Theos-Talk Archives (October 2003 Message tt00243)

Oct 21 2003

Dear Friend 

Permit me to observe that "Christianity" as a dogmatic religion based on
the BIBLE: is not the teaching of Jesus.

One need only to read and think over the sayings attributed to Him in
the SERMON ON THE MOUNT if one desires to distinguish between the two.

Here is a valuable essay presenting thee differences, written by a
student of Theosophy, Christianity and the Bible. The references will be
found explained in detail in ISIS UNVEILED Vol. II, and the SECRET
DOCTRINE 

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THE BIBLE AND SECRET DOCTRINE


That the apostles had received a secret doctrine from Jesus is
evident from the words of Jerome who confessed it in an unguarded
moment. Writing to Bishop Chromatius and Bishop Heliodorus, he complains
that:


"a difficult work is enjoined since this translation has been
commanded me by your Felicities, which St. Matthew, the Apostle, did not
wish to be openly written. He made up this book sealed up in the Hebrew
characters, which he put forth that the book might be possessed by the
men most religious. This very book they never gave to any one to be
transcribed. This book, having been published by Seleucus, a disciple of
Manichaeus, who also wrote falsely The Acts of the Apostles, exhibited
matter not for edification."


Justin Martyr used only this Gospel, as also did most probably
Titian, his disciple. The genuine primitive Christians, the Gnostic
Ebionites, rejected all other Christian writings except this original
Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, since destroyed by the Church. The Ebionites
and also the Nazarenes believed that Jesus was but a man, according to
Epiphanius. 

Jerome states that the Hebrew book written by Matthew, though he
translated it twice, was nearly unintelligible to him, for it was arcane
and secret. Jerome knew that this original Gospel of Matthew was the
expounder of the only true doctrines of Christ, a work of the friend and
companion of Jesus.

The Church Fathers resorted to falsification of their
scriptures.

Matthew wrote his gospel in Hebrew and not in Greek, as it was
the gospel of the Nazarenes and the Ebionite Gnostics. Jerome cunningly
translated it into Greek with numerous secret meanings purposely changed
and called it the original. Matthew’s original Hebrew Gospel did not
anthropomorphize Christ. 

There were many kicks, blows and murders at the early Church
councils where scriptures were edited and selected. Those who abided by
the true writings of Matthew were chastised and humiliated.

The Gospel of John was written by a Greek Platonist, a non-Jew,
the name being a forgery.

There is a Mosaic Bible in Hebrew, but written in the Samaritan
alphabet and also there is one written in the Samaritan language and
alphabet. They have textual differences in the length of the cycles
between the flood and Abraham's birth. Rome follows the chronology of
the Hebrew language text.

The Samaritans repudiated the books of Moses, the Psalms, the
Talmud and Mishna, claiming that the Talmudists had disfigured the books
of Moses and Joshua out of all recognition.

Hebrew did not exist either as a language or as an alphabet in
the days of Moses. The books that now pass current under his name are
not the true records. Moses did not write in Hebrew square letters nor
in Samaritan characters, for both alphabets belong to a later date than
Moses.

The Hebrew alphabet is relatively recent and was probably
derived from the Palmyrene writing. The Hebrew Bible is written in the
Chaldaic phonographs of Hebrew words. The square letters Jews rely upon
are characters of an unknown, dead language as abstruse as the cuneiform
letters on the mountains of Assyria. Scholars do not carry the now known
Hebrew square letters beyond the period of the fourth century A.D.
Ancient Hebrew is neither Syriac nor Chaldaic, and was lost after 70
years captivity when the Israelites assimilated Chaldaic. Ancient Hebrew
ceased being spoken at that time. 

Jewish history cannot be carried back one day earlier than the
time of Moses. The language of Abraham was not Hebrew, but Chaldaic. The
Hebrew, in truth, cannot be called an old language.

The name Jehovah was unknown to Moses or any Jew before David.
NEITHER DAVID NOR SOLOMON RECOGNIZED MOSES OR THE LAW OF MOSES. They
aspired to build Jehovic temples along the lines of Venus worship and
discarded the initiate teachings of Moses.

The Hebrew scriptures had been tampered with and remodeled, had
been lost and rewritten a dozen times before the days of Ezra. Ezra is
probably the renegade Azara, the ambitious Chaldean priest who
refabricated the ancient lost books taking stray records and combining
them with the numerical keys in which he was versed.

The Christian historians state that the scriptures perished in
the captivity of Nabuchodnonosar, after which Esdras, the Levite, became
inspired and restored again the whole ancient scriptures.

Kenealy states that the works of Esdras themselves must have
been destroyed by Antiochus. Judas Maccabeus or some unknown compilers
must have re created the Old Testament probably from Greek sources well
after the Christian era.

The Bible is a masterpiece of clever, ingenious fables, whose
true meaning is revealed only to initiates. It is tale and allegory, a
repertory of invented personages and of dark sayings and parables and
thus quite misleading to the ignorant. Moreover, exoterically, it is
astrolatry and Sabean worship, pure and simple. 

The Old Testament was most undeniably milked out of the most
ingenious brains of Hebrew Kabalists familiar with Egyptian and
Babylonian Sanskrit centers of learning and with Hindu Deities. The
prototypes of nearly all Biblical personages are found in the early
pantheon of India. The sons of Brahma have become the patriarchs.

The Septuagint manuscript is our most primary source of the
Old Testament, and it is claimed to have a miraculous inspiration when
first written in Greek, which copy has long been “lost.” The texts used
are Hebrew copies that were made from this destroyed Greek manuscript. 

There is much dishonesty surrounding even the writing of the
Septuagint manuscript. Yet people persist in talking of the ancient
Hebrew as if one man alive knows one word of it!
  
The Hebrew Bible exists no more. What exists now are garbled
falsifications. I U II 135 165

With the exception of Paul and Clement of Alexandria, none of
the Church Fathers knew much of truth. They were mostly ignorant and
uneducated. Learning and sin were considered synonymous with the early
Christians. They were painfully ignorant of contemporary teachings on
the sphericity of the Earth and the heliocentric system! How great was
their ignorance.

There is little of Paul left in the writings attributed to him.
He was a brave, honest and sincere man who believed not in a personal
Christ, but in a non anthropomorphic abstract Christ ideal. Paul was a
profoundly learned scholar and high initiate. He had never met Jesus. He
was converted solely on metaphysical philosophy and belonged to the same
mystery school as Jesus, analogous to an ancient Masonic Lodge. Thus
Paul calls himself a "Master Builder," a code name of rank in the secret
schools then and still used in Masonry today. 

Paul was hated and persecuted by Peter, the John of Revelation
and James. John was a Jewish Kabalist, with much inherent hatred of
Greek mysteries. Paul's profound Greek learning had humiliated him and
he considered that Paul was polluted because of his non kosher, but
superior Greek wisdom. After Paul's death, both Peter and John, who wore
the headdress of the Jewish high priests and their petaloon trousers,
zealously resumed preaching the rite of circumcision, an exclusively
Jewish covenant that Paul had discarded. Peter was a Jewish Kabalist and
not an initiate.

Such men as Irenaeus , Epiphanius and Eusebius have transmitted
to posterity a reputation for such untruth and dishonest practices that
the heart sickens at the story of their crimes of that period. The whole
Christian scheme rests upon their sayings.



THE SORTES SANCTORUM

We must not forget that the Christian Church owes its present
Gospels and its dogmatism to the Sortes Sanctorum. Unable to agree as to
which were the most divinely inspired of the numerous gospels of the
time, the mysterious Council of Nicea concluded to leave the decision
to miraculous intervention. There were 318 bishops in the council and
they were a set of illiterate, simple creatures that understood nothing,
according to Sabinus, which is equivalent to saying that they were a set
of fools. Pappus tells of the bit of magic resorted to, to decide which
were the true gospels. In his Synodicon to the council Pappus says:


"having promiscuously put all the books that were referred to
the Council for determination under a communion table in a church, the
bishops besought the Lord that the inspired writings might get upon the
table, while the spurious ones remained underneath, and it happened
accordingly." 


But we are not told who kept the keys of the council chamber
overnight! 

The Christian world owes its "Word of God" to a method of
divination, for which the Church later would burn thousands at the
stake. In treating of this phenomenon of the self sorting manuscripts,
the Fathers of the Church say that God himself presides over the Sortes.


St. Augustine confessed to using divination by lots, but never
for a worldly purpose. The Fathers found authority for the Sortes in the
verse where it is said "the lot is cast into the lap, but the whole
disposing thereof is of the Lord." Proverbs 16:33. They later reversed
themselves to say that divination was wholly disposed by the Devil.
[ IU II 251 ]

The following letter written by Saint Gregory of Nazianzen,
one of the most respected Church Fathers, to Saint Jerome, shows what
posterity got instead of the truth: 


"Nothing can impose better on a people than verbiage; the less
they understand, the more they admire. Our fathers and doctors have
often said, not what they thought, but what circumstances and necessity
forced them to say."
[ IU II 183 ]

-----------------------

Collected from THE SECRET DOCTRINE and ISIS UNVEILED by H. P.
Blavatsky  


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FOOTNOTES (Important, please also read)


JEROME, SAINT. Originally Sophronius Eusebius Hieronymus.
340?-420?. Latin scholar who produced the Vulgate, the first Latin
translation of the Bible from Hebrew.


JUSTIN MARTYR, SAINT c.100-c.165, is recognized as one of the
most important early Christian writers. A Samarian, he studied in
different schools of philosophy--Stoic, Peripatetic, Pythagorean, and
Platonic--before becoming a Christian. Justin took up the task of making
a reasoned defense of Christianity to outsiders. He went to Rome and
opened a school of philosophy. Justin is the reputed author of a vast
number of treatises, but the only authentic remaining works are two
Apologies, his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, and fragments of On the
Resurrection. Justin was beheaded, probably in 165. Feast day: June 1.
Bibliography: Barnard, L. W., Justin Martyr: HIS LIFE AND THOUGHT
(1967).


GNOSTICISM is a term derived from a Greek word for knowledge
(gnosis) and applied to a philosophical and religious movement that
influenced the Mediterranean world from the 1st century BC to the 3d
century AD. It expressed itself in a variety of pagan, Jewish, and
Christian forms. Its name is derived from the fact that it promised
salvation through a secret knowledge or understanding of reality
possessed by its devotees.


EBIONITES, A Jewish-Christian sect that flourished until the 4th
century, the Ebionites accepted Jesus Christ as the greatest of the
prophets but not as the Son of God. They practiced a rigorous asceticism
and stressed the binding character of the Mosaic Law. After the fall of
Jerusalem in AD 70, the Ebionites settled in Transjordan but remained
outside the mainstream of Christianity. They are often identified with
the Nazarenes, a similar sect described by 4th-century writers.


SEPTUAGINT (sµp“t›-…-j¹nt), n. A Greek translation of the Old
Testament made in the third century B.C. [Latin septum ³ gint ³, seventy
(from the traditional number of its translators) 


SAINT IRENAEUS, b. Anatolia, c.140-60, d. c.200, known as the
father of Catholic theology, is the most important theologian of the 2d
century AD. Irenaeus is known through several extant works. His major
efforts were spent in combating GNOSTICISM, and his great work,
"Adversus haereses" (Against Heresies), was written for this purpose. He
developed the doctrine of recapitulation (anakephalaiosis) of all things
in Jesus Christ in opposition to the teachings of gnostics. Irenaeus
was the first Father of the Church to systematize the religious and
theological traditions of the church.


EUSEBIUS OF CAESAREA c. 260-c. 340. Palestinian theologian whose
Ecclesiastical History, written in Greek, is a record of the chief
events in the Christian Church until the year 324, the first historian
of the Christian church. The outbreak of persecution during the reign of
Diocletian forced Eusebius to take refuge in Egypt, but he was captured
and imprisoned. Around 315 he was elected bishop of Caesarea, in
Palestine. At the Council of Nicaea he sought to reconcile the opposing
parties. Although he did not incline to the homoousios doctrine of
ATHANASIUS, which established the full divinity and equality of Christ
with the Father, he eventually signed the formula approved at Nicaea,
largely in deference to Emperor Constantine, who had convened the
council. His Chronicle (c.303) and Ecclesiastical History (c.324) are
principle sources of early Christian history.


NICAEA, COUNCILS OF. The two councils of Nicaea were ecumenical
councils of the Christian church held in 325 and 787, respectively. The
First Council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical council held by the
church, is best known for its formulation of the Nicene Creed. It was
the decision of the council, formalized in the Nicene Creed, that God
the Father and God the Son were consubstantial and coeternal and that
the Arian belief in a Christ created by and thus inferior to the Father
was heretical. Arius himself was excommunicated and banished. The
council was also important for its disciplinary decisions concerning the
status and jurisdiction of the clergy in the early church and for
establishing the date on which Easter is celebrated.
 
The Second Council of Nicaea, the seventh ecumenical council of the
Christian church, was convoked by the Byzantine empress Irene in 787 to
rule on the use of saints' images and icons in religious devotion. 


PAPPUS {pap'-uhs} Pappus, fl. early 4th century AD, was a Greek
mathematician of Alexandria who is important not only for his original
contributions to higher geometry but also as a valuable source of
information on his predecessors. His Mathematical Collection, a guide
for reading the original works of Greek geometers, is the main, and
sometimes only, source for knowledge of works by Euclid and by
Apollonius of Perga. Pappus also wrote a commentary on Ptolemy's
Almagest and a geographical work, Description of the World.


GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS, SAINT, c.330-389, one of the FATHERS OF
THE CHURCH. He, BASIL THE GREAT, and GREGORY OF NYSSA are called the
Cappadocian Fathers. Brought up in the Cappadocian town of Nazianzus
(present-day Bekar, Turkey), where his father was bishop, Gregory was. 


BLAVATSKY , Helena Petrovna Hahn. 1831-1891. Russian-born
theosophist who was the chief founder (1875) of the Theosophical Society
in New York City; and wrote books of occult lore, such as ISIS UNVEILED
(1877) and THE SECRET DOCTRINE (1888), and The VOICE OF THE SILENCE .

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NOTES by DTB:

This articles is by a Christian Scholar, and is offered by DTB
after careful checking. Here is a valuable essay presenting thee
differences, written by a student of Theosophy, Christianity and the
Bible. The references will be found explained in detail in ISIS UNVEILED
Vol. II, and the SECRET DOCTRINE

=========================================================

It is hoped that this will be of help.

Best wishes,

Dallas

================================

-----Original Message-----
From: pepi
Sent: Monday, October 20, 2003 6:46 PM
To: 
Subject: "rules of the THEOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT"



Dallas wrote............ I believe it is one of the original rules
of the THEOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT that nothing be said antagonistic to some
other religion, sect or system of belief. I feel this is a violation,
but, I may be wrong.

________________

Dear Dallas,

What in the world do you consider ISIS UNVEILED if not an antagonistic
diatribe against Christendom??

Janaki