Yehoshua Ben Pandira

He would have received the name Yehoshua, which would have become Yeshua in certain sacred texts, and eventually Yeshu, or Jesus in the english language.

Yehoshua the Gnostic

Allow me to begin this article with a few words from Master Samael Aun Weor:

We were thrown to the lions in the Roman Circus and celebrated our rituals in the catacombs; we were burned alive at the stakes of the Roman Catholic Inquisition. We accompanied Christ Jesus in the Holy Land; we were the mystical Essenes of Palestine.

We are not improvising opportunistic doctrines. We have remained hidden for twenty centuries, and now we descend once again into the streets, bearing on our shoulders the old cross, heavy and rough.

Paul was a Naassene Gnostic who brought our doctrine to Rome. Christ taught our doctrine in secret to the seventy disciples.

The Sethians, the Perates, the Carpocratians, the Naassenes, and the Essenes were Gnostics.

The Egyptian, Aztec, Roman, Trojan, and Carthaginian Mysteries, the Eleusinian Mysteries, those of India, the Druids, the Pythagoreans, of Mithras and Persia, etc., all together make up what we call Gnosis or Gnosticism.

Today, we are reopening the ancient Gnostic sanctuaries that were closed with the coming of the Dark Age.

“Our leader is our Lord Christ Jesus, who dwells in Shambhala, in Tibet, with the same body he resurrected from the dead; with him dwell many other Masters whose bodies are sons of the resurrection.”

V.M. Samael Aun Weor

Face of Yehoshua on an Emerald — Fictional illustration

The True Face of Yehoshua

The face of Jesus is said to have been engraved on a large emerald that would have passed from hand to hand and is believed to be his only true likeness. What remains today would be illustrations and paintings, since the emerald has disappeared. Here is a brief explanation I found online:

There are many representations of this likeness of Jesus associated with a short statement that reads as follows: “The true appearance of our Savior copied from the portrait engraved on an emerald by order of Tiberius Caesar, an emerald that the Emperor of the Turks later gave from the treasure of Constantinople to Pope Innocent VIII for the ransom of his brother captured by the Christians.” The emerald likeness appears in historical annals when Sultan Bajazid II gave it to Pope Innocent VIII in the 15th century. The accounts of the emerald’s origin are associated with artifacts such as the Veil of Veronica, the letter from Pontius Pilate to Tiberius Caesar, and the letter from Publius Lentulus to the Roman Senate. The veil and the documents are apocryphal, as is the story of the emerald. The emerald no longer exists and is believed to have disappeared during the Sack of Rome in 1527 by the troops of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor.

A representation of the face of Jesus was made by Richard Neave, a medical facial reconstruction expert. He is said to have based it on skulls of Jewish individuals from the time of Jesus.

We must also mention the extraordinary work of Ray Downing, who, with his team, created a 3D model of the Shroud of Turin and extracted a possible face of Jesus from it.

**Jesus by Richard Neave / Jesus by Ray Downing**

The True Birthdate

Well yes, it seems that even the birthdate of Jesus is a subject of controversy. It is by studying historical accounts that some manage to suggest a period for his birth, since some of these accounts are dated and when overlapped with known elements of Jesus’s life, lead to an estimate.

Some scholars already suggest that he was born a few years before year zero. But the most extreme estimate comes from the Theosophists, who even claim he was born 100 years before year zero. Who is right… we will surely know one day.

Bonus

Many films have been made about the life of Jesus, and among those that stand out for their visual quality are Franco Zeffirelli’s and, more recently, Mel Gibson’s The Passion. Of course, these films are based on more or less inaccurate interpretations of Jesus’s life. But their artistic quality is remarkable.

I’m offering here a digitized version of an illustrated book based on Zeffirelli’s film. It’s simply for the pleasure of revisiting these images, which involved great artistic effort.