Q & A

Q: What is the most authentic document of Jesus’ teaching? The Gospel of Thomas? Are there others you would point to?

The Gospel of Thomas seems to be the most authentic. Certainly the four Gospels of the Bible contain his teachings, but mixed in with untrustworthy elements. Still, they should be read with the understanding that the sugar must be separated from the sand, as Sri Ramakrishna said about all scriptures. [Read The Gospel of Thomas for Awakening on our website or in print.]

The Second Coming of Christ by Yogananda [Available for download on our E-library] is invaluable in understanding Jesus’ teachings, as is his autobiography and the books of his public talks [see our post A Yogi’s Recommended Reading List.]

The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ is a remarkable document that does not claim to be infallible, but is also invaluable in understanding Jesus and the difference between THE Christ and A Christ. [Read online on our website and also The Aquarian Gospel for Awakening, a commentary.

The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ seems to be very much conformed to the idea of the narrators. Still, it is good to look into.

In The Christ of India the quotation from the Bhavishya Mahapurana is short but certainly authentic. There we see what Jesus thought of the religion of his land of birth and his definite adoption of Sanatana Dharma. [Also available in print.]

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Q: You write in a Q&A section that Jesus did no such thing as pay for our sins. If that is the case, why does he say in Mark 10:45 that he came to give his life as a ransom for many? Or even more to the point, in Matthew 26:28 he says “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

One problem is that fact that the “original Greek” texts date from sometime after the beginning of the fourth century and have been made to conform to the theology of the Nicene or Constantinian version of Christianity. Even the Aramaic text was corrupted after this time and the Peshitta text was imposed on the Aramaic-speaking churches. Lamsa’s so-called “original” text is the Peshitta.

In the (Aramaic) Cureton Gospels we have the nearest to the original, but the “translation” published in 1894 is little more than a paraphrase of the King James gospels. One of our monks who was a linguist translated all four into English, but after his death the computer disk on which they were found was damaged by a company we gave it over to for transcription. We do have the gospel of John and Luke and hope to post them on our website in the future. But we cannot be sure there was not some meddling with those texts, though they are much older than the Greek.

From the beginning…

The root of the problem goes right back to just after the departure of Jesus from Israel to return to India. (See The Christ of India on our website.) In the ancient book of Kashmiri history, the Bhavishya Maha Purana, there is the following account of the meeting of a king of Kashmir with Jesus sometime after his return:

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