Course XXVII - Teaching 25: Christendom

Christendom marked a new basic era that was entirely different from the precedent, which revolutionized the world and still today is creed of the European civilization.
Any religion born of the two currents, namely Vedic and Egyptian, flow into the sea of Christianity; and those that did not survive, remain in decline. Christendom will be the only vital religion in the world –conqueror of civilization.
Christian religion is born in the East like all others; it emerged from Judaism and transplanted to western peoples, it yielded fruits there.
Jesus, a Solar Initiate of fourth category and Hebrew by birth, appeared among men in the beginning of our era.
Of humble family, He who had to become Divine Incarnation of suffering learnt the lesson of pain since his childhood.
None know where he picked up that wonderful doctrine of the Gospels that would transforms peoples, since the texts are unaware of his life from the age of twelve to thirty.
Modern occultists say he went to India and there learnt his divine doctrine; others say this occurred in ancient Egypt; and Rosicrucians say this happened in the sect of Essenes, who were ancient Hebrew mystics that preserved the esoteric wisdom.
But none can know it for certain, since those years of study developed by an Initiate remain hermetically closed in the circle of a Master and his disciple.
Until then, religious instructors had looked at mankind and benefited it from their golden thrones and shining temples; but Jesus came and, like a unique example, descended to men, sharing their miseries, living among them and speaking their language. He wanted to drink the cup of human martyrdom. Even his painful death was similar to that of miserable and abandoned men.
How cannot a religion take root when it deified the human suffering, and showed its own God, Son of Man, nailed to the cross?
Jesus did not found any religion, but only launched an idea, the idea of a humanized, understood, sublimated and divinized pain.
Paul of Tarsus was the organizer of Christian religion.
Christ’s disciples, humble and uneducated men, only wanted to revere the Master’s memory and to live his doctrine in the Hebrew frame. Once, even Jesus had said, “I came to save the sons of Israel”. They did not suspect their ideal could go beyond the Hebrew circle.
But as Paul, an intelligent man, a Lunar Initiate with great prophetic vision, saw and understood the wonderful doctrine of the Gospels, he preached to Gentiles, men of other religions. He organized a church with laws and tenets, and moved the new creed to Rome, the great capital in those days.
Christ’s religion advanced fearlessly toward the north. After years of martyrdom, after three centuries hidden in catacombs, and after a long baptism of blood, it got out to daylight to conquer barbarians, those new developing peoples.
The early leaders of the Christian church had a vast vision when they left behind stagnated sages of the East and went toward barbarians of the north, because they intuited that a barbarian of those days would become conqueror tomorrow and thence a support of their religion.