Believe it or not, at the start of the 21^st century we find ourselves in the middle of a religious war. Our enemy, who claims to represent Islam, is attacking the West on multiple fronts. Islamic terrorists have attacked America, Israel, Spain, France, and Russia in recent years, and even the president of the mightiest nation on Earth has openly doubted if the West can ever win this war against these religious extremists.⁽²⁾ Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have professed to be devout Muslims, but their claim to represent true Islam has been widely disputed. Still, while their fellow Muslims around the world have not universally united in support of this Jihad against the West, they have also not done so in condemnation of it either. This should not surprise us, because Islam was born with a warlike nature, and aggression will probably always be in its blood. Although he preached peace, history leaves no doubt that Mohammed supported the use of violence for the advancement of Islam, and his followers have never forgotten that injunction. This observation is not meant as a condemnation of Islam, but only to distinguish it from other religious approaches, such as Buddhism, that are not so warlike.

Constantinian Christianity, the foundation of Western civilization, was also born of war, and will probably always have war in its blood as well. By this, I do not mean the original religion Christ taught, but rather that imposter which came later and modified His teachings. This imposter shows no evidence of being the true offspring of the Prince of Peace, but seems instead to be, much like Islam, born of a warlike parentage. Constantine's Church has been in a fairly constant state of war since its inception, fighting the Jews, the Gnostics, the Muslims, the Protestants, and even a good portion of the scientific community. However, unlike that imposter which came later, it does not seem that true Christianity could have originally been a warlike religion. Its gentle Founder never carried a sword, refused to defend Himself when attacked, and taught His followers to "love their enemies", "give to those who ask". "worship not money", "turn the other cheek", and "resist not evil". Not only did the meek Founder of Christianity go quietly like a lamb to His own slaughter, but actually told His disciples that if they wanted to be saved, they would have to follow His example and do the same.⁽³⁾ There seems little doubt -- that person is NOT represented by our Western civilization today. He is not represented by our politicians or our priests, not by Wall Street, Academia, or even Hollywood. He is virtually unknown. And so are His true teachings.

That could be a problem just now. While the Islamic militants attacking us today are at least being honest with and loyal to their own personal beliefs in fighting this war, we find ourselves in apparent conflict with our religion's peaceful Founder if we fight back. In order to fight back, we must actually fight on two fronts -- we must fight both our outer enemy and also our inner faith. And so, while we are divided within ourselves, our enemy is whole, and would thus seem to hold a significant advantage over us.

Islam is visibly growing stronger and more robust around the world, even as Christianity seems to be dying the fabled "death of a thousand cuts". In Europe, once the stronghold of a vast Christian Empire, an increasing percentage of the population now considers religion completely irrelevant to their lives. Meanwhile, in America, Christianity's supposed new center of gravity on the planet, we find a corrupt ministry and priesthood whose sexual and financial scandals have managed to make the vulgarities of popular television seem tame by comparison. And in science, more and more evidence is piling up in support of reincarnation, an idea which, if true, spells doom for conventional Christian theology.⁽⁴⁾

Nonetheless, the only way we will win this war, the only way we can survive this onslaught, is to be whole ourselves as well, to be true to our religion (whatever that may be) at least as much as our enemy is to his. If we embrace our faith halfheartedly, our hearts, and thus our strength, will be divided already, leaving us likely to lose our battles before they even begin. If we are to be in a religious war, we cannot expect to win by betraying our religion while our enemy is loyal to his.⁽⁵⁾ Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. It has become more and more clear from the last century's archaeological finds that what the world follows today is not Original Christianity, but a heavily edited, modified, and incomplete substitute. People around the world are realizing that even if we try, it may not be possible for us to be true to Christ's original teachings today, simply because we have been misled about what they were. This, of course, has been argued before. Right from its inception, sects began splitting off from the main trunk of Christianity, accusing the church of betraying and corrupting Christ's original teachings. In a virtual orgy of finger-pointing, this accusation has been repeated by every single denomination of Christianity.

While all these sects don't agree what the true teachings of Original Christianity actually were, they all do agree that those original teachings were eventually betrayed and corrupted. Of course, we didn't have any solid proof to back up those claims until 1945, when a large cache of previously-unknown early Christian scriptures were unearthed in Egypt. In Nag Hammadi, a small southern village on the west bank of the Nile, we found 52 early Christian writings that had once so threatened Constantine's Church that it sought out and destroyed all existing copies. And then, for good measure, that same church also murdered any poor soul who happened to be caught in possession of one of these illegal scriptures.⁽⁶⁾ The only reason any copies of these works remained to be found at Nag Hammadi is because Constantine's Church never knew they were buried there.

The Lost Gospels

Never before had such a collection been recovered; this twentieth century find brought the first serious defeat in the church's ancient and ongoing war against these records. For nearly 2000 years, the church's censorship campaign had been successful, alienating the world from some of the earliest flowerings of Christian thought. Thanks to that censorship, some of the teachings and recurring themes in these early scriptures now seem totally alien to Christianity, not making any sense at all to conventional theology. In the Gospel of Thomas, for example, we are repeatedly instructed to "make the two one"; in the Gospel of Philip, we are told that Jesus Himself "divided" in two when He died; in the Secret Book of James, we read that salvation revolves around the relationship between one's own soul and spirit; in the Gospel of Mary, we are warned against having a divided heart; and in the Gospel of Truth, we learn that Jesus' mission was to repair a great division. This theme of division and duality obviously permeated early Christian thought, but was later erased from the canvas of history, making it as alien to the church as a flashlight to a caveman.

A great many of these lost scriptures have been dated to the first or second centuries, making them some of the earliest Christian literature ever written. Despite that, however, these teachings were meticulously erased from the church's legacy; we never inherited them because the church didn't want us to. For 1500 years, the church burned these books, along with their owners. This campaign to destroy all but a carefully chosen set of early Christian teachings began with Constantine's conversion in the 4^th century, and lasted all the way until the end of the Spanish Inquisition in 1834.

It was the longest censorship campaign in human history.

There's no way to calculate how much we lost. Although a few listings of titles of missing early Christian scriptures still exist, we know these listings aren't inclusive. They are just the only listings that managed to survive the editing process of the church. Still, they are enough. They make it clear that many more early Christian scriptures once existed than do today. In the first centuries of the church, the faithful once also read all the following, right alongside the familiar titles in today's Bible:

The Acts of Andrew

The Gospel of Andrew

The Gospel of the Twelve Apostles

The Gospel of Barnabas

The Gospel of Bartholomew

The Gospel of Basilides

The Gospel of Cerinthus

The Revelation of Cerinthus

Epistle from Christ to Peter and Paul

The Gospel of the Egyptians

The Gospel of the Ebionites

The Gospel of the Encratites

The Gospel of Eve

The Gospel of the Hebrews

The Book of the Helkesaites

The Gospel of Hesychius

The Book of James

The Acts of John

The Gospel of Jude

The Acts of the Apostles by Lentitus

The Books of Lentitius

The Acts of the Apostles by Leucius

The Acts of the Apostles by Leontius

The Acts of the Apostles by Leuthon

The Gospel of Lucianus

The Gospel of Marcion

The Gospel of Matthias

The Traditions of Matthias

The Gospel of Merinthus

The Gospel of the Nazarenes

The Acts of Paul and Thecla

The Acts of Paul

The Preaching of Paul

The Revelation of Paul

The Gospel of Perfection

The Acts of Peter

The Doctrine of Peter

The Gospel of Peter

The Judgment of Peter

The Preaching of Peter

The Revelation of Peter

The Acts of Philip

The Gospel of Philip

The Gospel of Scythianus

The Acts of the Apostles by Seleuccus

The Revelation of Stephen

The Gospel of Titan

The Gospel of Thaddaeus

The Epistle of Themison

The Acts of Thomas

The Gospel of Thomas

The Gospel of Truth

The Gospel of Valentinius

While today's official New Testament only offers its readers the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, along with a handful of letters from Paul, Peter, James, and Jude, early congregations also read dozens of other gospels and holy scriptures that no longer exist. All we have left today are these empty titles, which stand as mute witness to the power and thoroughness of the church's censorship campaign.⁽⁷⁾ Although only eight authors are represented in the official New Testament, in the earliest years of Christianity the faithful read the work of at least 38 additional authors (that we know of). The earliest disciples spent their lives teaching a literate culture about Christ, and, as Luke himself testifies, a great many written works emerged from their passionate commitment to that mission :

"Many have taken pen in hand to draw up an account of the things that have taken place among us, just as they were handed down to us from the first eyewitnesses and ministers of the word. Since I have perfectly followed all these things from the very beginning, it therefore seemed good for me to also write you an orderly account."
- The Gospel of Luke 1: 1-3

In the earliest years of the faith, before Luke got around to writing up his version of events, many others had already done so. Constantine's Church, however, condemned all of those early reports, all except the 27 books that made it into the New Testament. And as it was making those decisions, the church demonstrated special favoritism towards one author in particular -- Paul -- who wrote more than half of all the books in the New Testament. Of its 27 books, Paul, a man who never even met Jesus in the flesh, wrote 13 of them. Today, of course, Constantine's Church embraces Paul's letters as the standard by which all other Christian scripture is to be judged, primarily because his work seemed to be, at least before the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, the oldest surviving Christian literature. However, in Philippians 3:10-14, Paul himself confessed that his familiarity with Christianity was imperfect and limited, which would seem to cast doubt on the full accuracy of His representation of Christ's original teachings. He admitted that he did not yet "know" Christ and still wished to accomplish this, and that he was not yet "perfect" in the faith. Despite these shortcomings, however, Paul's writings were not only chosen to be in the Bible, but given preference over a great many other scriptures, including many allegedly written by some of the actual Twelve Apostles, such as Peter, James, Andrew, Thomas, and Philip. Of course, the church's only possible defense of this would be if all those writings are falsely attributed, and were not actually written by the true Twelve. For if they were authentic, then the testimony of those who spent a year or more being instructed by Christ during His ministry would surely be preferred over someone who had only had visions of Him after His resurrection.

Certainly, the church does deny that these scriptures were written by members of the original Twelve; however, there are two things wrong with that argument. One, if these scriptures were not originally written by the Apostles, then where are the scriptures they would have written? In a literate civilization, a sizable percentage of the Apostles probably would have scratched out some sort of written recollection or teaching over the course of their lives, and Luke confirms that this in fact did occur. If these recently discovered scriptures are not the ones they wrote, then where are the ones they did write? And two, very good cases can be made that both The Gospel of Thomas (found at Nag Hammadi Egypt in 1945),⁽⁸⁾ and The Gospel of Peter (found in Akhmim Egypt in 1886)⁽⁹⁾ actually do date from the mid-first century, which is exactly when the Twelve would have been most likely to produce written works.

We know our lists of lost works are incomplete, because the Nag Hammadi find contained no less than 41 early Christian scriptures that we'd never even heard of before. Their titles had previously appeared in no list, no correspondence, no surviving document of any kind. These scriptures were considered so dangerous to the church that not one single mention of them was allowed to survive the passage of time. In the last century, for example, we discovered that there had once been a Gospel of Mary. We never knew that before, and the only possible explanation why we never did is because the church didn't want us to. If the church had wanted that text to survive, no power on earth could have erased it from our heritage.

Not only were all these texts themselves to be rooted out, the church decided, but all trace of them as well. History was to be wiped completely clean of any memory or mention of the ideas in these works. And until their texts were finally unearthed again in Egypt, all we had left were empty titles, and lots of questions about what kind of ideas had once been inside them.

How many more were there? Were there yet another 41 scriptures written in the earliest years of the church that we still don't know anything about? Were there a hundred? Two hundred? There just doesn't seem to be any way to know. If the church could successfully erase all memory of these 41 scriptures, it could do anything. 1500 years is a long time to get a story straight.

Truth Through Censorship

Constantine's Church openly admits this censorship. It claims that all these lost texts were erroneous representations of Christianity and so deserved to be destroyed; and in support of that position, it points to some extant writings of early church figures which say as much. However, this argument is disingenuous, for the church is arguing its case with evidence it itself has admitted tampering with. For all we know, the vast majority of Christians in the first two centuries preferred these forbidden scriptures over those Constantine's Church canonized, but now that all evidence which might have reflected that has been erased, we will never know. As soon as Constantine's Church began tampering with the evidence, it lost all credibility.

Over the years, many have accused the church of betraying its original integrity in order to gain political strength and stability, and such a motivation would be easily understandable. Christians suffered horrific persecution in the first 300 years of the church. Many of the original apostles endured beatings, stonings, and imprisonments, and anyone who accepted a public position as a Christian leader was asking for a short and troubled life. For example, in 235 AD the Roman Bishop Pontian was arrested almost as soon as he was ordained. Rome sent him to the lead mines of Sardinia, where prisoners were forced to toil 20 grueling hours per day on nothing but one meal of bread and water. Most died within months. Like Pontian, many high-ranking Christians were sent to the Sardinian mines in those years, or persecuted in other equally miserable ways. Less than a century later, however, after the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, everything changed.⁽¹⁰⁾ In 314 AD, the new Roman Bishop found himself showered with prestige, wealth, pomp, and the favor of the Emperor. Instead of facing persecution, he was now living in the lap of luxury, with a beautiful palace, a glorious cathedral, and all the trappings of power.

After suffering so much grief from all those centuries of persecution, it was only natural for Christians to welcome a more politically approved status for the church. But ever since that status was granted, historians have been asking if accepting it was a mistake. Before Constantine, the church had been a pure fellowship of selfless heroes, people so committed to serve Jesus that they endured any hardship. There was no question of their personal dedication to the church's ideals and teachings, since they were putting their lives on the line just to be a member. But after Constantine's conversion, the newly "politically correct" church became an attractive career option for the average person. Simply claiming to be a Christian could bring power, prestige, and promotion, where it had previously only brought persecution. This placed the church at risk of being infiltrated by unscrupulous people seeking nothing more than worldly power and political advancement. Such people, if they succeeded in securing a foothold in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, could ascend to positions where their ambition could compromise the church.

The Emperor's New Sword

As Constantine came to power in the fourth century, the Roman Empire was struggling with a dilemma. After centuries of persecutions, it had become obvious that the flood of Christians refusing to pay religious homage to the Emperor was not going to end, even under penalty of death. Constantine knew a radically new approach was needed to deal with the Christians. The continuing sociological phenomenon of civil disobedience meant just one thing to Rome: the masses had become unacceptably unruly, and the Empire needed to find something to render them servile and cooperative again. Until Christianity entered the picture, state and religion had always operated in tandem in Rome; the Emperor had always enjoyed being viewed as a god, and exercising a god's unlimited control over his subjects. The entrance of Christianity into Roman culture was the first real interruption of that privilege. This strange new religion gave its followers the courage to defy the state, as they so famously did during the Christian persecutions. This open defiance made a huge impression on Rome. It left the Emperor looking weak, which threatened the stability of the whole Empire.

But the Emperor eventually realized that this new faith might be made to work for him instead of against him, just as all the former religions had done. Constantine tried to increase his control over the population by reunifying state and religion, two social forces which had recently been wasting their energies against one another. With Christianity working for the state, the Emperor reasoned, he could re-establish his traditional control over the populace, giving commands the masses would again be too afraid to disobey. Indeed, Christianity seemed to hold the potential to make the Emperor's power over the masses greater than it had ever been before. With a renewed alignment of church and state, the people would no longer merely fear the ability of the state to take one's life, but would then also fear its ability to condemn one's soul to eternal damnation in the afterlife as well. If a government could get the population to truly believe it had such power, it would possess the most successful populace control system imaginable.

But some adjustments would be needed first. As it was, the Christian religion showed a lot of potential; the courage and dedication it inspired in men's hearts must have seemed a very attractive commodity to the Emperor. What power a man would have if he could control such faith! But that religion would still need to be shaped and manipulated somewhat in order to fine tune it into the best possible political tool. The state's claim to religious power would have to rest on one assumption -- that earthly authorities could irreversibly damn one's soul into eternal punishment. That, of course, would require the people to believe that a single, eternal afterlife immediately followed one's present earthly life. There was no room for reincarnation in this picture, or any idea that a person might have more than one life, or more than one chance to get things right. Reincarnation, if it was there, would have to go.

Reincarnation in the Early Church

Reincarnation was there. There's really no questioning the presence of reincarnation in early Christian theology. In fact, the doctrine of rebirth was so mainstream in the earliest years of the church that one of its most prominent teachers, Valentinus, almost became Pope. Born in Alexandria around A.D. 100, Valentinus claimed to have been personally initiated by Theudas, a disciple and initiate of the Apostle Paul, who had passed down secret teachings and rituals from Christ Himself. Like Paul, Valentinus also claimed to have had a vision of the risen Christ. Following this mystical experience, he began teaching in Alexandria, but migrated to Rome around 135 AD, where he quickly became an influential and widely respected member of the Orthodox Church. His pro-reincarnational teachings were so well received there, in fact, that he was actually a candidate for the papacy. After losing what is said to have been a very close election, he continued to teach in Rome for many years, and his theology attracted a large following, especially in Egypt and Syria.

Constantine's Church openly admits that some portion of pre-Nicene Christianity believed in reincarnation, and the recovered gospels from Nag Hammadi, preserved in their original unedited condition for 1500 years, say the same thing. In fact, it would have been surprising if reincarnation had not been a part of the original teachings of the church, since the world in which Christianity arose was utterly saturated with the idea.⁽¹¹⁾ In Egypt, that massive cultural force on Israel's Western border, the doctrine was so ancient that a number of Pharaohs even had the idea incorporated into their very names.⁽¹²⁾ And towards the East, rebirth was the foundation of India's entire culture. But by far the most direct influx came through Hellenistic thought. Ever since Alexander the Great conquered the Mediterranean world in the fourth century BC, the pro-reincarnational teachings of Plato and Socrates flowed like water through the Holy Land. By enforcing the spread of Greek language, Alexander and his successors brought everyone into communication in an unprecedented way.

Many ancient reports coming out of Egypt insisted that the belief was common among the earliest Christians, being imparted in secret to the faith's most advanced initiates.⁽¹³⁾ According to tradition, Christianity was originally brought to Egypt by Saint Mark in the second half of the first century. While we possess no records describing the theology of Mark besides the canonical gospel, he may have also authored a Secret Gospel of Mark that contained more advanced teaching for those being initiated into the Christian mysteries.⁽¹⁴⁾ Excerpts from that "secret gospel", which were rediscovered in the 20^th century, seem to portray Jesus initiating a student into secret mysteries of the church. From the very beginning of the Egyptian church, then, a 'secret doctrine' seems to have been taught to those who were deemed worthy.

The Alexandrian Catechism

The intellectual center of the Roman Empire at the time was in Alexandria Egypt, and the Catechetical School, an official institution of the church, was founded there sometime in the second century. Before the establishment of that school, however, the Christian sects of Carpocrates, Basilides, Isidore, Valentinus and Heracleon all flourished in Alexandria. These groups all taught a form of Christianity that included reincarnation, which put them in familiar company in that corner of the world. The famous Jewish philosopher Philo, also an Alexandrian, taught a version of Judaism that included reincarnation, and back then, Christianity was widely thought of as another Jewish sect. Alexandria's JudeoChristian reincarnationist schools have been dated as far back as 117 AD.

The original founding date of the Catechetical School is unknown; any documents that might have provided that information have been deleted from the historical record. In any case, we know the school dates at least as far back as 175 AD, when it was headed by a man named Pantaenus. Although this school became very famous and influential, history has left no record of the teachings of Pantaenus. All we know is that he eventually passed along the leadership of the school to Saint Clement⁽¹⁵⁾ in 190 AD, who ran the institution until he in turn passed the reins to Origen in 203 AD.

Born about 150 AD, Clement of Alexandria was deeply respected in the early Christian community; in addition to being the head of the most prestigious theological college of his day, he was also a presbyter in the church of Alexandria. He was exceptionally well-read, holding a comprehensive knowledge of JudeoChristian literature, including both orthodox and heretical works. Clement used and honored many scriptures that Constantine's Church later condemned, including The Gospel of the Egyptians, The Gospel of the Hebrews, The Traditions of Matthias, The Teaching of Peter, The Epistle of Barnabas, the Apocalypse of Peter, and The Preaching of Peter, all of which he seems to have considered authentic. He claimed to have received a secret esoteric Christian tradition from Pantaenus, which had been passed down directly from the Apostles Peter, James, John and Paul. These mysteries had to remain hidden, Clement insisted, and could never be written or taught publically :

"...the wise do not utter with their mouth what they reason to council. 'But what ye hear in the ear," says the Lord, "proclaim upon the houses," bidding them receive the secret traditions of the true knowledge, and expound them aloft and conspicuously; and as we have heard in the ear, so to deliver them to whom it is requisite; but not enjoining us to communicate to all without distinction, what is said to them in parables."
- Clement of Alexandria, "The Mysteries of the Faith Not To Be Divulged to All"

Did those secret teachings include a belief in reincarnation? The ninth century Greek theologian Photius thought so, accusing him of teaching reincarnation in his work "Outlines" (Hypotyposeis).⁽¹⁶⁾

Although he possessed an extraordinary education and was hailed as a theological pioneer, Clement was dwarfed in all of these by his student Origen, who is widely recognized as the most prominent, distinguished, and influential of all the early church fathers. The most prolific theologian of early Christianity, he is said to have written over 6,000 works, although the vast majority of those ultimately failed to survive the church's later censorship. Still, in Origen's extant works, we seem to catch a far more substantial glimpse of the esoteric teachings passed down to him from Pantaenus and Clement. And one of Origen's contemporaries -- Saint Jerome -- also publically accused him of teaching reincarnation in his writings as well. However, Origen makes a curious distinction. While he enthusiastically condemns belief in the reincarnation of the soul, he seems to openly support belief in the reincarnation of the spirit.⁽¹⁷⁾ Origen taught that the living are born into this world after having already experienced previous lives :

"The soul has neither beginning nor end... [They] come into this world strengthened by the victories or weakened by the defeats of their previous lives." ⁽¹⁸⁾

Constantine's Choice

In addition to Valentinus, Clement, and Origen, we also know that many other prominent figures in the early church taught a form of Christianity which included reincarnation. But we know too that reincarnation did not mesh with the Empire's political needs. And, of course, we know that the church subsequently edited and modified the literature of the time to suit its purposes. Knowing all that, only one question remains : did Constantine intentionally compromise Christ's original teachings to further his political ambitions? Of course, our knowledge of the history of these first centuries is far from perfect, and scholars still dispute various details of the early church councils. Because of the insufficiency of our information, there cannot help but be some confusion and obscurity. Nonetheless, it is quite clear that like all the Emperors who came before him, Constantine didn't think anything was forbidden for him to do. Although he paid lip service to Christianity, Constantine demonstrated virtually no loyalty to Christ's teachings. Over the course of his life, he murdered his own wife, his eldest son, and many of his closest friends, and reveled in the mutilation and torture of political enemies and prisoners of war. Despotic and ambitious, Constantine seemed ruthlessly determined to achieve complete dominance over the Empire regardless of the cost. And although he claimed to be a Christian, he at the same time also worshiped the traditional Roman sun god. Such a life would seem to be a far cry from the ideals and teachings of Christ, but it does seem to have a lot in common with the subsequent history of the Church of Rome and all its descendants, a parallel which has led many over the centuries to suspect that the true founder of the Roman Church was not Christ at all, but Constantine himself.

Shortly after acquiring control of the united Empire and ending the Christian persecutions, Constantine almost immediately found himself facing yet another domestic crisis over religion. The east was rioting in one city after another; bishop was now contending against bishop, and people were fighting in the streets. Although Constantine did not fully comprehend what all the fuss was about, he resolved to put an end to it. He needed a united church for his united Empire, so for the first time in the history of the church, the state intervened in a dispute about belief. It wouldn't be the last time.

By Constantine's orders, 1,800 bishops from all corners of the Empire were invited to attend a great church council at Nicaea, but only about 300 answered the imperial summons, perhaps because they realized that Constantine intended to chair the meeting himself. The thought of a Roman Emperor presiding over church affairs must have been very intimidating and troubling to the Christians of that era; many of the attendees still bore scars of torture from previous Emperors.

At the heart of the matter to be addressed was a simple question: had Jesus always been God, or had He once just been a man who at some point became God's Son? Was there, in other words, a time when the Father alone existed, but not the Son? This was no mere academic question. If Jesus was originally a man who later became God's Son, that implied that other men could potentially also become Sons of God. And if others could become Sons of God, then no one would necessarily need the church for their salvation, but could instead achieve that goal on their own, the same way Christ did. This question was ripping the church apart, just when Constantine needed it to hold the empire together.

In the end, it was decided in that meeting that Jesus had always been God, and that other men could not follow in His footsteps to achieve the same result. Instead, the council declared that the souls of men were not like Jesus' soul, and did not, in and of themselves, possess any inherent potential for divinity. While Christ's soul had always existed, the council decided, man's soul was a created thing, and did not come into existence until the person was physically born. There was thus a huge gulf between God and man, and the church was the only bridge between them. In short, man had to rely on the church to acquire eternal life. In denying the soul's divine origin, the council implicitly ruled out all possibility of pre-existence and reincarnation, while emphasizing the power and authority of the church over the individual.⁽¹⁹⁾ In the end, one definition of Christianity was chosen in that meeting, and all others were rejected. Shortly after, the dreaded Christian persecutions began anew, this time orchestrated by the church itself.

Return of the Christian Persecutions

Some things never change. Since the earliest days of the Roman Empire, anyone refusing to pledge allegiance to the Emperor was put to death, and this attitude did not suddenly disappear just because Constantine converted. After the Council of Nicaea, all who practiced those rejected versions of Christianity were labeled enemies of the state, and started to be hunted down. These new persecutions involved unprecedented literary censorship, starting with Emperor Constantine's order that all writings of the Christian theologian Arius had to be delivered up to the authorities to be burned, and that anyone found concealing them would be put to death. But that was just the beginning. When Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official state religion a few years later, the Roman government published an edict requiring all subjects of the Empire to profess the faith of the Bishop of Rome, and those who refused found themselves the enemies of the state all over again. Much as before, everyone was again forced to either pledge allegiance to the official state religion, or suffer harsh punishment. The church went through an amazing transformation in the fourth century. Instead of being prey, Christians were now the hunters. Instead of being martyrs, church leaders became "heretic" hunters, mercilessly killing any who dared disagree with them. All writings inconsistent with the official teachings of the church were outlawed, and those who read them risked being burnt at the stake. And that, historians think, was just about when all those texts started to be gathered up and buried at Nag Hammadi. For the next thousand years, the church continued to hunt and kill "heretics". Curiously, Jesus seems to have predicted all this:

"The time is coming when whoever kills you will think he is doing God a service."
- John 16:2

With the church deciding what could and could not be read, all authors who challenged the teachings of the church had their works erased from history. Thousands of books were burnt, and hundreds of thousands of "heretics" along with them. Less than 100 years after Constantine's conversion, the church burnt the entire contents of the famous Library of Alexandria in Egypt, and it continued to launch similar campaigns for the next 1000 years. It massacred tens of thousands of Christian "heretics" in France in the Albigensian crusade of 1209-1255, and possibly hundreds of thousands more during the Inquisition.⁽²⁰⁾ Like George Orwell's imaginary "Big Brother", Constantine's Church sought complete control over both public and private opinion. When the printing press was invented in the fifteenth century, the church demanded the right to approve all manuscripts before publication. The church even refused to let people read its own book. As unlikely as it seems today, it was actually illegal to possess the Bible, and simply reading it was considered proof that someone was a heretic. Men and women were actually burned at the stake for reading the Roman Catholic Bible.

Obviously, something had gone horribly wrong. Christianity had taken a wrong turn. What had started out as love had warped into hatred and fear. Prior to Constantine, however, the church had been different, a pure fellowship of selfless heroes filled with the love, courage, and fruitfulness that only comes from authentic health and wholeness. Even though the original church contained the disparate elements that would later become known as the Roman and Gnostic Churches, they were originally very successful together. Prior to Constantine, Christians had been known throughout the Empire for their remarkably advanced social innovations. Christian communities had been very organized, cohesive, and creative, introducing artisan associations, charitable groups, and retirement and funeral insurance agencies that supported all members regardless of social class. They not only introduced these modern social innovations, but executed them so well that the Roman government tried to emulate their new social systems. However, Rome fumbled the job so badly that all it ended up doing was emphasizing how well the Christians had done.

Orphans of War

After the Council of Nicaea, however, everything changed. There then seemed to be two separate churches, the Constantinians and the Gnostics, which were suddenly alienated from and at war with one another. Each of those surviving halves sincerely believed that it alone represented the true Church, the original teachings of Christ, but, as we will see from the recovered scriptures from Nag Hammadi, they were both wrong. Neither half was the whole. What had originally been filled with a dynamic and creative complexity had been shattered, and from its ashes, two equally crippled halves crawled forth. Constantine's Church became a powerful dictator, murderer and thief, waging endless wars of conquest both at home and abroad, while the gnostic church became a disorganized and ineffective dreamer that receded into the shadows of history, occasionally reappearing with new names like Manichaeism, Bogomilism, and Catharism. Each time it resurfaced, it taught an otherworldly version of Christianity that incorporated reincarnation, and each time it was hunted down anew by Constantine's Church. Both halves are the orphaned offspring of Christianity's first war, and neither has known any peace since.

These two halves are very different, but their difference is not an unfamiliar one. One exhibited the characteristics of one half of the human psyche, while the other behaved more like the other half of the mind. Constantine's Church focused more on objective "left brain" issues like discrimination, order, and authority, while the gnostic church paid more attention to subjective "right brain" issues like intuition, imagination, and personal experience. Like the conscious mind, Constantine's Church was more dominant and out-in-the open, while the gnostic church was more like the unconscious, carrying out its activity in the background. We will run across this pattern again and again in our search for Original Christianity.

The divorce between the orthodox and gnostic factions of Christianity did not actually begin in Nicaea. Instead, they seem to have started differentiating from one another almost as soon as Christ was lowered from the cross. All the Council of Nicaea did was bring this process to fruition. And since that first climactic division in Nicaea, Christianity has just continued on the same self-destructive course, fracturing ever further with each new century. Where there had originally been just one church, there are now, according to the World Christian Encyclopedia, over 34,000 different Christian denominations.⁽²¹⁾ Each has its own unique teachings and practices, but none, the lost gospels suggest, reflect the original teachings of Christ.

And so, at the dawn of the first great religious war of the third millennium, the West finds itself unarmed. The world today is in much the same situation the Roman Empire was just after Constantine's conversion: a single monolithic power is again struggling to maintain and reinforce its dominance over the rest of the globe. When Rome tried to use religion to achieve that end back in the 4^th century, Christianity's early history ended up getting erased and rewritten. It is curious that we find ourselves at such a point in history once again, because at this crossroads, we find that what we need most now -- our original religion -- is precisely what we lost the first time we came around this corner.

1. "Falsehood in Wartime", 1928.

2. In a "Today Show" interview broadcast August 30^th, 2004, President Bush said the United States could never win the war against terrorism.

3. Matthew 10:38-39, Matthew 16:24-25, Luke 14:26-27, John 12:26. Certainly the martyrs of Christianity's first three centuries understood this.

4. Dr. Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist from Charlottesville, Virginia, has spent virtually his entire distinguished career researching reincarnation. This former head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia has devoted the last 40 years to the scientific documentation and verification of past life memories, accumulating over 3000 cases in his files. And while many feel that Stevenson's numerous scholarly books and articles offer the best scientific evidence yet for reincarnation, he is not alone in this pursuit. Numerous other scientists around the world, such as Dr. Erlendur Haraldsson of Iceland, are now also investigating cases of reincarnational memories. Meanwhile, the last 30 years have also seen an explosion of popular interest in reincarnation as well, as millions have begun to explore their own memories through past-life regression.

5. We may no more want to engage in a religious war without religion in our heart than we would want to get into a knife fight without a knife in our hand.

6. After having been hunted, persecuted, and killed for centuries by the Romans, the authorities of Constantine's Church embraced the same strategies against its own enemies as soon as it had the power to do so. Shortly after Christianity became the official religion of the Empire, being a Manichee, or gnostic, carried the death penalty.

7. A few of these ancient works, such as The Gospel of Thomas and The Gospel of Truth, were finally recovered again at Nag Hammadi, after being lost to history for over 1500 years.

8. Among scholars of Thomas, the view that Thomas preserves the earliest sayings of Jesus is almost universally accepted. However, other NT scholars have been slower to accept this conclusion, as the discussions that went on for decades among Thomas scholars are only just now beginning to filter out to the rest of the fragmented and parochial world of biblical scholarship.

9. "The original stage of Peter may well be the earliest passion story in the gospel tradition." See The Complete Gospels, Robert J. Miller, ed., p. 400.

10. Historians disagree if Constantine really ever converted to Christianity at all. He worshiped the Roman sun god at the same time he professed to be a Christian. After his 'conversion', he built a triumphal arch in Rome that featured the sun god, and a statue of the sun god for Constantinople. All his coins featured the sun. He made Sunday (the day of the sun god) into a day of rest when work was forbidden. Christianity incorporated worship of the Roman sun god into its rites during Constantine's reign, praying towards the rising sun, worshiping on Sunday, and celebrating Jesus' birth on December 25 (the birthday of the sun god). Constantine's character never reflected Jesus' teachings, even after his so-called 'conversion'. He remained vain, superstitious, and violent, with little respect for human life. He reveled in slaughtering the enemy during military campaigns, forced prisoners to fight wild beasts, and even had a number of his own family members executed. Constantine supposedly waited until just before he was dying before asking to be baptized, and, in fact, historians disagree as to whether or not he actually was baptized at that time.

11. The Jewish historian Josephus reported that reincarnation was widely taught in Judea in the first century, and was even taught by the Pharisees. See his Jewish War, 3, 8, 5 and Antiquities of the Jews 18, 1, 3. This historical report is given even greater credence by the fact that Judaism went on to officially incorporate the doctrine of reincarnation as 'gilgul' in the Zohar, a classic of Jewish mysticism purportedly written in the 2^nd century.

12. The ka-name of Amonemhat I was "He who repeats births," the ka-name of Senusert I meant "He whose births live," and the ka-name of Setekhy I was "Repeater of births." Pharaohs sometimes claimed to have more than one ka (soul), claiming, in effect, to possess multiple selves, identities, personalities, and so on; this suggests that these ancient Pharaohs claimed, just as 'holy men' of the East do today, that they remembered their past lives and identities.

13. A great many biblical passages seem to refer to reincarnation. See The Division of Consciousness and The Lost Secret of Death for more.

14. See Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark by Morton Smith.

15. Clement was venerated as a saint down to the seventeenth century .

16. Clement's Hypotyposeis is no longer extant, but numerous fragments have been preserved in a handful of Greek works. Photius argued in his work Bibliotheca that Clement taught reincarnation in Hypotyposeis. While he softpeddled reincarnation, Clement may have been more open with other elements of the esoteric tradition he inherited from his teachers. In Clement's day, the distinction between orthodox and gnostic was not nearly as defined as it would become later. Even though Clement was a towering leader of the church in his day, he referred to the most advanced and purest Christians as 'gnostics'. There was a huge difference, Clement insisted, between the faith of the ordinary Christian and the knowledge of the perfect Christian. The perfect Christian, he maintained, receives profound insights into the mysteries of the religion which ordinary Christians must accept on faith alone. Emphasizing the moral worth of religious knowledge, Clement extolled Christian perfection, referring to the perfect Christian as "the true gnostic". Despite all this, however, Clement had no notable or lasting influence on the subsequent history of Christian theology, except for his influence on the young Origen. Most of his works, including On First Principles, On Prophecy, On Angels, On the Devil, On the Origin of the Universe, On the Unity and Excellence of the Church, On the Soul, on Resurrection, On Marriage, and others, have been lost to history. We can only imagine what other early Christian insights Clement might have tried to share with us in those works

17. See Origen's Commentary on John 6:7 and Commentary on Matthew 10:20

18. From his De Principiis

19. Even so, the current of reincarnational thought in Christianity was so strong that the church was eventually forced to more explicitly condemn reincarnation a few hundred years later, at the 2^nd Council of Constantinople. See Appendix 1 for more.

20. No one really knows how many people were put to death during the Inquisition, because, of course, the Roman Catholic Church was the only entity that had any chance to keep records. Estimates range all the way from a low of 7,000 victims to a high of 67 million.

21. David Barrett et al, editors, World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions - AD 30 to 2200, Oxford University Press, 2001. More conservative surveys still list over 660 distinct Christian denominations.