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The thought system that evolved out of this book and used by the followers of Abraham is called monotheistic theology. As stated, Christian theology starts from the god portrayed in this bible, a work of the prophets and their entourage, and not from a directly perceived object. However, Christians also claim that all goodness on earth comes from this god of the bible. Human nature is considered by Christians as entirely evil, in contrast to the viewpoint of Hindus. According to Christians, one needs to turn to “faith” to save oneself from this deplorable and terrible condition. In this context, ‘faith’ means a belief in the goodness of the Lord God and Jesus without any evidence. On the basis of this book, Christians believe that all goodness on earth comes from this biblical god. Without him, they say, we are all evil. For this reason, “faith” is good and “rational thought” is bad.
We will now examine what secular (faithless) scientists have to say about the character of the Lord God, which will be a significant factor in our assessment. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins starts his second chapter with these words: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” [17] One who has read the bible dispassionately may find Dawkins strikingly articulate in his expression, evaluating the Lord God using the values of this age.
The New Testament and Jesus
The New Testament, also a collection of books about its protagonist Jesus, was written much later than the first part. The earliest of these books are estimated to have been written by second and third generation Christians in the latter half of the 1st century CE. They are deemed by scholars as records of the preaching of the earliest Christian missionaries. The collection as seen now was authorized in the 4th century CE by Christian leaders of that time to establish a certain common ground among the numerous versions of Christianity that existed at that time.
The first four books of this collection are called canonical gospels and were selected from around 60 such gospels [18] that circulated at that time. The rest of the books comprise the acts of the apostles, who were disciples of Jesus, while spreading Christianity, and the letters or epistles of Paul, a convert from Judaism who never met Jesus in his lifetime. Biblical scholars like Prof. G. A. Wells differentiate the character of the Jesus of the gospels and the Jesus depicted in the Pauline epistles. It is pointless here to go into the details that make up these differences, but suffice to say that all of them together make up the character of Jesus Christ as preached by many Christian professionals today. The gospels describe the extraordinary life of Jesus, while the remaining books build up a thought system from it, but together they make a connection to the thought system of the Old Testament and the Lord God.
According to the gospels, Jesus was born of a virgin and the Lord God of the Old Testament and brought up as the foster son of one Joseph. From the little we know of his biography, he became a preacher among the poor people of Judea, a part of today’s Israel, then a Roman colony. When he was not preaching, Jesus did many miracles, like raising the dead from their graves, enabling blind people to see and exorcising devils that possessed human beings of that time. He also did things that seem trivial and crazy [19], but these things were said to have been prophesied in the Old Testament as marks of the messiah / savior for whom the Jews were waiting. He was prosecuted for blasphemy by the Jews because he called himself “son of god” and found guilty and crucified according to their laws and then buried. Then he is said to have resurrected from his death and escaped from his tomb. Later he appeared to his close followers and after giving many directions and advices for a few days, he disappeared.
According to the epistles attributed to Paul, the Jewish belief in a savior who will come to their rescue gets transformed into a belief in the savior of all mankind. If you ask me from what it is that we are saved, let me remind you and take you back to the Old Testament and the sin of Adam and Eve in eating the fruit of knowledge. This sin, we are told, is never to be forgotten. Paul tells us that Jesus took birth in order to save us from this sin and inherited evil. Though Paul makes an excellent case for a sin overarching the species, there is nothing in the statements of Jesus himself anywhere in the gospels that he was preaching to the whole of humankind.
Actually, there is a contrary evidence that he was exclusively preaching to the Jews. There is a scene in one gospel, Mark chapter 7, when a non-Jewish woman from Syria comes and asks him to exorcise her daughter. Jesus refuses to do her bidding calling non-Jews “dogs”. Only when the woman agrees with Jesus and tells him that even dogs (non-Jews) get leftovers from children (Jews) does he proceed to do her bidding. [20]
This discrepancy in the gospels and Paul’s version will give an idea of the true nature of the books; they vary with each other in many aspects and these discrepancies are not just restricted to the audience Jesus actually had in mind when he preached. Now we will look at the Jesus of today’s Christian theology as well as of modern scientists.
Jesus and the original sin
As mentioned earlier, it was Paul who came up with the idea for the first time as to what the horrible sin [21] (disobedience of Adam) was from which Jesus (the only obedient man) was supposed to have saved us. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, [22] also known as Saint Augustine who lived in the latter half of the 4th and the beginning of the 5th centuries, spent much time deliberating on the sin from which mankind was saved by Jesus. He named it the “original sin” though orthodoxy still calls it “ancestral sin”, [23] because this sin never washes off or is redeemed, and is transmitted from parent to child from the time of Adam and Eve. The only way for humankind to save themselves is to accept Christ as savior by submitting to baptism.
The entire Christian theology rests upon this doctrine of original sin and without it, fails completely as a valid thought system. The claim that Jesus is the exclusive savior of humankind does not stand if there was no original sin. So, we will first examine this sin before we proceed to examine what scientists and scholars say of Jesus.
The “original sin” can be dismissed as humbug from a scientific point of view. Because, if, as Christians say, evil was transmitted from every parent to every child like a genetic disease, it should be found in the genes. The indications are on the contrary. The existence of a universal moral code in the human species beyond religious persuasions, as confirmed by the findings of Marc Hauser, not only speaks against a genetically transmitted evil, but indicates the opposite. This finding is also confirmed by the existence of the notion of goodness even prior to the writing of the Christian bible. The idea of bhoodhdaya (compassion for all beings) among Hindus also confirms the existence of goodness prior to the birth of Jesus Christ. This proves beyond doubt that goodness is a genetic trait of human beings.
There is no valid case for a theological Christ as propounded by Christian orthodoxy. This proposition is simply untrue. What about Jesus Christ the man? What do scholars tell us about Jesus from the evidence of the bible as a fellow man?
The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy was the first to examine Jesus as an ordinary mortal who was also a rebel and stood for all the oppressed people of his time. [24] He found, like Friedrich Nietzsche after him, a marked difference between the Christ of the Christian churches and the Christ of the New Testament. While Tolstoy found Christ a revolutionary, Nietzsche looked upon Christ, in Koenraad Elst’s words, endowed with features that would still endear him to young dreamers. “While Christ’s religion is centered on love and surrender, Paul’s Christianity becomes, in Nietzsche’s analysis, the religion of hatred and revenge,” [25] says Elst.
To quote Elst again: “One might say that Nietzsche’s view of Jesus was very one-sided. The peaceful apostle of love is a popular image of Jesus based on only a few gospel texts: the Sermon on the Mount; ‘when you get slapped, offer the other cheek also’; ‘he who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword’; ‘the lilies of the field don’t toil, yet Solomon in his splendor was not as good-looking as any of them’; ‘do not judge lest you yourself be judged’. These passages are of disputed historicity, while many reliably historical passages show us a very different Christ, short-tempered, defiant, and a Doomsday prophet. The gentle Jesus, who was in Nietzsche’s view the original Jesus whose teaching and example were later deformed by Pauline Christianity, was himself just as much a creation of his second-generation disciples.” [26]
There are many statements in the bible made by Jesus that endow him with love, surrender and compassion. But there are other statements that say exactly the opposite. For example: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the world. No, I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34) “I came to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already kindled!” (Luke 12:49) “Do you suppose that I came to bring peace to the world? No, not peace, but division. From now on a family of five will be divided, three against two and two against three. Fathers will be against their sons, and sons against their fathers; mothers will be against their daughters, and daughters against their mothers; mothers-in-law will be against their daughters-in-law, and daughters-in-law against their mothers-in-law.” (Luke 12:51-53). [27]
Many popular writers and celebrities who supposedly follow the Hindu religion still call Jesus the great teacher of peace, [28] but one can say this only if one is ignorant of the New Testament in all its parts and hasn’t read the history of Christianity. [29]
So, what does this tell us about Jesus? The bible is like a huge jigsaw puzzle, from which one can draw pieces and make your own Christ, but then find that many pieces are still left out unused. Every church creates a Jesus of its own, but there are still pieces left out in the bible for others to make something else. Humanists make a Jesus out of some pieces, but certain pieces are left unused. Anybody familiar with the bible would affirm this. The rigorous consistency that is required for a true thesis is missing, because of opulent data that contradict themselves.
In the aforementioned book, Psychology of Prophetism, Koenraad Elst mentions reports of psychopathologists who examined various statements of Jesus and deduce that he had a psychopathological condition called Paraphrenia, which is included in the category of Paranoia. This is irrelevant here, but it shows there are still more possibilities to create a new personality of Jesus, but some pieces of the jigsaw puzzle would still be left over. Elst tries his best to use up all the pieces by explaining that all the contradictions have been caused by human error. All the good (humane) statements attributed to Jesus are really not his, because they are really not original.
The unoriginality of Jesus’ ‘good’ statements is confirmed by other sources, in particular by Paul N. Tobin in his compelling thesis, The Rejection of Pascal’s Wager – A skeptic’s guide to Christianity [30]. He says in the chapter Ethical Teachings of Jesus: “There were many thinkers, before and after Jesus who extolled teachings similar to Jesus. They include, among others Lao Tzu (6th cent BCE), Mencius (4th cent BCE), Epicurus (342-270 BCE) and Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE). But there is actually a difference between these humanists’ teachings and Jesus’. To them doing good comes spontaneously to the educated because he understands that man is a social animal. But to Jesus one must do good because the reward is great.”
This obsession with reward (after death) is a thread seen throughout the New Testament. [31] This is a stark contrast to the message of nishkama karma (action without expectation of reward) in the Bhagavad-Gita and I am mentioning this because there are Hindu gurus [32] who preach that the message of the Gita and Jesus are the same by randomly picking up a statement or incident involving Jesus and comparing it with a statement of Krishna.
So much for the nature of Jesus as obtained through the New Testament.
Conclusions
As we have seen, the Jesus of theology is untenable as a scientific proposition. One needs to go beyond the boundaries of sense to grasp such a reality. Many Christian theologians advocate the rejection of reason to comprehend this reality and say the ultimate reality is beyond human common sense. Some say all genuine religious experience is completely mystical and that includes Jesus. Some say that many Hindu yogis like Ramakrishna Paramhamsa and Paramhansa Yogananda have perceived Jesus in mystic visions and their experience shows that Jesus is truly divine. They say you can only experience this directly, only by eliminating your intelligence.
Is the reality of ‘faith’ true in a mystical sense? Generally, all paths of yoga are considered to lead you to the direct perception of supreme reality. This applies to jnanayoga as well, though the importance of jnanayoga has been waning because of the little importance we grant to rational thinking in the realm of religion. Whether one is Hindu or Christian or Muslim or Jew, he or she takes for granted that religion means the absence of reason or the suspension of rational thinking. Nothing can be farther from the truth.
Jnanayoga is the branch of study that confirms the Vedic thesis through rational thinking. According to Hindu tradition, one can perceive the ultimate reality through rational thought and this path is called jnanayoga. [33] The ultimate reality, brahman, would be no true reality if it were also not validated by rational thought. There are many ways to attain this reality, but the reality itself should be validated by rational thinking so that it can be considered true. [34]
When one looks at Jesus Christ from the viewpoint of jnanayoga, he falls short of the characteristics of brahman. The character also falls short of the neutral dictionary definition of the capital ‘G’ god as the “Being perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness who is worshipped as creator and ruler of the universe” (Merriam-Webster).
It is notable that Swami Vivekananda warned against the fallibility of mystical experiences. Mystical experiences are no test for verifying reality, because they need not simply be true. [35] If somebody says he has experienced or saw Jesus while meditating, Jesus does not become supreme reality because of that. Mystical experiences are anubhava (experience), but not jnana (knowledge).
In the light of sanatana dharma, Jesus Christ is neither the brahman nor kutashta chaitanya [36] of Hindus, nor a dharma master as some people have been postulating in recent years. On the contrary, it is a concept and symbol that should be rejected not only because it is untrue, [37] but it is dangerous for the sustenance of the human species when it is dominant. Since the rise of Christianity in Rome in the 3rd century CE up to the present time, the history of the world is an illustrated example of what an utterly destructive force Christianity is for the human species as well as for the environment.
Soon after Christianity became an official religion of Rome, the empire fell and the whole of Europe became a battlefield of ignorance, [38] despite the intellectual head start given to the continent by the classical Greek and Roman civilizations. The chief impetus for colonialism was the Christian religion that was unleashed upon continent after continent, sustained by the funds of slave trade and pillage and loot, which were all sanctioned by the church by quoting the bible. The riches of extortion and outright robbery funded the European Renaissance that brought back the humanistic ideas, but these were not enough to stave off the gross ignorance of faith that culminated in the two World Wars of the last century. These wars were exclusively between Christian nations but did not fail to impact the whole world.
This illustration of history was just to demonstrate the untenability of a faith without rational thinking. Faith that is required to be a Christian is an impossible proposition in sanatana dharma and should be rejected by all those who have the welfare of humankind and the whole world as one family in mind. For people who believe in statements like vasudeiva kutumbakam [39] and lokah samastha sukhino bhavanthu,[40] Christianity is an abomination that should be rejected.
There is a view prevalent among some American Hindus that there is no harm in adopting dharma and seeing Jesus Christ as an ishtadeva, provided the “history-centrism” of Jesus Christ is rejected. [41] This is also a fallacy, because by rejecting the historicity of a certain divinity, the proposition does not change its qualitative nature. Specifically, by rejecting the historicity of Jesus Christ, he will neither transform into a phenomenal deva as depicted in the Vedas nor can he be attributed with the intellectual construction of Isvara.
It would be theoretically possible only in one way, and this is to position him as a phenomenal deva in the Hindu sense of the term and then accept him as an ishtadeva. For this, we have to consider the actual phenomenal impacts wrought by Jesus Christ through his followers. By rejecting the historicity of Jesus, the negative historical impacts made by Christianity cannot be wished away.
That is indeed a big problem. Judging the historical impacts made by Jesus Christ’s devout followers during the last 2000 years, the god hasn’t done the human species any favors, but on the contrary has sown and harvested distress and destruction and continues to do so. Phenomenally viewed, Jesus is a fallen deva,[42] an asura to be precise, in the Hindu definition of the word. Therefore, one would be courting certain disaster by accepting Jesus as an ishtadeva, with or without “history-centrism.”
George Thundiparambil; based on the Sita Ram Goel Memorial Lecture delivered at the Global Hindu Conference 2012 at Houston, Texas, on 28 July 2012