The Case of The Missing Messiah

FOREWORD In 1944 the author of this essay published his volume "Who Is This King of Glory?" It stood as perhaps the most forthright and uncompromising critique of the fundamental tenets of Christianity that has been put forth up to that time, or even to the present. It assembled and correlated a vast body of documentary and factual data which, if it could not be successfully confuted, rendered the verdict of the non-historicity of the Gospel narrative and its central figure, Jesus of Nazareth, final and no longer controversial. Its thousands of readers are almost unanimous in the conviction that it closed the case beyond debate and on the negative side. In the wide sweep of its searching survey, all that hitherto had, in the general mind of religionists, been assumed to stand as solid historical substantiation of the physical life and exalted preaching of the Nazarene personage disappeared completely from view; or at any rate was seen as incompetent to testify in the category of historical evidence. While on the other side, the more minute the examination of the data adduced, the higher the mountain of evidence piled up in disproof. In fact, when the question was canvassed with the lens of a discerning knowledge of ancient esoteric practice and schematism in the inditing of religious literature, it was found that there was virtually no evidence that could be accredited as factually historical in support of the existence of Jesus. And just as surprisingly it was seen that all the evidence that could rate as historically authentic was marshalled on the contra side. In fine, all the evidence bore heavily against the thesis, and what had been assumed to be evidence for it vanished into the mists of allegory. This astounding determination of course found little acceptability in orthodox religious ranks. It seemed incredible that all Christian scholarship, all theological erudition, over some eighteen centuries could have been either unconscionably blind or hopelessly stupid, or consciously knavish, that it could either have totally missed the discovery of this glaring error, or could have successfully conspired to suppress the truth and permit the Christian system of beliefs based on the life of this dramatic character dominate the mind of the most progressive half of present humanity for nearly two millennia. There is no question but that this complication in what is undoubtedly the most significant and fateful item in the field of religious hypnotization in the Western segment of humanity is both supremely incredible and totally incomprehensible to the general mind. That one scholar, working almost alone and in obscurity, should now establish beyond dispute (though it will be disputed) what the learned gentry of the world had missed for so many centuries, is likewise a prediction that will not find credence anywhere. This observation, however, need not appear so exceptional a phenomenon, since the discoverer is ever the one who singly has come upon some secret, some great truth, that all the world has missed. It is the presupposition in all discovery. The debate is one that could hold the fate of our world in the balance. It would be difficult to adduce a general theosophical concept more fateful for the world (or the Occidental half of it) than the idea that man must discount his own powers, indeed surrender them abjectly, and look for his salvation to a power exterior to his own proper endowment, and not integral with that endowment, in all the crises in his history.