Would the real Jesus please stand up.
Deepak Chopra muses on three different Jesus and wonders which one is relevant to today.
Despite his claims of a historic Jesus things are not so clear cut. There is in fact no historic record of a Jesus as described in the Bible. There are records of various Messiah type characters in around the period, and a number or scholars consider the Jesus in the Bible to be an amalgam of their stories.
One interesting idea I heard once but have not been able to find information on is that Pythagoras is also considered to be a proto-Jesus character. The numeric cult that surrounded Pythagoras is said to have claimed that he could raise people from the dead and performed other miracles and indeed even ascended to heaven. It’s also interesting to note that it was the Greeks that wrote the New Testament … a little local colour perhaps.
