A different way of looking at Christianity

What Jesus only explained to his inner circle (not to the crowds)

Recently I have come across a remarkable and, to my mind, exceptionally well-produced series of videos called The Esoteric Path on YouTube.

The Esoteric Path on YouTube (link)

I find myself increasingly drawn towards Gnostic and esoteric interpretations of Christianity and, in particular, towards the idea that the message of Jesus may have been considerably more inward and experiential than the institutional Christianity with which many of us were brought up.

This has caused me to reconsider something I have felt for a long time: have we lost part of the original, hands-on message of Jesus?

I was brought up with the conventional Christian understanding of Jesus as our Saviour. I am now exploring another possibility—not necessarily that this understanding is simply wrong, but that it may not tell the whole story.

What particularly interests me is the idea of Jesus as someone who demonstrated what a human being could become through an immediate relationship with the divine: that the divine is not merely something external to us, administered through an institution, but something which in some sense can be discovered within.

The history is complicated. Christianity was diverse long before the fourth century, and Gnostic movements themselves represented a variety of beliefs rather than a single alternative Christianity. Nor did the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 rewrite the words of Jesus or decide which Gospels should be included in the Bible.

Nevertheless, something enormously important happened during this period. Under Constantine and his successors, Christianity became increasingly associated with imperial authority, institutional structures and formally defined doctrines. Nicaea in 325 and subsequently Constantinople in 381 were important stages in that development.

My question is therefore not whether Constantine suddenly changed Christianity at Nicaea. That would be much too simple.

It is whether, as Christianity developed from a spiritual movement into a powerful institution, something of the immediacy of Jesus’s original message became obscured.

Could a teaching concerned with personal transformation, direct experience and liberation from fear and ignorance gradually have become a religion in which authority increasingly flowed through doctrines, priests and institutions?

That question has become increasingly important to me. I find myself rebelling against any religious system which leaves the individual feeling powerless or dependent upon a hierarchy for access to God.

The Esoteric Path series has given me a great deal to think about. The programmes are detailed, beautifully presented and have a scholarly tone. That does not necessarily mean that every historical interpretation they offer is correct, and I intend to keep questioning what I hear.

But they have opened a door for me.

If you are a Christian—or simply interested in who Jesus was and what his teaching might originally have meant—you may find the series worth exploring.

I increasingly find myself asking not simply, “What am I supposed to believe about Jesus?” but “What was Jesus actually inviting us to discover for ourselves?”

That, for me, is becoming a much more interesting question.