Theos-Talk Archives (September 2004 Message tt00115)

FROM "REPLY TO THE MISTAKEN CONCEPTIONS OF THE ABBÉ ROCA ..."(1)

LET THE ABBÉ demolish the proofs we offer against the existence of
a 
carnalized Christ, hence Christ-Man, whether called Jesus or Krishna; 
let him demonstrate that there has never been any other incarnated 
God than his "Jesus-Christ," and that this one is the "only" as well 
as the "greatest" of the Masters and Doctors -- not only the greatest 
of the Mahâtmans but God in person! Very good; then let him give
us 
proofs, irrefutable or at least as logical and evident as those 
advanced by us. But he must not come offering as proof the voice 
which speaks in his soul, or quotations drawn from the Gospels. 
Because his voice -- were it even the twin-sister of that of the 
daïmôn of Socrates -- has no more value in the discussion, for
us or 
for the public, than has for him or for any other person, the voice 
which tells me to the contrary in my soul. 

Judge for yourself. I write in every letter that a divine Christ (or 
Christos) has never existed under a human form outside the 
imagination of blasphemers who have carnalized a universal and 
entirely impersonal principle. 

For me Jesus Christ, i.e., the Man-God of the Christians copied from 
the Avatâras of every country, from the Hindu Krishna as well as
the 
Egyptian Horus, was never a historical person. He is a deified 
personification of the glorified type of the great Hierophants of the 
Temples, and his story, as told in the New Testament, is an allegory, 
assuredly containing profound esoteric truths, but still an allegory. 

Every act of the Jesus of the New Testament, every word attributed to 
him, every event related of him during the three years of the mission 
he is said to have accomplished, rests on the programme of the Cycle 
of Initiation, a cycle founded on the Precession of the Equinoxes and 
the Signs of the Zodiac. When the Hebrew Gospel not according to but 
by Matthew the Gnostic, of whom they have made an Evangelist ... 
when, I say, that original document shall have been translated, if 
ever it is found, and the Christian Churches will have at least one 
document not falsified, then only will it be feasible to speak of 
the "life of Jesus," of the events of which "no one is ignorant." 
Meanwhile, and without losing time arguing the subject of the century 
in which Jesus or Jehoshua lived, one fact is certain, namely that 
the Occultists are prepared to prove that even the sacramental words 
attributed to him on the cross have been disfigured, and that they 
mean something quite different from what the Greek translation 
conveys. 

The legend of which I speak is founded, as I have demonstrated over 
and over again in my writings and my notes, on the existence of a 
personage called Jehoshua (from which Jesus has been made) born at 
Lüd or Lydda about 120 years before the modern era. And if this
fact 
is denied -- to which I can hardly object -- one must resign oneself 
to regard the hero of the drama of Calvary as a myth pure and simple. 
As a matter of fact, in spite of all the desperate research made 
during long centuries, if we set aside the testimony of 
the "Evangelists," i.e., unknown men whose identity has never been 
established, and that of the Fathers of the Church, interested 
fanatics, neither history, nor profane tradition, neither official 
documents, nor the contemporaries of the soidisant drama, are able to 
provide one single serious proof of the historical and real 
existence, not only of the Man-God but even of him called Jesus of 
Nazareth, from the year 1 to the year 33. All is darkness and 
silence. Philo Judaeus, born before the Christian Era, and dying 
quite some time after the year when, according to Renan, the 
hallucination of a hysterical woman, Mary of Magdala, gave a God to 
the world, made several journeys to Jerusalem, during that interval 
of forty-odd years. He went there to write the history of the 
religious sects of his epoch in Palestine. No writer is more correct 
in his descriptions, more careful to omit nothing; no community, no 
fraternity, even the most insignificant, escaped him. Why then does 
he not speak of the Nazarites? Why does he not make the least 
allusion to the Apostles, to the divine Galilean, to the Crucifixion? 
The answer is easy. Because the biography of Jesus was invented after 
the first century, and no one in Jerusalem was better informed on the 
subject than Philo himself. We have but to read the quarrel of 
Irenaeus with the Gnostics in the 2nd century, to be certain of it. 
Ptolemaeus (180 A.D.), having remarked that Jesus preached one year 
according to the legend, and that he was too young to have been able 
to teach anything of importance, Irenaeus had a bad fit of 
indignation and testified that Jesus preached more than ten or even 
twenty years! Tradition alone, he said, speaks of ten years. 
Elsewhere, he makes Jesus die at the age of fifty years or more!! 
Now, if as early as the year 180, a Father of the Church had recourse 
to tradition, and if no one was sure of anything, and no great 
importance was attributed to the Gospels -- to the Logia of which 
there were more than sixty -- what place has history in all of this? 
Confusion, lies, deceit, and forgery, such is the ledger of the early 
centuries. Eusebius of Caesarea, king of falsifiers, inserted the 
famous 16 lines referring to Jesus in a manuscript of Josephus, to 
get even with the Gnostics who denied that there ever had been a real 
personage named Jesus. 

It is hardly necessary to say that for the words of Jesus to possess 
any value as proof, the authenticity of the Gospels must first be 
proved. Jesus, whether he lived at that epoch or earlier, never wrote 
anything, and what he has been made to say in the four Gospels is 
sometimes terribly contradictory. As to Paul, undoubtedly a 
historical personage, it would be difficult to separate, in his 
writings, what he said himself and what his editors and correctors 
have made him say. However, there remains -- doubtless by 
inadvertence -- one expression, by him or by his collaborators, which 
sums up in two words what was thought about Jesus. Look up the 
Epistle to the Hebrews, ii, 9; you will read there that Jesus was 
made "inferior to the angels." That is enough for us. Can one who is 
inferior to the angels be God, the Infinite and the Only? 

Indeed, every man, every Ju-su (name of Horus, Khonsu, the Son, the 
type of humanity), above all, every initiate whose body is made 
inferior to that of the angels, can say, in the presence of his
Âtman 
(Divine Spirit): Vivit vero in me Christus, as he would say: Krishna, 
Buddha, or Ormuzd lives in me. 

I have the most profound respect for the transcendental idea of the 
universal Christos (or Christ) which lives in the soul of the Bushman 
and the savage Zulu, as well as in that of the Abbé Roca, but I
have 
the keenest aversion for the Christolatry of the Churches. I hate 
those dogmas and doctrines which have degraded the ideal Christos by 
making of it an absurd and grotesque anthropomorphic fetish, a 
jealous and cruel idol which damns for eternity those who decline to 
bow down before it. The least of the Gnostic Docetae who claimed that 
Jesus crucified was nothing but an illusion, and his story an 
allegory, was much nearer the truth than a "saint" Augustin or even 
an "Angel of the Schools." 

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(1) NOTE--These are selections taken from an article by H. P. 
Blavatsky, originally published in the French journal Le Lotus, 
Paris, April, 1888. It is one of a series of essays and replies 
written by H.P.B. and Abbé Roca on Christian Esotericism.
Reprinted 
in H. P. Blavatsky Collected Writings, Vol. IX, 1962. 
Quoted from:
http://tinyurl.com/58cxb