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It is remarkable what happens when you abandon your preconceptions about Christianity – hard though that might be, if, like us, you were brought up as a churchgoer – and approach the subject as objectively as possible.

When we began our latest book, The Masks of Christ: Behind the Lies and Cover-ups About the Man Believed to be God, we thought we had already reached certain conclusions in our 1997 The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ (which Dan Brown acknowledges as a major inspiration for The Da Vinci Code). But as our research progressed we became enthralled – perhaps even a little shocked – by what we were faced with, but which only served to reinforce and clarify our previous conclusions.

We begin with a great mystery.

The Great Debate

Of the many puzzles surrounding Jesus, perhaps the most fundamental is the clash between the Jewish and pagan elements in his mission.

Certain New Testament passages are unequivocally hardcore Jewish nationalist, such as Jesus’ claim to the title of Messiah, a role which (despite Christians’ later redefinition) only makes sense in Jewish terms. The Messiah – ‘Anointed’, in Greek ‘Christos’ – was to be the great deliverer, who would reassemble and lead the twelve tribes of Israel in kicking out the Romans, before finally fulfilling God’s promise to extend their rule to all other nations.

Of course, Jesus conspicuously failed to fulfil that role. From the Jews’ perspective he achieved the exact opposite, spawning a religion that, in his name, subjected them to centuries of subjugation. That is why his besotted early followers changed the whole emphasis of ‘Messiah’, with Paul initiating the new spin with the notion that has underpinned Christianity ever since: instead of being a hard-nosed Jewish military leader, the new Messiah was a god-man whose redeeming death and resurrection offered eternal life to all who accepted him, regardless of their ethnic or religious background.

Yet the gospel writers still ensured Jesus was associated with the old prophecies of the Messiah, such as entering Jerusalem on a donkey, which was an unequivocal declaration of Messiahship.

Even though by the time of the gospels the Christian movement had adopted Paul’s doctrine that the message was for all mankind, clearly the internal evidence shows that Jesus himself intended to confine the ‘Good News’ to the people of Israel. We see this in the tale of Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark’s Gospel, where at first he refuses to heal her possessed daughter because she is not one of the chosen people – even calling her ‘dog’, the racist term used by Jews of Gentiles – only changing his mind when she implicitly acknowledges his God’s superiority. As several scholars admit, since this contradicts the gospel writer’s own position, it must be authentic.

Jesus the Pagan

On the other hand, some Biblical passages are hard to equate with Judaism, especially those about Jesus’ more private rituals, most obviously the Eucharist, the symbolic eating of his ‘body’ as bread and drinking of his ‘blood’ as wine that he supposedly established at the Last Supper. Such a rite, even symbolically, was unthinkable for a Jew, for whom ingesting human blood was an abomination. In fact, it resonates much more neatly with the mystery cults of the Romans, Greeks and Egyptians, where gods were symbolically devoured to forge a spiritual communion between the cult member and the deity. Importing such practices into Judaism would have been regarded by the mainstream as blasphemous.

Evidence has also accumulated over the last few decades that Jesus modelled his cures and exorcisms on pagan magicians’, primarily from Egypt, echoing – or perhaps confirming – early Jewish claims that he had been schooled in sorcery in Egypt. And if the suppressed ‘Gnostic Gospels’ are accepted as genuinely representing certain sides of Jesus’ beliefs and teaching – as we do – then they, too, show a thinking not obviously associated with the Judaism of his day, especially where the spirituality of the feminine is concerned, as exemplified in his relationship with Mary Magdalene.

The majority of New Testament scholars simply reject the non-Jewish parts of the gospels as inauthentic, arguing that the Eucharist was invented by the apostles of the new religion – Paul again! – to make it more Gentile-friendly, something familiar from the sects that celebrated dying-and-rising saviour gods who incarnated as a mortal man. The academics assume that this was borrowed from one of many such cults, perhaps that of Mithras or Dionysus, and was applied to the meal that Jesus’ first followers held purely in memory of him (with no mystical connotations).

But in fact, there is no reason to reject these passages except the impossibility of fitting them into a Jewish context. The logic is that, since we know that Jesus was Jewish, and no Jew could possible have entertained such practices, then he couldn’t have done so, and therefore they must be later inventions.

However, the evidence simply isn’t there. It is hard to imagine later followers inventing Jesus using pagan magic in such detail – even down to specific phrases found in earlier Greco-Egyptian magical papyri. And the internal evidence of the New Testament itself points to the Eucharist being one of the earliest Christian practices, going back to Jesus himself. It is the one element that appears virtually identically in all four gospels and Paul’s Letters. (It is generally agreed that Paul’s Letters predate the gospels, although we would argue that Mark’s Gospel might be contemporary with some of Paul’s writings.)

Even odder, as Paul clearly struggled to fit the Eucharist into his ‘revealed’ version of Jesus’ mission, evidently he would even have been happier to ignore the rite entirely, but it was already too well established. His solution was to transmute the rite into a memorial, specifically to dodge the ‘communion’ aspect. So ironically the evidence points to the exact reverse of the conventional position – instead of Paul adding the ‘mystical communion’ element, he tried to get rid of it!

Part of the Christian process of redefining the meaning of the ritual meal was linking it to the Last Supper the night before his crucifixion. However, the evidence of John’s Gospel is that Jesus actually instituted the rite earlier, when he was preaching in Galilee – which led to a mass desertion of disciples appalled by his injunction that they must drink his blood.

It must be stressed that such practices are not merely difficult to reconcile with Judaism – as a would-be Messiah had to be – but impossible. They are totally incompatible.

So, as some scholars are now beginning to argue, could the Jewish parts be the invention? But that solution doesn’t work either, since it means rejecting passages that are strongly evidential – such as the episode of the Syro-Phoenician woman and the entry into Jerusalem.

So we hit an impasse. According to accepted thinking, Jesus could never have been both a Jewish leader and a proponent of mystery school rites. Is there any possible solution?

Enter the Magus

One potential way forward, we realised – with some astonishment – lay in exploring the parallel between Jesus and that flamboyant scriptural bad boy to end bad boys, Jesus’ hugely unconventional contemporary, Simon Magus, whose very name underlines his apparently pagan credentials, ‘Magus’ meaning ‘occultist’ or ‘magician’.

The earliest reference to Simon Magus (or Simon of Gitta, after the town of his birth in Samaria) comes in the Acts of the Apostles, the continuation of Luke’s Gospel that takes the story on after Jesus’ crucifixion. After the first persecution of Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem that began with the stoning of the first Christian martyr, Stephen, some of Jesus’ disciples, led by Philip, fled to Samaria. This was within, at most, ten years of the crucifixion – probably less. Here they find that many Samaritans follow Simon Magus, regarded as the ‘Great Power’ sent by God. Philip not only successfully converts Simon’s followers to Christianity, but also the Magus himself. Some time later Peter and the disciple John go to Samaria to take the Holy Spirit to the community established by Philip, and Simon Magus reveals his true colours by offering them money for the secret of the Holy Spirit, earning a stern condemnation from Peter.

Clearly, as the Simonites found it so easy to switch their allegiance there must have been a marked similarity between the messages of Jesus and the Magus. And Simon himself was, albeit briefly, once a member of the Christian community in Samaria. Although Acts attributes his success there to sorcery, as we now know Jesus himself indulged in pagan magic, so this points up a similarity between them.

Although Acts’ story ends with Simon asking forgiveness, other early Christian sources show he went on to challenge the fledgling Jesus movement, appearing in the writings of the Church Fathers as the ‘first heretic’ who attempted to lead the early Christians astray. Again, the term suggests a basic similarity between Simon and Jesus – heresy being a variation of a religion.

A major source is the related texts known as the Clementina or the Pseudo-Clementine Literature. Written around 150 CE but drawing on earlier material, it describes the struggle between Peter and Simon Magus for the hearts, minds and souls of the Samaritans.

It is crystal clear that the Church Fathers’ big problem was that Simon Magus was far, far too similar to Jesus, performing miracles and healings – even being regarded as an incarnate god. The early Christians were anxious to point out to their flock that, although Simon appeared to be cut from the same cloth as Jesus, this was a ploy by the Devil to sow confusion. Epiphanius of Salamis wrote that Simon “worked under the cloak of Christ” and even hinted that he claimed to be Jesus resurrected. Hyppolytus of Rome said bluntly: “He was not the Christ.” But do they protest too much?

The Magus, too, promoted a seemingly peculiar blend of Jewish and pagan ideas. The Clementina makes the apparently extraordinary statement that, while he taught that there were “many gods,” he was citing the books of Moses (i.e. the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament). This seemed so weird that the Clementina was dismissed as nonsense – but in 1842 a work of Hippolytus was discovered in which he had included (in order to point out the errors) large extracts from Simon’s own treatise, the ‘Great Revelation’, whose one-time existence was known but which was believed to have been lost.

The ‘Great Revelation’ reveals an elevation of the sacred feminine and an emphasis on sexual mysticism that fit awkwardly with the patriarchal character of Judaism, and which caused much outrage among the Church Fathers, to whom Simon’s rituals were obscene and disgusting. Notoriously, he is said to have travelled with one Helen, a former prostitute from Tyre – described as a black woman who danced in chains, and who he claimed was the incarnation of God’s ‘First Thought’, the female power through whom God had created the material world. (Of course there are intriguing parallels between the relationships of Simon and Helen, and Jesus and Mary Magdalene as portrayed in the Gnostic Gospels.)

An even more extraordinary link between Simon and Jesus is that, again according to the Clementina, the two men shared the same teacher: John the Baptist. Indeed, it states that it was Simon Magus, not Jesus, who John chose as his successor.

But what does all this have to tell us about the historical Jesus?

The big clue comes from the fact that Simon Magus was a Samaritan, one of those who, despite an ethnic kinship with the Jews, were detested by them – a feeling that was decidedly mutual.

On the subject of Jesus and Samaria, the gospel writers appear to differ awkwardly. In Matthew, Mark and Luke Jesus is depicted as shunning the land and its people (with some exceptions, notably the parable of the Good Samaritan). On the other hand, John’s Gospel has him extending his mission into Samaria.

There is, in fact, strong evidence that the enigmatic Gospel of John was originally written for an early Samaritan Christian community, which would explain its positive view of the Samaritans. For example, it describes the first person to whom Jesus chooses to reveal his Messiahship as the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well in the heart of Samaria, and the first to recognise him as the Messiah are Samaritans. We suggest it was written for Samaritan converts from Simon Magus’ following – after all, some of the gospel’s unique stories, particularly those with an unexpected sexual subtext, seem to have been specifically included (or contrived) to subvert Simon’s teaching.

The key figure of John the Baptist was also active in Samaria. According to John’s Gospel, one of his centres was Aenon (modern Ainûn), in Samaria.

So, Jesus and John the Baptist both took their missions into Samaria – another parallel with Simon Magus. But what is it about that land that explains the Jewish/pagan paradox of both Jesus’ and Simon’s teachings?

The key lies in the reason for the animosity between Jews and Samaritans, which had its roots in the earliest days of Israel. The Samaritans were descended from the Israelite tribes of Ephraim and Manesseh, and still inhabited their lands, between Judea and Galilee. Originally, Ephraim was predominant: Moses’ successor and the conqueror of the Promised Land, Joshua, was from Ephraim and the tribe was given the honour of being custodians of the Ark of the Covenant in its sanctuary at Shiloh. Some historians and archaeologists believe that Ephraim and Manesseh were two of only three tribes (the other being Benjamin) that came out of Egypt, the others being native Canaanites who were converted to the religion of Moses. And intriguingly, legend linked them with the Egyptian religion of Heliopolis, since their progenitors, Ephraim and Manesseh, were sons of Joseph and Asenath, the daughter of the high priest of Heliopolis.

After the creation of the kingdom of Israel a power struggle developed between the tribes of Ephraim and Judah. King David usurped Ephraim’s status by taking the Ark to Jerusalem, the new religious centre in Judah’s territory. After Solomon, the kingdom split in two, Ephraim heading the ten tribes of the larger Kingdom of Israel in the north, with the smaller Kingdom of Judah (which gave its name to the Jewish people and religion) in the south. A new sanctuary and temple, a rival to Jerusalem, was built in Ephraim’s land on Mount Gerizim.

Although larger and more powerful, the northern kingdom collapsed when it was invaded by the Assyrian empire in the eighth century BCE. The Jews later claimed that the Assyrian influence corrupted the religion of the north, a taunt that was returned when Judah underwent its own trauma of invasion and mass deportation in the Babylonian Captivity two centuries later. When the Jews returned to Jerusalem after their seventy-year exile, they set about codifying and reforming their religion, incorporating concepts from that of Babylon. So both the Jews and the Samaritans believed that only they practised the ‘pure’ religion of Moses, and that the other’s version was heretical. Victors’ history decided that the Jews won, but the Samaritans could have been right…

The rivalry reached a climax when, about two centuries before Jesus, the Jews conquered Samaria and destroyed their temple – yet another reason for Samaritan resentment. It was only with the advent of Roman rule that Samaria was freed from Jewish subjugation.

Not unnaturally, by Jesus’ day, the Jews and Samaritans detested each other. The hostility even affected their respective end times speculations: all the prophecies foresaw a re-gathering of the twelve tribes – one of the functions of the Messiah – and a reconciliation of Judah and Ephraim, but opinions differed over which tribe would come out on top. Naturally, the Jews thought it would be them. Moreover, their deeply-ingrained prejudice made the idea of bringing the Samaritans back into the fold deeply distasteful. Meanwhile, the Samaritans believed in a coming saviour, the Taheb (‘Restorer’ or ‘Returner’), who would reassemble the tribes under the authority of Ephraim, restoring the situation that had existed at the very beginning of Israelite history. And part of the Taheb’s function was to overthrow Judah. (The Samaritan woman would therefore have recognised Jesus as the Taheb.)

Many scholars and archaeologists have shown that the Israelites’ original religion was far from the monotheistic and patriarchal institution it was to become, and that it owed much to either, or both, the native, pagan religions of Canaan and Egypt. The classic study is Raphael Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess (1967, revised 1990), which argued that, before the split after Solomon’s reign, the Israelites had worshipped a goddess, Asherah, alongside Yahweh, revealing both polytheism and an awareness of the sacred feminine. (Images of cherubim excavated from ninth-century Israel are almost identical to Egyptian depictions of the winged Isis.) Patai also showed that early Israelite tradition incorporated a female figure which manifested God’s power of creation.

And as we know, all of these are characteristics of the teaching of the Samaritan Simon Magus – which makes sense if, as the Samaritans claimed, they really did preserve the original form of the Israelite religion.

But we believe it would also resolve the basic contradiction about how Jesus’ career could incorporate ‘Jewish’ and pagan elements. If, instead of ‘Jewish’ we think in terms of the ‘people of Israel’ – i.e. the original religion and tribes – then much about his mission falls into place.

The Samaritan connection also offers an explanation of the origin of the Eucharist. One of the texts that might include a possible Jewish precursor to the Christian Eucharist is the late BCE or early CE ‘The Book of Joseph and Asenath’. Normally described as a product of the Jewish community in Egypt, it includes a ritual involving the eating of bread and the drinking of wine – the nearest ceremony to the Eucharist in any Jewish source, and, although the key element of equating the bread and wine with body and blood is absent, some have suggested that it may have influenced either Jesus’ rite or the practices of the first Christians, who added the communion element.

However, as ‘The Book of Joseph and Asenath’ describes the Biblical tale of the union of the patriarch Joseph and the daughter of the Egyptian high priest of Heliopolis, it was clearly written by or for a community to which their marriage was particularly important. As the sons of Joseph and Asenath were Ephraim and Manesseh, the legendary ancestors of the Samaritans – and there was a large Samaritan community in Egypt – it seems the text is Samaritan and not Jewish.

So in the Samaritan connection we find clues to the apparent discrepancy between the Jewishness and paganism found in Jesus’ teachings. And it was against the background of age-old simmering tribal hatred that the extraordinary character of Simon Magus – the ‘bad’ Samaritan – arose, challenging the cult of Jesus with his miracles and claims of divinity.

It is all too easy to accept the rather garbled version of his later life as given by the early Church fathers, in which he is tamed by the apostles and dies in a magical battle with Saint Peter. Yet this is the man who it seems John the Baptist nominated as his official successor – and not Jesus… But that, as they say, is another story…

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Despite often bitter opposition from many vested interests, LYNN PICKNETT and CLIVE PRINCE have fearlessly exposed cover-ups and conspiracies, from the faking of the Shroud of Turin (Turin Shroud), the Rudolf Hess mission (Double Standards), the battle among the Second World War Allies (Friendly Fire), the British royal family (War of the Windsors), the New Age movement and the hijacking of ancient Egypt (The Stargate Conspiracy), the Priory of Sion (The Sion Revelation) – and the origins and history of Christianity (The Templar Revelation) as well as their latest book The Masks of Christ. Their website is www.picknettprince.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 111 (November-December 2008).

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Strictly speaking, a pagan Christ is a contradiction in terms. The very concept of paganism was constructed by Christians who wanted to distinguish their faith from the old religion of Greece and Rome, which by the end of classical antiquity was observed only by peasants in remote rural areas – the pagani, or “country people,” or – to use words that are similar in tone – rustics, rubes, hayseeds. So there can be no pagan Christ. Paganism is all that Christianity is not.

Once we go past this elementary point, however, we see that the situation is not so simple. The resemblance between Christianity and its rivals could never be entirely overlooked. The Church Father Augustine (354–430) wrote, “That which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist from the planting of the human race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion which already existed began to be called Christianity.” Whatever Augustine meant by this – and it’s not entirely clear from the context – one thing it could mean is that the “true religion” is universal and has always existed; only comparatively late did it come to be codified in the teachings of Christ.

Before I go further into what this “true religion” might be, it’s necessary to stop and take a look at early Christianity in its context. Christianity, as is well known, grew up in the Roman Empire, a time of remarkable fecundity in religious belief, with a huge and dizzying marketplace of gods and cults and philosophies for the seeker to choose from, many of which bore more than a passing resemblance to one another. It’s impossible to believe that Christianity was not affected by this background. Although the Christians insisted that their religion was true and all the others were false, they still had to account for the fact that theirs was not so different from many of those they were denouncing.

Over the past century, one of the most influential views of the relationship between Christianity and paganism has been that of Sir J.G. Frazer (1854–1941), author of the classic work The Golden Bough, first published in 1890 and updated in many editions thereafter. A pioneer of comparative mythology, Frazer delved into the compendious collections of lore and legend that scholars were amassing in his time and noticed that Christianity had taken many of its elements from the religions it would eventually displace.

The most famous instance is Christmas. The birthday of Christ was not recorded and is not known; in the early centuries of the religion that bears his name it was not celebrated. But by the fourth century, Christ’s birthday came to be observed as a holiday. In the East (starting in Egypt), the date selected was January 6. But the Western church, which had never observed this date, set Christ’s birthday as December 25. Why? One Christian writer quoted (but not named) by Frazer explains: “It was a custom of the heathen to celebrate on the same twenty-fifth of December the birthday of the Sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity. In these solemnities and festivities the Christians also took part. Accordingly when the doctors of the Church perceived that Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnised on that day and the festival of the Epiphany on the sixth of January.”

Another, possibly more revealing, case involves the festival commemorating the death and resurrection of Christ. Today Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the full moon after the March equinox. (This is to some extent a simplification of the complex process of fixing the date of Easter, but it will serve our purposes here.) Frazer noted that there was an ancient tradition by which the death of Christ was observed on March 25, regardless of the phase of the moon. Remarkably, this coincided with the date on which the death and resurrection of a pagan god, Attis, was celebrated. Still more significantly, the parts of the world where Christians observed Easter on this date – western Asia Minor and Rome – were precisely the areas where the cult of Attis was most popular.

Attis, according to the myth, was a handsome young shepherd who was born of a virgin. Beloved of the Great Goddess of life, he was said in some legends to have been killed by a boar, in others to have died after castrating himself. (The priests of the Attis cult were all self-made eunuchs, in imitation of him.) After his death, he was changed into a pine tree.

It’s curious that the death and resurrection of Christ should have been celebrated in such close conjunction with that of one of the deities that the Christians so detested. What’s even more interesting is the underlying similarity of the myths: both are celebrations of a god, born of a virgin, who has died and risen again. More surprisingly still, Attis was not the only god in antiquity who was believed to have died and risen again. There was also Adonis, worshipped in Babylonia and Syria. Adonis, another beautiful young man, was said to die every year. His death caused passion to cease and beasts and men to forget to reproduce; all life would be extinguished if Ishtar, the goddess of life, did not rescue him annually from the halls of death. And of course there is Osiris, the slain and dismembered king of Egypt who was reassembled by his wife Isis (another goddess of life) to serve as the lord of the dead.

Even this cursory sketch suggests how many parallels we can find between Christianity and pagan religions. Moreover, it was obvious that the pagan faiths were much older than the Christian one. Christianity looked like a mere copycat of these religions, and that’s exactly what many of its pagan critics contended. The Christian fathers countered with a remarkably clumsy response: that Satan, foreseeing that Christ would come to earth, came down first and created religions that were merely diabolical imitations of the truth.

Those of us who find this argument implausible are left wondering exactly what the relationship between Christianity and these pagan cults was. Frazer saw the mystery religions of Attis and Adonis and Osiris as essentially fertility cults: Their rites were designed to mimic and foster the rebirth of life each spring. According to Frazer, Christ had come as a teacher of “ethical reforms”; the mythologies of the fertility cults were gradually assimilated to the faith of Christ’s followers “so as to accord in some measure with the prejudices, the passions, the superstitions of the vulgar.” Frazer writes:

To live and to cause to live, to eat food and to beget children, these were the primary wants of men in the past, and they will be the primary wants of men in the future so long as the world lasts…. These two things, therefore, food and children, were what men chiefly sought to procure by the performance of magical rites for the regulation of the seasons.

This all may sound plausible – as it certainly did to Frazer’s rationalistic late-Victorian contemporaries – but there’s one small problem with it. The idea that the mysteries of Attis and Adonis and Osiris, and by extension of Christ, were mere attempts to reproduce and sustain the cycles of life was known to the ancients and explicitly refuted by them. Plutarch, writing in the late first century CE, contends:

And we shall also get our hands on the dull crowd who take pleasure in associating the [mystic recitals] about these Gods either with changes of the atmosphere according to the seasons, or with the generation of the corn and sowing and ploughings, and in saying that Osiris is buried when the corn is hidden by the earth, and comes to life and shows himself again when it begins to sprout.

Cicero, the Roman statesman and philosopher (106–43 BCE), also says there is something more to the mysteries:

These Mysteries have brought us from rustic savagery to a cultivated and refined civilisation. The rites of the Mysteries are called “initiations” and in truth we have learned from them the first principles of life. We have gained the understanding not only to live happily but to die with better hope.

We can safely say this much: The ancient mysteries were more than rites intended merely to ensure that the crops grew and the animals bred. But what, then, were they? What is the dying “with better hope” that Cicero mentions? And why does the story of Christ, springing from the monotheistic world of Judaism, so much resemble those of the gods that went before?

At this point it would be helpful to address an extremely important issue: the reliability of the historical accounts of Jesus. Apart from a few extremely brief references in non-Christian writers such as Tacitus and Pliny the Younger (which talk about the Christians as a sect but say practically nothing about Christ himself), we have to rely on the canonical gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Scholars unanimously accept these as the oldest gospels, with the possible exception of the Gospel of Thomas, an early sayings collection with a strongly Gnostic tinge; the many other gospels that were written are almost certainly later – one reason they didn’t find their way into the New Testament.

Unfortunately, even these texts present Jesus at a remove. None of them, it is now generally acknowledged, was written by any of the Twelve Apostles or even by anyone who knew or saw Jesus personally. The earliest Gospel, Mark, is dated to around 70 CE; the latest, John, to around 100 (these dates are highly approximate). Nowhere in these Gospels is the claim that the writer himself has seen what he is describing. Indeed most scholars today agree that none of the texts in the entire New Testament was written by any of the Twelve Apostles.

The only surviving eyewitness account of Christ is found in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Paul did not know Jesus when he was alive, but he writes that after Jesus had appeared to Cephas (Peter), the twelve, and various other witnesses, “last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time” (1 Cor. 15:5). (Biblical quotations are from the Authorised King James Version.) This experience, usually equated with Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1–7), is an eyewitness account: Paul is claiming that he has had a vision of the risen Christ like that of the other apostles. Inasmuch as Paul died during Nero’s persecution in Rome in 64 CE, this text is almost certainly earlier than any of the Gospels. But Paul does not say anything more about his experience, and he says almost nothing at all about Jesus before his death.

In their 1999 book The Jesus Mysteries, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy argue that the extreme scarcity of direct evidence about Jesus, together with the strong resemblance of his story to other pagan myths, means that Jesus did not exist as a historical figure. He was created by Gnostic sages as a kind of Jewish equivalent of the dead and reborn gods of the pagan Mediterranean world.

Freke’s and Gandy’s view, although interesting, seems to be an overstatement given the evidence. They say that Paul’s vision (as described by himself) may have been a later addition to 1 Corinthians, a claim that, to my knowledge, no reputable scholar would agree with; or perhaps that it was a mystical vision of some sort. But the context of 1 Corinthians 15 indicates that, as Christians have always claimed, Paul, like the others who claimed they had witnessed the resurrection of Christ, regarded it as an actual encounter with the risen Jesus. Whatever it was they saw or did not see, this much seems indisputable. Indeed, if we go to 1 Thessalonians, another letter of Paul’s, which was the first New Testament book to be written (it’s generally dated to around 50 CE), we see Paul saying, “The Jews… both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets” (1 Thess. 2:14–15). “We believe that Jesus died and rose again,” he writes in the same letter (1 Thess. 4:14). In both these instances, he is stressing the historical actuality of these events: they are not a myth. Furthermore, Paul is not introducing this idea as a novelty but as a premise that he expects his readers to share.

About the historical Jesus, then, we can say this much: that as early as 50 CE, no more than twenty years after his death and still well in the lifetime of his disciples, his followers preached that he had suffered and died and was resurrected. These facts are not later mythic accretions but among the first things the historical record says about Jesus.

What, then, does this all mean? Paul’s own ideas seem to have grown and changed over time. In 1 Thessalonians, his first surviving epistle, he sounds like a modern-day fundamentalist, obsessed with the Rapture. In fact the idea of the Rapture comes from 1 Thess. 4:17: “Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with [the dead] in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.” Later, Paul becomes more mystical. In 1 Corinthians he explicitly denies the physical resurrection of the dead: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body…. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption” (1 Cor. 15:44, 50). This, incidentally, puts mainstream Christianity in the bizarre position of teaching a doctrine – the resurrection of the physical body – that is explicitly denied by its own scriptures. I do not know of any other such case in all of world religion.

Nonetheless, resurrection is at the core of Christianity from its earliest days, just as it was of the mystery religions of Attis and Adonis and Osiris that preceded it. And, like the pagan mysteries, which enabled its initiates to die “with better hope,” Christianity viewed the resurrection not an isolated case that happened to one (possibly divine) man, but something that is the common human inheritance, potentially available to everyone: “Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept” (1 Cor. 15:20). This was not the concept of resurrection as commonly taught, but part of what the Church Father Origen (185–253) called “the deeper and more mystical doctrines which are rightly concealed from the multitude.”

The nature of this resurrection lies at the heart of the old pagan mysteries and the Christian faith alike. To best understand it in a short space, it would be helpful to use the common metaphor of a seed, used both by Jesus in the Gospels and by Paul (as well as in some of the pagan mysteries). A seed is something extremely small and contains only in germ the full plant; this is the metaphor Paul uses to compare what he calls “the resurrection body” with the “natural body.” Christ in the Gospels likens the kingdom of heaven to a seed on several occasions as well: for example, “the kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed” (Matt. 13:31).

What, then, is this “seed”? What is the kingdom of heaven, for that matter? If you were to read the works of many theologians, you might conclude that they don’t know. But this is a central concept in esoteric Christianity. It is not difficult to grasp, but it is subtle. I’ve discussed it in detail in my book Inner Christianity, but in essence it comes to this: There is that in you which says “I.” It is consciousness in its pure form; it is never seen, but always that which sees. You may think you are your body or your emotions or your thoughts, but the fact that you can step back and look at all these things at a distance proves that these things are not you – not in the truest and fullest sense. In fact it is your very confusion of your “I” with your thoughts, emotions, and sensations that constitutes the fundamental problem of human existence. Liberation or enlightenment or, as the early Christians called it, gnosis is the freeing of the “I” from its identification with its own experience. Paul writes, “That which thou sowest is not quickened until it die” (1 Cor. 15:36). Esoterically, this means that the “I” must “die” – must detach itself from its former identifications – before it can be “resurrected” or “born again,” that is, realise its fullest potential in a life that is not limited by the body or the psyche. In the course of this liberation the “I” realises its own immortality.

This, in the simplest and most concise language that I can muster, is the secret that I believe lies at the heart of esoteric Christianity and of the Christian mystery itself. To speak of the resurrection of the physical body, explicitly denied by Paul, is to misunderstand; it is the symbolic death and rebirth of the true “I” – called “I am” in the Gospel of John – that is really the point. But it is an arcane point, and not everyone can grasp it. Early Christianity eventually allowed ordinary believers to believe in a physical resurrection because it was easier to understand; only those who wanted to go deeper were told the truth. As Origen writes, “The resurrection of the body,… while preached in the churches, is understood more clearly by the intelligent.” Origen is saying that the doctrine “preached in the churches” is not the whole story. Regrettably, however, as Christianity developed in later centuries, those who had only an inaccurate, secondary understanding of this truth came to lead the church. Because they did not understand the deeper message, they suppressed it, with consequences that have been disastrous for the spiritual life of the West.

In any event, the revelation of the true nature of the “I” makes the correspondence between the Christian mystery and those of the pagans much easier to understand. If these things are true, they are universally true, and if they are universally true, they must have been known in many times and places and cannot be the bailiwick of a single religion. That, I would suggest, is why Augustine can say that the “true religion” always existed. It’s also why the mystery religions so resembled Christianity. They were expressing a universal truth to which Christianity was also pointing.

All the same, this does not entirely explain the innumerable parallels between the Christ of the Gospels and the figures of ancient myth. Often it does seem that characteristics of the ancient pagan gods were later associated with Christ – and at a fairly early stage. The virgin birth, for example, is not mentioned in Mark, the earliest canonical Gospel, or for that matter by Paul. But it does appear in Matthew and Luke, which are generally dated to between 80 and 100. This suggests that by this point certain myths and legends had attached themselves to the basic story of Christ’s death and resurrection.

Exactly how this happened is unclear. There is no contemporary documentation of this process, or, for that matter, of Christ himself apart from the Gospels to serve as a check. The best guess seems to be something like this: The earliest Christians believed they had some experience of the risen Christ, and this was the central part of their message from the very beginning. By the end of the first century, as the Gospels were being written, the historical kernel of the story of Christ was expanded and recast, partly to imitate familiar aspects of pagan myths but also to symbolically express certain truths. That’s why Origen could write:

Very many mistakes have been made because the right method of examining the holy texts has not been discovered by the greater number of readers… because it is their habit to follow the bare letter….

Scripture interweaves the imaginary with the historical, sometimes introducing what is utterly impossible, sometimes what is possible but never occurred…. [The Word] has done the same with the Gospels and the writings of the Apostles; for not even they are purely historical, incidents which never occurred being interwoven in the “corporeal” sense…. These passages, by means of seeming history, though the incidents never occurred, figuratively reveal certain mysteries.

This process began with the Gospels but did not end with them. It continued for several centuries later, as we’ve seen with the Christian appropriation of Christmas and Easter in the fourth century. Later still, in the fifth century, when the cult of the pagan goddesses was suppressed, there was a need for a feminine face of divinity, and the mother of Christ was elevated to this role; many of the attributes of Ishtar and particularly Isis were then attached to her. Christianity’s success was at least partly due to its remarkable genius and flexibility in adapting pagan myths to its own ends. Ultimately, however, the true greatness of the faith lies in its profound and haunting expression of what may be the central mystery of human existence.

Bibliography

Raymond E. Brown,  Introduction to the New Testament, New York: Doubleday, 1997.

J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, New York: Macmillan, 1922.

Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries: Was the “Original Jesus” a Pagan God?, New York: Three Rivers, 1999.

The Greek New Testament, edited by Kurt Aland et al. Third edition. N.p.: United Bible Societies, 1966.

G.R.S. Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes: Studies in Hellenistic Theosophy and Gnosis, York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1972. Originally published 1906.

Origen, Contra Celsum, translated by Henry Chadwick, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953.

Origen, On First Principles, Edited and translated by G.W. Butterworth, New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

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RICHARD SMOLEY has over thirty years of experience studying and practicing the Western esoteric traditions. His latest book is The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe. His other works include Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (with Jay Kinney); Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition; The Essential Nostradamus; Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism; and Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity. He is editor of Quest Books and executive editor of Quest magazine, both published by the Theosophical Society in America. His website is www.innerchristianity.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 105 (Nov-Dec 2007).

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The feature film “The Unknown Stories of the Messiah” ignited considerable controversy when it was released in India by claiming Jesus journeyed to the East after the crucifixion, studied Hinduism and Buddhism, and was buried in a tomb in Kashmir.

Responding to attacks from India’s Christian leaders, the film’s producer Subhrajit Mitra pointed out that while “neither the Bible nor the mainstream ‘gospels’ give credence to such theories… there is evidence in Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist scriptures of Jesus staying in India.”

He said that a “Jesus-like man” finds mention “in the holy books of Jerusalem, Alexandria, Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tibet and India.”

The Indian film-maker was inspired by the writings of nineteenth century Russian adventurer Nicolai Notovitch and the German scholar Holga Kersten. Notovitch wrote a book, The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, after his visit to the Ladakh region in Jammu and Kashmir state in 1887. A century later, intrigued by Notovitch’s account of Jesus traveling to the East, Holga Kersten produced two best-selling books Jesus Lived in India and The Jesus Conspiracy.

Both authors relate popular legends and stories which tell of Jesus visiting Ladakh and the Kashmir valley, as well as Varanasi city, which is in India’s north-central state of Uttar Pradesh.

They allege that Jesus was buried in an ancient tomb built in the Kan Yar area of Kashmir’s Srinagar district. They also suggest that Jesus first came to India as a child to learn from Hindu gurus, and later returned to Palestine to teach what he studied in the East. He survived the crucifixion and returned to India where he died at age 120.

Notovitch asserted that in 1887, while at the secluded Himis monastery in Ladakh, he was shown a manuscript which discussed the “unknown life” of Jesus, or “Issa,” as he was supposedly called in the East. This Issa text, translated for Notovitch from Tibetan by a monk/lama, alleged that during his “lost years” Jesus was educated by yogis in India, Nepal and “the Himalaya Mountains.”

Stating that he felt the manuscript to be “true and genuine,” Notovitch maintained its contents were written “immediately after the Resurrection,” while the manuscript itself purportedly dated from the third century of the Common Era. Notovitch related that the “two manuscripts” he was shown at Himis were “compiled from diverse copies written in the Thibetan tongue, translated from rolls belonging to the Lassa library and brought from India, Nepal, and Maghada 200 years after Christ.”

When Notovitch returned to Europe there was much debate as to the authenticity of the manuscript he claimed to have studied. He was also accused of being an impostor who never visited the places he described. One skeptic was Swami Abhedananda.

Abhedananda journeyed into the arctic region of the Himalayas, determined to find a copy of the Himis manuscript or to expose the fraud. His book of travels, entitled Kashmir O Tibetti, tells of a visit to the Himis gonpa and includes a Bengali translation of two hundred twenty-four verses essentially the same as the Notovitch text. Abhedananda was thereby convinced of the authenticity of the Issa legend.

In 1925, another Russian, Nicolai Roerich arrived at Himis. Roerich was a philosopher, scientist and gifted artist. He apparently saw the same documents as Notovitch and Abhedananda. And he recorded in his own travel diary the same legend of Issa.

While doing research for his film “The Unknown Stories of the Messiah,” Subhrajit Mitra was particularly stunned by a story in the Bhavishya Maha Purana which tells of an encounter between King Shalivahana and a holy man referred to as Issa-Masih (Jesus the Messiah) near Srinagar, long after the crucifixion. It describes Issa’s arrival in the Kashmir region and how King Shalivahana, who ruled the Kushan area (39-50 CE), entertained the visiting holy man as a guest for some time. Compiled in 115 CE, the Bhavishya Maha Purana is one of the 18 holy books of Hinduism.

Author and researcher Holga Kersten says there are more than twenty one historical documents that bear witness to the existence of Jesus in India, where in addition to being known as Issa, he is also called “Yuz Asaf.” In Jesus Lived in India, first published in German in 1983, Kersten offers a thorough, methodical and authoritative examination of the evidence of Christ’s life beyond the Middle East before the crucifixion and in India and elsewhere after it.

According to Kersten, the many stories of Jesus journeying to the East are important because they highlight the “vital importance to find again the path to the sources, to the eternal and central truths of Christ’s message, which has been shaken almost beyond recognition by the profane ambitions of more or less secular institutions arrogating to themselves a religious authority. This is an attempt to open a way to a new future, firmly founded in the true spiritual and religious sources of the past.”

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 101 (March-April 2007).

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.

For our reproduction notice, click here.

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With the publication of Holy Blood, Holy Grail in the mid-nineties and the Gnostic Gospels found in Nag Hammadi, a new perspective on the role of Mary Magdalene in the revelation and dissemination of the esoteric teachings of Christ has emerged onto the public stage. With the release of The Da Vinci Code, she has been placed firmly in the public consciousness, her story awakening both excitement and controversy.

It is my contention that Mary Magdalene was the carrier of a tradition of respect and reverence for the Divine Feminine, a secret initiatory tradition that leads back through Jesus, Gnosticism, the esoteric teachings of Judaism, and the Egyptian mysteries of Isis to the ultimate ground or source of all religions. By seeking out the alternative roads to understanding, by looking at the Gnostic texts, legends, symbols, and iconography, one discovers the distinct possibility Mary Magdalene was not only first witness to and herald of the Resurrection, but the chief disciple and recipient of Christ’s’ gnosis, as well as teacher and transmitter of these extraordinary Mysteries to the people of France.

On the shores of the Mediterranean Sea outside Marseilles at Les Saintes Marie de la Mere there is a small chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalene and consecrated by Archbishop Roncalli (who later became Pope John XXIII). Given a place of prominence within this chapel are paintings of her arrival from Palestine in a small rudderless boat.According to legend, soon after the crucifixion and Resurrection, Mary Magdalene and her family were expelled from the Holy Land, set adrift on the Mediterranean Sea and made their way to this region, particularly the area around Southern France and Northern Spain. At this time in history, aside from the already established Celts, many Greeks, Arabs, Jews and others lived and travelled in this area. There was even a Jewish city known as Glanum Levi whose ruins can be found today in Provence.

In the midst of this cosmopolitan confluence of cultures, along with the exchange of goods there must have been an exchange of philosophical and religious ideas. It is very possible that during this period many spiritual and symbolic links were discovered between these diverse peoples and their traditional belief systems that stretched back to the temples of Egypt. Before her arrival in Les Saintes Marie Sur Les Mere, France was riddled with Isis cults. The name Paris etymologically can be linked to the pre-Celtic ParIsis, the grove of Isis. Clearly this region was fertile ground for Mary Magdalene’s mission.Following her arrival in France, she was said to have travelled the land, preaching the authentic Gnostic gospel of Jesus, which had been directly transmitted to her during his time on Earth and in mystic visions after his return to the more subtle dimensions of light. French religious literature from the Middle Ages is filled with legends and stories of the life of Mary Magdalene from this period until her death. Tales abound of her miraculous healings, her performance of the ritual of baptism, her aid in fertility and childbearing and even her ability to raise the dead. There are even reports of a secret tradition of the healing arts that exists today in France and traces its roots back to Mary Magdalene.1

After this prophetic mission was accomplished, Mary is reported to have withdrawn to a cave in Ste. Baum, where she spent the remainder of her days in pray and seclusion. She is believed to have been buried at Ste. Maximin where her remains were watched over by Cassianite monks from the fifth century until the Saracen invasion. Then in 1058, in a papal bull, Pope Stephen acknowledged the existence of her relics in the church of Vezeley, which became one of the major places of pilgrimage during the Middle Ages.

But before we look at the evidence for her distinctive role as Apostle of the Apostles and prophetic mission, let us take a look at the hidden history of Gnosticism, the powerful doctrine of Divine grace, healing and illumination that she was said to have transmitted.

The Gnostic Teachings

It was during the Hellenistic period that the mystic knowledge of Egypt, the great symbols, myths, astronomical, scientific and metaphysical teachings passed into the heart of the Mystery Schools of Greece and Rome, which included the region of Gaul where Mary Magdalene is reported to have lived and preached. These secret initiatory teachings of the Egyptians were also retained and transmitted through the inner circles of Judaism to Jesus himself.

At the heart of this lineage of transmission was an extraordinary metaphysical teaching known as Gnosticism. This teaching is believed to be the spiritual basis of his essential message to humanity, a message revealed to Mary Magdalene, his disciples and followers through the vehicles of metaphor, allegory and parable. Unlike the patriarchal, dogmatic, materially based teachings prevalent during this period, Gnosticism placed primary value on the feminine qualities of receptivity, intuitive perception, visionary experience and the art of healing. It was a teaching of love, selflessness, harmony and communion.

The mystic experience of, and communion with, the essential grace and majesty of Divinity, lay at the heart of this Gnostic transmission. The clear and immediate experience of this awakening was known as gnosis or wisdom. Often translated from its Greek root as ‘knowledge’, Gnosticism goes much deeper than mere intellectual understanding. Like a brilliant flash of light arising from the darkness, this understanding arises in the individual as a bright lucid awareness – an intuitive realisation of the pure essence, nature and energy of Divinity as it flows within oneself, the luminous realms and all of creation.

From the Gnostic viewpoint, the answers to all of life’s mysteries can only be found when one “opens oneself to this divine current and allows oneself to be penetrated by it to the point where one is fully transformed and illuminated by it.”2 From the viewpoint of many early Gnostic communities, this divine current was perceived as the feminine, healing and nurturing energy of God’s Holy Spirit.

The fundamental doctrine of the Gnostics relates the dualistic nature of the world in which we reside, the eternal struggle between good and evil. They believed that Jehovah, the wrathful god of the Old Testament was a false god and expression of what they called the demiurge. For how could a fully enlightened divinity contain within him the base emotions of anger, jealousy and vengeance? For them, the real God was a loving deity equally and directly accessible to all. This God taught that love, compassion and the true sacrifice and transformation of the self, or ego, was the highest spiritual path.

The Gnostics believed that the plan of this demiurge, or Satan, was to trap spirit in matter, and the Earth itself was a prison in which souls were exiled from their divine home. For them, the real world was the non-material world of spirit and all of their rituals and practices were designed to purify them and provide them with the means to find their way out of the impure world of matter, darkness and suffering and return to their true home in the Light.

Clearly, these sacred esoteric teachings were revolutionary. Unlike the fixed, restrictive, hierarchical systems prevalent during this period, these teachings were open to all, female, male, rich, poor Jew or Pagan. This all-inclusive transmission of teachings formerly reserved for the elite was at odds with the practices of Orthodox Judaism and the emerging Church of Rome. For once the seeker had been touched by this Gnostic current, she or he came to recognise their own divine nature and perceive their place in the world from a whole new perspective. No longer did they need the intercession of a priest or rabbi to connect them with their spiritual inheritance.

Evidence of Mary Magdalene’s primary role as disciple, visionary, mediatrix and herald of these revolutionary teachings can be found in a number of Gnostic texts. These include The Pistis Sophia, The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Mary and more.

Apostle of the Apostles

The Pistis Sophia is a Coptic Gnostic revelatory work composed and/or compiled in Egypt around the middle of the second century CE. It claims to disclose the “secret teachings of the Savior,” reserved for his inner circle of initiates during the eleven years following his Resurrection. Filled with powerful, poetic imagery, this text reveals the intimate connections between this emerging form of Christianity, Paganism and beliefs and rituals founds in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.3 It also clearly recognises and demonstrates Mary Magdalene’s essential role as foremost disciple, seer and prophetess.

It appears the teachings found in the Pistis Sophia were created specifically for the apostles who would go forth and spread his gospel. It takes the form of a dialogue between Jesus and these apostles and consists primarily of questions and answers. It is fascinating to note that in this text, out of the forty-six questions asked of him, thirty-nine of them come from Mary Magdalene. Due to her sincerity, astute level of inquiry and ability to comprehend the essence of his words, time and time again she is praised and recognised by him for her clarity and insight.

For example, after Jesus presents the first part of these mystical teachings concerning the aeons, orders and regions of the “Great Invisible,” he acknowledges Mary Magdalene’s superior capacity for contemplation, insight and revelation.

It came to pass then, when Mary had heard the Savior say these words, that she gazed fixedly into the air for the space of an hour. She said: “My Lord, give commandment to me to speak in openness.” And Jesus, the compassionate, answered and said unto Mary:

“Mary, thou blessed one, whom I will perfect in all mysteries, of those of the height, discourse in openness, thou, whose heart is raised to the Kingdom of Heaven more than all thy brethren.”

Throughout the text, after listening to her interpretation of his teachings, he acknowledges her perceptive abilities,

Well, said, Mary, for thou art blessed before all women on earth, because thou shalt be the fullness of all fullness and the perfection of all perfections.

This is only the first of a number of texts that speak of Mary Magdalene’s gifts and unique relationship with Jesus. According to a group of Gnostic Gospels discovered in 1945 in a cave in Upper Egypt near the village of Nag Hammadi, she was said to be an inspired prophetess who continuously experienced the living presence of her Lord within her.

In The Gospel of Mary, from this collection, Mary Magdalene, the visionary, reveals to the other disciples teachings that were transmitted to her through visionary experience. In this gospel, she clearly takes the lead, not only soothing and reassuring the male apostles who fear capture and death, but relating to them teachings of the Savior that she alone has been privileged to receive. As in the Pistis Sophia, the Savior blesses her for her visionary capacity. When Peter questions her vision, Levi responds with, “If the Teacher held her worthy, who are you to reject her? Surely the Teacher knew her very well, for he loved her more than us.”4

In The Gospel of Philip, from the same collection, the disciples appear to be jealous of the intimate relationship between the Savior and Mary Magdalene.

The Companion of the savior is Mary Magdalene. But Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval. They said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” The Savior answered and said to them, “Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness.”

Because I have no reason to doubt Philip’s account or the words found in these early texts, I feel that the Christianity brought to France by Mary Magdalene has a different feel about it because it was closer to the authentic teachings of Jesus. If Mary Magdalene truly was the Apostle of the Apostles, then Jesus transmitted more to her or perhaps she understood this transmission better than the rest of the apostles. Through this lens we can begin to perceive and acknowledge the different understanding and practice of Christianity that emerged in Southern France, one that lasted over 1,200 years and in a sense pervades the place to this day.

Magdalene’s Legacy

When one looks at the history of the region one finds evidence that with her arrival, a surge of spiritual awareness, code of ethics and respect for feminine values began, which wove itself into the very fabric of the psychic landscape of Europe. The Order of the Knights Templar was created in this region. The alchemists began their flurry of Cathedral building to preserve the secret metaphysical teachings passed down to them from ancient Egypt. The Crusades and the entire Back to Jerusalem movement began in this area. The mystical Kabbalistic texts the Bahir and Zohar emerged from this region, bringing to the Jewish people knowledge of the Shekhina, or ‘indwelling presence’ and ‘feminine potency of God’. The cults of the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene and Black Madonna, symbolically representing the three aspects of Isis in her role as Universal Goddess, arose here and spread throughout Europe.

It was here the troubadours and poets such as Wolfram von Eschenbach, Robert de Bouron and others sang their songs of devotion to the feminine principle and wrote their fables of the Holy Grail. And it was here in the beautiful mountains and valleys of Provence and Languedoc that the Cathars, as carriers of the Gnostic transmission of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, rebelled against what they considered to be the excesses of the priestly hierarchy, renounced all worldly possessions and fully committed themselves to the path of spirit. Among the Cathars, women as well as men were priests who transmitted divine grace and healing power through the laying on of hands in their sacred initiatory rites that link back to Mary Magdalene, Isis and the healing traditions held by the temple priestess.

As time marched on, the Church of Rome, threatened by the inroads these powerful Gnostic teachings were making among the local populace, labelled them heretical and moved to suppress them. To cement the rule of the Church of Rome, Pope Innocent III called for a Crusade against this Gnostic Cathar heresy. This crusade, which had as its focus the torture, murder and eradication of these loving and compassionate people was the starting point of a wave of fear, suffering and suppression of the feminine in both her divine and worldly aspects that would spread throughout Europe and become known as the Holy Inquisition.

Closer to our time, there are the visions of Saint Bernadette and the healing waters of Lourdes, as well as the mystery of Father Sauniere, Rennes Le Chateau and his strange chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalene. Then there is the saga of Otto Rahn searching through the hills and valleys of this region for the Nazis trying to find the Holy Grail for the upper echelon of the SS. There are the legends of the secret alchemists who live in a magical castle somewhere in the Pyrenees recently popularised in the Harry Potter series. Finally, emerging from this region, is the mystery of the Alchemical Cross of Hendaye, the prophetic visions of Nostradamus and the Basque legend that John of the Apocalypse still lives in a cave in the Pyrenees and will leave that cave only at the end of time.5

These events and stories reveal that Mary Magdalene and the Gnostic current may very possibly be the driving force behind the rich history of this region. Whether it is fact or legend that Mary Magdalene actually came to this area is less important than the power and impact her life and teachings had upon the people of France. It is obvious to anyone who opens their eyes to see, that early in the history of this grace-filled tradition, Mary Magdalene, Apostle of the Apostles entered and has remained at the heart of Christianity.

Footnotes:

1. From a conversation with minister and playwright Lila Sophia Tresemer, co-author of the play and DVD, Re-Discovering Mary Magdalene (written with her husband, David Tresemer), for which I created the choreography. In their travels through France, she discovered a tradition of using the healing oils of Mary Magdalene that was said to have been passed down to healers now living in the south of France.

2. Sharron Rose, The Path of the Priestess; A Guidebook for Awakening the Divine Feminine (Inner Traditions, 2002) p.104

3. From the forward by Leslie Shepard to G.R.S. Mead’s, Pistis Sophia (University Books, 1974), p. xvii

4. From the recent translation by Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene (Inner Traditions, 2002).

5. For greater insight into these events see Weidner and Bridges, The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye: Alchemy and the End of Time (Destiny Books, 2003) and the Sacred Mysteries DVD, Secrets of Alchemy: The Great Cross and the End of Time.

Top image caption: The “Mother of the World” by mystic and artist Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947). Nicholas and his wife Helena taught that the World Mother has manifested many times over the millennia. (Image courtesy of the Nicholas Roerich Museum, New York, www.roerich.org).

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SHARRON ROSE, MA.Ed, is a filmmaker, writer, choreographer and teacher. She is the author of The Path of the Priestess; A Guidebook for Awakening the Divine Feminine and the DVD, Yoga of Light. Together with her husband, Jay Weidner, she has produced numerous documentaries and instructional DVDs for their company Sacred Mysteries Productions. Sharron’s web site is www.sharronrose.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 2.

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Every dog has its day, so they say, and it looks like Gnosticism, an ancient approach to spiritual experience, may be having its day, once again. Of course, despite the best efforts of the early Catholic Church, Gnosticism never really disappeared, but its reappearance over the centuries has been fleeting and sporadic. Why, as we march into a new millennium, is this hidden stream of quasi-Christian mysticism triggering a fresh interest among both spiritual seekers and readers of popular novels?

Dan Brown’s mega-bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, surely shares part of the credit. This publishing phenomenon, which sold over 6 million copies, took a simmering interest in the Knights Templar, the Divine Feminine, alleged secret societies such as the Priory of Sion, the Holy Grail, and the question of the historical Jesus, and stirred these ingredients together with a generous dollop of Gnosticism.

The result was a blockbuster thriller that unexpectedly caught the popular imagination. Despite the fact that at least two other previous thrillers, The Da Vinci Legacy by Lewis Perdue (1983), and Kingdom Come (2000) by Jim Hougan, had overlapped much of the same territory, lightning struck Brown’s novel and sparked innumerable dinner-table discussions of heretofore-arcane topics such as Mary Magdalene’s real relationship to Jesus.

But the success of The Da Vinci Code is just the culminating phase of a gradual public awareness of Gnostic matters that extends back at least a century to the great Occult Revival of the late 19th century. At that time, Gnosticism slowly re-emerged from the shadows, nudged by the French occultist Eliphas Lévi, and propelled along by Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, French neo-gnostics such as Papus and Jean Bricaud, and researchers such as G.R.S. Mead (whose pioneering discussion of the Gnostics, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, was for many decades one of the few sourcebooks on the subject for general readers).

However, it was the discovery of a cache of ancient Gnostic scriptures at Nag Hammadi in the Egyptian desert in 1945 that really set off the modern phase of the Gnostic revival. Although their translation into English was not complete until the late 1970s, early access to some of the writings inspired the great psychologist Carl Jung to draw parallels between the ancient Gnostics and modern depth psychology. The publication in 1977 of the Nag Hammadi Librarytranslations, followed in 1978 by religious scholar Elaine Pagels’ best-selling exposition, The Gnostic Gospels, guaranteed that Gnosticism would not go away anytime soon. But before we take a further look at the burgeoning phenomenon of modern Gnosticism, a review of the ancient Gnostic teachings is in order.

Gnosis and the Church

Though scholars argue there were Gnostic teachings that predated the early Christian era, what is most commonly thought of as Gnosticism consisted of numerous Christian sects that thrived in the immediate centuries after the ministry of Jesus. These sects, often gathered around charismatic mystics, certainly thought of themselves as Christian, and it was only their emphasis ongnosis, or divine knowledge, that later earned them the sweeping label of Gnostic.

As Christianity spread outside the confines of a specifically Jewish faith, it was perhaps inevitable that some gentile Christians would reinterpret their conception of God to distinguish Him from the tribal “G-d of Israel” Whose Covenant with His people seemed anchored to their particular identity as Jews. Christian aspirations to a universal faith, applicable to anyone with ears to hear, led many Gnostics to posit that God the Father, of whom Jesus spoke, must be a different God altogether: a hitherto Unknown God Who existed far above the earthly realm and was free of ethnic contracts or favouritism. Christ functioned as the messenger from this remote and impartial God, and some Gnostic scriptures downgraded the Jealous God of the Old Testament to the role of Demiurge, a lesser creator-god who brought a flawed Creation into existence and mistakenly ruled it with a heavy hand as if he were the True God.1

Thus, in the Gnostic view, salvation from this diminished material realm of suffering and injustice depended less on one’s mere beliefs or on the following of religious laws that the Demiurge put in place, than on the individual’s inner experience of gnosis – a divine knowledge of the cosmic order and one’s true identity. The Gnostic scriptures alluded to Christ’s secret teachings, which would aid the Gnostic to embrace gnosis, and armed with this knowledge, to escape the illusory realm of the Demiurge at the time of death.

There are any number of reasons why Gnosticism was bound to come into conflict with that portion of the Church which was consolidating into an institutional monolith. Gnosis, by its very nature, was an individual experience that eluded systematisation. While the Gnostics had priests and even bishops, their leadership derived from their mystical bonafides, not from a bureaucratic position of authority. Furthermore, the canonical Gospels portrayed Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy and the Messiah promised to the Hebrews. The Gnostics’ break with what they considered the Demiurge was at cross purposes with this historical reading and undermined the working mythos of the institutional Church.

In another example of scriptural reversal, some Gnostic versions of the Creation story of Adam and Eve portrayed the Serpent as Liberator, offering the apple as a means to knowledge unfairly denied to humankind by the despotic Demiurge. There was obviously no way to accept this counter-version and the traditional version at the same time.

Divine Feminine

The most common Gnostic revision of the Creation story spoke of Sophia (Wisdom), an extension of the True God, venturing forth from the Pleroma (the fullness of the ineffable divine realm), producing an aborted spiritual being, Ialdobaoth (the Demiurge), who in turn created the flawed material world. Sophia, seeing sparks of the divine entrapped in matter, descended to try and free them and was herself entrapped. It took the efforts of the Christ (pre-existing in the Pleroma) to extricate her and return her, past the Archons presiding over intermediate planes, to her rightful place beside Him: a tale symbolic of the plight of the soul enmeshed in illusion.

Finally, the indications in Gnostic scriptures, such as the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary, that Mary Magdalene was closer to Jesus than the other disciples and received secret teachings denied to them, undercut both St. Paul’s misogynist version of Christianity and the Catholic Church’s claim to legitimacy based on St. Peter’s supposed selection as the “rock” on which the Church would be built. The prominent role given to the Divine Feminine via the Gnostic veneration of the Magdalene and Sophia was partly recuperated by the Roman Church through the significance it later afforded the Virgin Mary, but this status was subsumed within the overall supremacy of a Church run by celibate males.

Whatever Gnosticism’s virtues as an effective path to gnosis and to unconditioned consciousness, it was simply too idiosyncratic and contrarian to make the grade as a stabilising component of Roman power. Its subversive counter-myths stood little chance of being integrated into a social order based on top-down power relations emanating from Rome and Constantinople. The prevailing Church absorbed those elements of the Gnostic worldview that best served its own ends and scuttled the rest, consigning the Gnostics to the oblivion of heresy and their scriptures to the bonfires of proscribed texts.

Of course attempts to obliterate ideas or spiritual currents that remain attractive to some are never wholly successful. Pockets of Gnostic alienation persisted among the Eastern European Bogomils, and eventually influenced the Cathars of Languedoc (southern France). The scourge of the Inquisition originated as a response to the growing influence of the Cathars, whose 12th century challenge to the Catholic Church could no longer be tolerated. The Albigensian Crusade in the 13th century effectively wiped out the Cathars.2  Subsequent Gnostic impulses and teachings survived as heavily-cloaked myths and symbol systems within marginal esoteric currents of the West.

It was only once the religious and social hegemony of the Church was diminished by the succeeding blows of the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, and the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment, that there was sufficient elbow room for Gnosticism to re-emerge into the light of day.

Yet, the question remains why Gnosticism should prove of special interest to increasing numbers today. Are there particular characteristics of today’s society that resonate with the Gnostic worldview? One answer is provided if we consider the popularity of “The Matrix” movies and the influential ideas of science fiction author Philip K. Dick.

The Illusion of Daily Life

Central to both the Matrix and to Dick is the creeping perception that things are not as they seem: our perception of reality, both individual and collective, is an artificial construct masking the unnerving truth. In ripping away the façade of normality, we come face to face with our true dilemma – we live in a maze of illusions and self-delusions from which we must extricate ourselves. This is, of course, a fundamentally Gnostic worldview.

The ancient Gnostics were aware that material existence is, at its root, a beguiling and temporary illusion. (Hindus called this “Maya.”) Modern physics has confirmed this at the sub-molecular level, where one can see that apparently solid objects are, in fact, composed of moving bits of energy that are neither wholly particle nor wave. The closer one looks, the less there is to see. The vast emptiness of outer space is mirrored by the vast emptiness within matter itself.

Esoteric traditions around the world teach that consciousness can exist independent of the body, and that the ability to deliver our consciousness from its addiction to sensory input and compulsive thought patterns can lead to an experience of divine consciousness (gnosis). The message of the Christ of the Gnostics was not that he considered himself the unique and only Son of God, but that each person has the potential to expand their consciousness across the vast emptiness to the level of godhood or Self-realisation.

If the illusoriness of daily life was self-evident in the relatively simple world of two millennia ago, it is becoming even more so, for those with the eyes to see, in the present world of cybernetic virtual realities, Hollywood dream-worlds, instant messaging, corporate branding campaigns, and information warfare. The ancient Gnostics were resigned to the fact that the majority of humans were fatally caught in the illusion, and for this they were called elitists.  Similarly, modern Gnostics perceive that most people around them are inextricably locked into a delusory existence in which their potential consciousness is siphoned off in exchange for corporate profit and material survival. This, too, is a minority perception, but it is steadily growing.

The Gnostic rush many of us felt upon first seeing the Wachowski Brothers’ “The Matrix” was the heady sensation that somehow a deprogramming meme had made it through the corporate maze of AOL-Time-Warner, and that the dream factory itself had been tricked into promulgating a flash of gnosis. Millions responded and suddenly there was much more money on the table. All too predictably, the second and third Matrix films smothered the first film’s spark of insight under tons of ever more dazzling special effects, violence, and pretentious symbolism. The still small voice of the wake-up call embedded in film one was drowned out by the din of its own success. The series’ degeneration was an uncanny recapitulation of the suppression of ancient Gnosticism by the early Church. In the end, the Matrix – like the Church before it – emerged triumphant.

Of course, it is a bit of a leap from perceiving daily life as delusory to embracing an ancient cosmology that specifies a false god, a True God, a malevolent pantheon of Archons, and a hieros gamos (divine marriage) of Christ and Sophia. Unless one is in the market for a ready-made dramatic cast of spiritual entities to believe in, the Gnostic myths best serve as metaphors for one’s dilemma – and, in fact, that may have been the role they played for the early Gnostics, as well.

There are two ways to view the Gnostic myths as potent metaphors: one inner and one outer. The inner way is to see the Gnostic cosmology as a visionary description of the hurdles one must leap in meditation. In trying to ascend to a contemplative state of pure consciousness, one must move beyond the incessant activity of the mind (the Demiurge), and past one’s fears and compulsions (the Archons), before one can arrive at a consciousness beyond time and space (the Pleroma). The successful achievement of this gnosis while still “in the body” prepares one for the similar passage that one’s consciousness must take after death.

An outer reading of the Gnostic cosmology, on the other hand, might consider the Demiurge to be anyone’s flawed and limited image of God, which must be seen through and surpassed on the way to true spiritual insight. The Archons would be the many social laws, institutions, and corporate entities that hamstring one’s existence. On this level, a kind of external gnosis would be one’s realisation of the ultimate inability of these earthly captors to imprison our higher self. In this reading, Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection serve as metaphors for our own daily immolation and extrication. In this instance, a Gnostic motto might be: “Don’t let the bastards get you down!”

Wandering Bishops

Reading The Da Vinci Code or The Gnostic Gospels or watching “The Matrix” are all very well, but such books and movies do not by themselves constitute a Gnostic revival. Revivals or movements require actual social vehicles to engage and embody people’s interests. One place this is happening – albeit on a small scale – is in the low-profile milieu of small independent Gnostic churches. An examination of this phenomenon leads us to the quirky turf of “wandering bishops” – a curious subculture of purported Catholic, Orthodox, and Gnostic bishops who usually (and painstakingly) trace their lines of apostolic succession back to (wait for it) St. Peter or one of the other apostles. This requires some explaining.

The mainstream Roman Catholic Church hangs its legitimacy on unbroken lines of consecration from bishop to bishop, extending all the way back to St. Peter. Only bishops (or higher clergy) can ordain priests or consecrate other bishops – a form of organisational quality-control, as well as a narrow conduit for the divine grace that is said to be conveyed in the sacrament of ordination. Since an ordination or a consecration makes the recipient “a priest forever unto the order of Melchizadek,” a priest or bishop who later turns heretic, or otherwise runs afoul of the Church’s hierarchy, retains legitimate Orders – even if forbidden to celebrate Mass or excommunicated from the Church.

Employing a liberal interpretation of this curious rule, schismatic churches such as the Jansenist Dutch Church, which broke with Rome in 1723, could claim legitimate apostolic succession despite their status outside the Roman Church’s umbrella.  Taking this logic one step further, some bishops consecrated by bishops of the Dutch Church (later the Old Catholic Church, following an alignment with other “national” churches in 1889) claimed the right to start their own churches and pass on the line of “valid” consecration. For instance, Bishop James Ingall Wedgewood was consecrated a bishop in the Old Catholic Church in 1916 and within two years had founded the Liberal Catholic Church, which became a kind of esoteric house church for the Theosophical Society.3

One of the most influential of these independent bishops was Joseph René Vilatte, an Old Catholic missionary in Wisconsin, who sought and received consecration as bishop from the Syrian Jacobite Church in 1892 in Ceylon and subsequently consecrated several other bishops in North America and France who consecrated numerous other bishops in turn.

Needless to say, notions of doctrinal fidelity or consistency – which were understandably a key concern of Rome – were lost in the shuffle, with the result that independent bishops, who were often “more Catholic than the Pope,” sometimes shared the same apostolic lines as esoterically inclined bishops with Gnostic leanings. Over time, this led to a new generation of Gnostic bishops who could now claim apostolic succession. Exactly why apostolic succession would matter to latter-day Gnostics is something of a mystery, particularly since whatever legitimacy the original Gnostics claimed derived from gnosis itself, not from institutional standing. One suspects that even heretics desire approval, and in the absence of Gnostic lines of succession, most latter-day Gnostic bishops are quite happy to gain succession from St. Peter, illicit though it may be – especially if it tweaks the nose of the Vatican.4

One Gnostic “Patriarch” in France, Jules Doinel (Tau Valentin II), sidestepped the issue altogether by receiving “a double spiritual consecration; the first by Jesus in person, the second during a spiritualist séance by two Bogomile bishops.”5  Doinel, who founded the Universal Gnostic Church, went on to consecrate the noted French occultists Papus and Sédir, thus empowering further Gnostic lines, some of which have continued to the present. Another Gnostic group of French origin, the elusive Holy Order of Miriam of Magdala, has cited traditions of a female apostolic line extending back to Mary Magdalene, but has attached no importance to providing verification of such traditions. The spurious Priory of Sion, celebrated in The Da Vinci Code and hyped in Holy Blood, Holy Grail – and likely of no earlier origin than 1956 – avoided ecclesiastical trappings altogether, preferring to concoct a lineage based on the supposed bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene which the Priory claimed to guard.6

Perhaps representative of the Gnostic branch of bishops in the English-speaking world was one Richard Duc de Palatine, an Australian originally named Ronald Powell, who was initially ordained in the Liberal Catholic Church and, in 1953, consecrated a bishop by Mar Georgius I (Hugh George de Willmott Newman), Patriarch of Glastonbury, one of the most fecund independent bishops. Palatine then founded his own Pre-Nicene Gnostic Catholic Church. Palatine, whose penchant for organising esoteric orders was second to none, also founded the Order of the Pleroma, the Brotherhood of the Pleroma, the Disciplina Arcani, and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light. These appear to have led a largely mail-order existence.7  Palatine’s episcopal concerns were intermingled with esoteric, magical, and even Freemasonic preoccupations, but in spite of this – or perhaps due to it – some serious modern Gnostics became associated with him. The most notable is Bishop Stephan Hoeller, arguably the foremost proponent of a contemporary Gnosticism.

Hoeller was consecrated by Palatine in 1967 and for a number of years worked within the fold of his Church and other groups. His Los Angeles-based Ecclesia Gnostica (Church of Gnosis) grew out of his work with the Pre-Nicene Church, and Hoeller has been an indefatigable author and synthesizer, drawing upon ancient Gnostic sources, Jungian psychology, and esoteric Christian concepts, in an effort to construct a modern Gnostic presence.

Secret Teachings of Jesus

As a diligent search of the Web will show, there are an ever increasing number of fledgling Gnostic churches, most of them situated in, or derived from, the “wandering bishop” milieu. Many of them consist of little more than a bishop and a local congregation, if that. This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. After all, the ancient Gnostic sects amounted to the same thing: scattered groups with little uniformity between them. But it also presents the would-be seeker of gnosis with a certain dilemma: Can gnosis be taught? And if it can, who is qualified to teach it?

The ancient Gnostics claimed to be guardians of the secret teachings of Jesus, teachings that were lost when Gnosticism was defeated. Formal issues of apostolic succession aside, no modern Gnostics can claim to perpetuate those teachings in unaltered form, because the chains of transmission have been lost. Even the scriptures that have been recovered – as fascinating as they may be – retain an opaque quality, because the original interpretive keys are absent.

Thus, any modern Gnostic group or teacher must be carefully evaluated, based on subtle qualities that evidence real spiritual depth and understanding. Impressive lists of titles, degrees, and credentials mean little if there is no indication of a voice that speaks from the experience of gnosis. While it may be too much to expect that any given Gnostic teacher is going to be the embodiment of divine illumination, one still has the right to expect that those who talk the talk can walk the walk.

Divine knowledge may be gained in a variety of ways – after all, it was not the exclusive possession of the Gnostics, any more than the True God is the possession of any single religion. If teachers of real attainment choose to use the metaphors of ancient Gnosticism to encourage self-discovery, then the Gnostic revival may fulfill its promise. But if the rekindled interest in Gnosticism is going to amount to anything besides a few books and movies and an unsatisfied hunger for enlightenment, we need to see a growing indication of the true discovery of inner godhood, not a fruitless scramble to decipher a few fragments of someone else’s gnosis.

Footnotes:

1. Some scholars have suggested that this reframing of G-d was first done by Jewish intellectuals who were themselves dissatisfied with the Torah’s portrayal of the deity. Thus early Christian Gnosticism may have been influenced by, or may have been an extension of, a Jewish Gnosticism intent on reinterpreting the Jewish religious traditions. See: Birger A. Pearson, “The Problem of ‘Jewish Gnostic’ Literature,” in Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism, and Early Christianity, edited by Charles W. Hedrick and Robert Hodgson, Jr. (Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson Publishers, 1986), pp. 15-35.
2. Yuri Stoyanov, The Hidden Tradition in Europe (London: Penguin/Arkana, 1994).
3. The premiere exposition of this milieu is Peter F. Anson’s Bishops at Large (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), which is both droll and exhaustively detailed. It is, sadly, long out of print. A more recent (and apologetic) discussion of the phenomenon can be found in Lewis Keizer’s The Wandering Bishops: Apostles of a New Spirituality (2000), available in PDF format at:www.hometemple.org/WanBishWeb%20Complete.pdf.
4. The Vatican, for its part, seems to have nothing encouraging to say about independent bishops. One of the more common claims of Vatican recognition for the sacraments and orders of the Liberal Catholic Church, for instance – a supposed positive ruling by the Roman Congregation of Rites – has been exposed as a hoax. (See: “Rome and Liberal Catholic Orders,” by Rev. L. K. Langley at: www.lcc.cc/tlc/lxvi1/rome.htm) The Vatican’s stance appears to be that so-called valid orders are worthless without the Church’s recognition.
5. Anson, p. 307.
6. See: Robert Richardson, “The Priory of Sion Hoax,” GNOSIS Magazine #51, pp. 49-55, (www.gnosismagazine.com). Reprinted in New Dawn No. 61 (July-August 2000).
7. Anson, pp. 492-495, and J. Gordon Melton, The Encyclopedia of American Religions, Second Edition (Detroit, Mich: Gale Research, 1987), pp. 612, 618.

JAY KINNEY is the co-author, with Richard Smoley, of Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (Quest Books, Spring 2006) and editor of the anthology, The Inner West(Tarcher/Penguin, 2004). He was publisher and editor in chief ofGnosis magazine from 1985-1999 (www.gnosismagazine.com). His latest book is The Masonic Enigma. You can visit Jay at www.jaykinney.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 85 (July-August 2004).

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.

For our reproduction notice, click here.

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Of all the earliest followers of Christ, none has sparked the level of interest generated by one particular woman – the biblical figure known as Mary Magdalene. Revered as a saint, maligned as a prostitute, imagined as the literal bride of Christ, Mary of Magdala stands apart as an enigmatic individual about whom little is actually known, despite centuries of scholarly scrutiny and wild conjecture.

All that most Western Christians know about her is presented in the New Testament Gospels, and even that information is disputed. But there is some general agreement: She was a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ whom he had delivered from “evil spirits and infirmities.” Along with several other women, she ministered to Christ and witnessed his death on the Cross. She was there when his body was placed in the tomb, when the stone was rolled away to reveal an empty chamber, when an angel announced that Christ had risen from the dead – and when he made his first post-Resurrection appearance to the living. She brought the news of his Resurrection to the other disciples.

For 1,500 years, Mary Magdalene was portrayed, in art and theology, as a prostitute whose life was transformed by Jesus’ forgiveness. This notion, based on Luke 7:38, was the result of an erroneous sermon preached in 591 by Pope Gregory the Great. Noted French author Jean-Yves Leloup states that “only in 1969 did the Catholic Church officially repeal Gregory’s labeling of Mary Magdalene as a whore, thereby admitting their error.”

The stain of immorality attached to the figure of Mary Magdalene averted attention away from the significant role she plays in the unfolding of Christ’s teachings. The importance of Mary is especially apparent in Gnostic texts – some among the earliest accounts of Jesus’ ministry – which have been largely suppressed and ignored by Church authorities.

The Gnostic picture of Mary departs – in some ways, dramatically – from the historical and biblical image of perhaps the most significant female follower of Jesus.

The second-century Gospel of Mary was found in the late 19th century by archaeologists but remained largely ignored and untranslated for 50 years. It is the only account named for a woman and offers a different view of Christianity – one that describes an “interior spirituality,” says Karen L. King, author of The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle.

In the Mary Magdalene account, “salvation is not something that comes from an external saviour,” says King. “One has to seek salvation within.” Thus, the Magdalene gospel depicts Jesus as a teacher rather than as a saviour who dies to atone for humanity’s sins.

In her introduction in The Complete Gospels, King says:

…the Gospel of Mary communicates a vision that the world is passing away, not toward a new creation or a new world order, but toward the dissolution of an illusory chaos of suffering, death, and illegitimate domination. The Saviour has come so that each soul might discover its own true spiritual nature, its ‘root’ in the Good, and return to the place of eternal rest beyond the constraints of time, matter, and false morality.

Another Gnostic text – the Gospel of Thomas – reveals that women were disciples of Christ. However the New Testament only includes gospels written by men and distinguishes between the women of Christ’s life, and the ‘disciples’ – who are all male.

“You find in the [Gnostic] Gospel of Thomas that six disciples are named: Matthew and Thomas, James and Peter, Mary Magdalene and Salome,” says Prof. Elaine Pagels, professor of religion at Princeton University, and author of The Gnostic Gospels and Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas.

“Here, explicitly, Mary Magdalene is Jesus’ disciple. In the Gospel of Thomas and also the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, she is seen as an evangelist and a teacher, somebody who is gifted with revelations and teachings from Jesus which are very powerful and which enable her to be a spiritual inspiration to others.”

The Gnostics honoured equally the feminine and masculine aspects of nature, and Prof. Pagels argues Christian Gnostic women enjoyed a far greater degree of social and ecclesiastical equality than their orthodox sisters.

For Jean Yves-Leloup, the founder of the Institute of Other Civilisation Studies and the International College of Therapists, Mary Magdalene is the intimate friend of Jesus and the initiate who transmits his most subtle teachings.

His translation of the Gospel of Mary is presented in his book The Gospel of Mary Magdalene along with a commentary on the text which was discovered in 1896, nearly 50 years before the Gnostic Gospels at Nag Hammadi were found.

The Gospel of Mary can easily be divided into two parts. The first section (7,1-9,24) describes the dialogue between the risen Christ and the disciples. He answers their questions concerning matter and sin.

“Christ teaches that sin is not a problem of moral ignorance so much as a manifestation of imbalance of the soul,” says James Robinson, Professor Emeritus of Religion at Claremont Graduate University in The Nag Hammadi Library in English. “Christ then encourages the disciples to spread his teachings and warns them against those who teach of spirituality as an external concept rather than as an internal, Gnostic experience,” says Robinson.

After he departs, however, the disciples are grieved and in considerable doubt and consternation. Mary Magdalene comforts them and turns their hearts toward the Good and a consideration of Christ’s words.

The second section of the text (10,1-23; 15,1-19,2) contains a description by Mary of special revelation given to her by Christ. At Peter’s request, she tells the disciples about things that were hidden from them. The basis for her knowledge is a vision of the Lord and a private dialogue with Him. Unfortunately four pages of the text are missing here so only the beginning and end of Mary’s revelation are available.

This fragment of the gospel describes Mary’s vision of the soul’s ascent beyond the “powers” including the powers of fear. For the Gnostics, these “powers” are the Archons which act as cosmic prison wardens, attempting to prevent souls ascending to the True God. “It (the soul) has to overcome the powers of fear and the powers that threaten it as it proceeds into a life beyond death,” Prof. Elaine Pagels explains.

After Mary finishes recounting her vision to the disciples, Andrew and then Peter challenge her on two grounds. First of all, Andrew says, these teachings are strange. Secondly, Peter questions, would Christ really have told such things to a woman and kept them from the male disciples. Levi admonishes Peter for contending with the woman as against their adversaries and acknowledges that Christ loved her more than the other disciples. He entreats them to be ashamed, to put on the “perfect man”, and to go forth and preach as Christ had instructed them to do. They immediately go forth to preach and the text ends.

This confrontation between Mary and Peter is well documented in a number of Gnostic scriptures. Mary exposes the small mindedness and superficiality of Peter and Andrew who find it difficult to comprehend, let alone accept, the deeper spiritual understanding Mary acquired through her personal experience and closer relationship with Christ.

James Robinson observes:

Indeed Peter and Andrew seem to prefer the very thing against which Christ warned them – a religion based on arbitrary ideas (in this case represented by Peter’s male chauvinism and Andrew’s ignorance). And yet many of their ideas have shaped modern Christianity while, paradoxically, Mary Magdalene’s spirituality, which here seems more consistent with the teachings of Christ, is unheard of today.

JASON JEFFREY holds an interest in a wide range of subjects including geopolitics, the ‘New World Order’, Big Brother, suppressed technology, psychic/spiritual development, ancient civilisations and esotericism. He can be contacted at jasonjeffrey88@gmail.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 84 (May-June 2004).

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.

For our reproduction notice, click here.

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As you want people to treat you, do the same to them. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even tax collectors love those who love them, do they not? And if you embrace only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Doesn’t everybody do that? If you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even wrongdoers lend to their kind because they expect to be repaid. Instead, love your enemies, do good, and lend without expecting anything in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of God.
– The Book of Q

[Jesus’s] ecstatic vision and social program sought to rebuild a society upward from its grass roots but on principles of religious and economic egalitarianism, with free healing brought directly to the peasant homes and free sharing of whatever they had in return. The deliberate conjunction of magic and meal, miracle and table, free compassion and open commensurality, was a challenge launched not just at Judaism’s strictest purity regulations, or even at the Mediterranean’s patriarchal combination of honor and shame, patronage and clientage, but at civilization’s eternal inclination to draw lines, invoke boundaries, establish hierarchies, and maintain discriminations. It did not invite a political revolution but envisaged a social one at the imagination’s most dangerous depths. No importance was given to distinctions of Gentile and Jew, female and male, slave and free, poor and rich. Those distinctions were hardly even attacked in theory; they were simply ignored in practice.
– John Dominick Crossan, The Historical Jesus

In this essay I intend to convey some thoughts about the origins of Christianity and the historical Jesus. But before doing so I should first confess that for me this subject carries no slight emotional charge. I grew up in a Midwestern Protestant household and attended church throughout my youth (though at about age twelve I began to question the religious teachings with which I was being indoctrinated); meanwhile, the rest of my family was beginning a slow drift toward evangelical fundamentalism. For years afterward I was torn between the desire to escape the tight-lipped Puritan ethic and unreasoning faith of my parents, and the need to validate at least a fragment of their beliefs in order to maintain a thread of connection with them and to feel that there was something right about the spiritual context in which I had been raised.

This latter need led me to embrace, for many years, a New Age version of Christianity that regarded Jesus not as the only son of God, but as the spiritual point of focus for our particular planet, a significant member of a cosmic hierarchy of god beings. Increasingly, however, I’ve felt compelled to examine even these liberalised beliefs in the light of reason and experience: before I regard Jesus as the spiritual point of focus for myself and for the world, should I not put forth some effort to learn whatever facts exist concerning his teachings, his life, and how various beliefs about him originated?

At the same time, my ongoing study of the history of civilisation has led me to conclude that in very many cases Christianity has exerted a force in the direction of intolerance, the concentration of power, and the suppression of free thought. This is certainly the case in America today, where the Christian Right is villainising gays, feminists, environmentalists, and “godless humanists,” while working to protect and expand the rights of powerful corporations to undermine traditional cultures and to pillage ecosystems. The fundamentalists plead for “family values” while promoting ideas and institutions that are actively destroying the cultural medium in which healthy communities and families thrive. What is worse, I see my own relations enthusiastically contributing (by way of the evangelical ministries of Pat Robertson and his brethren of the TV pulpit) not only to hatred and atrocities in the world today, but to what will almost surely be a biological catastrophe of unprecedented scope in the century ahead. For me, this painful personal circumstance only intensifies the importance of determining, to whatever extent is possible, the truth of Jesus.

Decoding the Gospels

The search for the historical Jesus has been going on for more than a century now, and anyone who embarks on even a cursory study of the findings of New Testament scholars quickly discovers a glaring disparity: while the scholars have been making important discoveries about the gospels, their sources, and the history of first-century Palestine, the average church-going layman knows virtually nothing at all about these findings. It is easy enough to find parties to blame for this situation – the clergy, for wishing to spare their parishioners the possibility of confusion or loss of faith; the flock themselves, for preferring comfortable beliefs over unfamiliar new information; and the scholars themselves, for maintaining an aloof position that says to the layman, “You have no right to an opinion about the historical Jesus because you have not acquired the necessary intellectual tools; only specialists are entitled to pass judgment in this matter.” And so we have two groups growing ever further apart as time goes on: on one hand, millions of faithful Christians for whom evidence is irrelevant and faith is everything, of whom many regard every word of the Bible as historically accurate; and on the other, a small coterie of academics, and their readers, who are intent on following the evidence wherever it leads regardless of its agreement or disagreement with received teachings.

The scholars (who include historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, and literary experts) have approached the New Testament the same way they would any other piece of ancient writing, directing their efforts simultaneously along two lines: first, the literary analysis of the gospels and of related texts, including the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi scrolls (What do they have in common? In what ways are they different? When were they written and by whom? What sources did the authors draw upon?); and second, historical studies of events and characters and anthropological research into their cultural context (What religious ideas, philosophies, and myths were current in the Near East during the first century? What was the political and social situation in Palestine? What were the cultural backgrounds of the people mentioned in the narratives?).

Today most textual analysts agree that the earliest stratum in the Jesus literature is comprised of the genuine sayings of the master. The Jesus Seminar – an ongoing collaboration of eminent New Testament scholars seeking to determine the most probably authentic teachings of Jesus – has helped somewhat to clarify the conclusion that most independent investigators had already reached: that the authors of the canonical gospels (which were written several decades after the events they describe, and almost certainly not by the individuals to whom they are attributed) each drew upon a lost so-called sayings gospel. Known by the scholars as “Q” (for Quelle, German for “source”), this text was recently reconstructed and published by Burton Mack of Claremont College in his popular book The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins. Scholars may still dispute the authenticity of individual sayings, but the gist of Jesus’s original message, which we will explore below, seems clear enough.

The narrative biography of Jesus contained in the gospels is another matter, however. Clearly, some elements were derived from mythical sources. We know, for instance, that Mithras (a Syrian hero-god whose cult was popular throughout the Roman Empire during the first century) was believed to have been born in the company of shepherds and to have shared a last supper with his followers, later commemorated by them in a communion of bread and wine. Mithraism also taught the immortality of the soul and a future judgment and resurrection of the dead. The idea of a god who dies in order to save, redeem, or give life to the world had antecedents not only in the mythic biography of Mithras, but those of Osiris, Attis, Adonis, and Tammuz as well. Even the ascension story easily fits a mythic type well known during this period: all admired Roman emperors were said to have ascended to heaven after their deaths; as Morton Smith (author ofThe Secret Gospel and Jesus the Magician) tells us, “By the early second century there was a regular ritual to assure the ascension. Augustus’s ascension was attested to the senate by the sworn witness of a Roman Praetorian.”

But there is disagreement over just how much of the biography is history and how much is myth. Burton Mack argues that we must assume that everything but the sayings is myth; he writes: “The first followers of Jesus did not know about or imagine any of the dramatic events upon which the narrative gospels hinge. These include the baptism of Jesus; his conflict with the Jewish authorities and their plot to kill him; Jesus’ instruction to the disciples; Jesus’ transfiguration, march to Jerusalem, last supper, trial, and crucifixion as king of the Jews; and finally, his resurrection from the dead and the stories of an empty tomb. All of these events must and can be accounted for as mythmaking in the [early] Jesus movements….” On the other hand, Morton Smith and John Dominick Crossan (author of The Historical Jesus and Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography) accept at least some of the narrative material as factual; Smith contends, for instance, that the miracle stories resemble reports of the works of itinerant magicians known to have flourished throughout the Near East during the time in question, and proposes that Jesus was merely an example of the type.

Who Was Jesus?

Which brings us to the question, Who was the utterer of these sayings on which so great a religion was built?

One of the most radical interpreters of the evidence, G.A. Wells of the University of London, argues that Jesus did not exist as a historical person, but was invented by a group of first-century proto-Christians who merely expanded upon certain passages in 2 Isaiah and the Wisdom of Solomon describing a supernatural entity sent by God into the world as a man. However, most scholars dispute this interpretation, concluding instead that the number and character of early references to Jesus establish his historicity beyond doubt. And most agree that the evidence portrays him as a remarkable, charismatic individual.

But to grasp, to any significant degree, how Jesus’s cont-emporaries viewed him, we must first try to understand the context of the place and times in which he lived. During the first few decades of the first century, Palestine was a centre of religious and political ferment. The Hellenistic culture that had come to dominate the eastern Mediterranean region during the previous three hundred years had also profoundly affected Jewish society, and foreign myths, cults, and philosophies were current in the land. Politically, Palestine was under Roman domination, and the Jews were a repressed and exploited people whose aspirations for independence would erupt in the war of 66-73 c.e.

Anthropologists and historians agree that revelatory world-views tend predictably to spring from situations of intense social conflict and crisis. Such revelations take forms appropriate to the unique circumstances of time and place. In the case in point, according to Mack, “One important phenomenon of the Greco-Roman age was the appearance of the religious and philosophical entrepreneur, sometimes called the divine man, sometimes the sophist or sage. The entrepreneur stepped into the void left vacant by the demise of traditional priestly functions at the ancient temple sites and addressed the confusion, concern, and curiosity of people confronted with a complex world that was felt to be at the mercy of the fates.” In addition to freelance visionaries and prophets, the eastern Mediterranean during the first century was also home to magicians, protesters, bandits, messiahs, and revolution-aries. Jesus seems to have fit well into this milieu.

As we have already noted, Morton Smith sees Jesus primarily as a magician or miracle worker. Smith cites magical texts of the period, in which not only the major elements but even many minor details in the gospel stories find parallels. For example, he sees the eucharist as “a variant form of an attested magical rite for binding the celebrant and the recipient together in love; a number of other forms are found in magical papyri; the verbal parallels are unmistakable.”

In The Messianic Legacy, authors Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln argue that Jesus was in fact the rightful heir to the throne of David – hence his triumphal entry into Jerusalem and Pilate’s insistence on having the inscription “King of the Jews” affixed to the cross. They also emphasise Jesus’s role as a political agitator: Why, after all, would Pilate have dispatched (according to the Vulgate translation) a cohort of five or six hundred soldiers to the garden of Gethsemane to arrest Jesus, unless he anticipated a civil disturbance? Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem and driving of the moneychangers from the Temple can likewise be seen as acts of an insurrectionist.

Burton Mack, who puts more weight on Jesus’s sayings and less on the details of his biographies, tends to view him as a wandering wisdom teacher in the tradition of Diogenes the Cynic. The Cynics taught the renunciation of desires and appetites imposed by civilisation, equality among people, and the virtue of a natural life free from social conventions and possessions. In modern parlance, the term cynical is fraught with negative connotations; these, however, can be traced to an unfair caricature of a school of courageous philosophers known, in Mack’s words, for “voluntary poverty, renunciation of needs, severance of family ties, fearless and carefree attitudes, and troublesome public behavior.” Cynicism, according to Crossan, “involved practice and not just theory, life-style and not just mind-set in opposition to the cultural heart of Mediterranean civilization, a way of looking and dressing, of eating, living, and relating that announced its contempt for honor and shame, for patronage and clientage.” Jesus’s sayings closely parallel Cynic teachings; and, in the Hellenistic era, the philosophy of Diogenes would likely have been well known in Galilee. But Jesus, as a Jewish peasant Cynic, seems to have added a unique and significant twist to the established tradition: unlike the urban Greek Cynics, he advocated the formation of a rural social movement.

So, whence comes the image of Jesus as the only Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity, forgiver of sins, hearer of prayers? Was this how Jesus thought of himself? Was it how his first followers viewed him? The historical and textual evidence gives us no reason for thinking that it was, and offers instead an account of how and why these ideas came into currency decades or centuries after the period in question.

But what of millions of people’s dreams, visions, and NDE encounters with Jesus; what of miraculous conversions and healings, of prayers answered and lives changed? Perhaps these should be accorded precisely as much legitimacy and significance as, for example, an Australian native shaman’s experience of totemic ancestral spirit-beings; an early Egyptian’s experience of Osiris; or a West African peasant’s experience of Legba. Which is to say: the experience is no doubt real, and in many cases the healings and miracles may also be real – all products of the human mind’s extraordinary need for symbols of transcendence, and of its ability both to generate meaningful and internally consistent world views, and to alter its own perceptions and the physical body’s abilities and state of health and vigour in order to fit those views.

The Teachings of Jesus

Now we arrive at a central question: What was the message that Jesus sought to convey? Burton Mack summarises some of the significant themes in the reconstructed sayings gospel:

• Voluntary poverty
• Lending without expectation of return
• Critique of riches
• Etiquette for begging
• Etiquette for troublesome encounters in public
• Nonretaliation
• Rejoicing in the face of reproach
• Severance of family ties
• Renunciation of needs
• Call for authenticity
• Critique of hypocrisy
• Fearless and carefree attitude
• Confidence in God’s care
• Single-mindedness in the pursuit of God’s kingdom

Again and again, Jesus exhorts his followers to seek the kingdom of God – a metaphor for an alternative social order in which people live according to nature, free and equal. The idea of God in the earliest core of sayings is of a universal power – or “father” – that “makes his sun rise on the evil and the good,” that “sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” “Be merciful even as your Father is merciful”; “If God puts beautiful clothes on the grass … won’t he put clothes on you? Your father knows that you need these things.” Jesus was, according to Crossan, “neither broker nor mediator but, somewhat paradoxically, the announcer that neither should exist between humanity and divinity or between humanity and itself. Miracle and parable, healing and eating were calculated to force individuals into unmediated physical and spiritual contact with God and unmediated physical and spiritual contact with one another. He announced, in other words, the brokerless kingdom of God.” Most scholars agree that some of the sayings attributed to Jesus are later additions; these include apocalyptic warnings about the Final Judgment, pronouncements against the Pharisees, pronouncements against towns that reject the movement, congratulations to those that accept the movement, the lament over Jerusalem, and the story of the temptations in the wilderness.

It is possible to trace, via shifts in discourse in the added material, just how the early Jesus community developed. At the earliest layer, according to Mack, “the discourse … was playful and the behavior public. Individuals were challenging one another to behave with integrity despite the social consequences. … If we ask about the character of the speaker of this kind of material, it has its nearest analogy in contemporary profiles of the Cynic-sage.” Then, in the next layer of sayings, “selected imperatives were elaborated as community rules … Jesus’ voice was now that of a founder-teacher giving instructions for the manner of life that should characterize his school.” We see the beginnings of social conflict surrounding the movement. By degrees, the voice of Jesus is made to utter things that only the wisdom of God could have known. The last layer of sayings dates from immediately after the Roman-Jewish war. According to Mack, “A retreat took place from the vigor with which these people had engaged their social environment to a kind of resignation, an acceptance of the fact that the rule of God was a matter of personal and ethical integrity. An amazing accommodation seems to have been made with a Jewish piety against which earlier battles had been fought. And Jesus was heard quoting the scriptures even though he was now imagined as the son of God whose kingdom would only be revealed at the end of time.”

In the earliest level of sayings we hear Jesus preaching, “How fortunate are the poor; they have the kingdom”; “Everyone who glorifies himself will be humiliated, and the one who humbles himself will be praised.” He is proposing a social experiment – a classless society in which all are equal in the sight of God. It is a society governed not by power and wealth, nor by rigid laws, but by charity and kindness.

An Unholy Alliance

Jesus’s egalitarian social philosophy has special relevance for us now, living as we do in one of the most polarised and stratified societies in history. Indeed, today’s multinational corporate-dominated industrial system owes much to institutions and practices pioneered by the Roman empire. Like twentieth-century America and Europe, first-century Rome was at a pinnacle of economic and technological “progress.” It was a colonial power, the centre of a far-flung trade network. It was also an urban centre in which extremes of wealth and poverty coexisted. Like the European colonists of the past five centuries, the Romans were destroyers of indigenous cultures and voracious consumers of natural “raw materials” (such as forests); and like us, they relied upon unsustainable, soil-killing farming practices. While the earliest reconstructed collection of Jesus’s sayings does not mention Satan, it does suggest the idea that the pursuit of power and glory is at the heart of social evils. And in later additions to the sayings gospel, in which the devil (literally, “the accuser”) makes his first appearance, he clearly serves as the personification of institutionalised social dominance.

The new scholarship portrays the historical Jesus as an anti-authoritarian, a primitivist, and an anarchist. According to Crossan, the earliest Jesus people were the equivalent of “hippies among the Augustinian yuppies.” Jesus’s message was a challenge to social power in all its manifestations. Yet within only a few generations that message had been twisted and co-opted almost beyond recognition. Through a gradual process of subversion, Christian teachings were first mythologised and then appropriated by the ruling elite of the Empire. As a result, Christianity has become a kind of time capsule in which are preserved fragments of Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern myths and philosophies, the theologies of Paul, Constantine, and Augustine, and the imperialist social program of ancient Rome. It is surely fair to say that most of this is virtually the opposite of what Jesus originally had in mind.

Of course, through it all the words of the Galilean sage have continued to shine: “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” And, where individuals or groups have drawn inspiration from this earliest layer of teachings, a St. Francis or a St. Clair has come forward to propose the sort of “liberation” or “creation” theology that Jesus himself might have embraced. But as an institution, Christianity eventually became the handmaiden of the capitalist industrial state, supplying the theological justification for colonialism and a work ethic for the factory system. Today, “fundamentalists” claiming to represent the true teachings of the Galilean promote an anti-environmental, anti-feminist, anti-gay, pro-corporate, pro-technology agenda utterly opposed to the message of modern-day prophets of social justice and voluntary simplicity. Surely this constitutes one of the bitterest ironies in all of history.

A New Church?

At the end of the twentieth century we stand on the brink of a global civilisation whose might and sophistication would have delighted a Roman emperor to no end. The wealthiest one percent of the world’s population live in unimaginable opulence while hundreds of millions exist near the point of starvation. If we are to understand the devil as being not an otherworldly malevolent being, but as the tendency toward the accumulation of political and economic power, then it appears that in our generation virtually the whole world is coming to be possessed by the devil.

In such circumstances, one cannot help but yearn for a new Christianity that would pay attention to the discoveries of the scholars and focus its interest on the lifestyle and social program that Jesus taught and exemplified, rather than the theology his later followers adopted. Such a denomination or church could serve as a foil for the fundamentalists and as a haven for critics of the power system who are increasingly vulnerable to attacks from the neo-fascist Right.

And yet, seeing how easily ideologies and organisations are subverted, perhaps a new church is precisely what we do not need. It’s probably safe to say that Jesus did not wish to create a church of any kind. He seems to have envisioned instead a community of spirit. But when even well-intentioned attempts to form such a community result in the building of any sort of formal organisation, then the corrosive, hierarchical influence of civilisation seems nearly always to intrude. Moreover, a new Christian denomination could not help but focus much of its attention on the past, and on the person of Jesus. Again, this is probably not what he had in mind: it was only the later generations of his followers who insisted on uniquely divinising him. And hero worship, even given the best of heroes, tends to demean the worshipper. Jesus has not been the only individual in history to teach love, tolerance, equality, simplicity, voluntary poverty, generosity, and freedom from social conventions, and there are plenty of advocates of these ideals alive today who could benefit from our respect and support.

No, it is not a new church or denomination that we need. I suspect that one of the ideas that Jesus was seeking to convey was that true spirituality is not represented by a book or a hero or even a teaching. It may be expressed by means of a community of support, but it is not the community itself. It is a way of being. Those with some experience of that way of being may find it helpful to know that one of the most revered individuals in history taught and exemplified it. And the existence of people following that path today may somewhat vindicate that pivotal individual’s actual message (rather than the theology that conceals it). But the path itself is the point.

RICHARD HEINBERG is the author of Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age (Quest Books: 1995), Celebrate the Solstice: Honoring the Earth’s Seasonal Rhythms Through Festival and Ceremony (Quest Books: 1994), and A New Covenant With Nature. Since the publication of this article in his Museletter (now discontinued) Richard has produced many more publications. His website is http://www.richardheinberg.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 50 (September-October 1998).

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.

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