New age projections on Jesus

I recently came across a post on Facebook in which someone claimed that Jesus wasn’t a Christian, Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist, and Mohammed wasn’t a Muslim. According to the author, herself a spiritual teacher, “teachers of love” don’t do dogma, don’t follow scriptures or religions, but are guided directly by “Source” or “Infinite Love.” It was a poetic statement, using words like “exquisite,” “awesome,” and “no big deal.” Beautifully written, in a way. And yet… something about it didn’t sit quite right with me.

What struck me is how often people reinterpret Jesus in their own image. This has been happening for centuries. In medieval paintings, Jesus was portrayed as an Italian man, and later as a blond-haired German. Today, in many spiritual circles, we see a similar move: Jesus is lifted out of his religious context and reframed as a universal teacher of love, almost like an Eastern mystic who transcends law and religion altogether.

But historically, that image is hard to sustain. Jesus was a Jew, speaking to other Jews, fully embedded in the Jewish religious tradition. He engaged in intense debates with the religious leaders of his time about the laws of the Torah. In Matthew 5, he even emphasizes that he did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. Far from making the law obsolete, he deepens it.

In the New Testament, this very law is even described as an expression of love. So the sharp contrast between ‘law’ and ‘love’ that modern spirituality often insists on, doesn’t seem to be one Jesus himself made. On the contrary, he used the law as a vehicle for love—first for the Jews, and later also for the non-Jews.

In many new age and spiritual circles, there’s a deep mistrust of religion. Organized religion is seen as rigid, oppressive, and dogmatic; something the free soul must transcend. Under the influence of Eastern thinkers like Osho, the idea has become popular that true spirituality must be “non-religious.”

Yet what I often notice is that these same spiritual communities unintentionally adopt many of the same structures as religious groups: there are leaders, rituals, unspoken rules, and a certain amount of group pressure. There’s even a kind of orthodox; just packaged in words like “energy,” “alignment,” or “frequency.”

Maybe the problem isn’t religion itself, but how people (once they gather around shared ideas) start dealing with power, truth, and belonging. That’s why I consciously choose not to join any group, even when I agree with their message. Group dynamics tend to have a life of their own, and that dynamic is sometimes more problematic than the dogmas we believe we’ve outgrown.

Still, I feel free to engage with any group or religion. For me, the power of Jesus doesn’t lie in the idea that he stood outside of religion, but in his ability to open something radically new within his tradition. And maybe that’s exactly where he deserves to be seen and recognized.