Question of the week: How do you respond to claims that Jesus was actually a Yogi using kundalini? Or, that before he began his ministry in the land of Israel, he had spent time in India and/or other regions of the Far East being educated and trained there by gurus and ascended masters?
My answer: The gospels of Matthew and Luke in the New Testament both record that Jesus of Nazareth was born and raised in a poor Jewish family. Nevertheless, Jesus and his family went every year to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. Jesus’s poverty, his commitment to Judaism and Jewish holidays, and his faithful adherence to all the requirements of the Old Testament law left him with no desire, capacity, or time to visit India or any other part of the far east or to have contact with Hindu leaders, religious or otherwise.
The gospel accounts reveal that the only mode of transportation used by Jesus was his own two feet, with the exception of his entry on one occasion into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. The only region outside of Israel visited by Jesus was Sidon and Tyre, just west of Galilee.
There is no hint anywhere in the New Testament or in the contemporary extrabiblical historical texts that mention Jesus; namely, the historical books written by the Jewish historian Josephus and the Roman historian Tacitus, that Jesus ever taught or believed in the teachings of Hindu or Far Eastern religious leaders other than those moral teachings that are common to all religions. Jesus’s teachings were always consistent with the Old Testament.
