The rise of modern Gnosticism, part 2

In part 1, I may have given the impression that all or most individual Jesuits were Gnostics in their belief. That is certainly not true, for if there is a connection between the Gnostic Templars and the Jesuit Order, this would have been kept secret from all but a very few at the top of the Order. Like most secret organizations, there are many good people caught in a bad system, induced by the hope of learning the “final secret.”

Such is the case with Freemasonry and virtually all of the mystery religions in the past. They used men’s curiosity and desire for knowledge and truth to bind them with increasingly terrible oaths and thus enslave them to the organization.

The Jesuit Order was officially the enemy of Freemasonry, and certainly the main body of Jesuits believed this to be so and acted accordingly. However, I believe that those at the top of the Order worked with rabid devotion to gain influence and later to control the Church so that they might reverse this opposition in the future. When the time was ripe, the loyalty of the Jesuits could be redirected toward the Jesuit General, for they were already programmed to obey him.

The Jesuit Order itself, as founded by Loyola, was based on absolute blind obedience to the pope, which, in practice, was normally expressed as blind obedience to the Jesuit General, the head of the Order, who was presumably in subjection to the pope. The late Malachi Martin, himself a former Jesuit, wrote in his book, The Jesuits, page 162,

“And so was born what can be rightly called Jesuitism, the complete subjugation of all a man is, thinks, feels, and does to a practical ideal achievable in the world around him, in absolute obedience and submission to the mind and decisions of the Roman Pope, the Vicar of Christ.”

He explains this further on page 197,

“There is yet one more, the highest grade of obedience. You do not merely do what you are told without showing any overt opposition. Nor do you merely choose to will as your Superior wills, to do willingly what he commands. Now you agree mentally with your superior; you have obedience of the intellect. Unconditionally, you think like your Superior. You submit your judgment to that of your Superior ‘so far as only the surrendered will can say the intellect.’ This highest form is what Ignatius calls ‘blind obedience… the voluntary renunciation of private judgment’.”

Such “blind obedience” to men is perhaps the clearest manifestation of the problem of King Saul, where men desired to be ruled by men, rather than by God Himself (1 Samuel 8:7, 8). From the perspective of the people themselves, they believed that they were serving God through their king. The Israelites’ relationship to Saul was based on the same principle as the Jesuits’ relationship to the Pope and the Jesuit General.

The discipline of the Jesuits demanded misplaced loyalty, and they excelled in this more than any other Church Order. Even so, when the pope disbanded the Jesuit Order in 1773, many were angered by the pope’s decision. Adam Weishaupt, a professor of canon law, formed the Illuminati in 1776, infiltrated Freemasonry, and used the Freemasons to overthrow the Church’s grip on France in the French Revolution (1789-1794).

Obviously, these Jesuits (ex-Jesuits after 1773) failed to submit their intellect to the pope. In fact, they then showed their true colors, for their Luciferianism then came to the surface. When Weishaupt died in 1830, his position as head of the Illuminati was passed to Adriano Lemmi, whose protégé was Albert Pike, the avowed Luciferian Scottish Rite Freemason.

After the Illuminati was exposed in 1787, it was declared illegal, and Weishaupt was forced to renounce his own organization, at least in public. According to The Catholic Encyclopedia Online,

"After 1787 he renounced all active connexion with secret societies, and again drew near to the Church, displaying remarkable zeal in the building of the Catholic church at Gotha. he died on 18 November, 1830, "reconciled with the Catholic Church, which, as a youthful professor, he had doomed to death and destruction"--as the chronicle of the Catholic parish in Gotha relates."

https://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/view.php?id=6046

So Weishaupt once again became a good Catholic until his death in 1830. He was an expert in the art of infiltration and deception, so I have no doubt that there is much more to the story than this. The Jesuit Order was restored in 1814 and continues to this day.

Modern Gnostic Belief about the New Testament Story

First-century Gnosticism was quite different from modern Gnosticism. I have little interest in those differences. Of greater significance is that both have been mystery religions, i.e., secret societies designed to subvert Christianity and, in fact, claim to be the true version of Christianity. To bolster this claim, the modern Gnostics had to allegorize the gospels and to treat them as if the main characters were really other people. They base this on the idea that the apostles were in danger of being executed by the Romans, and hence, they had to write encoded gospels.

In treating the gospels as encoded stories, the modern Gnostics are able to interpret them in any way they wish. No longer being historical accounts of Jesus and the early Church, the Gnostics could treat them as allegorical accounts or even as deliberate deceptions designed to fool the Romans (and the rest of us!).

One of the main spokesmen for the modern Gnostics is Laurence Gardner. In his book, Bloodline of the Holy Grail, the Hidden Lineage of Jesus Revealed, he begins chapter three with the statement,

“The Gospels of the New Testament are written in a manner not common to other forms of literature. Their method of construction was no accident, however, for they had a common specific purpose and were not intended to relate history” (p. 32).

Apart from history, the New Testament would be comparable to Greek mythology, relating stories of the gods and goddesses which few believed literally but which were revered for their philosophical and psychological lessons. But Jesus’ death on the cross, followed by His resurrection and ascension are rooted in history—actual fact—and without those events actually taking place, there would be no salvation.

Salvation is not based upon the will of man, John 1:13 tells us, yet an allegorical view would base salvation on a belief in an allegory that supposedly imparts gnosis, “knowledge,” which causes men to become better informed and better “Christians.” In other words, salvation, they say, is based on his own beliefs and how he feels about himself, rather than on the historicity of Christ and His work and ministry. Paul certainly did not believe that, for he wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:1-4,

¹ Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, in which also you stand, ² by which also you are saved, if you hold fast to the word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. ³ For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, ⁴ and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.

Paul goes on to tell us that Christ appeared to many after His physical resurrection, lastly to Paul himself on the Damascus road. This is treated as historical fact, not as allegorical stories from which we derive spiritual (but historically false) knowledge. The New Testament was not written from a Greek allegorical viewpoint but from a Hebrew mindset that was rooted in the law and in history. In this case, the laws of sacrifice in the Old Testament were fulfilled by Christ’s own death on the cross as the final, perfect Sacrifice for sin.

Furthermore, Jesus’ physical descent from King David was important on account of the promise given to David, as well as the previous promise given to his tribe (Judah).

Who Were James and John?

Laurence Gardner says in pages 48, 49 of his book, Bloodline of the Holy Grail,

“Jesus referred to James and John (the sons of Zebedee) by the descriptive Greek name of Boanerges: the ‘Sons of Thunder’ (Mark 3:17). This is a positive example of cryptic information aimed at initiates. ‘Thunder’ and “Lightning’ were the titles of two high-ranking ministers of the Sanctuary. The symbolic titles derived from references to the phenomena at Mount Sinai, described in Exodus 19:16—when thunder and lightning enveloped the mountain, and Moses went up from the camp to meet with God…

“The man known to Jesus as ‘Thunder’ was Jonathan Annas, the son of Ananus, the Sadducee High Priest from AD 6 to 15. Jonathan (which means ‘Jehovah gave’) was alternately called Nathanael (‘Gift of God’), being essentially the same name. His counterpart and political rival, known as ‘Lightning,’ was Simon Magus (also called Zebedee/Zebediah—Jehovah hath given), influential head of the Samaritan Magi. He is better known in the Gospels as Simon the Canaanite or Simon Zelotes….”

So we are supposed to believe that the disciples were actually other historical figures—one a “Sadducee High Priest from AD 6 to 15, and the other being Simon Magus himself, going under the name of Jesus’ disciple, Simon Zelotes.

First of all, this view claims that true Christianity predated the ministry of Jesus Himself and that Simon Magus was actually a true disciple of Jesus. No matter, of course, that many people were called by the same name. Simon was a very common name, and there is no reason to say that Simon Zelotes was Simon Magus and that he was a high-ranking member of the temple hierarchy. Christianity was opposed (for different reasons) by both Pharisees and Sadducees in the temple, and this conflict did not arise until Jesus began His ministry.

Who was Judas Iscariot?

Gardner also identifies Judas Iscariot as follows:

“Another well-born nationalist leader of renown was Judas, who was Chief of the Scribes. The Dead Sea Scrolls were produced under his tutelage and that of his predecessor, the fierce Judas of Galilee, founder of the Zealots. Apart from his academic scholarship, Judas was the head of East Manasseh, and a warlord of Qumran [i.e., the Essenes]. The Romans had a nickname for him: to them he was Judas Sicarius—the Assassin, the Hit-man (a sica was a deadly curved dagger. The Greek form of the nickname was Sikariotes… and its corruption to Sicariote was in due course further corrupted to ‘Iscariot.’

Nice try, Mr. Gardner. The sicarii were indeed a sect of Jewish assassins, but they had nothing to do with Judas Iscariot. Iscariot is derived from the Hebrew name, Ish-Kerioth, “a man from Kerioth-arba,” (the old name for Hebron—See Joshua 14:15). Judas had to be from Hebron, because he was the betrayer, and his role was to play the part of Ahithophel, who betrayed David at Hebron in the Absalom conspiracy (2 Samuel 15:9, 12).

Once again, if we know the history in the Old Testament account, and if we believe the prophecies in those historical accounts, we will not be fooled by the modern advocates of Gnosticism. History does repeat itself and is therefore prophetic, but it is not based on mythology, nor is it simply allegorical. At best, one might say that the biblical stories are often historical allegories, as Paul affirms in Galatians 4:22-24. Yet Paul’s definition of allegory does not cut the story loose from actual history.