Jesus: Buddhist?

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Was Jesus Christ a Buddhist? His teachings seem eerily like those of the Buddha!

Mod: thread title was not descriptive and was shared between two threads. Edited.

I'd suggest they sound even more Hermetic/Neoplatonist. The whole new testament has that flavor and the old testament is loaded with regional astrotheology which I'm sure was a cultural transmission of the Babylonian captivity.

For Jesus and the land of Canaan in general the city of Alexandria, Egypt was a skip down the road and it was philosophically as hot as Athens was 400 years earlier - you do the math. Whether Jesus was actually that or whether it was John the Evangelist and Saul of Tarsis/Paul who were that though it's probably open for debate we don't really know for sure that Jesus necessarily said any of it. Debates still go on today whether Jesus was a Jewish rebel who wanted to throw Rome out of Jerusalem and had his story reformed into a Hellenistic propaganda piece by way of neoplatonism or whether he was perhaps from some esoteric school, such as the Egyptian mysteries or the Jewish Essene sect. The later I think is mostly romanticized and the political games, especially games suggesting obedience to government and 'give to Caesar what is Caesars' suggests it was a the former rather than the later.

John the Evangelist was also said to be a direct student of Philo Judaeus, a 1st century BCE Jewish Platonist, which again makes a great deal of sense when you look at the sayings in the Book of John, especially the introduction.

Buddhists see Jesus as another Buddha. --The one that was killed to be quite frank.

He was a rogue rabbi leading a radical doomsday cult. Said cult became the largest religion in the world.

Jesus was baptized by the Mandaeist preacher and prophet John the Baptist. Jesus would have been a gnostic of some sort, Mandaeism is one of the gnostic religions and he founded another religion that was originally gnostic in nature, Christianity.

He was right though - whether literally at the time or post-hoc when the gospels were written. Jerusalem was destroyed in a raid from 66 to 70 CE that happened, as stated in Luke, before the generation listening to his sermon passed away.

There are definite similarities.

Both even had three temptations. Differing temptations, but both had three.

Gnostics drifted into a more Buddhist flavored type of Christianity than the Orthodox (or maybe it was the Orthodox who strayed from the original more Buddhist flavored teachings of the founder).

The Greek word 'gnosis', the Aramaic word 'manda'and the Sanskrit word 'jñāna' all would be translated as 'knowledge'. (The roots jñā-, γνώ- (gno-) and know are all cognates.)

It's likely that Buddhism is derived from the same common Indo-Iranian belief system that birthed Yazdânism and Zoroastrianism.

Ideas birthed by Zoroastrianism, such as messianism, heaven and hell, and free will clearly influenced thought well outside of the Iranic world - gnostic faiths appear to be influenced by those ideas directly as well as indirectly by absorbing them from other schools of thought that had absorbed them earlier.

It would anchronistic to describe early expressions of ideas in line with gnostic thinking as expressions of Gnosticism, since it was only until more recently that the word 'gnosis' shifted from meaning knowledge or special knowledge into meaning esoteric knowledge. That said, those ideas themselves certainly existed and appear to be the foundation on which Platontic thought, Mandaeism and others were built on. They also influenced the way other faiths developed, likely influencing Second Temple era Judaic thought. (Yes, this is me contradicting my earlier post somewhat, I was using the term gnostic with far less precision in the last post compared to this one.)

Christianity ultimately is built on a mixture of Hellenic thinking (some of which was built on Iranic thinking), Iranic thinking and Judaic thinking (some of which was built on Iranic thinking). Further, Christianity (both of the Orthodox variety and various heretical sects) influenced later religious and philosophical developments in the Middle East.

When trying to pick apart 3000 years of thinking to figure out who influenced who it becomes very difficult to explicitly say 'this lead to this' because so often the ideas get spread out, reinterpreted, borrowed and reborrowed, or sometimes accidentally rearticulated by someone completely ignorant that someone had already expressed the same ideas earlier. (example: Muckers appear like a gnostic revival, but the founder had no familiarity with gnostic Christianity nor any background in theology).

tl;dr - Jesus wasn't a Buddhist and most likely was entirely ignorant of Buddhism. That doesn't mean he wasn't familiar with ideas that Buddhism was built on because those ideas weren't limited to Buddhism and they had spread all over Central and South Asia and South-Eastern Europe.

That goes to what said earlier as well - Hermeticism and Platonism were close enough to check most of the same boxes. Also the Silk Road was open over 100 years previous to Christianity which additionally had ideas cross-pollinating between Asia and the Mediterranean.

Not just the Gnostic offshoots, but the modern mainstream of Christianity, Islam, and even Judaism, borrowed heavily from Iranian Zaroastrianism (a day of judgement, heaven and hell, angels and devils).

The Iranians were descended from the same Aryan tribes who invaded northern India. So there maybe some deep ancestrial connection between the Hindu family of religions (on one hand) and the west eurasian abrahamic religions via Iran.But any family resemblence inherited from that far back would be vague at best.

But the sixth century BC in India there were rebel thinkers trying to reform Hinduism, and rebel against the Brahmin caste. The Jaines were one group, and the another group were the followers of Buddha.

For a brief time India was united around 250 BC by the emperor Ashoka who after conquering India converted to Buddhism. Ashoka sent Buddhist missionaries not only throughout India but also beyond India both east and west. Some of these missionaries started Buddhist communities as far west as Egypt in Egypt's post Alexander, pre Roman, Greek dominated period. Both in time and in place that would put Buddhism to within influencing proximity to the Judea of Christ's time.

I largely agree, but two dissents:

1) I didn't mention Islam or Baha'i or Manichaeism or other religions that came about after Christianity became dominant in the Roman Empire since the topic was Christianity and it's influences, not everything that grew out of the same set of ideas.

2) It's worth noting that Dharmic faiths and the Iranic religions were both practised and spread by Indo-Europeans. Judaism and the other Semitic religions were followed by different peoples, but the history of the Middle East is basically ongoing interaction between Semitic peoples and Indo-European peoples (and later on Turkic peoples as well). Aspects of the Semitic religions influenced Indo-European religious thought. Aspects of the Iranic religions influenced their Semitic neighbours. Iranic ideas influenced Semitic ideas, which further influenced Iranic and eventually Greek ideas, which further influenced Semitic ideas, (ad nauseam) which influenced religions like Christianity and Islam which ultimately both are thorough hybrids. Early Christians (and Mandaeists) might have mostly spoken Aramaic and Muslims Arabic but that doesn't mean those religions are genuinely Semitic in nature. Even modern Judaism is far removed from the religion of Abraham or Noah and even in the Second Temple era it was starting to be more of a hybrid than it had been far in the past (just hop in your time machine and ask Gospel era Samaritans).