INTERVIEW WITH MICEAL LEDWITH,
L.Ph., L.D., D.D., LL.D
By Louise SaintOnge of MastersConnection, LLC
Transcribed by Bertha Rainen

On a lovely summer afternoon, sipping wine…

MC:  We are going to focus on your latest, your second DVD, which is a set
of two discs: The Hidden Years, Vol. 2 of Deep Deceptions: HOW JESUS BECAME A CHRIST, that has just been released. I just loved it, by the way. There were many moments of it that were just so moving...

MICEAL:  Thank you.

MC:  …And really connecting to that deep knowing of what the scam has been for so long and the grief about that. I realized in reading the text, that there are many spin-offs of DVDs and many spin-offs of conversations and questions that I could have that would keep us here until the end of time perhaps, which would be wonderful.

MICEAL:  The DVD basically deals with the so-called hidden years of Jesus and what took place then. You know the conventional picture that we all got growing up was that we knew about a few days of his life at the stable of Bethlehem where he was greeted not by the ones you would expect, like the King of Judea maybe, because Jesus was the heir to the throne of Judea, nor was he greeted by the Sanhedrin or the High Priests. No, he was greeted by the outcasts of Jewish society who were the shepherds, and worse, by three Magi from Babylon- three Babylonian astrologers, which any self-respecting Jew would consider made him ritually unclean even to be downwind of them. So that is what we heard of, a few days at Bethlehem and then we were told they went to Egypt to escape the persecution of King Herod. We are not told what they did or how long they spent there.

Next thing we hear is that Jesus is in the temple at twelve years old, and apparently he spent three days there. Then we are told that he comes out of Galilee having spent an eighteen-year apprenticeship in a carpenter’s shop and starts to walk on water, heal the sick, and raise the dead, etc. ...Now if that were true, I think we should all be studying carpentry very intensely right now!

My point is that that story never rang very true with me and there was a time when I sat down to try to discover how much we actually do know about the life of Jesus and I found it was, generously speaking, just three years or less at the end of his life, and a few weeks of some detail in between, plus a couple of years in Egypt that we know nothing at all about from the New Testament.

MC:  As you said in the DVD, you figure that we don’t know anything about eighty percent of his life.

MICEAL:  Yes, more, well over that actually. I am just going to be safe here and say eighty percent, but I would say it is probably much more like ninety. In other words, out of a life of thirty-three years approximately, we know something about maybe three or four years.

MC:  I wanted to start off with two quotes that were in your DVD because it was so beautiful to talk about this man, this God-man realized, Jesus, and the power that he has held in the psyches of all of us for so long. The first quote is so powerful and it gives a sense of what we’re doing here.

One of the greatest military commanders of all times, Napolean Bonaparte, spoke of Jesus of Nazareth in these words:
     “Between him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison.
      Alexander the Great, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I, myself, have all founded empires.
      But on what did we rest the creation of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded
      his empire upon love, and at this hour, eighteen centuries later, millions of people
      would still die for him."
Apparently this is what Napoleon said in his exile on St. Helena.

And then you go on to quote Dr. James Allen Francis, eighty years ago:
      “All the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments
        that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned put together, have not affected the life
        of the human race as powerfully as this one man.”

So this DVD is really about finding out who this man really was that we have not known about for all
this time. You are focusing on the lost years and then how he became the Christ.

MICEAL:  I am focusing on the lost years because that gives the answer to what he really was.
I selected that quotation because it expressed so perfectly well the impact that the life of Jesus has
had on well over a third of the population of the Earth right now. And all of the Earth reveres him
even if they are not within the bounds of Christianity.

Jesus came into that incarnation for a very specific reason. That has been either totally forgotten, warped, or twisted to suit many different agendas down the centuries, so that now we are left with a message that has been hi-jacked. This had taken place centuries before the time of the Emperor Constantine who is usually blamed for all the unfortunate developments that took place in the tradition that claimed to follow Jesus’s name. The trouble goes back right to the time of his own apostles.
Most of them never grasped what he was about, truly. So the Church, of course, coming along subsequently, made the situation worse, and in due course Jesus was made into an individual that did all sorts of remarkable things, and ended up becoming an idol to be worshipped. He came to die for our sins, we are told, so we should never cease to feel guilty and be grateful to him for doing that by worshipping him.

God-- I mean we use this word God as if it was a perfectly clear and distinct idea to us, so that we always knew why God did what, when and where. How do we know what God is? I said in the DVD if insects were to think of God, presumably God would be seen as an insect. Or if we ponder how animals might think about God; then a dog might be expected to think of God as some form of magnified dog. We should have gotten the message and realized that we humans fall into the same trap, because when we think of God we think of an individual like ourselves – a magnified human person which is of course what God is not. So we have this picture that God sent Jesus down here.

God, this old guy with the beard up in the clouds, sent Jesus down as his emissary, or became man himself in Jesus. There are several forms of this belief in Christianity. And Jesus’ purpose here was to suffer and die for our sins so that this vengeful God could be appeased. This is a blasphemy of the
worst order, and yet this is what the message of Jesus and his whole teaching has been turned into.
Instead, he came here at the behest of a group of masters to break the chain of events which had kept humanity in such enslavement, and he came to blaze a trail for everyone else on earth that they too could obtain their evolution and become masters themselves. And it has been turned into the exact opposite. This DVD sets out to tell the story of what he went through in order to become that.

MC:  From what I understand, you are using the sources in the DVD from a Russian aristocrat who wrote a book that was published at the end of the 1800s the so-called Issa Scrolls? found during his visit to the Hemis monastery in Kashmere.

MICEAL:  Yes, in Kashmere.

MC:  Then there’s Swami Abhedananda who also got to see the scrolls, and the Nag Hammadi texts discovered in Egypt in 1945 with the Gospel of Thomas, and then the Secret Gospel of Mark.
Is that pretty much what you are using as resources in this DVD?

MICEAL:  Not just that alone. I mean the starting point for this of course is filling up those eighteen years between the ages of 12 and 30, a space that is more than half his lifetime. In the New Testament there are only a couple of hapless words about what he did in those years. But what did he really do during all of that time?

The Christian tradition would have us believe that he was making bird feeders, chairs and tables at a carpenter shop in Galilee with Joseph his foster father. The discovery made by Notovitch in that remote monastery in present day Kashmere gives a very different account indeed of what Jesus was doing in those missing years. But, in addition to Notovitch’s discovery you also have to notice that major elements of his teaching obviously came from the Egyptian mystery schools, and the fact that all of the major points of his teaching are parallel in the teachings of Buddha, five hundred and fifty years earlier.

Now, of course, we could stay here till nightfall talking about that. When Notovitch published his version of the Issa Scrolls in French in 1894 and shortly afterwards in English, it set the cat among the pigeons. All sorts of abuses were heaped on Notovitch and it’s no exaggeration to say he became the most hated man in Europe in religious terms. A Cardinal in Rome had advised him not to publish them as had the Archbishop of Kiev. Cardinal Rotelli in Paris besought him not to publish the scrolls also, and for obvious reasons. When he did publish he was vilified from every side.

MC:  And he wasn’t a religious man when he set out.

MICEAL:  No, not at all. He had no religious interest in going there at all. So the Issa scrolls are a good start because they do tell us what Jesus did in those hidden years. He left his homeland when he was twelve years old after that incident in the Temple. We know from other sources that his twin brother, Thomas, went with him. He went across through Persia and into Afghanistan and down into northern India. He spent six years in the sacred cities there and expected to find, you know, some of these great masters that the legends are about. All he found were gurus who wanted subjects and adoration. And after six more years he went up into the Himalayas to Nepal, to Tibet, where he met great masters. He was taught a great deal of stuff, you know, that we would call miraculous or paranormal, which is actually just normal except it’s unusual, and, of course, it becomes possible when you have brought forth the spirit to dominate what you are, and not the body. So when he was twenty-six he set out for home and came back into his homeland after a visit to Egypt in his twenty-ninth or thirtieth year. So that is how he was on his journey to mastery. And what he was given to accomplish
in the three years in his homeland was his final test to become the Christ.

MC:  So the reasons why we haven’t heard about all those lost years are because –

MICEAL:  Well, obviously, you know, if we are all meant to imitate Jesus, not to worship him, it is
going to be extremely hard to run a large world-wide organization of a billion members or more. It is much simpler to run such an organization if you are told you have just one life and you have got to
obey this set of rules and if you don’t, you go down to the hot place or the cold place depending on
your religious background. And if you do obey them, you go up and sit on a cloud for all eternity playing a harp in front of God. It is much easier to administer that form of organization than if everyone was taught how to bring forth the divine potential in all, irrespective of color, creed, gender, race or class.

MC:  And you talk on the DVD about the inquisitorial mind that has existed throughout history for so long. One thing that really stood out for me, which I had never heard about, was Vasco da Gama, the famous Portuguese explorer, when he reached the shores of India. Can you comment on that and what it was like, because originally the teachings of Jesus came through, I believe, the apostle Thomas to
the shores of –

MICEAL:  India.

MC: Of India, and then Vasco de Gama showed up.

MICEAL: Yes, in the late 1400s and later. But I referred to Vasco da Gama to provide an important piece of background information. Vasco da Gama is a great hero, as you know, in Portugal and,
indeed, in all of Europe. If we examine what he actually did in India and how he treated the native population and the native religions, he appears far from a hero indeed, and his legacy accounts for the
suspicion with which the people of India so distrusted European conquerors for so long.

When Notovitch published this account that he had culled from the scrolls in Kashmere, one of the men who most vociferously opposed him was Archibald Douglas, who was a professor in the Government college at Agra, where the Taj Mahal stands. Douglas went to the trouble of actually going up to the monastery of Hemis with the aim of totally disproving Notovitch. He knocked on the door of the Monastery and the lamas said we never heard of a Notovitch and what scrolls are you talking about?
So Archibald Douglas concluded that Notovitch was a fraud. Now Swami Abhedananda, who was a great disciple of Rama Krishna here in the United States, had also heard about the book of Notovitch and he went back to India in 1921. He decided he was going to expose Notovitch as a fraud also. So he went to the monastery of Hemis, a native Indian of course, and yes, they said yes, Notovitch was here at that time and yes, the scrolls do exist. And they showed him the same scrolls. Abhedananda copied them down himself and Abhedananda published the same material as Notovitch did. I have both publications here in my room and I have compared them carefully. They are obviously versions of the same material, but very different translations. In 1929 they were only published in Bengali by Abhedananda, and no English version was made for many years. But it is interesting that Abhedananda left out the very harsh criticisms of traditional Indian religion that Jesus made of Buddhism and Hinduism. Those criticisms are in the Notovitch scrolls but Abhedananda censored them out of his version.

But they are not the only witnesses. You have others such as Dr. Nicholas Roerich who was nominated for the Nobel Prize. You have the famous Swiss musician Elizabeth Caspari who was at Himis in 1939. She was also shown the scrolls. At that time she had never previously heard of Notovitch or the scrolls but the librarian at Hemis, when she was there with Madam Gasque, the head of the World Fellowship of Faith, brought out these scrolls wrapped in ornate silk and he said to her, “These scrolls tell us that your Jesus was here.” So to my mind there is absolutely no doubt but that those scrolls existed. But could you find them today if you were to go to Himis? I would very much doubt it.

I quoted the material about Vasco da Gama to give a little background there because Vasco da Gama arrived in the port of Calicut near Goa on the western coast of India in 1498. He had quite a large contingent of ships, fourteen or fifteen. He plundered the 20 ships that were in the harbor, peaceful trading ships, Arab and Hindu and Buddhist ships.

The Zamorin, who was the head of the town, sent a peace mission to him. Da Gama had captured the whole crew of the ships, 800 sailors. He cut off their hands and ears and their noses. He piled the pieces into a boat. He sent the boat back to the Zamorin along with the mutilated crew and asked him to make curry of the human pieces. The Zamorin sent out another emissary, a high class Brahmin, on a peace mission to Vasco da Gama because they weren’t equipped to deal with the fire power that this man had. It was customary in the Hindu tradition to bring your children with you on a peace mission to show you meant no harm. So the Brahmin brought his son and his nephew with him. Vasco da Gama cut off the Brahmin’s nose, cut off his ears, sewed a dog’s in their place onto his head, cut off his hands and hanged the two children from the yardarm of the ship.

And if you want to know how an Abbot of a remote monastery like Hemis would react to a high-ranking government official like Archibald Douglas who would arrive at his door at the height of British power in India, and asked about something that would have been a threat to a Christian based European regime. It’s no wonder he would have been told: “No, we have no scrolls. We never heard of Notovitch.”
I think if you will remember Vasco da Gama you will understand better why that happened with Archibald Douglas, and why the Indian, Swami Abhedananda, in 1921-22 got such a different reception as did several others later.

MC:  Very poignant and, as you say on the DVD as well, even though that kind of extreme behavior doesn’t happen now, it shows up in all kinds of ways to subvert.

MICEAL:  It does. Francis Xavier, who is the Catholic patron saint of India, boasted some time after Da Gama that the Church had destroyed all of these Hindu temples, for instance, in India. So the inquisitorial Inquisition is gone but the inquisitorial mind remains. And that also went back to Constantine.

You know what we forget is that it was not the case that one particular group carried on the teachings of Jesus in a true form, and that group was lucky enough to convert Constantine so that Christianity became the dominant religion of Europe. There were many different versions and traditions coming from Jesus that understood him and his mission in very many different ways. The one group that triumphed was only one of many and, unfortunately, they took no prisoners, and they still don’t. This is where the inquisitorial mind came from.

So there is this very peculiar trait emerging right early on which maintains that it is quite allright to try to force people to believe by all sorts of threats and coercions and that this can bring them round to true belief and can in some warped way be pleasing to God. This is a bizarre idea. You end up in the curious position of preaching and practicing hatred in the name of the God of love.

MC:  In your DVD you talk about the Jesus of Yom Kippur versus what is also called the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. Can you explain?

MICEAL: That group that I just mentioned, that Christian party whose way of looking at Jesus and his work won out over the others then tried to squash all the others into non-existence. I mean, the Nag Hammadi books that you mentioned found in Egypt in 1945 in December were a prime example. They were suppressed by the dominant religion. And what was that dominant religion? What were its characteristics? They believed that Jesus came to suffer and die for us. How did that happen? When some of the apostles were searching for a way of understanding Jesus, it should come as no surprise that it was to their own tradition they turned, the tradition of Judaism.

Jesus didn’t come to found a separate institution, nor did his apostles ever understand him in that way. He was setting something up within Judaism. But the apostles looked into their own tradition to see how they could understand Jesus within this tradition. And they of course thought of their own major festival of Yom Kippur which involved calling to mind all of our sins from the time of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Paradise right down to now. At Yom Kippur we remembered all the ways we had offended God. In the ceremony culminating it all in the days of the temple, a goat and a lamb that were perfect were selected to represent the people. We were all corrupted because we have been corrupted by Adam and Eve’s sin so there is no use asking a human being to do this for us. We have to select instead of a human being, an animal that is not tainted.

The goat was laden up with symbolic baggage representing our sins, and driven out into the desert where the goat met the Angel Hazazael, which was one of the Anunaki, watchers. In the Jewish tradition of course Hazazael was the prime demon of Yom Kippur. But he was one of the watchers, the Igigi of the Anunaki that were supposed to observe the human beings and the interactions between the gods and them. This is going way back into the days of ancient Sumer, a quarter million years ago.

MC:  That’s another conversation.

MICEAL:  That’s for another day. The second prominent element in the Festival of Yom Kippur was the sacrificial lamb. The lamb was sacrificed on the altar of the temple so that the spilling of its blood would appease the vengeance of this God and spare you and me. So the apostles said, “Oh, my goodness, Jesus is the quintessential lamb and goat of Yom Kippur. Of course! He came to take the burden of our sins on his back like the goat, and to be sacrificed on the cross and his blood spilled to appease God’s vengeance against us.” Jesus was turned into the job lot of the goat and lamb of Yom Kippur. And that is the way he is spoken in mainline Christianity down to this day.

MC:  The meek and the –

MICEAL:  No, no, the one who suffers on the cross to appease God’s vengeance and the one who takes the burden of our sins on his back like the goat. That is the way Christianity speaks of him to this day. The most surprised person in the world to hear that interpretation would be Jesus himself because he didn’t come to do either of those things, not to suffer and die for us nor to take away our burdens for us.

MC:  And so where then does the lion of the tribe of Judah come from? That sounds like a much more focused, powerful presence than the Yom Kippur version of Jesus.

MICEAL:  There was something that occurred to me when I was working on the DVD, because C.S. Lewis’ movie, The Chronicles of Narnia had just come out where, of course, Jesus is symbolized by the lion figure.

MC:  I didn’t know that. That is so good to think about that. The lion symbolizes Jesus?

MICEAL:  The lion in that movie represents Jesus, yes.

MC:  Okay, that’s another conversation.

MICEAL:  The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, well, that’s another matter indeed.

Well, anyway I just remembered a quotation from Lewis, who as you know, was a great friend of
Ronnie Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was the Extern Examiner in the College I was in, in Maynooth, years ago.

But anyway, oh yes, Dorothy Sayers who was a great writer of novels, etc., a very gifted lady, back in the 1950s, she said, thinking of the way that Jesus is presented, as the gentle Jesus, meek and mild etc., who came here as a child and all that stuff, you know, how could something so inappropriate be said about a person who was of such power and character that he could walk through a bloodthirsty mob that were intent on throwing him to his death, that could call King Herod a fox which is one of the worse things you could say in the Judaism of that day, or that could call the Pharisees a brood of vipers. I mean, the cultural symbol thing that a Jew hated was the snake. I mean how could a person with that strength of character be described as gentle Jesus, meek and mild? It has nothing to do with the real person. So Dorothy Sayers said to C.S. Lewis, “It seems to me that the Lion of the Tribe of Judah has been de-clawed, has been turned into a pussycat it for maiden aunts and wan curates.”

MC:  Beautiful.

MICEAL:  So that is why I put that in there. I don’t know if you are familiar with the term “curate” in this country? It means an assistant priest in a parish and “a wan curate” conjures up the image of a weak, sickly, pale and undernourished, pious junior cleric, sitting in his parlor behind lace curtains looking out on a hostile world all day....

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