Before religion and the Roman Church there was an understanding of the ‘Outer Mysteries’ and the ‘Inner Mysteries’. The ‘Outer’ were for the common man, sincere and ever-hoping the Divine Grace would spark their heart into the ‘Higher or Inner Mysteries’. The advanced Sages however, had tasted of the ‘Inner Mysteries’ or Gnosis, and initiated those who were ready. As early Christian father Origen puts it with startling bluntness: ‘Christ crucified is a teaching for babes.’
Those who were only aware of the ‘Outer Mysteries’ the, “Literalist Christians rested their faith entirely on the supposed miracle that an historical Jesus had physically come back from the dead and that this was some sort of proof that those who believed that Jesus was the Son of God would also be resurrected physically at the ‘Day of Judgement’. The Gnostics, in contrast, called taking the resurrection literally the ‘faith of fools’!
The resurrection, they insisted, was neither an historical event that happened once only to someone else, nor a promise that corpses would rise from the dead after some future apocalypse. The Gnostics understood the resurrection as a mystical experience that could happen to any one of us right here and now through the recognition of our true identity as the Daemon.”
The rudimentary ‘Literalists’ however, are the ones that took control of the Christian story, later becoming the Roman Church and other denominations. “Literalists were rigidly authoritarian. Gnostics were mystic individualists. Literalists wanted to enforce a common creed on all Christians. Gnostics tolerated various different beliefs and practices. Literalists selected four gospels as holy scripture and had the rest consigned to the flames as heretical works of the Devil.
Gnostics wrote hundreds of different Christian gospels. Literalists taught that the true Christian believed in Jesus as preached to them by the bishops. Gnostics taught that the true Christian experienced ‘Gnosis’ or mystical ‘Knowledge’ for themselves and became a Christ! The Gnostics were so effectively suppressed that until recently almost all we knew about them came from the writings of their detractors and oppressors.”