Was Jesus a Mason? What an absurd question, some may think. But don’t blame me! The question was put to me, some time before I entered Freemasonry, by an old Yorkshire Brother. He clearly found the question significant. I recall smiling and then, with a twinkle, uttering something like, “In the eyes of some masons, it might well be so.” Knowing that past attempts to trace the Craft to remote antiquity have fallen well outside the realm of historical evidence, I found the question a source of amusement and reflected on the ignorance of masons regarding their own history. However, subsequent researches have illuminated both the question and the author.
    Something my interlocutor had found in Masonry had made him ask the question. In fact, I recall my late grandfather (also a mason) asking me something similar when I was still at school, so the question must have occurred to other masons. I hope I will not disappoint you too much if I admit from the start that I cannot give a definitive answer to this (from the historian’s point of view) unreasonable or even meaningless question. What I can do is to put before you some interesting facts and speculations which I think might have a bearing on the question, and which, with careful consideration, might help some brethren to see something significant which they had not hitherto seen in their own masonic experience.
    The world of building as a source of symbolism (or ‘speculation’) is not unknown to the writers of the New Testament. Jesus’ ‘father’, Joseph, is described as a tekton. This Greek word (the origin of our word ‘technology’) is usually translated as ‘carpenter’ but it can also mean a builder or craftsman in stone. The Gospel of Luke tells us that Jesus’ mother had a cousin who was married to a priest, Zacharias, who worked as such in the Jerusalem Temple. The gospels reveal that the figure known to us as Jesus was very interested in the nature of the Temple, both as structure and symbol. He was also acquainted with speculative and symbolic ideas concerning stone.

And he brought him [Simon] to Jesus. And when Jesus beheld him, he said, Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone. (John I. 42)

It is a strange fact that the Aramaic word cephas, when written in Greek (as it was in the Gospel of John), adds up, according to the Greek ‘cabala’ (a letter-number code known as gematria in Jewish cabala), to 729. (k=20; h=8; f=500; a=1; V=200). Just a co-incidence? 729 happens to be 9-cubed. Where (according to the cosmological conceptions of late-antiquity) ‘9’ represents eternity (the realm of the aeons, beyond the seven planetary spheres of the cosmos), 9X9X9 could represent (to the initiate of the symbolic art of building), the corner of an infinite or cosmic cube. It happens that the Holy of Holies of Solomon’s Temple was a cube (I Kings VI.20). In the book of Revelation (late 1st or early 2nd cent. CE), the symbolic New Jerusalem is a cube also :

And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he [an angel] measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal. And he measured the wall thereof, an hundred and forty-four [12X12] cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel. (Revelation XXI. 16-17)

But what of the Temple?

And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. (Revelation XXI. 22)

The Temple of the New Jerusalem is a spiritual Temple. (Cubic lodges are of course not unknown to Masonry). Why a cube? According to Nigel Pennick, author of Sacred Geometry, Pythagoras expressed a tradition where building ratios were related directly to musical ratios: “the symbolic cube..like the city of Revelation or the Jewish Holy of Holies, contains the consonances of the universe.” Gordon Strachan, author of Christ and the Cosmos, explains:

Why should the cube be thought to contain the consonances of the universe? Because the ratios of its sides and edges are all equal and can therefore be said to be one to one, 1:1. But the ratio 1:1 in music, represents the note of unison or full string-length and the full string-length contains within itself the vibrations of all the other musical intervals.1

Very interesting no doubt, but what has this got to do with Jesus? In the next chapter of John, Jesus goes into the Temple in Jerusalem - a mighty new structure built by Herod the Great - and caused a major fracas. He made himself a whip resembling a cat o’ nine tails and drove out the sheep and oxen waiting to be sacrificed on the altar. Not content with that, he then overturned the tables of the money-changers (whose job it was to change non-Jewish money for special Temple coins to pay for the sacrificial beasts) and told everyone in earshot that they had turned “my Father’s house” into “an house of merchandise”. While doubtless rendering unto God what was God’s, this was nonetheless disorderly conduct on the grand scale. To top it all, he then suggested the Temple itself might be destroyed: “Destroy this temple, and in three days [9X9X9?] I shall raise it up.” To which the author of John adds: “But he spake of the temple of his body.” Quite possibly, but which body?

Hit by the Stone

And he beheld them, and said, What is this then that is written, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner? Whosoever shall fall upon that stone shall be crushed; but on whomsoever it shall fall, he shall be winnowed. (Luke XX. 17-18. My emphasis).

This fascinating text has gone largely unnoticed by orthodox theologians - a pity since it not only contains what could be described as the quintessence of Jesus’ spiritual teaching, but it also reveals his peculiar - not to say ‘alchemical’ - conception of the new Temple. Jesus quotes from Psalm 118, verses 22 to 24:

The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner. This is the LORD’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes. This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.2

Jesus, apparently re-interpreting a longstanding prophetic tradition regarding the Temple, refers to what is clearly a symbolic ‘stone’: the stone rejected by the “builders”. The inference is clear enough. Taking the words of the psalm allegorically (as Jesus does), the ‘builders’(or whoever may be meant by this term), have rejected the vital principle of the house of God - without which the true Temple will certainly fall, as all earthly structures must. (The Temple of Jesus’ day was destroyed by the Romans as a result of Jewish resistance in AD 70 - and has never been rebuilt). Following the psalmist and a prophecy of Isaiah (XXVIII.16), Jesus looks to “the day which the LORD hath made” and clearly believes that that day has now come. The ‘Day of the Lord’ (Yom Yahweh) has, he implies, been realised in his own appearance. The missing stone would appear to be the ‘messiah’, whose (rejected) gift of himself or his knowledge of the Holy Spirit becomes the formative principle of a new and spiritual Temple. (Speculative masons may see symbolic resonance in the transformation of the perfect ashlar from within the rough ashlar).
    Furthermore, the stone to which the saying attributed to Jesus refers (v.18) has supernatural powers. If ignored, that is to say if one ‘falls upon it’, ignorance of the stone will crush the spiritually blind. Jesus’ hearers may have enjoyed - but were more likely mystified - by the joke within the saying: that it is not the stone which falls from the sky which crushes the ignorant (as one might naturally suppose), but the stone they choose to ignore.
    Contrary to expectation then, it is the stone which falls from the heavens which produces the positive effect - that is, it winnows the one on whom it falls. Why ‘winnows’? To winnow is to separate the grain from the chaff (Greek: likmaw, likmao: an agricultural image for what can be interpreted as an alchemical process - the recovery of the grain - often identified in alchemy with gold, that is, the spirit). This separating process is what Jesus on numerous occasions claimed to be his essential purpose. Jesus says he brings not peace but a sword: a sword separates; he divides the ‘sheep from the goats’. In Mark XV. 37 the veil of the Temple which separated the people from the ‘Holy of Holies’ - the Divine Presence - is rent from top to bottom immediately after Jesus exhales pneuma (Greek for spirit) at the climax of the crucifixion (the Greek verb is exepneusen). There is I think the strong suggestion of an ‘alchemical’ process here - an analogy not lost on later alchemists who would write of the crucifixion of the mercurius principle.
    The use of the winnowing metaphor is as precise as other poetic images Jesus uses (such as the cleansing fire which [in basic alchemy] separates gold from its accreted impurities). When wheat is winnowed, the farmer thrusts it up into the air with a fork and lets the wind blow away the useless chaff. Etymologically, the word for ‘spirit’ in Hebrew (ruach - feminine) means breath, or wind: air3. While many readers will be familiar with the story of the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles at Pentecost, when the ‘upper room’ was filled with the sound of wind (Acts II. 2-3), the Greek language preserves a possible root-link between ‘air’ and ‘gold’: a most suggestive parallel in the alchemical context. In Greek, air is he aura (feminine), while ‘gold’ is to auron (neuter)4. So, the coming of the Stone initiates a spiritual apocalypse, that is to say, a revelation of what has been formerly hidden, namely the Spirit or, in the winnowing metaphor, the grain. Many will know of the parable of the Sower; it is the grain which is sown in the world. The grain is of course to make bread: “for the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life to the cosmos.” (John VI.33).
    If Simon was a stone, and he (Jesus) was the stone which came from above to winnow the grain from the chaff, what kind of ‘body’, what kind of ‘temple’ was Jesus proposing? Could it be something to do with the “house of fire” described in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, in which Enoch divined the figure of the Son of Man? The author of John may have thought so:

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, [spiritual vision], and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man. (John I.31)

But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. (John I.12-13)

And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God... (John XVII.3)

The Jesus of John comes like the alchemical Stone to divide the image from the reality, and give birth to a child of God. Had it not all been prophesied before?
    There were Jews who had an idea of ‘what was coming’. They need only have read their prophet Malachi (meaning my messenger) who declared some time, it is supposed, between 475 and 450 BC that the Lord would send a:

messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, he shall come, saith the LORD of hosts. But who may abide the day of his coming? And who shall stand when he appeareth? for he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fuller’s soap. And he shall purify the sons of Levi [the priesthood], and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the LORD an offering in righteousness. (Malachi III.1.)

Impressive though this is - and one could speculate on whether the life of Christ does not have within it the presence of a myth descending into history with all the key events pre-written in prophecies5 - the defining stroke is still missing, namely, that he, Jesus, is the cornerstone of the Temple which the builders threw away: the eternal stone and measure. The missing measure is the Son of Man: MAN. Not the earthy man, the average clod or stone in need of shaping, but the “house of fire”, the Hermetic man of nous: the spiritual man, he whom the Gnostics called the Anthropos: the archetype beyond the image.
    So, when Jesus beholds Simon, he sees beyond the image presented to him (Simon the fisherman) and penetrates to what Simon has never before seen in himself. Jesus sees in him a spiritual block of the new Temple - and in that Temple, the righteous sacrifice is neither bird nor beast, neither man nor money, but ego-sacrifice (the death of the ‘old Adam’ or false self). Surrender the image; return to the real. Thus to know the archetypal Son of Man, is to know the true God: it is to know thySelf.
    So was Jesus a Freemason? He was clearly not a member of the United Grand Lodge of England! But I cannot resist asking the question, equally absurd and certainly not at all historical or scientific: what is the United Grand Lodge of England, along with all the other Lodges grand or otherwise, separately or together, a part or parts of? Do they not also speak of a spiritual temple that is Man, not as he is, but as he should be? Or could be? Or will be?

© Tobias Churton. 1999. Some of the material in this article comes from the author’s forthcoming book, The Knights, the Cross and the Gnostics.

1. From The Temple of Solomon and the Cosmic Music, an article in the Occult Observer, Vol II. No.3 (1992)
2. This (undated) psalm seems to refer to the building of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem: a task apparently undertaken between 961 and 922 BCE . This legendary account, however, makes no reference to a special cornerstone or head-stone. For that we must look to the collection of prophecies gathered under the name of the prophet Isaiah, a man thought to have lived in and around Jerusalem between circa 745 and 686 BCE (although some of the prophecies bearing his name have been dated at least a century after the prophet’s death). In one singular prophecy (Isaiah XXVIII.16), we have a reference to God’s laying a “precious corner stone” in Zion - a strange thing perhaps since the Temple was apparently still standing (the Temple did undergo repairs under the reign of King Josiah around the year 622 BCE). Nevertheless, the kind of stone suggested in the Isaiah prophecy seems to have been more of the nature of a visionary hope and supernatural symbol than a visible object: “Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste. Judgement also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding place.” The idea behind the prophecy suggests a restoration of an ideal, combined with an ethical judgement, (already prefigured in the Divine mind), and so the prophecy may have been made after the destruction of the Solomonic Temple by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BCE, perhaps in order to encourage a (spiritual?) reconstruction after the Exile of Jews in Babylon. (An attempt to rebuild the Temple was undertaken in an intermittently desultory fashion between 520 and 515 BCE).
       The important thing to bear in mind is that after the Exile of the Jews in Babylon, the idea of the Temple became embroiled with prophetic visions of a spiritually or supernaturally redeemed Jewry (or even a visionary redemption of the world as a whole), while aspects of the Temple structure attained symbolic significance - in particular, the Temple cornerstone. The point is that the true stone is laid ‘by the hand of God’ and almost certainly represents not so much a physical and historical stone-laying but rather the controlling principle of any structure - physical or spiritual- built through its agency.
3. cf: Daniel II.34-35 where the impact of a supernatural stone destroys the Babylonian Empire which becomes “like the chaff of the summer threshing-floors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone which smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.”
4. Thus in alchemy, the messenger-god HERMES (also identified with John the Baptist in initiated circles) presides over the alchemical operation because Hermes’ element is Air and his movement is like the invisible but nonetheless penetrating wind. The name Mercurius (Latin form of Hermes) is given to the penetrating spiritus in the alchemical operation - often symbolized as a regenerating and penetrating serpent who enters into all substances and is the agent of division, transformation and purification. (There is even a Jewish legend that Solomon used a supernatural worm to separate the building-stones required for the Temple).
5. For example, Zechariah XI.10ff for a reference to thirty pieces of silver as the price of a prophet; Zech. XII.10 and XI.6 on the wounding of God’s chosen: “And I will pour upon the House of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplication: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son.” “And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.”