“The Nabathaens inhabited the Lebanon, as their descendants do to the present day, and their religion was from its origin purely kabalistic. Maimonides speaks of them as if he identified them with the Sabeans. “I will mention to thee the writings…respecting the belief and institutions of the Sabeans”, he says. “The most famous is the book The Agriculture of the Nabathaeans, which has been translated by Ibn Waho-hijah. This book is full of heathenish foolishness. …It speaks of the preparations of TALISMANS, the drawing down of the powers of the SPIRITS, MAGIC, DEMONS, and ghouls, which make their abode in the desert.”
There are traditions among the tribes living scattered about beyond the Jordan, as there are many such also among the descendants of the Samaritans at Damascus, Gaza, and at Naplosa, (the ancient Shechem). Many of these tribes have, notwithstanding the persecutions of eighteen centuries, retained the faith of their fathers in its primitive simplicity. It is there that we have to go for traditions based on historical truths, however disfigured by exaggeration and inaccuracy, and compare them with the religious legends of the Fathers, which they call revelation.
Eusebius states that before the siege of Jerusalem the small Christian community – comprising members of whom many, if not all, knew Jesus and his apostles personally – took refuge in the little town of Pella, on the opposite shore of the Jordan. Surely these simple people, separated for centuries from the rest of the world, ought to have preserved their traditions fresher than any other nations! It is in Palestine that we have to search for the clearest waters of Christianity, let alone its source.
The first Christians after the death of Jesus, all joined together for a time, whether they were Ebionites, Nazarenes, Gnostics, or others. They had no Christian dogmas in those days, and their Christianity consisted in believing Jesus to be a prophet, this belief varying from seeing in him simply a “just man”, or a holy, inspired prophet, a vehicle used by Christos and Sophia to manifest themselves through. These all united together in opposition to the synagogue and the tyrannical technicalities of the Pharisees, until the primitive group separated in two distinct branches – which, we may correctly term the Christian kabalists of the Jewish Tanaim school, and the Christian kabalists of the Platonic Gnosis. The former were represented by the party composed of the followers of Peter, and John, the author of the Apocalypse; the latter ranged with the Pauline Christianity, blending itself, at the end of the second century, with the Platonic philosophy, and engulfing, still later, the Gnostic sects, whose symbols and misunderstood mysticism overflowed the Church of Rome.
Amid this jumble of contradictions, what Christian is secure in confessing himself such? in the old Syriac Gospel according to Luke, (3:22), the Holy Spirit is said to have descended in the likeness of a dove. “Jesua, full of the sacred Spirit, returned from Jordan, and the Spirit led him into the desert”, (old Syriac, Luke 4:1, Tremellius). “The difficulty”, says Dunlap, “was that the Gospels declared that John the Baptist saw the Spirit, (the Power of God), descend upon Jesus after he had reached manhood, and if the Spirit then first descended upon him, there was some ground for the opinion of the Ebionites and Nazarenes who denied his preceding existence, and refused him the attributes of the LOGOS. The Gnostics, on the other hand, objected to the flesh, but conceded the LOGOS.””
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 