The Times of Michael’s Bestowal

121:6.1By the close of the first cen­tury be­fore Christ the re­li­gious thought of Je­ru­sa­lem had been tremen­dously in­flu­enced and some­what mod­i­fied by Greek cul­tural teach­ings and even by Greek phi­los­o­phy. In the long con­test be­tween the views of the East­ern and West­ern schools of He­brew thought, Je­ru­sa­lem and the rest of the Oc­ci­dent and the Lev­ant in gen­eral adopted the West­ern Jew­ish or mod­i­fied Hel­lenis­tic view­point.

121:6.2In the days of Je­sus three lan­guages pre­vailed in Pales­tine: The com­mon peo­ple spoke some di­alect of Ara­maic; the priests and rab­bis spoke He­brew; the ed­u­cated classes and the bet­ter strata of Jews in gen­eral spoke Greek. The early trans­la­tion of the He­brew scrip­tures into Greek at Alexan­dria was re­spon­si­ble in no small mea­sure for the sub­se­quent pre­dom­i­nance of the Greek wing of Jew­ish cul­ture and the­ol­ogy. And the writ­ings of the Chris­tian teach­ers were soon to ap­pear in the same lan­guage. The re­nais­sance of Ju­daism dates from the Greek trans­la­tion of the He­brew scrip­tures. This was a vi­tal in­flu­ence which later de­ter­mined the drift of Paul’s Chris­tian cult to­ward the West in­stead of to­ward the East.

121:6.3Though the Hel­le­nized Jew­ish be­liefs were very lit­tle in­flu­enced by the teach­ings of the Epi­cure­ans, they were very ma­te­ri­ally af­fected by the phi­los­o­phy of Plato and the self-ab­ne­ga­tion doc­trines of the Sto­ics. The great in­road of Sto­icism is ex­em­pli­fied by the Fourth Book of the Mac­cabees; the pen­e­tra­tion of both Pla­tonic phi­los­o­phy and Stoic doc­trines is ex­hib­ited in the Wis­dom of Sol­o­mon. The Hel­le­nized Jews brought to the He­brew scrip­tures such an al­le­gor­i­cal in­ter­pre­ta­tion that they found no dif­fi­culty in con­form­ing He­brew the­ol­ogy with their revered Aris­totelian phi­los­o­phy. But this all led to dis­as­trous con­fu­sion un­til these prob­lems were taken in hand by Philo of Alexan­dria, who pro­ceeded to har­mo­nize and sys­tem­ize Greek phi­los­o­phy and He­brew the­ol­ogy into a com­pact and fairly con­sis­tent sys­tem of re­li­gious be­lief and prac­tice. And it was this later teach­ing of com­bined Greek phi­los­o­phy and He­brew the­ol­ogy that pre­vailed in Pales­tine when Je­sus lived and taught, and which Paul uti­lized as the foun­da­tion on which to build his more ad­vanced and en­light­en­ing cult of Chris­tian­ity.

121:6.4Philo was a great teacher; not since Moses had there lived a man who ex­erted such a pro­found in­flu­ence on the eth­i­cal and re­li­gious thought of the Oc­ci­den­tal world. In the mat­ter of the com­bi­na­tion of the bet­ter el­e­ments in con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous sys­tems of eth­i­cal and re­li­gious teach­ings, there have been seven out­stand­ing hu­man teach­ers: Sethard, Moses, Zoroaster, Lao-tse, Bud­dha, Philo, and Paul.

121:6.5Many, but not all, of Philo’s in­con­sis­ten­cies re­sult­ing from an ef­fort to com­bine Greek mys­ti­cal phi­los­o­phy and Ro­man Stoic doc­trines with the le­gal­is­tic the­ol­ogy of the He­brews, Paul rec­og­nized and wisely elim­i­nated from his pre-Chris­tian ba­sic the­ol­ogy. Philo led the way for Paul more fully to re­store the con­cept of the Par­a­dise Trin­ity, which had long been dor­mant in Jew­ish the­ol­ogy. In only one mat­ter did Paul fail to keep pace with Philo or to tran­scend the teach­ings of this wealthy and ed­u­cated Jew of Alexan­dria, and that was the doc­trine of the atone­ment; Philo taught de­liv­er­ance from the doc­trine of for­give­ness only by the shed­ding of blood. He also pos­si­bly glimpsed the re­al­ity and pres­ence of the Thought Ad­justers more clearly than did Paul. But Paul’s the­ory of orig­i­nal sin, the doc­trines of hered­i­tary guilt and in­nate evil and re­demp­tion there­from, was par­tially Mith­raic in ori­gin, hav­ing lit­tle in com­mon with He­brew the­ol­ogy, Philo’s phi­los­o­phy, or Je­sus’ teach­ings. Some phases of Paul’s teach­ings re­gard­ing orig­i­nal sin and the atone­ment were orig­i­nal with him­self.

121:6.6The Gospel of John, the last of the nar­ra­tives of Je­sus’ earth life, was ad­dressed to the West­ern peo­ples and pre­sents its story much in the light of the view­point of the later Alexan­drian Chris­tians, who were also dis­ci­ples of the teach­ings of Philo.

121:6.7At about the time of Christ a strange re­ver­sion of feel­ing to­ward the Jews oc­curred in Alexan­dria, and from this for­mer Jew­ish stronghold there went forth a vir­u­lent wave of per­se­cu­tion, ex­tend­ing even to Rome, from which many thou­sands were ban­ished. But such a cam­paign of mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion was short-lived; very soon the im­pe­rial gov­ern­ment fully re­stored the cur­tailed lib­er­ties of the Jews through­out the em­pire.

121:6.8Through­out the whole wide world, no mat­ter where the Jews found them­selves dis­persed by com­merce or op­pres­sion, all with one ac­cord kept their hearts cen­tered on the holy tem­ple at Je­ru­sa­lem. Jew­ish the­ol­ogy did sur­vive as it was in­ter­preted and prac­ticed at Je­ru­sa­lem, not­with­stand­ing that it was sev­eral times saved from obliv­ion by the timely in­ter­ven­tion of cer­tain Baby­lo­nian teach­ers.

121:6.9As many as two and one-half mil­lion of these dis­persed Jews used to come to Je­ru­sa­lem for the cel­e­bra­tion of their na­tional re­li­gious fes­ti­vals. And no mat­ter what the the­o­logic or philo­sophic dif­fer­ences of the East­ern (Baby­lo­nian) and the West­ern (Hel­lenic) Jews, they were all agreed on Je­ru­sa­lem as the cen­ter of their wor­ship and in ever look­ing for­ward to the com­ing of the Mes­siah.