B702 <=> B704 (BTG XXXVIII Religion, p. 703)

“They mixed in it a great deal from the teaching of Saint Moses which by that time had already been thoroughly distorted: and much later, namely, during the period which contemporary beings there called the ‘Middle Ages,’ the so-called ‘elders of the church’ inserted into this Christian religion nearly the whole of that fantastic doctrine invented by those ‘learned’ beings in the city of Babylon, who belonged to the school of the dualists, about which I have already told you.

“The ‘elders of the church’ in the Middle Ages probably inserted this last doctrine for the convenience of their own ‘shops’ and for the ‘shops’ of their assistants, because of the famous ‘paradise’ and ‘hell’ contained in it.

“And therefore at the present time, in place of the teaching of the Divine Teacher Jesus Christ, in which among other things was revealed the power of the All-lovingness and All-forgivingness of our CREATOR, suffering for beings – it is now already taught there that our CREATOR mocks the souls of those who follow this teaching.”

“Dear and kind Grandfather mine, explain to me, please, what is meant by ‘elders of the church’?” asked Hassein.

“They call ‘elders of the church’ there, those beings who become professional dignitaries of the highest rank of any religious teaching.”

Having merely replied thus laconically, Beelzebub continued further:

“By the way, I may tell you here that among a rather small group of terrestrial beings the teaching of Jesus Christ was preserved unchanged, and, passing from generation to generation, has even reached the present time in its original form.

“This smallish group of terrestrial beings is designated ‘the Brotherhood of the Essenes.’ The beings of this brotherhood succeeded at first in introducing the teaching of this Divine Teacher into their own being-existence, and subsequently in transmitting it from generation to generation to later generations, as a very good means for freeing themselves from the consequences of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer.