same compositional deficiencies and editorial flourishes.

Interestingly enough, in terms of dissimilarities between the documents it is recognized by both Christian scholars and Indologists who look at the gospels and Ramayana/Ramacharitmanas that the development gap between their documents lies in the deification of the central figure becoming more important with the latter documents.  From the standpoint of compositional queues we simply do not see much difference between the development of the gospels and certain Hindu scriptures.