Buddhism, Christianity, and what Jesus taught
by Frank Walmsley

 

Do not think I am spinning yarns:
Get up and prove things otherwise!
All ecclesiastical history
Is a mishmash of error and coercion.

 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

Introduction:

Christianity is what is called a “hitching post religion,” to illustrate: When the horse was the main means of transportation you would find hitching posts everywhere. This is where horses were tied up when their riders would dismount. However with the advent of the automobile the horse slowly became an obsolete means of transportation but for a while the hitching posts remained. Hence the case with mainstream Christianity; the churches remain but they are rapidly loosing their followers as people gravitate to “new religions.” Unfortunately the “new religion” of North America is money and consumerism. The new temples are the “temples of consumerism” i.e. stores and shopping malls and the emphasis is now unfortunately on buying more “stuff.”

As Buddhists we know these goals are the lowest of the Triple World , that of desire or the World of Hunger and as such ephemeral at best. Fortunately deep down inside people feel the emptiness and yearn for something more. Ultimately that “something more” is Nam Myoho Renge Kyo.  

Buddhism is noted for its ability to embrace or incorporate other theologies and cosmologies. Shakyamuni incorporated Hindu cosmology into Buddhism. Nichiren adopted Hachiman (a Japanese deity) and inscribed it on the Gohonzon. Why do we have to slag Christianity by calling it "depraved" when most people really don't have a clue what it really is all about? Why can't we draw parallels between the two and plant the seed of doubt about what people have come to believe? Is this not a more skillful means? I've seen many cases of culturally embracing someone while doctrinally refuting with great respect for the person, if not for his/her delusions. 

Although I don’t have a complete version of all the Goshos, from my reading I don’t recall the Daishonin trashing Shinto. If anything he treated it with skillful means……… benign neglect.

It is imperative that you understand that I am not supporting any form of the Christian dogma in this paper. I share many other people’s belief that Jesus was at best a Bodhisattva of the provisional doctrines.  I will amply prove in the following pages that there is a very good argument for this hypothesis

 

Research Modality:

Three Proofs: Theoretical, Documentary and Actual

Several years ago I began working on a rebuttal of Christianity and recently decided to revisit it with the goal of producing some thoughts on how we could better promote growth in our membership in Canada. Perhaps these thoughts could also pertain to our neighbours to the south as we share many similarities in culture and language.

The irony is that modern Christians are about as close to the truth about their religion as the Pure Land Sect is to True Buddhism. In researching this paper I have done considerable investigation into the theoretical and documentary aspects of Christianity. The sad fact is that with the possible exception of the Christian Mystics, and some elements of Gnosticism, Christians don't understand what Jesus really taught. Jesus represents a very real archetype in the western psyche and that fact cannot be denied even if you have the most rudimentary understanding of psychology.

There is an old saying in Physics that provides the most “elegant” explanation of the historical rise of the Christian Church that states,  “If you keep your data base short enough, it will fit your theory.”  What is the significance of this statement?

Now by database we mean the facts i.e. Documentary and Actual Proof. The theory we are addressing is that promulgated by the mainstream Christian churches. Their problem is that their database is very short, as this paper will amply show.

It is imperative to expose some of the many myths surrounding the Christian Religion and through this process perhaps plant a “seed of doubt” in the minds of our Christian majority in the hope that they will consider our school of Buddhism.

The significance is twofold:

1) It compromises the credibility of the mainstream Christian Church.  
2) It is a more inclusive approach to interest people in Buddhism.

 

Historical Evidence: Theoretical and Documentary Proof

"The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus - The Five Gospels" was written by The Fellows of the Jesus Seminar, a group of 74 mostly Ph.D. scholars and theologians headed by Robert W. Funk, a Guggenheim Fellow and Senior Fullbright Scholar.  Roy W. Hoover a Weyerhauser Professor of Biblical Literature and professor of religion at Whitman College is the co-author.  After examining the Gospels extensively they concluded, "no more than 20 percent of the sayings attributed to Jesus were uttered by him."

So as you can see the “data base  for the Christian Church is very short at best.

It is important to note that the study indicates “Five Gospels”. For those familiar with the King James Version of the Bible, there are only 4 four Gospels; Mathew, Mark, Luke and John. The study by the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar uses an additional gospel by Thomas that has shed light on the true teachings of Jesus and will become increasingly important as this paper progresses.

The Coptic text of the Gospel of Thomas was discovered in December of 1945 in a sealed jar that was found in the desert in Egypt near the modern city of Nag Hammadi. In it were found many Gnostic teachings and the Gospel of Thomas, which is found as the second tractate, or document of Codex II. These teachings had been banned by the Christian church and declared heretical ("to be damned in the inextricable shackles of anathema forever"). This condemnation was certainly effective, because no other complete copy of this Gospel has survived. This is consistent with the Christian Church’s revisionist efforts throughout the last 2,000 years.

“It was in 367 AD that Archbishop Athanasius of Alexandria sent out an edict to establish the canonical books of the New Testament, and to condemn all heretical teachings and apocryphal books.” Thirty Essays on the Gospel of Thomas by H.R. Ross

Because of this particular edict the volumes containing the Gospel of Thomas were hidden in the desert thus escaping subsequent revisions by the Christian Church that followed for literally hundreds of years.

If someone takes the time to examine the Gospel of Thomas they will find much that is Buddhist in nature. What you will not find is reference to eternal damnation, the crucifixion, the resurrection, a God named Jesus, and all the other trappings of standard Christian dogma. It does not describe any miracles; there is no attribution of greatness to God, nor of his acting in judgment; neither does Jesus have any judgmental role nor does he forgive sins; Jesus makes no claim to be the Son of God or even the Son of Man. Jesus' message was one of compassion not the Old Testament message of "an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth" found in Judaism.

Some quotations from The Gospel of Thomas that echo Buddhism are as follows:

1) The Gospel of Thomas, login 77 states: “Cleave the wood, I am there; lift up a stone, and you shall see me there.”

2) The Oxyrhncus Greek version of he Gospel of Thomas reads: “There is nothing buried that will not rise up again.”

3) The Gospel of Thomas “does not refer to belief or faith; (in the Christian Church sense) it does not describe any miracles; there is no attribution of greatness to God, nor of his acting in judgment; neither does Jesus have any judgmental role nor forgive sins; Jesus makes no claim to be the son of God …….there is no mention of the passion of Jesus and the resurrection of Christ……..free of apocalyptic concepts…. Or a last judgment……..it leaves no place for a mediating priesthood and would divest them of their power.” Hugh MacGregor Ross; Thirty Essays on the Gospel of Thomas.

“Some scholars have suggested that if the names were changed, the ‘living Buddha’ appropriately could say what the Gospel of Thomas attributes to the living Jesus” American Religious Scholar Elaine Pagels

“When the Catholic Jesuits came to Japan in the 16th century to convert “heathens” to Christianity, they were horrified to discover that other Christians had obviously been there already and won over the population. They thought that the Amitabha cult was a variant of Protestantism that they so hated.” The Original Jesus by Dr. Elmar Gruber. 

 

The Gnostics:

Gnosticism has generally been discounted and downright persecuted by the Christian Church despite the fact that the true teachings of Jesus are much closer to Gnosticism than to mainstream Christianity. There are many parallels between aspects of Gnosticism and Buddhism that indicate an earlier Buddhist influence.

The Gnostics, although dualists, did believe that the attainment of knowledge or Logos was the key to “salvation that emphasized the mystical awakening of the self, the God within… Everything we seek is already in our presence, and not outside our self.” And “ Unlike the canonical gospels, that of Thomas spares us the crucifixion, makes the resurrection unnecessary, and does not present us with a God named Jesus. No dogma could be founded upon this sequence of apothegms.” Professor Harold Bloom from The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus.

“What begins to make us free is the gnosis of who we were, when we were “in the light.” When we were in the light, then we stood at the beginning, immovable, fully human, and so also divine. To know who we were, is to be known as we now wish to be known. We came in to being before coming into being; we already were, and so were never created.” Professor Harold Bloom commenting on the Gospel of Thomas.

Compare that to a quote from the Gosho Collation of the Layers of the Various Teachings of All the Buddhas: “mind just as it is, is light.” The Buddha Writing of Nichiren Daishonin translated by Martin Bradley

There is a growing body of evidence by certain scholars that the basis of the true teachings of Jesus is indeed based on Buddhism. This is what Jesus taught. Consider the following quote from the Gospel of Thomas:

Jesus said, “If your leaders say… ‘ Look the kingdom is in heaven,’ then the birds of heaven will precede you. If they say ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you.”

Again this is very Buddhist in its thought.

Joseph Campbell, the American scholar and historian, is perhaps best known as the inspiration for George Lucas's "Star Wars."  This series of movies has elements of provisional Buddhism contained in it. In commenting on  Saint Thomas:

"His followers said to him 'When will the kingdom come?' It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, ‘Look here it is,' or 'Look, there it is.' Rather, the father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it."

Joseph Campbell comments "Sheer Buddhism."

Campbell brought up a Roman Catholic, has very little use for standard Christian dogma. In his video series Transformations of Myth Through Time (Program #8-9) he examines many parallels between what he calls "true Christianity" and Buddhism. This series is an excellent provisional Buddhist primer and can be rented at some specialty video outlets that specialize in educational videos. I highly recommend it.

The series traces the historical roots of Buddhism from the Ayrans who entered India from the North West between 1500 and 1000BCE introducing the Hindu caste system, and the earliest Hindu scriptures such as the Rig Vedas, which comprises hymns to the deities (devas) of their pantheon.

In the video he recounts an amusing encounter between Alexander the Great and Indian Holy men (siddhas) as early as 327 BCE. He also emphasizes that the well-known Buddhist King Ashoka sent missionaries to Egypt, Cyprus and Macedonia (Greece) in 350 BCE.

It is a well-known historical fact that two centuries after Pythagorus Alexander the Great reached India. Alexander was very liberal for his time having been a student of Aristotle he was interested in local customs and religious thought.

Perhaps the best example of this spread of the Buddhist Dharma to the West is a group of two books written by Dr. Elmar Gruber and Holger Kersten.

Kersten's book Jesus Lived in India offers ample food for thought that Jesus’ teachings were heavily influenced by Buddhism and offers a well documented “data base” that Jesus did survive the crucifixion and escaped to India where he is buried. If you examine the Christian Church’s story of the resurrection from a Buddhist perspective the only way that Jesus could have appeared to his disciples after the crucifixion was to have survived his ordeal on the cross.  As you may recall Jesus did not appear as a ghost, vision or mass hallucination but in his corporeal human form (in the flesh.) This where Thomas got his name “Doubting Thomas” because be skeptic he wanted actual proof that it was indeed Jesus and not a ghost. The book does much to debunk standard Christian dogma and presents ample documentary proof to support his case.

The Original Jesus, The Buddhist Sources of Christianity, by Dr. Gruber flatly states in the preface, "Jesus was not a Christian. He was a Buddhist."

I would recommend these books. "The Original Jesus, The Buddhist Sources of Christianity" and Kersten's book “Jesus Lived in India” if you are interested in the story of Jesus that is not found in standard Christian Church dogma you may be able to find these books in the library.

“In the Acts of Thomas one of the first episodes is that Jesus, it is implied having survived his crucifixion and wanted Thomas to take the message to the East. Thomas protested, so Jesus sold him as a slave to a trader” Thirty Essays on the Gospel of Thomas by H.R. Ross

It is a historical fact that Saint Thomas did indeed travel to India spent more than 20 years there and established a thriving Christian community. He was later murdered by Brahmins on the East coast near the city of Madras and his teachings were eventually absorbed into the Hindu pantheon and cosmology.

Portuguese Christians destroyed the Thomas Churches in 1498 when Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and seized the spice trade from India . The Indian Christians were seen as “heretics” due to their belief in reincarnation and astrology and all the copies of the Acts of Saint Thomas were burnt in the subsequent Inquisition. The Churches of Saint Thomas in the interior and on the East coast of India were spared due to their isolation. So as early as 20 AD there was a definite exchange of religious ideas between the East and the West.

“We can find some similarities between Christianity and some sects of provisional Buddhism. The Jodo sect, founded by Honen, and the Jodo Shin sect, founded by Shinran teach that it is impossible for humans to extinguish their earthly desires and to achieve the happiness they yearn for……………These faiths rely solely upon others for salvation.”:
April, 2002 - Lecture in Praise of Nichiren Daishonin

Jodo is provisional Buddhism at its worst and also reflects elements of mainstream Church Christianity. This is not what Jesus taught.

Consider the following quote from the Gospel of Thomas: Jesus said, “If your leaders say       ‘ Look the kingdom is in heaven,’ then the birds of heaven will precede you. If they say ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you.” This is very Buddhist in its thought.

Allan Watts a former Christian Minister and Zen adept perhaps put it best when he states:

 “….. I know I am God (a Buddha) in disguise. That’s is very difficult thing to say in Western culture, but it’s very easy to say in India, because there everybody knows it’s true. Jesus knew this but couldn’t possibly say it in his culture without being accused of blasphemy, which is what happened, and they killed him for it. Christians never understood him. They said, ‘Sure Jesus is God (a Buddha) but nobody else is.’ And that strangled his teachings at birth”.

 

Reincarnation in Christian Thought:

Christians are always startled when asked if they are aware that reincarnation was once a Christian teaching. This is an undeniable historical fact. Therefore if you want to really get them thinking this is a good place to start.

Plato’s concept of transmigration was stated at the end of his Republic “ namely that souls proceed to Hades or the Isles of the Blessed in accordance with merits. Once they have either enjoyed the benefits or reaped the punishments that accrued during earthly life, they return once again to physical bodies” Quincy Howe Jr. Reincarnation for the Christian.

Alfred Lord Whitehead (1861-1947) Professor of Philosophy at Harvard once stated, “All Western Philosophy are but footnotes to Plato.”

This is indeed a very bold statement and hardly to be taken too seriously. However you must realize that Western philosophical and religious thought has been greatly influenced by Platonic and Neoplatonic thought. Plato had adopted reincarnation/transmigration or what the West calls “Metempsychosis” from Pythagoras.

“Platonic and other influences had already been at work even in the half-Hellenised Judaism into which Jesus was born. When it was carried by Paul and others into the Gentile world and interpreted, as inevitably it had to be, in terms of the fashionable philosophies of the day, the influence of Platonic and, later, of Neoplatonic ideas was such as cannot be ignored.” Reincarnation as a Christian Hope:  Hugh MacGregor Ross  

These Platonic influences stretch throughout the following centuries and are found in later philosophers such as Hegel and Schopenhauer. Parts of Emanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason are Buddhist in nature and the culmination of his system “Transcendental Idealism” which Schopenhaur championed is very close to the “Consciousness Only” school of Buddhism. In the West this is prevalent in the Idealism schools of Kant, Hegel, Berkley, and most importantly Schopenhaur. There is no space here to bring out these similarities but they should at least be noted as they had a considerable influence on Western thought if not Christian dogma. There are many other Buddhist influences in Christianity to name a few; The Christian Trinity and Rosary Beads.

 

Origon’s Theology:

You have to understand that the theology behind the four Gospels that make up the foundation of the Christian church was pretty “thin gruel” at best. It was left to subsequent leaders to “beef it up” with at least some semblance of what we would call theoretical proof if it was to stand any chance of competing with the other religions and philosophies of the day. The following is more information than you need but I feel it important that we as knowledgeable Buddhist know our background and facts.

Origon (185-254 AD) was a Greek and a philosopher (a Christian Platonist) and “he was beyond doubt the greatest biblical scholar as well as the most original philosophical mind of his age.  

Origon “who was by far the most remarkable genius, with the possible exception of Augestine, among the Christian Fathers, whose writings have commanded a greater authority in the Church than any other literature than the Bible itself.” Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation: Ian Stevenson, M.D.  

Origon was “filling in the gaps with Platonic philosophy that he knew from his education in Alexandria. He chose to read the Bible allegorically rather than literally and this is a very dicey affair to say the least, he was painstakingly cautious, and it took the most subtle thinkers of the church three hundred years to find fault with what he had created.” Quincy HoweJr. Reincarnation for the Christian.

The importance of Origon is that his validation of reincarnation was widely adopted for over 300 years by the mainstream Christian Church until the Second Council of Constantinople (the Fifth Ecumenical Council of the Church) 553 CE where it was stricken as a Christian teaching. There are several theories why this was implemented. One being that the Church wanted the heavy punishment of “eternal damnation” to keep the believers in line another that it was a political struggle between the Roman Emperor Justinian and Pope Vigilus.

Again, it is always interesting to note the reaction of Christians when you point out to them that the seemingly Buddhist concept of reincarnation/transmigration was once part of the churches teachings especially when you have the historical facts to support it.

The doctrine of purgatory (purging is the root word) was developed in the Middle Ages that briefly stated that souls have the option of going to heaven, hell or purgatory where they would purge their sins (negative Karma.) This is a form of reincarnation.

“On the basis of contemporary Biblical scholarship a plausible case can be made that Jesus and John the Baptist accepted reincarnation, having learned it from the Essences.” Quincy Howe Jr. Reincarnation for the Christian.

 

The Essenes (Gnosticism)

It is a strange thing that Jesus is given the title “Jesus of Nathareth” when he was supposedly born in Bethlehem. There is however an explanation for this that is important to this papers hypothesis. That it is a mistranslation. The correct translation of Act22:8 should read, “I am Jesus the Nazarene.”

The significance of this is the fact that the Essenes were also called Nazarenes.  John the Baptist was also an Essene.

The Essenes are a fascinating Jewish sect founded two centuries before the time of Jesus among the Jews in Alexandria and Palestine. As noted earlier Alexander the Great had conquered India and had later founded the city of Alexandria and a great university at the mouth of the Nile River in Egypt. It had been important to him, as a student of Aristotle, to bring back with him the art and literature of conquered territories including Buddhist monks and Hindu yogis.

According to Aristoxenus, who was writing during the time of Alexander the Great, the philosopher Socrates (469-399 BC) had met travelers from Indian in Athens Greece.

Essenes were very much like a Hinnayana sect of Buddhism in their lifestyle and certain belief structures indicating they were directly influenced by Buddhist missionaries from India. Points of similarity are briefly as follows:

1) “Perhaps the greatest positive quality of Gnosticism was its emphasis on Gnosis. Gnosis means the knowing, at the center of one’s being and far beyond the level of the mind, of spiritual Truth. It is a conscious awareness of the ultimate spiritual knowledge of which a man or woman is capable” Hugh MacGregor Ross: Thirty Essays on the Gospel of Thomas.

2)  This attainment is a path the seeker follows. He or she starts without that awareness, and comes to a type of spiritual attainment.  

3)  The transmission of this Gnosis is a living experience from one person to another.

4)  Gnostics forsake the material world and lived a life of austerity, celibacy, and asceticism away from the material world.

This Gnostic Church in the early centuries had a rather large following and became a real threat to the growing Christian Churches who branding heretical began a series of persecutions to destroy it and its teachings.

It is a historical fact that there was a flourishing trade between Babylon and India as early as 538 BCE and this trade reached a new dimension as the 5th Century BCE progressed as Asian goods became available in ancient Greece especially Athens. This was an exchange not only of goods but also more importantly to our study, of culture. This is the historic epoch immediately following Shakyamunis' death and his instructions to spread the Buddhist Dharma.

Indeed it is said that such important Greek philosophers such as Thales, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Pythagorus and many others are thought to have visited the East, perhaps a good explanation why there are elements of the Upanishads found in Plato (427-347 BCE)

Some brief examples would be:

Heraclitus (550-480 BCE) “Everything is in flux.”

Parmenides 515-445 BCE) declared the whole of the sensuous or phenomenal world to be an illusion.

Xenophanes (570-475 BCE) declared that man had the potential to be above all the gods “who has attained the highest wisdom and possesses an all-seeing eye.”

Democritus (460-339 BCE) “From nothing will come nothing. Nothing that is can be destroyed.”

Pythagorus (570-480 BCE) “Pythagorus can only have taken over this teaching  (reincarnation) from the Indians” Leopold von Schroeder.

Polyhistor (first century AD) wrote of Pythagoras “having discussions with Indian Brahmins who taught him their insights into the essence of mind and body.”

It is a well-known historical fact that two centuries after Pythagorus Alexander the Great reached India. Alexander was very liberal for his time having been a student of Aristotle he was interested in local customs and religious thought.

 

Paul’s Church and its Teachings:

"Christianity is the religion founded by Paul, which replaces Jesus’ Gospel with a Gospel about Jesus - a religion that should be called Paulinism. This Paulinism is a misinterpretation and falsification of Jesus’ real teachings - a fact that has been recognized by modern theological research: All the beautiful aspects of Christianity are linked with Jesus, all the unbeautiful with Paul." Historian W. Nestle.

Paul’s life is nothing short of amazing, for rarely has someone managed to get so much so wrong in such a short period of time and never before was it possible for so many people to share so many bad ideas all at once that would have repercussions lasting millenium. The best a person can hope for when he is dead wrong is that he runs into a brick wall quickly….. before he has a chance to build up speed. Unfortunatly for Christianity this was not the case when it came to Paul.

As you research the Christian Church the inconsistancies go on and on. The “data base” gets shorter and shorter until we come to the writings of Paul’s Epistles that are older than the four Gospels and form a group of works that are in sheer  number of pages in the Bible almost as large as the four Gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John together.

Modern research has concluded that “many of the Epistles (letters from Paul found in the bible) later attributed to Paul are forgeries or were patched together from a few genuine fragments. The Epistles to Timothy, Titus and Hebrews are thought to be entirely spurious. ………….The religious teachings presented in Paul’s Epistles is fundamentally different from what research has recognized as being the authentic sayings of Jesus.” Dr. Elmar Gruber  

Even Goethe doubted that Jesus had established the Christian religion and in his opinion it was done by his diciples such as Paul and modern textual criticism has revealed additions that “do not accord with an author’s style, period, circumstances or thinking, thus showing them to be misrepresentations by the Church”. Dr. Elmar Gruber

It was not until the end of the second century that the four Gospels that form the foundation of the bible were “canonized” (officially recognized.) The verification of the authenticity of these four core Gospels is at the very best very problematic in that they were composed between 50 and 100 years after the crusifiction of Jesus…..some two to three generations had passed before the first written accounts of his works. The Gospel according to John builds on the first three Gospels however its author was certainly not John as a simple fisherman could not possibly have authored a work with such a phiosophical  rendering in a language he did not know namely Greek.

It is a well known historical fact that the oldest writings of the New Testament “took on their final shape, as we know it today, in the fourth century, after many theologically determined changes.” The Original Jesus. Dr. Elmar Gruber

The reason I empasize the previous quote is the Christian Church, as opposed to the teachings of Jesus is based on the teachings of Paul and as as others have stated should be called “Paulinism.” What is the significance of this? If we take a long hard look at who this Paul really was and what he taught you can see how far the Church has strayed from what were basically very Provisional Buddhist teachings by the original Jesus. These strange deviations can be pointed out to “Christians” we come in contact with to plant the aforementioned “seed of doubt” about what people really believe to be the truth.  

Paul came from a rich family and acquired Roman his father bought him Roman citizenship. He was brought up in the Pharisaic tradition and he received his education in the Greek tradition of philosophy and literature. About the age of twenty he went to Jeruselum to study theology and became a strict believer, narrow minded and ever faithful to the laws of Judaism. This can be demonstrated by the fact that he even applied for permission to persecute the early Christians outside the city of Jerusalem. This was orchestrated to curry favour with the Jewish religious hierarchy.

The famous “experience” before the gates of Damascus led him to covert to Christianity. This hallucination or “vision” of Jesus has been attributed by some scholrs as either a phychotic episode or an epileptic seizure. An article appearing in the UK Financial Times reports on the continuing major research which links religious beliefs and visions with neurological processes. Authored by Dr. Raj Persaud, consultant psychiatrist to the Maudsley Hospital in London, England, the report notes "discoveries in modern neurology that establish a link between religion and particular brain areas," and the possibility that biologists may have even discovered "the location of god." Scientists, historians and philosophers have long debated the existence of a "god module" in the human brain that may account for religious visions, feelings of ecstasy and related phenomenon. Epilepsy seems to play a role in some of these experiences, and Persaud notes that a particular form of the illness involving the brain's temporal lobes seems to be related to "distinctive religious fervor."

Jeffrey Saver and John Rabin from the UCLA Neurological Research Center argue that substantial numbers of founders of religions, prophets and other religious figures, display symptoms which suggest they suffered from epilepsy," observed Dr. Persaud. Mohammad, Joan of Arc and the Apostle St. Paul are cited.

Paul often complained of a “thorn in his side” that has been attributed to the above or perhaps homophobic tendencies. He prayed for relief from his afflictions to no avail. So much for actual proof in his life.

Others feel that “perhaps Paul was simply fascinated by the possibility of becoming the spiritual leader of the religious mass movement then coming into existence.” As the saying goes “power corrupts.” Whatever his motives, underlying and overt, he often refers to “his church and his teachings.”

The following will give you an idea of what some well-established religious authorities think of “Paul’s Church”.

“No matter how deeply this teaching may have become established among Christian, the real Jesus knew nothing about it” Theologian Eduard Grimm

”Christianity is the religion founded by Paul, which replaces Jesus’ Gospel with a Gospel about Jesus” Religious Historian Wilhelm Nestle

“A religion that rather should be called Paulinism. This Paulinism is a misinterpretation and falsification of Jesus’ real teaching – a fact that has been recognized by modern theological research. All the beautiful aspects of Christianity are linked with Jesus, all the unbeautiful with Paul” The Original Jesus by Dr. Elmar Gruber

If you really look at the big picture Christianity has done much more harm than good. The suppression of Gnosticism, the crusades, the Inquisitions, witch-hunts, religious wars with protestant against Catholics, the secretarian violence that continues today in the Middle East is an offshoot of this. The American Economic incursions into the Middle East’s energy reserves is nothing short of a Holy Crusade by Christian values that now favour consumption over religion.

Another important paper on the Judeo Christian religion was written by Carl Jung and it is called “Answer to Job.” When this important psychological study was published back in the 1950’s it caused a storm of controversy and no end of trouble for Jung. I consider Jung the greatest psychologist the west ever produced and his greatness stems from his introduction of Eastern psychology into Western thought. In this paper Jung does a psychological profile of  “God” and it isn’t flattering to say the least. A must read for all followers of Judeo-Christianity. Classical Judeo Christianity is clearly a delusion. It represents the worst form of dualism and an outright denial of dependent origination.

Why has Church Christianity been so successful or as Alex Dolgorukii calls his most excellent treatise Why did Christianity “Win.”   A few quotes below will ask questions and give you some answers.

“Now, we must surely ask ourselves, if Christianity is really so terrible, why and how did it supplant and suppress, so easily, the religions which preceded it? Why did Christianity 'win' over the religions which preceded it?"

“This was a question which haunted me for years. It is only quite recently and after a really large amount of historical research, both on my own part, and on the part of many others, whose research and conclusions assisted me in finally understanding why such a clearly inferior metaphysical philosophy so easily replaced others which were not simply very much more benign and beneficial to humankind, but which were, clearly and immensely, both intellectually and spiritually superior to it.

“The primary problem was that this was a "war" which was apparent only to the Christians. The pre-Christian inhabitants of the classical world weren't at all aware that their metaphysical and existential philosophies were in a "to the death" conflict with a belief structure which was exactly the opposite of their own. The pre-Christian "Pagans" of the classical world were remarkably open and tolerant of the religious beliefs of others.

“Christianity, was then, and it still is, and it always will be, fiercely, indeed murderously, intolerant of any dissent at all! Except for its manifestation in Judaism, which in fact, had itself, been viewed for centuries by many of the inhabitants of the classical world with great contempt, and with much rueful amusement, for precisely that quality of fierce intolerance, this kind of fierce bigotry was an entirely unusual thing in the classical milieu.”

Mr. Dolgorukii’ calls Christianity “A perfect religion for an ant hill.” I would encourage you to read Dolgorukii’s complete dissertation and attach the web link to his complete article:
http://www.parascience.org/BKTWO-10.htm

I hope this would give you at least a thumbnail sketch of the difference between the Christian Church and the teachings of Jesus and the overwhelming evidence of Buddhism in these teachings.

This whole dissertation could be easily expanded into a whole book as many have been written that cover certain aspects of this paper. I for one don’t have the time or capability and I very much doubt most people have the interest. If you have made it this far I must commend you for your tenacity and patience.