From Sourcing the Apologetics:
The earliest work cited [substantiating the historical existence of Jesus] was at least forty years after the crucifixion would have taken place, the bulk of it was written centuries later, and the best you’ll get out of a lot of really bad scholarship it is that two generations after the events in question, some people said that there was a guy named Jesus.
The “existence” of the “deathless Himalayan avatar” Babaji, is very instructive in this context. Because, if Yogananda’s teachings (and the “Yogic Catholic Church” of SRF) were to sweep the world the way Yogananda predicted, and become the predominant religion, how many people do you think, two thousand years from now, would take the reality and existence of Babaji as a given?
A lot, I’d say.
If any Babaji existed, it wasn’t the Babaji of the Autobiography. But it’s just as likely—when one considers how much of the Autobiography of a Yogi is pure fiction—that no Babaji ever existed, at all. That is, that the story was just invented by Mahasaya, and embroidered by Yogananda, to justify their unique claims (later restricted further by SRF) on the kriya yoga path. Consider:
Kriya is an ancient science. Lahiri Mahasaya received it from his guru, Babaji, who rediscovered and clarified the technique after it had been lost in the Dark Ages.
“The Kriya Yoga which I am giving to the world through you in this nineteenth century,” Babaji told Lahiri Mahasaya, “is a revival of the same science which Krishna gave, millenniums ago, to Arjuna, and which was later known to Patanjali, and to Christ, St. John, St. Paul, and other disciples”….
Krishna also relates that it was he, in a former incarnation, who communicated the indestructible yoga to an ancient illuminato, Vivasvat, who gave it to Manu, the great legislator. He, in turn, instructed Ikshwaku, the father of India’s solar warrior dynasty. Passing thus from one to another, the royal yoga was guarded by the rishis until the coming of the materialistic ages. Then, due to priestly secrecy and man’s indifference, the sacred knowledge gradually became inaccessible.
In the SRF teachings, Babaji was believed to be the reincarnation of Krishna—with Yogananda himself being the Bhagavad Gita’s Arjuna, Krishna’s most beloved disciple.
Most tellingly: “No limiting facts about Babaji’s family or birthplace, dear to the annalist’s heart, have ever been discovered.“
Is that not what you’d expect from an utterly implausible character made up just to justify one’s claims on a certain spiritual path?
There are comparable issues with the “of Nazareth” part of Jesus’ birth, and the implausibility of a census where everyone had to travel to their place of birth, etc.
Not to mention that even Flavius Josephus’ much-touted mention of Jesus has been seriously disputed:
One passage [of Josephus' The Antiquities of the Jews], known as the Testimonium Flavianum, discusses the career of Jesus. The authenticity of the Testimonium Flavianum has been disputed since the 17th century, and by the mid 18th century the consensus view was that it had at a minimum been altered by Christian scribes, and possibly was outright forgery.
Personally, i do believe that psychic phenomena exist in reality but they operate at some kind of subtle quantum level and they occur spontaneously and nobody can “control” them. So having said that, let’s look at people like Yogananda.
It seems very obvious to me that the Yogananda types claim to know more than they can. Same is true of all gurus and even psychics. They claim to know God, to know these mysteries in depth as if they are somehow superior or different to most other people. They have an “agenda” to appear as an authority on these matters in order to weild influence, control and have power over others. Their statements should not be taken authoritatively by any means. They should be scientifically scrutinized with the wand of skepticism. Babaji is a complete myth as are all so-called miracles, which we find plenty of in Authobiography of a Yogi. Miracles do not exist. It’s easy to see why a person like Yogananda would claim not only to have witnessed miracles himself but to be able to perform them simply to control other people. It’s nothing but a power trip.
In connection with this, i’ve heard many a time a christian state that if the miracles of jesus were removed from the New Testament they would lose their faith. It would reduce Jesus to the level of any other human being, and they can’t have that. My reading of the Josephus argument is that he was not a contemporary witness of Jesus’ life and his writings were tampered with by politically minded church authorities. Nevertheless, there obviously did exist some “type” of Jesus, since SOMEBODY wrote those words. Was it an historical Jesus? Maybe, but unlikely. And since the Jews do not accept that Jesus was the Messiah they were awaiting it is even more unlikely.
Why would a Jewish messiah need a Roman convert to preach christianity throughout the western world?
I half agree with dave the skeptic’s scoffs, that Yogananda types claim to know more than they do and “miracles do not exist.” On trhe other hand I can un-skeptically say that everyone knows more than they could ever claim in words, and that the world is full of mysteries.
As an atheist-leaning agnostic christian humanist, my “faith” is in what dave might cal the Jesus “type.” And so I go to church and ‘lectio divina’ each week, unbothered by the possibility that the singular man-God Jesus never existed. There I am filled with awe by the scriptures and the hymns, and even by the simplistic, literalist faith of humble souls in the congregation. Can I explain this? No. Is it spirit, or neurochemistry? I don’t know. Is there a difference? I don’t know. All I know is it’s a grand mystery in my piddling life, and it just keeps happening. I’m happy to playfully call this a type of “miracle,” while a neuro-scientist might claim to know which neuro-processes are responsible for all of this. Can’t we both be right, me spiritually and the neuro-scientist scientifically?
[...] really, just like the contemporary Babaji fairy-tale, it could go either way: There are surely many yogis named “Babaji” in the Himalayas; [...]