What's probably pretty safe: The Gospel of Thomas and scrolls from Nag Hammadi and Qumran. These are two stores of early writings from the sect that Jesus most likely was a part of, though not in a way much in accordance with the traditional story. They were hidden to avoid them being destroyed by the early Roman Church. Enough of these scriptures have escaped suppression to show Jesus in a much more believable and spiritually meaningful light than the Roman gospels allow.

What's probably not: The trappings of Egyptian/Greek/Roman state supported blood sacrifice religion. For example, Dionysus turned water into wine, Mithras was resurrected after 3 days in a cave and they both had virgin births.

The Gospel of John, written no sooner than 300 AD quite transparently lays the Roman God-man story down, attacks the "Doubting" Thomasites. and establishes Peter as Jesus' successor. In these ways, the claim of Rome/Constantinople's exclusive representation of Jesus was given a "sound" theological basis. Doesn't have anything to do with the teachings of Jesus though.

The name "Christ", from the Greek "Kristos" has no historical connection with Jesus at all. It most likely comes from the Indian Kristos, a name for Lord Krishna. It seems now that there was much more cross pollination of ideas, religious stories and so on than previously supposed. For example, Alexander The Great of Macedonia sent Indian Brahmin scholars back home to Aristotle and friends.

The traditional Miracle stories: Most of these were attributed to Gautama Buddha, 500 years before Jesus. One in particular stands out as very hard to accept in a Judaic context of a historical Jesus. This is the tale of Lazarus' resurrection. It wouldn't, theologically speaking, have been a problem for the Buddha to have done this, and he is reported to have done so. In Jesus' context though, necromancy, being a specialisation of Egyptian Magic was not at all favourably regarded. It was about the most obviously evil thing one could do. You'd get stoned for it, and not in a nice way. Ask a Rabbi. more…

Discerning Jesus' message, and why it's difficult, why there's hope.

The Master from Galilee imparted Truth to his disciples, and all the rewriting, politically biased misinterpretation and outright fabrication that his followers have indulged in ever since has not been able to disturb that fact.

Truth - the kind of transcendent truth that Jesus taught can be overlaid with lies and distorted beyond recognition. Doesn't matter. It's still there, unkillable.

In my view, the real miracle that Jesus performed was the planting of a seed that is now bearing fruit. An exquisite Trojan Horse strategy. It's quite a story. If you read on, it'll look dark and bleak for a while - but, by the end of it, there will be light. Bear with me…

300 years after Jesus taught, he became a Demigod in the Roman State Religion. (OK, this was in Byzantium, not actually Rome, but it was the continuation of the Roman Empire.) The Emperor Constantine organised a vote, after which he got them to vote on his (Constantine's) Divinity. He then said "Jesus was the Christ who failed. I am the Christ that succeeds".

The"new" (The Egyptian Church of Serapis seem to have had a very similar teaching, and there was apparently a kindred relationship between them and the early Egyptian Christians. Perhaps this was the Egyptian Mystery School of Jesus, and St. Paul) religion was wildly disorganised. Groups with scriptures and teachings passed them on through many branchings of the original disciples' schools and churches. A chaotic situation, not very amenable to Roman control.

The trouble for Constantine was that Egypt was more or less the centre of whatever passed for authority over the Christians many cults, factions, sects and splinter groups. Constantine wanted that authority, wanted Jesus' followers absorbed into the Roman Machine, which they (early Christians) described as "Babylon". In their version, Babylon was the empire started by Nimrod, Son of Lucifer. This wasn't an easy time for sincere Christians – their political fortunes were picking up, martyrdom was down, life was looking good – but here were The Master's Teachings being edited and twisted to suit Babylon! Oy Vey!

Constantine convened a conference, invited the mainstream Roman-Establishment supporting Priesthood of Kristos and Mithras and had them vote on the Divinity of The Christ. Jesus, as we now know, made the grade with his earthly adjudicators and was elected to divinity. Constantine then called for a vote on his (Constantine's) divinity - and, wow, he made it too. Accepting his new (Divine) status, Constantine said "Jesus was The Christ that failed. I am The Christ which succeeds".

St Peter was given the role of Jesus successor (You are Peter, the rock on which I will build my Church) and it was claimed he'd died in Roman territory. By this exquisite theological argument, the Roman branch of Christianity was declared the leader of anyone claiming any version of Christianity, including the Egyptian schools.

The "converted" priests went about converting Christianity into something they could live with. They inserted Jesus into their Mithraism and Dionysian mythologies, got as close to their much beloved blood sacrifice rituals as their following could stomach and, above all, they established The Priesthood as a bureaucratic layer between common folk and all aspects of the Divine. Told you it was going to get a bit dark - and we're not even at the start of the "Dark Ages" yet.

The age of what the Church calls Pious Forgery was born, when the pieces of the original Cross proved that it was made of 42 types of wood,was a mile high, a kilometre across. Emperor Constantine's wife brought back two heads of John the Baptist from the Holy Land, and the town of Nazareth (Jesus was called a Nazarene - a reference to political affiliation. There was no "Nazareth Town") was named.

Constantine didn't take baptism in his new religion until near his death.

Meanwhile, just around the corner on another part of the planet…

Mary Magdalene and Joseph of Aramithea had escaped Palestine ahead of the crushing/civilising Roman actions there in AD 70.

Their landing point on the French coast is still remembered, and the journey their teaching lineage went into Eastern Europe where it flourished.

When the New Roman missionaries were converting Europe, gaining territorial influence, they met this brother Christianity, the Gnostics. The Roman response was to create an Order of The Church to take the Gnostics on in debate, out of which exercise The Gospel of Thomas was declared a heresy. The Gospel of John was written with it's anti-doubting-Thomas story. The "doubting" Gnostics and Thomasites doubted. They doubted much of the Roman version - an early Christian writing exists in which the writer strongly refutes the slander that his Master was a criminal, crucified on a cross. The Gospel of Thomas doesn't attribute the traditional Roman God stuff to Jesus, and doesn't mention crucifixion or the traditional miracles. It is a collection of the Master Jesus' sayings, which generally read better than the versions that went into the Bible.

The Gnostic's "missionaries" were gorgeous young men, trained and sent into the world by the Gnostic Priestesses as entertainers. The Troubadours.

These fellows went out into the hundreds of little kingdoms, singing of love, the Kingdom of Heaven (their community) and the rejection of the world (worldliness) and Courtly Love (Love that only can exist outside of marriage - free of the taint of ownership). When a king caught the vibe, and figured his kingdom could do with some of this stuff, a Priestess would come, and the king would get an education which would lead him to take an attitude of equality with other gnostic-influenced kingdoms. He'd join the Round Table. (I know some modern 'tablers, they don't seem to do the Gnostic thing though. More Dionysian).This is the historical origin of the Arthurian Legend which was extensively re-written as disinformation to kill the original, preserved in oral tradition. It went the whole way. Lancelot is now a Knight, a killer, not an emissary of Love. Guenivere is an unfaithful wife, Not a Priestess, and Arthur is clearly the Head of the Round Table, not an equal member.

The Romans had an answer to these heretical irritants who were annoyingly independent of thought and were into love, bliss and celebration, not blood sacrifice and social control.

Spiritual genocide ensued.

That's not overstating it. The most bloody crusade ever was against Christians. There's a story of one city, 50 000 inhabitants refusing to hand over four known Gnostics to the Roman Christian authorities. Siege was laid, and when it looked like it could take a while, the Pope sent word: Kill them all, God will know his own. 50 000 killed to be sure of getting four! Intense. The next while saw the extermination of the Gnostic Priestesses, killing a total of 9 million women. Mary's teaching lineage had been mainly - logically - carried by women. The Gospel of Thomas does make it clear that Mary was Jesus' most favoured disciple, that her line of teaching would likely be the deepest and most authentic.

It took 300 years to get the cover-up story in shape. It wasn't a "brother Christianity" that had been murdered, it was an evil old pre-civilization thing, led by witches and which involved worshiping Satan, hating Jesus, and saying Christian prayers backwards. Strange that an "old religion" was waiting for the missionaries, and already knew their prayers - and backwards at that! OK, it wasn't a great cover story, but, for a long time, it worked.

The Roman Church prospered, whacked the rival Islamic civilization back into the stone age with their Crusades, and things looked settled. Until Martin Luther.

The Protestants were Christians who were attracted to what the Romans hadn't destroyed completely - the transcendent message of Jesus, and who were repelled by the "Idolatrous" imagery, and the inappropriate position of priests, between God and Man. The central trip of the Roman thing - that God is only to be reached through His Official Representatives was questioned.

The celebration of Love, Joy, Bliss that characterised the Gnostics was missing, the Protestant's were a dry lot. Very serious. Very seriously pissed off a lot of the time. Some of their offshoots did (re)discover ecstatic forms of meditation and prayer, some, like the Amish, respected what they could discern of their Lord's views, and resisted aspects of the surrounding culture. The problem the Protestants had was they didn't have access to the authentic scriptures. The Bible was put together - another lament of political editing - but most gospels (30ish according to some estimates, 80ish by others) were unavailable. They'd all been destroyed, or put away safe from heretics.

All?

Well… one or two religious communities had hidden their sacred texts. This little gnostic time bomb went off in the 1940's when scrolls were found at Nag Hammadi and later at Qumran. It has taken a long time for translations and copies of some of the scrolls to come to light, the intriguing story of how these archaeological finds were controlled makes great reading. The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh (Corgi) tells it well.

And nowadays, if you look around the web, or around Stellenbosch, there's a new strain of Christian emerging. Typically, they don't want to be referred to as "Christian", regarding themselves as students and disciples of Jesus, and following, as far as they can discern them, the precepts of their Master. Enough of the Truth has survived within the ugly framework of the RCC to work like a virus, providing hints to seekers and leaving clues for those with some understanding to follow.

There's even a movement on the web, inciting Roman Catholics and members of other churches to apostasy. Not as an anti-Christian thing, but because they say prophecy indicates that the true believers will leave the Church in the end days because it will have become totally corrupt.

The Truth, though buried in Roman ritual and bureaucracy, has made a significant impact on the culture that spread it. The spirit of Jesus' teachings are more tolerated in the world, Not that there are more Christians, more that the cultural tolerance for Truth has improved. J Krishnamurti, Deepak Chopra, Gary Zukov, Osho, Alan Watts, Thomas Merton, John Lennon, Bob Marley, Ram Das, Leslie Temple-Thurston, and many other teachers with essentially the same message as Jesus are listened to in the Culture. The culture still doesn't tolerate communities which follow these teachers' hints though. Whenever one shows signs of working well and growing, there's generally a news report about a "suicide cult" who allegedly took poison and then died from 9 rounds each of hard military ammunition while waiting to be picked up by aliens. Strange how the media gets these stories out of no survivors. Strange too that a recent and impeccable martyr in the finest Christian tradition, David Koresh, hasn't been honoured as such.

The Roman way is still very much alive, with it's secret societies bonding an elite with a warped version of the original Egyptian King Making Ceremony, in which they die to the world of beasts (us) and are born to the world of men (them). Jesus's teachings being included in the Roman Way made Caliguas and Neros less generally acceptable. We've since had softer, gentler watered down versions these days, like Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, George Bush OK, he's still a junior with potential. Probably waiting for another 911. Civilised men you could enjoy a good meal and a bottle of wine with. That wasn't always a healthy option with the pre-christian fellows. There aren't regular crucifixions on the Whit House lawn.

Other practices and failings of the Church are revealed by the light of Jesus' teachings. Blatant disregard of conscience, obvious corruption and deceit is less tolerated by many people. That attitude is a growing thing. Relatively few people still think that the RCC is the place to be if you love truth and want to experience the Divine. They may love Jesus, but they know that's not where to find him. And the usual Priestly poison, that line in John: "No man cometh … but by me" which has kept many Christians from exploring, is giving way to Jesus statement that he would "send you many teachers".

|A revitalised and perhaps truer picture of Jesus is now emerging in the world. It's more in tune with the ethic expressed in The Sermon on The Mount and the Jesus that forgave the adulterous woman, beat up money changers, had Mary rub his feet, respecting others' ways of worship, and told us he'd send many teachers. Quite an improvement on Leo X (The Medici Pope) with his famous words: "Oh how we have profited from this fable of the Christ!"

It seems that the Gnostics' descendants, if there really are any left, the carriers of Mary's teaching lineage are now preparing to make some of their records and relics public. There have recently been a few books written with the cooperation of high-level masons, perhaps even members of the Priory of Sion. These books, one on the NYT best sellers' list, (The Da Vinci Code) introduce Christians to their history, and seem to be preparing the world for future revelations. With the RCC in increasing troubles in the media with pedophilic priests, a history of Papal assassinations and the rapid growth of pain-cult Opus Dei, it's surely about time! A very visible mission is on to discredit Dan Brown's book, but the basic, uncontroversial history of Mary Magdalene's position as closest disciple, her demonisation by the Church and the destruction of her teaching lineage is reaching Christian ears.

To the RCC's credit, however, I saw a news item a while back, an interview with a theologian of theirs involved in the current re-write of the New Testament. A comment of his stood out for me: "The Bible is and always has been an ongoing work. Only fundamentalists believe the Bible was delivered, complete, in a fax from God."

I wonder if that fellow's doing allright - fundamentalist of fundamentalists Cardinal Ratzinger just got the RCC's top job as Pope Benedict XVI. This fellow used to head the theological AND doctrinal commissions of the RCC, effectively, he was their High Inquisitor. His most outstanding service to The Church to date was his heading the suppression of early christian writings discovered near the Dead Sea. This is documented in Michael Baigent's book, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception.

The transcendent message of Jesus may still be resurrected - maybe it will be the true "second coming". Perhaps Jesus' followers will one day follow his directives by living communally, adhering to Truth, practicing Sacred Sexuality and respecting the Divine Feminine. Christians may one day take steps to redeem their currently well deserved and undisputable reputation of being the worst murder-raper-killers of all time. Just will they now please stop Christian Fundamentalist George's Crusade in Sumeria/Mesopotamia/Iraq!

Christians have started to notice this stuff. They aren't being scared off the pursuit of truth by their priest's views of heresy and damnation. I've met devotees of Jesus. I have to call them that because they don't like being called "Christian". They don't believe sex is evil outside of the Church's constraints, though they feel the constraint of their upbringing. They think they should probably try to live communally, share the "worldly" stuff they have, though they admit it's a bitch, facing the addiction to having "stuff" that's your "own". They are sincere, and not too serious. I love you guys, the world could do with more of your flavour of Christian. Sorry.