The Bright Star of Bethlehem and the Thorny Path

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 11 pages

A response to a vexed reader of Lucifer, and one of the most temperate pieces in this section. The key to the mystery of Jesus is again located in the wordplay of Chrēstos and Christos, with the observation that the learned Egyptologist under discussion passes over the real meaning of the two appellations in silence; and the Talmudic dating of Jesus ben Pandira to the fourth year of Alexander Jannaeus, 106 to 76 BC, is repeated from the companion file in this series.

The substantive claim is that an Initiate who has succeeded in merging his spiritual being into the state of Buddhi-Manas may be regarded as a Christos after his last and supreme initiation, having been called Chrēstos before it. Carnalising the Christ-principle is rejected: Theosophists will not accept a Christ made flesh, an anthropomorphic God, or a Shepherd in the person of a Pope — though a man of flesh assuming the Christ-condition temporarily is a matter of fact on the plane of matter and a subjective reality in the spiritual realm. She agrees with her correspondent that the suppression and perversion of esoteric facts in the gospels was not done so thoroughly as to stop an occultist reading between the lines, and closes with the passage the title takes.

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