01. EARLY CHRISTIAN DIVISION

The well in the Original Essene Community Complex

In looking for a clear esoteric base of an Hermetic Christianity, we must first view the years following the death of Jesus the Nazarene.

During the first six decades of the first century after the possible birth of Jesus (Yeshua), Judaism was composed of many competing factions: Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, Zealots, and other leaders which included John the Baptist and Jesus. It must be made clear that they were all Jewish and followed the normal Jewish practices, such as observing dietary restrictions, observing the sabbath, and worship at the temple.

The teachings of Jesus were in and of themselves not radical and matched closely those of Beit Hillel, a great Jewish rabbi who lived in the second half of the 1st century before the birth of Jesus. In fact, many of the sayings of Jesus are almost directly taken from Hillel.

Some time in the early thirties, Jesus was executed for aggravated assault on merchants in the temple, considered as treason or revolution against Rome, and his disciples returned to their homes in Galilee immediately following his death.

There was great diversity within the Jesus-dominated goups during the first few decades after his execution. Some of those that knew Jesus and others who were inspired by his interpretation of the Jewish teachings settled in Jerusalem, while others spread abroad, teaching, even in Jerusalem, very different gospels and even different views of who Jesus was, his mission and his deeds.   

We have then at the end of  of the first century CE the three large groups within the Christian movement:

1. The Jewish Gnostics

The Gnostics claimed a secret knowledge about God, humanity, and the rest of the universe. They had their own interpretations of the Bible and theories about the world and the rest of the universe and a tolerance of all religious beliefs.

But there was a complete divorce from the Old Testament Jehovah, whom they considered an inferior God figure (the Demiurge) who was fundamentally jealous, lacking in compassion, generating unnecessary genocide.

Many today viewing the Torah or the Old Testament can see clearly why they may have taken that point of view and divorced Christianity completely from Judaism.

2. The Jewish Christian movement

This movement consisted of the disciples of Jesus and other followers who fled to Galilee after Jesus' execution. They regrouped in Jerusalem under the leadership of James, one of Jesus' brothers. Many were killed, enslaved, or scattered during the Roman attack on Jerusalem in 70 CE.

The Jewish Christians under James included many members who had had a close relationship with Jesus. They believed that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. They viewed Jesus as a great prophet and rabbi, but not as a deity.

The group viewed themselves as a reform movement within Judaism. They organized a separate synagogue, worshiped and brought animals for ritual sacrifice at the Jerusalem Temple. They observed the Jewish holy days, practiced circumcision of their male children, strictly followed Kosher dietary laws, and practiced the teachings of Jesus as they interpreted them to be.

3. The Pauline Christians

In the New Testament there are many references to conflicts between the Jewish Christians and the followers of Paul (originally Saul), who was a Jew from Tarsus. It was he who originally persecuted the Jewish Christians on behalf of the priests at the Jerusalem Temple.

He experienced a powerful religious conversion, after which he disappeared for three years, and reappeared having changed his name to Paul, becoming an active Christian missionary until his execution by the Romans in the mid-60's. 

He created a new Christianity that had little relation to the early Christian roots, for it contained elements from various forms of Paganism, an accusation which may be denied, but nevertheless he invented and included in the new Christianity the concept of Jesus as "The Word", as a god-man -- the savior of humanity, who was executed, resurrected and ascended into heaven.

We can conclude that these additions may have been expedient means in order to generate success of his ideas, for they entered into competition within the Roman Empire with the current Pagan and Mystery religions.

Many of the events included in his New testament appear to have been copied from sources from as far away as Egypt and India.

He abandoned most of the laws of Moses and eliminated Jewish behavioral rules that Jesus and his disciples had followed during his ministry. He took the rather authoritarian and perhaps arrogant stance that God had unilaterally abrogated his covenants with the Jews and transferred them to his own Christian groups. 

Despite this, his groups did not have a central authority. The faithful met in homes and there were no buildings dedicated to the religion and no standards to be followed. That was all to come much later, as was ordination and complex hierarchy. 

We can say that Paul had his own vision and his mission; nonetheless it has been developed into modern Christianity that bears little relation to his way or that of the Jewish Christian movement. In fact, the the great controversies of the third and fourth centuries about the Person of Christ and the nature of God. The Christological and Trinitarian debates do not feature the ideals of Paul and can be considered perhaps the genesis of Modern Christianity.

It is not surprising therefore to find Christianity as it stands today as Samsara-oriented and except perhaps within inner circles divorced from promulgation of an inner compassion and benevolence that does not depend upon ritual prayer and commandments.

Conclusion

We must look then directly to the earlier Gnostics and the Jewish Christian Movement in an attempt to discover a Christian Compassion that was indeed not just social convention and custom.

What we are interested in learning is, within any Christian group, whether liberating meditation takes its part and in what form and also whether compassion and benevolence are really generated through a direct deity union, a union with a Christ figure, by any other means or whether what is generated is a Cognitive imitation of the Christ figure.