a tale of two religions
For the last thousand years, those of us in the Western world have been reading the Bible forwards, backwards, sideways and inside out, looking for secret messages and divine codes. Medieval occultists often looked to the Bible when designing their works on alchemy, astrology and transcendental mysticism. Michel de Nostredame scoured its voluminous recesses when composing his quatrains. Famous occult scholars at the turn of the 20th century diligently tried to reconcile it with the newly minted theory of evolution. So if you come across a cover story about the secrets of the Bible, you might wonder what secrets? Are there any left? And were there any in the first place?
Let’s do something bordering on heresy and go back to the Bible’s origins. The Old Testament was completed sometime around 450 BCE when it was first read to the public. In keeping with religious traditions at the time, it wasn’t available to just anyone and was written by the Levis, the Hebrew tribe designated as priests of the new monotheistic religion of Judea. It was meant to be part history lesson, part legal codex. The Hebrew conception of God is that of a strict and loving father. He doesn’t play games or mess around. He tells you what to do and you do it or face the consequences.
During the Roman occupation, Jews looked for a savior, a messiah to free them from the pagan oppressors who took their land, built temples to their bizarre deities and indulged in lifestyles considered self-indulgent and decadent by Hebrew standards. There was no shortage of men who wanted to take on the role, the most famous of them being the focal point of a brand new religion. After the crucifixion of Jesus, subsequent uprisings by other would-be martyrs and the Roman crackdown on Judea, two interesting developments occurred side by side.
The first was the birth of Christianity, a brand new religion which preached that the messiah of Hebrew legend had come. Hundreds of religious pundits and scholars began writing the letters and tales which would later be included into the New Testament at the Council of Nicea after which the Bible as we know it was assembled and accepted as canon. Why would anyone have to edit and assemble the Bible? Because there were so many different, conflicting and downright mystical tales that didn’t reflect the history that the bishops at the Council assumed to be the appropriate one. It’s only in the last few hundred years that fundamentalist movement which viewed the Bible as the concrete, literal word of God without error emerged.
When the Bible was first published, it was like a textbook. It was open to various interpretations but it carried with it many indisputable truths and laws to be studied and followed. Aside from the ugly episodes of violent Christian missionaries and their bishops committing religious hate crimes in the quest to spread their faith, the new religion was designed to be as accessible and easy to accept as possible. There weren’t supposed to be any great secrets. You had a direct hotline to God as long as you accepted that Jesus of the Cross was the messiah and died for your sins to forge a new covenant with God, like Abraham when he moved from Sumer to the land that would become Judea.
At the same time, rabbis and religious scholars expelled from Jerusalem and robbed of their temples and schools began looking for secret codes in the Old Testament. Stricken by panic and grief, they looked for an answer to their troubles. Their ultimate goal was to reach God and learn the reasons behind what was going on in the world. The musings and ideas with which they came up during their trances and prayers would be combined with other esoteric ideas and become the Kabala, the mystical engine behind Western occultism from which the idea that the Bible was more than meets the eye was born.
Biblical stories while rich in metaphor and carrying with them a heavy dose of ancient cultural references and religious punditry of the classical world, were never intended to be secretive. They were written to tell stories and discuss pressing social and political concerns in a society where God and politics were inseparable. We started looking for secrets and mysteries in these tales because we were (and still are) desperate to find answers to our biggest questions and after centuries of fundamentalist and occult influence looked to the Bible as the best possible authority to life’s existential dilemmas.
