(a) Not until the fourth century when one Christian party became successful enough to be armed with worldly power did the persecution of Gnostics begin.
(b) In the attempt to eliminate unpalatable tenets, no less than seven Councils were held in those early centuries. Here such tenets were branded as heresies and arrangements made to exterminate them thoroughly. Especially at the Council of Nicea (325
a.d. ) and the great Council of Constantinople (381 a.d. ), rebirth was pronounced a heresy, all the books teaching it were ferreted out and destroyed, and its advocates threatened with severe punishment. (c) Yet not only had several Christian sects believed in reincarnation but some of the early Christian Fathers, too. The Fathers who held metempsychosis to be true included Origen, who flourished about 230
a.d. , Justin Martyr, 140 a.d. , Clement of Alexandria, 194 a.d. , Tertullian of Carthage, 202 a.d. The sects who held it included Basilidians, the second-century Marcionites of Pontus, the Valentiniens of Egypt, also second century, and the Simonians. Moreover, all Gnostic sects held it and they were once more numerous than any other group of Christians. This is important, that most of the early Christians believed in this doctrine. (d) The Manichaeans also taught rebirth and, together with the Gnostics and Samaneans, formed a considerable part of the early Christian world.
(e) Where the literature was not destroyed it was so adulterated or interpolated as to make it appear either quite ridiculous or utterly erroneous. The historians among the later Fathers even accused the Gnostics of eating children!
(f) The early Gnostics came closer to the truth, but the later cults which sprang up among them departed from it by intermixing it with nonsense and corrupting it with falsehoods.
(g) Philo, himself a Jew, explicitly states that the Essenes got their knowledge from Indian Brahmins. Everyone knows that rebirth was an essential feature of the Brahmins' faith, so it is fair to assume that it was taken up by the Essenes, too.
-- Notebooks Category 9: From Birth to Rebirth > Chapter 2 : Rebirth and Reincarnation > # 162
