The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ

The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ is an esoteric religious work by Levi H. Dowling, first published in 1908. Dowling said he had transcribed the Akashic records to produce an alternative life of Jesus.

The book begins before Jesus's birth and expands the childhood of Mary and the years of Jesus's life absent from the canonical Gospels. It sends him through India, Tibet, Persia, Assyria, Greece, and Egypt in a global spiritual apprenticeship.

Later sections retell his return to Palestine, ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection. Christian names and episodes are combined with ideas associated with New Thought, Theosophy, astrology, and comparative religion, creating esoteric and universalist teachings.

The work is important to the history of alternative spirituality, not as an ancient source for the historical Jesus. Its 182 short chapters should be read as modern religious imagination shaped by the spiritual movements of Dowling's own period.

"1. Augustus Cæsar reigned and Herod Antipas was ruler of Jerusalem.
2. Three provinces comprised the land of Palistine: Judea, and Samaria, and Galilee.
3. Joachim was a master of the Jewish law, a man of wealth; he lived in Nazareth of Galilee; and Anna, of the tribe of Judah, was his wife.
4. To them was born a child, a goodly female child, and they were glad; and Mary was the name they gave the child."