Posted by Roberta Grimes • February 06, 2021 • 40 Comments
Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus
Crown Him the Lord of heaven, enthroned in worlds above;
Crown Him the king, to whom is given the wondrous name of Love.
Crown Him with many crowns, as thrones before Him fall.
Crown him, ye kings, with many crowns, for He is King of all.
– Matthew Bridges (1800-1894) & Godfrey Thring (1823-1903), from “Crown Him With Many Crowns” (1851)
As people moved from being hunter-gatherers to living first in tribes and then in towns, they began to need rules to govern their community social behavior. Such moral laws generally came from human-made gods, and most were similar to the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments as they were written more than a thousand years before Jesus was born:
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before or beside Me.
“You shall not make for yourself a graven image or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them nor serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, inflicting punishment for the wrongdoing of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing favor to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.
“You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain.
“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. For six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God; on it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male slave or your female slave, or your cattle, or your resident who stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the seas and everything that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day; for that reason the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
“Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be prolonged on the land which the Lord your God gives you.
“You shall not murder.
“You shall not commit adultery.
“You shall not steal.
“You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your 
neighbor’s wife, or his male slave, or his female slave, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor” (Exodus 20:1-17).
Please read this list again. Note how rigid and cold, how devoid of compassion, how fear-based and largely lacking in love The Ten Commandments really are! They are so deeply of their own time and culture that arguably they are no longer useful to us on any level. Let’s consider them in light of our modern spiritual understandings:
* The first two commandments forbid polytheism and idol-worship. Three thousand years ago this was a great step forward! But it has been a long time now since either of those old ways of doing religion was any threat to spirit-based monotheism.
* The third commandment requires that we respect the name of God. Primitive cultures saw great magical powers in names! Now, of course, we know that the Godhead cares a lot more about what is in our minds and hearts than the Godhead cares about our use of Its name.
* The fourth commandment requires us to take time off from working. Not long ago, most people were spending most of every day just keeping themselves alive. We needed an occasional day of rest, and if we were to take our human-made gods seriously we needed to spend time with them as well.
* The fifth commandment requires that we care for our parents. Laws can tell us something of what life was like when they were first written. And this effort to tie caring for the elderly to longer-term stability suggests that the transition from living in roving clans to living in cities meant that the elderly went from being burdens on younger generations to being valued as sources of stability and wisdom.
* The sixth through the eighth commandments are black-letter laws for better organizing human societies. We have talked about the fact that strict and arbitrary laws like these can be nothing more than guidelines, since each of them has many possible exceptions.
* The ninth and tenth commandments are rules for structuring relationships in larger and more complex societies. Hunter-gatherer groups generally numbered fewer than fifty people, and they were often extended families. Such small groups of mostly relatives could share an us-vs.-them loyalty that was diluted as we began to live in larger settled cities, so now rules were needed to govern respecting the property of those outside our own clans and being honest in our interactions with strangers.
Arguably the most important moment in all four Gospels comes when someone asks Jesus to name the greatest commandment. For the Lord to speak directly against the prevailing religion would have been a capital crime, so He seems to have used answering pertinent questions as a chance to cloak His most important lessons in what might look to the lurking Temple spies like simple throwaway answers. For example, here He didn’t name any of the Ten Commandments, but instead He gave us God’s new Law of Love. He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.” (MT 22:37-40). “The Law and the Prophets” was what the Jews of His day called the Christian Old Testament. So in just these few words, and well beneath the radar of the Temple spies, Jesus told us to throw away all the Old Testament laws – including The Ten Commandments – and put in their place God’s new Law of Love.
Jesus in His Gospels made a point of outmoding all the Old Testament rules and laws, including The Ten Commandments. He made our relationship with God a personal and not a public one (MT 6:1-6), He healed and worked on the Sabbath (MT 12:1-13), He disregarded rigid sexual taboos (JN 8:3-11), and He replaced the very idea of rules with the notion of living our lives in God’s love (MT 22:37-40). To help to foster that love, He stressed the moral importance of forgiveness (MT 18:21-23) and loving kindness (JN 13:34). The teachings of Jesus replace the old notion that God just tells us what to do with the personal empowerment of internal standards that we ourselves are responsible for applying by virtue of our own love-infused perspectives. It is impossible for us to sufficiently stress what a radical departure this notion was two thousand years ago! Indeed, it remains so radical today that most Christians still see the black-letter Ten Commandments as important, even a full two thousand years after Jesus told us He had replaced them so we could simply throw them away.
The Ten Commandments so deeply work against God’s Law of Love that the two cannot be lived simultaneously. The former morality is entirely external, demanding nothing more than that we know and obey the law as it was given to us; while the latter insists that we internalize what love is and what it might require of us in each new situation. Even beyond that, living by love calls upon us to trust in both our own ability to understand love and our ability to always discern in each moment what God’s love requires. God’s Law of Love is a more radical basis for morality than any set of laws could be!
And yet, this is what Jesus asks of us. He trusts us to be able to discern and live by an internal morality based in love that is divorced from every law. He can be confident about our ability to do this because He knows a lot more than we know! He is in fact an aspect of the Godhead living briefly here on earth. Two thousand years ago Jesus told us things about ourselves that we could not otherwise have begun to understand until well into the lifetimes of modern people who are still among us today.
There are several moments in the Gospels where Jesus shows us He possesses the Godhead’s knowledge, but for me the biggest one comes in Mark and toward the end of the Lord’s life on earth. On the previous day He had cursed a fig tree, perhaps so He could give His disciples this lesson. Then as they passed that tree on the following morning, they saw that it had withered from its roots. Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, look, the fig tree that You cursed has withered.” And Jesus answered and said to them, “Have faith in God. Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted to him. Therefore, I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be yours” (MK 11:21-24). A full two thousand years ago Jesus taught His disciples the power of praying in affirmations! He understood and taught His followers how to use the creative powers of their minds, which is a modern understanding so cutting-edge that scientists still struggle with it today.
We should be reluctant to lightly put aside the Godhead’s ancient, divinely-revealed truths. But still, we must not deny to God the right to give us new revelations! And it is clear now as we read the Gospels that God’s Law of Love as Jesus revealed it is meant to be the root of a whole new morality based entirely in love. In the fullness of time, God 
asked us to move on from trusting written rules so we could embrace instead the powers of our minds to give us a whole new morality where each of us will be able to govern ourselves in a harmony of divine love. The Godhead’s only moral law is in fact the love that Jesus taught! This feels exciting, doesn’t it? But how might it work? We’ll begin to talk about that next week….
Crown Him with many crowns, The Lamb upon the throne.
Hark how the heavenly anthem drowns all music but its own!
Awake, my soul, and sing of Him Who died for thee,
And hail Him as thy matchless King thru all eternity.
– Matthew Bridges (1800-1894) & Godfrey Thring (1823-1903), from “Crown Him With Many Crowns” (1851)
Dear Roberta, dear everybody—thank you for this important reminder that Jesus’ teachings stand apart from the cultural artifacts of times that were ancient even in His days on earth. I have often wondered how history (and today’s world too) would view His wisdom if He had not been linked by “the Church” to the messianic prophecies of long-ago societies.
Dear Mike, I don’t think it’s the messianic prophesies that are the problem, so much as it is the Christian religious dogmas that were not codified until centuries after His death. A messiah could certainly be a teacher, and those following Him would want to listen to Him! But once the historical Jesus became first of all a human sacrifice as part of a religion that was established centuries after His death, frankly no one who saw Him as a sacrifice really cared anymore what He had said. I was astonished when I first began to do this work seriously to find that, truly, practicing Christians really don’t care what Jesus said or what He meant. For them, it is all about that get-out-of-hell-free card. Poor Jesus!
Oh Roberta, what a thought!
‘But once the historical Jesus became first of all a human sacrifice ……. frankly no one who saw Him as a sacrifice really cared anymore what He had said.’
Why that’s so true isn’t it !? You can see this in the delivery of much of modern Christianity. This sacrificial thing really skewed the importance of the teachings of Our Jesus.
Somehow, your post has made me see this sad fact in a way I haven’t seen it before. I can’t quite explain it, but something has just ‘clicked’ in my understanding.
Heck, the way we humans twist things sometimes can be much more damaging than outright denial, suppression or even persecution. This twisting, this malformation, can damage the most precious things over centuries. 🤭😶😬
Oh my dear Efrem, that is so true!
When I was channeling Liberating Jesus, after awhile I could hear what I think were some of His thoughts. Not speech really, and I knew it wasn’t directed at me. He would say things like, “If you love Me, then listen to Me!” My heart broke for him 🙁
“If you hold to my teachings then you really are my disciples,” as He said. My point up top was simply that if we in this present moment did not have all of the “messiah foretold” elements of the OT attached to Him, how would we view this teacher who appeared on the scene with these amazing notions of the divine and our relationship to God? The OT would be an irrelevant history of an ancient society, Revelations would be minor ancient poetic imagery and we wouldn’t need most of what the epistles and Acts relate. In short, the gospels really would be “good news”!
(Roberta here – I am responding this way because the software had intended no further response to this thread.)
Dear Mike, I guess I don’t really think that the messianic prophesy is a negative thing. There likely have been itinerant preachers in many places who have given us wisdom, and while we can see now that Jesus actually came to us as God on earth, that wasn’t especially obvious to the primitive masses of His day and time. Perhaps His words still would have been remembered, passed down, and written down, even without that messiah connection, but I think that would have been far less likely! No, I think the problem that got Jesus trapped in a false religion was not the messiah prophesy, but rather it was the actions of the Emperor Constantine (and those around him) three hundred years later. They chose which old stories about Jesus were acceptable and which were heretical, and they were the ones who made Christianity all about sin and the sacrifice to God of God’s sinless son. It was a fear-based story, and it short-circuited the teachings of Jesus (which He tells us were the actual point of His entire life!). I think that what made those teachings stand out, be remembered, be written down, and eventually spread widely enough to even attract the Roman religion-builders was the fact that those who first preserved His words believed that they fulfilled the messianic prophesy. But of course, this is only my idea ;-).
Efrem, I also found that statement powerful. It is so refreshing to me that the things in organized religion that never felt quite right to me are truly just manmade contingencies. I remember when I first surrendered to Jesus and so I could be saved, I expected something dynamic to happen, but nothing. Everyone says they were changed, but I felt no different. Yet the teaching of Jesus always felt right when other things did not.
Dear Timothy, I feel the same way! Way back when I was a Protestant, I actually got myself “saved” twice. I guess the first one didn’t take. And I, too, was told that I had been transformed, when of course I felt no different. The relevant Gospel passage is actually a reference to reincarnation, anyway! There is tremendous power in the teachings of Jesus actually to altogether transform us, but no church seems to be interested in that. Our poor Lord must be so frustrated by now!
Hey Timothy 👋
I have the feeling that flash bang, sound and light wizardry are things humans relate to. Certainly in the music, stage show or advertising world – everything is flash bang sensation. 💥
Maybe the Divine works like nature’s growth pattern instead. Realization of the relationship with Jesus grows like a tree. 🌲
Certainly I’m feeling this way. The drawing closer to the Beloved One is happening in the deep quiet places of our souls.
Somehow I feel your own ‘drawing closer’ is too deep to be ‘dynamic’ or hard hitting. I reckon it’s the same with many of us, my friend.. 😉🌅🙏🏼
This is one more example of how clever Jesus was. The temple guards could not argue with him for saying we must love God with all our mind and heart etc., but at the same time, he was able to introduce a brand new way of looking at God, which didn’t include the old outdated rules. Yet, he never said that they no longer applied (which likely would get him in loads of trouble) – he simply ignored them in order to introduce this new concept as being the most important commandment.
Oh yes indeed, dear Lola! It is amazing to see how well He managed to get so much across that was new, and yet technically He still colored between the lines. It is a delight to watch!
He was a genius to be able to get away with it, as every little thing was considered heresy back then. I do agree that the things he said fell by the wayside once Constantine was in power. That’s when the bible became the “golden rule”, and Jesus was thought of as a sacrificial lamb.
Dear Lola, it does astonish me to see how soon and how completely the Christian dogmas altogether replaced the Man! For the first three hundred years after His death, Jesus was their living Teacher to many who still followed Him even centuries after His death and resurrection. Millions of these earliest followers were buried in Roman catacombs, and in all those millions of burials over hundreds of years, there is not a single depiction of a cross to be found! It took the Roman church centuries to stamp out the living Jesus in the minds of His followers, and to replace their revered Teacher with the symbols of death that so completely claimed Christianity that centuries later John Calvin was able to convince significant numbers of earnest Christians that God actually creates most people to be predetermined to burn in hell. Sometimes, seeing what Christians have done to Jesus over all those centuries makes you want to weep for Him.
This is true. It was quite a long time before the cross became synonymous with Jesus. Why do you think that happened? Was it maybe because they wanted to drill it into people’s heads that Jesus was a sacrifice in order to make us feel guilty? As for John Calvin, where did he ever come up with that strange idea? Jesus himself never even hinted that anyone was predetermined to be in hell. In fact, the concept of hell came much later, didn’t it?
(Roberta, responding…)
These are great points, Lola. Yes, for certain, the first broad use of the cross as a symbol three to four hundred years after the resurrection of Jesus marks the moment when fear and guilt became the basis of Christianity. It was just as plain as that! And not just the cross, but Jesus nailed to the cross. “Look at how He had to suffer in your place! Look at how evil you really are!” With that burdened cross always in your face, fear and guilt were the religion’s basis from that day to this one. Fear and guilt were what got your attention. Yes, there was love there too, but it made us feel even guiltier! “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son so those who believe in Him won’t perish, but will find everlasting life.” What are the emotions you feel when that is your religion’s basis?
As for Calvinism, I haven’t much studied its ideas. but as I recall the notion that some people are created to go to hell, no matter how good they might be, while others are created for heaven, no matter what they do, stems from the fact that God is infinitely powerful and knows everything so of course God has to have known before we were created which of us will be saved and which won’t be saved. Of course, there are other ways that the religion could have solved the heaven-or-hell conundrum of God’s infinite knowledge – including what turns out to be true, which is that there is no hell. But Calvin chose to embrace the most fear-based alternnative.
Excellent analysis–and I believe correct. Love God and His creations. Hate is self-destructive. Acquiring this perspective requires a stressful life here, not available in Heaven.
Dear Jack, that pretty well sums it up! Growing spiritually is a simple matter of consiousness physics. We enter lifetimes on earth to experience negativity, the lower consciousness vibrations that we feel as fear and anger, so we can turn away and push against it all. And thereby experience the ever higher consciousness vibrations that we feel as love! It is one thing to say it, and frankly it sounds too simple to be true. But it is quite another matter to actually experience for yourself how well this very simple process works!
Lets face it. our minds would have to be reprogrammed thanks to centuries of induced fear, but once that has been accomplished, it would be a simple process as noted above.
What seems to be the case is that all we really need to do is to lose our fear of death. When we no longer fear death, we no longer really fear anything, and that includes God, hell, and every other religion-induced fear. It’s actually pretty easy!
Yes, losing the fear of death is of primary importance, but that is impossible if one still believes in a fear-based God. Even one of the old laws said “I am a jealous God.” Surely, that must have terrified every one.
Dear Roberta. Hi everyone. I was thinking about Eleanor Roosevelt’s statement “with great freedom comes great responsibility”. The love you speak of would indear a sort of prevenient responsibility. This blog ties in very nicely with last week and how wonderful this world would be with that love.
I didn’t intend to misquote Mrs Roosevelt. She didn’t use the word great.
Dear Ray, I think this is a profound point, and it’s one that I believe we will be tackling next week. To simply follow laws that are based in words gives you an objective good-enough standard that you and everyone else can see. You didn’t steal. You didn’t murder someone. You cared for your grumpy mother in your own home until her natural death. Good for you! Even if at the same time you were speaking cuttingly to a co-worker rival, bullying your children in sadistic little ways, and fighting leaving-trash-in-the driveway wars with your neighbor you find so annoying, you were still a “good person” in terms of those black-letter laws.
To practice a morality based in God’s perfect love does indeed involve a “prevenient responsibility.” It’s the ultimate honor system!
t the age of 73, I now have a grasp of your teachings about the afterlife. I am secure in myself, and I am happy and look forward to what awaits while I learn how to be a more caring and loving person. Thank You
Dear David, I am so happy about this! Although by the time we hit our seventies, most people think their minds are set and it’s too late to learn something new, my experience has been that you can go from knowing almost nothing to your own level of confidence about what comes next in maybe a year or two. Thank you for demonstrating this truth yet again!
Sorry Roberta, the first three fourths of my letter did not post. I guess I was a bit long, but it was a story of enlightenment brought about by your writing, and others like you! The main credit was to the chapter on Jesus that you wrote at the end of “Staying In Touch” . Again Thank You!!
Oh my dear David, I am thrilled to have been able to help you! And now you are helping to enlighten others, which is how knowledge of the truth will spread to all the world. Thank you so much! Simply by sharing your own truth, you can do so much for so many!
Hi Roberta and everyone,
This post really highlights beautifully the difference between the external (manifest laws) and the internal (creative force of love) for me.
The ‘beauty part’ is that if we love at core then we naturally fulfill these ten laws anyway:
Should we love God (Spirit) then we would not worship any other thing or concern ourselves with statues and idols. Nor would we bandy the Divine Name about. We’d naturally want to set aside a time of spiritual contemplation and meditation. We would strongly desire regular communion with God. (This is what the Sabbath is essentially about.)
Should we love our fellow human beings, we would definitely honor and care for our beloved mother and father. We would certainly not murder, turn a love relationship into unfaithfulness and we wouldn’t steal, defame or covet. Rather, we would love and nourish each other…
The essence takes care of the many manifestations of something because it is the core reality. Maybe it’s like a tree that has leaf mite or fungal spotting. If you nourish the roots and thus enrich the tree’s sap, in time the blight will vanish and all the leaves will become healthy and renewed. You don’t have to pick off every damaged leaf on the tree, one by one. 🍂🍃🌱
If people were shining beings of perfect Love, what need then for rules? 🙏🏼🌅❣️
Oh my dear Efrem, this is beautifully said! I have thought, too, that the Ten Commandments might have been an earlier attempt by the aspect of the Godhead Who came to us as Jesus a thousand years later to tell us how we will think and be when we have attained the kingdom of God on earth.
What I am wrestling with for next Sunday is how we can envision actually moving from the sewer of negativity that human life is now to arrive at the place where we have only divine love in our hearts, and our acting on that love – or in other words, living by an internal version of The Ten Commandments – actually will come naturally!
So thought provoking, Roberta! Jesus’ love-based morality sounds rather messy, but in a deliciously creative way – no more Hamurabi’s code or Moses’ code, chiseled in stone, violations punished perhaps by being stoned, or in some other appropriately horrific manner. Instead of beating ourselves or others down to be good serfs for whatever monarch or organization is in power, we’d get to lift ourselves and others up to be better, more complex, more spiritual human beings. It is nice to contemplate what human potential could be unleashed. The tough thing to wrap one’s head around is how that course change would be accomplished. The way the world is today, it feels like spitting into a category five hurricane, but we need to start somewhere I guess. I get the impression that there are a lot more folks on the other side working on this than we realize, thank God, like a powerful locomotive engine with cars stretching into the distance, full of untold numbers of workers, sounding it’s horn and thundering our way, picking up workers still in the flesh as it comes. This motif or metaphor keeps coming up for me lately, and I pray it is true.
Dear Scott, I love this! We really do need to start somewhere. And we don’t have to try to soften the minds of people whose hearts are hardened, because we all are one consciousness, one spirit, so simply by helping everyone who is willing to raise his individual consciousness we contribute immeasurably to the elevation of the consciousness of all the world.
Hi Roberta. I love what you and Efrem are getting at above regarding sometheng akin to an internal version of The Ten Commandments, like helping people install an inner compass that always points towards love, without having to consult long lists of hairsplitting legalisms. The problems of this complex world will only get more and more complex, but the approach to them needs to get simpler, just as Jesus was able to boil down the whole old testament to his simple law of love. The change can come as each heart magnetized towards love, towards understanding our oneness, will attract more, like a snowball effect. We can only hope. That must be why the Way spread so quickly in the early days – I guess now we might say went viral. 💗👆
Dear Scott, I love the idea of “installing an inner compass”!
It is hard to describe how transformative it really is to raise our personal consciousness vibrations, but it does made you feel entirely different. I mean, you can still recall how things affected you before, but now you just feel this vast internal peacefulness. Things happen that once would have upset you, and you see them, but they don’t hit you as they once did. Even with the degree of elevation that my own experimentation with the teachings of Jesus was able to make in me, that change was quick, palpable, and permanent. I was astonished by it! Even after a decade, it still surprises me whenever I think of it.
Roberta: Interestingly, many talk show guests on radio shows, including your own, have discussed this feeling of inner peacefulness once they were able to disconnect from fear and negativity. Most of them noticed synchronicities in their lives and even found new ways to solve problems that had plagued them for years. This leads me to believe that fear and negativity are major blocks to experiencing oneness and would prevent us from dealing effectively with even minor problems, let alone major ones.
Yes, my dear, true enough. And it really isn’t hard to raise your consciousness vibrations at all! The problem is that most people don’t even understand that such a transformation is possible, nor can they imagine what a difference it will make. Bringing this enlightenment to more and more people so they will be open to what is so easily possible is what I see as the central mission of my life!
Yes, I agree, Only a very small percentage of people would ever think this is possible, plus they are too materialistic to give it much thought but this is starting to change. I can see it. More and more credible people are starting to discuss spiritual experiences and treating them as “real” rather than some kind of quirk of the brain. This never would have happened 30 years ago..
Hey Scott,
As Roberta does, I love the idea of having ‘an inner compass’ as you say. The thing is that no matter how improbable you think the direction shown on the compass is – it is never wrong. Imagine knowing that the inner compass always points to love! What may be achieved with this is endless.
Dear Efrem, I think that for most people these concepts are simply foreign, when in fact once they are explained they make such sense – much more sense than do the teachings of any religion. More and more, I see our primary task as simply getting as many people as we are able to reach started on learning and living The Way. Once we are broadly doing that, the rest seems almost to teach itself!
My dearest Roberta,
I have come to see that these concepts do make more sense than religious teachings. If we focus, even for a while, on these things, on The Way, the truth of it becomes clear. It’s a bit like one of those 3D pattern images that were so popular in the 1990s; you hold the picture in a steady by ‘open’ gaze and the hidden image pops out.
Once people look at this understanding and give it some time, they can experience actual results. ❣️
Dear Efrem, I agree with your thought that the teachings of Jesus make so much more plain sense than do any of the Christian dogmas. They are eternally fresh; they nourish your spirit. Even after all this time, I sometimes find new insights, just as you have done here!
Roberta I love your blog thank you and your wonderful conversational replies…… .. like David (reply) your teachings are illuminating my life from a very dark place where organised religion was very “heavy” in my part of the world and growing up where Christianity was the only true path to god. may I ask if Jesus was God on earth , which I can accept in part where then does Buddha , Mohammed , etc come in ? so does that make Christianity the “only way” to source … I’m sorry if this question deviates from your blog .I would love your opinion on this .. Love to all xxxx
My dear Louise, thank you for saying such lovely things! To answer your question, yes indeed, Jesus came to us from the highest aspect of the Godhead. He came quite literally as God on earth, and we are told that He came to (a) try to better understand people in bodies, and why they were having so much trouble growing spiritually, so he could (b) then tell us how we can best get around our problems and learn to jump-start our spiritual growth.
It seems right now to be likely that the life of Jesus is the only time when an aspect of the Godhead has come to earth in a body. There are, as you point out, other spiritually advanced beings who have come to earth in bodies to teach us, some of whose named are remembered now and others who came and taught but were not remembered.
But Christianity – the religion – is emphatically not the only, nor is it even the best way to raise our consciousness vibrations so we can approach the Source! What works is the TEACHINGS of Jesus, and Christianity doesn’t do much with those teachings. Even further to that point, there are some Eastern religious and spiritual traditions that teach alternative ways to elevate our consciousness vibrations away from fear and toward love, and it is my understanding that they work, but none is as simple nor (I think) as effective as the Gospel teachings of Jesus.
I hope this helps!