If reincarnation is a true reality, we would expect to see reference to it in the Bible.
And we do.
There are not just hints of reincarnation—there are several references in the Bible about needing to be reborn.
Jesus himself told us that we must be reborn.
Sometimes this refers to actually being re-born in a new body. Often, though, it refers to the inner rebirth of our spirit.
If we have an intense desire to live in God, self-purification will be required to bring this about.
Unless we continually give ourselves to this process of rebirth—which we do through our personal self-development—we will stagnate.
We will die.
Physical rebirth is a continuation of this same process.
It defies logic to assume that we can complete all our necessary development in one short life.
Another reference appears in Scripture that John the Baptist was a reincarnation of Elijah.
Removing reincarnation from the Bible was to combat a lazy, fatalistic attitude. So good motives, but misguided strategy.
In the years following the life and death of Jesus Christ, reincarnation was taught as a normal part of the Christian religion. Early Christians understood reincarnation as a reality.
Later, church fathers saw how the knowledge of reincarnation was misused in Eastern traditions. So they attempted to remove this danger by eliminating reincarnation from the Bible.
The misuse they witnessed in Eastern cultures was a fatalistic attitude toward life: “It doesn’t matter what I do—it’s karma. I must go through this, regardless, and I can do nothing about it.”
This kind of fatalism hindered people’s development. But the opposite extreme—denying the truth of reincarnation—brought about another damaging attitude which has also hindered our development.
By overemphasizing free will at the level of our ego—which is an outer superficial level—we created an attitude of “if I don’t behave, I will be punished.” This edict, coming from an outer authority, creates fear—fear of God for not obeying the law.
As always, our deviations from truth can create opposite extremes that are equally harmful.
The intention behind removing this teaching from the Bible was to combat a lazy, fatalistic attitude. For due to this, people denied the need to develop themselves and grow spiritually.
The motives, then, were good but the strategy was misguided.
Then why not just bring it back?
Restoring the teachings about reincarnation to the Bible would create a whole new set of problems. Because this is not the only truth that has been deleted, denied, distorted, mistranslated and misunderstood.
Rewriting the Bible would require a greater level of maturity and self-responsibility among the world’s churches than exists today.
For they would all need to be open to inner truths.
At the deepest levels, these truths are unchanging. Yet they constantly change in the way they manifest on Earth. They evolve according to the changing social mores of a culture, and the growth and development of the people in a society.
For changes to the Bible to be accepted, humanity would need to have opened its channel to God—to the Higher Self. Generally speaking, this takes more maturity and self-responsibility than exists today.
In our current state of development, we still cling to fixed rules. We do this as a safeguard against the destructive impulses of our Lower Self.
Without a rigid structure in place, our guardrails in life disappear.
This explains why so many take the Bible literally—sometimes taking it to the point of absurdity.
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