World Famous Cults and Fanatics Read Online Free PDF Page A

driver’s hasty braking. Seconds before, acting on an impulse and completely unaware of the man about to
    throw himself on the tracks, a passenger had pulled down the emergency handle, which automatically applies the brakes of the train. The passenger had no particular reason for doing so. In fact,
    the Transport Authority considered prosecuting him on the grounds that he had had no reasonable cause for using the emergency system!
    ***

 
    Chapter Two
    Waiting for the Warrior-King
    A lthough many of the great mystics spent their lives as members of the Church, they did not believe that the Church was essential for
“salvation”. Man can know God directly, without the need for priests and sacraments. Some of them – like the thirteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart – came dangerously
close to being excommunicated, or even burned at the stake. (Eckhart was tried for heresy but died before he was condemned – which he was.)
    It was only one step from this belief that man has direct access to God, to the belief that there is no such thing as sin. If man is truly free, then he has choice, and if he chooses to
reject the idea that something is sinful – for example, sexual promiscuity or incest – no authority has a right to tell him he is a sinner. Preachers of this doctrine were known as
Brethren of the Free Spirit.
    Was Jesus a Messiah?
    T he answer to that question may seem obvious, for his followers certainly regarded him as the Messiah. But did Jesus agree with them? The
answer is: probably not. When his disciple Peter told him: “They call you the Christ, the Messiah,” Jesus advised him to be silent. The claim obviously embarrassed him.
    Why? Because, as we have seen, the Jewish craving for a messiah arose out of the longing for someone to lead them to victory. After the Assyrian invasion, the Jews became a conquered people,
oppressed by a series of more powerful nations: the Seleucids (descendants of Alexander the Great), the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Romans. For the same reason, the British of a thousand years
later came to believe firmly that King Arthur would return to throw off the foreign yoke. Jesus had no desire to be regarded as a military commander, which is what the word messiah originally
implied.
    What is difficult for modern Christians to grasp is that Jesus was only one of many Hebrew prophets who were believed to be the Messiah; the historian Josephus mentions several of them. He
regarded them all as charlatans and agitators. Christians later changed Josephus’s text, in which Jesus is described as a small man with a hunched back and a half-bald head, to read:
“six feet tall, well grown, with a venerable face, handsome nose . . . curly hair the colour of unripe hazel nuts . . .”, and various other details that transform the unprepossessing
little man into the early Christian equivalent of a film star. So all the writings about Jesus have to be treated with great caution; the later Christians were quite unscrupulous in changing
anything that disagreed with their own image of “the Messiah”.
    But if Jesus declined to be regarded as a military leader, why did anyone pay any attention to him? The answer is that he announced that the end of the world was about to take place, and that
this would happen within the lifetime of people then alive. This is why he told them to take no thought for the morrow, and that God would provide. The world would soon be ending.
    It is also important to understand that it was the Jews themselves, not their Roman conquerors, who disliked Jesus. The Sadducees, who loved Greek culture and disbelieved in life after death,
thought him an uncultivated fanatic. The Pharisees, who regarded themselves as the guardians of the Law, reacted angrily to Jesus’s attacks on them as narrow-minded and old-fashioned. The
Zealots wanted to see the Romans conquered and thrown out of Palestine, and had no patience with a messiah who preached peace and love.