My initiation took place on a Wednesday evening after school during my senior year in high school. It was in a house with green aluminum siding on a quiet street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a couple of blocks from the Harvard Law School. I sat cross-legged on the carpet, face to face with a saffron-robed monk. He was a disciple of the guru who lived in India, who traveled the world instructing new devotees in the ancient disciplines of Tantra Yoga. He had me do "puja"-that is, bow before a picture of the guru. He closed his eyes for a moment and then leaned over and whispered my mantra into my ear. The monk described the meditation technique in detail and drew a diagram of the mental visualizations on a slip of paper. He taught me a Sanskrit chant and sent me on my way.

For the next three years, this discipline completely absorbed my life-to the alarm of my parents. On weekends, when college classmates traveled the fraternity party circuit, I was away at retreats where I would chant and meditate for hours on end. I was given a Sanskrit name and was expected to meditate at least two hours a day, follow a strict vegetarian diet, and fast twice a month.

I read everything I could get my hands on about Eastern spirituality, and took all the available college courses on comparative religion. I was convinced that all religions ultimately got you to the same place. I thought that even Christianity, about which I actually knew very little, offered the same enlightenment that the gurus and yogis spoke of-for those who were willing to go deeper than the usual Sunday morning experience. Beneath what I took to be the impossibilities of a face-value reading of the Bible, I thought I saw a set of symbols that pointed to something very much like Hindu mysticism. This included the conviction that God was not so much a person, as an impersonal absolute reality that interpenetrated all things; that the Divine was ultimately located in the inner self; and that our human problem was not sin, so much as spiritual confusion, which could only be overcome by an inner knowledge of one's own innate divinity.

I no longer see things that way. It eventually became clear to me that one could not impose a Hindu mystic gloss on the Christian faith. Christianity was something very different. In my early twenties I worked through my intellectual difficulties with Christianity, and made a conscious decision for Jesus Christ. I felt no compulsion to demonize other religions. It seemed to me that God had been leading me all along.

Yet it was also clear that I was at a turn in the road. I was choosing one thing over another. Moreover, in choosing Christian faith, I felt called to embrace the whole package and not to water it down, adjust it to the spirit of the age, or coordinate it in some higher synthesis with other forms of spirituality.

In recent years, religious ideas that I once held with fervor have gained a wide currency. Eastern religions continue to arouse interest. Books by the Tibetan Buddhist Dalai Lama are now best sellers. Once available only in "esoteric" bookstores, laden with incense, Zen mediation stools, and posters of Hindu deities, they now dominate the religion section of bookstores in every mall.

Increasingly, people are also looking to the Christian past to discover a similar mysticism of inward spiritual discovery. Some claim that this religion of "inner self-knowledge" is the true Christianity. These teachings are said to be contained in various "hidden gospels" that were suppressed by the Catholic Church.

Is there any historical validity to these claims? It is true that the New Testament did not fall from heaven in one piece. The various books of the New Testament were written over time, and were selected from a larger body of writings that were current in the early Church. There was a period of sifting, during which the church made decisions about which books were to be included in the canon of Scripture and which were not.

It is also true that the early church co-existed alongside a rich variety of religious groups that were associated in varying degrees with the Christian movement. These included the following: The Ebionites were Jewish Christians who had become separated from the Gentile church. The Marcionites rejected the Old Testament and only accepted the Gospel of Luke and the Epistles of Paul. They believed in two Gods, the evil God of the Jews, who made the world, and the loving God of Jesus, who offered an escape from an evil world. The Montanists were a rigoristic charismatic sect. They believed themselves to be filled with the spirit of prophecy, and claimed to be heralds of a new Age of the Spirit.

Of all these periperal Christian sects, however, none has more captured the modern imagination than the group that we have come to call the "Gnostics."

The term "gnostic" comes from the Greek word for knowledge. Gnosticism claimed to offer salvation from the oppressive bonds of material existence through gnosis or "knowledge." Gnostics claimed to be a spiritual elite, who contained within themselves a spark of divinity. They regarded all others as either grossly materialistic or stuck in the ignorance of conventional religion.

In the Gnostic view, our human problem is spiritual ignorance, not sin or alienation from a personal God. The solution lay in an inward spiritual knowledge, rather than in forgiveness and atonement accomplished on our behalf on the cross.

For the Gnostics, Jesus' death had no atoning value; there was no sacrifice for sin. His resurrection was merely a metaphor for spiritual illumination. Jesus was sent from the divine fullness simply to bring illumination to those few with an inner divine spark, so that they could escape from this evil material world.

In the end, Gnosticism was based on an identification of the inner self with God rather than a reconciled and living relationship with a personal God who is distinct from his creation. In this sense, Gnosticism is similar to various forms of eastern religions. Yet much of its appeal lies in its "homegrown" character as part of the spiritual legacy of the West. And for those already suspicious of "organized religion," the fact that Gnosticism was allegedly suppressed by a hierarchical church only adds to its credibility.

Two recent bestselling books testify to the current attraction of Gnosticism. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code has been on the New York Times Hardcover Best Seller List for 70 weeks. An engaging thriller, the plot involves a number of claims about Christianity and the Catholic Church that the author claims to have thoroughly researched. Among these are the allegations that Jesus was neither crucified nor raised from the dead, that he married Mary Magdalene and intended her to be the head of the church, that the current four Gospels were a fourth century forgery commissioned by Emperor Constantine, and that our accepted history of the origin of Christianity is totally suspect. And truth behind the deception, he tells us, lies in these other Gnostic gospels that had been suppressed by Constantine.

In fact, Dan Brown's command of the historical facts is so tenuous that his claims are easily refuted by anyone with a basic knowledge of late antiquity. A more serious exposition of the Gnostic outlook is a second bestseller, Elaine Pagels' Beyond Belief.

Elaine Pagels is a professor of religious studies at Princeton University. In 1979 her book The Gnostic Gospels brought recently rediscovered Gnostic writings into public awareness. Beyond Belief is a reflection on the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, which is the earliest of the non-canonical Gospels. Distraught over the fatal disease of her infant son, she found herself drawn to a church (an Episcopal church in New York City) for the first time in many years. This led to an attempt to find spiritual sustenance within a version of Christian teaching that she could live with-namely the Christian Gnosticism whose views the early church had rejected centuries before. She argues that the Gospel of Thomas was written before the Gospel of John (while most scholars place it three or four decades later). She suggests that John's Gospel, with its doctrine of the Word made flesh in Christ and his atoning death and resurrection, was written to counter Thomas' presentation of Jesus as a simple teacher of inward spiritual self-discovery.

Professor Pagels is a respected scholar who writes beautifully. In a recent New York Times interview, she said that she periodically attends an Episcopal church in Princeton. This is not someone who is trying to tear down the foundations.

Her project has appeal. At least as far back as St. Augustine's Confessions, the church has recognized that self-discovery and the authentic encounter with God go hand in hand. A dry external orthodoxy without an inward spiritual life has no power to transform. But the Gnostic program of inner self discovery depends on such a thorough redefinition of Christian teaching that it in fact becomes something else-which is precisely what the early church recognized when it rejected texts such as the Gospel of Thomas.

Historians tell us that there were both Christian Gnostics and non-Christian Gnostics. It is revealing that their views and practices were virtually identical-indicating that while the Christian Gnostics used Christian language, the Christian story was actually peripheral to the Gnostic program. The same can be said about the New Age Gnosticism of today.

When I studied Gnosticism in graduate school, and now when I read Elaine Pagels and similar writers, I always have the sense that "I've been here before." The language, symbols, and cultural trappings of Gnosticism differ from the Hindu and Buddhist teachings I studied in my early adulthood, but the underlying program seems very much the same.

Had I stumbled across Beyond Belief during my Hindu phase, it would have seemed entirely consistent with what I already believed. I would have recognized it as another version of what Aldous Huxley called "The Perennial Philosophy," a unifying mystical outlook that crops up in numerous cultures and allegedly lies behind the symbols of all world religions.

Christian conversion, for me, was the discovery of something entirely different. At the core of Christian orthodoxy is what has often been called the "Scandal of Particularity," that God has acted in a particular way, in a particular time and place, with a particular people, yet in a way that has universal consequences.

The "Scandal of Particularity" is whimsically expressed in a rhyme by William N. Ewer: "How odd of God, to choose the Jews." But He did. And the salvation of the world is bound up in this particular story of a particular people, the Jews, fulfilled in the coming of Jesus the Messiah, who lived, died and rose from the dead, so that we might share in the New Life of the resurrection.

Gnosticism, Hindu mysticism, or any form of Huxley's "perennial philosophy" offers a universal wisdom with no direct tie to history or to any particular event in the human story. They offer a spiritual project that can be undertaken in any time or place without necessary connection to any historical personage. The teachers embodying this wisdom are many, but in the end they are interchangeable. The message is simple and accessible: "Know thyself," and find your innate divinity within.

Gnosticism, even Elaine Pagels' elegant version of it (and Ms. Pagels overlooks many of the odder features of traditional Gnostic teaching), is an attempt to force this teaching into a Christian mold. It may have appeal, but it is not the faith of the creeds and the New Testament. In the end, the Gnostic Jesus is just another wisdom teacher. God has not entered into the human experience. He has not acted on our behalf to neutralize sin and death. Nor are we brought through our baptism into Christ's death and resurrection into an intimacy with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If divinity lies within the self, there is ultimately no relationship with God-we are talking to ourselves. In the end, there is no grace; it is all up to us.

But in Jesus Christ we are not talking to ourselves. We do not find God within ourselves. We find God in a relationship with Jesus Christ, through whom we meet a God who is other than ourselves, and yet totally available-reaching out to us with open arms. Our access to God that is available through Christ is not an achievement of our own or the fruit of spiritual discipline-it is the gift of grace, pure and simple.