Peter, Not an Initiate, and the Enemy of Paul

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 37 pages

The longer half of a pair, the other being Paul, an Initiate, was the real founder of Christianity. Peter and Paul are treated as archetypes of two opposing powers in Christianity. The secret doctrine preached by Jesus, the argument runs, was disfigured by the Fathers beyond recognition, and what they fought for was not truth but their own interpretations and unwarranted assertions. From the days of Marcion of Sinope the primitive church was split in two: one party viewing Christianity as a Hebrew institution and law, a narrow extension of Judaism, the other striving to replace Mosaic law with universal compassion and true brotherhood — Peter representing the first, Paul the second.

The mission of Jesus, according to Marcion, was to abrogate the Jewish Lord, opposed to the God and Father of Jesus Christ as matter is to spirit. The middle chapters follow the Apostle of Circumcision persecuting the Apostle of the Gentiles: the Roman church, having first denied that Simon Magus existed at all, merged his individuality entirely in that of Paul, whose Epistles were both secretly and openly calumniated by Peter and charged with containing dysnoëtic learning. The remaining pages set out Paul as Blavatsky reads him — Saul in the flesh the parallel of Chrēstos and Paul freed of earthly obligations the parallel of Jesus Chrēstos becoming Christos in spirit; the open revocation of circumcision; Christ for Paul an embodied ideal rather than a person; Paul a Nazar and Chaldean theurgist, and a Master-Builder in the kabbalistic, theurgic and masonic sense.

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