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HOW THE CHURCH ASSUMED, ESTABLISHED AND IMPOSED ITS AUTHORITY

By 312 AD the whole political face of the empire had changed. Only Maximian's son Maxentius lay between Constantine and control of the whole western half of the Roman Empire. On 28th October 312, having stormed his way through northern Italy, Constantine, tall and bull-necked, reviewed with his generals his final plans for the capture of Rome itself, just ten miles to the south.

Behind Rome's walls Maxentius had the advantage of superior numbers, well-prepared defenses, and command of the Empire's premier fighting force, the Praetorian Guard. Nor could Constantine, as aggressor, expect much enthusiasm from Rome’s citizens, their daily existence now threatened with disruption by yet another Roman’s bid for mastery over another. Constantine was badly in need of something to give his cause extra purpose and justification. As is now part of Christian legend, on the night before the battle Constantine had a dream in which he was shown a sign, accompanied by the words: Hoc signo victor eris! ‘By this sign you shall be the victor.’ The sign consisted of the Greek letters Chi-Rho, the first two letters of the name Christ, in a monogram form that had recently been adopted by the still persecuted group called Christians, of whom, as Constantine was well aware, there were a considerable number among the ordinary citizens of Rome. That the original Christ preached a form of pacifism would certainly never have occurred to Constantine. For him the Chi-Rho seemed an inspired sign to fight by, and at dawn he gave orders for it to be painted on every soldier’s shield.

Meanwhile, to the south, Maxentius had planned what seemed to him a brilliant piece of defensive strategy. Unfortunately for Maxentius things went badly wrong. In the confusion some of the defending army found themselves trapped between Constantine’s army and the Tiber; hundreds simply fell or hurled themselves into the water in full armour. In this way Maxentius himself died, and his corpse was soon afterwards found washed up downstream. He was swiftly decapitated, and with his gruesome trophy dripping from a lance Constantine made his triumphal entry into Rome later that day, the Christians monogram still emblazoned on his soldier’s shields.

The events of that day marked the turning point from which events led to the contrived Christianity we now know. Constantine made it part of his policy to set Christianity on course. Altogether more obscure, however, is the relationship between his brand of Christianity and the intentions of Jesus.

Only six years before the Milvian Bridge battle he had had hundreds of Frankish rebel prisoners torn to pieces in an arena. He had stood by without apparent qualm while Galerius had supervised the burning of Christian sacred texts and the mutilation of those who refused sacrifice to the pagan gods. Even after his victory the triumphal arch erected in his honour, which stands to this day alongside the Colosseum, was adorned with traditional pagan symbols. A commemorative medallion struck by Constantine in 313 AD portrays him as Invictus Constantinus alongside the image of Sol Invictus, the god of a pagan cult imported from Syria a few decades earlier by the Emperor Aurelian. Even eleven years after winning the battle at the Milvian Bridge Constantine murdered his already vanquished rival Licinius, former Emperor in the East; he then killed his wife, by having her boiled alive in her bath, and his own son – hardly the action of a true follower of Jesus.

Properly to understand Constantine, we need to recognise that for him politics came first, and matters of religion (or at least religious ethics as we understand them today) a very poor second. Having set himself to conquer a vast and hitherto bitterly divided Empire, his first concern had to be the matter of unity. Never disloyal to supporters, from the very onset of his rule in Rome he granted tolerance both to Christianity and to followers of every other religion in the Empire; Mithraists, Jews, adherents to the traditional Graeco-Roman pantheon, and many others. In unequivocal recognistion of the Christians, with whom he clearly identified himself, he lavished money on the erection of basilicas both in Rome and elsewhere in the Empire, and gave over an imperial palace on the Lateran Hill as a residence for Rome’s bishops. Equally there could have been nothing but a shrewd desire for unity in his adoption of the Sol Invictus cult. Essentially a simple cult of the sun, followers of Orpheus, Mithras or Apollo could all find common ground in it. Nor could the Christians grumble. Although in the East there lingered an abhorrence, inspired by the Jews, for representational images, in the West Christians had begun representing Jesus in the guise of the sun god Apollo or Orpheus, the priest of the sun. A third-century mosaic from the Mausoleum of the Julii underneath present-day St Peter’s in Rome actually portrays Jesus as Sol Invictus, driving the horses of the sun’s chariot. That Constantine himself mixed Christianity and the Sol Invictus cult is clear from a second commemorative medallion issued by him within two years of the first, on which he represented himself with a Chi-Rho monogram on his helmet, and a leaping Sol chariot horse below. How far Jesus had become divorced in western Christian minds from the Jew of history is forcefully illustrated by a portrait of him as a beardless Apollo-like youth in a mosaic that once decorated the floor of the Roman-Christian villa at Hinton St Mary in Dorset. Only the Chi-Rho monogram identifies it as Jesus. To what extent Constantine was aware of all the contradictions is impossible to tell, but there are at least some signs that he recognised the incompatibility between Jesus’ teachings and the demands of governing the Roman Empire. It was only when he was approaching death that he asked for, or was accepted for, Christian baptism. As was still the custom, he received this naked, thereafter renouncing forever the purple of his imperial rank.

If Christianity had an unorthodox champion in Constantine, he for his part acquired an extraordinary assortment of subjects in those who called themselves Christians in his time. There were bitter divisions between the ‘traditors’, or traitors, who had betrayed their fellow Christians, surrendered Christian books and offered pagan sacrifices during recent Roman persecutions, and those who had suffered mutilation and hard labour rather than do so. There were equally deep divisions between Christians from Rome and those from Alexandria and from Antioch.

In the third century the great Lucian of Antioch, reflecting Christianity’s origins in Jewish monotheism, had stressed the essential oneness of God, the simple humanity of Jesus, and the importance of the way of life Jesus taught, which those obsessed with theology too easily overlooked. One of those who had been taught by Lucian was a magnetic, ascetic-looking priest and preacher called Arius, who went on to officiate within the Alexandrian diocese.

Arius found himself excommunicated, and not unexpectedly sough support from leading churchmen whom we knew to hold views similar to his own; men such as the powerful Bishops Eusebius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Nicodemia, both former Lucian pupils. Eusebius of Nicodemia did not let his colleague down. He immediately summoned a synod of the bishops in his region, formally supporting Arius and condemning the Alexandrian viewpoint.

Constantine, who had just won the eastern half of the Empire, thereby at last achieving his cherished goal of unity, suddenly found himself in the midst of this seething dispute between two rival groups of Christians, with epithets such as ‘maniacs’, ‘eels’, ‘cuttlefish’, ‘atheists’ and ‘wolves’ being hurled between one faction and the other. The extent to which Constantine, of no great education, even understood the theological issues is by no means clear, but he tried to pacify the protagonists by sending an identical letter to both Arius and Alexander, almost unctuously pleading for ‘equal forbearance’ and reconciliation.

Unfortunately, from a distance even Constantine was unable to smooth such troubled waters. Nor was there any supreme ecclesiastical authority to whom the matter could be referred; the Bishops of Rome, Alexandria and Antioch each being recognised as having supreme authority within their respective geographical regions, but no supremacy over all Christendom. Accordingly, to resolve this and other issues (such as the date of Easter, another bitter source of contention), Constantine decided personally to summon all Christian leaders to the first-ever 'World Council'. The appointed date was early summer 325 AD, the venue the pleasant lakeside town of Nicaea, today Iznik in northern-western Turkey, where Constantine had a suitably commodious palace.

From the very circumstances of the time, it was bound to be an extraordinary gathering. With Christianity having spread as far as Britain in the West and India in the East, for some of the delegates the journey took several weeks, if not months. When they assembled, it was to set eyes on each other for the first time in many cases, though for several, such as Bishop Pamphnutius, sight was denied because they had been viscously blinded during earlier persecutions. The hermit Jacob of Nisibis arrived in goatskins accompanied by a persistent horde of gnats. Another delegate was the saintly Nicholas from the city of Myra in Asia Minor, who was the prototype of the Christmas Santa Claus. Also present of course was Arius. Although the Bishop of Rome excused himself as too old to travel, he sent two priests to represent him. Before this bizarre and unprecedented assembly Constantine dazzlingly robed and dripping with gold and jewels of a decadence earlier Emperors would have abhorred, took his place on a low, wrought gold chair.

It was at this point in history, and before this assembly, that a decision was to be made that would have the most profound consequences for believers in Jesus Christ to this day. In the simplest of terms, the point at issue was whether Jesus was a master who had come to serve God’s purpose at a particular time, or whether he had been God for all eternity, ‘of one substance with the Father’ (as those in the West expressed it). If the latter, then he was effectively a supraterrestrial entity easily compatible with Sol Invictus, but light-years removed from the Jesus envisaged by Arius and the Antiochenes.

Although reports of the exact proceedings of the Council of Nicaea have not survived, from those contemporary accounts that do exist it would seem that Eusebius of Nicodemia and Eusebius of Caesarea, representing the Antiochene party, forcefully espoused the Arian view, confidently expecting that they would win the day. To try to provide a formula on which the whole gathering could agree, Eusebius of Caesarea read out the statement of belief which he was accustomed to employ at baptisms within his own diocese:

“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of all that is seen and unseen; and in one lord Jesus Christ, the word of God, god from God, lght from light, life from lfe, only begotten son, first-born of all creation, before all ages begotten from the Father, who for our salvation was incarnate and living among men… “

For many present-day Christians the words more than adequately impart a divinity to Jesus. But to the fourth-century Alexandrians, they made Jesus appear less than God himself.

For the judgement of Solomon on the issue, the only appropriate recourse was to Constantine, almost certainly theologically illiterate, but politically a superb man-manager. Exactly what swayed Constantine in that crucial moment we shall probably never know. There can be little doubt that for him the deification of a man was nothing particularly special. He had had his father Contantine deified, would be accorded the same honour after his own death, and would surely have expected Jesus to be a superior entity in the divine hierarchy. He might well also have taken into account Alexandria’s strategic and commercial advantages. Whatever his motives, Constantine ruled in favour of the Alexandrians, Eusebius’ formula was heavily edited to accommodate the Alexandrian view, and, while affirming that the standpoint of the Antichenes was entirely reasonable, Constantine urged all Council delegates to sign the revised formula as a statement of faith on which all Christians should in future agree. For all those who signed, there was the inducement of an invitation to stay on at Nicaea as Constantine’s guests for his twentieth anniversary celebrations. For those who refused there was immediate banishment. Among all concerned, it appears to have gone entirely unnoticed that the formula they were about to impose on all Christians contained not one jot of the ethical teachings that the human Jesus had once preached. Perhaps not unexpectedly, all but two of the most die-hard Arian loyalists signed. But from the none too truthful face-saving letter of Eusebius of Caesarea sent back to his home diocese, it is clear how uneasy he felt about the extent to which he had compromised the fundamental principles of what he had been taught about Jesus. Other signatories, who were equally swayed into acquiescence by their awe of the forceful Constantine, felt exactly the same. Only on returning home did Eusebius of Nicodemia, Maris of Chalcedon and Theognis of Nicaea summon the courage to express to Constantine in writing how much they regretted having put their signatures to the Nicene formula: ‘We committed an impious act, O Prince’, wrote Eusebius of Nicodemia, ‘by subscribing to a blasphemy from fear of you’.

But it was too late. An overwhelming majority of Christianity’s highest dignitaries had put pens to parchment, and even though the Arian controversy would rumble on for another two or three centuries, effectively there was no turning back. Although no gospel regarded Jesus as God, and not even Paul had done so, the Jewish teacher had been declared ‘Very God’ through all eternity, and a whole new theology would flow from this. A great master who was incarnate around the time has since stated;

“You inquire from us what position we assign Jesus the Christ. We are not careful to enter into curious comparisons between different teachers who, in different ages, have been sent from God. The time is not yet come for that; but this we know, that no spirit more pure, more godlike, more noble, more blessing and more blessed, ever descended to find a home on your earth. None more worthily earned by a life of self- sacrificing love the adoring reverence and devotion to mankind. None bestowed more blessings on humanity; none wrought a greater work for God. It is not necessary that we should enter into curious comparisons between God's great teachers. Rather would we give to all the meed of praise that is their due, and hold up the example of self-denial, self- sacrifice, and love to the imitation of a generation which sadly needs such a pattern. Had men devoted their energies to the imitation of the simplicity and sincerity, the loving toil and earnest purpose, the self- sacrifice and purity of thought and life which elevated and distinguished the Christ, they had wrangled less of His nature, and had wasted fewer words upon useless metaphysical sophistries. Those of your theologians who dwelt in the days of darkness, and who have left to you an accursed heritage in their idle and foolish speculations, would have turned their minds into a more useful channel, and have been a blessing instead of a curse to mankind. Men would not have derogated from the honour due to the great God alone, but would have accepted, as Jesus intended, the simple Gospel that He preached. But instead of this they have elaborated an anthropomorphic theology which has led them to wander further and further from the simplicity of His teaching; which has turned His name and creed into a battle-ground of sects; and has resulted in a parody on His teachings--a sight on which His pure spirit looks with sorrow and pity.

Friend, you must discriminate between God's truth and man's glosses. We do not dishonour the Lord Jesus--before whose exalted majesty we bow--by refusing to acquiesce in a fiction which He would disown, and which man has forced upon His name. No, assuredly: but they who from a strict adherence to the literal text of Scripture--a text which they have not understood, and the spirit of which they have never grasped--have dishonoured the Great Father of Him, and of all alike, and have impiously, albeit ignorantly, derogated from the honour due to the Supreme alone. Not we, but they dishonour God! Not we, but they, though they have the prescription of long usage, though their words be coloured by extracts from writings which they have decided to be Divine: and though in those writings there be found words which pronounce a curse on any who may disagree with what is stated there. We do not regard such curses save with pity. We do not labour to upset belief when it is a harmless error, but we can lend no countenance to views that dishonour God, and retard a soul's progress. The attributing to a man of Divine honour, to the exclusion in very many cases of personal honour and love for the Great Father, is a mischievous error which derogates from the duty of man to his God. The holding of a narrow, cold, dogmatic creed, in all its rigid, lifeless literalism, cramps the soul, dwarfs its spirituality, clogs its progress, and stunts its growth. "The letter," says your Scripture, "the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." Hence we denounce such views of God as are contained in the fable of a material hell; and we proclaim to you purer and more rational ideas than are contained in the orthodox notions of atonement and vicarious sacrifice. We proclaim to you a spiritualised religion. We call you from the dead formalism, the lifeless, loveless literalism of the past, to a religion of spiritualised truth, to the lovely symbolism of angel teaching, to the higher planes of spirit, where the material finds no place, and the formal dogmatism of the past is for ever gone.

We have spoken to you with care, and with a due sense of the importance of what we say. Dwell on it with care. Ponder it with single desire for truth, and seek the Divine aid ministered to all who pray for it.”

+IMPERATOR.

Merely to enumerate the many ways in which the original concepts of Jesus and his teachings were adulterated, as a result of Constantine’s actions and the consequences of the Council of Nicaea, would take a book in itself. First, doctrine was formulated in the light of preserved writings (gospels, etc.). Then, doctrine was adjusted to conform to existing pagan patterns. Finally, writings were edited to support doctrine. There can be no better example of the distortions that took place, however, than occurred in respect of the cult of Mary, mother of Jesus. In Constantine's time interest in Mary had been negligible and, even later in the 4th century, churchmen such as Helvidius and Jovinian pointed out the clear gospel evidence that Mary had given birth to several children after Jesus. Besides the list of Jesus' brothers and sisters in the Mark gospel (6:3), Luke unequivocally describes Jesus as Mary's 'first-born', and the Mathew gospel, in the original Greek, speaks of her husband Joseph having no intercourse with Mary 'until her son was born', strongly suggesting that they had normal sexual relations afterwards and by no means making it clear that they had never had intercourse prior to Jesus' conception. But, of course, with Jesus having been made 'Very God', it was inevitably not long before someone began to speculate on his mother's position. Sure enough, in the year 431, just a few miles down the coast from Nicaea, the proposition was put to the Council of Ephesus that Mary should henceforth be entitled 'Theotokos' - God-bearing, and thereby 'Mother of God'. As in Nicaea, there was an Antiochene resistence movement, spearheaded by Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople, who argued strongly that Mary could only be mother of Jesus' humanity, but to no avail. Yet another Alexandrian, the famous patriarch Cyril, packed the Ephesus meeting with his own supporters before most Antiochenes could arrive, and the cult of Mary was firmly on its way. In 1854 Pope Pius IX made it an article of faith for all Catholics that Mary should be considered 'immaculately conceived' - that is, conceived free of sin.

For the Christian Gnostics and other fringe groups freedom of speech ended. The books of Arius and his sympathisers were ordered to be burnt, and a reign of terror proclaimed for all those who did not conform to the new, official ‘Christian’ line:

“Understand now by this present statute, Novatians, Valentinians, Marcionites, Paulinians, you who are called Cataphrygians ... with what a tissue of lies and vanities, with what destructive and venomous errors, your doctrines are inextricably woven! We give you warning ... Let none of you presume, from this time forward, to meet in congregations. To prevent this, we command that you be deprived of all the houses in which you have been accustomed to meet ... and that these should be handed over immediately to the catholic church.”

Within a generation, hardly leaving a trace of their existence for posterity, the great majority of these groups simply died away as successive ‘Christian’ Emperors reiterated the policies that Constantine had pursued. But in about 370 AD an unknown person trudged from what was probably the monastery of St. Pachomius in Upper Egypt to bury the red earthenware jar that would be rediscovered as the Nag Hammadi hoard some sixteen centuries later. Without doubt this represents a mere fraction, and not necessarily a representative one, of the lost Gnostic and other material. It can scarcely have been a coincidence that with the dying out of the various fringe groups there also died much of the breathtaking dynamism that had fired the healings and exorcisms carried out since the time of Jesus himself.

A new era was ushered in. On the site of the shrine marking Peter’s grave Constantine erected a giant basilica, which would assume yet more grandiose proportions at the behest of the power-seeking popes of the Late Renaissance. But somehow, in all the jostling to make the Bishop of Rome supreme pontiff over all Churches, the words of the man at the root of it all had been almost forgotten, and a false doctrine had been contrived in support of a powerful and growing vested interest.

The church destroyed whatever literature conflicted with its own interests, wrote its own history, and became the only permitted educator and historian.

What the Powers of Darkness had not achieved by killing the great Master, they partially managed by playing upon the human weakness of insecurity, superstition, greed and ambition.

The following is an edited reply by a famous Freethinker, Robert G. Ingersoll, to an article written by Cardinal Manning:

Manning’s proposition was, “The Church itself, by its marvellous propagation, its eminent sanctity, its inexhaustible fruitlessness in all good things, its catholic unity and invincible stability, is a vast and perpetual motive of credibility, and an irrefragable witness of its own divine legation.”

Ingersoll’s answer:

And what of Christendom today?

The basic doctrine of most Christianity, taken from the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, is still that:

First: The Master Jesus of Nazareth and the Creator are one and the same being, and that

Second: As God Incarnate, the Master Jesus made a vicarious atonement for the sins of all who, by faith in Him, live their lives in the service of God and their fellow men, and

Third: Those who do not accept the Master as their Mediator and Saviour that they try to live as he taught, will have everlasting life in heaven.

But if we apply the light of discernment to the writings which so imperfectly chronicle the earthly mission of Jesus, we do not find that he claimed any such position as orthodox or fundamentalist churches have ascribed to him. Yet in ignorance they still anthropomorphise principles, functions, qualities and states of consciousness, misunderstanding the Master’s use of personification in his speeches.

Moreover, if a great master speaks about God in the first person, it is to signify that the baser elements of the master’s nature are so nearly extinguished that the Spark of Divinity within him, his portion of the all-pervading Christ Spirit, has grown, unhindered by the Ego, into so brilliant a light, that the master's will has become at-one with God’s almighty purpose. When a master uses the word ‘I’ in such a way, he is not speaking about himself!

This elementary concept, so little accepted in the West, is taken for granted by many millions in eastern countries.

Let us compare a Bible reading with the words found in the much older Bhagavad Gita:

First, the words of Jesus: ‘Your father Abraham was overjoyed to see my day; he saw it and was glad.’

The Jews protested: ‘You are not yet fifty years old. How can you say that you have seen Abraham?’

Jesus replied: ‘In very truth I tell you, before Abraham was born, I am.’

Then the words of the legendary Avatar, Krishna, to his disciple:

‘I have been born may times, Arjuna, and many times has thou been born. But I remember my past lives, and thou hast forgotten thine.

When righteousness is weak and faints, and unrighteousness exults in pride, then my spirit arises on earth.

For the salvation of those who are good, for the destruction of evil men, for the fulfilment of the kingdom of righteousness, I come to this world in the ages that pass.’

SO WHAT DID THE MASTER REALLY TEACH?

In clarifying this, let us first state what he did not teach:

The Master did not teach about mystical vicarious atonement or any special act of divine intervention whereby man could escape the wages of sin. Karma is natural law, which is the divine will and purpose in its enactment and expression. The law is perfect in its operation: it does not need ‘grace’ to ensure man’s salvation. His spiritual evolution is the only reconciliation to God; his freedom from the cycle of re-incarnation his salvation at a stage thereof.

“God is not mocked. As a man sows, so shall he reap.”
Galatians 6:7

“... you will certainly not come out from there until you have paid the last penny.”
Mathew 5: 26

“The one who conquers – I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God, and he will by no means go out any more …...”
Revelation 3:12

And then what he did teach – the following are interpretative paraphrases of the biblical passages referred to:

“There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews:
The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him.
Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?
Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.
That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
Nicodemus answered and said unto him, How can these things be?
Jesus answered and said unto him, Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things?”
John 3:1-10

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only directly manifestation of himself (the Christ Spirit)… “
John 3:16

Commentary: Initiates experience this divine manifestation as light/and or sound. By ‘bathing’ in it as instructed their evolution accelerated.

“But to all who acknowledge its redeeming power it gave the power to attain God-realisation, to all who exercised their trust in the Word.”
John 1:12

Commentary: The only existence is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent consciousness. God is the intelligence, power and substance of the universe, which is consciousness expressing itself in a kaleidoscopic infinity of energy patterns.

John, the initiator, speaks about the Light and the Sound (Word) and the coming Avatar – a master of such high evolution that in him man’s inherent divinity is evident; someone who is God-realised; who knows by experience that the Father and the Son (Divine true self) are One and who is able to show others how to let the Son (here, the Sound of the Holy Spirit to be meditated on) reveal the Father to them also. The Self, the soul’s inner light, may be traced to its source to reveal the universal light: we attain God-realisation via Self-realisation or realisation of our true nature and relationship with God.

Like other masters developed in the east, Jesus would speak of God in the first person to indicate that when a God-realised master identifies himself with man’s innate divinity, his every action is virtually an expression of the divine will and purpose. The Jews misunderstood this, as millions do today.

By 253 AD when, for reasons of social stability and political expediency, the Roman Emperor Constantine convened the First Council of Nicaea, the mistaken concepts of the Master Jesus as exclusive manifestation of divinity in its ‘Son as Saviour’ aspect and the doctrine of the vicarious atonement were already gaining ascendancy. This resulted in translations being misleading even when accurate because of the translators’ confused interpretations of the statements of the mystic John, who of all disciples was closest to Jesus, because he alone understood the esoteric import of his master’s teachings.

Resorting to the original Greek does not help: it is essential to bear in mind when reading the Gospel as it now stands that the meanings of the various references to the “Son”, “Son of Man” and “me” may switch back and forth between the man Jesus, the Christ Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and Atman, the omnipresent divinity at the kernel of his and every soul.

The “I Am”, the True Self, the Innate Divinity, the Christ Spirit, is the way and the truth and the life. No-one attains God-realisation except by letting his higher self take him to Self-realisation.
John 14:6

(which is realising that):
The Self and the Father are one.
John 10:30

And that:

He that has seen the True Self, the Innate Divinity of himself (and everyone else), has seen the Father.
John 14:9

So the Master Jesus taught:

The value of initiation
into a practise whereby initiates bathe in the “Word and Light” –
- a divine emanation which attracts souls heavenward, and
by simultaneously living charitably and lovingly,
reduce the tendency to incur earthbinding karmic consequences,
while rapidly working off karmic debt, and
become Self-realised and, concomitantly, God-realised,
and free of the karmic imperative of earth-plane experience,
and attain masterhood and ascension to the celestial spheres.

His every comparison with himself was a reference to
every soul’s potential and destiny.
All could attain the right to call themselves “sons of God.”

The truth that sets us free also sets us free of the dogma of the Church and the Beast whose number is Six hundred and sixty-six, and frees us to attain an ever truer concept of, and relationship with, the Christ.

Bibliography

The Bible – Authorised by King James, and the Jerusalem translations.
The New Testament Apocrypha – Various translations.
Keep the Rome Fires Burning – Maurice Barbanell
The Curse of Ignorance – Arthur Findlay
Many Mansions – Gina Cerminara
Spirit Teachings – Rev. W. Stainton Moses
Bhagavad Gita – Translations by Swami Sivananda, Prabhavananda and Isherwood, and Juan Mascaro.