The Handbook / EAS
Karma, reincarnation and many paths.
The religions do share much moral wisdom, and Christians should honor that. But they give contradictory answers to the most basic questions: Is ultimate reality personal or impersonal? Is there one God, many, or none? Is our problem sin or ignorance? Is salvation by grace or by effort? Did Jesus die and rise? These cannot all be true. Saying they all lead to the same place quietly overrules what each religion actually teaches. Jesus made a unique claim, and it deserves to be examined on its own terms.
Karma takes moral consequences seriously, and so does the Bible: we really do reap what we sow. But karma, by itself, has no room for forgiveness, and it leaves us carrying a debt we can never fully pay. Grace is not a loophole that ignores justice. At the cross, God himself bears the penalty of sin, so justice is satisfied and mercy is free. Grace is fairer than it looks and kinder than karma can be.
The Bible teaches that each person lives once, dies once, and then faces judgment, and that our future hope is the resurrection of the body, not a return in another body. Jesus never taught reincarnation, and when he linked John the Baptist to Elijah he meant that John came 'in the spirit and power of Elijah', as the angel had said. Early Christian writers explicitly rejected transmigration. Reincarnation and resurrection are two different answers to death, and Christianity stakes everything on resurrection.
This view rightly senses that we were made for God and that the spiritual life is more than rules. But the Bible teaches that God is the Creator, distinct from his creation, not the sum of all things or our hidden true self. If everything is God, then good and evil, love and cruelty, are equally divine, and there is no one to love us or to forgive us. The Christian hope is better: not discovering that we are God, but being united to God who made us, through Christ.
The 'lost years' story rests mainly on Nicolas Notovitch's 1894 book about a supposed Tibetan Life of Saint Issa. Within two years, the scholar Max Müller and Professor J. Archibald Douglas, who visited the monastery, found that the head lama denied Notovitch's visit and the manuscript. No such text has ever been produced for scholars. The Gospels place Jesus in Nazareth as a known local craftsman, and his teaching is rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures, not Hindu or Buddhist thought.
