Next we will look at The Narrative of Joseph. Copies of this are found in several European archives.
Again, remember that what is here translated Jews should really be Judeans.
I am Joseph of Arimathea, who begged from Pilate the body of the Lord Jesus for burial, and who for this cause was kept close in prison by the murderous and God-fighting [God-killing] Jews, who also, keeping to the law, have by Moses himself become partakers in tribulation; and having provoked their Lawgiver to anger, and not knowing that He was God, crucified Him and made Him manifest to those that knew God.
Two points are made here in this statement that by bringing about the crucifixion of Jesus His enemies made Him manifest to the knowers of God.
First, it affirms that evil still works for the good ultimately, even if that is not the intention. And second, it indicates that only those who already see can see! We can observe this continually in the matter of miracles. Those who already believe are confirmed in their belief, and those who do not believe still do not. Those who are seemingly converted by a miracle will in time either go back to their original unbelief or their belief will not manifest in any practical way in their life. And this is because belief and unbelief, like everything else that rises in the mind of the human being, is a matter of the vibratory nature of the mind and intellect. By belief or unbelief a person is simply expressing the quality of the energies that go to make up his inner bodies. It is absolutely impossible for an outer force to make a person either believe or cease to believe. A religion which gives complete freedom of belief is not liberalit is being realistic. A religion which does not give such freedom only creates hypocrites.
In those days in which they condemned the Son of God to be crucified, seven days before Christ suffered, two condemned robbers were sent from Jericho to the procurator Pilate; and their case was as follows:
The first, his name Gestas, put travellers to death, murdering them with the sword, and others he exposed naked. And he hung up women by the heels, head down, and cut off their breasts, and drank the blood of infants’ limbs, never having known God, not obeying the laws, being violent from the beginning, and doing such deeds.
And the case of the other was as follows: He was called Demas, and was by birth a Galilean, and kept an inn. He made attacks upon the rich, but was good to the poora thief like Tobit, for he buried the bodies of the poor. And he set his hand to robbing the multitude of the Jews, and stole the law [perhaps plundered the temple] itself in Jerusalem, and stripped naked the daughter of Caiaphas, who was priestess of the sanctuary, and took away from its place the mysterious deposit itself placed there by Solomon. Such were his doings.
We are already familiar with this man, who met the Holy Family when they were on their way to Egypt. Perhaps he stole the law by stealing the sacred scrolls, intending to sell them, for handwritten texts were extremely valuable, and Romans or other Gentiles would no doubt have paid well for Jewish curiosities in the same way Europeans and Americans today buy the plunder of vanquished and vanished cultures.
The priestess of the sanctuary was the temple virgin in charge of all the sacred vestments, coverings of the holy vessels and such like and their manufacture. She supervised the work and prayer of the other temple virgins. She was like the superior of a convent.
Stripped naked is not a euphemism for rape. It means just what it says. Unlike today when it is the fashion to bare the body, in those times it was a supreme insult for either man or woman to have their clothes stripped from them. By so doing, the thief demonstrated his arrogance and his contempt for the temple authorities. It was the equivalentthough much more intense and objectionableof a shenanigan of an acquaintance of mine. A brilliant student, he naturally despised the university he attended. To express his disgust for state-supported pedantry, he and another man broke into the school of music and stole a great deal of things. Just before leaving with the last load of loot, he wrote in huge letters on a blackboard: You FOOLS! His handwriting was distinctive and that (alone) gave him away and he was caught. In the same way, after plundering the temple the thiefconfident that he would not be apprehendeddisgraced the daughter of Caiaphas, and thereby Caiaphas himself. It was an act of defiant pride and contempt.
And Jesus also was taken on the third day before the passover, in the evening. And to Caiaphas and the multitude of the Jews it was not a passover, but it was a great mourning to them, on account of the plundering of the sanctuary by the robber. And they summoned Judas Iscariot and spoke to him, for he was the son of the brother of Caiaphas the priest.
A new and interesting fact indeed!
He was not a disciple before the face of Jesus; but all the multitude of the Jews craftily supported him, that he might follow Jesus, not that he might be obedient to the miracles done by Him, nor that he might confess Him, but that he might betray Him to them, wishing to catch up some lying word of Him, giving him gifts for such brave, honest conduct to the amount of a half shekel of gold each day. And he did this for two years with Jesus, as says one of His disciples called John.
This is, sad to say, quite believable. Working from within is an ancient tactic. In our time the most unsettling example has been the domination of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union and abroad through KGB agents masquerading as bishops and priests. Many times in both religion and politics the opposing side has infiltrated through agents that have risen to high position. Of course Jesus would have known the truth about Judas, but all was a furtherance of the divine plan.
And on the third day, before Jesus was laid hold of, Judas says to the Jews: Come, let us hold a council; for perhaps it was not the robber that stole the law, but Jesus himself, and I accuse him. And when these words had been spoken, Nicodemus, who kept the keys of the sanctuary, came in to us, and said to all: Do not do such a deed. For Nicodemus was true, more than all the multitude of the Jews. And the daughter of Caiaphas, Sarah by name, cried out, and said: He himself said before all against this holy place, I am able to destroy this temple, and in three days to raise it. The Jews said to her: Thou hast credit with all of us. For they regarded her as a prophetess. And assuredly, after the council had been held, Jesus was laid hold of.
And on the following day, the fourth day of the week, they brought Him at the ninth hour into the hall of Caiaphas. And Annas and Caiaphas said to Him: Tell us, why hast thou stolen our law, and renounced [hidden] the ordinances of Moses and the prophets? And Jesus answered nothing. And again a second time, the multitude also being present, they said to Him: The sanctuary which Solomon built in forty and six years, why dost thou wish to destroy in one moment? And to these things Jesus answered nothing. For the sanctuary of the synagogue had been plundered by the robber.
And the evening of the fourth day being ended, all the multitude sought to burn the daughter of Caiaphas, on account of the loss of the law; for they did not know how they were to keep the passover. And she said to them: Wait, my children, and let us destroy this Jesus, and the law will be found, and the holy feast will be fully accomplished. And secretly Annas and Caiaphas gave considerable money to Judas Iscariot, saying: Say as thou saidst to us before, I know that the law has been stolen by Jesus, that the accusation may be turned against him, and not against this maiden, who is free from blame. And Judas having received this command, said to them: Let not all the multitude know that I have been instructed by you to do this against Jesus; but release Jesus, and I persuade the multitude that it is so. And craftily they released Jesus.
And Judas, going into the sanctuary at the dawn of the fifth day, said to all the people: What will you give me, and I will give up to you the overthrower [or, taker away] of the law, and the plunderer of the prophets? The Jews said to him: If thou wilt give him up to us, we will give thee thirty pieces of gold[?]. And the people did not know that Judas was speaking about Jesus, for many of them confessed that he was the Son of God. And Judas received the thirty pieces of gold.
And going out at the fourth hour, and at the fifth, he found Jesus walking in the street. And as evening was coming on, Judas said to the Jews: Give me the aid of soldiers with swords and staves, and I will give him up to you. They therefore gave him officers for the purpose of seizing Him. And as they were going along, Judas said to them: Lay hold of the man whom I shall kiss, for he has stolen the law and the prophets. Going up to Jesus, therefore, he kissed Him, saying: Hail, Rabbi! it being the evening of the fifth day. And having laid hold of Him, they gave Him up to Caiaphas and the chief priests, Judas saying: This is he who stole the law and the prophets. And the Jews gave Jesus an unjust trial, saying: Why hast thou done these things? And He answered nothing.
And Nicodemus and I Joseph, seeing the seat of the plagues, stood off from them, not wishing to perish along with the counsel of the ungodly.
Having therefore done many and dreadful things against Jesus that night, they gave Him up to Pilate the procurator at the dawn of the preparation, that he might crucify Him; and for this purpose they all came together. After a trial, therefore, Pilate the procurator ordered Him to be nailed to the cross, along with the two robbers. And they were nailed up along with Jesus, Gestas on the left, and Demas on the right.
And he that was on the left began to cry out, saying to Jesus: See how many evil deeds I have done in the earth; and if I had known that thou wast the king, I should have cut off thee also. And why dost thou call thyself Son of God, and canst not help thyself in necessity? How canst thou afford it to another one praying for help? If thou art the Christ, come down from the cross, that I may believe in thee.
Here we encounter one of the root principles of Protestantism: that material good and spiritual good are the same thingthat spiritual people will never know pain or want. This of course is absurd since both pain and want can work to a persons goodat least to the purification of his karma, if nothing else. Woe betide the modern spiritual teacher who dares to show signs of aging or illness! I knew one leader in the New Thought movement who panicked when he began to get wrinkles and lose his hair. Desperately he went from one rejuvenation treatment to another. He was right to be concerned, for his church was composed of utter materialists whose brand of Christianity was a metaphysical lever to pry health and wealth out of the cosmos without working for or meriting it. Most of the women (and a sprinkling of men) in his congregation had a crush on him, and came Sunday after Sunday to look at the beauty that had gotten him a bit part in a Hollywood spectacular (it had gotten him about half a dozen wives in succession, too). Money he hadhe was getting it out of thembut eternal youth he had not. So his throne was wavering.
I once met an Indian yogi at the Los Angeles airport. To the horror of his disciples, since his last visit more than a year previous his beard had developed some gray streaks. All around me I heard murmurs of consternation. Later I learned that several of them had stopped looking upon him as their guru since he obviously was not beyond earthly change. At the turn of the century when Swami Vivekananda passed through London, he learned that quite a few of his formerly fervent followers had left town when they heard he was coming. The reason? They had learned that a few months before he had been seriously ill in India, and they had begun denouncing him as a fraud since they were sure that masters cannot get sick. His own guru, Sri Ramakrishna, had died of throat cancer, and told those close to him that the purpose of the cancer was to eliminate the shallow and false disciples.
The phenomenon of the healer who is himself chronically ill is not at all rare. One of Americas greatest healers in the first half of this century did his healing from a bed in a hospital. It is all a matter of karmasometimes the karma of others that the healer is mercifully taking upon himself.
Those who identify with matter hold the view of the foolish thief. But Jesus had said: Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour. Father, glorify thy name. Then came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.…Jesus answered and said,…Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out.1
It is true that pain and want do come from evil karmas, from wrongdoings in our past. The sufferings of Christ were expiatory for others, but it was His sin as Adam that demanded the expiation on behalf of those His descendents who had suffered so greatly from the effects of His transgression. Yet through that suffering the ancient evil was exorcised. The same is true of us. As we endure the bitter fruits of past actions their dominance is ended. Knowing this, Jesus would not partake of the drugged wine that would dull His pain upon the cross.2
Since, as Jesus said: Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also,3 we who strive for Christhood can expect that every time something goes wrong in our lives there will be the observers who will insist that it is a sign that something is wrong with us. And they are rightbut not in the way they mean it.
Another delusion expressed here is the idea that belief is based on external events. Not so. But we have already covered that, so there is no need to repeat the facts here.
But now I see thee perishing along with me, not like a man, but like a wild beast. And many other things he began to say against Jesus, blaspheming and gnashing his teeth upon Him. For the robber was taken alive in the snare of the devil.
Taken alive in the snare of the devilthis is a horrible expression, and it is true of those who consciously follow the path of evil. Not beguiled by their ego or by that of any others, there are those who have said with full comprehension: Evil, be thou my good. These are the real Satanists, for they worship the real Satan: evil. Their minds become thoroughly reshaped and polarized until they are sons of Satan rather than sons of God. (I am speaking of their manifestation, not of their irrevocable divine nature that shall in time manifest.)
Jesus openly told His opponents: Ye are of your father the devil.4 Regarding Judas He said to the Apostles: Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?5 Such persons are living embodiments of Satanic power. When they open their mouths Satan speaks.
Many of us have met Satan face-to-face by meeting such persons, but the thought is so terrible that we gloss it over and explain it some other way. This is foolish, for we need to be on guard against such Satanic agents. Through their egotism they usually tip their hands and let us know what they are planning for us, so it is good to mark them out and analyze their actions and words carefully. We can often tell what is evil by observing their reaction to it. What they like is evil and what they hate is goodone hundred percent of the time. So they can be valuable sources of information to us. However I have observed that once a person recognizes them for what they are, even though that recognition is not outwardly revealed, they sense it and disappear from their orbit. For the enemy does not want his ways discovered.
The state of mind of such persons is absolutely as inconceivable as the illumined consciousness of the saints. We should pray for such ones, even though it will unsettle them greatly. We must not despise them or feel enmity toward them, for we have perhaps been in the same condition in previous lives. As Jesus has counseled us, we should bless them and pray for them.
But the robber on the right hand, whose name was Demas, seeing the Godlike grace of Jesus, thus cried out, I know Thee, Jesus Christ, that Thou art the Son of God. I see Thee, Christ, adored by myriads of myriads of angels.
Remember, this man was an Essene who had gone wrong. But he could not deny what he had once known. Either from his Essene practice or from a previous life, he was clairvoyantly able to see the angels that were always with the Lord, surrounding Him in adoration. Despite his evil life, the seed of inner light manifested in these closing hours of his death. Thus in the Eastern Christian tradition we call him The Wise Thief.
Pardon me my sins which I have done. Do not in my trial make the stars come against me, or the moon, when Thou shalt judge all the world; because in the night I have accomplished my wicked purposes. Do not urge the sun, which is now darkened on account of Thee, to tell the evils of my heart, for no gift can I give Thee for the remission of my sins. Already death is coming upon me because of my sins; but Thine is the propitiation. Deliver me, O Lord of all, from Thy fearful judgment.
As an Essene he not only believed in reincarnation, he understood the law of karma. Thus he feared not the mythological judgment of Churchianity, but the real judgment that takes place after death when the soul is weighed in the balance of truth and its karmic destiny is declared. Far worse than the static flames of hell is the possibility of countless births of suffering upon the earth and the consignment to astral hells in between. Even worse is the karma of being twisted and polarized to the lefthand path. So he continues:
Do not give the enemy power to swallow me up, and to become heir of my soul, as of that of him who is hanging on the left; for I see how the devil joyfully takes his soul, and his body disappears.
Another horrible truth is expressed here. When a person follows the lefthand path, his soulhis subtle bodiesbegin to disintegrate. The energies of which they are composed literally begin to disperse and are absorbed into the astral bodies of the evil spirits that surround him or go to feed the cosmic Satanic Power. Thus we have the very accurate term soul eaters for certain demonic entities.
The crucifix is hated for many reasons by the evil ones, but one of the basic reasons is that the crucifix radiates the divine principle of giving up everythingincluding physical lifefor the love of others. I do not mean it is a symbol or a reminder of that principle: the crucifix causes that principle to arise in the subtle mind energies of the beholder. Thus, when confronted with the crucifix they are truly tormented by its presence. On the cross Jesus gave His life for others. Contrarily, the evil ones take the life of others. (Vampire stories are symbols of this.) Jesus gave His body for those who took refuge in Him. The evil ones take the bodies of those they dupe. Eventually those who are linked with them fade away like the Ring Wraiths in The Lord of the Rings. They turn into dry husks, all the time congratulating themselves on how powerful they are and how important and great. Dying they experience as coming to lifejust as those on the righthand path experience coming to life as death. Therefore Jesus said: He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.6 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.7 Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.8 This is part of the mystery of Christ which we must solve withinand withour own life.
So the thief with his clairvoyant vision could actually see the foolish thief being consumed by evil entities that were drawing the life from him.
The physical bodies of lefthanders show this process of attrition. More and moreespecially through television and motion pictureswe see those who are turning into living corpses. No makeup can disguise it. I know a middle-aged Christian woman who heard a man yell: Hey, Babyface! at her. At first she was amused, but then she realized that in comparison with ordinary people she did appear young and fresh.
It is a pathetic thing to see the majority of people looking more and more eroded as time goes by. This is because nearly everyone upon the earth is being obsessed by one or more negative psychic entities that are drawing the very life from their psychic veins.
God gives His life to us. Satan takes life from his children. Like the Greek god Kronos, he eats them. This is why Jesus said: I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.…Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him. As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.9 Satan and his (its) followers do just the opposite.
Do not even order me to go away into the portion of the Jews; for I see Moses and the patriarchs in great weeping, and the devil rejoicing over them. Before, then, O Lord, my spirit departs, order my sins to be washed away, and remember me the sinner in Thy kingdom, when upon the great most lofty throne [or, upon the great throne of the Most High] Thou shalt judge the twelve tribes of Israel. For thou hast prepared great punishment for Thy world on account of Thyself.
Jesus said: God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. Yet: He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.10
And the robber having thus spoken, Jesus said to him: Amen, amen; I say to thee, Demas, that today thou shalt be with Me in paradise. And the sons of the kingdom, the children of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and Moses, shall be cast out into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.11
The outer darkness is the state in which the awareness of the inner light, that is the true Christ within each of us, is lost. It is ignorance, from which arises all suffering and bondage, the state in which weeping and gnashing of teeth is inevitable, the evil tree which bears the fruit of deathphysically, psychically, and spiritually.
And thou shalt dwell in paradise until My second appearing, when I am to judge those who do not confess My name.
That is, just as He descended into hades and offered deliverance to those who had rejected his message of deliverance during his incarnation as Noah,12 so the Lord Jesus in His next incarnation among the Jews will give to those who rejected Him (who shall have been reincarnated at that time) another opportunity to receive His life-giving grace. Those who again reject Him will condemn themselves by their wilful ignorance and thus be judged through their own actions.
And He said to the robber: Go away, and tell the cherubim and the powers, that turn the flaming sword, that guard paradise from the time that Adam, the first created, was in paradise, and sinned, and kept not My commandments, and I cast him out thence. And none of the first shall see paradise until I am to come the second time to judge living and dead. And He wrote thus: Jesus Christ the Son of God, Who have come down from the heights of the heavens, Who have come forth out of the bosom of the invisible Father without being separated from Him [lit., inseparably], and Who have come down into the world to be made flesh, and to be nailed to a cross, in order that I might save Adam, whom I fashioned.
In this instance Adam means the human race that is descended from Adam.
To my archangelic powers, the gatekeepers of paradise, to the officers of My Father: I will and order that he who has been crucified along with Me should go in, should receive remission of sins through Me; and that he, having put on an incorruptible body, should go into paradise, and dwell where no one has ever been able to dwell.
And, behold, after He had said this, Jesus gave up the ghost, on the day of the preparation, at the ninth hour.
The sun, being a spiritual (psychic) rather than a material entity, responded to the death of Christ by becoming symbolically darkened.13 As above, so below was thus demonstrated. Since men of earth had wished to extinguish the physical presence of the Light of the World, and thus plunge themselves into spiritual darkness, so also the external light was extinguished momentarily as a sign of this.
And there was darkness over all the earth; and from a great earthquake that happened, the sanctuary fell down, and the wing of the temple.
And I Joseph begged the body of Jesus, and put it in a new tomb, where no one had been put. And of the robber on the right the body was not found; but of him on the left, as the form of a dragon, so was his body.
The physical body is an extensionindeed a reflectionof the mind, just as the material world around us is rooted in the astral world and is an indication of its nature. Because his devotion and faith had been so intense, the body of the wise thief was dematerialized upon the going forth of his subtle bodies and his ascent to paradise. This dissolving of the physical body frequently happens when the inhabitant is never going to return to earthly rebirthas was the case with the wise thief who, despite the horrible agonies of being tortured to death on the cross, yet defended the Lord Jesus and appealed to Him for the welfare of his spirit rather than his body. We can never know what may be the past karmas and evolution of another. Some who appear to be the worst off are really only crouching to make the great leap upward into the realm of freedom from the cycle of birth and death. And many who appear to be so virtuous are teetering on the brink of a great fall into the outer darkness of ignorance.
The bodies of evil people also manifest their immersion in darkness on occasion. Sometimes they do not even decay, for the earth will not receive them. This is a sign of being almost hopelessly earthbound. Usually only the dissolution of the creation or the coming of an incarnation of God can free such ones. The subject is so unpleasant that it is better to say no more.
And after I had begged the body of Jesus to bury, the Jews, carried away by hatred and rage, shut me up in prison, where evil-doers were kept under restraint. And this happened to me on the evening of the Sabbath, whereby our nation transgressed the law.
That is, the Sabbath was broken by these actions which would be considered as work, and all work was prohibited on the Sabbath.
And, behold, that same nation of ours endured fearful tribulations on the Sabbath.
In later times the misfortunes that befell Jerusalem usually occurred on the Sabbath, including the destruction of the city by the Romans in 70 A.D.
And now, on the evening of the first of the week, at the fifth hour of the night, Jesus came to me in the prison, along with the robber who had been crucified with Him on the right, whom He sent into paradise. And there was a great light in the building. And the house was hung up by the four corners, and the place was opened, and I came out. Then I first recognized Jesus, and again the robber, bringing a letter to Jesus. And as we were going into Galilee,…
By Galilee is meant the section of Jerusalem inhabited by the Galileans and where they usually stayed when on pilgrimage to the Holy City. It was called Little Galilee.
…there shone a great light, which the creation did not produce.
The uncreated light of divinity which was beheld by the apostles on Mount Tabor accompanied the resurrected body of Jesus wherever He went. Usually He came out of it and stepped back into it at the beginning and ending of His apparitions.
And there was also with the robber a great fragrance out of paradise.
There is a divine perfume which often accompanies holy manifestations. Great saints often manifest it by their presence, physical and spiritual. This is the olfactory equivalent of the divine light that is seen with the inner eye. This fragrance is really perceived by the inner, astral, senses, and not with the outer, though it may seem so.
And Jesus, having sat down in a certain place, thus read: We, the cherubim and the six-winged, who have been ordered by Thy Godhead to watch the garden of paradise, make the following statement through the robber who was crucified along with Thee, by Thy arrangement: When we saw the print of the nails of the robber crucified along with Thee, and the shining light of the letter of Thy Godhead [or, the shining light of the letter, the fire of the Godhead, we indeed were extinguished], the fire indeed was extinguished, not being able to bear the splendor of the print [i.e., of the nails]; and we crouched down, being in great fear.
Visions and apparitions are given for the benefit of those receiving them and sometimes consist of things that would not make sense objectively. Certainly it would not seem that the cherubim write letterseven to Jesus! But this sacred drama took place for the instruction of Saint Joseph and those to whom he would recount it. The information given is certainly not merely symbolic.
The letter of Thy Godhead was the ideogram of the Supreme Name, the Name of God, and therefore also the Name of Jesus, for I and my Father are one.14
For we heard that the Maker of heaven and earth, and of the whole creation, had come down from high to dwell in the lower parts of the earth, on account of Adam, the first created. And when we beheld the undefiled cross shining like lightning from the robber, gleaming with sevenfold the light of the sun,…
This is a mistranslation. It should read: the sevenfold light of the sun, referring to what are known in esotericism as the Seven Rays. The subject is so profound that I really do not think it appropriate to interrupt our present considerations for the lengthy exposition required to adequately outline it.
…trembling fell upon us. We felt a violent shaking of the world below; and with a loud voice, the ministers of Hades said, along with us: Holy, holy, holy is He who in the beginning was in the highest. And the powers sent up a cry: O Lord, Thou hast been made manifest in heaven and in earth, bringing joy to the world; and, a greater gift than this, Thou hast freed Thine own image from death by the invisible purpose of the ages.
So mighty is the power of the cross of Christ, in its depictions, its relics, and in its making as a gesture of power known as the Sign of the Cross, that it does indeed shake up the lower parts of creation and ourselves, and causes that which is within to be lifted up unto contemplation of the higher planes of the spirit. For this reason we should often make the Sign of the Cross and never put anything into our bodieseven a sip of waterthat has not been magnetized by this great Sign. When we make the Sign of the Cross it mobilizes all the divine forces with us. When made toward an object it evokes the divine within it. This is really why the Sign of the Cross repels evil beings. It does not hurt them or push them away, rather it begins evoking their own divine nature. But they hate their own divinity so much that they flee from the place where it is being made manifest.
After I had beheld these things, as I was going into Galilee with Jesus and the robber, Jesus was transfigured, and was not as formerly, before He was crucified, but was altogether light;…
During these three days the transmutation of Jesus body was completed, and it was made infinite and eternal.
…and angels always ministered to Him, and Jesus spoke with them. And I remained with Him three days. And no one of His disciples was with Him, except the robber alone.
And in the middle of the feast of unleavened bread, His disciple John came, and we no longer beheld the robber as to what took place. And John asked Jesus: Who is this, that Thou hast not made me to be seen by him? But Jesus answered him nothing. And falling down before Him, he said: Lord, I know that Thou hast loved me from the beginning, and why dost Thou not reveal to me that man? Jesus said to him: Why dost thou seek what is hidden? Art thou still without understanding? Dost thou not perceive the fragrance of paradise filling the place? Dost thou not know who it is? The robber on the cross has become heir of paradise. Amen, Amen; I say to thee, that it shall belong to him alone until that the great day shall come. And John said: Make me worthy to behold him.
And while John was yet speaking, the robber suddenly appeared; and John, struck with astonishment, fell to the earth. And the robber was not in his first form, as before John came; but he was like a king in great power, having on him the cross.
This is now doubt the origin of the Christ the King crucifix symbol, although it was the thief who was seen as a king enthroned upon the cross. This, too, has a symbolic message.
And the voice of a great multitude was sent forth: Thou hast come to the place prepared for thee in paradise. We have been commanded by Him that has sent thee, to serve thee until the great day. And after this voice, both the robber and I Joseph vanished, and I was found in my own house; and I no longer saw Jesus.
And I, having seen these things, have written them down, in order that all may believe in the crucified Jesus Christ our Lord, and may no longer obey the law of Moses, but may believe in the signs and wonders that have happened through Him, and in order that we who have believed may inherit eternal life, and be found in the kingdom of the heavens. For to Him are due glory, strength, praise, and majesty for ever and ever. Amen.
Amen, indeed!
Next: Chapter Eleven–The Book of John Concerning the Falling Asleep of Mary
1) John 12:27,28,30,31 [Go back]
2) And they gave him to drink wine mingled with myrrh: but he received it not. (Mark 15:23) [Go back]
3) John 15:20 [Go back]
4) John 8:44 [Go back]
5) John 6:70 [Go back]
6) Matthew 10:39 [Go back]
7) Matthew 16:25 [Go back]
8) John 12:25 [Go back]
9) John 6:51,53-57 [Go back]
10) John 3:17-21 [Go back]
11) But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. (Matthew 8:12) [Go back]
12) For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water. (I Peter 3:18-20) [Go back]
13) Luke 23:45 [Go back]
14) John 10:30 [Go back]