Edmond Bordeaux Szekely; Essene Gospel Of Peace

Edmond Bordeaux Szekely; Essene Gospel Of Peace
 

It was in 1928 that Edmond Bordeaux Szekely first published his translation of Book One of The Essene Gospel of Peace, an ancient manuscript he had found in the Secret Archives of the Vatican as the result of limitless patience, faultless scholarship, and unerring intuition, a story told in his book, The Discovery of the Essene Gospel of Peace. The English version of this ancient manuscript appeared in 1937, and ever since, the little volume has traveled all over the world, appearing in different languages, and gaining every year more and more readers, until now, still with no commercial advertisement, over a million copies have been sold in the United States alone. It was not until almost fifty years after the first French translation that Book Two and Book Three appeared, and these also have now become classics of the Essene literature.

Book Four, The Teachings of the Elect, will come as a surprise to those readers who are aware of Dr. Szekely's death in 1979. if I were also a philologist, or scholar, or archeologist, I might be able to provide some explanation. But I am only his faithful famulus amanuensis, and the instructions he left me were clear and explicit: "Two years after my death, you shall publish Book Four of The Essene Gospel of Peace. " That was all, and I am now carrying out his wish.
This Book Four, The Teachings of the Elect, represents yet another fragment of the complete manuscript which exists in Aramaic in the Secret Archives of the Vatican and in old Slavonic in the Royal Library of the Habsburgs (now the property of the Austrian government). As to the reason for the delay in its publication, I can only surmise that Dr. Szekely wanted the vivid reality of these ageless truths to stand alone, unobscured even by the presence of the translator. He did say in his Preface to the first London edition of Book One in 1937 that "we have issued this part before the rest, because it is the part of which suffering humanity has most need today." Perhaps, in the same way, the troubled world of forty-four years later needs this fourth volume of The Essene Gospel of Peace.
Again the words of Dr. Szekely: "We have nothing to add to this text. It speaks for itself. The reader who studies the pages that follow with concentration, will feel the eternal vitality and powerful evidence of these profound truths which mankind needs today more urgently than ever before."

"And the truth shall bear witness of itself."