Jesus: The Missing Years (Warning, one "dirty" word)

In the Bible, we don't get a full biographical picture of the life of Jesus because the gospels are kerygmatic accounts rather than historical (or, to use Frye's other term), descriptive accounts of the life of Jesus. If I remember correctly, we get nothing of Jesus's time on earth from Cana, where he was but a child, until a couple years before his death in his early to mid thirties. There's a theory kicking around that instead of working full time in Joseph's carpentry shop, Jesus may have travelled a bit, spending time in caravans which included Far-Eastern folk. And, so the theory goes, alot of the radical teachings which got him into so much trouble came from sitting around caravan campfires listening to Taoists, Buddhists, and Hindus. While taking this class and flipping through the Tao Te Ching (which is my method of reading it now), I see many of Jesus's ideas appear in this text that predates Christ by many centuries (even by the most conservative estimates). Examples (From the Mair translation of the Ma Wang Tui manuscripts):

The Tao, verse 12:
Treat well those who are good,
Also treat well those who are not good;
thus is goodness attained.
Translated to the Christian:
Love those who love you. Also love those who do not love you.

The Tao Verse 25:
Seek and you shalt receive;
Sin and thou shalt be forgiven.
In the Christian, I think that is repeated almost verbatum.

There are alot more of these parallels. The question as to whether the 'Good News' of Christ was actually a displacement of Eastern philosophy will never be known, of course. Could be that some sentiments are universal in their appeal to humanity. That somewhere, what it is to be human pre-ordains what is good and what is bad, in a moral sort of way. Or it very well could be that Jesus was a Taoist. Doesn't really matter in the end, does it? Regardless of where it came from, the one commandment Christ actually gives, "Love one another as I have loved you," is something that would be wonderful if all people who called themselves Christians actually did it. But alas, it is not so. Sad, really. More people should read the Bible, and less people should listen to dogmatic interpretation of it. Ah well, as my own Polonian maxim states, "You can wish in one hand, and shit in the other, and see which one fills up first."