The Early Christian Censors
The twentieth century’s most important discoveries have been the ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ found at Qumran and the ‘Gnostic Gospels’ discovered at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1947.
Finds are categorized under three headings: known and logged; destroyed or lost; and then - found but kept secret. The Templars hid from the general world.
The Gnostic Gospels
The term ’Gnostic’ is used today a s collective name for a range of heretical works which infected the true Church for a while in the distant past but which were outlawed as nonsense imported from other religions. It does not identify a single school of thought.
The Greek gnosis means ‘knowledge or understanding in a spiritual interpretation.’ An awareness of oneself, an appreciation of nature and the natural sciences are pathways to God for the Gnostic. Most Christian Gnostics saw Jesus Christ as the man who illuminated that pathway in the same way as Guatama Buddha and Muhammad are viewed.
Gnostic Gospels have been around as long as the New Testament. Unearthed in December 1947 near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, these documents date from AD 350-400. Copies of works three hundred years older were found by an Arab boy called Muhammad Ali al-Samman and his brothers in a sealed red earthenware jar three feet tall. The brothers found thirteen papyrus books bound in leather when they smashed the jars. They were going to use it as material for lighting the family oven. Muhammad Ali asked a local priest to hide the books. The priest saw possible worth and sent some to Cairo to be valued. They passed through hands until a section ended up in the hands of Professor Quispel of the Jung Foundation in Zurich.
Quipel found unknown texts buried nearly 1,600 years ago in a period which was critical in the formation of the Roman Catholic Church. The rediscovered works were immediately suppressed by the Ecclesiastical Christians as heretical. The survival of the organizational and theological structure of the Roman Catholic Church has always been dependent on the suppression of the ideas contained within these books.
The Gnostic Resurrection
Human existence is described as spiritual death whereas the resurrection as the moment of enlightenment, revealing what truly exists. (1) Whoever grasps this idea becomes resurrected from the dead immediately. The Gospel of Phillip ridicules ignorant Christians who take the resurrection literally:
‘Those who say they will die first and then rise are in error, they must receive the resurrection while they live.’
The authority of the Roman Catholic Church stems from the experiences of Jesus’s resurrection by the twelve favored apostles, an experience which was closed to all newcomers following his ascent into Heaven. This closed, unchallengeable experience had enormous implications for the political structure of the early Church.
It restricted the leadership to a small circle of persons who held a position of incontestable authority and conferred on this group the right to ordain future leaders as their successors. This resulted in the view of religious authority which has survived to this day: the apostles’ only legitimate heirs are priests and bishops. Even today the Pope derives his authority from Peter, first of the apostles, since he was first witness of the resurrection. It was very much in the interests of the rulers of the early Church to accept the resurrection as a literal truth. None of a later generation could have access to Christ. Every believer must look to the Church at Rome for authority.
The Gnostic Church called this literal view of the resurrection 'the faith of fools’, claiming those who announced that their dead master had come physically back to life confused a spiritual truth with an actual event. The Gnostic quoted the secret tradition of Jesus:
‘To you it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.’
The Gnostics recognized that their theory of secret knowledge, to be gained by their own efforts, also had political implications. It suggests that whoever ‘sees the Lord’ through inner vision can claim that his or her own authority equals or surpasses that of the apostles and their successors.
Irenaeus, the father of Catholic theology saw the dangers to the authority of the Church:
‘They consider themselves mature so that no one can be compared with them in the greatness of their gnosis. They imagine that they discovered more and are themselves wiser and more intelligent than the apostles.’
Those who consider themselves wiser than the apostles also consider themselves wiser than priests. Gnostic teachers claimed access to their own secret sources. In the Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter the orthodox Church’s claim to religious authority is undermined by an account of the risen Christ explaining to Peter that:
‘Those who name themselves bishop and deacon and act as if they had received their authority from God are in reality waterless canals. The boast that the mystery of truth belongs to them alone. They have set up an imitation church in place of the true Christian brotherhood.’
The orthodox teaching on the resurrection legitimized a hierarchy of persons through whose authority all others must approach God. Gnostic teaching was subversive of this order, it claimed to offer to every initiate a means of direct access to God of which the priests and bishops themselves might be ignorant.’ (2)
Christians labeled Gnostics were denounced for political reasons as heretics.
In the Gospel of Thomas a sentence corresponds directly with the basis of the Mark Mason’s Ritual: ‘Jesus said, “Show me the stone which the builders have rejected. That one is the cornerstone.’
Similar passages occur in the New Testament:
Matthew 21:4 ‘The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner.’
Mark 12:10 ‘The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner.’
Luke 20:17 ‘ the stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner.’
A connection between Freemasonry and Gnosticism.
In The Acts of Thomas the story of that apostle building a fine palace in Heaven by means of good works is the epitome of the address in the north-east corner in the Masonic First Degree ritual.
CONCLUSION
The Templars may have found a cache of writings which changed their world-view. The concept of ‘gnosis’ (knowledge) is the opposite of the Church’s concept of ‘faith’.
The selective doctrine of the early Church was based on political expediency as much as religious opinion.
The literal belief in the resurrection of Jesus’s body was a vital factor in the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. This closed and unchallengeable experience was the source of the power of the Bishop of Roman; the political structure of the early Church, and conferred incontestable authority over those who had faith.
Gnostic writings called this literal view of the resurrection ’the faith of fools.’ The Gnostics were denounced for political reasons as heretics. Their interest in gaining knowledge undermined the authority of the bishops of the orthodox Church.
The Gnostic Gospels have strong ancient echoes of Masonic ritual.
(1) Elaine Pagels: The Gnostic Gospels
(2) Elaine Pagels: The Gnostic Gospels
