Open Veils · Answer
How do the templars view christ?
The Templars' exoteric Christology was Bernardine and orthodox; their esoteric inner-circle practices — as attested by inquisitorial records, Masonic successor traditions, and Gnostic-influenced researchers — suggest a radically different interior theology. The trial charges of denying Christ were not pure fabrication: dozens of knights confessed independently, and some confessions survived retraction. The deeper tradition points to a Johannine, initiatic Christ — not the crucified redeemer of Rome, but a living gnosis-bearer.
Evidence
- Bernard of Clairvaux's tract In Praise of the New Knighthood framed Templar violence as spiritually sanctified — a 'malicida,' killer of evil rather than men — but this exoteric theology masked a more complex inner doctrine according to esoteric researchers.
- Manly P. Hall argued in The Secret Teachings of All Ages that the Templars absorbed Johannine Christianity during their decades on the Temple Mount, privileging the Gospel of John's logos-Christ — a cosmic, initiatic principle — over the sacrificial Christ of Pauline orthodoxy.
- The trial records — preserved in the Chinon Parchment, partially released by the Vatican Archives in 2001 — document initiates being ordered to deny Christ three times and spit on the cross.
- Mauro Biglino's textual work and John Allegro's Dead Sea Scrolls research both independently suggest that early esoteric communities near Jerusalem held a Christ-figure that bore no resemblance to Roman Catholic doctrine.
- The Baphomet figure — venerated according to trial testimony — was interpreted by occultist Eliphas Lévi as a symbol of the androgynous, transcendent Sophia-Christ, a gnostic totality rather than a demonic idol.