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The Myth of Resurrection

Much of our current understanding of the true meaning of resurrection is shrouded in blissful ignorance or superstition. But we ought not be hard on ourselves, for superstition is what remains after the original understanding of a concept has been lost over time. And as concepts go, ‘living resurrection’ has been around far longer than we presently imagine.

Once upon a time it was regarded as a sacred ritual whose traditions were zealously guarded by adepts of the highest moral integrity. Admission into its inner practices was a privilege attained by few, and those few regarded the experience as the pinnacle of their spiritual development. Then, around two thousand years ago, the story became distorted and obscured. So, where and how did it take a wrong turn?

In the first century a new religion was brought to Rome, with a man named Yeshua ben Yosef occupying the leading role of resurrected hero. But the story did not fare well with a populace long accustomed to raising its heroes and rulers on pedestals and deifying them. Nor did it wash with the Gnostics of Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt who, up until that point, considered this man Jesus to have been a mere mortal; they equally believed he’d never been crucified much less reincarnated from a physical death. The chief proponents of such ‘heretical’ views were Bishop Marcion of Sinope, Valentinus of Alexandria, and another scholar from that same enlightened city, Basilides, who wrote twenty-four commentaries on the Gospels and claimed that the crucifixion was a fraud—that a substitute named Simon of Cyrene took Jesus’s place. Manuscripts possibly written within a century after Jesus’s time, and rediscovered near the Nile at Nag Hammadi in 1945, claim as much. One of them—Second Treatise of the Great Seth—is particularly damning because it actually quotes Jesus in the first person describing the crucifixion: “I did not die in reality but in appearance, lest I be put to shame by them. . . . For my death which they think happened, happened to them in their error and blindness, since they nailed their man unto the death. . . . It was another, their father, who drank the gall and the vinegar; it was not I . . . it was another, Simon, who bore the cross on his shoulder. It was another upon whom they placed the crown of thorns. . . . And I was laughing at their ignorance.”¹

Even as late as the seventh century the Qur‘an upheld the same argument:

And their false allegation that they slew the Messiah, Isa, the son of Maryam, the Messenger of Allah, when in fact they never killed him nor did they crucify him but they thought they did. And those who disputed his fate were themselves in a state of uncertainty as to the truth and reality of the incident; their belief was based on empty knowledge and their supposition was formed on grounds admittedly insufficient, for indeed they just did not slay him but the guilt nevertheless resided in the intention.²

Most damning of all is the debauched Pope Leo X’s admitting that the story of Jesus was a myth, in what must rank as one of history’s biggest gaffes: “All ages can testifie enough how profitable that fable of Christ hath ben to us and our companie.”³

Nevertheless a literal view of the crucifixion and resurrection was subsequently leveraged by the Roman Catholic Church, whose authority relied on the experience of Jesus’s miraculous regeneration after death by a small, closed group of apostles, and the position of incontestable authority the event supposedly bestowed upon them. Since Peter the apostle was the first male witness, and the pope came to derive his authority from Peter—based on Peter having been declared first bishop of Rome, despite a total absence of evidence⁴—naturally it was in the best interests of the church to promote a literal spin on the subject of resurrection. The position was no doubt helped by the apostle Paul’s misunderstanding of Jesus making dead people return to life, not to mention his lack of understanding of the ritual of living resurrection that was secretly performed by the Jerusalem Church. Remember, the Jerusalem Church was governed by Jesus’s brother James the Just, a man who would have been privy to the secret teachings, whereas Paul never even knew Jesus. The First Epistle to the Corinthians nearly lets the cat out of the bag when it notes that Paul was “determined to know nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified.”⁵ In other words, that Paul sought to deny the existence of earlier myths of risen god-men already established throughout the ancient world. Paul then dug himself into a deeper hole by professing that spiritual knowledge is a vanity created by the devil—hardly the position taken by a man with a true understanding of spiritual doctrine.⁶

Thus the population of Europe was brainwashed into accepting the resurrection as a literal miracle experienced solely by Yeshua ben Yosef after being nailed to a cross, physically dying, and rising three days later, contrary to the laws of nature, even contrary to Jesus’s personal views!

This turn of events did not occur overnight. For the new cult of Jesus the God to supplant the old gods, he needed to be deified and made acceptable to people of the Roman world and beyond, he had to be seen to possess similar supernatural powers. And so, like the rejuvenating gods of the Egyptians, Persians, Phoenicians, and Greeks—Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, Zeus, Osiris—Jesus too was made to cross into the Otherworld and reemerge triumphantly as a resurrected god.

Even if the political machinations behind this story are removed there still remains the fundamental misunderstanding of ‘raising the dead.’ For one thing, Gnostic cults claimed such a term was never meant to be taken literally. To ancient holy orders it was a figurative description of a ritual only revealed to initiates of the esoteric arts. And whereas Catholic dogma maintained that survival of the soul is only possible upon physical death (or following the end of the world) everyone else shared the common understanding that resurrection was to be achieved while still living, a point unequivocally stressed by the suppressed Gospel of Philip: “Those who say they will die first and then rise are in error. If they do not first receive the resurrection while they live, when they die they will receive nothing.”⁷ In other words, those who believe in a literal interpretation of resurrection are confusing a spiritual truth with an actual event; Philip himself even goes on to describe fundamental Christianity as “the faith of fools.”

Divine Virgin Semiramis with baby Thammuz.

The Gnostics of that period had a better grasp of the Mysteries than orthodox religious orders. The knowledge they had acquired in secret over centuries concerned an inner experience of God. They could claim the experience, and therefore, an authority that surpassed that of the apostles and their successors. This posed a great danger to the authority of the church, a concern voiced by Irenaeus, the father of Catholic theology: “No one can be compared with them in the greatness of their gnosis, not even if you mention Peter or Paul or any of the other apostles . . . they themselves have discovered more than the apostle.”⁸

This would have been Iranaeus’s mere opinion had the Apocalypse of Peter—another gospel from Nag Hammadi—also not come to light to undermine the church’s position. In this account the ‘risen’ Jesus explains to Peter, “Those who name themselves bishop or deacon and act as if they had received their authority from God are in reality waterless canals. Although they do not understand the Mystery they boast that the Mystery of truth belongs to them alone. They have misinterpreted that apostle’s teaching and have set up an imitation church in place of the true Christian brotherhood.”

So here we have the fundamental problem: the Gnostics offered every initiate a direct experience of God via a ritual of living resurrection, whereas the church claimed resurrection of the soul could be achieved only if channeled through its offices. And from this point on, the secret tradition practiced by Gnostic and other esoteric orders was labeled as heretical for purely political reasons.

Yet the concept of living resurrection survived among Gnostic Christians and Greek traditions, just as it had once been actively practiced by sects such as the Sabeans, Mandeans, Manichaeans, Nazoreans, and particularly, the Essene community of Jerusalem, who wrote about it on scrolls made of copper, which they deliberately concealed in caves at Qumran shortly before the Romans sacked their temple. Thanks to two curious goat herders, these writings were discovered in 1947.

The Copper Scroll describes how immersion in the secrets of the Mysteries led to a final ritual of raising the dead conducted in secret chambers beneath Temple Mount. Indeed one of the most important buildings described in the inner temple court is the House of Tribute, whose entrance was still known in the first century BC as the Gate of Offering. It stood on a stone platform, inset into which was a marble slab that could be raised by a fixed metal ring to reveal an opening into a deep cavern below. A flight of stairs led to an underground passageway and into the Chamber of Immersion where cleansing rituals were performed. These practices are validated in early scriptures such as the Book of Ezekiel, which literally describes how the elders of Jerusalem “engaged in secret mysteries . . . of Egyptian provenance” in darkness under the Temple of Solomon, and refers to the secret chamber used for initiation as “the bridal chamber.”

The Copper Scroll.

The living resurrection ceremonies performed by the Essenes and other Near East sects up to the Christian era were themselves a continuation of rituals handed down fifteen hundred years earlier from the traditions of Pharaoh Seqnenre Taa in Luxor.⁹ And even those were reenactments of identical ceremonies going back a further two thousand years, at which time there appears the concept of an inner group of initiates defined as ‘the living,’ who separate themselves from ordinary people, ‘the dead.’

At the temple of Edfu there’s a description of a ritual called ‘raising’ or ‘standing up,’ the knowledge of which was transmitted only to a select few within the inner temple. The initiation was conducted in subterranean chambers, many of which can still be accessed through passages hidden within Edfu’s hollow walls. It was this ritual that was still being enacted by the Essenes and the Jerusalem Church right up to their final days.

Not surprisingly, then, by the time people such as John the Baptist and Yeshua ben Yosef arrived on the scene, the teachings they professed hardly caused a batted eyelid. In fact they were welcomed with astonishment by a populace long accustomed to such secret knowledge being outlawed by the rabbis of Jerusalem or by the Romans.

The vehicle by which the concept of living resurrection was transmitted was called the Mysteries or the Knowledge. Like the parables taught in early Christian circles, the Mysteries were divided into two groups: the Lesser Mysteries took candidates through a conceptual understanding of living resurrection. The Greater Mysteries was the actual experience involving a voluntary death followed by a slow recovery, and it was taught only to a selective group. The initiate was placed in a figurative grave, his consciousness directed out of body, and in this altered state he crossed into the Otherworld and roamed its realms. Upon discovering the true place and nature of his soul, the initiate returned, convinced of his immortality, to face the perceived tyranny of physical death without fear because he’d already experienced paradise and was therefore free.

That’s some benefit. No wonder the Gospel of Philip insists, “While we exist in the world we must acquire resurrection.”¹⁰

As a man who was himself familiar with the secrets taught by the Essenes and the Nazoreans, Jesus too maintained a two-tier structure: “Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables.” To the many he offered simple teachings, but to those whom he initiated into his inner group—the few—they were given secret knowledge. In the Nag Hammadi texts, Jesus keeps referring to the kingdom of God as an inner mystery rather than a physical place, dropping hints here and there that he will transmit, in secret, “what no eye has seen and what no ear has heard and what no hand has touched and what has never occurred to the human mind.”¹¹ Once the members of the inner brotherhood understood these teachings they were thereafter declared ‘risen.’

The rituals and processes behind living resurrection were rarely written down; they were remembered using extraordinary feats of memory and communicated verbally only to candidates who’d passed long periods of strict observation. Any surviving texts concerning the secrets of the Mysteries indicate they consisted of a direct experience of the spirit world requiring the suspension of normal physical life, including a person’s waking consciousness, a know-how of the forces of nature, and an encounter with elemental forces including gods and souls of ancestors. Early philosophers such as Plato explain how these ‘gods’ were in fact occult forces bound in nature—suprarational and transcendental forces that cannot be rationalized by mental contemplation alone.

In the oldest Egyptian rituals this involved a crossing of the threshold of death in order for the initiate to observe himself as a spirit in the world of spirit. One underwent the experience of dying but only figuratively, a dismemberment from the material world and a reduction of the physical body insofar as it was possible to strip oneself of physical baggage to allow the soul to travel to finer dimensions. It was the relationship between the individual and these innate forces that formed the Egyptian sacred science of heka, what Europeans came to call magic.

The Mysteries indicated a sacred truth, one that words and images alone are incapable of representing but whose validity could be understood through a ritual ‘ascent to heaven.’ And the method by which this was achieved was called initiation.

Raising ceremony, Babylon.