I remember speaking to a Jesus Mythicist who told me that he had become more and more convinced about the connection between Jesus and Krishna. I had been meaning to look more into this and so I finally read The Bhagavad Gita.
This is one of the classics of Hinduism and perhaps the most popular of the Hindu scriptures. It is relatively sharp and so it does not require the same time commitment as some of the other books.
The Bhagavad Gita is a poem that is a conversation between a warrior named Arjuna and Krishna. Arjuna is not aware at first that Krishna is an avatar of the god Vishnu. The subject of the conversation is Arjuna’s misgivings about going into battle against people he knows, including relatives.
On a surface level, there are some similarities. Krishna is a god in human form. He uses the phrase “born again” and uses the images of light and darkness, as well as others used by Jesus. Krishna uses the title “lord.” See the lyrics for George Harrison’s song, My Sweet Lord.
But when you read The Bhagavad Gita, you can see pretty quickly that you are swimming in different waters than the Gospels.
What it means to be an avatar of Vishnu is not the same thing as Jesus being an incarnate of the Hebrew God. There were various avatars and they were important, but it was not the creation-changing event that the incarnation was.
Also, in Hinduism there is no real concern over whether there was a historical Krishna. Some Hindus most likely do believe it but the lack of a historical figure would have very little affect on the value of this book. For Christians, as much as we rightly value the teachings of Jesus, the foundation is even more so on what the real Jesus did.
A good example of the difference is the advice that Krishna gives to Arjuna. Krishna advises him to go ahead and kill the enemy and to worry about it because ultimately the body is not the real us. Being killed with a sword or a spear will not harm the real person, who will go on to be reincarnated. It is difficult to imagine Jesus giving such advice.
I do recommend Christians read the Bhagavad Gita as it is a literary classic and is useful for understanding another religion. But it tells us nothing about Jesus.
