“The oldest Nazarenes, who were the descendants of the Scripture nazars, and whose last prominent leader was John the Baptist, although never very orthodox in the sight of the scribes and Pharisees of Jerusalem were, nevertheless, respected and left unmolested. Even Herod “feared the multitude” because they regarded John as a prophet, (Matthew xiv, 5).
But the followers of Jesus evidently adhered to a sect which became a still more exasperating thorn in their side. It appeared as a heresy within a heresy; for while the nazars of the olden times, the “Sons of the Prophet”, were Chaldean kabalists, the adepts of the new dissenting sect showed themselves of reformers and innovators from the first.
The great similitude traced by some critics between the rites and observances of the earliest Christians and those of the Essenes may be accounted for without the slightest difficulty. The Essenes, as we remarked just now, were the converts of Buddhist missionaries who had overrun Egypt, Greece, and even Judea at one time, since the reign of Asoka, the zealous propagandist; and while it is evidently to the Essenes that belongs the honor of having had the Nazarene reformer, Jesus, as a pupil, still the latter is found disagreeing with his early teachers on several questions of formal observance. He cannot strictly be called an Essene, for reasons which we will indicate further on, neither was he a nazar, or Nazaria of the older sect. What Jesus was, may be found in the Codex Nazaraeus, in the unjust accusations of the Bardesanian Gnostics.
“Jesus is Nebu, the false Messiah, the destroyer of the old orthodox religion”, say the Codex. He is the founder of the sect of the new nazars, and, as the words clearly imply, a follower of the Buddhist doctrine. In Hebrew, the word naba means to speak of inspiration; and nebo, a god of wisdom. But Nebo is also Mercury, and Mercury is Buddha in the Hindu monogram of planets. Moreover, we find the Talmudists holding that Jesus was inspired by the genius of Mercury.
The Nazarene reformer had undoubtedly belonged to one of these sects; though perhaps, it would be next to impossible to decide absolutely which. But what is self-evident is that he preached the philosophy of Buddha-Sakyamuni. Denounced by the later prophets, cursed by the Sanhedrin, the nazars – they were confounded with others of that name “who separated themselves unto that shame”, they were secretly, if not openly persecuted by the orthodox synagogue. It becomes clear why Jesus was treated with such contempt from the first, and deprecatingly called “the Galilean”. Nathaniel inquires – “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?”, (John 1:46), at the very beginning of his career; and merely because he knows him to be a nazar.
Does not this clearly hint, that even the older nazars were not really Hebrew religionists, but rather a class of Chaldean theurgists? Besides, as the New Testament is noted for its mistranslations and transparent falsification of texts, we may justly suspect that the word Nazareth was substituted for that of nasaria, or nozari. That it originally read “Can any good thing come from a nozari, or Nazarene”; a follower of St. John the Baptist, with whom we see him associating from his first appearance on the stage of action, after having been lost sight of for a period of nearly twenty years.
The blunders of the Old Testament are as nothing to those of the gospels. Nothing shows better than these self-evident contradictions the system of pious fraud upon which the super-structure of the Messiahship rests. “This is Elias which was for to come”, says Matthew of John the Baptist, thus forcing an ancient kabalistic tradition into the frame of evidence, (11:14). But when addressing the Baptist himself, they ask him, (John 1:21), “Art thou Elias?” “And he saith I am not!” Which knew best – John or his biographer? And which is divine revelation?
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 