Wisdom of Jesus & the Yoga Siddhas

Who was Jesus? One of the most influential human beings of all times? The founder of Christianity? A messiah or savior sent by God to redeem humanity of its sins? What were His teachings? Is our knowledge of Jesus limited to what is recorded in the Bible? What has modern historical research to say about what Jesus did and taught? "What were the original teachings of Jesus, before the Christian religion became organized?" With the discovery of many new source documents in the Sinai Desert and near the Dead Sea, and with the advent of modern methods of textual analysis by scholars who are independent of institutional bias, today most Biblical scholars will agree that the books of the Bible's New Testament are written at several levels of authenticity: What were likely the actual words of Jesus, quoted in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, but recorded several decades afterwards. What were likely interpolations - words attributed to Jesus by unknown sources. What was said about Jesus or about His teachings by others, for example, Paul in his "letters," which make up most of the rest of the New Testament, and which served as the basis for early Church dogma. Within Christianity and in the popular understanding of Jesus and his teaching, how much have these interpolations and early Church dogma distorted or obscured the actual words and teachings of Jesus? What do the actual words of Jesus say about who Jesus was and what His teachings were? What do the actual words of Jesus not say? Answers to these questions are a prerequisite to making comparisons between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of the Gnostics and other mystics, such as those of the Yoga Siddhas. Previous attempts by some, incl