Introduction

Before you react to any of this material it is important that you update your knowledge of the New Testament. Along these lines we'll try to bring you up to the standard of scholarly research of the last 150 years or so.

As far as Jesus, here is what some of the eminent scholars tell us:

Rudolf Bultmann: "The character of Jesus, the clear picture of his personality and life, have faded beyond recognition."

"I do indeed think that we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either, are moreover fragmentary and often legendary..."

Ernst Käsemann: "One is overwhelmed by how little (on the accounts of Jesus in the New Testament) can be called authentic... the historical figure of Jesus is only traceable in a few words of the Sermon on the Mount, the conflict with the Pharisees, a number of parables and some further narratives."

Günther Bornekamm: "The attempt to reconstruct an original draft of the Gospel according to Mark is a hopeless undertaking..."

While the present state of New Testament research offers a far more optimistic view--especially with the development of modern New Testament scholarship in the US--experts in general have gradually come to believe that no more than 15 percent of the words of Jesus in the New Testament can actually be attributed to Him.

Further, it is now widely agreed that the New Testament was not written by eyewitnesses, but rather it gradually evolved, reflecting the views of various Christian communities represented from the Gospel of Mark on, written around 70 AD.

The latest Gospel of John (AD 125), with the exception of a few sentences--due to its exaggerated Christological and Gnostic tendencies-- is now widely seen as what Bultmann called a 'Tendenz Roman' (i.e. tendentious literature).

It is accepted that Matthew and Luke, written shortly after Mark (c. AD 80-85), both drew on Mark as far as the plot is concerned.

Further, as both contain virtually identical instructional material not included in Mark, it is assumed that both authors drew upon a common source, logia, labeled since by scholars as Q (from the German word Quelle meaning 'source'), either written or oral sayings of Jesus, which might have been in circulation around the time of the composition of the Synoptic Gospels (i.e., those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke).

This assumption in its most basic form is called the 'two sources theory,' expressing that Matthew and Luke drew both on Mark as far as the plot, and on Q as far as the instructional material.

This theory gained considerable strength with the emergence of the Gospel of Thomas (Nag Hammadi Codex, discovered in Egypt, 1945), which indeed turned out to be a Gospel of Jesus' sayings--the existence of the genre of a gospel of sayings thus being demonstrated.

None of the Gospels were written in Israel; all of them reflect the understanding of the evolving Christian communities in the various geographical locations they represent.

Hence at the heart of the argument is the idea that the Gospels we have all known, loved, eagerly recited and reposed our faith in--from the manger in Bethlehem to the death at Golgotha and beyond to the resurrection and ascent to heaven--rather than representing the Jesus of History are actually proclamations of the Jesus of Faith, i.e. what Christian communities outside Israel had in due course, and in any case after AD 70, come to believe about Jesus.

By now it is quite certain that neither Jesus nor his disciples had any conception of him being the awaited Messiah, the Christ, God incarnate, the second person of the Trinity, or even of salvation coming to mankind through his sacrifice at Calvary.

Even the Last Supper clearly emerges initially from Paul's letters:

For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me. In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord (1 Corinthians 11:23-27 ).

What Paul said he received here might very well not be what those received who physically associated with Jesus, such as Peter, John and the rest of his disciples. However, Paul's authority--entirely based on his experience on the road to Damascus (Acts 9.3)--prevailed.

And so his last supper plus a whole host of theological concepts which were subsequently reiterated by the Gospel authors, from Mark on. It has been the Christian take on Jesus since.

This leaves us to conclude that the immediate disciples and followers of Jesus were not Christians.

Paul's followers were.

With much of Christianity's theological concepts thus being questioned--Soteriology (Jesus as the suffering savior) as much as Christology (Jesus as the divine second person of the Trinity)--Christianity is facing a major doctrinal crisis.

And an incredible chance and opportunity for revival as well, provided it can free itself from its theological constructs, which--since the days of Paul--have been superimposed and grafted on to the teachings of the Jesus of history.

The amount of energy and sincere work invested by New Testament scholars in their quest to discover the historical Jesus is impressive, reaching from Hermann Samuel Reimarus 1694-1768 into our modern times.

Comparing favorably with our own conclusion, we arrived from a different camp: the ancient bhakti tradition of India, with a very different set of tools:

Guru - what has been heard from disciplic succession, the line of highly realized teachers coming to us through the ages, from the time of Sri Krishna on.

Shastra - evidence gathered from the authoritative body of Vedic literature.

and Sangha - the association of devotees.

As far as Guru: our spiritual master His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada not only exemplified the conduct of a highly realized soul in his own life, he also discussed on countless occasions the subject of Jesus.

Shastra: Vedic scripture gives an enormous amount of information regarding the state of mind of someone immersed in transcendence, which makes the life of Jesus--even after 2000 years, and given the small amount of information we have--quite transparent.

Sangha: associating with devotees on a daily basis, experiencing the glories and frailties of human life plus facing similar problems and opposition in context of a similar unenlightened outer environment has enhanced our understanding of what it must have been like living inside a revolutionary spiritual movement, two thousand years ago.

Practicing spiritual life under the guidance of the pure devotee and in the association of his followers has undoubtedly helped to understand:

That Jesus loves Krishna.

And that Krishna loves Jesus too.