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  • The Mystery of Christian Origins: Hail the Solar Kristos

    The Mystery of Christian Origins: Hail the Solar Kristos

    An innate knowledge of the Gods is coexistent with our very existence; and this knowledge is superior to all judgement and deliberate choice, and subsists prior to reason and demonstration.
    –  Iamblichus, 4th Century Neoplatonist, On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians

    The first Nazarene communities established in the first centuries C.E. by Jesus’ own disciples and inspired Master Teachers knew no birthday for their saviour. Only with the triumph of the Constantinian (Christian) church in the 4th century did the adoption of a date become an issue. The Roman Church Fathers pushed for the adoption of the Mithraic winter-solstice festival called Dies Natalis Solis Invictus, Birthday of the Unconquered Sun.

    In fact most of the ancient Mysteries celebrated the nativity of the solar deities Attis, Osiris, and Dionysus, in the form of the Divine Child, at the northern hemisphere’s winter solstice on or near 25 December. As Charles King explains:

    the old festival held on the 25th day of December in honour of the ‘Birth-day of the Invincible One,’ and celebrated by the Great Games of the Circus… was afterwards transferred to the commemoration of the Birth of Christ, of which the real day was, as the Fathers confess, totally unknown: Chrysostom, for example, declares that the Birthday of Christ had then lately been fixed at Rome upon that day, in order that whilst the heathen were busied with their own profane ceremonies, the Christians might perform their holy rites without molestation.1

    The Roman church adopted 25 December as the nativity of Jesus the Christ because the people were used to celebrating it as the birthday of a solar deity, the Son of Man who bore such titles as Light of the World, Sun of Righteousness, Liberator and Saviour.

    The Eastern branch of the Christian church, still influenced by the earliest Nazarene precepts, placed no significance on a fixed date for the birth of Jesus the Christ. For them the birthday of the Galilean Master Jesus was of little importance compared with his life and sacrifice on the tree of matter. Only late in the 4th century did they agree to honour it. The church of Jerusalem continued to ignore the Roman date of 25 December until the 7th century. Within the Eastern Orthodox churches holy Easter, the commemoration of Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection, is held to be the high point of the Orthodox calendar and is celebrated with more pomp than Christmas.

    The distinguished Orientalist Alain Danielou says that in India the winter solstice is celebrated as the birth of the god Shiva, who was worshipped in Greece under the name Dionysus. Danielou remarks that the birth of Shiva’s son Skanda (the god of transcendent Knowledge or Gnosis) and Krishna (held to embody the supreme personality of the Absolute) are also celebrated at the winter solstice. Krishna and Skandar, both portrayed as the Divine Child, share numerous similarities with Dionysus.

    In the words of one scholar:

    In the fixing of the dates for the feasts of the Christian year… it is possible to glimpse the memory of many of the ceremonies belonging to a previous era. At Delphi in Winter, the Thyades, the Bacchantes of Parnassus, used to awaken a baby in a cradle, the liknites, or infant Dionysus, whose reappearance was celebrated about the time of the Winter solstice [25 December]… The establishing of the feast of the Christian Nativity (starting from the fourth century of our era) on a date close to it in the calendar… accounts for the mechanism by virtue of which a new god is inserted at a liturgical period which existed before the spread of his own cult.2

    Mystery of the Solar Kristos

    Essene communities in the Holy Land and other pre-Christian, Jewish, and Pagan Gnostics welcomed the Christian revelation, finding in its teachings a familiar echo of their own ideas. Christian Gnostics became part of the rich religious tapestry of the area, which was also influenced by the growth of the Mithraic religion throughout the Roma Empire. The Neoplatonists were the first to protest the exclusivity and increasing militancy of Christianity. Intolerance of other beliefs was introduced largely by St. Paul and grew progressively worse as Christianity assumed greater political power in the Roman Empire. Constantine declared it the state religion in 325.3

    The Ancient Tradition, upheld by all the Secret Schools since the dawn of time, finds its outward expression in the universal message of a past Golden Age when Man was free from care and evil non-existent; to the subsequent ‘fall’ of Man and the loss of oneness with the Divine; and finally to a revelation received from heaven foretelling the reparation of this loss and the coming of a Redeemer who should save humanity. We find this message, in a multitude of forms, within the great pre-Christian pagan traditions.

    Everywhere, in Persia, as in Egypt, in Sumeria as in Greece, all the legends associated with divine saviours told of the voluntary sacrifice of a youthful deity, embodying the Solar Kristos or Logos, the manifested emanation from the one omnipotent, ever concealed, infinite and unknown Father. Each of these saviours may be compared to a ray of the Solar Kristos incarnate in human form.

    The triumph of the Roman church as a political power witnessed the corruption and debasing of many of these venerable motifs, myths, legends and principles, as well as their absorption into what became Christianity. At the same time in its dogmatic form the Church portrayed itself as the sole repository of truth, slandering the noble pre-Christian traditions as the ‘work of the devil.’ Driven on by their need to discredit the entire true and good in the previous religions, Christian zealots sacked the temples of other saviours, burned ancient sacred books, and attacked initiates of the Mystery Schools. Their crimes knew no bounds as they built their own churches on the same foundations as the old ‘pagan’ temples. In 415, an enraged Christian mob, incited by the Church bishop, captured Hypatia, the famed female leader of the Alexandrian Neoplatonic school. She was then tortured, killed, and dismembered.

    When confronted with the remarkable similarity between the Christian Jesus and the saviour deities of the ancient world, the Church Fathers retorted that the devil himself had – centuries before – caused the pagans to adopt certain beliefs and practices. Justin Martyr for instance describes the institution of the Lord’s Supper as narrated in the Gospels, and then goes on to say: “Which the wicked devils have imitated in the mysteries of Mithra, commanding the same thing to be done.” Tertullian also says:

    the devil by the mysteries of his idols imitates even the main part of the divine mysteries… He baptises his worshippers in water and makes them believe that this purifies them from their crimes… Mithra sets his mark on the forehead of his soldiers; he celebrates the oblation of bread; he offers an image of the resurrection, and presents at once the crown and the sword; he limits his chief priest to a single marriage; he even has his virgins and ascetics.

    The Spanish explorer Cortez, too, it will be remembered, complained that the devil had positively taught to the indigenous peoples of the Americas the same things the Christ had taught to Christendom.

    The Master Teachers of the Gnostic Secret Schools maintained that throughout history Saviours, Avatars, Messiahs and Christs appeared in all lands and to diverse peoples. These Kristed-beings brought a message of liberation to mortals trapped in the darkness of mundane existence. As a modern scholar of Gnosticism, Professor Hans Jonas, explains:

    The savior does not come just once into the world but that from the beginning of time he wanders in different forms through history, himself exiled in the world, and revealing himself ever anew until, with his gathering-in complete, he can be released from his cosmic mission.4

    Examining ancient history we discover these Kristed ones, embodiments of the First Emanation (Logos) of the Heavenly Father, described in a number of ways. Of nearly all these saviours it was widely believed:

    (1) They were born on or very near the winter solstice (Christmas day).

    (2) They were born of a Virgin-Mother.

    (3) And in a Cave or Underground chamber.

    (4) They led a life of toil for Mankind.

    (5) And were called by the names of Light-bringer, Healer, Mediator, Saviour, Deliverer, Shepherd.

    (6) They were however temporarily vanquished by the Powers of Darkness.

    (7) And descended into Hell or the Underworld.

    (8) They rose again from the dead, and became the pioneers of mankind to the Heavenly world, the Realm of the Father.

    (9) They founded communities of believers, and Orders into which disciples were received by baptism.

    (10) And they were commemorated by sacrificial Eucharistic meals.

    Jesus the Christ can be said to be the last in a long line of Avatars and Christs who came to earth to bring humanity knowledge of the True God. Let us briefly review the similarities between some of these saviours and the Gospel Jesus.

    Mithra

    The French scholar Renan once wrote: “If Christianity had succumbed to some deadly ‘disease’, the world would have become Mithracized.” In other words, it would have adopted the religion of Mithra. Mithraism arrived in Rome during the first half of the first century B.C.E. By 307 the Roman emperor officially designated Mithra “Protector of the Empire.”

    The Christian Church Fathers incorporated many details of the Mithraic mystery religion into their Church ceremonies and doctrine. The influence of Mithraism on the emerging Christian church is obvious in the Church’s adoption of the Mithraic feast of 25 December. Some resemblances between Christianity and Mithraism were so close that even St. Augustine had to grudgingly confess that the priests of Mithra worshipped the same deity as he did. Dr. Martin Larson says:

    The fact is that the parallel between Mithraism and apostolic Christianity was actually far more extensive than any of the early Fathers implied. Both taught almost identical doctrines concerning heaven and hell, the last judgement, and the immortality of the soul. Both practiced the same sacraments, those of baptism and the communion of bread and wine. Regeneration through the second birth was a basic doctrine of both, and each had the same conception concerning the inter-relationship of their members – that all were mystical brethren. Each believed that its founder was mediator between God and Man, that through him alone was salvation possible, and that he would be the final judge of all. Both taught the doctrine of primitive revelation. Both emphasised the constant warfare between good and evil, required abstinence and self-control, and accorded the highest honour to celibacy. We need not be surprised at these similarities, since we know that Mithraism and Christianity were alike based upon ubiquitous doctrines and practices already hoary with age before these cults appeared.5

    The Persian saviour deity Mithra embodied the Solar Kristos, the Maintainer of the Universe. The Zoroastrian holy scripture the Zendavesta declares Mithra to be the First Emanation of Ahura Mazda, the Supreme Lord of Wisdom and Goodness, and the manifestation of Himself unto the world. From Ahura Mazda emanated a number of hierarchies of good and beautiful divine beings (angels and archangels).

    It is worth recalling the admission of the Judean historian Josephus that the highest principles of the Jewish religion, in the time of Jesus, were all drawn from the Zoroastrian scheme.

    The apostle Paul, who came from Tarsus a stronghold of Mithraism, uses the language of the Mithraic mysteries in explaining that Jesus the Christ is the “Brightness (or reflection) of his glory, the express image of his person, upholding all things by the word of his power.” Thereby testifying to the truth that Jesus the Christ is a reflection of the Invisible Supreme One in his First Emanation (as the Kristos or Logos).

    Horus & Osiris

    Osiris, you have gone away, but you have returned; you were asleep, but you have been wakened. You died, but you live again.6

    Horus, the son of the Egyptian deities Isis and Osiris, was born at the winter solstice. To the ancient Egyptians the visible terrestrial sun was a mere representation of the invisible spiritual Central Sun of Divine Wisdom. The solar deity Osiris manifests as the infant Horus in the hearts of mankind; becoming “regenerated” within the souls of the pure by the power of the eternal Mother, Isis, the ever immaculate virgin, the blessed Queen of Heaven. By his own power Horus, son of Osiris, vanquished Set the Evil Principle, just as Jesus the Christ overcame Satan. In the words of the 19th century author Gerald Massey:

    The Christian dispensation is believed to have been ushered in by the birth of a child, and the portrait of that child in the Roman catacombs as the child of Mary is the youthful Sun-God in the mummy image of the child-king, the Egyptian Karast, or Christ. The alleged facts of our Lord’s life as Jesus the Christ, were equally the alleged facts of our Lord’s life as the Horus of Egypt.

    Images of the goddess Isis and her infant son Horus were sacred objects in every Egyptian home, resembling Mary and the Christ-child, both in appearance and in veneration.

    Osiris, the father of Horus, was human, like us, and thus able to take upon himself all our sorrow, but also divine, and therefore able to confer divinity upon mortals. He brought the divine bread from heaven for humanity; he taught justice and practiced mercy; he died, was buried, and rose from the grave; he gave to all who became members of his mystical body his flesh to eat and his blood to drink so that this divine sacrament might then transfigure them into celestial gods; he went before to prepare mansions for his initiates.7

    Of all the saviour deities worshipped by the ancients as personifications of the First Emanation of the Father, it is Osiris with whom Jesus the Christ is most associated. Osiris was called Lord of Lords, King of Kings, and God of Gods. He was the Resurrection and the Life, the Good Shepherd, Eternity and Everlastingness, the god who “made men and women to be born again.” The renowned Egyptologist Budge says, “From first to last, Osiris was to the Egyptians the god-man who suffered, and died, and rose again, and reigned eternally in heaven. They believed that they would inherit eternal life, just as he had done.”

    According to Egyptian scriptures, “As truly as Osiris lives, so truly shall his follower live; as truly as Osiris is not dead he shall die no more; as truly as Osiris is not annihilated he shall not be annihilated.” The flesh of Osiris was eaten in the form of communion cakes of wheat, the “plant of Truth.” Osiris was Truth, and those who ate him became Truth also, each of them another Osiris, a Son of God, a “Light-god, a dweller in the Light-god.”

    At death, every Egyptian had to appear before the judgment tribunal presided over by Osiris himself, and receive a new life. Osiris could search out the secret places of the heart, and before him no one could be perfect in his own right. Every aspirant to “Osiris-ship” (Khrist-hood) knew that if the law was enforced, he could never enter eternal life. Therefore he exclaimed: “Do ye away with my evil deeds, and put ye away my sin which deserved stripes on earth, and destroy ye any evil whatsoever that belongeth unto me.” Centuries before the Sermon on the Mount, the Egyptian suppliant implored: “bring ye not forward my wickedness… [for] I have given bread to the hungry man, and water to the thirsty man, and apparel to the naked man, and a boat to the shipwrecked mariner. I have made holy offerings to the gods… Be ye then my deliverers, be ye then my protectors… I am clean of mouth and clean of hands; therefore, let it be said unto me…’Come in peace; come in peace.’”

    Budge remarks that the Egyptians believed in “the resurrection of the body in a changed and glorified form, which would live to all eternity in the company of the spirits and souls of the righteous in a kingdom ruled by a being who was of divine origin, but who had lived upon the earth, and had suffered a cruel death at the hands of his enemies, and had risen from the dead, and had become the God and king of the world which is beyond the grave.”

    Many of the expressions and stories found in the Bible are drawn from the older ‘pagan’ traditions of Egypt and Sumeria. Sir Charles Marston concludes in The New Knowledge about the Old Testament:

    Before the time of Abraham, then, before any book of the Old Testament was written, and right down through the centuries after every book in the Old Testament had been written, there existed this belief in a Future Life and the presence of the bread and water of Eternal Life in Heaven. The possession of this knowledge enhances the significance of Christ’s statements in the New Testament: “I am the Bread of Life (John 6:35) and “I am the Living Bread which came down out of Heaven, if any man eat this Bread he shall live forever” (John 6:51) and again “The water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up in Everlasting Life (John 4:14).

    The 23rd Psalm in the Old Testament is taken from an Egyptian text appealing to Osiris the Good Shepherd to lead the deceased to the “green pastures” and “still waters”, to restore the soul to the body, and to give protection in the valley of the shadow of death. The Lord’s Prayer was prefigured by an Egyptian hymn to Osiris-Amen beginning “O Amen, O Amen, who art in heaven.” Amen was also invoked at the end of every prayer by the devotees of Osiris. The priests of Osiris, like the later Christian priests and Gnostic Elect, were celibates.

    Jesus’ words, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24), reflect an Osirian doctrine that a dying man is like a corn of wheat “which falls into the earth in order to draw from its bosom a new life.” Jesus’ words, “In my Father’s house are many mansions” (John 14:2) is very similar to an Egyptian text telling of numerous Arits (“mansions”) in the blessed land of Father Osiris. Ancient legends about Osiris were ascribed by Christians to Jesus.

    Dionysus

    In ancient Greece Dionysus was the god-begotten, virgin-born Anointed One (Kristos). Some writers see the young god as a prototype of Jesus the Christ. Portrayed as seated on the Heavenly Father’s throne, brandishing his lightning-scepter, Dionysus was hailed as King of Kings and God of Gods, titles later applied to the resurrected Jesus. The crucified Jesus was referred to as hanging on a tree, in the same way the sacrificial Dionysus was titled the “Young Man of the Tree.”

    The Roman historian Tacitus said Dionysus had been the god of Jerusalem in an earlier period, but a different god had replaced him, a god with less attractive characteristics. Dionysus “established a festive and cheerful worship, while the Jewish religion is tasteless and mean.” According to Tacitus some of the old Israelite customs “were founded in honour of Dionysus”. Coins found near Gaza, dating from the 5th century B.C.E. show Dionysus on one side, and on the other his opposite the bearded figure labeled YHWH – Yahweh.

    Alain Danielou notes the numerous similarities between Dionysus and Jesus:

    The Christian myths appear to be closely linked to those of Dionysus. Jesus, like Skanda or Dionysus, is the son of the Father, of Zeus. He has no wife. The goddess-mother alone finds her place next to him. He is surrounded by his faithful, his bhaktas, who are of the people, fishermen. His teaching is addressed to the humble and the outcast. He welcomes prostitutes and those who are persecuted. His rite is sacrifice. It is in the Orphic tradition that the passion and resurrection of Dionysus occupy a central position. It is through Orphism that many of Dionysus’ “miracles” were attributed to Jesus. Several aspects of the Orphic legend of Dionysus are to be found in the life of Jesus. The parallel between the death and resurrection of the god and of Christ is self-evident.

    The myths and symbols tied to the birth of Christ, to his baptism, his following, his entry into Jerusalem on an ass, the Last Supper (banquet and sacrificial rite), his Passion, death and resurrection, the dates and nature of the various feast days, his power of healing and of changing water into wine, inevitably evoke Dionysiac precedents.8

    Tammuz

    The self-sacrifice of Christ has often been compared to that of Tammuz or Adonis but most resembles the young man, the fairest and the best, who sacrificed himself to absolve his people of their sins. This was part of the earliest sun-worship.9

    We find the same inner message in the stories of the Egyptian Osiris and the Greek Dionysos, in the saga of Tammuz of Mesopotamia. Elements of which are later reflected in the Gospel accounts of Jesus.

    Tammuz is the Babylonian version of the ancient Sumerian saviour-god Dumuzi, the “only-begotten Son”. Tammuz is a beautiful youth whose cyclical death and rebirth are associated with the cycles of nature. During summer Tammuz is united in love with his sister/mother Ishtar, the Queen of Heaven. At the end of summer Tammuz dies, and the heart-broken Ishtar goes down to Hades to rescue him. With his rescue he is reborn in the upper Realm of Light. He is called Healer, Saviour, and Heavenly Shepherd.

    Tammuz’s death and descent into Hades symbolises his fall into the spiritual darkness of the physical world. He is rescued from this gloomy realm by Ishtar, Heavenly Wisdom, symbolising his spiritual self or True Being. When Tammuz dies, he falls into a pit (Hades), and Ishtar (representing both the Divine Spirit and his spirit) mourns his fall and entrapment:

    The lord is exposed to the woe in the pit…
    My heart is sending wailing of flute to the steppe,
    to the place where the strong one is chained,
    to the place of the chains of Tammuz,
    to the lamb which is given in the power of the nether world…

    The Gospels relate the women coming to Jesus’ tomb were the first to see the risen Lord. Centuries before, women lamented the slain Tammuz, the sacrificial lamb, with the cry:

    Why have they slain him, him of the plains?
    The Shepherd, the Man of Wisdom,
    the Man of Sorrow why have they slain?
    The Lord, the Shepherd of the fold lives no more,
    the spouse of the Queen of Heaven lives no more.

    The women of Jerusalem still wept for Tammuz at the Feast of Unleavened Bread in Isaiah’s day and according to the Church Father Jerome he had a sacred grove at Bethlehem. The Hebrew prophets, in their preaching of the worship of Yahweh, condemned the popular cult of Tammuz. But this did not stop elements of the older tradition being incorporated into Israelite religion and later Christianity.

    Attis

    Happy is the man who is beloved of the gods. Happy is he who, instructed in the divine rites, sanctifies his life, whose soul makes its way to the mountains, for he will experience raptures by virtue of the holy purification.10

    Dr. Martin A. Larson says that “Attis became one of the most potent saviour gods of the ancient world, and left his heavy imprint upon Christianity.” Attis, like Jesus the Christ, was a personification of the Solar Kristos. The early Christian theologian Arnobius writes, “When we name Attis… we mean and speak of the sun.” An ancient Roman inscription declared: “To Attis the Most High God who holds the universe together.”

    The ancient Greeks envisioned the youthful virgin-born Attis as a solar saviour deity holding within himself “the incorporeal cause of the forms that are embodied in matter.” Attis had descended “even unto our earth… from the stars” so that he might, through self-sacrifice, teach mortals to prepare themselves for that spiritual journey that would bring them to the celestial throne. It was the purpose and destiny of Attis to demonstrate that “in all things the conversion to what is higher [spiritual development] produces more power… than the inclination to what is lower [carnal reproduction].” Following his act of self-sacrifice, Attis was “led upwards as though from our earth” to resume again “his ancient scepter.” The Roman Emperor Julian (332-363) wrote “the trumpet sounds for Attis and for all of us who flew down from heaven and fell to earth.” Attis, the Solar Kristos, is “the leader of all the tribes of divine beings”.

    The Gnostic Secret School known as the Naassenes identified Attis with Jesus the Christ, whose mission it was to show the way to pass “from the material condition… to the eternal essence.” The Naassenes insisted that if an individual wished to become enlightened and return to the Realm of Light at death (rather than be reincarnated) he or she must undergo a process by which they might become “neither male nor female, but a new creature… who reunites the two sexes [the primal androgynous Adamic state].” A Naassene poem praising Attis shows how the ancients envisioned the Solar Kristos embodied in numerous local deities and represented in an array of forms:

    Whether [Thou art of] the race of Saturn or happy Jupiter, or mighty Rhea, Hail Attis, gloomy mutilation of Rhea. Assyrians style thee thrice-longed-for Adonis, and the whole of Egypt [calls thee] Osiris, celestial horn of the Moon; Greeks denominate [thee] Wisdom; Samothracians, venerable Adam; Haemonians, Corybas; and the Phrygians [name thee] at one time Papa, at another time Corpse, or God… or green Ear of Corn that has been reaped.

    Jesus the Christ

    That the Christos represents the solar power reverenced by every nation of antiquity cannot be controverted. If Jesus revealed the nature and purpose of this solar power under the name and personality of Christos, thereby giving to this abstract power the attributes of a god-man, He but followed a precedent set by all previous World-Teachers. This god-man, thus endowed with all the qualities of Deity, signifies the latent divinity in every man. Mortal man achieves deification only through at-one-ment with this divine Self. Union with the immortal Self constitutes immortality, and he who finds his true Self is therefore “saved.” This Christos, or divine man in man, is man’s real hope of salvation – the living Mediator between abstract Deity and mortal humankind. As Atys, Adonis, Bacchus, and Orpheus in all likelihood were originally illumined men who later were confused with the symbolic personages whom they created as personifications of this divine power, so Jesus has been confused with the Christos, or god-man, whose wonders He preached. Since the Christos was the god-man imprisoned in every creature, it was the first duty of the initiate to liberate, or “resurrect” this Eternal One within himself. He who attained reunion with his Christos was consequently termed a Christian, or Christened, man.11

    Among the Essenes, a Kristos/Christos (Anointed One) was a priest, specifically designated as the Redeemer. Among the Slavic peoples, Kristos or Krstnik meant a sacrificial hero. The Khlysts, a 17th century Russian Gnostic community, taught that every man and woman was potentially capable of embodying the Krist/Christos, the Divine Word (Logos) of the Father.

    The true “Christ Principle,” the glorified Spirit of Supreme Truth, is universal. The Solar Kristos, embodied in Jesus and all the saviours and Avatars of the past, cannot be monopolised by any one person or group. The Kristos, the only genuine Christ, cannot be confined to any one creed or sect. The name “Christ” has been used in a manner so intolerant and dogmatic that Christianity is the religion of arrogance and ignorance. This is why many Gnostic Teachers prefer to use the spelling Kristos as opposed to the popular title Christ that is today applied to a fictionalised, corporal, carnalised Jesus of the Churches.

    Few Christians understand the ageless Mystery of the Kristos. The real truth of Krist is revealed by Divine Wisdom or Gnosis, which concerns itself with the essential reality behind the fleeting appearances of objects in nature.

    The Christian sacred books, especially the Gospels, Acts and Epistles contain fragments of Gnostic wisdom, very similar to the pre-Christian Mysteries of initiation. It is the corrupted, interpolated passages and distorted literalist presentation that makes of the Bible a book of falsehoods. The New Testament Gospels were not written in the time of the Galilean Master Jesus, some of the books compiled as late as the 2nd century C.E. The Nazarene writers of the Sayings or Logia of Jesus the Christ, of which the Gospels are a corrupted later compilation, knew the Truth, but those who came after them had only dogma and a quest for power. The Gnostic Nazarenes experienced the living spirit of the teachings of Jesus the Christ. The Church Fathers, lacking the guidance of the Spirit of Truth, could only grasp a very materialised and disfigured version of the story of Jesus.

    The early Gnostics viewed the drama of the New Testament crucifixion – regardless of history – as fundamentally an allegorical and philosophical symbol. As always the Gnostics look beyond mere words to connect with the timeless inner message. Read in their literal, dead letter meaning, the four gospels appear to the honest inquirer as simply slightly altered versions of the pre-Christian pagan Mysteries. This is because the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth, death and resurrection reflect the stories associated with previous manifestations of the Solar Kristos such Attis, Adonis, Tammuz, Osiris, Mithra and Dionysus.

    The early Gnostic Christians saw the Christ of the Gospels as a Manifestor and Revealer of the Unknown Father. A dozen times, according to Matthew, Jesus the Christ calls the Supreme Lord, “My Father.” In St. John’s Gospel, the Christ says, “I and my Father are one.” “I am come in my Father’s name.” “My Father hath sent me.” “I am in my Father.” Etc.

    The Galilean Master Yeshua (Jesus/Jason/Joshua) the Essene, who studied the Ancient Mysteries in Egypt, became one with the heavenly Logos or Solar Kristos at his baptism. This is why within the Gospels we find a mixture of Essene sayings, including direct quotations from Essene scriptures, together with a retelling in exoteric language of age old mysteries. Along the way we also encounter numerous interpolations and revisions, the work of later Church scribes. It is this Jesus the Christ, the Essene Master, who is credited as the inspirer of the first Nazarene communities that existed long before the era called ‘Christian’. They are the only original Christ-ians.

    But these separated communities, who were in the world but definitely not of the world, had their roots in the ancient Mystery schools, in the Mystic Brotherhoods of Egypt, and in the Essene Order. Many of the virtues associated with the Gospel Jesus and His followers were already present in the Essene communities. According to Philo Judaeus:

    Three things regulate all they learn and do – viz., love to God, love of virtue, love for man. A proof of the first is the matchless sanctity of their entire life, their fear of oaths and lies, and the conviction that God is only the originator of good, never of evil. They show their love of virtue by their indifference to gain, glory, and pleasure; by their temperance, perseverance, simplicity, absence of wants, humility, faithfulness, and straightforwardness. They exemplify their love for their fellow-creatures by kindness, absence of pretensions, and lastly by the community of goods.

    This helps us to appreciate the environment that gave birth to and nurtured the Nazarene communities and Gnostic schools. It is worth noting that in the Gospel of Matthew there are references to a widespread secret network that supported the disciples of the Master Jesus. Wherever they went in the land of Palestine they encountered the ‘worthy’, the ‘faithful’, or the ‘Brethren of the Lord’. “Peace be with you!” appears to have been the greeting or pass-word of the Essenes, the disciples of Jesus, and also of the Nazarenes.

    The mystery of the Kristos, presented in the life and words of Jesus, was identical with that which had been communicated to those who are ‘worthy’ since the dawn of time. From the Gospel according to Luke, we learn that the worthy are those who were initiated into the Mysteries or Truths of the Gnosis, and who were accounted worthy to attain that resurrection from the dead in this life. They were those who knew they could die no more. In other words, they are those initiates who strive to live the higher life and to attain spiritual illumination. Such individuals seek to realise the Krist within. This resurrection is the birthright of every human being endowed with soul and spirit. Such an individual becomes, and is a Christ-Man, a Kristed One, and a true Christ-ian.

    The Church Father Clement of Alexandria was familiar with the Mysteries of the kingdom preserved by the Nazarenes. He wrote:

    That man with whom the Logos dwells… is made like God and is beautiful… [T]hat man becomes God, for God so wills it…. [T]he Logos of God became man that from man you might learn how man may become God.

    This doctrine of deification was at the core of the pre-Christian Mysteries. The distinction between men and gods was that men died and gods did not. Thus, the object of the Mysteries was to become immortal, to become one with the Solar Krist. The initiates of Mithra declared, “I am thou and thou art I,” that is the same as Christ’s admonition, “Abide in me, and I in you” (John 15:4).

    The Christians later perverted this sacred truth by declaring the Man Jesus to be the only Christ, the only expression of the Divine Logos, the one Son of the Father, and even the eternal God in the flesh. Belief in the Man Jesus as the Messiah and Anointed One was taught by His first disciples, but adoration of Jesus as the one eternal God come in the flesh was not taught at all. Even in the heavily edited New Testament Gospels the words ascribed to Jesus are plain. Whenever occasion arose, the Man Jesus asserted his inferiority to the Eternal Father.

    He made himself inferior in knowledge when he said that of the day and hour of the day of judgment no one knew, neither the angels in heaven nor the Son; no one except the Father (Mark 13:32). He made himself inferior in power when he said that seats on his right hand and on his left in the kingdom of heaven were not his to give (Mark 10). He made himself inferior in virtue when he requested a certain man not to address him as “Good Master,” for there was none good but God (Mark 10:18).

    Should there be any further doubt about the nature of the Man Jesus, one only has to contemplate the words of his prayer at Gethsemane. “All things are possible unto thee,” imply that all things were not possible to him, while its conclusion “not what I will, but what thou wilt,” indicates submission to a superior power (Mark 14:36).

    The Gospel of Mark says not a word about Bethlehem or a miraculous birth. The Nazarene community at Jerusalem to which Mary and the brothers of Jesus belonged (Acts 1:14), and over which, James presided, knew nothing of the much-later Church doctrine of Jesus as “the one God come in human form”.

    The Nazarenes, faithful to the tradition of the apostles, saw Jesus as a Man, like other men, but that he was good and virtuous. The Gnostic Nazarene community established by the Master Teacher Cerinthus said Jesus was born altogether as other men are, but he excelled all men in virtue, knowledge and wisdom. At the time of his baptism, the Divine Word, the eternal Christ – Kristos – came upon him symbolised by a dove, and left him at the time of his crucifixion. This was also the position of St. Paul when he wrote how the heavenly Christ “made himself of no reputation” in coming to earth. The Christ as the Divine Word was far more significant to the disciples than Jesus as a flesh and blood being.

    The virulently anti-Gnostic Catholic Church Father Irenaeus, speaking of the Nazarene doctrine taught by Cerinthus, says:

    He represents Jesus as the son of Joseph and Mary, according to the ordinary course of human generation, and not as having been born of a virgin. He believed nevertheless that he was more righteous, prudent and wise than most men, and that the Christ descended upon, and entered into him, at the time of his baptism.

    The Nazarene doctrine, as propounded by Cerinthus, was that Jesus was a mortal, but as the best and wisest of the human race, he was selected as the worthy instrument to restore upon earth the authentic knowledge of the true and supreme Deity. When he was baptised – an outward symbol of inner transformation – in the Jordan, and not till then, he became more than man. At that time, the Solar Kristos, the Logos (Word) of the Father, the First Emanation from the Throne of Light, the Crown Prince of God, descended on Jesus symbolised by a dove, to inhabit his mind, and direct his actions during the allotted period of his ministry.

    The Solar Kristos has been made known by various Anointed Ones and Avatars since the dawn of time. In His earthly ministry Jesus the Christ taught the Path of Transformation, the way to self-mastery and spiritual enlightenment. At the crucifixion, the spirit and blood of Jesus were envisioned by the Nazarenes as having enlivened the earth, permeating it with His consciousness and the energy of His Being. Jesus’ life-experience became fused with the soul of the planet. They believed that through the communion rite they were imbued with the transcendent abilities of the Solar Krist, following in the footsteps of the Elder Brother. Jesus’ sacrifice made possible and guaranteed limitless potential attainment to the true Christ-ian disciple. When he was delivered into the hands of his enemies, the Kristos departed him and returned to the Realm of Light.

    Jesus the Christ declares in the Gospel of John, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born again he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” Here the Christ is referring to the birth from above, spiritual illumination. He who finds Kristos within himself and recognises it as his only Way becomes a follower of the Solar Krist/Christ. Kristos or the Christ consciousness is the realisation of the divine spirit within. To achieve the Kristos condition, one has to live in Christ, to obliterate one’s limited, conditioned personality and it’s separateness from the Eternal Father, the Absolute. Only by realising the divine spark within can one be united with the Life and Light of the Solar Kristos. In the words of Dr. Martin Larson:

    Each man is torn between the two contrary natures in his members, which always strive for mastery. But this conflict cannot end in victory for the higher without direct aid from the God of Light. The advent of Christ is the historic fact which makes the triumph for the spiritual aspect possible. God’s Nous descended upon the entirely human Jesus at His baptism; and He therefore proclaimed salvation to all those who are spiritual or will strive to become so.12

    Clearly there is a difference between the Man Jesus and the transcendent Christ/Krist revealed in the Gospels and in all the legends of the great Avatars and Saviours. Today, not possessing the key of Divine Wisdom, the Christian churches worship a man-made, carnalised Jesus. One early Gnostic school masterly illustrated the difference between the Cosmic Christ and the Man Jesus in the following account:

    Many of his [Jesus’] disciples did not recognise the descent of Christ into him; but when Christ descended into Jesus, then he began to work miracles and to heal and to proclaim the unknown Father and to confess himself openly as the Son of the First Man.

    At the crucifixion the Christ left Jesus but we are told:

    Christ did not forget what was his own, but from above sent into him a certain power which raised him in a body which was both psychic and spiritual; the worldly elements remained in the world. When the disciples saw that the transformed Jesus had risen again, they did not recognise him [Luke 24:34], nor did they recognise the Christ by whose grace he rose from the dead. And the greatest error of the disciples was this, that they thought he rose in a worldly [material] body, and did not know that “flesh and blood do not attain to the kingdom of God” [1 Cor. 15:50]. The descent and ascent of the Christ is confirmed by the fact that the disciples say that Jesus did nothing remarkable either before the baptism or after the resurrection. They are ignorant of the union of Jesus with the Christ… Jesus remained for eighteen months after the resurrection and from the perception which descended into him learned this teaching which is manifest. He taught these things to a few of his disciples who, he knew, could receive [Matt. 19:11] such great mysteries [Matt. 13:11], and thus was taken up into Heaven.

    The Gnostic Master Teacher Marcion (C.E. 85-160), in response to the corruption being advanced in the name of the Christ, established his own community early in the 2nd century. He denounced as fraudulent the notion that the Christ referred exclusively to a Man of flesh and blood. The Solar Krist has no genealogy or Jewish line of descent, no earthly mother, no mundane birthplace or human birth. Marcion preached that throughout human history the Supreme God, the Lord of Light and Love, sent His Word (Logos) to every tribe and nation. Thus the Solar Kristos manifested in the Messengers of Light who brought suffering humanity saving knowledge of their true origin, revealing the Heavenly Father. Marcion exposed the materialist – later Catholic – Christians who imagined that the Christ had risen in a physical body, not knowing that “flesh and blood do not attain to the kingdom of God.”

    Gerald Massey offers the following thoughts on the gulf between ‘Historic Christianity’ (from which modern day Christianity arose, be it Protestant or Catholic) and the Gnostic Nazarenes:

    Historic Christianity originated with turning the Gnostic and Esoteric teachings inside out and externalising the mythical allegory in a personal human history. All that was interior with the knowers [Gnostics] was made objective; all that was spiritual in significance was embodied to be made palpable for the ignorant. A corporeal Christ was substituted for the trans-corporeal man – a Christ whose advent was without, instead of the one that must be evolved within – a personal Saviour who died for all, instead of the Christ that was the living spirit working within all. It was remarked by Augustine that the Gnostics “promised eternal life to anybody” – that is, with the soul of man was an eternal principle, and the resurrection was not cunningly reserved for the elect who accepted the Historic belief. The Gnostic claimed to be illuminated by the presence of the Christ within; the Christian, according to Justin, by the name of the Christ without.13

    The story of the Christ, the Solar Kristos, is not limited to physical or historical events. The story of Jesus the Christ in the Gospels, complete with its miracles, is not to be understood as mere mundane history. It is a humanised retelling of a spiritual reality of the interior life.

    The cosmic message in the legends of Attis, Osiris, Dionysus, Tammuz, Mithra – indeed all the saviours of antiquity – find a dramatic restatement and fulfillment in the Gnostic Revealer Jesus the Christ. What counts in the various stories of divine incarnations are the inherent principles and not the legends with which they are surrounded in order to make them more readily understood. It is of no importance that these stories are legion, differing from one region to another. We should not lose sight of the fact that such accounts are only there to make abstract ideas and universal realities more comprehensible. To attribute to Jesus the Christ the miracles and legends of the saviour deity Dionysus does not distract from His message, but serves to make His divine nature more easily understood. A cosmic reality, an eternal symbol, is behind all the historical facts and the legends associated with Jesus the Christ. Jesus embodied the Solar Kristos and came to rescue the sparks of Light and show the way back home. He taught man how to resurrect the Krist within and be reunited with the unknown Father.

    A Gnostic scripture, the Apocryphon of John, compiled in the 2nd century and discovered in 1945 near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi, offers a revelation of the cosmic Christ. The writer tells how the Christ appeared to the disciples in multiple forms:

    Behold, the [heavens opened and the whole creation [which is] below heaven shone and [the world] was shaken. [I was afraid, and behold I] saw in the light [a youth who stood] by me. While I looked [at him he became] like an old man. And he [changed his] likeness (again) becoming like a servant. There was [not a plurality] before me, but there was a [likeness] with multiple forms in the light, and the [likeness] appeared through each other, [and] the likeness had three forms.

    He said to me, John, John, why do you doubt, or why [are you] afraid? You are not unfamiliar with this image, are you? – that is, do not [be] timid! – I am the one who is [with you] always. I [am the Father], I am the Mother, I am the Son. I am the undefiled and incorruptible one.14

    In celebrating the birth of Jesus the Christ we worship the Solar Kristos who has come to earth in numerous embodiments to deliver the eternal message of liberation. Hail the Solar Krist!

    Contributed by Universal Life Gnostic Fellowship (Australia), an extended version of the original article that appeared in New Dawn 22 (Nov-Dec-Jan 1993/1994) entitled “The Mystery of Christian Origins”. For further information visit www.gnostic.info.

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    .

    Footnotes

    1. C.W. King, Gnostics & Their Remains

    2. H. Jeanmaire, Dionysos

    3. James Wasserman, Art and Symbols of the Occult

    4. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion

    5. Dr. Martin A. Larson, The Story of Christian Origins

    6. Pyramid Texts, 1004

    7. Martin A. Larson, The Story of Christian Origins

    8. Alain Danielou, Gods of Love and Ecstasy

    9. James Bailey, The God-Kings & The Titans

    10. Euripedes, The Suppliants, 72

    11. Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages

    12. Dr. Martin Larson, The Story of Christian Origins

    13. Gerald Massey’s Lectures

    14. Apocryphon of John

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author. For our reproduction notice, click here.

  • Christianity: The Ultimate Secret

    Christianity: The Ultimate Secret

    From New Dawn 84

    Today there is an unprecedented thirst for the innermost secrets of Christianity. The quest for these lost teachings drives the plots of best-sellers like The Da Vinci Code and Holy Blood, Holy Grail; it is discussed in major newsmagazines; and it is the subject of intense speculation and debate among believers and nonbelievers alike. What are these secrets? What difference might they make to our lives today?

    Sometimes the hidden truths of Christianity are described in terms of suppressed facts about Jesus’s life. One of the most popular at present is the idea that he was married to Mary Magdalene and even had children with her. Some say Joseph of Arimathea brought these children to Britain after Christ’s death.

    There are some intriguing hints of these ideas in the written texts. In one apocryphal Gospel, for example, Jesus is described as kissing Mary Magdalene frequently on the mouth. The other disciples become jealous and start to grumble, “Why don’t you love us as you love her?” Jesus turns to them and says, “Why don’t I love you as I love her?” – the answer, presumably, being obvious enough.

    But there is, of course, no real proof that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene or that they had children. And even if it could be proven, what difference would it really make? What would it matter even if their descendants had survived to this day? The bloodline would have been so diluted over the course of two thousand years that the connection would be extremely tenuous in any event.

    Consequently, while speculations about Christ’s private life may fascinate us as we are fascinated by gossip about celebrities, in the end it can be little more than an entertainment. If these are the ultimate secrets of Christianity, they are rather disappointing.

    Sometimes, however, these hidden truths are portrayed in another light. In a recent article on Jesus and the lost Gospels, the American newsmagazine Time observed that, according to Gnostic teachings, Christ’s task was to transmit a “special wisdom” that confers spiritual liberation. Unfortunately, as the article goes on to say, this wisdom “is alluded to but not spelled out” in Gnostic texts.

    While the Time article is correct in saying that this wisdom is not spelled out in the Gnostic texts, the knowledge has by no means been lost. It has been preserved in the esoteric tradition of Christianity, which has survived in an unbroken line from Christ’s day to the present. It can be found in obscure texts, oral teachings – even in the canonical Gospels when they are read at a level beyond the merely literal.

    These truths have, it is true, become obscured and concealed, for a number of reasons, some good, some not so good. But before I can explain why they came to be hidden for so long, let me spell out briefly what, I believe, the essence of this wisdom is. It’s not particularly difficult to understand, although it will be somewhat easier to grasp if you have some meditative experience.

    Discovering the True “I”

    The best way to introduce it is by means of a simple exercise. Sit comfortably, in a relaxed but alert position. Have your back as straight as possible; you can prop yourself up with pillows against the back of a chair if you like. Let your attention settle down, and, to the best of your ability, allow the ordinary preoccupations of your day to subside.

    Look around the room you are sitting in. It may or may not be familiar; that does not matter. Only be sure to cultivate a sense of the presence of yourself as you sit in your chair. This is where you are; around you, outside you, is the visible and sensible world.

    Now close your eyes and bring your attention to your body. Be aware of your sensations – the breath, perhaps, or the beating of the heart, or the feelings in your back as it presses against the chair. If you pay attention, you can catch a glimpse of two things: an experience, a muscle sensation, say, and an “I” that is experiencing it.

    Go deeper still, to the river of thoughts, images, and emotions that are probably coursing in front of your mind. You may try to stop the flow of this stream of consciousness, as it has sometimes been called. Probably you will fail. The thoughts and images, memories, ideas, speculations, plans will most likely continue whether you want them to or not.

    In this realm also you can observe two things: an “I” that is experiencing and something that is experienced. As you continue, even your most intimate feelings and desires will pass before you like images on a screen. If you can remain both relaxed and alert (admittedly a difficult balance), you may have a sense of something very quiet and small in you. It seems to have no power, no volition of its own, yet it is that in you which is constantly awake and experiences all that passes for your life. In the strictest sense, you cannot even observe it, for it is actually that which observes. If you look for it, you find that it continually recedes further and further, for there is no limit to this “I” that experiences. You can follow this thread of consciousness back for as long as you like, but you may find this exercise to be of value even if you can only do it for a few seconds.

    What Is the Kingdom of Heaven?

    If you read the New Testament carefully, you will notice that the synoptic Gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – often refer to a mysterious entity known as “the kingdom of heaven” or “the kingdom of God.” Christ describes it in parables, likening it to a mustard seed, to leaven, to a treasure hidden in a field. In John, on the other hand – long known to be the most “esoteric” of the Gospels – Christ does not speak in parables. Instead he describes the kingdom of heaven by using “I am” statements: “I am the door”; “I am the true vine”; “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” You will also remember from Exodus, when Moses encounters the Lord in the burning bush, that the highest name of God is “I am that I am.”

    These texts point to the same truth that you may have experienced while doing the exercise above. The kingdom of heaven is that in you which says “I.” This is not the ordinary ego, with its bundles of agendas, desires, and loathings. In its purest, most naked form, this true “I” is consciousness – a consciousness that we share with the entire universe, animate and inanimate. So when Christ says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” esoterically speaking, he is saying, “‘I am’ is the way, the truth, and the life.” “I am” is the door through which we must proceed to enter the kingdom – that is, to recognise and understand this truth experientially.

    The inner Christian tradition has a name for this experiential recognition: it is called gnosis, or “knowledge” in the true sense. Although gnosis is often regarded as something rather mysterious, as you can see, the fundamental insight behind it is comparatively simple. Understanding it doesn’t require vast amounts of learning or scholarship. But there are a number of things that interfere with this recognition, which suggests why this truth is so frequently lost and so frequently needs to be discovered anew.

    Remember Christ’s parable about the kingdom of heaven being “like unto a treasure hid in a field” (Matt. 13:44). In terms of the exercise above, the consciousness, the “I” that is fundamentally you, is buried in a “field.” This is the field of your own experience – your thoughts, emotions, feelings, your pleasures and pains. You become identified with this experience, forgetting that there is something beyond it – the experiencer, the “I” that is eternal and undying and immune to all destruction and decay. But if you remember the truth of what you are – or rather of what this “I” is – you unearth the treasure from the field. And as the parable goes on to say, that is worth the price of everything else put together.

    Death and Resurrection

    It is written that “God loved the world.” Like God, consciousness, this “I” that stands at the back of each of us, witnessing and experiencing our lives through us, loves the world it has made. It loves this world so much, in fact, that it rushes forth to unite with it, becoming lost in the process. In the Gnostic Gospels, this is likened to a pearl that is lost at the bottom of the sea. But the most famous metaphor for this process forms the central drama of Christianity: death and resurrection.

    When the “I” is submerged in and identified with its own experience, this is, esoterically, known as death. In Genesis God tells Adam that if he eats of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, he will surely die. This doesn’t refer to physical death, but to the “death” of consciousness in the darkness of its own experience. The passion, death, and resurrection of Christ portray this process allegorically. The God-man is crucified. He suffers all sorts of pain and indignities, and finally perishes in an ignominious fashion. But in the end it does not matter, because he rises again in a glorified form.

    This is Christ’s story. It is our story as well. We are crucified on a cross known as time and space. We pass through life, which often seems to offer no end of sorrow, pain, and humiliation. And in the end we die. But in fact nothing that is real or true about us dies. The true “I,” the consciousness that is the only real and eternal part of us, goes on to live in a new and different form.

    This is a universal truth, so it has always been known. The ancients before Christ expressed it in the form of mystery religions. While we don’t know exactly what went on in the Eleusinian or Dionysian mysteries, we do know that in essence they were about death and resurrection. Here the great mystery of the death and rebirth of consciousness was expressed in ritual form. As the great esoteric visionary Rudolf Steiner pointed out, with the coming of Christ, what had been conducted secretly, in the mystery religions, was now carried out publicly and in full view. And the “good news” of this truth was proclaimed to all nations.

    The Truth Hidden

    Ironically, as this truth was proclaimed far and wide, its essential meaning came to be submerged. Rites like the mass were instituted to commemorate the passion of Christ, but it was forgotten that Christ’s own passion was to remind us of our own situation.

    As the spiritual master G.I. Gurdjieff pointed out, “The Christian church is a school concerning which people have forgotten it is a school. Imagine a school where the teachers gives lectures and perform explanatory demonstrations without knowing that these are lectures and demonstrations; and where the pupils or simply the people who come to the school take these lectures and demonstrations for ceremonies, or rites, or ‘sacraments,’ i.e., magic. This would approximate to the Christian church of our times.”

    But why did this happen? How did the central message of Christianity come to be so thoroughly occluded for so long? This happened for several reasons. In the first place, the insight toward which this article has been pointing is not always that easy to grasp. It can be difficult for consciousness to look back upon itself, especially since, as I’ve suggested, this true “I” can never be seen, because it is always that which sees. As St. Francis of Assisi put it, “What you are looking for is what is looking.”

    Moreover, now as in the past, people by and large tend to want an external religion, an external God who controls their destinies and can damn them or, being duly appeased, save them from damnation. This is not really an accurate picture of the human condition, but people tend to fall back on it because it’s easy to grasp. It was even more so in the formative times of Christianity, when religions of all sorts – at least in the West – were preoccupied with coaxing the gods through sacrifice. When Christianity came onto the scene, it was almost immediately recast in the same terms. Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection were seen, not as a reminder of the deepest truth about ourselves, but as an appeasement of a petulant deity. Two thousand years later, it’s clear that this model does not make any sense, but people haven’t managed to find anything plausible in its stead. That’s why it’s time to reintroduce and restate these central truths.

    Another issue has to do with the social role of religion. Religion has two functions in society, which don’t always jibe well with each other.

    In the first place, it’s meant to help individuals make contact with the higher dimensions of their own being. In the second place, it serves as a guarantor of the social order. Since societies can’t afford to have policemen watching over everyone’s shoulder at every moment to make sure they behave, they have found it helpful to install an internalised policeman into the human psyche. This policeman usually takes the form of an all-seeing God who watches our every move and keeps an elaborate tally of our good and bad deeds, for which we will be recompensed accordingly in the afterlife.

    Unfortunately, the notion of an external God who rewards and punishes, while it is a convenient way to oil the wheels of the social order, tends to interfere with personal experience of the divine. People are led to feel guilty and unworthy. Like Cain after murdering Abel, they hide from the voice of God.

    Archons and Conspiracies

    These reflections have led some people to view the social and political order as a massive conspiracy whereby a privileged few manipulate the psyches of the masses in order to retain their position at the top. Although it’s certainly true that in many ways the social order is run by and for the benefit of comparatively few individuals, it has never seemed plausible to me that they manipulate these social mechanisms in the way they’re sometimes portrayed. Human beings, in their unenlightened condition, are simply social mammals – and mammalian societies have pecking orders. While those at the top may benefit from their position, it doesn’t follow that they’ve created the system or even understand it particularly well. They’re simply fighting to stay on top. This is no less true of the pope or the president of the United States than it is of an alpha male in a pack of wolves.

    Speaking of conspiracies, I might point out that certain esoteric Christian texts, notably those categorised as Gnostic, refer to a corrupt and wicked cosmic order. This evil system goes far beyond mere political and economic conspiracies. As the Epistle to the Ephesians puts it, “we struggle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph. 6:12). The Gnostic texts speak of entities known as archons or “rulers.” These entities, which have peculiar names like “Oblivion” and “Deficiency,” are sometimes portrayed as inimical angels that bar the way to the paradise of union with God. Is there any truth to this concept?

    As sometimes happens, the truth may be both more and less terrifying than it seems at first glance. Certainly it would be disheartening to believe that evil archangels, with powers far surpassing those of mere humans, lurk over us to keep us incarcerated in our little pen in the cosmic order. It may be more dismaying still to realise these archons exist, not in the spiritual stratosphere, but within the very structure of our minds and brains.

    The archons of Gnostic mythology resemble what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called the “categories.” These are basic modalities – such as space, time, quantity, and causality – by which the human mind structures its own experience. These categories shape our experience of the world, because this is how our brains work. At the same time, the world isn’t really this way; it’s just the way we experience it. From this insight, Kant concluded that the world as it is in itself is unknowable: we will always be limited by the construction of our own minds.

    Esoteric traditions of both East and West would agree with Kant that our customary ways of seeing are limited and constrained. But they don’t agree that we are stuck here. By attaining gnosis, also known as enlightenment, we can free ourselves from the world our brains have made and see a higher reality.

    Some accomplish this realisation spontaneously: it comes unbidden and unsought, a gift from heaven. These events are real enough; you only need open a book like William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience to come across many examples of them. But this kind of instantaneous realisation doesn’t occur for most of us. We require systems of spiritual training and practice to liberate ourselves from that subtle and invidious master known as the human mind. Meditation is one of the most universal methods for achieving this end, because in most of its forms meditation stills the consciousness and helps it to cut loose, even if only for a few moments, from the constraints of ordinary experience.

    In this way, we can begin to make that most difficult journey, which leads us away from the world we know to the world as we can know it, and on which faith is only the first step toward knowledge.

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  • The Gospel of Judas Revealed

    The Gospel of Judas Revealed

    From New Dawn 96 (May-June 2006)

    The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week three days before he celebrated Passover. …Jesus said to him, “Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal.”
    – The Gospel of Judas1

    From an historical point of view this find is as important as the Nag Hammadi writings discovered half a century ago. Everything tells us that we are dealing with the Gospel of Judas referred to by Irenaeus in the second century AD. It is fantastic that something like that re-appears after 1800 years.
    – Dr. Stephen Emmel2

    The story of how the Gospel of Judas arrived in the Western world is a fascinating tale. Like many of the so-called Gnostic Gospels, it somehow travelled out of Egypt and arrived in the US with a large price tag. Unlike many manuscripts which vanish sight unseen, luck or providence if you like brought this manuscript not only to light but finally to restoration and publication. In the words of Professor Elaine Pagels, “the discovery of the Gospel of Judas is astonishing.”

    Originally unearthed by a farmer in 1978 near El Minya, Egypt, from where it had been hidden in a “tomb-like box” for some 1,600 years, the leather-bound papyrus codex was in superb condition. The farmer secretly sold the codex to an antiquities dealer in Cairo, without advising Egyptian Antiquities. In a clandestine meeting in 1983, the antiquities dealer offered the codex for sale to various scholars in Geneva, however with an asking price of over $3,000,000 and a dubious provenance, the price was considered extraordinary.

    Ironically, while the Gospel survived well in Egypt, it seriously deteriorated when stored for some 16 years in a safety deposit box in Hicksville, New York. Finally purchased by antiquities dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos in 2000, the following year the codex was acquired by the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art in Switzerland. With the help of National Geographic and an agreement reached with the Egyptian government, restoration work soon began.

    Known as the Codex Tchacos (named after Dimaratos Tchacos, father of Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos), it is a 26-page document written on 13 sheets of papyrus leaf in ancient Egyptian, or Coptic. The codex contains not only the Gospel of Judas, but the First Apocalypse of James, the Letter of Peter to Philip, and a small fragment of text that scholars have called the Book of Allogene.

    If we focus on the Gospel of Judas, the document is a 3rd century Coptic translation of a now lost Greek text, thought to have been written by a group of early Gnostic Christians before 180 CE. While its significance is much debated, there is no question about its authenticity. There is universal agreement it is the genuine article. “All you had to do was look at this thing once,” said Bart Ehrman, a scholar of early Christianity. “I’ve seen a lot of ancient manuscripts, and there was no question.”3 According to James M. Robinson, America’s leading expert on ancient religious texts from Egypt, “I don’t know of any scholar who thinks this is fake.”4

    Heresy Hunting

    Back in the 2nd century of the Christian era, the Christian Bishop Irenaeus mentioned a Gospel of Judas was in use among the Kainites, an early Gnostic Christian sect. In part I of his Against Heresy, paragraph 31.1, he wrote:

    (Some) stated that Cain owes his existence to the highest power, while Esau, Korak, the Sodomites and all other men are dependants of each other. (…) They believe that Judas the Betrayer was fully informed of these things and that only he understanding the truth like no one else fulfilled the secret of betrayal that confused all things, both in heaven and on earth. They invented their own history called the Gospel of Judas.

    The Gospel had been known to exist for some time when discussed by Irenaeus around 180 CE, with his primary source being Justin Martyr. This moves the date back to around 140 CE, and most scholars therefore date the Gospel itself to around 120 CE or even earlier. This is significant because it places the Gospel of Judas within the same timeframe as the Biblical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

    The publication of the Gospel of Judas undertaken by National Geographic is unlikely to disturb the mainstream Christian church. In a recent interview, Monsignor Walter Brandmuller, president of the Vatican’s Committee for Historical Science, called it “a product of religious fantasy,” and went on to say, “There is no campaign, no movement for the rehabilitation of (Judas) the traitor of Jesus.”5

    From past experience with the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947 and the Nag Hammadi Library unearthed two years earlier, whatever the merits of a document it does not bring about a religious revolution. There is an entrenched power structure within Christendom and regardless of the strength of evidence presented, the Church will use spin, distortion and, if necessary, violence (remember the first crusades were against the Cathars) to preserve its dominion.

    The significance of the Gospel of Judas needs to be seen in the context of the larger picture provided by Gnosticism and current scholarship regarding Christian origins. Too often modern Christians live in a sort of self imposed ghetto. They read Christian books, subscribe to Christian magazines, and generally are not exposed to scholarship except through the lens of their chosen leaders or churches. In many cases even when a Christian leader tries to inject scholarship and critical thinking, it is still filtered through a very antiquated religious lens. There does seem to be a surprisingly large gap between modern research into Christian origins, even that generally available, and the information the average Christian receives within his or her community.

    Over the last 100 years the academic model that has arisen in regards to Christian origins is radically different from the traditional Christian worldview. It would be fair to say Christianity is sometimes even seen as a Gnostic heresy and not vice versa. While this is an inflammatory way of describing Christian origins, it does seem quite clear that within the early Christian “spectrum” there was an exceptionally wide range of traditions and practices. This diversity was not only tolerated but encouraged and embraced. Christianity was not a single, monolithic tradition handed down from one leader to another in succession; it was diverse and multi-faceted with many dispersed centres of power.

    Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton who specialises in studies of the Gnostics, recently said in a statement, “These discoveries are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion, and demonstrating how diverse – and fascinating – the early Christian movement really was.”6

    Gnostic Christianity

    Although later denounced by certain leaders as ‘heretics’, many of these Christians saw themselves as not so much believers as seekers, people who ‘seek for God.’7
    – Elaine Pagels

    Early Christianity seems to have included many differing viewpoints from the rather staid Judaic Christian mix of James the Brother of Jesus to the esoteric Gnosticism of the followers of Mary Magdalene and Simon Magus. Variations in approach were such that within one movement there were libertine sects that used sex and mind altering substances, and others which were strictly ascetic and celibate. There were groups which were strictly Judaic in focus even to the point of keeping the old laws and festivals of Israel, while others were clearly influenced by the Greek Mysteries and even Buddhist traditions.

    Each of these communities had their own sacred texts and interpretations of the teachings of Jesus; the majority would now be considered Gnostic, i.e. they emphasised personal and direct experience of the divine. Accordingly, each of these groups acted like a “Mystery Cult” and had their own specialised practices, mythologies and rites. Many had distinct Gospels which included unique revelations from Jesus to their founders. For example, in the Pistis Sophia, we read of the secret teachings of Jesus to Mary Magdalene and the Gospel of Thomas begins… “These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and Didymus Judas Thomas wrote them down.”8

    These secret writings and communities flourished for hundreds of years. It was only in the early 4th century that Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria wrote a letter to some Christians in Egypt ordering them to reject what he called “secret, illegitimate books.”9 In 363 CE the first synod (of Laodicea) was held to decide the official contents of the Bible.

    Certainly by the middle of the 4th century, Christianity had become a political force and dissenting views were not tolerated. Under threat and violent persecution, Gnostic communities withdrew from public view, to survive as an ‘underground’ movement. This continued right through to such groups as the Templars and Rosicrucians, and even to the present day.

    Clearly, early Christianity offered a wide spectrum of beliefs and practices catering to the unique needs of people with differing levels of spiritual development. This helps us understand the Gospel of Judas. While Christendom has attempted to downplay the significance of this Gospel, its message, like that of Gnosticism in general, is actually quite confronting and challenging.

    Secret Teachings

    The Gospel of Judas is a secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke to Judas Iscariot. It portrays Judas as one of the initiates, a specially loved and favoured disciple who undertook one of the most painful missions asked by his teacher, to betray the saviour as part of a greater plan of spiritual import.

    The Gospel outlines a specifically Gnostic worldview, offering a cosmology which is fairly consistent with the radical Gnostic sects of the period. Cosmology in Gnosticism is a complex idea with many Aeons, worlds, dimensions and forms. It is impossible to appreciate the cosmology of the Gospel of Judas without these, however, I cannot give them comprehensive coverage here, but I will try to give a general outline.

    There is a world of light which is beyond all created forms. This spiritual realm contains various dynamic intelligences or energies, of which one, Barbelo, is discussed in the Gospel of Judas.

    For there exists a great and boundless realm, whose extent no generation of angels has seen.
    – Gospel of Judas

    There are many dimensions or worlds which exist between this higher reality and the physical world, and all are populated with forms of varying potencies.

    The physical world is depicted as flawed, even evil, and is beyond the boundary of these worlds. It is the product of a bloodthirsty and ignorant creator deity. His name is given as Nebro, which means ‘rebel’; while others Gnostics call him Yaldabaoth. There are many myths and stories about how he came to exist and create the physical world.

    Judas said to Jesus, “[What] is the long duration of time that the human being will live?”

    Jesus said, “Why are you wondering about this, that Adam, with his generation, has lived his span of life in the place where he has received his kingdom, with longevity with his ruler?”

    Judas said to Jesus, “Does the human spirit die?”

    Jesus said, “This is why God ordered Michael to give the spirits of people to them as a loan, so that they might offer service, but the Great One ordered Gabriel to grant spirits to the great generation with no ruler over it – that is, the spirit and the soul…
    – Gospel of Judas

    While the Gospel of Judas does not present a full account of the creation process, when interpreted in conjunction with other Gnostic texts it certainly presents a mythos which is very much at odds with the standard Judeo-Christian legend. Saklas, a demi-god under Yaldabaoth, creates the body of man while the angels Michael and Gabriel, emissaries of the world of light, allow spirits from the world of light to incarnate within these shells.

    This is very similar to Mandaean myths of creation where the physical bodies created by lesser spirits cannot even move off the ground, writhing and screaming in the dirt. In sympathy, emissaries of the light world allow spirits to enter them. But becoming trapped, fascinated by the allure of the flesh, these spirits now believe they are physical rather than spiritual beings.

    There is a suggestion, also found in other Gnostic literature, of various degrees of spiritual awakening. Some beings only have one soul, some have two, some have none. In the Gospel of Judas, those with one soul receive it from Michael, while those with both a soul and spirit have received them from Gabriel. Each of these classes are under varying degrees of control by the rulers (principalities and dominions) that manipulate our world.

    This model is found within the Gnostic schools where there are three levels of initiation:

    1. Hylic – most of sleeping humanity, under full control of rulers.

    2. Psychic – partially awakened, under partial control of the rulers.

    3. Pneumatics – awakened.

    There is an essential dualism within the Gospel of Judas which helps explain the significance of Jesus’s death and the role of Judas. Since man’s origin is within the spiritual dimensions and the flesh is a cage, then death is not to be feared but a form of liberation. Accordingly, Judas helps Jesus escape his prison of flesh and liberate the essential true nature within him.

    You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.
    – Gospel of Judas

    The Gnostics taught that in some way or another we must each overcome the body and its demands and liberate the true Christ nature within. While individual praxis may vary from asceticism to libertinism, the goal is the same. In addition, these Gnostics also identify the creator of the physical world as our enemy, and hence see Yaldabaoth as the primary force holding us back from achieving true liberation.

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    Indeed, in the Sethian tradition, Yaldabaoth is identified with Jehovah and the serpent of Genesis is actually seen as the liberator. This relates back to Irenaeus’ claim the followers of the Gospel of Judas were “Kainites” since in this interpretation, Cain is the saviour, not Abel, and the Sodomites are the people of God, not the slaughtering puritans and so on.

    We also find within the Gospel of Judas reference to both Seth and Adamas which is significant as they tie elements of the Gospel to the Naassene or Serpent Gnostic traditions. This has strong resonance with the Greek Orphic Tradition which is superbly covered in The Gnostic Secrets of the Naassenes by Mark Gaffney.

    There is a distinct absence of the saving power of the blood of Christ or the vicarious nature of the crucifixion in the Gnostic texts. Indeed the crucifixion and Resurrection are not even mentioned in the Gospel of Judas. The role of Judas shows the path to liberation is in awakening the Christ within and overcoming the restrictions created by both the physical body and the forces of the lower spiritual/physical worlds. These are sometimes represented as the planets, powers and dominions or rulers.

    The multitude of those immortals is called the cosmos –  that is, perdition – by the Father and the seventy-two luminaries who are with the Self-Generated and his seventy-two aeons. In him the first human appeared with his incorruptible powers. And the aeon that appeared with his generation, the aeon in whom are the cloud of knowledge and the angel, is called [51] El. […] aeon […] after that […] said, ‘Let twelve angels come into being [to] rule over chaos and the [underworld].’ And look, from the cloud there appeared an [angel] whose face flashed with fire and whose appearance was defiled with blood. His name was Nebro, which means ‘rebel’; others call him Yaldabaoth. Another angel, Saklas, also came from the cloud. So Nebro created six angels – as well as Saklas – to be assistants, and these produced twelve angels in the heavens, with each one receiving a portion in the heavens.
    – Gospel of Judas

    Judas works with Jesus to help liberate him from the power of the body; he plays an important role within the initiatory process of the crucifixion and Resurrection, which some suggest was actually an initiatory drama rather than a real historical event, but that is outside our discussion here.

    This Gospel needs to be interpreted within the larger framework of the dualist Gnostic tradition. The motif of Judas as special disciple and the negative interpretation of both the body and the world resonate through the vast majority of the Gnostic sects. In addition, the emphasis on Jesus as a giver of light, a transmitter of the message from the higher dimensions rather than as a sacrifice, is central to a Gnostic view of salvation.

    Jesus was seen as a way-shower, an emissary, a being whom we should emulate, not worship. This approach is central to the Gnostic vision; liberation comes through individual effort inspired perhaps by the life of Jesus, but ultimately through our own perseverance. In this way we move towards achieving our own state of divinity, our own theosis.

    The Gospel of Judas is certainly a fascinating revelation, though it does not necessarily add greatly to what we already know about the Gnostic vision. What it does do, however, is bring home the significance of this message for today’s world. If the Gospel of Judas had been taken seriously by the early Church and the Gnostics not suppressed, anti-Semitism and all its related violence may not have had such a disastrous effect within Western history. If Judas was only doing his job as a “special” disciple of Jesus, then the whole myth of “Judas the Christ Killer” dissolves and is replaced by Judas, the holder of the Mysteries.

    In 2006 with continued violence instigated by self-proclaimed religious fundamentalists, it is perhaps time we rehabilitate the Gnostic tradition. Gnosticism brings a spirit of openness, diversity, individual responsibility and freedom. With the publicity brought about by The Da Vinci Code and now the publication of the Gospel of Judas, it is time we let go of old prejudices, superstitions and narrowly held opinions and allow a different light to shine from beyond the confines of matter.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 96.[/alert]

    [alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

    Recommended Reading

    Adam, Eve and the Serpent by Elaine Pagels
    Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism by Kurt Rudolph
    The Gnostic Bible: Gnostic Texts of Mystical Wisdom form the Ancient and Medieval Worlds by Willis Barnstone
    The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
    Gnostic Philosophy: From Ancient Persia to Modern Times by Tobias Churton
    The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas
    The Gospel of Judas by Bart D. Ehrman, Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, and Gregor Wurst
    Jesus and the Lost Goddess: The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy
    The Jesus Mysteries: Was the “Original Jesus” a Pagan God? by Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy
    The Other God: Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy by Yuri Stoyanov
    The Secrets of Judas: The Story of the Misunderstood Disciple and His Lost Gospel by James M. Robinson

    Footnotes

    1. The Gospel of Judas, as translated by a team led by Rodolphe Kasser and provided by the National Geographic Society.
    2. www.michelvanrijn.nl
    3. “Scholars have ‘no question’ on authenticity”, by Tom Avril, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 7 April, www.philly.com
    4. “Another Take on Gospel Truth About Judas, Manuscript Could Add to Understanding of Gnostic Sect”, by Stacy Meichtry, 25 February, Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.com
    5. Ibid.
    6. “In Ancient Document, Judas, Minus the Betrayal”, by John Noble Wilford & Laurie Goodstein, 7 April, New York Times, www.nytimes.com
    7. “The ongoing evolution of Christianity”, by Jane Lampman, May 15, 2003, Christian Science Monitor, www.csmonitor.com
    8. “The Gospel Truth”, by Elaine Pagels, April 8, New York Times, www.nytimes.com
    9. Ibid.

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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  • Who’s Afraid of the Paranormal?

    Who’s Afraid of the Paranormal?

    From New Dawn Special Issue 10 (Dec 2009)

    It usually goes something like this: average family live peaceful existence in house. Then one day, objects mysteriously relocate. The dog barks at unseen intruders. The tap that usually streams hot water now vomits a liquid the colour of blood. Strange noises are heard in the middle of the night; on the bed, the billowing duvet outlines the shape of a body that no one can see. The youngest child becomes fluent in a previously dead ancient language before scribbling cryptic words such as REDRUM all over the walls (hint: read in front of a mirror). The mother turns hysterical, the husband tries to rationalise the unusual hubbub only to succumb to paranoia followed by the sudden acquisition of otherworldly powers, such as freezing objects with his breath and fingernails that turn into meat cleavers whenever he loses his cool.

    Modern paranormal movies have come a long way from the halcyon days of grainy black and white film noir when a good fright involved a poor choice of short cut through the cemetery at midnight. Latter-day blockbusters such as Paranormal Activity, The Sixth Sense and X-Men not only leverage the visual baggage we carry in our cultural psyche, they also rely on cutting-edge special effects to bring these myths to life and peel several more micro-layers of skin off our collective hides. Just like zombies, they come crawling into our homes, hell-bent on scaring the living daylights out of the living. And we can’t get enough of it.

    Modern society seems obsessed with the paranormal, and yet our comfort level with it is 50-50: we are at the same time curious and repelled by that which we cannot see. This dichotomy is due in part to how we perceive the world around us. Or to be more precise, how we don’t.

    The human eye is an apparatus whose function is severely restricted. While our visual cortex offers a generous spectrum that is 400-790 Terahertz wide, it is nevertheless a very narrow window through which we can see the Universe; insects, for example, can see well beyond us into the ultraviolet. Still, reality is far wider in scope, with gamma and X-rays, infrared, and microwaves and so on. No wonder we are afraid of the dark, there’s so much more of it around. And it takes up much more space than we sometimes dare imagine.

    It’s not just paranormal movies that have progressed over time; our relationship with the unseen has evolved as well. In its modern connotation the adjective ‘paranormal’ denotes events or phenomena that are beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding. However, had you been alive 5,000 years ago the paranormal would have been considered very normal. It was a subtle, yet integral part of the whole universal prism: an agreeable lodger cohabiting the same condominium whom you saw by appointment.

    Even flying Tibetan monks and other extraordinary feats by avatars who transformed water into wine and raised the dead were once considered ordinary achievements by extraordinary people in control of their full co-creative power. Shaman once levitated colossal stones into massive stone circles using nothing more than their guided will-power which, scientifically-speaking, is a series of electromagnetic impulses. Somewhere along the line we lost that knowledge and ability, and it’s taken 2,000 years and Princeton’s P.E.A.R. laboratory to prove that a correctly-applied frequency does indeed levitate rock. So if ordinary people are capable of such ‘paranormal’ feats then these powers are within reach of anyone who wishes to master them.

    All that is needed is an unshakable belief that it can be done. And lots of practise. And there’s the rub: our curiosity in the paranormal exists today because we see in it a seed of truth, that welling within us lies the ability to create whatever we so wish. We are gods in our own fashion, and there are days in our lives when our will manifests in such a way that we believe it. But something happened that made us frightened of wielding this awesome power.

    When the Supernatural Became Scary

    You could say that humans lost confidence in themselves, and in time we began to see the spook in everyday things. From that point on the incredible turned into superstition. Take the much-maligned ‘cemetery’, a word whose Greek origin means ‘a place of sleep’. Sleep equates to rest, hardly cause for alarm. So, how did we become such a frightened species of carbon units? Our recent history provides us with a good excuse.

    Much of the shift from normal to paranormal happened during the Dark Ages. Famine, pestilence, plague, slaughter, pillage, barbarian invasion, social decline, cultural collapse – there are good reasons why this era is so aptly named. These were times when humanity seriously lost the plot. And stirring this concoction of doom was the new kid on the block, the Roman Catholic Church, whose intolerant attitude to anything outside the confines of its orthodox view was in full zeal by the 7th century.

    Following the first ecumenical council in Nicea in 325 CE, it was agreed by the bishops in attendance that only a select number of Christian gospels should be included in the official church canon. What was removed (or covered up) were such esoteric writings as the gospels of Thomas and of Mary Magdalene. In so doing the Church began its systematic dismantling of feminine power throughout the known world. The low point culminated with the burning of millions of women falsely accused of witchcraft. But we are getting ahead of our selves.

    Of importance to our discussion is the preoccupation by the Church fathers of all things evil. With the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of conflicting ‘barbarian’ hordes, all of Europe was awash in blood – literally. The emerging Church saw this time as an opportunity to flex its muscle upon a largely illiterate society, and fear would become its most useful tool. And what better way to bring people to the protective bosom of the Church by making evil the culprit in every situation. Evil brought the plague to your town, evil took your wife to hell; evil, not malaria, consumed your children, evil was the vermin behind your failed harvest.

    By the 11th century evil was the stranger skulking on every corner. And who better to personify this unseen danger than some misshapen character called the devil. With the Church pushing God as the supreme light, a mirror-character was required to personify everything that was outside orthodox scripture, or ‘good’. Let us remember that the success of any conflict has always been defined by who we chose to accept as the scapegoat, and in this grab for the control of human souls, ‘Lucifer’ became it.

    ‘Devil’ stems from the Greek diavolos, meaning “one who throws across.” So far, nothing too malicious or paranormal about that. But given the Church’s disposition towards pagans (whom the church also considered evil, even if pagan simply means “one who lives in the country”) it was not long before Pan, the pagan god of fecundity and nature, was retrofitted to become the horned, half-man half-fawn creature and the Church’s best recruitment officer. Thus, our irrational fear of the devil, the central protagonist in the land of the paranormal, is nothing more than a misplaced belief: fear of the very force that gives birth to everything in life, including ourselves: nature.

    The Origins of Our Irrational Fears

    Strictly speaking, to fear the paranormal is to fear the unknown, and in today’s societies that means the fear of evil. But what is evil? There are several schools of thought on this. The origin of the word comes from the old English yfel, whose roots are linked to eve, the primordial woman. Given the Church’s position on the divine feminine, the connection seems very plausible. After all, we have been brainwashed to believe that it was this luckless woman (whose Hebrew origin havva and hayya means ‘living’) took a bite of the apple of knowledge which led to her expulsion from Paradise, along with that of her husband Adam. Since then, all patriarchal societies have had a green light to blame, nay, persecute women for any ill that befalls them. So far this is in complete concordance with the patriarchal position of the Church.

    But wait. That apple: wasn’t it a serpent who whispered bons mots into Eve’s ear and made her partake of the forbidden fruit? And isn’t the serpent one of the many disguises worn by the devil?

    So we are made to believe. The devil, of course, also went on to inherit other roles such as the vampire bat, the goat, the rooster, flies, even the black pussycat. Yet despite the obvious brainwashing, our heart rate revs closer to red whenever we see the image of the goat superimposed on an inverted pentagram. This was yet another concoction by the Church. People have an equally irrational fear of snakes, quite possibly for the same reason (myself included, and yes, I was raised as a Catholic). If you doubt any of this, watch people on the street give a very, very wide berth to any passing black cat.

    Such associations, once ingrained in the subconscious, particularly by seemingly trustworthy political and religious offices, can take generations to overcome. Take for example the paranormal connotations surrounding the number 13. To this day many prominent buildings in the western world have no 13th floor – a supernatural feat in itself, when you think about it, because the 14th floor IS the 13th, the upper part of a building doesn’t float in mid-air!

    Collective fear of the number 13 is such that it even has its own adjective: paraskevidekatriaphobia. In America up to 21 million people are negatively affected by this number whenever it occurs on a Friday, costing the economy an estimated $800 million in lost revenue. It can be argued that such a mass belief inevitably becomes self-fulfilling, and yet in Holland accidents, fires and thefts occur at a lower rate on this day because people are generally more vigilant of the forces of evil.

    Thirteen’s drawing of the short straw can be traced back to two pivotal events in history. The first occurred on Friday, 13 October 1307. On this most infamous of days, orders from the Vatican enforced to exterminate the entire order of the Knights Templars. The original Templars – along with related Orders such as Cathars, Albigensians and Bogomils – pledged allegiance to the divine feminine, not to Rome. They served Isis, Mary Magdalene, and honoured the rising of Sirius, whom ancient societies equated with universal wisdom and truth.

    The second event goes back to the negation of the divine feminine in everyday life by an encroaching patriarchal society through such things as the superseding of the 13-month lunar calendar by the 12-month solar cycle. In ancient traditions, lunar is equated with feminine, due to the Moon’s influence on water and fertility cycles; and solar with masculine, due to its explosive ferocity. This change started as far back as 1300 BCE; it was further implemented by the Romans and later enforced by its secular arm at the Vatican.

    It only takes a small effort to understand how such concepts can alter our perception of reality, and yet to this day the association between things evil or paranormal and the 13th and/or Friday continue to be reaffirmed, albeit for commercial exploitation: films such as Resident Evil 5 and Friday the 13th were released on… you guessed it; not to mention one of my favourite albums, Black Sabbath’s eponymous debut LP. Even 2012 was released on Friday, 13 November 2009. While marketers see such associations as harmless fun, all it does is help reinforce and prolong an institutional belief system.

    Our Bonds With the Unseen Universe Were Severed

    Our relationship with the paranormal is to a large degree shaped by lingering superstition. Superstition is what remains after the underlying understanding behind a fact has been distorted or lost. Take the devil-serpent association: the serpent or dragon has forever been a symbolic representation of one of nature’s fundamental motions of energy, the meandering pathways of magnetism that slide along the Earth. These are the same energy pathways upon which sit countless sacred sites – the temples once designed to help you reconnect with the invisible world.

    In the old days you did not need a bishop to act as intermediary (and an unreliable one at that) to help you speak to God. You could do it all by yourself by visiting a pyramid or a stone circle. Back then it was perfectly acceptable to eat the apple of knowledge, because with total knowledge comes total understanding, and with understanding comes a lack of fear. And without fear all that you don’t see suddenly becomes your friend. As Jesus once taught, “Know Thyself.” But such self-awareness did not allow room for the rising class of religious middle men aiming to keep a safe distance between you and God. There’s a strange irony here, for in Latin, the origin of the word ‘religion’ is religio, which means ‘reconnecting’. Yet by painting a supreme creative force as external rather than internal, religion is designed to do the very opposite. And what lies beyond the physical and the rational belongs to God; and the rest, to some seemingly very unpleasant and ugly entities.

    Our symbiotic relationship with the paranormal has shifted over the course of time, and demonstrates how far, as a global society, we have shifted from total understanding to ignorance.

    It also makes for a gripping script. Mass consciousness evolves in periods of roughly 4,320 years. During each period humanity strives to have a collective experience. Between 6628-2308 BCE cultures such as those in Europe worked with the feminine principles of nature: cooperation, nurturing, the greater good of the tribe, and the implementation of a lunar-based culture.

    By working with the life-affirming laws of nature, people were more sensitive to the forces that surround and permeate the tangible world, and were thus far better attuned to its subtleties. They sourced locations rich in magnetism, where even the force of gravity is lessened. In harnessing these basic principles they forged a closer bond with the unseen universe. The payback for such a relationship was the maintaining for thousands of years of a society that flowed in perpetual rhythm with all life. Some native cultures, such as the Aborigines, to some extent, still maintain such abilities of psychic perception.

    Many of our ancestors’ shamanic experiences of the otherworld were carved in stone – from Egyptian hieroglyphs to Asian temple reliefs. Myths were constructed in which the acts of the gods would be memorialised for times to come, and many of their stories describe the physics of the universe. In the Rig Vedas there exist descriptions of nuclear processes now familiar to particle physicists.

    Several of the parables in the New Testament of the life of Jesus are paranormal events in themselves, and they are brimming with esoteric wisdom and hidden information. The story of the miraculous catch of precisely 153 fish which occurs in the last chapter of St. John can be deconstructed to reveal a geometric framework revealing the Kabalistic Tree of Life as well as numeric values of great cosmological significance.

    That great temples should be constructed at locations rich in magnetism became an extension of this relationship with the paranormal. The practise was also an insurance policy for later times: should people ever become too immersed in the physical world and lose the ability to see the subtle one, they at least know where to go to reconnect. To help communication with the invisible, names were ascribed to entities who provided humanity with specific things, such as agriculture, the arts, or weather forecasting. These would in time be honoured – not worshipped – as gods, and visiting a temple would be like attending a meeting with family, such was the close relationship with otherworldly forces. And because there was no need for competition, the relationship between worlds benefited everybody. Indeed, this was Paradise.

    The act of dying was regarded merely as a stage one goes through in the bigger scheme of things, a boat trip of the soul to ports on the sea of Infinity. As the Pyramid Texts assert, Egyptian temple culture stressed the importance of the conduct of the soul during its human incarnation, and the meticulous rites of passage afforded the deceased were a matter of great importance. Again, the cooperation with those paranormal forces called ‘gods’ was paramount in aiding the transfer of a bunch of molecules – the body and its soul – from one form and toward another. Death was the continuation of a great journey, not a destination. It was even cause for celebration.

    Around 2600 BCE things change dramatically. A sudden reversal of weather and an abrupt rise in sea-levels coincides with the next 4,320-year phase of human consciousness evolution. The feminine-cooperative experiment is slowly dismantled in favour of solar, masculine-driven power which has led us to experience the opposite properties of the divine feminine: control over cooperation, power of the few over the many, scarcity replaces abundance, fear trumps trust, knowledge slides into ignorance.

    Existing sacred sites are adapted from lunar to solar, and inevitably, the places of connection with the world of the unseen are corrupted; understanding is lost and slowly the whole-istic system disintegrates into superstition. By 1300 BCE the climate deteriorated further. By the time of the Aztec and Mayan cultures, unlike the former keepers of the temples, the view of the invisible universe held by the newly entrenched priestly caste had become so distorted that it neither understood the relationship with nor possessed the ability to control the gods. Of course, no one ever did, it always had been a relationship. Out of an irrational fear of the wrath of the spirits, the priests condemned thousands of people to be slaughtered in open ball-courts to appease the spirit world, who never had it in for humanity in the first place.

    The communicating cord with the invisible frayed, and the distance between god, good and hu-man, which the Church would eventually exploit, widened into an unbridgeable chasm. At this point humanity began to approach death with dread, and the gods of yesterday became the ghosts of today.

    You could not write a better paranormal movie script, only this one is scarier, considering the many millions who died in the fruitless pursuit of appeasement.

    It took until the late Victorian era for science – or a tiny band of enlightened scientists, at least – to engage with the bogey man. Just as Bram Stoker was putting the finishing touches to his canine-toothed protagonist, across the Irish Sea, in London, a group of gifted men of their day were busy inking an experiment that would prove the survival of the soul after death. The Society For Psychical Research was a brain trust of people such as William Crookes, who gave us the cathode ray tube, and Oliver Lodge, who, along with Tesla, gave us radio.

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    Lodge’s fascination with life after death had begun whilst a member of the Ghost Club. Later he designed a posthumous experiment whereby he would communicate from the otherworld using an alpha-numerical code based on sound. While the experiment appears to have worked shortly after his death in 1940, his initials, along with those of all the past presidents of the Society For Psychical Research reappeared in the 1990s, encoded in a number of those otherworldly geometric shapes created by sound, the crop circles.

    Like the ancient Egyptians before, it appears these luminaries succeeded in proving that life is nothing more than a bunch of molecules and frequencies in a state of transition from one form into another.

    It could be that most of the life that exists beyond the veil is not so paranormal after all. Modern research into parapsychology and quantum states suggest that a substantial part of it is us reassembled in a super-human, superabundant state. And our concept of this invisible world whether in film or in the mind, is shaped by our relationship with those forces that lie but a whisper away from our breath.

    So whenever you next celebrate Helloween, sorry, Halloween remember that this celebration of accelerated tooth-decay once was borne of higher, less menacing ideals: originally the Celtic feast of Samhain, it was the time of tribute to the spirit world, to those who’d gone ahead to protect those in the physical world to survive the dark, cold months of winter. And in so doing, we rise safely out of the darkness and into the light each Spring.

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  • The Bible: Myth or History?

    The Bible: Myth or History?

    From New Dawn 123 (Nov-Dec 2010)

    Every civilisation needs a myth; but woe to the civilisation whose myth has been found wanting. That is the position of Christianity today. It came to ascendance at a time when the myths of Greece and Rome had lost their credibility. The pagans themselves laughed at the stories of their gods; Plato sought to censor them. Christianity triumphed because it offered its sacred scriptures not as myth but as fact. Mystical adepts had always known that the stories in the Bible were not meant to be taken entirely at face, but as the religion degenerated into priestcraft, these insights were forgotten or suppressed.

    Today we have come full circle. Over the last two centuries a staggering number of scholars – the vast majority Christians themselves, many of them clergymen – have laboured on the great project of seeing how much of the Bible is historically valid. The verdict has not, in general, gone in the Bible’s favour. Little by little its validity as a plausible source for the facts it claims to recount has been eroded. In the nineteenth century, scientists such as Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin showed that the epochal changes in geology and biology could not have happened in the six thousand years allotted to them by Genesis, while the German scholar David Friedrich Strauss (who was a Lutheran pastor) showed that much that the Gospels said about Jesus was probably not accurate in any factual sense, but consisted of stories and legends that had accumulated around him after his life.

    But the inquiry did not end there. Much of the Hebrew Bible consists of history – the history of Israel from primeval times to around 500 BCE. It tells of patriarchs such as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; of the bondage of the Israelites and their miraculous liberation by the hand of God; and of David and Solomon and their successors to the thrones of Israel and Judah.

    Until fairly recently scholars took much of this account at face value. But as our knowledge of the first millennium BCE in the Near East has improved, it has become more and more obvious that the Bible cannot be entirely trusted even in these areas.

    I must digress here to make an important point. Many of the articles in New Dawn present what is called “alternative history” – views of the past that run counter to what conventional scholars believe. This approach is valuable and refreshing, if only because academics tend to operate like a team of horses with blinders on. Nevertheless, what I am going to be saying in this article (and in the following article, “God’s Forgotten Wife”) is not alternative history. It is conventional scholarship, and it consists of things that anyone would learn at a mainstream seminary or divinity school, although these findings have not always trickled down to the public at large.

    To take one fairly simple example, two hundred years ago nearly everyone in the Judeo-Christian world believed that the first five books of the Bible (known to the Jews as the Torah, to the Christians as the Pentateuch) were written by Moses. Today practically no scholar who is not a fundamentalist believes this. Many scholars do not even believe that a person such as Moses ever lived, or that an exodus from Egypt ever occurred in anything like the way it is described. Moreover, a generation ago it was generally accepted that the accounts of David and Solomon in the books of Samuel and Kings were reasonably accurate – even contemporary – accounts. But today it is agreed that these histories were written centuries later, and the glories ascribed to these two monarchs were vastly overstated.

    To summarise all these findings, an article of this length cannot hope to be complete. All the same, it is possible to sketch out some of the major findings along with their implications.

    Israel in History: The Archaeological Evidence

    The history of Israel begins with the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The general setting for their lives is best placed in the early second millennium BCE. The original texts (there were several) that make up what today we call Genesis were not written until around the seventh century BCE. Consequently, what we have about these patriarchs is a collection of legends with an interval of a millennium between the events and the written accounts. It would be hard to find anything here that could be called real history.

    As we come closer to the present, the picture becomes clearer, although it does not necessarily validate the Bible as a source. The descent of Jacob and his twelve sons into Egypt to escape a famine in Canaan does resonate with a well-documented period (in the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries BCE) in which Egypt was ruled by the Hyksos, Semitic “foreign kings” that came from the northeast. But here too it is very hard to reconcile the biblical account (again written almost a thousand years later) with the Egyptian documents. They portray the Hyksos not as slaves but as rulers; indeed an Egyptian king list includes one “Yaqub” – identical to “Jacob.”1 They did not flee a tyrannical Pharaoh but were thrown out by the Egyptians themselves – an almost complete reversal of the biblical account.

    As for the flight of the Israel to the land of Canaan to escape their Egyptian taskmasters, this too is hard to accept, because in the period in which this is supposed to have happened – the thirteenth century BCE – Canaan was an Egyptian province, complete with governors and forts and garrisons. Egypt would retain control over Canaan until around 1160 BCE.

    In fact the first mention of Israel in any contemporary text comes from a stele from the reign of Pharaoh Merneptah, the son of Rameses II (often portrayed as the pharaoh of the Exodus), and it dates to 1207 BCE. It tells of an Egyptian campaign into Canaan, and in it Merneptah boasts, “Israel is laid waste; his seed is not.”2 Obviously this is an exaggeration, but it suggests that at this time the people of Israel were an already well-established population at a time when Pharaoh still ruled the land.

    Scholars generally agree that there was no conquest of Canaan by the Israelites as described in the book of Joshua. How, then, did Israel come to be? To understand this, we have to grasp something about the geography of Palestine. The country can be roughly divided into three north-south strips. The first is a fertile coastal plain parallel to the Mediterranean shore. The second is a band of hill country east of the plain. The third and easternmost is the Jordan River valley. It was the second of these regions, the hill country, that was the Israelite homeland. In the Late Bronze Age (1500-1200 BCE), it was sparsely populated. But at the beginning of the Iron Age in the thirteenth century, its population rose dramatically. And it is these Iron Age settlements that scholars believe were the homes of the proto-Israelites. There was very little in their material culture (alphabet, pottery, and so on) that differentiated them from the Canaanites of the coastal plain, except that the proto-Israelites’ culture was more primitive – the pottery was crude and poorly ornamented, for example – and, strangely, the bones of pigs are almost completely absent from the animal remains that are found at these sites, indicating that these people, whoever they were, had a taboo against eating pork even in the earliest times.

    Where did these hill people come from? Scholars do not agree entirely, but they are more or less unanimous in stating that most of them were not freed slaves coming up from Egypt. In all likelihood, they were people fleeing the social breakdown in the Bronze Age culture of the Palestinian coastal plain – itself only a localised version of the end of Bronze Age civilisation that was taking place all around the eastern Mediterranean. They were probably augmented by a small number of nomads who adopted sedentary ways of life. These hill people were not city dwellers; their social units were extended families that were themselves organised into tribes, which in turn formed a loose confederation that resembles the one described in the book of Judges.

    Myth Made History: Moses, David & Solomon

    Did Moses live? There is no reference to him in any contemporary source. The name Moses is a curious one; it is Egyptian, and it literally means “son,” as we see in some Egyptian names: Thutmosis (or Thutmose), the name of several pharaohs, means “son of Thoth,” the god of learning. It would be odd if Moses had been the prophet’s original name, just as in the English-speaking world there are many Johnsons and Williamsons, but practically nobody with the surname “Son.” Possibly his name originally included the name of an Egyptian god that Moses himself – or later chroniclers – chose to remove.

    Scholars thus have stopped believing in any great migration that resembles the biblical account. To the extent that they lend any credence to the story of Exodus at all, they grant the possibility that a charismatic leader led a small band of former Semitic slaves to the hill country of Palestine and that as Egyptian power began to wane in that area, this people, along with the hill people that had already settled there, was able to shake off its chains.

    To move on to the late eleventh and tenth centuries BCE, the period that biblical historians call “the united monarchy,” when Israel was supposedly ruled by a single king – Saul, followed by David and David’s son Solomon. According to the Bible, this was the zenith of Israel’s power and influence. David supposedly ruled over a territory that stretched from the Euphrates to Gaza (1 Kings 4:24), while Solomon accumulated vast riches and a thousand wives. But the archaeological remains and extrabiblical texts say virtually nothing about these rulers; some scholars go so far as to doubt whether there ever was a united monarchy at all. Richard A. Freund, professor of Jewish history at the University of Hartford, Connecticut, in the US, sums up the situation:

    If… David was so prominently involved in the lives of so many different peoples in the region, it stands to reason that he would be mentioned in one of these different non-Israelite literatures. If… Solomon conducted international relations with Egypt, marrying into the royal family and importing horses, why wouldn’t there be a record somewhere in Egypt that would corroborate this relationship?…. But no independent corroboration of these events exists from archaeological evidence or source not influenced by biblical tradition, save perhaps an early medieval collection called the Kebra Nagast, the national epic of Ethiopia.3

    The earliest extrabiblical reference to David comes from an inscription found at Tel Dan in northern Galilee in 1993. Dated to the ninth century BCE, it contains a claim by Hazael, king of Aram, that he has killed Ahaziah, king of Israel, and Jehoram, “king of the house of David.”4 Hazael, Ahaziah, and Jehoram are all mentioned in the Bible, so this inscription confirms these men lived and ruled and that there was a house of David in the ninth century BCE. Nevertheless, this inscription dates more than a hundred years later than David is supposed to have lived, so it confirms nothing more about him.

    Nor is there much archaeological evidence for the existence of Solomon’s Temple, which would have been built around 940 BCE.5 Indeed the archaeologist Israel Finkelstein contends that Jerusalem, supposedly Solomon’s magnificent capital, was actually a rather humble place. “Digging in Jerusalem has failed to produce evidence that it was a great city in David or Solomon’s time,” he argues. “Tenth century Jerusalem was rather limited in extent, perhaps not more than a typical hill village.”6

    There is archaeological evidence for a highly prosperous and centralised monarchy in Israel, but, Finkelstein contends, it was in the ninth century BCE and not the tenth. Remains include palaces, storage centres, and even stables. They are centred around Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel (the ten tribes that seceded from the house of David after Solomon’s death, ending the united monarchy). They were the work of the Israelite king Omri and his heirs – every last one of whom, according to the Bible, “wrought evil in the eyes of the Lord” (1 Kings 16:25).7 The most notorious of the Omrid dynasty was Ahab, whose queen was the proverbially wicked Jezebel.8

    It is thus really only in the ninth century BCE that biblical history and the extrabiblical evidence begin to converge, and in the eighth century the picture becomes still clearer. The Bible tells of the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel at the hands of the king of Assyria in 722 BCE (2 Kings 17:3-23); this is confirmed by an Assyrian stele. The Bible also says that Hezekiah, king of the southern kingdom of Judah, was able to save his tiny nation from destruction by the Assyrians. This too has a parallel in the surviving Assyrian records – although these happen to mention the huge tribute of gold and silver that Hezekiah had to pay in return. The Bible, by contrast, credits the survival of Judah to the miraculous intervention of Yahweh, whose angel “smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand” (2 Kings 19:35-36).

    Yahweh’s Companions?

    But it is when we turn to the religious history of ancient Israel that the picture becomes truly astonishing. After all, the intense interest in the Bible has a great deal to do with the part that is said to be played by God in history: specifically the revelation of the one true God, Yahweh, to the nation of Israel, and his granting of the land of Canaan to them in perpetuity on condition that they obey his law and worship him alone. But here, too, the extrabiblical sources create a much more checkered picture. Egyptian texts of the Late Bronze Age do show some familiarity with a god called “Yhw” (Egyptian, like Hebrew, did not employ vowels in its script) in connection with some nomads located in the southern part of Jordan.9 This resonates with the biblical account, which has Moses learning about Yahweh in Midian (see Exodus 3), which is in the same area. And it is possible, as we have seen, that a charismatic leader like Moses could have led a small band to Canaan and used this god as a rallying-cry to unify the hill folk and create a national identity for them. But even so, the reality would be very different from the story narrated in the Pentateuch.

    Scholars today generally agree that the revelation of a monotheistic Yahweh to Moses and his spiritual heirs is not an accurate picture of what happened. Instead, they contend, Yahweh only gradually – over the course of several centuries – came to be seen as the sole god of Israel and as the supreme god of the universe. Frank Moore Cross, one of the most distinguished Old Testament scholars of his generation, has argued that originally Yahweh was an epithet of El, the high god of the Canaanite pantheon, in his function as patron deity of a confederation of tribes known as the Midianite League. Cross says that Yahweh later became differentiated from El among the proto-Israelites, and eventually came to displace him.10

    Margaret Barker, another biblical scholar, has an even more radical suggestion. She contends that throughout most of the era of the First Temple (c.940-586 BCE), both El and Yahweh were worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem as separate deities, forming a trinity with Asherah, Yahweh’s divine consort (see the next article). El retained his position as the high god – the lord of the universe – whereas Yahweh was the national god of Israel alone. It was only with the “reforms” of the religion of Judah that took place under King Josiah in 621 BCE (2 Kings 23) that Asherah was discarded and Yahweh was conflated with El. In fact, Barker claims, the Josianic “reform” was actually a radical restructuring of the faith. The Bible portrays it differently, as a purge of alien elements, but that is because the Bible was written by the party that instigated the purge. It was this party that created the Deuteronomic history in the Bible (comprising Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings), which has shaped our historical understanding of this period to this day. Nearly all the biblical texts I have mentioned above are taken from the Deuteronomic account.

    Obviously there is a great deal more to say about these matters, and endless numbers of books have been written about them. I have limited my discussion here to the Hebrew Bible simply because of space. The New Testament is problematic as well, but for different reasons. Here it is not archaeology or the larger historical context that is the question: there is ample extrabiblical evidence for the existence of the Second Temple, which was still being completed at the time of Christ and was sacked by the Romans in 70 CE. Indeed the Temple’s western wall, today called the Wailing Wall, still survives. There is also ample extrabiblical documentation of figures such as Herod the Great and Pontius Pilate. There is no such documentation for Jesus, but this is not in itself problematic. We might reasonably expect some archaeological evidence for the existence of David and Solomon, who were supposedly great monarchs, but Jesus was comparatively obscure in his own day. It is only when we ask who Jesus was and what his earliest followers thought him to be that the controversies arise.

    In any event, we have seen a strange reversal over the last two hundred years. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the educated world in the West took the Bible as history while the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were written off as legend. Then in the early 1870s, the pioneering archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann unearthed the ruins of Troy in Asia Minor, and scholars realised that the Homeric poems – whether or not their specific characters ever lived – were firmly grounded in the world of Late Bronze Age Greece. Ironically, when scholars examined the Bible in the same fashion, they came up with little more than a few isolated inscriptions and the stables of the wicked King Ahab.

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    Literal Truth of the Bible Under Attack

    Does this all matter? Does the Bible have to be true in a historical sense? Not necessarily. As I noted at the outset, esotericists have long acknowledged that these stories are in many ways symbolic of higher truths. The book of Exodus, with its ten plagues and miraculously gushing stones, is in all likelihood not true historically. But the British Kabbalist Warren Kenton, writing under the pen name Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, gives an intricate and profound analysis of the mystical dimensions of this saga in his book Kabbalah and Exodus.

    What the original authors of the biblical texts may have intended is a difficult question to answer, since we do not even really know who they were. Nevertheless, Christianity has often proselytised on the premise that the stories in the Bible are literally true. It is reasonable to assess the Bible in terms of the claims that its proponents have made for it, and those claims have been found wanting.

    All this said, the scholars who have delved so deeply into the historicity of the Bible over the last two hundred years have shown tremendous moral and intellectual courage. They have not, for the most part, been debunkers but have been serious scholars of Judaism and Christianity who are often profoundly committed to their faith. Some have turned to archaeology to validate this faith and have had to admit they were wrong. Joseph Callaway, an American professor of biblical archaeology, tried to find the city of Ai, supposedly destroyed by Joshua (Joshua 7-8), but he concluded that the city did not exist in Joshua’s time. He wrote: “For many years, the primary source for the understanding of the settlement of the first Israelites was the Hebrew Bible, but every reconstruction based on the biblical traditions has floundered on the evidence from the archaeological remains.”11 Callaway took early retirement from his very conservative seminary rather than cause any embarrassment on this count.

    Many journalists have lacked Callaway’s integrity, so you can pick up an American newsmagazine such as Time and read an account of Moses that treats him as if he were Churchill or John F. Kennedy.12 To bring the far more elusive truth to light would no doubt cause many readers to cancel their subscriptions. Sometimes the weaker a myth is, the more stridently it is defended.

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    Sources:

    Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God, Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992.
    Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of Religion of Israel, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1973.
    William G. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the History of Ancient Israel, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2001.
    –  – . Who Were the Ancient Israelites and Where Did They Come From?, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2003.
    Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.
    Richard A. Freund, Digging through the Bible: Modern Archaeology and the Ancient Bible, Plymouth, U.K.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.
    Simon Goldhill, The Temple of Jerusalem, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004.
    Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, Kabbalah and Exodus, London: Rider, 1980.
    Hershel Shanks, et al., The Rise of Ancient Israel, Washington: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1992.
    D. Winton Thomas, ed., Archaeology and Old Testament Study, Oxford: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1967.

    Footnotes:

    1. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites?, 10.
    2. Finkelstein and Silberman, 57; see also Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites?, 202.
    3. Freund, 117.
    4. Freund, 117–18.
    5. Goldhill, 31.
    6. Finkelstein and Silberman, 124, 133.
    7. Biblical quotations are taken from the Authorised (King James) Version.
    8. For an account of the archaeological findings and their relation to the house of Omri, see Finkelstein and Silberman, ch. 7.
    9. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites?, 128.
    10. Cross, 44, 71.
    11. Quoted in Dever, 47–48.
    12. A good example is Emily Mitchell and David Van Biema, “In Search of Moses,” Time, Dec. 14, 1998; www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,989815-7,00.html; accessed Sept. 21, 2010. The article is worth careful deconstruction. It does, for example, ask “Did Moses even exist?” and mentions such evidence as the Merneptah inscription. But the vast bulk of it is devoted to a retelling, in Time-style prose, of the biblical account as literally true. The reader is subtly led to believe that somehow, in the end, all these things did happen. The article is a cover story, timed to the release of the film The Prince of Egypt. A more recent article, “How Moses Shaped America,” by Bruce Feiler (Time, Oct. 12, 2009; www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1927303-3,00.html; accessed Sept. 21, 2010) discusses the political uses made of the Moses story by American politicians without attempting to touch the historical issue of whether this figure actually lived.

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