I make a fundamental difference though between the Christ of the Bible and the Christos of the Gnostic Gospels.
The Christ of the Church is a mythic personality created by the Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicea and he is a mythic construct based on a fusion of pagan myths, pagan sun worship and various cults such as Mithraism in the Roman Empire at the time of the formation of the Church and the Bible.
We have all seen the excellent documentary Zeitgeist which clearly shows that the Christ of the Bible is a mythic construct designed to suit the agenda of the Roman Empire and the Roman Emperor Constantine by 'fusing' as many cultic myths as possible at that time into a new form of state based religion in order to unify those different cultic groups around the new state based religion of Christianity / Constantinism ;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZFV6WxaVSA
The real Christos was not a 'christian'.
Christianity is a product of the Emperor Constantine not Christ.
In effect Christianity should be renamed ' Constantinism'.
Here is the fundamental truth for all Christians to ponder upon and understand ' CHRIST DID NOT WRITE THE BIBLE '.
That one fundamental truth puts the Bible and the Churches in their true context.
The Christos was a divine being. This is simple to establish as for one person to have had such an impact on the people of his time, and all time since, shows his presence was in some way divine.
But the Churches that have built in his name are the very anti-thesis of the spiritual teachings of Christos himself.
What I despise is the Marxist pseudo-Church of England, and all such religious hierarchies, that say they speak in Christs name. The Church of England does not speak in the name of Jesus Christos, they speak in the name of the secular Church erected in his name and in the name of the Bible that was put together to empower the Roman Empire and its emperor Constantine.
The Churches worship Constantine and the power of Rome not Christos.
Christ himself foretold that such Churches would arise after his death and that they would use his name to build their materialist powerbases on earth in order to lead souls from the true Gnosis and to keep man in perpetual ignorance and slavery to the Church and its leadership itself.
The Bible is not the word of God, the Bible ( in its hundreds of different and differently edited forms ) is a political construct, put together by officials of the Roman Empire working for the Roman Emperor Constantine.
The Bible is a political book whose creation was based on unifying the Christian movement and the Roman Emperor under the authority of the Emperor and his 'official' church.
The Gnostic Gospels were destroyed by the Roman Church so as to ensure that only one church with one hierarchy worked for one emperor.
Therefore to say the Bible represents the totality of the teaching of Christ is like saying the Daily Mail is the only newspaper that tells the truth as the Daily Mail managed to destroy all the other newspapers that existed and also managed to kill all its journalists and editors and establish itself in the eyes of a terrified populace as the one newspaper that tells the truth (even if that was imposed at the point of a sword).
Any 'truth' that requires the terrorisation of those that hold a dissenting viewpoint, that burns books that disagree with its orthodoxies, that imprisons those who disagree with its position as a truth and that incites people to attack or villify those that deny the established 'truth' is not the truth.
Only lies need terror to enforce their power.
In fact the commentaries of the Gnostic Gospels were not just surpressed by the early Roman Church, the followers of the Gnostic Christos were persecuted and killed by the Church and anyone who dared challenge the secular power of the Church were murdered by the Church.
To say that the Church of England speaks in the name of Christ is tantamount to being an apologist for murder.
This also applies to all religions from Catholicism to Islam.
Each of these 'religions' have no spiritual basis for their 'secular power' in our societies as none of them as they manifested today are purely products of the spirit. They have become political ideologies cloaked in the rhetoric of religion.
Spirit stands in opposition to the secular, and any attempt to impose a spiritual vision via the use of secular power is direct evidence that those seeking to do so are in fact the enemies of the spirit.
The spirit seeks its fruition in a reunion with god, and any religious authority that seeks to join the secular with the spirit on earth is guilty of the greatest lies and blasphemies.
The journey that the individual takes toward the spirit is a solitary journey of the soul.
The source and salvation of the spirit is not to be found by being obedient to a book, a priest, an imam, a rabbi, a Church or a religion.
Any religion that says, ' You must obey what we say as only we speak in the name of God and if you disobey what we tell you to do then you will go to hell ' is in fact an enemy of the spirit.
The spirit is of god and god welcomes all those who have made the journey to the source of the spirit itself.
In the words of the Gnostic Gospel of Phillip: "Become not a Christian, but a Christ!"
As Christ himself said in the Gnostic gospels The Apocalypse of Peter about the people who were going about saying that they were 'Christians' and that they had the authority to speak in the name of Jesus Christos :
The Saviour said "I have told you that these people are blind and deaf. Now then, listen to the things which they are telling you in a mystery, and guard them. Do not tell them to the sons of this age. For they shall blaspheme you in these ages since they are ignorant of you, but they will praise you in knowledge."
"For many will accept our teaching in the beginning….And they (will) praise the men of propagation of falsehood, those who will come after you. And they will cleave to the name of a dead man, thinking that they will become pure. But they will become greatly defiled and they will fall into a name of error, and into the hand of an evil, cunning man and a manifold dogma, and they will be ruled without law."
"And there shall be others of those who are outside our number who name themselves bishop and also deacons, as if they have received their authority from God. They bend themselves under the judgment of the leaders. Those people are waterless channels."
The message of Jesus Christos was that in order to serve the spirit one had to be reborn as a Christ, in other words that one must experience an internal spiritual awakening that therefore put ones own awakened spirit and soul on a par with Christ, for at the moment of that spiritual awakening the soul attains the same level of spirit as Christ did.
The religions though all say that ' you must obey what we say and all our laws otherwise you will go to hell and be damned'.
The difference between the two is vast - Christos says ' You have no need of a Church when you become a Christ' whilst the Church says ' There is no path to Christ except through the Church'.
When you become obedient to a church or a holy book as the source of the path to the spirit, then you are damned. No book or Church can lead the spirit to god. Only the individual soul can achieve union with god via its own journey.
Anyone who wears the robes of authority and says ' you must obey me as I wear these robes of power' is an enemy of the spirit.
Yet this spiritual knowledge of the Gnosis that was recorded at the time of Christ by the various Gnostic groups has been eradicated throughout history by the Churches. It was only the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls that revealed this lost knowledge.
This re-discovery of this lost knowledge was in fact The Second Coming Of Christ.
The knowledge in the amphora dug up in the desert was the resurrection of Christos, in that Christos was reborn again in our time and his wisdom as stated in the Gnostic scrolls became a flood of spiritual knowledge able to replenish individual human souls and lead them once more towards Gnosis.
The Dead Sea Scrolls allowed the rebirth of the Gnosis in our time, which in turn allows individuals to know Christos for themselve and become Christos.
Once one is awakened by the Gnosis then one becomes Christ and therefore each awakened Gnostic is in fact a reborn Christ and each are the embodimdent of The Second Coming itself.
There will not be just one Christ, but millions of Christos.
The waterless channels of the Churches were revealed by the Dead Sea Scrolls as what they were, whilst the scrolls themselves revealed to the world the true message of Christos - which is that there is an alternative path to the Kingdom of Heaven via the Gnosis. One does not have to travel to a Church, a synagogue or a mosque or be obedient to a book to find God, for God is within us all and awaiting for us take the first steps towards reunion with his spirit via our questing souls.
The fundamentalist Christians that think that Christ himself will return in physical form have misunderstood entirely the meaning of the Second Coming.
What is The Second Coming is the return of the Gnosis - the knowledge to allow individuals to attain the spiritual Gnosis for themselves and become a Christos.
But this knowledge is a direct challenge to the authority and power of the Churches for they are secular powers dependent upon money to survive - and therefore they keep peddling the myth that the Second Coming is a physical return of Christ.
The Churches are therefore the Anti-Christ themselves.
The Anti-Christ is not some Hollywood movie beast or some diabolical CGI effect in a film - the Anti-Christ are the Churches that keep their followers in delusion and lies for their own benefit, power and glory.
The true Anti-Christ wears the robes of the Church and speaks in the name of the Churches.
All those who say ' you must obey our laws, our holy book and our religion alone' are the enemies of the spirit. The spirit is the father of all and welcomes us all back into its arms. None are denied by the spirit just because of earthly doctrine or dogma. That is the greatest blasphemy of all, that the god who gave us sould would deny us welcome just because we did not adhere to the commandments of a book, a pope, an imam or a rabbi.
This is how the Anti-Christ has become able to speak in the name of Christ - when the Churches are in fact 'waterless channels'.
As for Christos - Christos challenged the religious authority of the Jewish establishment and the secular power of the Roman Empire.
Christ surrounded himself radicals who fought against the Roman Empire - people who would be called 'Nationalist Terrorists' today such as Simon The Zealot.
Christ did not remove the difference between Greek, Roman and Jew - he saw them all as they were and each as equal in error in relation to their spiritual beliefs.
Christ came not to remove the differences between nations, peoples, religions and races.
Christos came to save individual souls, not build Churches.
In fact in his classic phrase ' render unto Ceaser' what Christos was saying is that we are each of us born into a secular, material and organic situation such as into a nation or a race, and that we should be aware of that reality and give what is right and due to that nation or race. But our souls belong to god.
Christ is saying that the soul of the Gnostic Christos, an enlightened one, belongs solely to God whilst the physical container of the soul, the body, has earthly duties that it owes to the people and nation that it is born into. In other words that we each have a duty to each other in the context of who we are and the situtation we are born into, but that the soul belongs to god.
This does not mean Christ came to sweep away the difference nations and races and tribes - Christ saw that nations, races and tribes were the fundamental basis of human life and that we owe a duty to each of those existing organic realities. But at the same time the aim of the individual is to seek Gnosis for themselves and thereby fulfil their duty and destiny to god.
Christ was not some lackey of the secular and religious authority of his time.
He surrounded himself with outcasts not lickspittles of the establishment.
For the Church of England to say any political organisation cannot be a member of the Church is in fact to confirm the reality of its own apostasy from the message of Christos.
Note that the Church of England has never banished Communists from its ranks, even during the great purges of Stalin or when millions were being killed by Mao in China.
Churches, Holy Books,, religious leaders, religions, religious authorities and religious dogma do not seek to save souls, they seek to enslave them.
The Second Coming is already here, but we are so lost in delusion that we cannot see the presence of Christos is not as a prince of the Church but that he awaits within us all.