f the author's point of view:

The Christ [said the mystics] was born "of a virgin"; the unwitting
believer in Jesus as _the_ historical Messiah in the exclusive
Jewish sense, and in his being _the_ Son of God, nay God Himself,
in course of time asserted that Mary was that virgin; whereupon
Rabbinical logic, which in this case was simple and common logic,
met this extravagance by the natural retort that, seeing that his
paternity was unacknowledged, Jesus was therefore illegitimate, a
bastard [_mamzer_].[703]

It is obviously, then, less from Thibetan Mahatmas, Hindu Swamis, Sikh
Gurus, or Egyptian Brothers than from Jewish Cabalists that these
leaders of Theosophy have borrowed their ideas on Jesus Christ. As the
Jewish writer Adolphe Franck has truly observed: "Des qu'il est question
de theosophie, on est sur de voir apparaitre la Kabbale."[704] And he
goes on to show the direct influence of Cabalism on the modern
Theosophical Society.

Mrs. Besant, without endorsing the worst blasphemies of the Toledot
Yeshu, nevertheless reflected this and other Judaic traditions in her
book _Esoteric Christianity_, where she related that Jesus was brought
up amongst the Essenes, and that later He went to Egypt, where He became
an initiate of the great esoteric lodge--that is to say, the Great White
Lodge--from which all great religions derive. It will be seen that
this is only a version of the old story of the Talmudists and
Cabalists, perpetuated by the Gnostics, the Rosicrucians, and the
nineteenth-century _Ordre du Temple_.[705] But according to one of Mrs.
Besant's Theosophical antagonists, her doctrine "rests on a perpetual
equivocation," and whilst allowing the English public to believe that
when she spoke of the coming Christ she referred to the Christ of the
Gospels, she stated to her intimates what Mr. Leadbeater taught in his
book _The Inner Life_, namely, that the Christ of the Gospels never
existed, but was an invention of the monks of the second century.[706]
It should be understood, however, that in the language of the
Theosophists, led by Mrs. Besant and Mr. Leadbeater, Jesus and "the
Christ" are two separate and distinct individualities, and that when
they now speak of "the Christ" they refer to someone living in a
bungalow in the Himalayas with whom Mr. Leadbeater has interviews to
arrange about his approaching advent.[707] Portraits of this person have
been distributed am