Who was Jesus?

[vulcanlogician]

I love Emerson. (Are you a fan?)

From one vantage point, the Oversoul can simply be seen as a oneness that exists between everything. Like a tree. We tend to think of a tree as one discrete object. But it isn't. It can be divided into many, many subparts. But these subparts harmonize into a whole that we call a tree. Emerson thought that every separate "part" of the universe harmonized into a single whole like that.

I do like Emerson.  I studied some of his essays.  Emerson's oversoul was mystical - it was something divine that we are a part of.  The oversoul inspires the best aspects of the human spirit.  Adherence to tradition and dogma is the antithesis of real religion, to him.

From Emerson's essay "The Over-Soul"

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character, and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.

The man could write.

Yes. Excellent writer. I just interpret the oversoul as being the universe, really. Maybe its fundamental organizing principle too, but nothing further than that. I mean, maybe Emerson went further than that in his writings (I've only read a few of his essays). But, in the passage you quoted, all I hear is reverence for the universe/nature. A sort of pantheism at most. (It is mystical, though.)