The Judeo-Christian religious concepts have been borrowed
from nearly every culture of the ancient world. From Egypt: monotheism; a preoccupation in the after-life, complete with rewards dependent upon ethical and sacramental considerations of this life;
soteriology, ie. the death and resurrection of the "Jesus Christ
as salvation" (a key element).
From Africa: the doctrine of eucharist, which has its
ultimate root in prehistoric cannibalism.
From the ancient cult of Attis: celibacy and the Gospel
injunction commanding auto-emasculation. (Removing the testicles.)
From the Semitic peoples of 2700 BC, the Mother-Godess
principles.
From Pythagorean Greek doctrines, communism and celibacy.
From Greece (the Stoics): the Logos doctrine which was in time to
develop in the doctrine of the Trinity.
From the Zoroastrianism of Babylon and Persia: the
absolute metaphysical dualism of good (Ahuramazda) and evil (Aharman or
Ahriman); the use of water for baptism and spiritual purification; the savior
born of a true virgin-mother; the belief in demons who make human beings
impure and who must be exorcised; the apocalyptic vision and prophecy
(ie Armageddon, Last Judgment, establishment of the Kingdom of
Righteousness; and intensely personal and vivid concepts of hell and heaven.
From the Brahmans of India: the concept of the clergy as direct
representatives of the Great Father (that inspired the clergy of the
Catholic Church to designate themselves as the Holy Fathers); the Absolute
Authority of the Priesthood; the exclusion of women from the clergy;
elaborate formulae by which sinners might free themselves from guilt;
excommunication (the principle thunderbolt of the Catholic Church); the immunity of the priesthood from taxation or civil duties,several sanctions against remarried women; recognition of degrees of legality in marriages; and a requirement that an ascetic joining a
religious order bestowing all his wealth upon the official priesthood.From Buddhism: glorification of celibacy, separation of religious and civil codes of conduct ("render unto Caesar..."), the emphasis on the rights and virtues of poverty, equating it with sainthood; salvation made an internal, not an external process; renunciation of the flesh; and most important of all,
ethics (much of Buddhism's ethical system passed almost intact into the Gospels).
The four primary components of the Gospel Jesus are: soteriology, which comes from the mystery-cults; ethics, which came primarily from India; eschatology, largely derived from Persia; and the supernatural Messianic concept, which was an Essene adaptation of a Zoroastrian doctrine. The one essential element which gives vitality to the religion of Jesus Christ is the faith in Him as the savior, that is the God-man who sacrificed Himself for us, whose eucharist makes us divine, and who confers upon us resurrection and blessed immortality. (It is the Zoroastrian Myth of Mythra, btw, that gives us a babe born miraculously, in a cave, on the 25th of December, witnessed only by some shepherds who brought gifts.) The one basic
weakness of Mithraism was that it had no historical founder. In the struggle between the early Christian Church and the esoteric mystery-cults, which proved once and for all that any religion which becomes the state will most certainly destroy all its competitors and, at the same time, every vestige of freedom, one of the first to fall before the Church Triumphant was the mystery-cult of Mithra, to which Christianity owes so much.
Egypt gave the world the god-man savior, who was several
times reconstituted in Greek and barbarian mysteries; Persia gave us the fear of Hell and the hopes of Paradise, and the concept of the Last Judgment; India gave us the priest state and the Buddhist's renunciation, which made sex, family, wealth, labor and comfort into crimes, and which made of idle communism and holy parasitism the saintly way of life; Greece gave us democracy and private property, which Pythagoras attempted to replace with a celibate but self-reliant communism. The Essenes were Pythagoreans who encased their pagan religious synthesis (which Jesus absorbed) in a Jewish integument. In the Gospels, therefore, we find a synthesis of Osirian-Dionysiac soteriology, Zoroastrian eschatology, Buddhist ethics and renunciation, Pythagorean communism, and the Essenic Parousia.
Since this is in fundamental contradiction with private property or enterprise,and since it is the reverse of the secular way of life which we have developed, the modern individual who accepts the Christian synthesis as written exists in a state of duality: he gives lip service to a philosophy of life which is diametrically opposed to his actual manner of existence.
For this reason, countless millions read their Gospel without the faintest realization of its true meaning.
"My son, give attention to my words,
Incline your ear to my sayings.
Do not let them depart from your eyes;
Keep them in the midst of your heart;
For they are life to those who find them,
And health to all their flesh.
Keep your heart with all diligence,
For out of it spring the issues of life.
" Proverbs 4:20-23
In Christian Terms: The first six lines of this are to point out the
importance of the last two lines. Those two lines tell of the one way to know God directly, beyond concepts, as later Jesus taught also in the Sermon on the Mount; MT 5:8 {Blessed [are] the pure in heart: for they shall see God.} ... |
