Book review

BOOK REVIEW BY GEORG FEUERSTEIN, PH.D

I was both surprised and delighted when I received this book. Surprised, because I had not expected Marshall Govindan, a teacher of Kriya Yoga, to be a Jesus scholar.

Delighted, because I share Govindan’s fascination with Jesus and because the book offers an excellent overview of what are now considered reasonably established facts about Jesus and his teachings.

Govindan’s clear exposition of the tangled web of New Testament scholarship in itself commends this book to a Christian or Christian-connected readership.

But The Wisdom of Jesus and the Yoga Siddhas does more than rehearse the scholarly evidence. As the title suggests, it uniquely relates the teachings of Jesus to those of the Siddhas of South India. This may seem like a rather large intellectual leap, but Govindan has substantially succeeded in making this comparison work. His book is systematic and answers all the key questions one might have. Readers will not only acquire a much richer understanding of the figure of the God-man Jesus but will also gain a valuable glimpse into the extraordinary spiritual realizations and thoughts of the great Siddhas of Tamil Nadu.

This book will be of particular interest to Yoga-practicing Christians, who will discover a Jesus (based on New Testament scholarship) who is far more plausible and appealing than the re-modeled Jesus of conventional Christianity.

This is possibly Govindan’s most engaged and engaging work yet.