Gnostic Jesus Quotes

If we can believe in the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, old Uncle Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don't bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth can destroy you.

And so Jesus continued to preach in those lands and one day, when he was in the city of Pataliputra or modern-day Patna, close to the River Ganges, Jesus met a beautiful young woman whose name was Mari, better known today as Mary Magdalene: an attractive woman who was some ten-years younger than Jesus was.

Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely that man was created in God's image. Either/or: either man was created in God's image - and has intestines! - or God lacks intestines and man is not like him. The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the Great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus "ate and drank, but did not defecate." Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man's crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the creator of man.

Then it happened that whenever he began to see Mari's [Mary Magdalene] passionate enthusiasm, her eyes emanating a light that amply showed how contended she was aiding so many people, Jesus could not help but be proud of his most-beloved disciple. Mari, likewise, felt indebted and grateful to Jesus as she saw her fellow sisters gradually being saved on all counts, some even going on to become some of Jesus's staunchest disciples...

One of the main reasons Jesus wanted Mari [Mary Magdalene] to start her own following of female disciples was because in those times, Jewish women had no probative value in society and were therefore not even given a basic education. Their intellect was considered decidedly inferior to men's and apart from this, women's far superior intuition was interpreted as a characteristic that associated them to the devil since the men could not quite understand this inner knowledge or find a plausible explanation for it...

This is why Jesus would urge Mari [Mary Magdalene] to look after the women noting, ''Cultivate their regard for you because those women who are naturally drawn to you are exceptional people, sensitive women who are very close to spiritual freedom. However, before they can achieve this ultimate goal, you must first tend to their psychological wounds, the visible and the invisible lesions they have experienced at the hands of men, just as we once did in your homeland. It is only if these existential traumas are healed properly that these women can finally reach equanimity of spirit and heart.

At the time that she came to live with Jesus's mother, Mari [Mary Magdalene] had no inkling about how she would be greeted by her since their cultures were radically different from each other. The pleasure of her surprise was therefore boundless when Jesus's mother heartily welcomed her with open arms, despite the cultural difference in their religious beliefs. In all fairness, Mari did not make it difficult for Mary to accept her; if anything, she invited Mary to teach her the social habits and local traditions of her people down to the most minor detail especially since she would find them very useful later on in her public life with Jesus.

So they trust in the deity of the Old Testament, an incontinent dotard who soiled Himself and the universe with his corruption, a low-budget divinity passing itself off as the genuine article. (Ask the Gnostics.) They trust in Jesus Christ, a historical cipher stitched together like Frankenstein's monster out of parts robbed from the graves of messiahs dead and buried - a savior on a stick. They trust in the virgin-pimping Allah and his Drum Major Mohammed, a prophet-come-lately who pioneered a new genus of humbuggery for an emerging market of believers that was not being adequately served by existing religious products. They trust in anything that authenticates their importance as persons, tribes, societies, and particularly as a species that will endure in this world and perhaps in an afterworld that may be uncertain in its reality and unclear in its layout, but which states their craving for values "not of this earth" - that depressing, meaningless place their consciousness must sidestep every day.

The Emperor Constantine the Great (272 - 337) and his Pauline bishops decided that all the Gospels that went against the politics of the emperor and the Hellenistic Christianity that was created by St Paul, were to be excluded from the New Testament. Proof of this can be found in the fact that the 27 books of The New Testament are but a very small fraction of the Christian literature that was produced in the first three centuries after Jesus lived. These documents are known as the Apocryphal Gospels (Greek, Apocrypha: ' hidden' or 'secret writings') and some of them retained quite a following and were highly respected in the communities of the earliest times...

Mari [Mary Magdalene] possessed a remarkably coherent understanding of what following The Way [Rahasya] meant. She believed that this spiritual philosophy taught that the world represented Man's mystic school from whence each person ultimately graduated by reaching the Enlightened State. Therefore, according to this spiritual discipline, human suffering is very subjective and manifested itself according to every person's personal karma or attitude to life. This meant that every life a person experienced imparted a certain number of spiritual lessons that may not have been experienced before in other lives. Ultimately, every experience could be relived and bring about spiritual growth, assisting the individual to move continually closer to the Enlightened State.

What happened to Jesus after he was crucified? A historical reconstruction It is an undeniable fact that the New Testament Gospels present the crucifixion and the resurrection as the pivot upon which Christianity is based. However, this notion is most surprising when we take into consideration that this postulation was never part of Jesus's teaching. Certainly the evangelists 'Mark' and 'Matthew' do hint at these strange happenings, but it is a noted fact amongst the majority of the biblical scholars that these sequences were added several centuries after the original Gospels were written, and this was done so that the political editors of these Gospels could adapt the writings according to their political and theological needs...

In its mythology, Mithra, the Persian god of light and wisdom, was born of a virgin in a cave on the 25th December and later, as an adult, undertook long voyages for the purposes of illuminating mankind. His disciples were twelve; he was betrayed, sentenced to death, and after his death, he was buried in a tomb from which he rose from the dead. The Mithrian religion also states that at the end of all time, Mithra will come again to judge the living and the dead. In this religious cult, Mithra was called the Saviour and he was sometimes illustrated as a lamb. Its doctrine included baptism, the sacramental meal (the Eucharist), and the belief in a saviour god that died and rose from the dead to be the mediator between God and mankind. The adherents of this religion believed in the resurrection of the body, universal judgement, and therefore in heaven and hell.

Once the caravan reached the Kashmir Valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal Range, in the northernmost region of the Indian subcontinent, Jesus continued the journey with a small group of locals until he completed the last leg on his own, guided from one place to another by the local people. Some weeks later, he made it to the Indian Himalayan region where Jesus was greeted by some Buddhist monks and with whom he sojourned for some time. From that location, he then went to live in the city of Rishikesh, in India's northern state of Uttarakhand, spending most of his time meditating in a cave known as Vashishta Gufa, on the banks of the River Ganga. Jesus lived in those lands for many months before he continued traveling to the northeast, until he arrived in the Kingdom of Magadha, in what is presently West-central Bihar. It so happened that it was here, in Magadha, that Jesus met Mari for the first time, the woman better known today as Mary Magdalene...

At this crucial point, for the Roman Church to reach a compromise between this myth of Mithra and the Hellenistic Christianity of St. Paul, it was necessary to have a sudden change of events or an altered version of Jesus's life, and it was here that the Roman Church began to implement a psychological process known today as Cognitive Dissonance. In a few words, this happens when a group of people produce a false reconstruction of an event they want to continue to believe in, a literary strategy also known as the Reconstructive Hypothesis. This theological notion is equally known as Apotheosis or the glorification of a subject to divine level such as a human becoming a god. In the case of Jesus, this process was copied in its entirety from the religion of Mithra where their 'divinisations' were practically the same.

This medicinal potion was additionally consumed as part of a sacred ritual known as Sōmayajña where the Yogis that Jesus himself had taught were helped to reach an enlightened trance. In effect, Jesus had developed the Nirvanalaksanayoga Tantra specifically for women, to heal them from the psychological damage and abuse they had to endure at the hands of men. He wanted to enable them to rise above patriarchal dominance, realise their highest potential, and then he would guide them towards an enlightened state. The first person to benefit from this privilege was Mari [Mary Magdalene] herself. Jesus began teaching this discipline in every place that he visited: from Kashmir in the northernmost region of the Indian subcontinent, to Uttar Pradesh, and Mari would accompany him on every journey he embarked on, from east of the Indus to Nepal.

It is a surprise to me to like myself; among all the elaborate possibilities I contemplated for my future, that never figured. My hard-won contentment reflects the simple truth that inner peace often hinges on outer peace. In the gnostic gospel of St. Thomas, Jesus says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.

With the illusion stripped away, I could see that we were part of an ocean of light. We are light flowing, moving, and transmuting shape similarly to the way that water morphs into steam and ice and snow.

We live in a Jesus haunted culture that is Biblically illiterate, and so unfortunately at this point in time, almost anything can pass for knowledge of the historical Jesus from notions that he was a a Cynic sage to ideas that he was a Gnostic guru to fantasies that he didn't exist, to Dan Browne's Jesus of hysterical (rather than historical) fiction.

I want to encourage you to reject any form of pump-you-up sermons that are only a veiled way of telling you to die again the death that Jesus died for you. Don’t spend time killing off the life Jesus gave you. There’s a word for that—Gnosticism

There is no way to tell if we are the pioneers of a visionary new age, whisking humanity into the high vibrations of an interdimensional love party, or post-modern Don Quixotes attacking techno-industrial windmills with our flimsy, rolled-up yoga mats.

someone with access to an inner source of spiritual insight does not need the church—or does not need it as ordinary people do. Furthermore, such a person often has an inner authority lacking in many leaders of established religions. This was precisely the response Jesus evoked when he began to preach: “And they were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one that had authority and not as the scribes” (Mark 1:22).

The question concerning Jesus: do you want to know the real story, or just the allegory?

Jesus says, “Do not look here, do not look there, for the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.

Could it be that following our initiatory path and connecting with higher source wisdom might actually be one of our species’ best defense systems?

It’s a remarkable experience to ask yourself identity-crisis questions from a comic book movie with a mostly straight face, but I don’t recommend it.

Jesus said: Wretched is the body which depends upon another body, and wretched is the soul which depends upon their being together.

Marcion, in his two brilliant books, explained how the God of the Jews was not the God of whom Jesus spoke. He provided many examples that show that the Jewish god is only a jealous tribal deity. The Old Testament contains some genuine wisdom. However, it is very clear that the Hebrew prophets and rabbis gradually destroyed all trace of the Divine Feminine and worshiped the Demiurge. The same applies to the other main patriarchal religions: Islam and Christianity.

Our ailing planet needs spiritual warriors, ones capable of standing up to the Western materialism machine, so we can create sustainable societies that care for their citizens, harmonize with the cycles of nature, and receive and honor the vast healing light that quietly connects us all.

In the 'Gospel According to the Egyptians,' Jesus proclaims: 'Men will be the victims of death so long as women give birth.' And he specifies: 'I am come to destroy the works of woman.' When we frequent the extreme truths of the Gnostics, we should like to go, if possible, still further, to say something never said, which petrifies or pulverizes history, something out of a cosmic Neronianism, out of a madness on the scale of matter.

If we can believe in the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, old Uncle Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don’t bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth can destroy you.

We need to stop fighting the old systems and start creating new containers for people who are going through these spiritual openings,’ Tavis reflected. ‘Together, we need to build something that’s never existed before—a global network of light.

Ancient Gnostic sects held that the god of the Old Testament was the Devil, and the Bible his evil message to corrupt humanity. Can anyone doubt that they were right? Read the Bible for yourself. Learn the horrific truth. The Abrahamic faiths are Satanic.

Redemption is not simply making creation a bit better, as the optimistic evolutionist would try to suggest. Nor is it rescuing spirits and souls from an evil material world, as the Gnostic would want to say. It is the remaking of creation, having dealt with the evil that is defacing and distorting it. And it is accomplished by the same God, now known in Jesus Christ, through whom it was made in the first place.

In Arabic to say, for example, "Wisdom is precious," you could repeat the feminine pronoun: al-hikmah hiya thamînah, literally "Wisdom, she is precious." It is stated by some Sûfî Sheikhs (Masters) that Sûfîsm originally was named Sophia, which connects Sûfîsm with the Christian Gnostic tradition, in which Wisdom is personified as a woman, the divine Sophia. The physical mother of Jesus was an external image of manifestation of the Virgin Sophia, the word 'Sophia' stemming from Sophos (wisdom). The Gnostics, whose language was Greek, identified the Holy Spirit with Sophia, Wisdom; and Wisdom was considered female.

Gnosticism is undeniably pre-Christian, with both Jewish and gentile roots. The wisdom of Solomon already contained Gnostic elements and prototypes for the Jesus of the Gospels...God stops being the Lord of righteous deed and becomes the Good One...A clear pre-Christian Gnosticism can be distilled from the epistles of Paul. Paul is recklessly misunderstood by those who try to read anything Historical Jesus-ish into it. The conversion of Paul in the Acts of the Apostles is a mere forgery from various Tanakh passages... [The epistles] are from Christian mystics of the middle of the second century. Paul is thus the strongest witness against the Historical Jesus hypothesis...John's Gnostic origin is more evident than that of the synoptics. Its acceptance proves that even the Church wasn't concerned with historical facts at all.

The traditional version of history bequeathed to us by the authorities of the Roman Church is that Christianity developed from the teachings of a Jewish Messiah and that Gnosticism was a later deviation. What would happen, we wondered, if the picture were reversed and Gnosticism viewed as the authentic Christianity, just as the Gnostics themselves claimed? Could it be that orthodox Christianity was a later deviation from Gnosticism and that Gnosticism was a synthesis of Judaism and the Pagan Mystery religion?

Many people in this world are always looking to science to save them from something. But just as many, or more, prefer old and reputable belief systems and their sectarian offshoots for salvation. So they trust in the deity of the Old Testament, an incontinent dotard who soiled Himself and the universe with His corruption, a low-budget divinity passing itself off as the genuine article. (Ask the Gnostics.) They trust in Jesus Christ, a historical cipher stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster out of parts robbed from the graves of messiahs dead and buried—a savior on a stick. They trust in the virgin-pimping Allah and his Drum Major Mohammed, a prophet-come-lately who pioneered a new genus of humbuggery for an emerging market of believers that was not being adequately served by existing religious products. They trust in anything that authenticates their importance as persons, tribes, societies, and particularly as a species that will endure in this world and perhaps in an afterworld that may be uncertain in its reality and unclear in its layout, but which sates their craving for values not of this earth—that depressing, meaningless place their consciousness must sidestep every day.

Jesus said, "Seek and you will find. In the past, however, I did not tell you the things about which you asked me then. Now I am willing to tell them, but you are not seeking them

If we fail to understand the biblical story of Jesus, we will compromise our prophetic interpretations of the end-times. And that's exactly what we've done.

Maybe the same essential download was also being delivered to other people—a massive, compassionate battalion of us—at the same time.

Christ wasn’t only a yogi; he was an activist, carrying his message to those who most needed it.

Why build entirely new systems for connecting to Christ consciousness when the institutions—whether Methodist, Lutheran, or Baptist—have already been created?

Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

People cannot see anything that really is without becoming like it.

Speak of truth with those who seek it and of knowledge with those who have sinned in their error. [33]

Note, though, something else of great significance about the whole Christian theology of resurrection, ascension, second coming, and hope. This theology was born out of confrontation with the political authorities, out of the conviction that Jesus was already the true Lord of the world who would one day be manifested as such. The rapture theology avoids this confrontation because it suggests that Christians will miraculously be removed from this wicked world. Perhaps that is why such theology is often Gnostic in its tendency towards a private dualistic spirituality and towards a political laissez-faire quietism. And perhaps that is partly why such theology with its dreams of Armageddon, has quietly supported the political status quo in a way that Paul would never have done.

From this perspective, we were all divine Shakespeares, creating and playing the roles of muscled heroes and conniving villains, pious saints and debauched sinners, corrupt CEOs and disinterested temp workers.

Orthodox Jews and Christians insist that a chasm separates humanity from its creator: God is wholly other. But some of the gnostics who wrote these gospels contradict this: self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical. Second, the “living Jesus” of these texts speaks of illusion and enlightenment, not of sin and repentance, like the Jesus of the New Testament. Instead of coming to save us from sin, he comes as a guide who opens access to spiritual understanding. But when the disciple attains enlightenment, Jesus no longer serves as his spiritual master: the two have become equal—even identical.

De Wys' powerfully written, hard-nosed initiate's tale whisks readers into the deep wild of one of the most mysterious, miraculous, and misunderstood healing methods on our planet – shamanic mediumship. Daring and hilarious, tragic and miraculous, "Ecstatic Healing" is a must read for those who like to boldly go where few mystics have gone before." Talat Jonathan Phillips, author of "The Electric Jesus: The Healing Journey of a Contemporary Gnostic," co-founder of Evolver.net

The Gospel of Philip takes up the same theme: Jesus took them all by stealth, for he did not reveal himself in the manner [in which] he was, but in the manner in which [they would] be able to see him. He revealed himself to [them all. He revealed himself] to the great as great … (and) to the small as small.69 To the immature disciple, Jesus appears as a child; to the mature, as an old man, symbol of wisdom. As the gnostic teacher Theodotus says, “each person recognizes the Lord in his own way, not all alike.

The One is the invisible spirit. We should not think of it as a god or like a god. For it is greater than a god, because it has nothing over it and no [3] lord above it. It does not [exist] within anything inferior [to it, since everything] exists within it, [for it established] itself.9

The contrast between the biblical and Gnostic Jesus is stark when the gospels of John and Thomas are compared. “John says that we can experience God only through the divine light embodied in Jesus,” said Princeton religion professor Elaine Pagels. “But certain passages in Thomas’ gospel draw a quite different conclusion: that the divine light Jesus embodied is shared by humanity, since we are all made in the image of God.”3 While John stresses the resurrection as evidence of Jesus’ divinity, “Gnostic writers tend to view . . . the resurrection and other elements of the Jesus story not as literal, historical events but as symbolic keys to a ‘higher’ understanding,” said religion writer Jay Tolson.4

On the other hand, Christos descended from the realm of Light and brought humanity the light of true knowledge in the simple principles of love. Marcion de Sinope (85 – 160 C.E.) was an important leader in early Christianity. Marcion, in his two brilliant books, explained how the God of the Jews was not the God of whom Jesus spoke. He provided many examples that show that the Jewish god is only a jealous tribal deity.

Such unity and completeness of humankind was lost, the Gospel of Philip declares, in the separation of Adam and Eve. Originally Adam was androgynous, but the fall from primordial oneness allowed humankind to slip into mortality and death. The Gospel of Philip states, “If the female had not separated from the male, the female and the male would not have died. The separation of male and female was the beginning of death.

Christianity did not begin as a monolithic revelation. In other words, it did not begin as a single teaching directly coming from the mouth of Jesus. After Jesus' death, there were many different and opposing viewpoints concerning who he was and what he taught. There were many different groups competing for converts. Each of these diverse groups traced their teaching back to the individual apostles and each had books to support their points of view.

Both Jew and Gentile enjoyed complexities, especially the Greeks with their philosophical systems. They loved mental gymnastics and intellectual labyrinths. They believed the truth was knowable, but only to those with elevated minds. This system later became known as gnosticism, a belief that certain people, by virtue of their enhanced reasoning powers, could move beyond the hoi polloi and ascend to the level of enlightenment. At the time of Paul, we can trace at least fifty different philosophies rattling around in the Roman and Greek world. And the gospel came along and said, “None of it matters. We’ll destroy it all. Take all the wisdom of the wise, get the best, get the elite, the most educated, the most capable, the smartest, the most clever, the best at rhetoric, oratory, logic; get all the wise, all the scribes, the legal experts, the great debaters, and they’re all going to be designated fools.” The gospel says they are all foolish. Paul’s quotation of Isaiah 29:14 in verse 19, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,” had to be an offensive statement to his audience.

To speak of Jesus’s divinity without speaking of his kingdom coming on earth as in heaven is to take a large step toward the detached spirituality—almost a form of Gnosticism—that the first two centuries of the church firmly rejected. Only recently did the awful realization dawn on me that a certain stance was not only possible, but actually occurring: people were affirming the divinity of Jesus—which I also fully and gladly affirm—and then using it as a shelter behind which to hide from the radical story the gospels were telling about what this embodied God was actually up to.

What interested these gnostics far more than past events attributed to the “historical Jesus” was the possibility of encountering the risen Christ in the present.49 The Gospel of Mary illustrates the contrast between orthodox and gnostic viewpoints. The account recalls what Mark relates: Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene … She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it.50 As the Gospel of Mary opens, the disciples are mourning Jesus’ death and terrified for their own lives. Then Mary Magdalene stands up to encourage them, recalling Christ’s continual presence with them: “Do not weep, and do not grieve, and do not doubt; for his grace will be with you completely, and will protect you.”51 Peter invites Mary to “tell us the words of the Savior which you remember.”52 But to Peter’s surprise, Mary does not tell anecdotes from the past; instead, she explains that she has just seen the Lord in a vision received through the mind, and she goes on to tell what he revealed to her. When Mary finishes, she fell silent, since it was to this point that the Savior had spoken with her. But Andrew answered and said to the brethren, “Say what you will about what she has said. I, at least, do not believe that the Savior has said this. For certainly these teachings are strange ideas!”53 Peter agrees with Andrew, ridiculing the idea that Mary actually saw the Lord in her vision. Then, the story continues, Mary wept and said to Peter, “My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I thought this up myself in my heart? Do you think I am lying about the Savior?” Levi answered and said to Peter, “Peter, you have always been hot-tempered … If the Savior made her worthy, who are you to reject her?”54 Finally Mary, vindicated, joins the other apostles as they go out to preach. Peter, apparently representing the orthodox position, looks to past events, suspicious of those who “see the Lord” in visions: Mary, representing the gnostic, claims to experience his continuing presence.55 These gnostics recognized that their theory, like the orthodox one, bore political implications. It suggests that whoever “sees the Lord” through inner vision can claim that his or her own authority equals, or surpasses, that of the Twelve—and of their successors. Consider the political implications of the Gospel of Mary: Peter and Andrew, here representing the leaders of the orthodox group, accuse Mary—the gnostic—of pretending to have seen the Lord in order to justify the strange ideas, fictions, and lies she invents and attributes to divine inspiration. Mary lacks the proper credentials for leadership, from the orthodox viewpoint: she is not one of the “twelve.” But as Mary stands up to Peter, so the gnostics who take her as their prototype challenge the authority of those priests and bishops who claim to be Peter’s successors.

Here Bart and I find almost no common ground because he, with the huge majority of scholars, considers at least the “lucky seven” (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon) to be authentically Pauline and thus earlier than the earliest gospel, while I think the whole lot of them are late-first, early-second-century patchworks of Paulinist (Marcionite and Gnostic) and Catholicizing fragments. Thus, in my eyes, the relation between the Pauline epistles and a historical Paul is exactly analogous to that obtaining between the gospels and a historical Jesus. The documents may be as

From the centre of the “perfect man” flows the ocean (where, as we have said, the god dwells). The “perfect” man is, as Jesus says, the “true door,” through which the “perfect” man must go in order to be reborn. Here the problem of how to translate “teleios” becomes crucial; for—we must ask—why should anyone who is “perfect” need renewal through rebirth?108 One can only conclude that the perfect man was not so perfected that no further improvement was possible. We encounter a similar difficulty in Philippians 3 : 12, where Paul says: “Not that I … am already perfect” (τετελείωμαɩ). But three verses further on he writes: “Let us then, as many as are perfect (τέλεɩoɩ) be of this mind.” The Gnostic use of τέλεɩoς obviously agrees with Paul’s. The word has only an approximate meaning and amounts to much the same thing as πνεʋματɩκóς, ‘spiritual,’109 which is not connected with any conception of a definite degree of perfection or spirituality. The word “perfect” gives the sense of the Greek τέλεɩoς correctly only when it refers to God. But when it applies to a man, who in addition is in need of rebirth, it can at most mean “whole” or “complete,” especially if, as our text says, the complete man cannot even be saved unless he passes through this door.

During the first three hundred years after Jesus' death, there was neither an organized religion nor a central authority or book. There were many opinions and beliefs about who Jesus was. At first, even the apostles argued among themselves and had strong disagreements with the 'apostle' Paul (a man who had never met Jesus) over the basic concepts of Jesus' teachings. The Christian Bible as the public knows it, more or less today, did not appear until the middle of the 3rd century. Put differently, the first version of the Christian Bible as the public knows it did not appear until about one hundred and twenty years after Jesus died. And St. John's Book of Revelation was not accepted as part of the New Testament until 382 CE!

Therefore no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day” Colossians 2:16   Resurrection, Idolatry, and the Christ Consciousness The ancient church identified several individuals who left the true faith and had to be excommunicated. In 2 Timothy 2:17, Paul wrote Hymenaeus and Philetus taught the resurrection had already occurred. Tertullian wrote in Flesh of Christ 16, that Alexander left the true faith and joined a subgroup of the Ebionites who followed several heresies: that Jesus was just a man with a sin nature, that there is no physical resurrection and that people can become sinless by obtaining the Christ Consciousness. Hypolytus wrote in The 70 Disciples that Demas forsook the true faith and became a priest of idols. (Propbably a Carpocratian Gnostic.) Lastly, Tertullian wrote in On the Resurrection that Phygellus and Hermogenes denied there would be a resurrection of the physical body. Instead, they taught the Gnostic teaching of reincarnation. 

The church's theology bought into this ahistoricism in different ways: along a more liberal, post-Kantian trajectory, the historical particularities of Christian faith were reduced to atemporal moral teachings that were universal and unconditioned. Thus it turned out that what Jesus taught was something like Kant's categorical imperative - a universal ethics based on reason rather than a set of concrete practices related to a specific community. Liberal Christianity fostered ahistoricism by reducing Christianity to a universal, rational kernel of moral teaching. Along a more conservative, evangelical trajectory (and the Reformation is not wholly innocent here), it was recognized that Christians could not simply jettison the historical particularities of the Christian event: the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. However, there was still a quasi-Platonic, quasi-gnostic rejection of material history such that evangelicalism, while not devolving to a pure ahistoricism, become dominated by a modified ahistoricism we can call primitivism. Primitivism retains the most minimal commitment to God's action in history (in the life of Christ and usually in the first century of apostolic activity) and seeks to make only this first-century 'New Testament church' normative for contemporary practice. This is usually articulated by a rigid distinction between Scripture and tradition (the latter then usually castigated as 'the traditions of men' as opposed to the 'God-give' realities of Scripture). Such primitivism is thus anticreedal and anticatholic, rejecting any sense that what was unfolded by the church between the first and the twenty-first centuries is at all normative for current faith and practice (the question of the canon's formation being an interesting exception here). Ecumenical creeds and confessions - such as the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed - that unite the church across time and around the globe are not 'live' in primitivist worship practices, which enforce a sense of autonomy or even isolation, while at the same time claiming a direct connection to first-century apostolic practices.

In addition, Christ Jesus spoke a language called Aramaic. While He was born Jewish and could read the Hebrew sacred texts, it is probable that He did not speak Hebrew with his Apostles or with those people who came to hear Him speak. For, it was not common during the time of Christ Jesus for the Jewish people to speak in Hebrew. Extremely few people in ancient times could read or write. The Jewish people of the time of Christ Jesus spoke Aramaic. The New Testament Gospels, on the other hand, were written in Greek. Thus, before even beginning to speak about all the errors created by innumerable scribes re-copying the Gospels over and over again, we must confront the fact that when Christ Jesus spoke, he spoke in Aramaic. We know that the authors of the Gospels in the New Testament were not the persons traditionally named as the authors of these Gospels: Saint Mark did not write the Gospel of Mark; Saint Matthew did not write the Gospel of Matthew and so on. In order to create each one of the New Testament Gospels, some author who spoke and wrote in Greek had to have read a document already written in Aramaic (or possibly Hebrew, although this is unlikely), or possibly sat and listened as one of the Apostles or followers of Christ Jesus related the stories to him in Aramaic and then the author who spoke and wrote in Greek, translated the Aramaic tales into Greek. So, straightaway, we realize that it is impossible that we are reading the exact words of Christ Jesus; the best that we can hope for is that we are reading the best translation of Christ Jesus’ words from Aramaic, into Greek and finally into English.

Philosophy can speak of the Cross in many tongues; when it is not the ‘Word of the Cross’ (1 Corinthians 1, 18), issuing from faith in Jesus Christ, it knows either too much or too little. Too much: because it makes bold with words and concepts at a point where the Word of God is silent, suffers and dies, in order to reveal what no philosophy can know, except through faith, namely, God’s ever greater Trinitarian love; and in order, also, to vanquish what no philosophy can make an end of, human dying so that the human totality may be restored in God. Too little, because philosophy does not measure that abyss into which the Word sinks down, and, having no inkling of it, closes the hiatus, or deliberately festoons the appalling thing with garlands: The Cross is thick bestrewn with roses: who has joined roses to the Cross?37 in place of Jerome’s ‘naked, to follow the Naked One’. Either philosophy misconceives man, failing, in Gnostic or Platonic guise, to take with full seriousness his earthly existence, settling him elsewhere, in heaven, in the pure realm of spirit, or sacrificing his unique personality to nature or evolution. Or, alternatively, philosophy forms man so exactly in God’s image and likeness that God descends to man’s image and likeness, since man in his suffering and overcoming of suffering shows himself God’s superior. Here God only fulfils himself and manages to satisfy his own desires by divesting himself of his essence and becoming man, in order, as man, ‘divinely’ to suffer and to die. If philosophy is not willing to content itself with, either, speaking abstractly of being, or with thinking, concretely of the earthly and worldly (and no further), then it must at once empty itself in order to ‘know nothing . . . except Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (I Corinthians 2, 2). Then it may, starting out from this source, go on to ‘impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification’ (ibid., 2, 7). This proclamation, however, rises up over a deeper silence and a darker abyss than pure philosophy can know.

The adoptionists were right to affirm that Jesus was human but wrong to deny that he was God; the docetists were right to affirm that Jesus was divine but wrong to deny that he was human; the Gnostics were right to affirm that Christ was both divine and human but wrong to deny that he was a single being. And so, if you put together all the orthodox affirmations, the result is the ortho-paradox: Christ is God; Christ is a man; but he is one being, not two. This became the standard Christological affirmation of the orthodox tradition. As we will see, this did not settle the issue of who Christ was for the orthodox. It instead led to more questions, and “false beliefs” continued to propagate—not against any of the standard orthodox claims, but against various ways of understanding these claims. As time went on, heresies became increasingly detailed, and the orthodox affirmations became increasingly paradoxical.

The weakness of God is stronger than human strength. And it leads, as Jesus said it would lead, to a life of following him, which would itself be about taking up the cross and so finding life, about the meek inheriting the earth. The point of it all, once more, is vocational: if we can study Genesis and human origins without hearing the call to be an image-bearing human being renewed in Jesus, we are massively missing the point, perhaps pursuing our own dream of an otherworldly salvation that merely colludes with the forces of evil, as gnosticism always does.

The Gnostic (Knowing) Christians understood these principles being taught by Jesus that were hidden away in so many ingenious ways. The ruling classes at the time feared the true teachings of Jesus. These teachings had been relayed to the disciples and they performed many miracles with them.

Reading and rereading this collection, I encounter the generosity, frailties and strengths, contradictions and contributions of “disappeared” rebels and heretics, of prophets and soldiers and healers. I am reminded of the noncanonical Gnostic Gospels suppressed by state religion; the heart of this work seems to pulse with the Gospel of Thomas (113): The disciples said to Him, “When will the Kingdom come?” [Jesus said,] “It will not come by waiting for it.

together a few hundred years after Jesus’s crucifixion. But we know different. We know for a fact that early Christianity was very diverse in its beliefs and in its writings. It was made up of scattered communities of people who had competing interpretations of what Jesus was and what he preached and what he did, communities that based their faiths on very different ideas. And before too long, they started squabbling about whose version was right. Ultimately, one of these groups won by gaining more converts than the others. And the winners decided which of these early writings were the ones their converts should follow, they changed them to fit the story they settled on, and they branded all the others blasphemous and heretical and suppressed them. They buried the competition, along with their beliefs and practices, and then they rewrote the history of the whole struggle. My point is, they decided what would be considered genuine, sacred scripture, and what wouldn’t. And they did a great job. There’s hardly anything left of the texts they didn’t like. The only reason we know they even existed is that they’re occasionally mentioned by early church writers, and the handful of copies we have of any of these competing versions are down to the occasional fluke, like the discovery of that stash of gnostic gospels at Nag Hammadi back in the 1940s.

If that is true, then our love for the rapture reveals a lack of love for the very world Jesus came to save. The very idea of the church abandoning the world in its time of need is endemic of an American Christianity that is more focused on the self than the needs of the other, more gnostic (concerned with right ideas) than actually Christian, and hyper-​focused on the hereafter to the detriment of the here and now.

the wafer in prayer to God, Jesus, Mary and the saints and declares it to have physically changed into human flesh and blood he makes an idol out of it. Even in the case of consubstantiation, which says it does not physically change but God is spiritually present in the wafer, it is still an idol. The idea of God entering the communion bread came about from a Gnostic heretic named Marcus in the first century. Marcus taught that when he blessed the cup of wine, the Holy Spirit would enter the cup and anyone who drank from it would be filled with the Holy Spirit. In this case, the transmuted communion would impart the Holy Spirit. Today the idea is that the transmuted communion will impart a grace that forgives some sins. About transubstantiation, ancient church father Irenaeus said clearly:   “Pretending to consecrate cups mixed with wine, he contrives to give them a purple and reddish colour, so that Charis [the Holy Spirit], should be thought to drop her own blood into that cup through means of his invocation… the church has never taught such a thing… all who follow such a demonic teaching are crack-brained.” Irenaeus Against Heresies 1.13

compared, a decision will be made by the harlot church that Jesus was not really God at all. This will allow the harlot church to be conquered by the Muslim world, and in turn, destroyed by them.   Psychology Modern science has never found any evidence that even suggests there might be an “unconscious mind.” It is just a Freudian theory. Freudian psychology is based on ideas from Aristotle and Pythagoras. The Carpocratian Gnostics combined the teachings of Aristotle and Pythagoras with Christianity and were classified as a cult for it. Today we see the self-esteem movement, instead of true repentance; and tolerance instead of true conversion. These forms of psychology are alluded to as the “myths” in 2 Timothy 4:3-4. In 1 Timothy 3:13 evil deceivers will wax worse and worse deceiving and being deceived.   Victorinus wrote about the seven churches in Commentary on Revelation. He stated in the end times there would be “Christians” who are Christians in

this saying appears in an inscription from a mosque at Fatehpur Sikri, India: “Jesus said, ‘This world is a bridge. Pass over it, but do not build your dwelling there.

The Gnostic Christ (and the historical Jesus), like the Buddha, like Krishna, like Lao Tzu, taught that all material things are impermanent—whether they be riches, or one’s own body. Attachment to that which is impermanent causes suffering. Give up attachment and suffering ceases.

The great quest of Hinduism, Buddhism and Gnostic Christianity is to seek and find the means for liberating oneself from the bonds of the material, illusory, world.

We are not, after all, defined by whatever longings and aspirations come out of our hearts, despite the remarkable rhetoric of our times. In the area of human well-being, that is the road to radical instability; in the area of theological beliefs, it leads to Gnosticism (where you try to discern the hidden divine spark within yourself and then be true to it). Jesus himself was quite clear, following in the prophetic tradition: the human heart is deceitful, and out of it come all kinds of things that defile people, that is, that make them unable to function as genuine human beings, as the royal priesthood they were called to be. The gospel Jesus announced was not about getting in touch with your deepest feelings or accepting yourself as you really are. It was about taking up your cross and following him. That is tough, and it doesn’t stop being tough when you’ve done it for a year, or a decade, or a lifetime. The victory won through suffering on the cross is implemented, here as elsewhere, through the suffering of Jesus’s followers, most of whom will continue to be troubled from time to time by temptation in relation to money and sex and many other things beside.

In order to create each one of the New Testament Gospels, some author who spoke and wrote in Greek had to have read a document already written in Aramaic (or possibly Hebrew, although this is unlikely), or possibly sat and listened as one of the Apostles or followers of Christ Jesus related the stories to him in Aramaic and then the author who spoke and wrote in Greek, translated the Aramaic tales into Greek. So, straightaway, you realize that it is impossible that you are reading the exact words of Christ Jesus; the best that you can hope for is that you are reading the best translation of Christ Jesus' words from Aramaic, into Greek and finally into English.

The idea of false renunciation (self-sacrifice) is not contained in the teachings of the Christos. This idea of renunciation was created by a Roman Catholic Church hungry for money and power. It is truly the time to eliminate all images of the suffering Christ: bloody and beaten, weak and tortured. These images are designed to fill the Catholic with tremendous feelings of guilt; the horrible misconception that because of their sins Christ Jesus had to suffer such nightmarish torture and death. Nothing more diabolical, nor more evil, can be imagined than filling the hearts and minds of young people with guilt that will live inside of them for the rest of their lives!

It is quite possible that Barabbas was the crucified person. The name Barabbas means Son of the Father. 'Barabbas' (or 'Bar Abbas') is the Hellenized form of the Aramaic name Bar Abba, which means 'son of the father'. And the name 'Jesus' (from the Greek 'Yesous') is the Hellenized form of the Hebrew name Yeshua. Pilate was essentially asking the Jerusalem crowd: Who do you want me to release: Yeshua son of the Father or Yeshua son of the Father whom your followers call Messiah?' The fact that both men had the same name has been covered up by Catholic and Christian churches, but it is obvious that there was a great opportunity for confusion during this highly emotional, chaotic and devised moment.

It is quite possible that Barabbas was the crucified person. The name Barabbas means Son of the Father. 'Barabbas' (or 'Bar Abbas') is the Hellenized form of the Aramaic name Bar Abba, which means 'son of the father'. And the name 'Jesus' (from the Greek 'Yesous') is the Hellenized form of the Hebrew name Yeshua. Pilate was essentially asking the Jerusalem crowd: Who do you want me to release: Yeshua son of the Father or Yeshua son of the Father whom your followers call Messiah?" The fact that both men had the same name has been covered up by Catholic and Christian churches, but it is obvious that there was a great opportunity for confusion during this highly emotional, chaotic and devised moment.

When the Christos incarnated in the man Jesus, He united Himself with the destiny of the Planet Earth.

Jesus represents a conscious unification with the Source.

The aforementioned philosopher and Sûfî, ibn al-Arabî, saw a young girl in Makkah surround by light and realized that, for him, she was an incarnation of the divine Sophia.

It's a man's name. His full name would be 'Yeshua ben Yosef' (Jesus son of Joseph). According to Strong’s Concordance 'Nazaret' is a valid transliteration of the word Ναζαρέτ, ἡ. Jesus was an Initiated Adept. However, he was not born as the Christos. Jesus was prepared by Sophia, through many Earthly incarnations, to become a pure vessel for the reception of the Christos.

Remember that, according to the Gospel of John, there were “Three Mary's” at the foot of the Cross! Mary, Mother of Jesus Mary of Clopas Mary Magdalene Three women mentioned in Mark 16: 1 also came to the tomb of Jesus who were named Mary!

The Initiated Adept Jesus could revivify his own flesh through his Christic Body of Pure Light and become the Fully-Actuated 'new creation.' The lesson to be learned is that you too can receive the Christos and become illumined. The Christos is the Divine Seed and Sophia is the Sacred Fertile Land. Your task is to prepare the land (Physical, Etheric and Astral, bodies) to receive the Spirit of the Christos, and thus the land will flourish again. The Christos calls you to awake out of sleep.

What if there was something so controversial about the life of Jesus that the early Roman Catholic Church would not want to make this information available to the public?

Gnostic and Islamic escape hypotheses, which propose that God did a miraculous act to cause someone to be crucified in Jesus’ place,

There was certainly a battle, but I get the sense that you are referring to something very specific.” “There is only one battle.” “One?” I asked, curious. His eyes flashed, and he looked straight at me. “Union or separation,” he said definitively. “Once again, sir, you have my undivided attention.” “Indeed,” John boomed, as if he had been given permission to hold forth. “The Greeks and the Pharisees make the same mistake, though in different ways—a large mistake,” he exclaimed, with a sigh of lament, “and apparently these Gnostics are their children.” I knew to the core of my soul that we had arrived at the heart of everything. I could see it in his face and in the way he held his head. I was not sure what he meant by union or separation, but it was clear that to him this was the crosshairs of the cosmos. “I think I could come up with some reasonable ideas about the connections between the Greeks and the Gnostics, but how could the Pharisees be connected?” “The truth of all truths: Jesus. Jesus in his Father and us in him. Without Jesus, what do you have?” “Not much, I reckon. Just ourselves.” “Ourselves and ideas of separation from God,” St. John declared in his most authoritative apostolic tone. “Listen, young Aidan.” And as I did, I felt that my world was about to be shattered. “The assumption of separation is the great darkness.” His words hit me like a blow to my gut, but before I could recover he continued on. “Then, you see, we have to find our way to God. The Greeks offer their way through their minds; the Pharisees offer theirs through external rules. This is Ophis’s chief trick—blind us to how close the Lord is, closer than breath: we’re in him, and he’s in us. Ophis deceives the nations by one lie—separation. Our joy”—his face lit up like the rising sun—“is to tell the truth, let the light shine—and persevere the tribulation of enlightenment.” “Wow,

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

The Old Testament is the record of prophets. Jesus was a prophet. The New Testament is the record of apostles and prophets. The entire biblical revelation is prophetic. God speaks through word and deed, words explaining deeds, and deeds revealing words, so that words become deeds. The event of God speaking his word is an event as much as events in the purpose of God are words spoken by God. Word and deed come together in Jesus Christ. When he spoke, things happened. What he did was God speaking. He is the WordEvent of God’s revelation to man.

However it—or the kind of extreme individualistic epistemology it embraces—can lead historians to an overly skeptical approach particularly to those sources that were intended to recount and inform events of the past, that is, testimony in this restricted sense. Particularly in Gospels scholarship there is an attitude abroad that approaches the sources with fundamental skepticism, rather than trust, and therefore requires that anything the sources claim be accepted only if historians can independently verify it…..

Equally, it does not mean that Christian beliefs cause more distortion than other ideological beliefs. This emerged with particular clarity in engaging with the opinion that Jesus did not exist. This view is demonstrably false. It is fuelled by a regrettable form of atheist prejudice, which holds all the main primary sources, and Christian people, in contempt. This is not merely worse than the American Jesus Seminar, it is no better than Christian fundamentalism. It simply has different prejudices.

Some people, including some who wanted to think of themselves as followers of Jesus, took exactly that line. We can watch the process taking place in the so-called Gnostic gospels (books like the Gospel of Thomas).

Tertullian argued, one of the reasons that Jesus had to be truly human is because God cannot die; only a true human with a true physical body can die. If, as Gnostic Christians claimed, Jesus only appeared to be human, then his death only appeared to be real, and, if so, there is no true sacrifice for sin and no salvation. It was the true human nature of Jesus, not his divine nature, that suffered and died on the cross.

At this point, the notion of apostolic succession became very important. What was argued was simply that, if Jesus had some secret knowledge to communicate to his disciples—which in fact he did not—he would have entrusted that teaching to the same apostles to whom he entrusted the churches. If those apostles had received any such teaching, they in turn would have passed it on to those who were to follow them in the leadership of the various churches. Therefore, had there been any such secret teaching, it should be found among the direct disciples of the apostles, and the successors of those disciples, the bishops. But the truth was that those who could now—that is, in the second century—claim direct apostolic succession unanimously denied the existence of any such secret teaching. In conclusion, the Gnostic claim that there is a secret tradition with which they have been entrusted is false.

Some Gnostics are totally atheistic, and see the whole thing as a myth describing psychological processes (one of my friends doesn’t believe that Jesus even existed, a position called “mythicism,” with which I personally disagree).

To this epoch of ardent abstractions and impassioned logomechaies belongs the philosophical reign of Julian, an illuminatus and Initiate of the first order, who believed in the unity of God and the universal Dogma of the Trinity, and regretted the loss of nothing of the old world but its magnificent symbols and too graceful images. He was no Pagan, but a Gnostic, infected with the allegories of Grecian polytheism, and whose misfortune it was to find the name of Jesus Christ less sonorous than that of Orpheus.

In particular, the story Revelation tells is the same story that all four gospels tell, though the church, which has done its best to hush up this fact about the gospels, has not usually recognized the similarity. The four canonical gospels (unlike the so-called gnostic ‘gospels’!) tell the story of how Jesus of Nazareth, Israel’s Messiah, conquered the power of evil through his death and became the lord of the world.