Where the Knights Templar and the Teutonic Knights are concerned, can you give us any hints to some of the secrets they claim to possess? If the Church has no excess to these secrets then how are these Orders revealing these secrets to the world. I would have thought that would have been the Churches position.
Well, secrets wouldn't be secrets if they were all revealed. There has always been a body of secret knowledge that has been passed down through out the ages. We have the knowledge from Lemuria down to Atlantis, the great Indian Vedas to the Egyptian Mysteries, carried down to the beginning of Christianity. Every ancient civilization was given a dispensation of knowledge brought to them through the incarnation of a spiritual master. Not all of this knowledge remained in its pure form as it was passed down through oral traditions then translated onto paper.
Isn't it a bit deceptive of the Church not to reveal knowledge pertaining to man's salvation? The average church goers are quite ignorant of any secret knowledge being hidden from them.
It's still a mystery as how much knowledge the Church has hidden in it's archives. It's still uncertain how much knowledge was revealed to the Church through the inner circle, and just how much of this knowledge actually survived. People are also foolish in believing that the "Freedom of Information Act" obligates any authoritive body to bear open that what it declares as "Top Secret." They still produce information only what they want us to know, and to convince us of their sincerity, they lay on the table a few juicy documents.
Outside from the Knights Templar, is there any other evidence, in scripture perhaps, to suggest that there is a hidden knowledge?
Okay, we can only guess what the original Knight Templar discovered. We do know that it involved Mary Magdalene as they built cathedrals in her honor. They wouldn't have done this were she a mere repenting prostitute. What the Freemasons proclaim as knowledge is disputable. Leonardo da Vinci for instance, and his depiction of the Last Supper, obviously was in possession of some secret knowledge. People claim him to have been a Freemason, but he is also known to have been connected with the Rosicrucians. So he got his information from somewhere. Hence we have two females included around the table of the Last Supper. To the Church, this would be an offence as it has long been regarded as an event shared only with his Twelve Disciples. To do this, da Vinci had to exclude two of the disciples, and that we don't know why.
We must also bear in mind that, outside the Old and the New Testaments, there exists various other manuscripts which have been excluded from the Canon. For instance we have various works of the Gnostic writings and the Apocrypha. We are also certain that many documents were removed during the various ecclesiastical councils held throughout the centuries.
There is no need for me to list the names of the many documents quite readily available over the internet if one wishes to research ancient writings. Bear in mind that most of these documents are deemed "uninspired" by the Church authorities, even some that once were a part of the Canon. The Book of Jasher, for instance, though referred to in the Old Testament as a cross reference to particular events, has been excluded. It is somewhat strange that the Old Testament writers considered the book of value by referring to it twice and yet the much later Church Fathers found it of little importance. We can understand why as it deals with the Biblical Exodus but in a very different light. Another example is the Book of Enoch. This is also considered "uninspired" even though the New Testament letter of Jude quotes from it, a sure indication that the Book of Enoch must have been extensively used by the first century Christians. Why would Jude quote prophesy from the manuscript if he himself considered the work unimportant? In this book alone we can see a body of secret knowledge not accepted or taught by the Church.
