[Steve]

While I’m sure that profound truths have been passed down in the world’s scriptures, should we not acknowledge the numerous contradictions, inconsistencies, and sometimes altered translations over the centuries exist? Exactly how much is factual? 

For example, in a letter to a British newspaper, a reader aptly points out that: “We don’t have His sermons in the original Aramaic, so must rely on varying, often conflicting, translations via the Koine Greek gospels. Indeed, the use of parables by Jesus was a deliberate unclarity that puzzled the disciples (Matthew 13:10–14). 

Much blood has been spilled through the ages ever since, arguing over the precise meaning of His far from ‘clear and simple’ message. How does the sentence: ‘Think not that I am come to send peace on Earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword’ (Matthew 10:34) make any clear sense? 

Nonetheless, if some of the Biblical references to Jesus are more than misleading, such as the following, they seem to support his ‘out-of-this world’ provenance: 

• The visit to Mary by Gabriel, the “angel” (derived from aggelos , Greek for messenger, transliterated as angelos ), foretelling the “immaculate conception”; 
  
• An angel announcing the birth of the Christ, followed by the “heavenly host” of angels which afterwards departed “into heaven (i.e the sky). 
  
• The “star” reported by the wise men “which they had seen at its rising” and “went ahead of them until it stopped above the place where the child lay”; 
  
• Jesus’s comment to a group of Jews: “You belong to this world below, I to the world above. Your home is in this world, mine is not”; 
  
• The so-called “resurrection” witnessed by the apostles when “as they watched, he was lifted up, and a cloud removed him from their sight and as they were gazing intently into the sky, all at once there stood beside them two men in white who said . . . ‘This Jesus, who has been taken away from you up to heaven, will come in the same way as you have seen him go’”; 
  
• Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus “when suddenly about midday a great light flashed from the sky all around me, and I fell to the ground” and Jesus spoke to him. Though unable to hear Jesus’s voice, Paul’s terrified fellow travelers also saw the brilliant light, which left Paul temporarily blinded. 
  

Other possible alien factors to be taken into consideration in this context are Jesus’s evidently telepathic ability, in addition to his healing and mastery of teleportation. In one of his two books on Christ, theologian Holger Kersten provides compelling evidence that Jesus lived in India following his “resuscitation” (as the original Aramaic word implies), dying there in old age and buried in Srinagar, the capital of Jammu and Kashmir. His tomb still exists in Kashmir, and he is said to be revered there to this day. 

For die-hard Christians who dismiss the possibility, they should ponder on the fact that the New Testament has only one sentence (in Luke) about Jesus’s years from the age of thirteen to thirty. Suppose Jesus had later reincarnated and returned again to Earth “in the same way as you have seen him go”: It is doubtful that such a revelation would be welcomed, or even believed, by the Christian hierarchy.