The Beginning Of The Jesus Story
Fast forward now for about three hundred years to the time when the number of believers in the new tale had grown so strong that it was inevitable that sooner or later a bright spark somewhere would recognise its potential for exploiting it for selfish gains. Clearly, the time for writing it down had come and it did not take long until the Roman emperor, from 306 to 337 AD, Constantine the Great, also known as Constantine I or Saint Constantine recognised that great spiritual and political capital could be made out of the new tale.
Through cleverly manipulating it and applying it to achieve his ends of increased power and possible world domination, Constantine became the first Christian emperor and a significant figure in the history of Christianity. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on his orders at the site where Jesus’ tomb in Jerusalem is supposed to have been, soon became the holiest place in Christendom. The Papal claim to temporal power is believed to have been based on the Donation of Constantine. To this day, he is venerated as a saint by Eastern Orthodox Christians, Byzantine Catholics and Anglicans.
There is no need for me to investigate the nature of Constantine’s relationship with the Christian Church here, as Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy in their book ‘The Jesus Mysteries’ have done this much better than I could ever hope to do. The two most relevant chapters of this book have already been shared with you in another part of my jottings under the heading ‘The Great Cover-Up’. If you are as yet unfamiliar with it, please follow the link here or at the end of this chapter.
The research of Freke and Gandy revealed that before a church was set up by Constantine, the early Christians were all Gnostics. The word comes from the Greek gnostikos = learned and gnosis = knowledge. The Gnostics were given this name because they knew that the hero of the then circulating tales about a holy man, who had descended from the highest levels of life to walk the Earth with humankind as its teacher, were just that: stories, no more and no less. The prophets of the sacred texts of old had announced for a very long time that a man would one day appear in our world to save and redeem humankind.
The Gnostics were highly advanced souls who knew that such tales should never be taken literally. They were aware that sacred wisdom and truth in the form of esoteric metaphors and allegories was hiding behind their surface words. They appreciated that each one of them had been given by the Highest forces of life with the greatest of love and care to assist humankind with getting a better idea of its pathway through Earth life and to explain to us in ways that could easily be grasped the various initiations each one of us eventually has to undergo.
The Angels knew that revealing such things to the mass of people would have to wait until we and our world had sufficiently absorbed the lessons of the patriarchy. They were specifically designed to show us how deep human spirits in earthly life are capable of sinking in their selfish pursuit of power, fame and glory. There is probably nothing in the whole of Creation to excel our human nature when it comes to cruelty and depravity, greed and corruption, and the gross baseness of human behaviour towards each other each one of us in the early stages of our development as earthlings displays.
To provide us with a tool for taking us down to the greatest depths of this road of pain and suffering, darkness and depravity, the Angels inspired Eusebius, Constantine’s spin doctor, to cobble together the Jesus story. Its details were culled from the sacred teachings of the religions that already were in existence, though a new name had to be invented for the new story’s hero. Taken straight from the old religions, all other elements merely had to be placed in different settings from that of the old stories but with which people were familiar and could associate with in their minds.
This enterprise followed the age-old tradition of storytelling, which decreed that a story is not worth telling unless its events are wrapped around a personality with heroic and superhuman inclinations. He has to be capable of conquering everything that comes his way, just the same as Heracles/Hercules and many other male protagonists before them, merely in a somewhat different way in keeping with the customs of the time in question. The crowning glory of such exercises is the fact that a storyteller worth his salt never allows the truth to interfere with his spinning of a good yarn. The Jesus story is probably one of the finest examples of this.
But all legendary heroes before Jesus had the same symbolic meaning and were bringing an identical message to humankind struggling on the Earth plane. The main difference between them and the hero of our new tale is that the old protagonists were known to be metaphors and allegories only. The people accepted them as such. The Greek legends that have come down the ages to us and our world have their roots in the even more ancient Egyptian mythological tales.
Gnosticism existed long before literalism appeared on the scene. It seems to me the latter had to be invented, as the Gnostics already experienced God as being an integral part of themselves. They knew that the Divine was not something that could only be found in temples and churches and their sacred writings. With the help of spreading such beliefs, the priesthoods slowly but surely turned their scriptures into perfect instruments for subjecting and exploiting people for selfish personal gains, for satisfying their insatiable human hunger for power and empire building. Greed and corruption, murder and intrigue were the order of the day among those grappling for top positions in the hierarchy’s ranks, with their lust for power and conquest of souls and – more to the point – people’s possessions. The sad catalogue of human suffering this caused blossomed and bloomed and was given free reign under the protective cloak of what in those days went under the name of religion.
In order to make all this possible, the latest arrival on humankind’s heroic scene had to be different. Basically, it was all very simple. Jesus was declared to be a historical figure and the events he was involved in were presented as historical facts. This turned the new tale into a just the right tool for the endless warmongering of the coming centuries and millennia, forever attempting to systematically destroy or at least suppress the religions that had existed a long time before Christianity appeared on the scene.
If any of the followers of the other belief systems were unwilling to agree with and join the new religion and accept its way of being presented as the truth and nothing but the most holy truth, they were removed from the scene in whatever manner was considered to be necessary, if need be just wiped out. Literalism provided the churches with an ideal instrument for doing just that. The followers of other religions, who were equally fanatic and misguided, down the ages have been doing nothing more than following the example of Christianity.
Recommended Reading:
• ‘The Great Cover-Up’
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The above is a chapter from ‘Myths & Legends For The Aquarian Age’.
If it has whetted your appetite to read more, please follow the link below:
‘Myths & Legends For The Aquarian Age’
