The missionaries have also done a lot of humanitarian work; they have brought a lot of good work, education for instance, to the world. They took, in many ways, this message of Jesus to heart: To help the poor and the disenfranchised. You and I will not be speaking English if it wasn't for the missionaries. I have kept in touch with all the Irish Christian brothers I came to know while studying at an Irish school in New Delhi. I go to Ireland once a year; I am going again this month. I find that, even within the Catholic Church, there's the conservative and the liberal side. I teach at Fordham University, which is a Catholic university, I teach at Notre Dame, which is a Catholic university -- I teach Jesus at these universities. It's not that they are my enemies; we are on very good terms.

Now, it turns out that there's one web site, www.catholicism.org, a very global community. As soon as The Third Jesus came out, they had the headline that I was the Anti-Christ and was to be treated like an enemy. I would say 90 per cent of the response from the Christian community has been positive; 10 per cent has been extremely nasty and negative and this comes from some very prominent Christians. But that's to be expected. Some prominent Christians like Pat Robertson... he has devoted many of his Sunday programs only to attacking me.

The book has gone to Number 2 in The New York Times bestseller list for five weeks. The book is doing extraordinarily well. You have to realise that, being a non-Christian, I am treated as an outsider. And yet Pope Benedict's book on Jesus is nowhere, but my book is Number 2 on the Christianity list on Amazon.com

I argue that we are all contained in one breath; we share the same breath, we share the same spirit. Jesus, too, said this. In the gospel of St John, he says, 'All things that I do, you can do and more.' And when he says no one comes into the kingdom of heaven except through me; the 'me' -- if you go to Aramaic -- is not the small ego 'I' but the universal 'I' which is the source of everything in all of us.

Image: Chopra speaks at the closing night of the Urban Zen Initiative Well-Being forum at the Stephan Weiss studio in New York City.
Photograph: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images

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