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Jesus Had “Secret” Teachings That Christianity Forgot

Centuries into the religion’s history, an oral tradition said to be from a deity disappeared.

Jonathan Poletti
I blog God.
6 min readDec 24, 2024

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There is a fact about Christianity which you won’t hear in church. Early on, the religion said it had advanced teachings from Jesus. One could only get them in person and in private—never from a book.

In writings of the early church, there was a prominent idea that after his resurrection, Jesus had given these “secret” teachings. They could only be spoken of among the ‘initiated’.

Grok

Christianity lately likes to say it’s all public.

All teachings are available to anyone who might like to learn them. You’d even be told that “secret” teachings aren’t allowed.

That isn’t so clear in the Bible, where Jesus is all about secrecy. He taught only select disciples, and his often very enigmatic teachings had some kind of inner, disguised meanings.

At times he’d tell disciples what his parables meant (cf. Mk 4:10–12). He’d also say he’d expected them to have figured it out, and they didn’t. It’s like the scriptures were a…

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