Note 137 — Part I.—Ralph’s Story. (continued 2)

This, I am afraid, is a misunderstanding (due, no doubt, to my own fault) on the part of our learned correspondent, of the meaning that was intended to be conveyed in the articles now criticized. If he goes to the trouble of reading over again the paragraph that misled him (see p. 307, 5th paragraph), he will, perhaps, see that it is so. That which was really meant was that, though the terms Christos and Chréstos are generic surnames, still, the personage so addressed (not by Paul, necessarily, but by any one), was a great Initiate and a “Son of God.” It is the name “Jesus,” placed in the sentence in parentheses that made it both clumsy and misleading. Whether Paul knew of Jehoshua Ben Pandira (and he must have heard of him), or not, he could never have applied the surname used by him to Jesus or any other historic Christ. Otherwise his Epistles would not have been withheld and exiled as they were. The sentence which precedes the two incriminated statements, shows that no such thing, as understood by Mr. Massey, could have been really meant, as it is said “Occultism pure and simple finds the same mystic elements in the Christian as in other faiths, though it rejects emphatically its dogmatic and historic character.” The two statements, viz., that 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 irreconcileable. 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.B.]