Literary critic Patrick Sammut interviews author Anton Sammut

about his book The Secret Gospel of Jesus.

Your book comprises a story that runs parallel to the narratives found in the New Testament Gospels but which contains certain details which are not to be found in the latter. What do you have to say about this?

As you are perfectly aware, every novel needs to adopt a particular literary style and this is crucial if it is to be a reflection of the theme of the book. In the case of The Secret Gospel of Jesus, I needed to maintain the style used in the Gospels so that the reader would be able to relate to the text more easily.

As for the details that you are referring to, I would like to emphasise the fact that I did not just make up these specific details using my imagination. They are all based on, and in some cases actually copied verbatim from Gnostic Gospels and other historical documents which for political and theological reasons were put aside or almost completely destroyed by those who did not want to have certain facts revealed. Proof of this can be found in the fact that the 27 books of the New Testament represent but an extremely minute fraction of the Christian literature that was produced in the first three centuries after Jesus’s time. These Gospels are known as Apocrypha: sacred texts that were highly revered by the earliest of communities and for this reason, some of these details are included in this novel too so that the reader could thoroughly comprehend Jesus’s humanity just as he realistically was. I say this because in reality, in the New Testament Gospels we come across Jesus as a rather psychologically incomplete person, in the sense that in these texts he never smiles, laughs or jokes with his friends – how could this be possible? In addition, we are not told anything about what he did in his free time and whether he did any travelling in his life and if so, where to. It is only logical to ask, did Jesus’s life consist only of what is written in the New Testament?

Contrastingly, there are people who reason that what is narrated in these Gospels is enough for a person’s soul salvation. However, I seriously suspect that those who reason in this way are only doing so to protect the romantic interpretation with which they were indoctrinated since they were children without ever pausing to probe about how things had indeed happened. In fact, from this point of view, the New Testament Gospels contain quite a number of anomalies especially when it comes to their translation from the original texts. As an example, let us just mention the episode where the rooster crows (Matthew 26:34) which was actually not a rooster at all but a man or sentry who used to be on guard duty in the Temple. Every four hours this man needed to sound a type of bugle known as a Shofar, to indicate a certain length of time had passed. The problem occurred when the original text was translated into Latin where the word Shofar was translated as Gullicinium that means ‘rooster crowing’ which probably referred to the particular sound this bugle made when it was blown. This is only one example of many much greater errors that exist in the New Testament and if anyone is interested in learning more about such biblical inconsistencies, they may refer to my book The Other Side of the Judeo-Christian History where I go into much finer detail about these discrepancies.

In spite of all these facts, many people would resolutely insist on romanticising Jesus’s biblical story because many times fictions are easier to digest than reality. By ‘romanticising’ I refer to how people are not particularly interested in how things really happened but prefer to believe in that which reflects their cultural or religious identity, a personal identity they have been steeped in since their most initial years, an egoic structure which they refer to as ‘faith’, which they have simply built on the indoctrination that others have invented for them without their ever having tried to discover the truth inside themselves. In fact, it is due to these religious beliefs that throughout history entire populations have been eradicated by ‘holy wars’ waged against other religions: a personal ego that is in continual conflict against the ego of all those that confront it, both personally as well as collectively (Collective Narcissism). This is where the importance of the details I have included in this novel came into effect. Contrary to what many people genuinely believe, Jesus did not establish any religion; it was someone else who deviously invented a new religion around Jesus’s life. Jesus only wanted to liberate people by revealing them how to experience the Kingdom of Heaven inside themselves, that which is known in Buddhism and in other spiritual disciplines as the Enlightened State.

Jesus and his unconditional love of the weak, including women, children and animals. To what extent do you think that Jesus was a revolutionary of his time and the place where he lived?

Obviously, for enlightened persons like the Buddha and Jesus, it was purely natural that through their morphic resonance or their total interconnectivity with all creatures they would defend all those that were shunned by society. In fact, another key factor that I earnestly wished to emphasise in this novel was the excellent relationship Jesus had with the other sex. Indeed, in the novel it is women who were the most devoted of Jesus’s disciples and above all, it was women’s extraordinary intuition that enabled them to understand precisely what Jesus’s teaching was all about. One such woman was Mari of Magadha who is better known today as Mary Magdalene. She was an extraordinary woman who has nothing to do with the infamous woman whose name is besmirched in the current manipulated texts of the New Testament, something that will probably come to light later on.

Regarding your second part of the question, I do understand what you implied by the term ‘revolutionary’, in the sense that Jesus’s teaching was much more advanced and radical than the Zeitgeist or the Spirit of the Age that his contemporary societies were caught up in then. However, we must be extremely cautious how to associate this term with Jesus unless it is in the appropriate way that you yourself used it because psychologically speaking, this term implies a dualistic concept that means Jesus may have been against some form of status quo. We must be scrupulously careful here because Jesus had no intention of ever being such a revolutionary. To be a ‘revolutionary’, such a person must bring to light a fundamental concept that his ego must be adamantly opposed to it. For example, an individual of this type always feels the need to develop ‘a mission’ out of the injustices of the world (Narcissistic Supply) but often he manages this not to bring about some form of global justice – since this is essentially impossible – but simply to feel morally superior to others (Existential Narcissism). This is simple logic since what this person is supposed to be reforming and bettering inside of him, he expects to do it in the external world. For instance, imagine an idyllic world devoid of all injustice – what could such an Existentialist complain about then? Yet such people would still be able to detect something about which to rebel, something over which they could vent their unpleasant feelings. These are the same people that Jesus refers to in Matthew 11:17, “We played the pipe for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.” Such conceited people are so spiritually devoid that they actually enjoy being addressed in this negative way because their ego thinks it has found a rival with whom to fight, consequently being identified as such.

Yes, it is factual that Jesus fought for justice and for the downtrodden as Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) did through his Satyāgraha (non-violent resistance), but Jesus was not a revolutionary like the ones I mentioned earlier. Being an enlightened person, Jesus was not captured in the illusion of the dualistic separation which is the mentality of the egoic self against the world since he perceived everything as being one with God. Therefore, since Jesus was free from the prejudice of the human ego, this implies that his actions and teachings would be decidedly opposed to society’s prejudiced dualism. In my opinion, it is only in this specific way we can consider Jesus a ‘revolutionary’ when it comes to describing his extraordinary personality.

What enticed you to write a novel like this? What were the resources you used?

As far as resources are concerned, I used various texts including those that I have just mentioned, besides other historical ones like Brahmanic, Hinduist and Buddhist texts. However, I would like adding that not everyone has easy or direct access to some of these documents. One could say that these texts, such as the Apocryphal and Gnostic Gospels are not part of the New Testament. But then one could also reason that although many people believe that Jesus was born in a cave they might not know that this idea had its inception not in the New Testament Gospels but in the other documents that I used in this novel. In spite of this, if people continue wanting to believe that Jesus was born in a cave, then they will find it much more difficult to believe that Jesus studied at the Library of Alexandria and he undertook lengthy journeys to India and Kashmir as are narrated in the same manuscripts from whence the story of Jesus being born in a cave also originated.

Therefore, what induced me to write this novel was to portray Jesus as a human being rather than a God-like man: a theological notion known as Apotheosis or the divination of a mythological figure, where in the case of Jesus, this process was copied in its entirety from the religion of Mithra where their ‘divinations’ are practically the same. This is why I wanted to separate the romanticised Jesus of religion from the actual historical man.

The part that reveals the connection Jesus had with the Oriental spiritual wisdom is absolutely fascinating. This is what ties this work of yours to the other books you have published. What are your reactions?

In fact, this novel represents the culminating product of three other books that came before it, which are The Other Side of the Judeo-Christian History (2012), The Philosophy of Cosmic Spirituality (2014), and Consciousness – the Concept of Mind (2016), all of which are available also in Maltese. I arranged these books to be a trilogy so that first of all I would assist the reader from one stage to another and secondly to emphasise the understanding that the teachings of Jesus were universal and not connected to any other form of religion, so much so, that his spiritual wisdom was the same as was taught by other enlightened man. For example, it can be noted that what the Buddha taught – who lived 500 years before Jesus – was the same as what Jesus taught. Take, for instance, the Buddhist Dhammapada Sutra (10:1), where the Buddha says, “Consider others as you do your own self,” while Jesus declared, “Do unto others that which you would have them do unto you.” Then in the Majjhima Nikaya Sutra (21:6), the Buddha declares, “If someone strikes you across the face with his hand, you must abandon all thought of revenge,” while Jesus proclaims, “If someone strikes your cheek, turn the other one.” And again, in the Dhammapada (4:7), the Buddha says, “Do not look at the sins of others, but observe what you have done or what you have left undone,” while Jesus affirms, “Those who are without sin, let them throw the first stone.”

It is also worthy to point out that the similarities I have mentioned are just a minute fraction of all the similar teachings where the Buddha and Jesus overlap each other and if anyone is interested in such features they can consult my book The Philosophy of Cosmic Spirituality where I go into much greater detail about this.

In some ways, this novel invites us to avoid all that which is superficial and useless to finally be able to see the true Light. Why is this and, what is the true Light?

In this regard, we can see that about two thousand years ago, which is the time when the Light of ancient wisdom began to be shunned to make way for the collective religions, Man fell into an abyss of spiritual ignorance. This was not because humanity had regressed substantially in this area but because those who had committed this perverse acrobatic manoeuvre wanted to maintain their religious hold over the people. These ‘religious guidelines’, however, did not and never could reflect the spiritual wisdom that the Children of the Light taught, precisely because these types of religions work only on the conceptual level of the mind, which is that psychological department in which the illusive ego of every human being functions (Sanskrit, Karmaja-adhyasa). In fact, it was for this particular reason that humanity, especially in the West, was engulfed by a psychosis of tremendous religious fear. Many of these neurotic fears, as an aware person can effortlessly comprehend, originated from the invention of the concept of hell, because it was through this fallacious idea of hell that the masses could be brought under the absolute control of those who, from the beginning, had never embraced the Divine Light, for the fundamental reason that this spiritual wisdom could end up freeing humanity from every form of psychic and religious slavery, which is exactly what Jesus wanted to do. Hence, at this point I think it would be a worthy idea to include a short side note about this erroneous concept of hell, so the reader could acquire a sounder understanding of this distorted belief.

If one were to carefully analyse the original texts of the Gospels – from which for example many of the truths concerning reincarnation and karma about which Jesus spoke were eliminated (although some details about these ideas may however be detected here and there) – one would find that in certain passages, Jesus employed the term Gehenna.

The word Gehenna is derived from the Hebrew Gehinnom which refers to the Valley of Hinnom, a remote place outside Jerusalem where in the times of Jesus was used as a dump where the deceased bodies of criminals were cast and then burnt. This is the reason why Jesus made use of this place, eschewed by the Jews, to symbolically explain the contaminated state the human spirit/psyche would find itself in when it did not foster the Kingdom of Heaven within it. Put differently, these symbolic words of Jesus meant that, due to the fact that this place shunned by the Jews was to be found outside of the walls of Jerusalem and was, in addition, a place where in ancient times sacrifices made in honour of Moloch were conducted (2 Kings 23:10), for the Jews this was a place to be doubly shunned. Accordingly, Jesus wanted to demonstrate that those who did not welcome the Kingdom of Heaven within them would be like someone cut off from the grace of God like the dumping place in the Valley of Hinnom was cut off from the walls of Jerusalem which in Jesus’s symbology, this Holy City represented the presence of God in human beings (Hebrew, Šekīnah). However, along the years, those who deceptively edited these original Gospels ended up contorting the teachings of Jesus according to their theological and political needs, enabling them to keep control over the masses – and it was at this convenient point they came up with the deceiving concept of hell.

Despite all this, many of those who adhere to these religions are not particularly interested in discovering these truths because they are more than satisfied with continuing to believe what was dictated to them in the past. There is little that can be done for such people because when you do try to elucidate them about these historical facts they will instinctively put up a firm resistance against such truths without realising that by this exhausting, neurotic approach, they are also draining their inner élan vital, and for this deleterious repercussion, they must continue to supplicate some divine entity beyond their own self ‘to save their souls’. Therefore, it is useless to prove such people that religion is but a fabrication of the human mind because they have been so thoroughly indoctrinated that their existential identity (Sanskrit, ālaya-vijñāna) will not allow them to accept anything but that which they were indoctrinated in since when they were children.

However, this does not mean such people are not worthy individuals; on the contrary, many are indeed good-hearted persons. Most importantly, I would like making it clear that there is nothing wrong with a person following a religion. What these people need to understand is that the exemplary life they are leading is not due to their following any particular religion but is possible because they happen to be at an advanced level of Consciousness (to properly comprehend what I mean by this term, I courteously invite the reader to consult my book Consciousness, The Concept of Mind and the Transcendence of Conventional Thought). For example, a specific person can be illiterate and not follow any form of religion but regardless, he may however be the most just person on earth; conversely, another person may have an abundance of doctorates in theology but nevertheless remain a dishonest person. For example, there have been many popes that followed this perverse model. One of them was Pope Sergius III (Papacy, 904-911), who among others ordered the assassination of another pope and whose pontificate was described as a reign of pornocracy governed by prostitutes. He was followed by Pope Benedict IX (Papacy, 1032-1048) who lived a completely dissolute and frenzied life, so much so that Doctor of the Church St Peter Damian (c.1007-1072), described him as revelling in immorality. In fact, in his Liber Gomorrhianus, a treatise about papal corruption and sexual abuse, Peter Damian accuses Benedict IX of regularly indulging in homosexual and bestial acts. And these that I mention here are but a minuscule fraction of the numerous corrupt popes who came along the years.

I mention such things to highlight the fact that it is not religion that makes a person just but how well an individual manages to spiritually transform his life, an internal transformation, which in the original Greek Gospels Jesus referred to as metanoia: a significant word, which also happened to be the title of one of my novels (2018). It is this which is the real Light or the Kingdom of Heaven that a responsible person should aspire to: a spiritual wisdom that cannot be found except within man’s Higher Self or in his mind/spirit/soul.

The last sections of your book take the form of a detective story where you explain what might have happened to Jesus after he was taken off the cross. Once again, you are treading on dangerous ground since you are implying that some crucial truths have been covered up for whole centuries. What can you declare about this?

What you are stating is true and the fact that I moulded these chapters in the style of a detective story was so that I could involve the reader in a much more direct way since these segments are crucial to the proper understanding of the gist of the whole novel. Having said that, perhaps it would be a worthy idea to examine why I am ‘treading dangerously’ as you so aptly put it.

As you know perfectly well, society consists of you and me – it acknowledges you but in no way does it want to see you realise yourself beyond its cannons, including going beyond the collective religion that represents it, simply because this particular religion depends exclusively on the organised chaos that evolves from the same unconscious dynamic behaviour of the masses. This is so true that collectivist religions allow you to do almost anything – you can sin, break the law and the rest of it, except get to properly know who you really are. This is permissible so in this unaccountable way, you remain an unconscious person, so that this kind of religion can ‘condone your sins’ and ‘correct you’ whenever you need to be reprimanded, without ever becoming aware that in this haphazard process you have come under the undisputed control of those who, ironically, do not even have control over their own actions, as can be seen in the examples of the corrupt popes I mentioned previously. However, this type of religious control over the masses engenders absolute power and it is precisely only this that interests those that transformed the teachings of Jesus into a religious dictate.

At this point, one could logically ask why the System was sociologically built in such an antagonistic way that goes so completely against Man’s free spirit. It stems from the anthropological fact that basically, the human gender is of an ethnocentric nature which means that we are bred and taught in the kind of culture that we constitute a part of it. In a mainstream society of this kind, a member is not taught how to look at the world as he perceives it but according to the pre-established laws that are provided for him by the society since the time he was a child. It is for this reason that it is so challenging for an individual to escape from such a culture or religion which has been indoctrinating him since birth. This autocratic, neurotic system is so effective, that today certain religious people who believe they possess an ‘unshakeable faith’ will go so far as to eliminate even scientific evidence if it contradicts their beliefs. We have become so expert in this area that to accomplish this specific goal many times we manage to fool even our own selves, a mental strategy known in psychology as self-fulling prophecy or motivated reasoning. This is a mental process that enables a particular person to reaffirm his own beliefs and as if this were not enough we end up consulting a specific group of people who, because they happen to be on the same religious plane as we are, will justify our reasoning: another psychological tactic known as confirmation bias.

Therefore, if you happen to be one of those persons who do not conform to any of these religious models, you will be automatically marked as ‘a dangerous person’ for the simple reason that you have become self-aware of who you really are. In fact, if any individual really desires to attain this goal, he can do this just by using his own intellect and inner force. In one of his greatest works, The Nicomachean Ethics, the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC) stated that we actually do have control over what we do and that our actions depend only upon our own will (Greek, eph’hemin). This positive behaviour is that same appetitus rationalis that was discussed so often by the philosophers of the past; that is, the intellectual or logical capacity for rational thought with which a person can decipher fiction from truth.

Said this, I would like to mention one more thing about this topic. When a person is spiritually free, he will remain so even if he is locked up in jail as Gandhi was, whereas along the same lines, a person internally imprisoned by his own egoic mind will stay so even if he were to travel round the world seven times over.

The fact that women could teach The Way and were actually authors of Gospels (like Mari of Magadha) is very interesting and provocative. What do you have to say about this?

Most importantly, we have to keep in mind that ever since these Western, collectivist religions were born, thinking has been chiefly associated with the male intellect due to a ferocious misogynistic campaign that has been raging furiously for these last two thousand years. For example, in this regard, one of the most prominent doctors of the Catholic Church, St Augustine of Hippo (354-430) declared, ‘Women should not be enlightened or educated in any way. They should, in fact, be segregated, as they are the cause of hideous and involuntary erections in holy men. In herself woman is not of the image of God. The man, alone, is the image of God. I fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children.’

I say this to amply show the inhuman position women were placed in these misogynist religions. However, before the appearance of these various perverse psychoses, the women were very well regarded in the ancient world. For example, the Brahmacharini or the educated Indian women – and we are now referring to hundreds of years before the time of Jesus – were from the very start participants in philosophical debates, both as scholars as well as priestesses of the Vedas (female gurus known as Acharyā) which represent the sacred Indian texts that were written whole centuries before Jesus’s times and which Jesus actually quoted even in the New Testament Gospels although many people have no inkling of this.

In Alexandrian Egypt, at the same time, this analogous feminine movement prominently included the cult of Isis who is the Universal Mother and the spiritual representation of the Divine Wisdom. This cult was lead by the priestesses of Isis, who was the most beloved divinity not only in Alexandria but also in all the Mediterranean Basin. But then, in the fourth century, when the Catholic Church continued to gain power along the Old Continent, it tried to find a way to eliminate the cult of Isis and her priestesses completely. In fact, it was at this historical point that St Paul’s alternative religion came up with the idea of substituting the Mother of Jesus with the new Isis as the ‘Queen of Heaven’. This doctrinal tactic, as we have previously seen, is technically known as Apotheosis, a deification process that the Catholic Church had already undertaken when it interchanged the Myth of Mithra and the historical figure of Jesus.

Why am I saying all this? Because I just want to make it clear that from the very beginning, spiritual wisdom was always persecuted by the misogynist religions invented by men but many times it would still come to pass through the heroic efforts of extraordinary women like Mari of Magadha who taught The Way or the Cosmic Spirituality in every time. But the spiritual damage to the feminine world had already been done, especially in the West where there was no longer any point of direct reference that could uniquely represent the Eternal Feminine in the tampered New Testament Gospels. It was for this reason that in my historical novel I made certain that I would once again restore the spiritual equilibrium that existed once upon a time in the original historical narrative of Jesus.

In the last part of the novel, you concentrate on what happens to Mari of Magadha after Jesus, having been saved from death, is no longer part of the scene. Why is this?

Because symbolically speaking I wanted to make sure I brought across the explicit message that the religious and misogynist era of Pisces has also come to an end and that in its stead, the spiritual/feminine Epoch of Aquarius is slowly taking hold, represented especially by Mari as delineated in the last part of the novel.

The Epoch of Pisces (c.10 BC-AD 2050) was the historical era of the misogynist religion of the masses which among others lead to the birth of the Hellenistic Christianity that St Paul invented and through which the religious power over the collective could be guaranteed. However, we presently stand at a very interesting moment of spiritual transition where the new Age of Aquarius (c.2050-4000) will invariably bring about the end of all the religious superstitions of the mythical past. Eventually, these religious neuroses – which are the same gloomy shadows in the subconscious mind that Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung (1875-1961) spoke eloquently of, will subtly change into an era of spiritual illumination for the grand majority of mankind.

In fact, in one of his academic works that deals with these specific matters, Jung stated, that Man’s Pure Consciousness faithfully reflects the perfect equilibrium of the principal four elements that are to be found inside him. These are the body, the mind, the spirit and the soul which can participate in an equitable way and total harmony in a person’s life. However, unfortunately, this was an existential step that went far beyond the proper point it was supposed to go and the calamitous result can frequently be seen in neurotic aberrations for which the ‘preventive medicine’ invariably remained the organised religion of the masses. In this respect, Jung concluded that when there is a psychophysical imbalance similar to the aforesaid example, it ends up appearing as an insidious spectre on the subconscious mind through which continue fiercely to overshadow the authentic identity of the Higher Self, described as the Spirit or the Internal Teacher of Man (Greek, Daimōn). This neurotic mechanism came into effect because during the last 2000 years (circa) Man was lead not by his Consciousness or by his Spiritual Heart that was referred to by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) but by collectivist religions that have always been antagonistic to the spiritual evolution of Man’s Consciousness. This inevitably happened because to adamantly maintain their political and religious power over the masses, those that used to and still continue to control the collectivist religion left humanity in a spiritual ignorance for thousands of years. This spiritual ignorance brought with it a detrimental, neurotic dissonance over the masses which in turn ended up being relayed from one generation to the other by means of that which, in Oriental mysticism is known as Prarabdha Karma, a scientific fact that is to be found even in the DNA of every human being.

However, now that we are gradually entering the Age of Aquarius and thus the Age of Illumination, Man will enter a mature stage where he will start eliminating these neurotic dissonances from his unconscious mind and as a direct result will continue to spiritually discover who he really is. This spiritual comprehension was correctly described by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) as the B-cognition. The ‘B’ that Maslow was referring to is the ‘B’ in ‘Being’ which faithfully represents man’s complete and perfect entry into his own True Nature (Sanskrit, Tatsamāveśalakşaņam). Therefore, the more a specific person comes to know himself in this way, the more he becomes ‘in-dividual’ (Sanskrit, amrita-yana), where he will also realise that the only way to attain enlightened wisdom is to look within. This is the enlightenment that Man can achieve even at this very time, an internal understanding or Aparōkṣa Jñāna through which Man can reach the Enlightened State or the Kingdom of Heaven that was so dear to Jesus. This is what I have made thoroughly explicit in this novel so that it can be clearly understood by everyone.