The Master did not forget His promise to come to them after the world had lost sight of Him,[167] and for something over fifty years He visited them in His subtle spiritual body, continuing the teachings He had begun while with them, and training them in a knowledge of occult truths. They lived together, for the most part, in a retired spot on the outskirts of Judæa, attracting no attention among the many apparently similar communities of the time, studying the profound truths He taught them and acquiring "the gifts of the Spirit."
These inner instructions, commenced during His physical life among them and carried on after He had left the body, formed the basis of the "Mysteries of Jesus," which we have seen in early Church History, and gave the inner life which was the nucleus round which gathered the heterogeneous materials which formed ecclesiastical Christianity.
In the remarkable fragment called the _Pistis Sophia_, we have a document of the greatest interest bearing on the hidden teaching, written by the famous Valentinus. In this it is said that during the eleven years immediately after His death Jesus instructed His disciples so far as "the regions of the first statutes only, and up to the regions of the first mystery, the mystery within the veil."[168] They had not so far learned the distribution of the angelic orders, of part whereof Ignatius speaks.[169] Then Jesus, being "in the Mount" with His disciples, and having received His mystic Vesture, the knowledge of all the regions and the Words of Power which unlocked them, taught His disciples further, promising: "I will perfect you in every perfection, from the mysteries of the interior to the mysteries of the exterior: I will fill you with the Spirit, so that ye shall be called spiritual, perfect in all perfections."[170] And He taught them of Sophia, the Wisdom, and of her fall into matter in her attempt to rise unto the Highest, and of her cries to the Light in which she had trusted, and of the sending of Jesus to redeem her from chaos, and of her crowning with His light, and leading forth from bondage. And He told them further of the highest Mystery the ineffable, the simplest and clearest of all, though the highest, to be known by him alone who utterly renounced the world;[171] by that knowledge men became Christs for such "men are myself, and I am these men," for Christ is that highest Mystery.[172] Knowing that, men are "transformed into pure light and are brought into the light."[173] And He performed for them the great ceremony of Initiation, the baptism "which leadeth to the region of truth and into the region of light," and bade them celebrate it for others who were worthy: "But hide ye this mystery, give it not unto every man, but unto him [only] who shall do all things which I have said unto you in my commandments."[174]