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But we have evidence that John must have belonged to a certain religious movement, current in those days, which must have been something like the Essenes, also called the Therapeuts, who were chiefly occupied in healing the sick and interpreting dreams. [...] Then we know from Philo Judaeus of Alexandria that monasteries existed in those days and that there were considerable settlements on the Dead Sea and in Egypt, and they naturally had a body of teaching. There are still disciples of John in the neighborhood of Basra and Kut-el-Amara in Mesopotamia; they have a collection of sacred books, one of them has been translated recently, the Mandaean Book of John. The Mandaeans were disciples of John and they were Gnostics. Peculiarly enough, the Gnostic Evangel is also called the Evangel of St. John; this is obscure, but since it was written only at the beginning of the second century, it is possible that the name of John covers the Gnostic side of Christian origins. [...]
So we are almost forced to assume that Christ received Gnostic teaching and some of his sayings — like the parable of the Unjust Steward which we recently mentioned, and particularly the so-called "Sayings of Jesus" which are not contained in the New Testament — are closely related to Gnosticism. Also those Evangels which were not accepted by the church, and therefore mostly destroyed, contained Gnostic teaching; we can substantiate this from the knowledge of the fragments which we still possess, the Gospel of the Egyptians, for instance, and among the Apocrypha of the New Testament, the Acts of St. Thomas, where the Holy Ghost is called Sophia and where she is the blessed mother. So already in its origins, Christianity was so closely surrounded by Gnostic and by Alexandrian wisdom that it is more than probable that Christ received a Gnostic initiation and possessed a rather profound understanding of the human soul and the peculiarities of spiritual development. One could say that he himself was the ripe fruit of antiquity; he gathered up in himself the essence of the wisdom of the Near East, contained the juice of Egypt and of Greece, and came together with the mob. And that caused a great whirlwind which moved masses and formed them, which brought about that form which we call Christianity.
Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 1031-1032). Princeton University Press.
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C.G. Jung (Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung)