Say What?! Jesus was a Buddhist!

Have you ever wondered about the similarities between the Christian and Buddhist faiths? If you have, I am willing to bet that if you have then you may have noticed some striking similarities between the teachings of Buddha and Jesus. Well If you have your not alone. More and more people (regular citizens and scholars alike) are entertaining the possibility that Jesus was in effect a practicing Buddhist or at the very least the his views about the world (views that later shaped the Christian faith) were influenced by Buddhism. To understand how and why this may in fact be the case we must first examine how this influence could have occurred and why it is Jesus who would have been influenced and not the other way around.

The reason that Jesus could have been influenced by the teachings of Buddha and not vice versa is very simple, Jesus lived around 500 years after Buddha did thus it was impossible for Buddha to learn of the teachings of Jesus but it is possible and indeed plausible that Jesus in fact learned of the teachings of Buddha. You may be thinking: "How can there be no record of this in the Bible?" Well there are two very good reasons there is no biblical record of Buddhism influencing Jesus first you must remember that the bible is a book and books get edited and the bible is no different. In fact it is printed on the cover of most bibles "The King James Version" this means it was edited by King James and many things were omitted from the final draft that we use today. The second reason we see no biblical reference to Buddhist influence is a good chunk of the life of Jesus is missing. From age 13-30 there is no written record of Jesus's life. Upon his return however he is obviously a changed and "enlightened" man. Most Christians accept that he went out into the wilderness to search for the truth (just as Sidhartha who would become Buddha did 500 years earlier) during the missing years of his life. This prompts us to ask the questions of: Where exactly did Jesus go? Who did he encounter on his travels? And what did he learn on his journey that changed him so profoundly and where did he learn it from?