“How little Jesus had impressed his personality upon his own century, is calculated to astound the inquirer. Renan shows that Philo, who died toward the year 50, and who was born many years earlier than Jesus, living all the while in Palestine while the “glad tidings” were being preached all over the country, according to the Gospels, had never heard of him! Josephus, the historian, who was born three or four years after the death of Jesus, mentions his execution in a short sentence, and even those few words were altered “by a Christian hand”, says the author of the Life of Jesus.
Writing at the close of the first century, when Paul, the learned propagandist, is said to have founded so many churches, and Peter is alleged to have established the apostolic succession, which the Irenaeo-Eusebian chronology shows to have already included three bishops of Rome, Josephus, the painstaking enumerator, and careful historian of even the most unimportant sects, entirely ignores the existence of a Christian sect.
Suetonius, secretary of Adrian, writing in the first quarter of the second century, knows so little of Jesus or his history as to say that the Emperor Claudius “banished all the Jews, who were continually making disturbances, at the instigation of one Crestus”, meaning Christ, we must suppose. The Emperor Adrian himself, writing still later, was so little impressed with the tenets or importance of the new sect, that in a letter to Servianus he shows that he believes the Christians to be worshippers of Serapis.
“In the second century”, says C. W. King, “the syncretistic sects that had sprung up in Alexandria, the very hotbed of Gnosticism, found out in Serapis a prophetic type of Christ as the Lord and Creator of all, and Judge of the living and the dead.” Thus, while the “Pagan” philosophers had never viewed Serapis, or rather the abstract idea which was embodied in him, as otherwise than a representation of the Anima Mundi, the Christians anthropomorphized the “Son of God” and his “Father”, finding no better model for him than the idol of a Pagan myth! “There can be no doubt”, remarks the same author, “that the head of Serapis, marked, as the face is, by a grave and pensive majesty, supplied the first idea for the conventional portraits, of the Saviour.””
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 