Did Jesus and his followers believe in reincarnation?

[John Human]

If the quotation below is accurate, then Jesus Christ and his immediate followers lived in a culture where reincarnation was taken for granted. If so, is there any reason to doubt that reincarnation was part of the worldview of the earliest Hebrew Christians?

Reincarnation in the Old Testament
http://adishakti.org/_/reincarnation_in ... tament.htm

...Flavius Josephus, born 37 C.E., died after 93 C.E., is the most well know Jewish historian. He was a Pharisee, born Joseph ben Matthias who served as a commander in Galilee in the Jewish revolt against Rome in 66 C.E. His Jewish Antiquities, written about 93 C.E., describes the history of the Jews from the Creation onward with a particularly full account of the Maccabees and the dynasty of Herod. Reincarnation runs through his works like salt through a salt shaker. He talks of rebirth in such a matter-of-fact way that one must assume it was an accepted way of thinking which was so common at the time that it did not merit any further explanation. ... [snip]

There are three learned Jewish philosophers appearing just before or at the time of Christ who taught the doctrine of reincarnation. They were Philo Judaeus, aka Philo of Alexandria, C. 20 B.C.E.- C. 50 C.E., who was the greatest Jewish philosopher and theologian of the Greco-Roman period whose writings have survived; the Jewish sage Hillel, the great Chaldean teacher who was the leading Pharisee in Jerusalem during the late 1st century B.C.E. and early years of the present era; and the great Jewish sage Jehoshuah ben Pandira. Today these three men are household names in Judaism and garner enormous respect from all orthodox Jews regardless of sect. They are prominent fixtures in Jewish religious history and they all taught the doctrine of reincarnation.

[John Human]

Jesus was influenced by Judaism.

PART 2 of my reply

The Kabbalah has deep roots in Jewish culture, with matter-of-fact references to reincarnation:

https://www.chabad.org/kabbalah/article ... er-341.htm

At first, Moses was Abel, who was the son of Adam. Later, he reincarnated into Seth, then Noah...[/b]

And here is a different example, referring to a noted Talmudic scholar:

Reincarnation In Judaism
https://www.near-death.com/reincarnatio ... daism.html

In the Talmud, "gilgul neshamot" (i.e., reincarnation) is constantly mentioned. The term literally means "the judgment of the revolutions of the souls." Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel (1604-1657), one of the most revered Rabbis in Israel, states in his book entitled Nishmat Hayyim:

"The belief or the doctrine of the transmigration of souls is a firm and infallible dogma accepted by the whole assemblage of our church with one accord, so that there is none to be found who would dare to deny it... Indeed, there is a great number of sages in Israel who hold firm to this doctrine so that they made it a dogma, a fundamental point of our religion. We are therefore in duty bound to obey and to accept this dogma with acclamation... as the truth of it has been incontestably demonstrated by the Zohar, and all books of the Kabalists." (Nishmat Hayyim)

And then there was Hillel Lichtenstein (1814–1891), a Yiddish-speaking rabbi and pioneer of ultra-Orthodoxy:

http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article ... ein_Hillel

In his own self-perception and in the views of those near him, he was a reincarnation of the prophet Jeremiah.

p.s. I figured out the "glitch in the system": If I make a post that includes the "url" markup, that caused the post to "blank out," as in post #8 of this thread.

[William]

There are all sorts of beliefs regarding what happens to the individual after this life. I have not come across anything which outright negates any other beliefs to do with what happens to the individual after this life. I do not see why reincarnation can't have its place in all of that.

From what I can gather in my own studies on the subject, not everyone gets to choose - or chooses to reincarnate, as there are other options available and it all depends upon the stage the Individuate Spirit is at as to how that pans out...

[John Human]

The Greeks and Romans had views on reincarnation. Hadrian writes about his soul passing on after his death into someone else. Pythagoras is associated with the transmigration of souls into animals.

Yes indeed. In addition, the final chapter of Plato's Republic presents without embracing the idea of reincarnation.

In Roman culture, the tale of the Golden Ass is an allegory on reincarnation, with a magician trying and failing to transform himself into a bird, making an ass of himself (so to speak), and the ass then goes through a procession of different owners (representing different lifetimes), until finally finding salvation in the cult of Isis.

So early Christianity jumped from a culture (Hebrew) where reincarnation was a fixture of thought into another culture (Greco-Roman) where reincarnation was a fixture of thought. Is there any evidence of reincarnation in the Gospels?

Evidence for Reincarnation in the Bible
http://www.markmason.net/ch16ex1.htm

A number of the key Biblical passages supporting reincarnation have already been quoted, during the discussion of the concept, but there is more of this evidence to consider. The most well known is a series of passages which establish that John the Baptist was a reincarnation of Elijah:

"See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the LORD you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come," says the LORD Almighty. (Malachi 3:1)

"See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before that great and dreadful day of the LORD comes." (Malachi 4:5)

But the angel said to him "do not be afraid, Zechariah; your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to give him the name John…And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah…to make ready a people prepared for the Lord." (Luke 1:13,17)

Then three times, that we know of, Jesus assured his disciples that John the Baptist really was Elijah returned:

"But I tell you, Elijah has come, and they have done to him everything they wished, just as it is written about him."
(Mark 9:13)

"For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John. And if you are willing to accept it, he is the Elijah who was to come." (Matt 11:13-14)

"But I tell you, Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him…" Then the disciples understood that he was talking to them about John the Baptist.
(Matt 17:12-13)

And it's not as if Elijah just came down from heaven and appeared as a herald for Jesus: his spirit and power manifested in a little baby, born in the normal way - just how reincarnation says souls return. Some Christians say this only shows John the Baptist was a prophet like Elijah, with a similar spirit and power. They are contradicting Jesus, however, who quite clearly, in the above passages, says John the Baptist is Elijah, and is not just like him.

[John Human]

I've presented several times my analysis that the "Virgin Birth" was one of three interlocking doctrines that "Jesus never said" and that become meaningless without the other two ("original sin" and Jesus's atonement on the cross for our sins). If these three doctrines are indeed later fabricated additions to the Jesus story, what of the claim (made elsewhere in the gospels) that Jesus was the "son of God"?

Here is a way (for those inclined to go down such a path) to acknowledge that Jesus was recognized as "the son of God" without buying into the Virgin Birth:

1. As implied by Paul, Jesus was the reincarnation of Adam, the "first man" who was "begotten" by God. That was mentioned earlier on this thread: viewtopic.php?p=959871#959871

2. The sin of Adam, as recounted in Genesis, was disobedience motivated by lust. We "participate" in this sin at the moment of our conception, with parental lust permeating the fusing of the two gametes (sperm and egg) into a zygote.

3. Jesus had to live as a blameless prophet and then atone on the cross for his past-life sin to "set things right" for the descendants of Adam, with the later doctrinal innovations allowing his message to be universalized in Greco-Roman culture.

4. The baptism of Jesus was a necessary act of repentance and absolution. The recognition of Jesus as the "son of God" at his baptism by John the Baptist was a recognition of the cleansed and renewed Adam.

Please understand that I'm not insisting on any of the above, except for the belief among some of Jesus's contemporaries that Jesus was the reincarnation of Adam. My thought here is that some (and perhaps many) of the stories in the Bible should be understood in a different way from how they are usually presented these days.

[John Human]

I've presented several times my analysis that the "Virgin Birth" was one of three interlocking doctrines that "Jesus never said" and that become meaningless without the other two ("original sin" and Jesus's atonement on the cross for our sins). If these three doctrines are indeed later fabricated additions to the Jesus story, what of the claim (made elsewhere in the gospels) that Jesus was the "son of God"?

[snip]

Please understand that I'm not insisting on any of the above, except for the belief among some of Jesus's contemporaries that Jesus was the reincarnation of Adam. My thought here is that some (and perhaps many) of the stories in the Bible should be understood in a different way from how they are usually presented these days.

i'm rather surprised that no one has seen fit to question or explore the ramifications of any of the above. Maybe it's taking a while to sink in...

In addition to the evidence that orthodox Jews for millenia (including Jesus) believed in reincarnation, there is a growing body of scientific case studies (around three dozen) involving past-life memories of young children that lead to positive identification of a particular deceased individual as the person being remembered.

The best-known of these studies is the case of James Leininger, as I mentioned earlier, in post #36 on the "Debate with a Scientist" thread at viewtopic.php?t=35419&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=30

As explained in the case study, written by Dr. Jim B. Tucker, at https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-stu ... 000331.pdf:

James Leininger is the son of Bruce and Andrea Leininger, a Protestant couple in Louisiana in the United States. Beginning at the age of two, he made statements and demonstrated behaviors that suggested that he remembered the life of an American pilot killed during World War II, a young man who has now been identified as one James M. Huston, Jr. The case has garnered significant attention... [snip] This report includes a more thorough review of the documentation of James's statements and behaviors that was made before the pilot Huston was identified, which is critical in assessing the evidence of a past-life connection that the case provides.

I'd like to suggest that the widespread belief in reincarnation in the ancient Mediterranean world (including in Hebrew culture) is a reflection of ancient awareness of an actual fact of human existence that got edited out of our cultural awareness as primitive Christianity evolved into settled Catholic dogma as the dominant religion of the Roman Empire.

In other words, to re-capture the way of thinking of the original Christians, we have to include reincarnation as part of the mix, and we need to open our minds to the possibility that it's more than just a belief.