Helena Blavatsky and the Mahatmas on the Historicity of Jesus

INCLUDING COSMOLOGICAL NOTES ON CHRIST AND LOGOS

Theosophy’s view of Jesus is so different from both Christian orthodoxy and modern New Age reinterpretations. Theosophy repositions Jesus as human, allowing reconciliation with Judaism, pre‑Christian mystery schools, ancient Greek and Indian philosophy rejecting the exclusivism and uniqueness of the Christian doctrine. In this framework, which could be proven, Jesus is not anomaly in cosmic history. Christianity’s dogmatic structure doesn’t simply invite belief in Jesus as the Christ and Son of God but requires it. The exclusivist truth-claims of Christian theology contradict the record, existence and learning of other adepts and world-teachers and cannot achieve true reconciliation and restore Christos and Logos to metaphysics nor restore Jewish philosophy to dignity. From the earliest creeds, it has been professed that Jesus is the unique incarnation of the Logos and salvation comes only through him, reinforced by the Gospel of John, the Nicene Creed, and the Church Fathers. The Gospel Jesus reflects Pythagorean, Buddhist, Egyptian and Essenian, Stoic-Platonic and Jewish Merkabah and prophetic mysticism and ethics. This is undeniable. Christianity asserts, that there is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved, and though the Catechism of the Catholics now would say that there are seeds of Grace and Truth in other religions, well the “esoteric Catechism” goes much further in restoring our understanding and the original universality of the LOGOS.

“I write in every letter that a divine Christ (or Christos) has never existed under a human form outside the imagination of blasphemers who have carnalized a universal and entirely impersonal principle.” (Helena P. Blavatsky, Reply to the Mistaken Conceptions of the Abbe Roca concerning my Observations on Christian Esotericism)

MESSIANISM AND APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION

ACCORDING TO HELENA BLAVATSKY, messianism is an invented fraud, or a tradition invented by Irenaeus who shields it behind blind faith, and fraud is also attributed to Eusebius and the Roman Catholic Church development of the concept of apostolic succession. She provided a radical esoteric perspective on Jesus that directly challenges orthodox Christian claims of a unique, historical Man-God savior, defining the Christos not as a person but the impersonal and universally-diffused divine principle that was also latent in every human soul. This position establishes that in whatever years he existed, there was a historical initiate, but the Jesus of the Gospels was invented after the first century, and the Gospel accounts are not historical. Blavatsky and the correspondents in the Mahatma papers consistently distinguished the mortal adept Jesus (“a perfected man”) from the universally-diffused Christos, rejecting the carnalized, anthropomorphic Christ invented by early Church fathers as a deified personification.

TOLEDOT YESHU ISSUE FROM MEDIEVAL POLEMICS TO NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCHOLARSHIP

The Gospel Jesus is argued as being largely an allegorical construct, and this legend she argues was based on a real historical initiate that lived and taught approximately a century before the conventional Christian era. Blavatsky thought this allegorical construct of the Gospel Jesus was built upon the story and fate of a personage known as Yeshu Ben Pandira of Lod (or Lydda) in the Toledot Yeshu, or a man in that part of the world sometime around that time, whose name may have actually been Yeshua.

Describing this Yeshu, Blavatsky explains that he was initiated at a young age in the rabbinical tradition in transmission of authority, later adding to this knowledge his learning acquired in Egypt. When the persecution of King Janneus ended, he returned to Judea. His adventures are told as in the stories of many initiates, in allegorical language. Upon returning from Egypt, this Yeshua was accused by the Jews of possessing knowledge of Egyptian magic art, i.e., sorcery, and was put to death by the Sanhedrin.

Blavatsky goes further and suggests, that without these stories of traces of such personage like the ‘son of Pandira’ בן פנדורה and disciple of Joshua ben Perachiah that the Theosophists mixed up with Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai (fifth President of the Sanhedrin), the whole Christian canon is false, as the account of the New Testament has no record in history.

There were some misattributions and mixture of elements of different persons with the name Yeshu in the Talmud beginning with Medieval Christian polemicists (from the 13th-17th centuries) to harmonize all references that continued into the nineteenth-century through Theosophists, hence, e.g., a mistaken association of Yeshu with Lydda. This mistake originated from some non-rabbinical critical revisions of the Toledot Yeshu (medieval Jewish anti‑gospel narratives), which placed episodes of Yeshu’s life in Lydda (or Lod). These secondary sources often freely mixed local geography with polemical storytelling, the narratives of Talmudic characters and Apocryphal legends. Adopted by various nineteenth-century to twentieth-century scholars (including Theosophists), the Lydda setting was often treated as if it were Talmudic and authoritative, though it wasn’t.

In The Secret Doctrine (1888), Blavatsky, G.R.S. Mead and many other Theosophists often cited the Talmudic passage from the Babylonian Talmud tractate Sanhedrin 43a (part of the Gemara or rabbinical commentaries) to suggest this was the original pre-Christian Yeshu. Sanhedrin 43a tells the story of a man named Yeshu that was stoned and hanged on the eve of Passover for sorcery and leading Israel astray. Blavatsky does not say that the tradition of the Gemara is accurate in every respect, highlighting the bias of the text.

Nevertheless, the position of the Theosophists was that the Gospels are a Solar-Zodiacal allegory, and the Jesus of the many Churches and denominations is largely a distorted fiction based on some actual individual of that name. In the Talmud, there are numerous Yeshu’. There is: (a) Yeshu (in Toledot Yeshu that combined all the Talmudic Yeshus), (b) Yeshu ben Pandira (in Tosefta Hullin 2:22–23, Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 104b and Sanhedrin 67a, Jerusalem Talmud, Shabbat 14:4 – 14d), (c) Yeshu ben Stada (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 104b and Sanhedrin 67a, son of Miriam a hairdesser), (d) Yeshu disciple of Joshua ben Perachiah (Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 47a and Sanhedrin 107b) lived in the Hasmonean period (1st century BCE) and fled to Egypt (not executed nor connected to the Sanhedrin presidency, (e) and a Yeshu accused of being a sorcerer who was executed on Passover (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 43a).

CORRUPTION OF THE CHRISTOS MYSTERY

Whether there was a historical Jesus, or Jesus is an utter mythical fiction is of no real consequence.

“Jesus or Jehoshua Ben Pandira, whenever he lived, was a great Initiate and the “Son of God”—just as Apollonius of Tyana was—and that Paul never meant either him or any other living Initiate, but a metaphysical Christos present in, and personal to, every mystic Gnostic as to every initiated Pagan—are not at all irreconcilable. A man may know of several great Initiates, and yet place his own ideal on a far higher pedestal than any of these.” (H.P. Blavatsky)

The Gospels themselves are a Zodiacal allegory and built on a prototypal way of constructing legendary biographies interpreted by “keys” of esoteric symbolism, much like the Pentateuch. They encode profound truths about initiation (baptism as spiritual rebirth, crucifixion as the triumph of spirit over flesh, three days in the tomb as the sacred sleep of the neophyte) while veiling the historical adept’s life. Blavatsky and the Mahatmas viewed orthodox Christianity as a tragic distortion. The true Christians “died with the last of the Gnostics” and the Church became “the deadliest enemy of the ethics of Christ.” Early fathers like Irenaeus invented traditions, forged documents, and suppressed Gnostic teachings to create a new religion of blind faith. Eusebius inserted the Josephus passage and contradictory accounts were harmonized through pious fraud.

Jesus’ mission emphasizes ethics in a declining cycle and was, in one sense a partial failure not because of the teacher, but because its ultimate outcome lies in the hands of all those who come after them. The Church lost the key to Wisdom, carnalized the Christos, and promoted messianism as an invented fraud, shielding themselves under apostolic succession and personal God worship.

REJECTING THE CARNALIZED CHRISTOS

In the Gospels, this literary Jesus, speaking to a non‑Jewish woman (a Canaanite), says he was sent only to the so-called lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matthew 15:24). Later Christian theology universalized Jesus’ mission, but Theosophists read like G.R.S. Mead and Blavatsky read the line differently. So, we have established, that the Jesus of the Gospels is a composite literary figure and spiritual adept in the Gospels, not a single historical person; therefore, Theosophists reject the notion, that Jesus is a universal messiah for all humanity, as well as for all people of Israel. The idea of a single universal messiah is a later theological invention, and it is therefore a grave error to blame the Jews for killing Jesus, as Protestants did.

Jesus is placed alongside Confucius, Lao Tze, Zarathustra, etc., not above them. There was nothing new Jesus teaches that was not already taught by Orphism, Philo, Gautama, Shankaracharya and many others. In Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky rejected the belief that Jesus was the messiah the Jews prophesied. I have also never accepted such a notion, and do not subordinate Jewish tradition to the Christian claims. The man had a mission of his own, and it is believed he failed. The Gospel Jesus teaches and professes precepts straight from monastic Buddhism to the Jews, and in fact, all his sayings are nearly verbatim repetitions of the Pythagoreans.

The Gospels are considered mainly to be allegorical and containing profound esoteric truths, not mainly historical as James M. Pryse argued in his work, on the Hellenic Restoration of the Gospels.

Blavatsky weighs the doctrines of Christianity against the long record of systems, which it displaced.

“Assuredly no doctrine about a personal God, a gigantic man and no more — (though a number of so-called divine beings were and are still recognized) — was ever taught by the true Magi.” (Helena Blavatsky, Zoroastrianism in the Light of Occult Philosophical)

THE METAPHYSICS OF CHRISTOS

The view portrayed in the Mahatma Letters is that the miracle-worker Gospel Jesus did not exist as a literal historical person in the era ascribed to him (Letter 22, A.T. Barker ed), and that the Jesus of the New Testament is a mythological composite built from older traditions, and that Christ is esoterically, the divine Vāc वाच्, or the Paramātman परमात्मन् (supreme Self). It is this truth, that underlies Christianity and is sensed. However, this philosophical exposition concludes that the historical Jesus is therefore not a single verifiable individual. The Gospel Jesus Christ serves as a symbolic vessel for older esoteric teachings through the votaries of the new religion, with its Hellenic-Jewish synthesis. These letters explained that Christ is a divine principle within each human being, not a historical person, which establishes Christos as a concept analogous to principles in Hellenic, African and Indian philosophy.

The Christ figure of the Gospels, or the New Testament bares the imprint of Essenian ideas, Therapeutae teachings, Jewish apocalyptic movements, monastic Buddhist‑influenced ethics and Hellenic and Pythagorean ancient cosmological, numerological and solar‑myth symbolic traditions. Therefore, what comes from the New Testament is heavily adapted composite wisdom of knowledge from the Essenes, Therapeutae, Jewish mysticism, various mystery schools (possibly Hellenic-Jewish) and teachers whose sayings were later attributed to “Jesus.”

In this esoteric explanation, Christos is equivalent to the regeneration or rebirth of spirit or a state achieved by other adepts across cultures and is the same truth (or leads to the same truth) as the Nirvana of Buddhism, not a unique incarnation. Christos is therefore definitely not a space ghost or man-god.

It must be strongly stated that despite the universalization of the Gospel Jesus as applicable to Jew and Gentile, it creates a new exclusivism and argument for the uniqueness of Jesus. This exclusivist religious expression the Churches constructed and established is a sham in relation to these analogous details, as much as the fantastical psychic Christian innovations of Theosophists (like Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater) and ex-Theosophists (Alice Bailey, Rudolf Steiner and others) subconsciously ever trying to reconcile their childhood bred beliefs. Four Apostles and Gospels are still forced upon this character, Jesus — whose ways are no different than the demi-gods, initiates and priests of older legend.

The Christos is not the supposed historical Jesus, but the Solar God re-born in the lunar aspect of man. It is the same concept as the LOGOS before the Christians and is the essential or eternal soul in man. Blavatsky explains the distinction of the two oracular terms, Christos and Chrestos.

 “Nor shall I dispute this statement in general. But this does not invalidate in one iota my claim. The temple priests assumed the names of the gods they served, and this is as well known a fact, as that the defunct Egyptian became an “Osiris”—was “osirified”—after his death. Yet Osiris was assuredly neither “man nor an Initiate,” but a being hardly recognised as such by the Royal Society of materialistic science. Why, then, could not an “Initiate,” who had succeeded in merging his spiritual being into the Christos state, be regarded as a Christos after his last and supreme initiation, just as he was called Chrêstos before that? Neither Plotinus, Porphyry nor Apollonius were Christians, yet, according to esoteric teaching, Plotinus realized this sublime state (of becoming or uniting himself with his Christos) six times, Apollonius of Tyana four times, while Porphyry reached the exalted state only once, when over sixty years of age. The Gnostics called the “Word” “Abraxas” and “Christos” indiscriminately, and by whatever name we may call it, whether Ma-Kheru, or Christos or Abraxas, it is all one. That mystic state which gives to our inner being the impulse that attracts “the soul towards its origin and centre, the Eternal good,” as Plotinus teaches, and makes of man a god, the Christos or the unknown made manifest, is a pre eminently theosophical condition. It belongs to the temple mysteries, and the teachings of the Neo-Platonists. (H.P. Blavatsky)

This position clearly rejects the idea of a fleshly Christ, explaining that historical Christianity was based on the suppression and perversion of that which was esoteric in Gnosticism.

“Christ made flesh,” would be a claim worse than imposture, as it would be absurdity, but a man of flesh assuming the Christ-condition temporarily, is indeed an occult, yet living, fact. (H.P. Blavatsky)

Replying to Gerald Massey in a letter, Blavatsky stated, that;

“…I, as a Theosophist and an Occultist of a certain school, accepting my proofs on data which he rejects—i.e., esoteric teachings—we can hardly agree upon every point. But the question is not whether there was or never was an historical Christ, or Jesus, between the years 1 and 33 a.d.—but simply were the Gospels of the gnostics (of Marcion and others, for instance) perverted later by Christians—esoteric allegories founded on facts, or simply meaningless fictions? I believe the former, and esoteric teachings explain many of the allegories.” (A Note of Explanation, Lucifer, Vol. I, No. 5, January, 1888, pp. 418-421)

Blavatsky believed this position was also the deathblow to future pseudo-Messiah claimants and saw Theosophists as being incapable of falling into this trap and teaching of a Christ made flesh by any means of interpretation. The position also does not allow the mistaken interpretation that “Christos” is a mere state of consciousness anyone can reach. It is a primordial metaphysical reality universally-diffused in nature, a spiritual noumenal fire latent in every human being and atom, only reached through profound purification (initiation) of the heart. In the seven-fold constitution of the Theosophical system that expands in detail on the traditional triad of spirit, soul and body, the birth of Christos in the heart of man is very rare, difficult, achieved through lifetimes (metempsychosis) and is not accessible to the unpurified (lunar or egoic) personality. It is causal, based on the union of the source of harmony and insight in man with the rational faculty refined and made lucid through discipline, observation and contemplation on eternal truths, or the grander reality beyond the seeming. The rational faculty in this understanding is not the secular Enlightenment limit of reason but refers to a super-sensible discernment of the soul’s exile from the divine in the world of appearances.

Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, Zeno and many others all taught this before the Christians picked up after them and claimed to be not merely a New Testament that re-expresses the Wisdom of all Ages and explains the esotericism of parallel ideas to it, but wreck through, adapt and dominate the ancient world. The Gospel Jesus, e.g., is literally just the embodiment of the Stoic sage who possesses this union of the rational mind in harmony with divine LOGOS. For the Theosophists and the Stoics: (1) the universe is a living, rational organism, (2) the divine Logos permeates everything, (3) the human rational soul is literally a fragment of this LOGOS, and (4) the goal in life is to purify the mind so it aligns with the divine order that sets the universe in motion.

SUBVERSIVE FIXATIONS WITH CHRISTIANIZING THEOSOPHY

The development of Christianity as we know it, contain parallels to the New Age movement in the latter’s relation to the Theosophical movement, as something that partially undermined its mission in the West. All the efforts of the original Theosophical movement had become usurped in the next century by the claims of individuals on the very basis of belief Blavatsky and her teachers were in strict opposition to. The Theosophical writings are diametrically opposite to many popular alternative spiritual notions and still represent, contrary to Christian polemics against Theosophy, an antidote to them and the concept of Christ as a singular personified incarnation on earth (in any manner) — whether the Church, Neo-Theosophy or any cult utilizes it to establish worldly authority.

“Theosophy (…) hushes the “Lo here! and lo there!” and declares the Christ, like the kingdom of heaven, to be within. (…) With the advent of Theosophy, the Messiah-craze surely has had its day, and sees its doom.” (Helena P. Blavatsky, Modern Apostles and Pseudo-Messiahs)

She explains in her earliest major work, that “The present volumes have been written to small purpose if they have not shown that the apostolic succession is a gross and palpable fraud” (Isis Unveiled, Vol. 2, p. 544). Now, compare this to Charles W. Leadbeater, who wrote in Sacraments: “My clairvoyant investigation into those early periods absolutely confirms the contention of the Roman Church. They know that there has been no break in apostolic succession” (Science of the Sacraments, p. 286).

In H.P. Blavatsky asking, “In such a case, would Jesuits like to see the main leaders of a theosophical society acting under the inspiration of their own methods and piously cheating the public in the name of sacred Masters?” we cannot speak on the case of blaming Jesuits. However, we can observe, that individuals did cheat the public and gullible members through the use of the names of Jesus, K.H., Morya and others, like Leadbeater, Guy Ballard and so on created caricatures, misused images and immortalized these figures into a new angelic innovation similar to the function of Catholic saints.

Leadbeater, a former priest of the Church of England became Annie Besant’s spiritual guide and his new psychically-inspired Christianity along with influence by orthodox Brahmin Hindu, G.N. Chakravarti and the latest addressed anti-Blavatsky attitude took hold of the Theos. Soc., splitting it in 1895.

Charles W. Leadbeater had significant influence on 20th century spiritual concepts, not Blavatsky. Biographers should therefore retire from falsely stating, that Helena P. Blavatsky was the Mother of the 20th century New Age movement. If all these 20th century groups and individuals that appropriated Theosophy actually had read H.P. Blavatsky, there’d be no New Age movement, highly characterized by high commercialization, materialism, psychism, psychological and sexual manipulation and anthropomorphism. Leadbeater’s influential innovation on 20th century alternative spiritual messianism is the Christ, World Teacher concept. In this belief, Christ was the Bodhisattva Maitreya and Jesus was overshadowed by this being. Alice Bailey had her own project with her Arcane School after leaving the Theosophical Society. Later, pleading for $30,000, Mrs. Bailey claimed, The Christ was coming, and that Jesus separately was going to Rome. Both Alice Bailey and Charles W. Leadbeater were obsessively fascinated with occult geopolitics and Masonic ceremonialism.

Besant’s administration suppressed writings and actively allowed Blavatsky’s major works to go out of print, even attempting to rewrite and edit her books to support their new theories — promoting over it their newfound revelation of the Sacrament!

Therefore, think carefully on this when understanding the aims of the Theosophical movement, despite the discontents of many within it, that wanted to maintain a Western, or Euro-centric conception of Hermeticism and Western orientation of the Theos. Soc. We cannot move on to explain the twenty-one or more founders of the Theosophical Society in-depth without addressing the constant attempts to Christianize or overtake Theosophy with a quasi-Catholic-Masonic innovation, or mockery. Theosophy was a movement aimed at a genuine, serious philosophical renaissance and ethical reform, subverted by a mocking religiosity based on an imaginary, anthropomorphized Christ and his Angels to the backdrop of rainbow palettes and commercialized products. Those who would desire this are deluded and have the public’s lack of knowledge of this history to count on the undisturbed even unchallenged peddling of slanderous lies about the nature and purpose of Theosophy within the current of esotericisms.

The truth is that the path is inward, not in the worship of any object of worship. The Nazarene adept points to the universal principle within each soul. The Gospels preserve esoteric truths for those with eyes to see, but the carnalized Jesus of the Churches is a myth that has obscured ancient Wisdom for two millennia, and we have been living from and within the consequences of this for many centuries.