Mark Booth - The Secret History of the World

Four hundred years later the initiations of Jesus Christ introduced a new element, opening up dizzying new dimensions in love.

IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THE MOMENTOUS events described in the Gospels better, we must now look at Jesus’s involvement with the Mystery schools.

We are trespassing on closely guarded academic territory here. Controversial findings now widely accepted by biblical scholars, but which have not yet filtered down to the wider congregation, show that there are some early Christian texts, rediscovered in Palestine in the 1950s, which contain versions of sayings of Jesus that are likely to be closer to the originals than the versions contained in the four Gospels.

And some of these texts contain sayings which don’t appear in the Gospels at all.

And the fact that texts like the Gospel of St Thomas contain ‘truer’ versions of the biblical sayings is a reason for believing that the entirely non-biblical sayings these texts contain may be authentic.

This is important for our history, because some of them relate to the secret teachings.

The Gospels hint that Jesus gives favoured followers teachings not for public dissemination. When Jesus warns against casting ‘pearls before swine’ he seems to be talking of holding some sacred truths back from the multitude. More explicitly, Mark 4.11 has Jesus say: ‘The secret of the kingdom of God is given to you, but to those who are outside everything comes in parables.’

A more striking and revealing account of Jesus’s involvement in secret teaching is to be found in a letter written in the second century by Clement, Bishop of Alexandria. This text was discovered in 1959 in the stacks of the library of the Mar Saba Monastery near Jerusalem by Dr Morton Smith, Professor of Ancient History at Columbia University:

… Mark, then, during Peter’s stay in Rome, wrote an account of the Lord’s doings, not however declaring all of them, nor yet hinting at the secret ones, but selecting those he thought most useful for increasing the faith of those who were being instructed. But when Peter died as a martyr, Mark came over to Alexandria, bringing his own notes and those of Peter, from which he transferred to his former book the things suitable to whatever makes for progress towards knowledge, and in this way he composed a more spiritual gospel for use of those who were being perfected… and dying he left his composition to the church in Alexandria, where it is still carefully guarded.

The Bishop of Alexandria then quotes from this ‘more spiritual’ version of Mark’s Gospel:

And they came to Bethanay, and a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and said to him: ‘Son of David, have mercy on me.’ But the disciples rebuked her.

And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightaway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and, seizing his hand, raised him.

But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him.

And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth came to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. And then, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan…

To modern sensibility this story — which appears to be a more detailed version of the story of the raising of Lazarus in John’s Gospel — might seem to describe a homosexual liaison, but, as we shall see as we come to examine the nature of initiation ceremonies more clearly, it is certainly a Mystery school initiation that Mark alludes to here.

The raising of Lazarus from the dead has traditionally been seen as an encoded account of initiation. The clues are there. Lazarus ‘dies’ for thee days and when Jesus Christ raises him, he uses the phrase ‘Lazarus, come forth’ that the hierophants had used in the Great Pyramid when, after three days, they stretched forth a hand to raise the candidate from the open tomb in the King’s Chamber.

What was the initiation of Lazarus like from Lazarus’s point of view? What was the alternative form of consciousness it conferred? Readers may be surprised to learn that we know the answer to these questions. Because in the secret history the man called Lazarus in the Gospel of John later wrote the Revelation of St John the Divine. According to the secret doctrine, the opening of the seven seals and the great visionary events that follow that are described in Revelation, refer to the revivifying of the seven chakras.

Unpalatable though some may find it, the fact of the matter is that the teachings of Jesus Christ are steeped in the ancient and secret philosophy, and this is equally true of his sayings recorded in the Bible as it is of the newly discovered sayings.

I have led up to this point gently. Those of us brought up as Christians may find it easier to recognize these things in alien cultures, partly, no doubt, because of the greater focus that distance brings, but also because we are less acutely aware of treading on sacred ground. Christianity’s most sacred texts are deeply occult:

The meek shall inherit the earth

Faith moves mountains

Ask and it shall be given.

There is deliberate obfuscation by Church leaders when it comes to these and other key tenets of the Christian faith. Modern liberal Christianity has tried to accommodate science by playing down its occult dimensions, but the sayings from the Sermon on the Mount listed above are descriptions of how the supernatural operates in the universe. Not only are they paradoxical and mysterious, not only are they irrational, not only do they describe what is highly unlikely according to the laws of probability, they describe the universe behaving in a way which would be completely impossible if science described everything there is.

For the meek will certainly not inherit the earth and prayers will not be answered by the forces that science describes. Neither virtue nor faith will be rewarded — unless some supernatural agency makes them so.

The New Testament is full of occult and esoteric teaching, some of it explicitly stated. The problem is that we have been educated to be blind to it. But the text quite clearly says that John the Baptist is Elijah come again — that is, reincarnated. There is magic too. The late Hugh Schonfield, Morton Smith and other academic experts have shown that Jesus’s miracles, particularly in the form of words he uses, are based on pre-existing magical papyri in Greek, Egyptian and Aramaic. When in John’s Gospel Jesus Christ is described as using spittle to make a paste to apply to the eyes of a blind man, this is not a purely godly action, in the sense of an unmediated influx of spirit, but a manipulation of matter in order to influence or control spirit.

Again, it is no denigration of Jesus Christ to point this out. One must not view these things anachronistically. In terms of the philosophy and theology of the day, this sort of divine magic — or thaumaturgy — was not only respectable, it was the highest activity to which a human being could aspire.