This is Deepak Chopra’s second book on Jesus in less than a year. Is Jesus becoming an obsession for Chopra? So much so, that he couldn’t help writing his own Gospel account of Jesus’ life?

Such attempts to rewrite the Gospel are nothing new. There is a tiresomely long-standing tradition of editing the Bible to get the kind of God we want. It began before the Bible in its entirety—Old and New Testament—was entirely written and put together.  In particular, the Gospels themselves were undertaken as written witnesses against those who were busily trying to reedit the life of Christ to suit their beliefs.

And so, against those who preferred a purely spiritual savior because they thought the physical world was evil and vile, we find Jesus as a real baby wrapped in swaddling rags and sleeping in a feed trough, beaten bloody and nailed to a cross, and eating fish after the resurrection. The simple message: we were with him; he was not a ghost.

Against those who would make him merely a man, Jesus claims “I and the Father are one,” walks on water, and to make sure that he is not taken to be a merely political revolutionary, fires off clear declarations that his kingdom was not of this world.

In short, the Gospels were written, not just to tell who Jesus was, but just as strongly, who he wasn’t. The four Gospels are like the four sides of a fence, keeping out predators who would drag Jesus off and make him a king of any and every fancy and fad, and keeping in believers so that they don’t lose sight of the shepherd and wander away upon the paths of their own imaginations.

Hearing this, we might be tempted to complain, in a typically modern way, that if the four Gospels are four fences then they are certainly wicked constraints, taking away all our beautiful creative freedom to seek the truth unburdened by any boundaries. But that is the exact opposite of the real situation. Jesus Christ is not an idea but a person. Like any real person—whether it is Napoleon or your Cousin Fred—the boundaries of our knowledge are set by who the person actually was. The worst sin of a biographer is to become an autobiographer writing about another person as if he were actually a second self.

And that brings us to Deepak Chopra’s Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment where we find Jesus slowly discovering that he is not a Jew but a Hindu, and one, we hazard a guess, not all that different from Chopra himself. The gist of Chopra’s novel—and it is very novel since it has almost no connection to the Old or New Testament—is that Christianity was hijacked by those who didn’t understand that God was everything and that everything was God. That is, neither the Jews themselves nor Jesus’ immediate followers were Hindu pantheists. Unlike everyone around him, however, Jesus did realize this (in the novel, helped along by a mysterious man living in a shack in the snowy mountains, to whom Jesus is drawn as a Hindu seeker to his guru).

Well, why didn’t he just tell everyone that he was a Hindu rather than cause such confusion? He did, so Chopra would have it, but they just wouldn’t listen. He kept telling them that he was the light and that they were the light because everyone including Jesus, Mary, Judas, and Satan are the light—all are ultimately God because ultimately God is everything. The whole goal of salvation, of enlightenment, is to realize that one’s soul (ātman) is not at all distinct from God (Brahman, the supreme soul). This realization, won through meditation, constitutes enlightenment. The Kingdom of God is within because our soul is God.

But the foolish Jews thought that he was only claiming divinity for himself, and so they had him crucified for blasphemy, and the foolish Christians likewise thought that he was only claiming divinity for himself, and so they worshipped him rather than everything including themselves. Nobody got the real message…that is, until Chopra provided the key “missing Gospel” covering Jesus’ lost years from twelve to thirty.

How to respond to his efforts? One is tempted to write a biography of Chopra wherein (ignoring his evident sincerity, all the historical evidence, his Indian Hindu background, and his own writings) we find that he is not a selfless Hindu mystic but a self-promoting, talk-show hopping atheist riding the latest waves of new-age spirituality all the way to the bank.

That would obviously not be fair to Chopra, just as it is not fair to rewrite the Gospel biography of Jesus to make him something he was not.  There is more at stake here, however, than mere accurate biography. The Bible stands on one very solid point, from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation: God is not the world; He is the creator and redeemer of the world. When this distinction is lost, Christianity is lost in a fusion and confusion of creator and creature, redeemer and redeemed.

The background argument for Chopra’s novel of Jesus “lost years” was provided earlier in 2008, the New York Times bestselling The Third Jesus: the Christ We Cannot Ignore.

It doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to guess that Deepak Chopra thinks that the “first” and “second” Jesus should be jettisoned for a “third Jesus.” The third Jesus—the one who realizes “God-consciousness” just like a good meditative Hindu—wins out over the historical Jesus, the “rabbi who wandered the shores of northern Galilee many centuries ago,” and the unhistorical Jesus, “the abstract theological creation,” the Jesus “who never existed…the Jesus built up over thousands of years by theologians and scholars.”

According to Chopra, Jesus wasn’t a Jewish rabbi, and he wasn’t the Word made flesh, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, the God-made-man Who is the object of Christian worship. The Third Jesus, the real Jesus, is merely a teacher of God-consciousness, no more or less divine than anyone else, except for the fact that he realizes that he and everybody else is divine. And so, when Jesus says “I am God,” Chopra informs us, this “is the simplest statement in the world for someone in God-consciousness.”

Just what is God-consciousness? For Hinduism, it is the realization that nothing, including myself, is distinct. All is God and God is all. Thus, any attempt to make any real distinctions between God and me, or good and evil, must be given up. Of course, such a reinterpretation demands a little Hindu midrash on the Bible. For example, when Jesus warns us “Resist not evil,” he really means that we must resist any notion that there is evil. As regards evil,” Chopra preaches in the name of the Third Jesus, “the new thing you must create is the absence of duality. No more dark versus light. No more fixed boundaries to divide safe from unsafe, God from Satan, self from nonself. As these boundaries fade, nothing remains but one reality, a boundless state known as God.”

It should seem obvious, even from a casual reading of the New Testament, that the writers were not trying to pull up fixed boundaries, but to set them more clearly. They were not pointing to a self-dissolving state of consciousness, but to a person, and it is precisely here that Christianity is at radical odds with the kind of Hinduism Chopra espouses. Hinduism obliterates the reality of personhood, and hence dissolves everything into God and God into everything. Christianity is about the dread and perm anent reality of all personhood forever, both God’s and even more powerfully, our own. There are fixed boundaries between good and evil, and Jesus pounded them down all too clearly in his teachings, death and resurrection.

First, repackage Jesus. Second, lose Christianity.

Though Chopra has many criticisms of Christianity, Nietzsche absolutely hated it.

I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty -- I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.
N. Conclusion. The Antichrist.

What possible expedient could rid the world of Christianity? Both Nietzsche and Chopra start by discarding the Biblical and traditional view of Jesus as God and Savior and replace it with Jesus as enlightened. But is this enough? Nietzsche is more blunt than Chopra in what must be done, pleading for us to kill the Biblical God so we become new gods. But how can we possibly kill the Biblical God? Nietzsche calles for all cultural leaders to write new myths of passionate irrationality showing man transcending himself through spiritual enlightenment to become god. Chopra has dutifully obliged.

Nietzsche, from The Joyful Wisdom, section 125:

But the mad-man pierced them with his glance: "Whither has God gone?"
he cried; "I am going to tell you. We have killed Him--you and I! We all are His murderers. But how have we accomplished this? How have we been able to empty the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe off the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither does the earth now move? Whither do we ourselves move?

"Are we not groping our way in an infinite nothingness? Do we not feel the breath of the empty spaces. Has it not become colder? Is there not night and ever more night? How do we manage to console ourselves, we master-assassins? Who is going to wipe the blood off our hands? Must not we ourselves become gods to make ourselves worthy of such a deed?

Chopra, from Jesus, A Story of Enlightenment:

Yet there’s another Jesus left out of the New Testament- the enlightened Jesus. His absence, in my view, has profoundly crippled the Christian faith, for as unique as Christ is, making him the one and only Son of God leaves the rest of humankind stranded. A huge abyss separated Jesus’s holiness from our ordinariness. Millions of Christians accept this separation, but it doesn’t have to exist. What if Jesus wanted his followers-and us-to reach the same unity with God that he had reached?

Professor Ben Witherington challenges Chopra's interpretation of Jesus

Jesus did not, and does not come to take us to a higher spiritual plane, so that we might better get in touch with the little bit of God that is in us all or our own God-consciousness. Indeed, he seeks to lead us to have a relationship with the God he called Abba who is wholly other, and who urges us to recognize the Creator Creature distinction. We are not God, nor is God inherently in us or a part of our being. The end result of navel gazing is that we may well get more in touch with 'our inner child', but we do not get more in touch wit h the 'outer' God who created the universe and all that is in it. The former sort of spirituality is a form of narcissism, or at its worse, self- worship. The latter form of spirituality reinforces the Creator/creature distinction and leads to worship of the one true God.

Jesus, if you must call him mystical at all, was an apocalyptic seer who had exclusionary visions--- he said things like " All things have been given me by the Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son and to whomever the Son wishes to reveal the Father." (Mt. 11.27). In other words, the mysticism of Jesus has nothing to do with pan-spirituality. It has far more to do with his saying "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father, but by me.

Ben Witherington

Columnist Kelly Boggs points out that “to deconstruct the orthodox Christian understanding of Jesus, Chopra finds it necessary to undermine the credibility of the Gospels.” Then Chopra turns around and bases his argument for a “third Jesus” on those same “unreliable” Gospels.

Christianity Today

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