"Who do people say I am?" This was the question that Jesus asked his disciples. Their reply was that people were saying he was one of the Old Testament prophets "raised from the dead." Considering that the Last Judgment and the Resurrection of the Dead had not occurred, this begs the question, "What did they mean by "raised from the dead?" They were not talking about resurrection because the orthodox Christian doctrine of resurrection originated with the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism and this doctrine holds that corpses do not crawl out of their graves until the Last Judgment and the End of Days. And considering the fact that reincarnation was an orthodox teaching in Jesus' day (see Flavius Josephus) then the answer becomes crystal clear. They were talking about reincarnation. Even the Bible is filled with teachings of reincarnation including those taught by Jesus.

The early Christian sect known as the Ebionites taught that the Holy Spirit had come as Adam and later reincarnated as Jesus. Other Jewish Christian groups such as the Elkasaites and Nazarites also believed this. The Clementine Homilies, an early Christian document, also taught many incarnations of Jesus. The Samaritans believed that Adam had reincarnated as Seth, then Noah, Abraham, and even Moses.

Reincarnation has always been a part of Jewish and Christian history. In fact, orthodox Judaism still teaches reincarnation. A large number of early Christians were believers in reincarnation. Most bishops of the early church were pagan by birth and were well educated in the reincarnational ideas. But ideas concerning reincarnation were suppressed by the Church in the West, probably for political reasons, and in the name of "orthodoxy" the Church destroyed the writings and persecuted the Christian believers in reincarnation. But despite the historical changes of New Testament canon, a large amount of references to reincarnation can still be found there. These believers were Christian Gnostics and they claimed to possess the secret teachings and mysteries of resurrection that was handed down directly from the apostles. According to these mysteries, resurrection was not a physical event at all, but a spiritual event of spiritual rebirth and regeneration by the Holy Spirit within a living believer which liberates them from reincarnation. The Christian Gnostics also believed that Roman orthodoxy (which was based primarily on Pauline Christianity rather than the Christianity taught by Peter and James) held a definition of "resurrection" which was a vulgarization and a misinterpretation of the mysteries of Christ which he taught only to the apostles and not the public at large. These mysteries, which even Paul mentions in his epistles, concerns a believer's liberation from death and rebirth through the spiritual resurrection of a believer from spiritual death to spiritual life by the Holy Spirit. Bodily resurrection involves corpses coming out of their graves. Spiritual resurrection involves a spiritually "dead" person becoming spiritually regenerated, spiritual awakened, spiritually born again, and liberated from reincarnation.

The basic mystical teachings of the ancient world religions and the lives of the prophets who founded them have such striking similarities that they cannot be easily dismissed or ignored. All the great mystics of the world religions taught reincarnation including Jesus. In fact, a strong case can be made that these prophets were the reincarnations of the same soul and that is what these pages will attempt to show.

Modern research into both near-death experiences and reincarnation, such as that of Dr. Ian Stevenson, support reincarnation as a scientific fact. Reports of people having past life memories where specific information is remembered have been documented and verified. And according to the famous near-death experiencer Edgar Cayce, the Christ soul who incarnated as Jesus also incarnated and lived many past lives including other Biblical personalities. Cayce identified the important incarnations of the Christ soul to include the following: