Every universal cause is divine and every particular one is temporal. The principles of the divine Manifestations of God were, therefore, all-universal and all-inclusive.
(Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá:68)
Each Holy Book shows humanity traveling the same road and covering the same ground, namely, from the beginning to the end of time, called the apocalypse, after which a whole new kind of history will begin. Each Book is a reconstruction of the real shape of historical time and meaning of temporal existence.
As a book the Bible is an unfolding recreation of an archetypal vision of human possibility; a vision which informs, that is puts form into, the human intelligence so that its innate potential may be expressed. It is a vision which informed human intelligence prior to the writing of the Bible and will continue to inform this intelligence should the Bible, or at least the Christian religion, become entirely forgotten. It's the vision of a God-man teaching lesser men how to climb out of the raging sea of material passion into which they have metaphorically fallen and in which they are drowning, scale a forbidding mountain arising in the midst of that sea, maneuver past horrible dragons and monsters which threaten to consume him, and get free of alluring but treacherous sirens and nymphs which tempt him to stop his climb, until he reaches the top where he enters the God-man's golden City of Light and discovers that his entire journey was a scaling of the inner mountain of self, that the journey was his own spiritual development, the goal of which was the recovery of his true self.
The real drama of the epic is entirely psychological, not historical. The validating of the quest of consciousness toward the perfect or mature form of itself is entirely experiential, not experimental. To say the fall is human pride, the sea is human passion, the darkness human ignorance of its real nature, the monsters and sirens the various kind of fears and temptations threatening its advance, the Golden City
The Bible is both a single vision of human possibility and is two testaments of that vision. These are called old and new not just because one came before the other in time, but also because the second is a more developed recreation of the first. But their essence is the same and timeless. Christ and Moses, the two most prominent Visionaries in the Bible, though by no means the only Ones, were energized by the same expanding Vision. The Koran is a later, more complete and unified testament of the same Vision that appeared in the Bible. For the Vision in the Koran begins and ends exactly where the Bible does, namely, the beginning and end of time. Hence it is really a recreation by the single mind of Muhammad of the same vision informing the Bible. This is not to say that He lifted it from the Bible. God revealed the Vision through Him. He was the Vision: the vision of God looking through Muhammad.
The Koran is a more expanded and complete Vision because the generic human mind was, at the time of Muhammad, more developmentally advanced than it was during the time of either Moses or Christ, in large part thanks to Their Revelations. The Vision remains the same, but more of it is revealed to the human consciousness and the human mind grows into it. And this larger and more unified testament called the Koran reveals a more developed view of human power than was and remains possible to the mind remaining within the confines of the traditional Jewish or Christian statements of the Vision.
The Holy Books are not reliable empirical history, though they comprehend it. They do this not by reducing history to the telling of the Sinaic meanderings of some obscure tribes of nomadic ex-slaves, or to the toppling of the Roman edifice from the Christian mole burrowing within, nor by chronicling the rise of some barbarous clans of Arabs to the pinnacle of civilization, and dismissing the rest of humanity as unworthy of attention, except as they interact with these chosen peoples.
The Holy Books comprehend history by revealing the essential meaning of historical events and the real spiritual significance for all people of these events. From a spiritual perspective, the essential events of history are the appearance of the Prophets, the Word of God which periodically becomes flesh and dwells among us, for these bring into human culture's mental activity both a new knowledge and real knowledge renewed. Many are the cultures more advanced in the arts of civilization than is the culture within which the Prophet first appears. But it is His appearance and the renewal of civilization His teachings achieve that promises humanity’s social evolution. His appearance always provokes a crisis of culture and history for that people and their traditions of experience and learning, and the spread of the Message to other cultures provokes the same crisis in those cultures.
These obscure Hebrews, captive Jews, oppressed Christians and pagan Arabs were chosen vehicles of a single, unfolding transcendental message. For the Prophets stand at the center of human history and each One is the center not just for His people, but for His time. His appearance among them makes His people the center of humanity, the materio-cultural source of the spread of the divine Word that influences the entire world. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, for example, that “…the New and Old Testaments propounded throughout all regions the Cause of Christ and were the pulsating power in the body of the human world.” (Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: 223)
The struggle of these different “chosen people” to come to grips with their special status is their hold upon us and not some special virtue of the people themselves. Except for this privilege of having their every mundane act refracted through the prism of their relation with a divinity that walked among them, their daily history is no more or less interesting than that of other people, and studying it gets the mind not a fraction of an inch closer to understanding the spiritual odyssey of humanity through time.
Using the Holy Books as a source book of historical data is also a very tricky affair. One has only to read the Bible’s different sequences of “begats”, or the Gospels varying accounts of the events surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus to understand this point. The Bible as history is often just another slippery myth; the Old Testament God, often a big, bad wolf which the Hebrews and Jews have to propitiate or outfox before He gobbles them up in a fit of rage, metamorphoses into the kindly, loving Father of the New Testament Who benevolently watches over and protects even His sparrows. But as the imaginative rendering of the spiritual odyssey of some remarkable peoples, who represent humankind and its evolving consciousness of divinity, the Holy Books make perfect sense. To perceive the Holy Books as the chronicling of the stages of humankind's evolution from a consciousness swaddled in sensuality to one standing upright in spirituality, a consciousness which at one time can only shiver in dread before a huge, scowling Deity, yet later can shelter under the loving kindness of the Father, is profound historiography.
The Holy Books, then, are not empirical history, or are very bad empirical history. But whatever such history they contain is entirely irrelevant to their purpose. They are really an informing and unfolding Vision, something that creates not just history but the awareness of history because they are the essential collective verbal form of the evolving human mind. History begins with an infusion of divine energy from eternity, and is renewed, or begun again and further developed, with another infusion, setting up cycles and stages of a developmental process—toward what?
The Holy Books articulate the inner structure of history unfolding through time as a progressively developmental sequence of religions and their civilizations toward a teleological finale, which can only be the emergence of that structure itself in full material form within both history and the mind of man, uniting the cultural and the spiritual cycles into one symbol and image. When this unification in consciousness occurs, the latent identity of history and mind will become manifest and man will see history as the Prophets have always done.
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