DID JESUS TEACH REINCARNATION?

8 Copyright 2018, John H. Davidson M.A. (Cantab)

John H. Davidson M.A. (Cantab)

Adapted from The Gospel of Jesus – In Search of His Original Teachings,

John Davidson, 2004.

Available from:
http://www.scienceofthesoul.org/product_p/en–176–0.htm

Broadly speaking, early Christianity seems to have encompassed two main

streams. There were the gnostics or mystics whose main interest was in
their own personal, spiritual development. And there were those who
developed into what we now call the orthodox stream, particularly after
Christianity became the religion of the Roman Emperor Constantine and
was legalized. There is a wealth of explicit documentary evidence that
many amongst the early mystically-minded Christians believed that Jesus
had taught reincarnation.

Reincarnation means that when a body dies, the soul goes on in the company of the mind.
And the mind, in which desires and the impressions of past events are etched in seed
form, brings the soul back into another body for the fulfilment or expression of those
seeds. An understanding of reincarnation is therefore quite incomplete without an
appreciation of its great corollary, the law of cause and effect. Conversely, the law of
cause and effect, when considered as a recompense for deeds and desires, good or bad,
seems deficient and full of inconsistencies if it is not considered along with reincarnation.
Once reincarnation and the law of cause and effect are understood as parts of one picture,
then so much else falls into place.

Now although reincarnation is not unequivocally taught in the New Testament, there is
no doubt that Jesus, Paul and many early Christians held that man has to reap the fruit of
his actions, for the theme of recompense and retribution is present throughout their
teachings. There is an incident related by Luke, for instance, where Jesus is sitting
chatting with a group of disciples when someone raises the subject of Pontius Pilate’s
recent execution of some Galileans (Luke 13:1–3).

Jesus listens, but then he turns the subject around and says that although they may have
seemed to be more guilty than anyone else, that was not in fact the case. He agrees
implicitly that their fate was indeed the result of their past sins, but he adds that
everybody is in the same boat. “Except ye repent”, he says, unless you turn towards God,
you will have to suffer the consequences of your own past sins or karma. He then
reminds them of another incident, where eighteen people had been killed accidentally
when a building collapsed:

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 “Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them,
think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I
tell you, nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish” (Luke
13:4–5).

Again, by presuming that their accidental death was due to past sins, he acknowledges the
principle of payment for sin in physical life. Now it is clear that, in the course of one
lifetime, just recompense is not meted out. The good do not get the best of everything
while the bad suffer. So was Jesus actually alluding to reincarnation?

It is certainly true that much of the terminology of the gospels appears in mystic literature
of the same period in their teaching of reincarnation. Jesus and others, for instance,
describe this world as the “outer darkness” and as a prison for the soul (“thou shalt not
come out thence until thou hast paid the uttermost farthing”). Jesus also speaks of the
souls in this world as the victims of sin (karma), of gaining freedom from sin, and so on.
But if Jesus did teach that souls return in life after life, why is it not clearly stated in the
gospels?

Well, it’s a long story, but at the heart of it is the fact that (as many Christian scholars
have observed) the gospels, as we have them, are a very poor record of what Jesus
actually taught. They are not and never were designed as a definitive statement of his
teachings. With the possible exception of the dialogues and discourses of John, they were
compiled fifty to a hundred years after the death of Jesus by those who were not his direct
disciples and who had their own ideas about things. And they then underwent three or
four hundred years of copying and editing before we have our first, often fragmentary,
copies of them. So anything could – and probably did – happen to the text.

Further, like meditation and spiritual practices, reincarnation was a part of the secret
teachings, not to be divulged to all and sundry (“cast not your pearls before swine”).
Even the great Christian father St Jerome (c.347–420) acknowledged:

The doctrine of transmigration has been secretly taught from ancient times
to small numbers of people, as a traditional truth which was not to be
divulged (Epistola ad Demetriadem).

Although it cannot now be ascertained with certainty whether reincarnation was a part of
Jesus’ ‘mysteries’, the early Christian teacher, Clement of Alexandria (fl.180–200) does
comment that there were many things which Jesus did not entrust to all and sundry:

He (Jesus) did not certainly disclose to the many what did not belong to
the many; but to the few to whom he knew that they belonged, who were
capable of receiving and being moulded according to them. But secret
things are entrusted to speech, not to writing (Miscellanies).

In addition to the many places in the canonical gospels where Jesus speaks of sin and
justice in a way which fits precisely with an understanding of the law of karma, there are
also a few instances which seem to point more specifically to a belief in reincarnation.
Perhaps the most frequently quoted of these passages concern the association of the
prophet Elias (Elijah) with Jesus and John the Baptist:

And his disciples asked him, saying, “Why then say the scribes that Elias
must first come?”

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 And Jesus answered and said unto them, “Elias truly shall first come, and
restore all things. But I say unto you, that Elias is come already, and they
knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed. Likewise
shall also the Son of man suffer of them.” Then the disciples understood
that he spake unto them of John the Baptist (Matthew 17:10–13).

“For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John. And if ye will
receive it (to accept it), this is Elias, which was for to come. He that hath
ears to hear, let him hear” (Matthew 11:13–15).

This indicates that the concept of reincarnation, at least amongst prophets, was not
unfamiliar or unusual to the Jewish people of those times. Indeed, Elias and many of their
mystics were expected to come again, as was later believed of Jesus.

Another passage which is commonly quoted by those seeking evidence that Jesus taught
reincarnation is the story in St John (John 9:1–2) of Jesus and the man born blind:

And as Jesus passed by,

he saw a man which was blind from his birth.
And his disciples asked him, saying,
“Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents,
that he was born blind?”

Taking the story at face value, the disciples clearly presume that the suffering of the blind
man and his parents is due to sin. And since the man was born blind, it seems that they
are thinking of some past existence, for else how could an embryo or a newborn baby
have committed any sin?

Immortality of the Soul

There is a third and fundamental aspect to an understanding of reincarnation and the law
of cause and effect, and that is the immortality of the soul and its pre-existence prior to
birth. Once it is understood that the soul is a particle of the divine, trapped in the
labyrinth and travail of birth and death, it also becomes clear that the soul must possess
all the qualities of the divine, just as a drop resembles an ocean.

Now, the earliest Christianity had no theology to appeal to intellectuals. This was
developed largely during the second to fifth centuries, and the source to which the
intellectual Christian fathers turned was Greek philosophy. It was clear to these early
fathers that Jesus’ teachings had much in common with Greek mysticism. The doctrine of
the Word or Logos, as God’s primary emanation and creative Power was widely extant in
the Greek world. Plato, Pythagoras and others, however, had also taught the immortality
of the soul – and reincarnation – and it is not surprising that some of the early fathers
accepted reincarnation or at least considered the idea as a possibility. It was a prevalent
part of their culture.

The uncertainty concerning such fundamental issues emphasizes that the teachings of
Jesus as found in the four gospels, are incomplete. The great St Augustine (354–430), for
instance, Bishop of Hippo (396–430) in North Africa and one of the most influential of
all the early church fathers, remained in doubt upon this point. In his Confessions,
speaking of his childhood and musing over the problems of a baby being born in sin and

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guilt, he wrote:

Say, Lord to me... say, did my infancy succeed another age of mine that
died before it? Was it that which I spent within my mother’s womb?...
And what before that life again, O God my joy, was I anywhere or in any
body? For this I have none to tell me, neither father nor mother, nor
experience of others, nor mine own memory (Confessions).

His honesty is appealing. Clearly, he did not feel that the gospels were an adequate guide
upon the subject and belief alone he could not trust. But the most famous of all the early
fathers who taught reincarnation as a part of Christian doctrine was the third-century,
Origen, a Christian teacher from Alexandria, steeped in Greek philosophy. Origen
believed in and taught both the immortality of the soul and reincarnation, among the
passages demonstrating this being one quoted by St Jerome in a Letter to Avitus:

The following passage is a convincing proof that he (Origen) holds the

transmigration of souls and annihilation of bodies. “If it can be shown that
an incorporeal and reasonable being (a soul) has life in itself
independently of the body and that it is worse off in the body than out of
it; then beyond a doubt bodies are only of secondary importance and arise
from time to time to meet the varying conditions of reasonable creatures.
Those who require bodies are clothed with them, and contrariwise, when
fallen souls have lifted themselves up to better things, their bodies are
once more annihilated. They are thus ever vanquishing and ever
reappearing” (Letter to Avitus).

And in Origen’s extant writings, we find:

Is it not more in conformity with reason (and I say this now following
Pythagoras, Plato and Empedocles, whom Celsus often mentions) that
there are certain secret (hidden) principles by which each soul that enters a
body does so in accordance with its merits and former character? (Against
Celsus).

And again:

The soul has neither beginning nor end.... Every soul... comes into this
world strengthened by the victories or weakened by the defeats of its
previous life. Its place in the world, as a vessel appointed to honour or
dishonour, is determined by its previous merits or demerits. Its work
(actions) in this world determines its place in the world which is to follow
this (On First Principles).

Origen himself, though controversial in his day, gained wide respect, and influenced the
development of Christian doctrine for at least three centuries. Jerome at one time
considered him to be the “greatest teacher of the Church after the apostles”. But in the
end, Origen’s teachings fell from favour and, in 543 AD, the Byzantine Emperor
Justinian convened a local synod at Constantinople whose purpose was to condemn the
teachings of Origen. This was the official beginning of a process which ended in the
discrediting of Origen’s theology, so far as orthodox Christianity was concerned.

In 553 AD, Justinian convened the Fifth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople,

4 Did Jesus Teach Reincarnation?

ostensibly to bring peace between the Eastern and Western arms of the Church. The
result, however, was a schism between the East and the West which lasted seventy years.
The Council was held very much on Justinian’s terms and Pope Vigilius, although in
Constantinople, refused to attend, for with the exception of six bishops from Africa, all
those present were from the East. Among the items on the agenda were the anathemas
(curses) derived from Justinian’s depositions against Origen and his teachings. The first
was aimed directly at a belief in pre-existence and reincarnation:

If anyone assert the fabulous pre-existence of souls, and shall assert the
monstrous restoration which follows from it: let him be anathema
(Anathemas Against Origen).

Justinian’s original draft was even more explicit:

Whoever thinks that human souls pre-existed... but that satiated with the
vision of God, they had turned to evil, and in this way the divine love in
them had died out and they had therefore... been condemned to
punishment in bodies, shall be anathema (Anathematisms of the Emperor
Justinian Against Origen).

Strangely, however, there is no evidence that the anathemas were ever ratified and on
technical grounds, at least, there is still no objection to a Christian belief in the
pre-existence and immortality of the soul, and in reincarnation, particularly since the
Pope did not attend the meeting. It must be obvious, however, that by the time Jesus’
teachings had become the subject of Imperial edicts, warring bishops and exasperated
Popes, the real understanding and interest in the spirituality and path of love Jesus taught
had long since been submerged and forgotten.

The Gnostics

It is among the gnostic writings where we find the greatest evidence of Jesus’ teaching of
reincarnation, and there is space here only for a few examples. The gnostic Christian
Basilides, for example, who taught in Alexandria around 125–135 AD and claimed to
have received his teaching through a line of apostolic succession, is said to have
published twenty-four volumes of Interpretations of the Gospels. All these have been
lost, but the second-century Christian father, Clement of Alexandria records:

The hypothesis of Basilides says that the soul, having sinned before in
another life, endures punishment in this (Miscellanies).

In fact, Clement’s pupil, Origen, comments that Basilides even credited the apostle Paul
with a belief in transmigration into forms lower than that of man, basing this assertion
upon an interpretation of a passage from Romans:

The apostle (Paul) has said, “I was once alive apart from the law,” at some
time or other. That is (Paul means), before I came into this body, I lived in
the kind of body that is not subject to the law: the body of a domestic
animal or bird (Basilides, in Origen’s Commentary on the Epistle to the
Romans).

Amongst the many other gnostic Christians who taught or believed in reincarnation was

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the well-known Valentinus (fl.140–160 AD) from whom many later gnostic schools were
descended, some still extant in the seventh century. He and his contemporary Marcion
(fl.140–160 AD) were both respected members of the church at Rome for many years,
Valentinus even being considered to fill the post of bishop. The fourth-century
Epiphanius indicated that Valentinus taught reincarnation, together with the little known
Colarbasus, though whether his comment included Marcion as well is ambiguous:

(Marcion) believes that the same soul is in men and animals. This futile
conjecture is made by many misguided sects. Valentinus and Colarbasus,
and all gnostics and Manichaeans, claim that there is a reincarnation of
souls, and that there are transmigrations of the soul of (spiritually)
ignorant persons – as they themselves call them.... They say that the soul
returns and is reembodied in each of the animals until it recognizes (the
truth), and is thus cleansed and set free, and departs to the heavens
(Epiphanius, Panarion).

Epiphanius and others may have derided the gnostics leaders, but other early Christians,
though they disagreed with them on many points, afforded them considerable respect.
The more broad-minded Clement of Alexandria, for example, highlights Basilides,
Valentinus and Marcion as outstanding personalities of the previous generation.

The early third-century father, Hippolytus, also writes of the Naassenes, a group of
gnostic Christians who appear to have been his contemporaries. They, too, believed in the
gnostic path and seem to have taught reincarnation as the means by which the soul is
trapped in matter. In his Refutation of All Heresies, Hippolytus quotes from a Naassene
hymn in which the soul is described as suffering the ills of birth and death until Jesus is
sent as a Saviour to release them:

Wherefore, surrounded with a nimble (variable) form,

with care o’erpowered, it (the soul) succumbs to (birth and) death.
Now holding sway, it sees the light,
anon, cast into piteous plight, it weeps.
Now it weeps,
now thrills with joy;
And as it wails, it hears its doom (judgment)
now hears its doom, now dies....
Wandering haplessly,
it treads the labyrinth of ills (rebirth).

But Jesus said, “Father behold,

a strife of ills across the earth
makes (man) to wander from thy Breath (Spirit).
He seeks to shun the bitter Chaos,
but knows not how to flee.

“For this reason, O Father, send me.

Bearing seals (of release), I will descend,
though all the aeons (inner heavens) I will travel;
All mysteries I will reveal
and show the forms of gods (to those I save).
The secrets of the holy Path
called Gnosis will I impart.”

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Another gnostic text, the Apocalypse of Paul, tells an imaginary, revelational story of an
ascent through the inner heavens, the central character being Paul. In the fourth heaven,
he witnesses the judgment of a soul who has recently left this world, the “land of the
dead”, The soul is quite unaware of the sins it had been committing, and only when three
witnesses are brought forward to testify against it, does it realize the truth of what they
say. The story continues:

When the soul heard these things,

it gazed downward in sorrow.
And then it gazed upward.
It was cast down.
The soul that had been cast down went
to a body which had been prepared for it.
And behold its witnesses were finished.

The incident is similar to one described by Jesus in the gnostic treatise known as the
Pistis Sophia. At one place, the soul is brought before the ‘ruler’ in charge of rebirth (a
‘she’). The soul is then handed over to her “receivers” or helpers and is

cast... into a body which is worthy of the sins which it has committed. And
verily I say to you that she does not release that soul from the changes of
the body before it has completed its last cycle, according to its due.

This passage, of course, echoes the words St Matthew, demonstrating once more the
meaning these early Christians gave to this saying of Jesus.

Amongst the most intriguing mystic or gnostic literature of the early Christian period is
the Manichaean, some of it clearly stemming from the time of the Iranian mystic Mani
(216–277 AD) himself or even earlier. Teaching the perennial mystic or gnostic path,
Mani taught that the soul remains lost in the realm of birth and death until such time as it
meets a Saviour who comes from God. He also taught that Buddha, Zarathushtra and
Jesus had all been Saviours in their own times, but that a living being required a living
teacher or Saviour to guide them, not one who had passed away. Among the Manichaean
psalms, for instance, we read:

Protect me in my corporeal existence, Jesus.

Oh Lord, save my soul from this birth-death
full of love is your throne, bright....

And expressing the distress of a soul trapped incarnate in this world, another Manichaean
poet pleads:

Who will release me from all the pits and prisons,

in which are gathered lusts that are not pleasing?
Who will take me over the flood of the tossing sea –
the zone of conflict in which there is no rest?
Who will save me from the jaws of all the beasts
who destroy and terrify one another without pity?...
Who will lead me beyond rebirths, and free me from them all –
and from all the waves, in which there is no rest?

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 I weep for my soul, saying: may I be saved from this,
and from the terror of the beasts
who devour one another!

The bodies of men, and of birds of the air,

of fish of the sea, and four-footed creatures
and of all insects –
Who will take me beyond these and save me from them all,
so that I shall not turn
and fall into the perdition of those hells?
So that I shall not pass through defilement in them,
nor return in rebirth.

Here there is no doubt that the poet is describing reincarnation into the bodies of animals,
birds and other species as falling into “pits”, “prisons” and “hells” where creatures hunt,
kill and devour others. Some people may think that this is an overstatement and the poet
is certainly trying to attract the attention of the reader by use of explicit language. But
many other mystics have also spoken in similar terms of the state of souls in this world.
Out of compassion, they are trying to awaken us from a deep slumber. But such is the
state of madness, drunkenness, forgetfulness or spiritual ignorance that the majority of
souls here are quite unaware of their plight.

Soon after the departure of Mani and his appointed successors, his teachings, like those of
Jesus, became the focus of a new religion, and the Christians treated the Manichaeans
with great enmity and hostility. Nevertheless, they survived until late into the Middle
Ages, only being finally dispersed during the thirteenth century. The collective name
given to these medieval gnostics was the Cathars, meaning the ‘pure ones’ and in the
twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the movement “spread so rapidly and resisted so
stubbornly the sternest efforts of suppression that at one time it may be fairly said to have
threatened the permanent existence of Christianity itself” (Henry Lea, The History of the
Inquisition in the Middle Ages).

Indeed, few people realize that what was later formalized as the Inquisition was begun by
Pope Innocent III (1160–1216) with the express purpose of eradicating them – by force.
So well-respected were the Cathars of the Languedoc area of France and so beloved and
trusted were they for their industry, morality and general sweetness, that they were
dubbed “les bonnes hommes”, the good men. Large numbers of people in Toulouse,
Beziers and other cities were of this faith. Pope Innocent, however, realizing that they
posed a threat to the Catholic Church, summoned the nobles of Europe to a crusade, the
first ever waged by Christians against Christians. The Cathars’ rich lands and property
were to be the prize and for all those who took part the Pope generously proclaimed
complete remission of all sins, not only of the past but of any future time as well.
Moreover, as a bonus, all debts owed by the crusaders to Jewish moneylenders were to be
cancelled.

First blood was drawn at the massacre of Beziers on July 22nd 1209. When Abbot
Arnaud-Amaury, the commander of the crusade, was asked how they should distinguish
the ‘heretics’ from the faithful, he replied, “Slay all, God will know his own.” And six or
seven thousand people were massacred in the church of St Madeleine alone, probably one
of the greatest slaughters of innocent people Europe had seen for centuries.

Surely someone at that time must have recalled the words of Jesus as he spoke to his

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disciples towards the end of his days, warning them of the difficult times ahead and the
extremes of conduct that would be shown by religious zealots and prejudiced rulers:

Yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you

will think that he doeth God service.
And these things will they do unto you,
because they have not known the Father, nor me.
John 16:2–3

At that time, Jesus was referring to the Jews and Romans. In later centuries, it was
Christians themselves who behaved that way.

The wars against the Albigensians, with their inquisitional courts and intermittent periods
of peace, continued for a further forty-six years until the surrender of Queribus, in 1255.
But the ‘success’ of this means of discovering, suppressing and extirpating ‘heresy’
proved so appealing to the Popes and catholic clergy that the Inquisition was formally
founded in 1232, to carry on the work, a malevolent organization which continued for six
centuries until its formal dissolution in 1820.

Reincarnation, as a Christian belief, was forced underground. Only the most daring of
philosophers, writers and theologians ever voiced it in public. Not until the second half of
the nineteenth century did it begin to surface once again. Indeed, this ‘lost chord’ of
Jesus’ teachings is still only slowly being rediscovered.

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