The Origin of Christianity

N.L.Vas

“There was once in China a very learned, studied man who was an expert scholar on all things Buddhist. People came from far and near to hear him expound his great knowledge. This scholar heard of an enlightened sage who lived at some distance, and made up his mind to travel that distance so he, too, could be enlightened. On reaching the monastery where the sage resided, he announced his purpose and was ushered in to meet the old gentleman. As is the Chinese custom, tea was brought and the sage poured a cup for his visitor and, then, for himself. The learned man told the sage how delighted he was to finally meet him and of how he - the scholar - though not actually enlightened like the sage, had studied all aspects of Buddhism all his life, lectured and wrote on the topic, and knew everything there was to know about it, and, generally, proceeded to tell the sage everything he knew. The sage listened, quietly, for a few moments then; he gently lifted the teapot and began pouring more tea into his guest's cup. When the cup was full, the sage didn't stop pouring. The tea ran over the top, across the polished floor, and onto the pants leg of the scholar - who immediately jumped, up, began to fuss, and demanded to know why the "crazy old man" was making such a mess by continuing to pour tea into a cup that any fool could see was already full. The sage stopped pouring, looked up and said, "Of course, you're right. If a vessel's already filled up, it doesn't make any sense for me, or anyone, to try to pour in more than it can hold. That's why there's nothing I can teach you". With that the sage left the room.”

The era of blind faith has gone; that of enquiry is here. The subject of Christianity and its origins is a delicate one to handle, due to the fact people firmly believe in God and that faith in God should not be trampled on or be made to seem unbelievable. We theosophists are not opposed to Christianity, and have never been in opposition to Christianity. We firmly believe in its fundamental principles of brotherly love and compassion. But there can only be one Truth, and it is not to be found in one region of the compass, but is in the circle as a whole.

Firstly I will give a short description of Christianity, then try and throw some light on where Christianity originated, what it has become and what it should become in the future.

A short description of Christianity:

From all the Semitic religions, Christianity is the most influential and has dominated a large population of the world, specially the western world. Its origin comes from the teachings of Jesus, a Jew by birth, reported to be born of a virgin mother, Mary. The religion has essentially one god, but the idea of a Trinity raises doubts as to the one god. Christians claim that their religion comes from the revelations of Jesus, but it can hardly be disputed that Christianity owes much of its origin to Judaism. Jesus himself never thought of founding a new religion but only tried to cleanse Judaism of the rubbish which clustered around it in the course of time. Moses gave the Jews a very pure ethical religion and Jesus only wanted to play the role of reformer. He respected the Ten Commandments of Moses, and restated them in the conception of God as Love. The Old Testament of the Bible is sacred to the Christians and the Jews, but only the Christians have a New Testament with the teachings of Jesus. Therefore the Jewish heritage of Christianity cannot be ignored. Christianity can be regarded as an extension of Judaism but in a more elevated direction. The Jewish God is depicted as powerful and just and sometimes as wrathful and revengeful. The Jewish God also had a contract to save the Jews only if they served him. But the Christian God loves his people unconditionally.

From the eight oldest religions known to us, Christianity is the sixth oldest. The eldest is Hinduism, then Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Sikhism.

The world has known many great civilizations. There was the great Egyptian civilization, with its Chaldean twin sister, the Mayan and Inca and many lost to us now. Plato tells us that 9000 years ago a huge island in the Atlantic sank within a short period, drowning all its inhabitants and civilization. The Hindus have a very old civilization, shown in their sacred writings the Vedas and the Upanishads.

The time period before Christ in the middle east and around the Mediterranean sea is what concerns us now. The empire of Alexander the Great had transformed the ancient world into one culture and Greek had become the international language. Greek is also the language of the original New Testament. Pagan, Jewish and Christian Gnostics all wrote in the Coptic language. The Greek term gnostikos was used by Plato as a rare philosophical term meaning ‘leading to knowledge’ or ‘capable of knowledge’. The term ‘Gnostic’ includes the classical esoteric tradition on which the Jewish and Christian Gnosticism are heavily dependent. Only by uniting Jewish and Christian Gnosticism with their Pagan predecessor can any sense be made of the elaborate Gnostic mythology of the Nag Hammadi library.

In December 1945 an Arab peasant made an astonishing archaeological discovery in Upper Egypt. Near the town of Naj Hammadi, on a mountain called the Jabal al-Tarif, honeycombed with more than 150 caves a peasant, named Muhammad Ali al-Samman, while digging, found the jars containing the papyrus books, which later became the Nag Hammadi library. Since the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library more light has been thrown onto the gospels of the New Testament, their origins are purely Gnostic. Alongside the Christian gospels at Nag Hammadi were found the works by Plato and works attributed to the ancient Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus.

What is now called the Christian religion had existed among the ancients, and never did not exist. All the sages of the ancient world had preached a single doctrine, originally revealed to Hermes, transmitted to Pythagoras and Plato in the Greek world and through the Zoroastrian Magi in the middle east. The word Chrestos existed ages before Christianity was heard of. In reality it is a translation of the word Kris, an esoteric term for the word anointed, but more of this later on. In the Greek language, the Chrestes is one who explains oracles, a prophet or soothsayer. It is directly borrowed from the Pagan Temple terminology. The Gnostic form of the word Chrest, or Chrestos, means a good, holy man. What we would call and adept, a high chela, or a disciple. There is a real significance in the two terms Chrestos and Christos. Christos was “the way,” while Chrestos was the lonely traveler on his way to reach the ultimate goal of “Truth,” the goal of Christos, union of the soul (the son) with the Spirit (the father).

The ancient sacred mysteries were established for the same purpose in every civilized nation of antiquity. For the cultivation of science; the acquirement of knowledge; the bettering of man’s moral and physical nature; the development of his intellectual and mental faculties; the understanding and study of the laws that govern the material and spiritual world, thus bringing him/her closer into contact with Deity. The candidate who was ready to be initiated was anointed, hence the word Kris. What is left of anointment is found by the Catholics, anointing the sick at the point of death.

Christianity has four main pillars of belief. The virgin birth, baptism, the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. These main pillars were inherited from the ancients and are to be found in the Gnostic doctrines. It is clear that in the majority of Mediterranean countries at the time, Gnosticism was the original Christianity. The finding of the Nag Hammadi library supports this evidence.

Gnosis is not an intellectual theory, rather a state of being. It is an inner ‘Knowledge’ which can never be truly understood from the outside. The goal of Gnostic spirituality is Gnosis, or knowledge of the Truth. To understand this better we use the example of a circle being our self. By imagining, moving our point of identification from the circumference of the circle of self up the radii to the center and realizing ourselves to be what we have been all along: Consciousness. The Gnostics teach that this is a journey of many lifetimes. Just as each night we go to sleep to wake up reinvigorated the next day, so at the end of a lifetime we die and reincarnate, manifesting ourselves as a new body in the world, the wiser for our previous experience.

To give a short general description of the main pillars on which Christianity was built. These pillars were inherited from the pagans, the Virgin Mary who gives birth to Jesus in the cave of the cosmos, represents the process of incarnation – the ‘way down’ into the prison of the body. Jesus, at the end of his mission resurrects and ascends back to heaven in glory, represents the path of spiritual awakening – ‘the way out’. The three wise men bearing gifts from the east, symbolize the three most precious things. They are, Right belief, Right knowledge and Right conduct.

Baptism was the symbol of washing away of the past to begin the quest of Gnosis. The name ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ is a distortion of ‘Jesus the Nazarene’ according to the Mandean Gnostics, Nazarene means ‘initiate’, Jesus was called the initiate. The crucifixion represents the death of the eidolon (the astral double of living beings) during an initiation ceremony. When we confuse what we are with what we appear to be, we create a false self, the image or the eidolon. The consciousness and the psyche have become disastrously confused in our present day. At initiation the psyche is crucified. Jesus the initiate resurrects as the Christ, the Consciousness of God, he divides his essence from his appearance and knows himself to be Consciousness witnessing psyche, and not the eidolon. For initiates who know their true identity as Consciousness, the horrors of our waking world are no more than a dream, which those bound to the wheel of suffering mistake for reality.

Throughout the first century CE, huge numbers of Jews in Judea and throughout the Mediterranean were fully integrated into a sophisticated Pagan society, regarding themselves as ‘cosmopolitans’ – ‘citizens of the cosmos’. We are compelled to make a distinction that will lead us to better understand why the original gnosis has been obscured. The distinction is in the terms ‘Literalism’ and ‘Gnosticism’. This classification is important because Gnostics interpret the stories and teachings of their spiritual tradition as signposts pointing beyond words to the mystical experience of the ineffable Mystery. Literalists believe their scriptures are actually the works of God. They take their teachings, stories and initiation myths to be actual history. They focus on the words as a literal expression of the Truth. Hence we will call them ‘Literalists’.

What became of the true Christianity is this. In the majority of Mediterranean countries Gnosticism was the original Christianity. Christian Gnosticism was an international movement spread throughout the Mediterranean, flourishing in cosmopolitan cities such as Alexandria, Edessa, Antioch, Ephesus, and Rome. Christian Literalism was initially a minor school of Christianity which developed in Rome towards the end of the second century. Over the course of the third century, Literalism grew in popularity in Rome and the west. Eventually their simplistic offer of vicarious atonement attracted more adherents than Christian Gnosticism, with its puzzling promise of Gnosis through mystical transformation.

As the Literalists grew more powerful, they attacked all other Christian schools. Eventually Christian Literalism became the party line of the Roman Empire. The totalitarian state dictated to its citizens the one religion that they were permitted to follow. Why isn’t the gospel of the Gnosis common knowledge? The Roman Church has spent 16 centuries systematically destroying the evidence that it ever existed. The possession of Christian works unacceptable to the established Church was punishable by a cruel death. Fortunately the library of Christian gnostic scriptures has been found at Nag Hammadi. But why were they buried in the first place? It was this campaign against heresy in which the bishops prevailed. Many were horrors perpetrated by the established church. No one was regarded a Christian unless he professed belief in Jesus by baptism and salvation through the blood of Christ. To be considered a good Christian one had to show faith in the dogmas of the Church and to openly declare them, to pretend to have blind faith in the teachings of the Church. The divine truth, i.e. leading the life of Chrêstos was split, and more than 230 sects in England alone were formed. Each one claiming to have Christ exclusively in their own inner chamber and denying him to all the others, “the false prophets”. A sad state of affairs has become our inheritance of the divine truth, which meant leading the Christos life of the glorified or the anointed. It does not serve much purpose in going into the further degradation of the ancient mysteries, suffice to say that Christianity has kept the spark of spirituality burning throughout the centuries, no matter how degraded it has become.

What the Christian religion in the future should do is to follow the lines of Truth. Showing tolerance to all beliefs including Pagans and heretics. By studying the mysteries of archaic esotericism, the universal mystery language would be unriddled. Christianity is about what we are. It is about the mystery of consciousness. The more one studies the ancient religious texts, the more one finds that the ground-work of the New Testament is the same as the ground-work of the Vedas and the Egyptian origin of the gods.

The teachings on love attributed to Jesus are so familiar that it is easy to miss how radical they are. We should love our enemies, repay evil with kindness, and not fight back when we are attacked. We should completely forgive those who wrong us, offer more than is asked of us and not lend money, but give it away to someone we know we won’t get it back from. The history of Christian Literalism, from the Crusaders and the Inquisition to the modern Vatican bankers and wealthy TV evangelists, is a betrayal of the gospel of love proclaimed by the original Christians. Love is what overcomes separateness and unites us to the Mystery which is Love itself.

To sum up, we have tried to show what is Christianity, a doctrine of universal brotherhood which has existed throughout all ages and has never ceased to exist. It has been reduced a system which demands conformity to its dogmas and tenets. Gross materialism has become the consequence of centuries of blind faith. And we have tried to show what it should become, that which it originally was, the practice of brotherly love. Love one another because we are parts of each other, fulfilling the ambition which motivates evolution.

In conclusion, to imagine that the purpose of life is to accumulate wealth, can be put on a par with believing that the Earth is flat. We are God in search of himself. He, who knows himself, knows God. Truth is not distant, but present in all things awaiting discovery. The Buddha said, “I will not accept a doctrine because the learned have stated it, nor will I accept it because the gods themselves have spoken; I will accept it only because it is true.”

Sources: Jesus and the lost Goddess.
The Gnostic Gospels.
Blavatsky: Collected Writings, Volume 8.
Comparative Religion.
Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches.

back