Christian church, early

132:0.5The sig­nif­i­cance of this re­mark­able do­ing can the bet­ter be un­der­stood when we re­cord the fact that, out of this group of thirty-two Je­sus-taught re­li­gious lead­ers in Rome, only two were un­fruit­ful; the thirty be­came piv­otal in­di­vid­u­als in the es­tab­lish­ment of Chris­tian­ity in Rome, and cer­tain of them also aided in turn­ing the chief Mith­raic tem­ple into the first Chris­tian church of that city. We who view hu­man ac­tiv­i­ties from be­hind the scenes and in the light of nine­teen cen­turies of time rec­og­nize just three fac­tors of paramount value in the early set­ting of the stage for the rapid spread of Chris­tian­ity through­out Eu­rope, and they are:

132:0.61. The choos­ing and hold­ing of Si­mon Pe­ter as an apos­tle.

132:0.72. The talk in Je­ru­sa­lem with Stephen, whose death led to the win­ning of Saul of Tar­sus.

132:0.83. The pre­lim­i­nary prepa­ra­tion of these thirty Ro­mans for the sub­se­quent lead­er­ship of the new re­li­gion in Rome and through­out the em­pire.

195:0.5How did this new mes­sage of Jew­ish ori­gin, which had al­most failed in the land of its birth, so quickly and ef­fec­tively cap­ture the very best minds of the Ro­man Em­pire? The tri­umph of Chris­tian­ity over the philo­sophic re­li­gions and the mys­tery cults was due to:

195:0.61. Or­ga­ni­za­tion. Paul was a great or­ga­nizer and his suc­ces­sors kept up the pace he set.

195:0.72. Chris­tian­ity was thor­oughly Hel­le­nized. It em­braced the best in Greek phi­los­o­phy as well as the cream of He­brew the­ol­ogy.

195:0.83. But best of all, it con­tained a new and great ideal, the echo of the life be­stowal of Je­sus and the re­flec­tion of his mes­sage of sal­va­tion for all man­kind.

195:0.94. The Chris­tian lead­ers were will­ing to make such com­pro­mises with Mith­ra­ism that the bet­ter half of its ad­her­ents were won over to the An­ti­och cult.

195:0.105. Like­wise did the next and later gen­er­a­tions of Chris­tian lead­ers make such fur­ther com­pro­mises with pa­gan­ism that even the Ro­man em­peror Con­stan­tine was won to the new re­li­gion.

195:0.11But the Chris­tians made a shrewd bar­gain with the pa­gans in that they adopted the rit­u­al­is­tic pageantry of the pa­gan while com­pelling the pa­gan to ac­cept the Hel­le­nized ver­sion of Pauline Chris­tian­ity. They made a bet­ter bar­gain with the pa­gans than they did with the Mith­raic cult, but even in that ear­lier com­pro­mise they came off more than con­querors in that they suc­ceeded in elim­i­nat­ing the gross im­moral­i­ties and also nu­mer­ous other rep­re­hen­si­ble prac­tices of the Per­sian mys­tery.

195:0.12Wisely or un­wisely, these early lead­ers of Chris­tian­ity de­lib­er­ately com­pro­mised the ide­als of Je­sus in an ef­fort to save and fur­ther many of his ideas. And they were em­i­nently suc­cess­ful. But mis­take not! these com­pro­mised ide­als of the Mas­ter are still la­tent in his gospel, and they will even­tu­ally as­sert their full power upon the world.

195:0.13By this pa­gani­za­tion of Chris­tian­ity the old or­der won many mi­nor vic­to­ries of a rit­u­al­is­tic na­ture, but the Chris­tians gained the as­cen­dancy in that:

195:0.141. A new and enor­mously higher note in hu­man morals was struck.

195:0.152. A new and greatly en­larged con­cept of God was given to the world.

195:0.163. The hope of im­mor­tal­ity be­came a part of the as­sur­ance of a rec­og­nized re­li­gion.

195:0.174. Je­sus of Naz­a­reth was given to man’s hun­gry soul.

195:0.18Many of the great truths taught by Je­sus were al­most lost in these early com­pro­mises, but they yet slum­ber in this re­li­gion of pa­ganized Chris­tian­ity, which was in turn the Pauline ver­sion of the life and teach­ings of the Son of Man. And Chris­tian­ity, even be­fore it was pa­ganized, was first thor­oughly Hel­le­nized. Chris­tian­ity owes much, very much, to the Greeks. It was a Greek, from Egypt, who so bravely stood up at Nicaea and so fear­lessly chal­lenged this as­sem­bly that it dared not so ob­scure the con­cept of the na­ture of Je­sus that the real truth of his be­stowal might have been in dan­ger of be­ing lost to the world. This Greek’s name was Athana­sius, and but for the elo­quence and the logic of this be­liever, the per­sua­sions of Ar­ius would have tri­umphed.

195:1.2Chris­tian­ity came into ex­is­tence and tri­umphed over all con­tend­ing re­li­gions pri­mar­ily be­cause of two things:

195:1.31. The Greek mind was will­ing to bor­row new and good ideas even from the Jews.

195:1.42. Paul and his suc­ces­sors were will­ing but shrewd and saga­cious com­pro­mis­ers; they were keen the­o­logic traders.

166:5.2This very syn­a­gogue later on be­came a Chris­tian church and was the mis­sion­ary head­quar­ters for the pro­mul­ga­tion of the gospel through the re­gions to the east. It was long a stronghold of the Mas­ter’s teach­ings and stood alone in this re­gion as a cen­ter of Chris­tian learn­ing for cen­turies.

166:5.4It was the ap­par­ent mis­for­tune of Ab­ner to be at vari­ance with all of the lead­ers of the early Chris­tian church. He fell out with Pe­ter and James (Je­sus’ brother) over ques­tions of ad­min­is­tra­tion and the ju­ris­dic­tion of the Je­ru­sa­lem church; he parted com­pany with Paul over dif­fer­ences of phi­los­o­phy and the­ol­ogy. Ab­ner was more Baby­lo­nian than Hel­lenic in his phi­los­o­phy, and he stub­bornly re­sisted all at­tempts of Paul to re­make the teach­ings of Je­sus so as to pre­sent less that was ob­jec­tion­able, first to the Jews, then to the Greco-Ro­man be­liev­ers in the mys­ter­ies.

171:1.6Within a short time af­ter the de­struc­tion of Je­ru­sa­lem, An­ti­och be­came the head­quar­ters of Pauline Chris­tian­ity, while Phil­a­del­phia re­mained the cen­ter of the Ab­ne­r­ian king­dom of heaven. From An­ti­och the Pauline ver­sion of the teach­ings of Je­sus and about Je­sus spread to all the West­ern world; from Phil­a­del­phia the mis­sion­ar­ies of the Ab­ne­r­ian ver­sion of the king­dom of heaven spread through­out Mes­o­po­ta­mia and Ara­bia un­til the later times when these un­com­pro­mis­ing emis­saries of the teach­ings of Je­sus were over­whelmed by the sud­den rise of Is­lam.

195:1.11The East­ern ver­sion of the mes­sage of Je­sus, not­with­stand­ing that it re­mained more true to his teach­ings, con­tin­ued to fol­low the un­com­pro­mis­ing at­ti­tude of Ab­ner. It never pro­gressed as did the Hel­le­nized ver­sion and was even­tu­ally lost in the Is­lamic move­ment.

194:4.9At first they bap­tized in the name of Je­sus; it was al­most twenty years be­fore they be­gan to bap­tize in “the name of the Fa­ther, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” Bap­tism was all that was re­quired for ad­mis­sion into the fel­low­ship of be­liev­ers. They had no or­ga­ni­za­tion as yet; it was sim­ply the Je­sus broth­er­hood.

121:2.5Each Jew­ish syn­a­gogue tol­er­ated a fringe of gen­tile be­liev­ers, “de­vout” or “God-fear­ing” men, and it was among this fringe of pros­e­lytes that Paul made the bulk of his early con­verts to Chris­tian­ity. Even the tem­ple at Je­ru­sa­lem pos­sessed its or­nate court of the gen­tiles. There was very close con­nec­tion be­tween the cul­ture, com­merce, and wor­ship of Je­ru­sa­lem and An­ti­och. In An­ti­och Paul’s dis­ci­ples were first called “Chris­tians.”

194:4.13And then broke out the new and re­lent­less per­se­cu­tions by the Jews, so that the ac­tive teach­ers of the new re­li­gion about Je­sus, which sub­se­quently at An­ti­och was called Chris­tian­ity, went forth to the ends of the em­pire pro­claim­ing Je­sus. In car­ry­ing this mes­sage, be­fore the time of Paul the lead­er­ship was in Greek hands; and these first mis­sion­ar­ies, as also the later ones, fol­lowed the path of Alexan­der’s march of for­mer days, go­ing by way of Gaza and Tyre to An­ti­och and then over Asia Mi­nor to Mace­do­nia, then on to Rome and to the ut­ter­most parts of the em­pire.

194:4.7Un­mis­tak­ably, a new fel­low­ship was aris­ing in the world. “The mul­ti­tude who be­lieved con­tin­ued stead­fastly in the apos­tles’ teach­ing and fel­low­ship, in the break­ing of bread, and in prayers.” They called each other brother and sis­ter; they greeted one an­other with a holy kiss; they min­is­tered to the poor. It was a fel­low­ship of liv­ing as well as of wor­ship. They were not com­mu­nal by de­cree but by the de­sire to share their goods with their fel­low be­liev­ers. They con­fi­dently ex­pected that Je­sus would re­turn to com­plete the es­tab­lish­ment of the Fa­ther’s king­dom dur­ing their gen­er­a­tion. This spon­ta­neous shar­ing of earthly pos­ses­sions was not a di­rect fea­ture of Je­sus’ teach­ing; it came about be­cause these men and women so sin­cerely and so con­fi­dently be­lieved that he was to re­turn any day to fin­ish his work and to con­sum­mate the king­dom. But the fi­nal re­sults of this well-meant ex­per­i­ment in thought­less broth­erly love were dis­as­trous and sor­row-breed­ing. Thou­sands of earnest be­liev­ers sold their prop­erty and dis­posed of all their cap­i­tal goods and other pro­duc­tive as­sets. With the pass­ing of time, the dwin­dling re­sources of Chris­tian “equal-shar­ing” came to an end—but the world did not. Very soon the be­liev­ers at An­ti­och were tak­ing up a col­lec­tion to keep their fel­low be­liev­ers at Je­ru­sa­lem from starv­ing.

• doctrine of sanctification by suffering; mortification of the flesh

89:3.3Pov­erty was just a part of the rit­ual of the mor­ti­fi­ca­tion of the flesh which, un­for­tu­nately, be­came in­cor­po­rated into the writ­ings and teach­ings of many re­li­gions, no­tably Chris­tian­ity. Pen­ance is the neg­a­tive form of this oft­times fool­ish rit­ual of re­nun­ci­a­tion. But all this taught the sav­age self-con­trol, and that was a worth-while ad­vance­ment in so­cial evo­lu­tion. Self-de­nial and self-con­trol were two of the great­est so­cial gains from early evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gion. Self-con­trol gave man a new phi­los­o­phy of life; it taught him the art of aug­ment­ing life’s frac­tion by low­er­ing the de­nom­i­na­tor of per­sonal de­mands in­stead of al­ways at­tempt­ing to in­crease the nu­mer­a­tor of self­ish grat­i­fi­ca­tion.

• doctrine of sanctification by suffering; mortification of the flesh

89:4.1Sac­ri­fice as a part of re­li­gious de­vo­tions, like many other wor­ship­ful rit­u­als, did not have a sim­ple and sin­gle ori­gin. The ten­dency to bow down be­fore power and to pros­trate one­self in wor­ship­ful ado­ra­tion in the pres­ence of mys­tery is fore­shad­owed in the fawn­ing of the dog be­fore its mas­ter. It is but one step from the im­pulse of wor­ship to the act of sac­ri­fice. Prim­i­tive man gauged the value of his sac­ri­fice by the pain which he suf­fered. When the idea of sac­ri­fice first at­tached it­self to re­li­gious cer­e­mo­nial, no of­fer­ing was con­tem­plated which was not pro­duc­tive of pain. The first sac­ri­fices were such acts as pluck­ing hair, cut­ting the flesh, mu­ti­la­tions, knock­ing out teeth, and cut­ting off fin­gers. As civ­i­liza­tion ad­vanced, these crude con­cepts of sac­ri­fice were el­e­vated to the level of the rit­u­als of self-ab­ne­ga­tion, as­ceti­cism, fast­ing, de­pri­va­tion, and the later Chris­tian doc­trine of sanc­ti­fi­ca­tion through sor­row, suf­fer­ing, and the mor­ti­fi­ca­tion of the flesh.

• Christian church was built around › miraculous concepts of Jesus’ divine-human personality

98:7.2It is not the prov­ince of this pa­per to deal with the ori­gin and dis­sem­i­na­tion of the Chris­tian re­li­gion. Suf­fice it to say that it is built around the per­son of Je­sus of Naz­a­reth, the hu­manly in­car­nate Mi­chael Son of Neb­a­don, known to Uran­tia as the Christ, the anointed one. Chris­tian­ity was spread through­out the Lev­ant and Oc­ci­dent by the fol­low­ers of this Galilean, and their mis­sion­ary zeal equaled that of their il­lus­tri­ous pre­de­ces­sors, the Sethites and Salemites, as well as that of their earnest Asi­atic con­tem­po­raries, the Bud­dhist teach­ers.

• Christian church was built around › miraculous concepts of Jesus’ divine-human personality

98:7.85. The his­toric fact of the hu­man life of Joshua ben Joseph, the re­al­ity of Je­sus of Naz­a­reth as the glo­ri­fied Christ, the Son of God.

• uncompromising at Lake Urmia

134:6.14Af­ter the death of Cym­boy­ton, his sons en­coun­tered great dif­fi­cul­ties in main­tain­ing a peace­ful fac­ulty. The reper­cus­sions of Je­sus’ teach­ings would have been much greater if the later Chris­tian teach­ers who joined the Ur­mia fac­ulty had ex­hib­ited more wis­dom and ex­er­cised more tol­er­ance.

134:6.15Cym­boy­ton’s el­dest son had ap­pealed to Ab­ner at Phil­a­del­phia for help, but Ab­ner’s choice of teach­ers was most un­for­tu­nate in that they turned out to be un­yield­ing and un­com­pro­mis­ing. These teach­ers sought to make their re­li­gion dom­i­nant over the other be­liefs. They never sus­pected that the oft-re­ferred-to lec­tures of the car­a­van con­duc­tor had been de­liv­ered by Je­sus him­self.

• Christian church was built around › fact of Christ’s death

143:5.11The apos­tles never ceased to be shocked by Je­sus’ will­ing­ness to talk with women, women of ques­tion­able char­ac­ter, even im­moral women. It was very dif­fi­cult for Je­sus to teach his apos­tles that women, even so-called im­moral women, have souls which can choose God as their Fa­ther, thereby be­com­ing daugh­ters of God and can­di­dates for life ev­er­last­ing. Even nine­teen cen­turies later many show the same un­will­ing­ness to grasp the Mas­ter’s teach­ings. Even the Chris­tian re­li­gion has been per­sis­tently built up around the fact of the death of Christ in­stead of around the truth of his life. The world should be more con­cerned with his happy and God-re­veal­ing life than with his tragic and sor­row­ful death.

• Christian church was built around › fact of Christ’s death

143:6.3The first night of the camp on Mount Ger­izim the apos­tles ex­pected that Je­sus would re­buke them for their at­ti­tude to­ward the woman at Ja­cob’s well, but he made no ref­er­ence to the mat­ter. In­stead he gave them that mem­o­rable talk on “The re­al­i­ties which are cen­tral in the king­dom of God.” In any re­li­gion it is very easy to al­low val­ues to be­come dis­pro­por­tion­ate and to per­mit facts to oc­cupy the place of truth in one’s the­ol­ogy. The fact of the cross be­came the very cen­ter of sub­se­quent Chris­tian­ity; but it is not the cen­tral truth of the re­li­gion which may be de­rived from the life and teach­ings of Je­sus of Naz­a­reth.

• great mistakes were incorporation of Persian and Greek thought, connection to Judaism, atonement, overemphasis on person of Jesus

149:2.2The Apos­tle Paul, in his ef­forts to bring the teach­ings of Je­sus to the fa­vor­able no­tice of cer­tain groups in his day, wrote many let­ters of in­struc­tion and ad­mo­ni­tion. Other teach­ers of Je­sus’ gospel did like­wise, but none of them re­al­ized that some of these writ­ings would sub­se­quently be brought to­gether by those who would set them forth as the em­bod­i­ment of the teach­ings of Je­sus. And so, while so-called Chris­tian­ity does con­tain more of the Mas­ter’s gospel than any other re­li­gion, it does also con­tain much that Je­sus did not teach. Aside from the in­cor­po­ra­tion of many teach­ings from the Per­sian mys­ter­ies and much of the Greek phi­los­o­phy into early Chris­tian­ity, two great mis­takes were made:

149:2.31. The ef­fort to con­nect the gospel teach­ing di­rectly onto the Jew­ish the­ol­ogy, as il­lus­trated by the Chris­tian doc­trines of the atone­ment—the teach­ing that Je­sus was the sac­ri­ficed Son who would sat­isfy the Fa­ther’s stern jus­tice and ap­pease the di­vine wrath. These teach­ings orig­i­nated in a praise­wor­thy ef­fort to make the gospel of the king­dom more ac­cept­able to dis­be­liev­ing Jews. Though these ef­forts failed as far as win­ning the Jews was con­cerned, they did not fail to con­fuse and alien­ate many hon­est souls in all sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions.

149:2.42. The sec­ond great blun­der of the Mas­ter’s early fol­low­ers, and one which all sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions have per­sisted in per­pet­u­at­ing, was to or­ga­nize the Chris­tian teach­ing so com­pletely about the per­son of Je­sus. This overem­pha­sis of the per­son­al­ity of Je­sus in the the­ol­ogy of Chris­tian­ity has worked to ob­scure his teach­ings, and all of this has made it in­creas­ingly dif­fi­cult for Jews, Mo­hammedans, Hin­dus, and other East­ern re­li­gion­ists to ac­cept the teach­ings of Je­sus. We would not be­lit­tle the place of the per­son of Je­sus in a re­li­gion which might bear his name, but we would not per­mit such con­sid­er­a­tion to eclipse his in­spired life or to sup­plant his sav­ing mes­sage: the fa­ther­hood of God and the broth­er­hood of man.

149:2.5The teach­ers of the re­li­gion of Je­sus should ap­proach other re­li­gions with the rec­og­ni­tion of the truths which are held in com­mon (many of which come di­rectly or in­di­rectly from Je­sus’ mes­sage) while they re­frain from plac­ing so much em­pha­sis on the dif­fer­ences.

• lacked moral courage to follow Jesus’ example toward women

149:2.9In one gen­er­a­tion Je­sus lifted women out of the dis­re­spect­ful obliv­ion and the slav­ish drudgery of the ages. And it is the one shame­ful thing about the re­li­gion that pre­sumed to take Je­sus’ name that it lacked the moral cour­age to fol­low this no­ble ex­am­ple in its sub­se­quent at­ti­tude to­ward women.

• Jesus believed to be Eternal Son

161:1.61. The Fa­ther in Par­a­dise does en­joy equal­ity of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with at least two other be­ings who are fully equal to him­self and wholly like him­self—the Eter­nal Son and the In­fi­nite Spirit. In view of the doc­trine of the Trin­ity, the Greek was com­pelled to con­cede the per­son­al­ity pos­si­bil­ity of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther. (It was the later con­sid­er­a­tion of these dis­cus­sions which led to the en­larged con­cep­tion of the Trin­ity in the minds of the twelve apos­tles. Of course, it was the gen­eral be­lief that Je­sus was the Eter­nal Son.)

• Christian church was built around › miraculous concepts of Jesus’ divine-human personality

166:0.2This en­tire mis­sion of three months in Perea was suc­cess­fully car­ried on with lit­tle help from the twelve apos­tles, and the gospel from this time on re­flected, not so much Je­sus’ per­son­al­ity, as his teach­ings. But his fol­low­ers did not long fol­low his in­struc­tions, for soon af­ter Je­sus’ death and res­ur­rec­tion they de­parted from his teach­ings and be­gan to build the early church around the mirac­u­lous con­cepts and the glo­ri­fied mem­o­ries of his di­vine-hu­man per­son­al­ity.

• lacked moral courage to follow Jesus’ example toward women

167:6.4Woman’s sta­tus in Pales­tine was much im­proved by Je­sus’ teach­ing; and so it would have been through­out the world if his fol­low­ers had not de­parted so far from that which he painstak­ingly taught them.

• substitute for kingdom of heaven

170:2.87. The new gospel af­firmed that hu­man sal­va­tion is the rev­e­la­tion of a far-reach­ing di­vine pur­pose to be ful­filled and re­al­ized in the fu­ture des­tiny of the end­less ser­vice of the sal­vaged sons of God.

170:2.9These teach­ings cover the ex­panded idea of the king­dom which was taught by Je­sus. This great con­cept was hardly em­braced in the el­e­men­tary and con­fused king­dom teach­ings of John the Bap­tist.

• Christian church was built around › miraculous concepts of Jesus’ divine-human personality

170:2.10The apos­tles were un­able to grasp the real mean­ing of the Mas­ter’s ut­ter­ances re­gard­ing the king­dom. The sub­se­quent dis­tor­tion of Je­sus’ teach­ings, as they are re­corded in the New Tes­ta­ment, is be­cause the con­cept of the gospel writ­ers was col­ored by the be­lief that Je­sus was then ab­sent from the world for only a short time; that he would soon re­turn to es­tab­lish the king­dom in power and glory—just such an idea as they held while he was with them in the flesh. But Je­sus did not con­nect the es­tab­lish­ment of the king­dom with the idea of his re­turn to this world. That cen­turies have passed with no signs of the ap­pear­ance of the “New Age” is in no way out of har­mony with Je­sus’ teach­ing.

• substitute for kingdom of heaven

170:5.7The church, as a so­cial out­growth of the king­dom, would have been wholly nat­u­ral and even de­sir­able. The evil of the church was not its ex­is­tence, but rather that it al­most com­pletely sup­planted the Je­sus con­cept of the king­dom. Paul’s in­sti­tu­tion­al­ized church be­came a vir­tual sub­sti­tute for the king­dom of heaven which Je­sus had pro­claimed.

170:5.8But doubt not, this same king­dom of heaven which the Mas­ter taught ex­ists within the heart of the be­liever, will yet be pro­claimed to this Chris­tian church, even as to all other re­li­gions, races, and na­tions on earth—even to ev­ery in­di­vid­ual.

170:5.9The king­dom of Je­sus’ teach­ing, the spir­i­tual ideal of in­di­vid­ual righ­teous­ness and the con­cept of man’s di­vine fel­low­ship with God, be­came grad­u­ally sub­merged into the mys­tic con­cep­tion of the per­son of Je­sus as the Re­deemer-Cre­ator and spir­i­tual head of a so­cial­ized re­li­gious com­mu­nity. In this way a for­mal and in­sti­tu­tional church be­came the sub­sti­tute for the in­di­vid­u­ally spirit-led broth­er­hood of the king­dom.

170:5.10The church was an in­ev­i­ta­ble and use­ful so­cial re­sult of Je­sus’ life and teach­ings; the tragedy con­sisted in the fact that this so­cial re­ac­tion to the teach­ings of the king­dom so fully dis­placed the spir­i­tual con­cept of the real king­dom as Je­sus taught and lived it.

170:5.11The king­dom, to the Jews, was the Is­raelite com­mu­nity; to the gen­tiles it be­came the Chris­tian church. To Je­sus the king­dom was the sum of those in­di­vid­u­als who had con­fessed their faith in the fa­ther­hood of God, thereby declar­ing their whole­hearted ded­i­ca­tion to the do­ing of the will of God, thus be­com­ing mem­bers of the spir­i­tual broth­er­hood of man.

170:5.12The Mas­ter fully re­al­ized that cer­tain so­cial re­sults would ap­pear in the world as a con­se­quence of the spread of the gospel of the king­dom; but he in­tended that all such de­sir­able so­cial man­i­fes­ta­tions should ap­pear as un­con­scious and in­ev­i­ta­ble out­growths, or nat­u­ral fruits, of this in­ner per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence of in­di­vid­ual be­liev­ers, this purely spir­i­tual fel­low­ship and com­mu­nion with the di­vine spirit which in­dwells and ac­ti­vates all such be­liev­ers.

170:5.13Je­sus fore­saw that a so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion, or church, would fol­low the prog­ress of the true spir­i­tual king­dom, and that is why he never op­posed the apos­tles’ prac­tic­ing the rite of John’s bap­tism. He taught that the truth-lov­ing soul, the one who hungers and thirsts for righ­teous­ness, for God, is ad­mit­ted by faith to the spir­i­tual king­dom; at the same time the apos­tles taught that such a be­liever is ad­mit­ted to the so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion of dis­ci­ples by the out­ward rite of bap­tism.

170:5.14When Je­sus’ im­me­di­ate fol­low­ers rec­og­nized their par­tial fail­ure to re­al­ize his ideal of the es­tab­lish­ment of the king­dom in the hearts of men by the spirit’s dom­i­na­tion and guid­ance of the in­di­vid­ual be­liever, they set about to save his teach­ing from be­ing wholly lost by sub­sti­tut­ing for the Mas­ter’s ideal of the king­dom the grad­ual cre­ation of a vis­i­ble so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion, the Chris­tian church. And when they had ac­com­plished this pro­gram of sub­sti­tu­tion, in or­der to main­tain con­sis­tency and to pro­vide for the rec­og­ni­tion of the Mas­ter’s teach­ing re­gard­ing the fact of the king­dom, they pro­ceeded to set the king­dom off into the fu­ture. The church, just as soon as it was well es­tab­lished, be­gan to teach that the king­dom was in re­al­ity to ap­pear at the cul­mi­na­tion of the Chris­tian age, at the sec­ond com­ing of Christ.

170:5.15In this man­ner the king­dom be­came the con­cept of an age, the idea of a fu­ture vis­i­ta­tion, and the ideal of the fi­nal re­demp­tion of the saints of the Most High. The early Chris­tians (and all too many of the later ones) gen­er­ally lost sight of the Fa­ther-and-son idea em­bod­ied in Je­sus’ teach­ing of the king­dom, while they sub­sti­tuted there­for the well-or­ga­nized so­cial fel­low­ship of the church. The church thus be­came in the main a so­cial broth­er­hood which ef­fec­tively dis­placed Je­sus’ con­cept and ideal of a spir­i­tual broth­er­hood.

• Christ became head of church rather than believer’s elder brother
• issues of eternal life partly transferred to C.c.

170:5.17The con­cept of Je­sus is still alive in the ad­vanced re­li­gions of the world. Paul’s Chris­tian church is the so­cial­ized and hu­man­ized shadow of what Je­sus in­tended the king­dom of heaven to be—and what it most cer­tainly will yet be­come. Paul and his suc­ces­sors partly trans­ferred the is­sues of eter­nal life from the in­di­vid­ual to the church. Christ thus be­came the head of the church rather than the el­der brother of each in­di­vid­ual be­liever in the Fa­ther’s fam­ily of the king­dom. Paul and his con­tem­po­raries ap­plied all of Je­sus’ spir­i­tual im­pli­ca­tions re­gard­ing him­self and the in­di­vid­ual be­liever to the church as a group of be­liev­ers; and in do­ing this, they struck a death­blow to Je­sus’ con­cept of the di­vine king­dom in the heart of the in­di­vid­ual be­liever.

170:5.18And so, for cen­turies, the Chris­tian church has la­bored un­der great em­bar­rass­ment be­cause it dared to lay claim to those mys­te­ri­ous pow­ers and priv­i­leges of the king­dom, pow­ers and priv­i­leges which can be ex­er­cised and ex­pe­ri­enced only be­tween Je­sus and his spir­i­tual be­liever broth­ers. And thus it be­comes ap­par­ent that mem­ber­ship in the church does not nec­es­sar­ily mean fel­low­ship in the king­dom; one is spir­i­tual, the other mainly so­cial.

• changed gospel

192:4.7On Thurs­day night the apos­tles had a won­der­ful meet­ing in this up­per cham­ber and all pledged them­selves to go forth in the pub­lic preach­ing of the new gospel of the risen Lord ex­cept Thomas, Si­mon Ze­lo­tes, and the Al­pheus twins. Al­ready had be­gun the first steps of chang­ing the gospel of the king­dom—son­ship with God and broth­er­hood with man—into the procla­ma­tion of the res­ur­rec­tion of Je­sus. Na­than­iel op­posed this shift in the bur­den of their pub­lic mes­sage, but he could not with­stand Pe­ter’s elo­quence, nei­ther could he over­come the en­thu­si­asm of the dis­ci­ples, es­pe­cially the women be­liev­ers.

• changed gospel

194:0.3These men had been trained and in­structed that the gospel which they should preach was the fa­ther­hood of God and the son­ship of man, but at just this mo­ment of spir­i­tual ec­stasy and per­sonal tri­umph, the best tid­ings, the great­est news, these men could think of was the fact of the risen Mas­ter. And so they went forth, en­dowed with power from on high, preach­ing glad tid­ings to the peo­ple—even sal­va­tion through Je­sus—but they un­in­ten­tion­ally stum­bled into the er­ror of sub­sti­tut­ing some of the facts as­so­ci­ated with the gospel for the gospel mes­sage it­self. Pe­ter un­wit­tingly led off in this mis­take, and oth­ers fol­lowed af­ter him on down to Paul, who cre­ated a new re­li­gion out of the new ver­sion of the good news.

194:0.4The gospel of the king­dom is: the fact of the fa­ther­hood of God, cou­pled with the re­sul­tant truth of the son­ship-broth­er­hood of men. Chris­tian­ity, as it de­vel­oped from that day, is: the fact of God as the Fa­ther of the Lord Je­sus Christ, in as­so­ci­a­tion with the ex­pe­ri­ence of be­liever-fel­low­ship with the risen and glo­ri­fied Christ.

194:0.5It is not strange that these spirit-in­fused men should have seized upon this op­por­tu­nity to ex­press their feel­ings of tri­umph over the forces which had sought to de­stroy their Mas­ter and end the in­flu­ence of his teach­ings. At such a time as this it was eas­ier to re­mem­ber their per­sonal as­so­ci­a­tion with Je­sus and to be thrilled with the as­sur­ance that the Mas­ter still lived, that their friend­ship had not ended, and that the spirit had in­deed come upon them even as he had prom­ised.

194:0.6These be­liev­ers felt them­selves sud­denly trans­lated into an­other world, a new ex­is­tence of joy, power, and glory. The Mas­ter had told them the king­dom would come with power, and some of them thought they were be­gin­ning to dis­cern what he meant.

194:0.7And when all of this is taken into con­sid­er­a­tion, it is not dif­fi­cult to un­der­stand how these men came to preach a new gospel about Je­sus in the place of their for­mer mes­sage of the fa­ther­hood of God and the broth­er­hood of men.

• possessions held in common; led to disaster

194:4.2Then comes the res­ur­rec­tion, with its de­liv­er­ance from de­spair and the re­turn of their faith in the Mas­ter’s di­vin­ity. Again and again they see him and talk with him, and he takes them out on Oli­vet, where he bids them farewell and tells them he is go­ing back to the Fa­ther. He has told them to tarry in Je­ru­sa­lem un­til they are en­dowed with power—un­til the Spirit of Truth shall come. And on the day of Pen­te­cost this new teacher comes, and they go out at once to preach their gospel with new power. They are the bold and coura­geous fol­low­ers of a liv­ing Lord, not a dead and de­feated leader. The Mas­ter lives in the hearts of these evan­ge­lists; God is not a doc­trine in their minds; he has be­come a liv­ing pres­ence in their souls.

• changed gospel
• Christ became head of church rather than believer’s elder brother

194:4.4What has hap­pened to these men whom Je­sus had or­dained to go forth preach­ing the gospel of the king­dom, the fa­ther­hood of God and the broth­er­hood of man? They have a new gospel; they are on fire with a new ex­pe­ri­ence; they are filled with a new spir­i­tual en­ergy. Their mes­sage has sud­denly shifted to the procla­ma­tion of the risen Christ: “Je­sus of Naz­a­reth, a man God ap­proved by mighty works and won­ders; him, be­ing de­liv­ered up by the de­ter­mi­nate coun­sel and fore­knowl­edge of God, you did cru­cify and slay. The things which God fore­shad­owed by the mouth of all the proph­ets, he thus ful­filled. This Je­sus did God raise up. God has made him both Lord and Christ. Be­ing, by the right hand of God, ex­alted and hav­ing re­ceived from the Fa­ther the prom­ise of the spirit, he has poured forth this which you see and hear. Re­pent, that your sins may be blot­ted out; that the Fa­ther may send the Christ, who has been ap­pointed for you, even Je­sus, whom the heaven must re­ceive un­til the times of the restora­tion of all things.”

194:4.5The gospel of the king­dom, the mes­sage of Je­sus, had been sud­denly changed into the gospel of the Lord Je­sus Christ. They now pro­claimed the facts of his life, death, and res­ur­rec­tion and preached the hope of his speedy re­turn to this world to fin­ish the work he be­gan. Thus the mes­sage of the early be­liev­ers had to do with preach­ing about the facts of his first com­ing and with teach­ing the hope of his sec­ond com­ing, an event which they deemed to be very near at hand.

194:4.6Christ was about to be­come the creed of the rapidly form­ing church. Je­sus lives; he died for men; he gave the spirit; he is com­ing again. Je­sus filled all their thoughts and de­ter­mined all their new con­cepts of God and ev­ery­thing else. They were too much en­thused over the new doc­trine that “God is the Fa­ther of the Lord Je­sus” to be con­cerned with the old mes­sage that “God is the lov­ing Fa­ther of all men,” even of ev­ery sin­gle in­di­vid­ual. True, a mar­velous man­i­fes­ta­tion of broth­erly love and un­ex­am­pled good will did spring up in these early com­mu­ni­ties of be­liev­ers. But it was a fel­low­ship of be­liev­ers in Je­sus, not a fel­low­ship of broth­ers in the fam­ily king­dom of the Fa­ther in heaven. Their good will arose from the love born of the con­cept of Je­sus’ be­stowal and not from the rec­og­ni­tion of the broth­er­hood of mor­tal man. Nev­er­the­less, they were filled with joy, and they lived such new and unique lives that all men were at­tracted to their teach­ings about Je­sus. They made the great mis­take of us­ing the liv­ing and il­lus­tra­tive com­men­tary on the gospel of the king­dom for that gospel, but even that rep­re­sented the great­est re­li­gion man­kind had ever known.

• did not employ Jesus’ simple spiritual appeal

195:0.3Upon such a stage of hu­man so­ci­ety the teach­ings of Je­sus, em­braced in the Chris­tian mes­sage, were sud­denly thrust. A new or­der of liv­ing was thus pre­sented to the hun­gry hearts of these West­ern peo­ples. This sit­u­a­tion meant im­me­di­ate con­flict be­tween the older re­li­gious prac­tices and the new Chris­tian­ized ver­sion of Je­sus’ mes­sage to the world. Such a con­flict must re­sult in ei­ther de­cided vic­tory for the new or for the old or in some de­gree of com­pro­mise. His­tory shows that the strug­gle ended in com­pro­mise. Chris­tian­ity pre­sumed to em­brace too much for any one peo­ple to as­sim­i­late in one or two gen­er­a­tions. It was not a sim­ple spir­i­tual ap­peal, such as Je­sus had pre­sented to the souls of men; it early struck a de­cided at­ti­tude on re­li­gious rit­u­als, ed­u­ca­tion, magic, med­i­cine, art, lit­er­a­ture, law, gov­ern­ment, morals, sex reg­u­la­tion, polygamy, and, in lim­ited de­gree, even slav­ery. Chris­tian­ity came not merely as a new re­li­gion—some­thing all the Ro­man Em­pire and all the Ori­ent were wait­ing for—but as a new or­der of hu­man so­ci­ety. And as such a pre­ten­sion it quickly pre­cip­i­tated the so­cial-moral clash of the ages. The ide­als of Je­sus, as they were rein­ter­preted by Greek phi­los­o­phy and so­cial­ized in Chris­tian­ity, now boldly chal­lenged the tra­di­tions of the hu­man race em­bod­ied in the ethics, moral­ity, and re­li­gions of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion.

• Christian church was built around › concept of glorified Christ
• Christian church was built around › miraculous concepts of Jesus’ divine-human personality

196:2.1Some day a ref­or­ma­tion in the Chris­tian church may strike deep enough to get back to the unadul­ter­ated re­li­gious teach­ings of Je­sus, the au­thor and fin­isher of our faith. You may preach a re­li­gion about Je­sus, but, per­force, you must live the re­li­gion of Je­sus. In the en­thu­si­asm of Pen­te­cost, Pe­ter un­in­ten­tion­ally in­au­gu­rated a new re­li­gion, the re­li­gion of the risen and glo­ri­fied Christ. The Apos­tle Paul later on trans­formed this new gospel into Chris­tian­ity, a re­li­gion em­body­ing his own the­o­logic views and por­tray­ing his own per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence with the Je­sus of the Da­mas­cus road. The gospel of the king­dom is founded on the per­sonal re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence of the Je­sus of Gal­i­lee; Chris­tian­ity is founded al­most ex­clu­sively on the per­sonal re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence of the Apos­tle Paul. Al­most the whole of the New Tes­ta­ment is de­voted, not to the por­trayal of the sig­nif­i­cant and in­spir­ing re­li­gious life of Je­sus, but to a dis­cus­sion of Paul’s re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence and to a por­trayal of his per­sonal re­li­gious con­vic­tions. The only no­table ex­cep­tions to this state­ment, aside from cer­tain parts of Mat­thew, Mark, and Luke, are the Book of He­brews and the Epis­tle of James. Even Pe­ter, in his writ­ing, only once re­verted to the per­sonal re­li­gious life of his Mas­ter. The New Tes­ta­ment is a su­perb Chris­tian doc­u­ment, but it is only mea­gerly Je­su­so­nian.

• almost wholly lost valiant human Jesus
• Christian church was built around › miraculous concepts of Jesus’ divine-human personality

196:2.4But the great­est mis­take was made in that, while the hu­man Je­sus was rec­og­nized as hav­ing a re­li­gion, the di­vine Je­sus (Christ) al­most overnight be­came a re­li­gion. Paul’s Chris­tian­ity made sure of the ado­ra­tion of the di­vine Christ, but it al­most wholly lost sight of the strug­gling and valiant hu­man Je­sus of Gal­i­lee, who, by the valor of his per­sonal re­li­gious faith and the hero­ism of his in­dwelling Ad­juster, as­cended from the lowly lev­els of hu­man­ity to be­come one with di­vin­ity, thus be­com­ing the new and liv­ing way whereby all mor­tals may so as­cend from hu­man­ity to di­vin­ity. Mor­tals in all stages of spir­i­tu­al­ity and on all worlds may find in the per­sonal life of Je­sus that which will strengthen and in­spire them as they pro­gress from the low­est spirit lev­els up to the high­est di­vine val­ues, from the be­gin­ning to the end of all per­sonal re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence.

196:2.5At the time of the writ­ing of the New Tes­ta­ment, the au­thors not only most pro­foundly be­lieved in the di­vin­ity of the risen Christ, but they also de­vot­edly and sin­cerely be­lieved in his im­me­di­ate re­turn to earth to con­sum­mate the heav­enly king­dom. This strong faith in the Lord’s im­me­di­ate re­turn had much to do with the ten­dency to omit from the rec­ord those ref­er­ences which por­trayed the purely hu­man ex­pe­ri­ences and at­tri­butes of the Mas­ter. The whole Chris­tian move­ment tended away from the hu­man pic­ture of Je­sus of Naz­a­reth to­ward the ex­al­ta­tion of the risen Christ, the glo­ri­fied and soon-re­turn­ing Lord Je­sus Christ.

• Christian church was built around › miraculous concepts of Jesus’ divine-human personality

196:2.6Je­sus founded the re­li­gion of per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence in do­ing the will of God and serv­ing the hu­man broth­er­hood; Paul founded a re­li­gion in which the glo­ri­fied Je­sus be­came the ob­ject of wor­ship and the broth­er­hood con­sisted of fel­low be­liev­ers in the di­vine Christ. In the be­stowal of Je­sus these two con­cepts were po­ten­tial in his di­vine-hu­man life, and it is in­deed a pity that his fol­low­ers failed to cre­ate a uni­fied re­li­gion which might have given proper rec­og­ni­tion to both the hu­man and the di­vine na­tures of the Mas­ter as they were in­sep­a­ra­bly bound up in his earth life and so glo­ri­ously set forth in the orig­i­nal gospel of the king­dom.

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.

121:3.43. The small mid­dle class. Al­though this group was in­deed small, it was very in­flu­en­tial and pro­vided the moral back­bone of the early Chris­tian church, which en­cour­aged these groups to con­tinue in their var­i­ous crafts and trades. Among the Jews many of the Phar­isees be­longed to this class of trades­men.

195:3.6The early plan of Chris­tian wor­ship was largely taken over from the Jew­ish syn­a­gogue, mod­i­fied by the Mith­raic rit­ual; later on, much pa­gan pageantry was added. The back­bone of the early Chris­tian church con­sisted of Chris­tian­ized Greek pros­e­lytes to Ju­daism.

• Jews

5:4.111. The He­brew con­cept—God as a vin­di­ca­tor of moral val­ues, a righ­teous God.

• Plato, Greeks

5:4.122. The Greek con­cept—God as a uni­fier, a God of wis­dom.

• Jesus’ teaching of God as loving Father

5:4.133. Je­sus’ con­cept—God as a liv­ing friend, a lov­ing Fa­ther, the di­vine pres­ence.

• Paul
• Philo

5:4.14It must there­fore be ev­i­dent that com­pos­ite Chris­tian the­ol­ogy en­coun­ters great dif­fi­culty in at­tain­ing con­sis­tency. This dif­fi­culty is fur­ther ag­gra­vated by the fact that the doc­trines of early Chris­tian­ity were gen­er­ally based on the per­sonal re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence of three dif­fer­ent per­sons: Philo of Alexan­dria, Je­sus of Naz­a­reth, and Paul of Tar­sus.

• continence cult

89:3.6It was only nat­u­ral that the cult of re­nun­ci­a­tion and hu­mil­i­a­tion should have paid at­ten­tion to sex­ual grat­i­fi­ca­tion. The con­ti­nence cult orig­i­nated as a rit­ual among sol­diers prior to en­gag­ing in bat­tle; in later days it be­came the prac­tice of “saints.” This cult tol­er­ated mar­riage only as an evil lesser than for­ni­ca­tion. Many of the world’s great re­li­gions have been ad­versely in­flu­enced by this an­cient cult, but none more markedly than Chris­tian­ity. The Apos­tle Paul was a devo­tee of this cult, and his per­sonal views are re­flected in the teach­ings which he fas­tened onto Chris­tian the­ol­ogy: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman.” “I would that all men were even as I my­self.” “I say, there­fore, to the un­mar­ried and wid­ows, it is good for them to abide even as I.” Paul well knew that such teach­ings were not a part of Je­sus’ gospel, and his ac­knowl­edg­ment of this is il­lus­trated by his state­ment, “I speak this by per­mis­sion and not by com­mand­ment.” But this cult led Paul to look down upon women. And the pity of it all is that his per­sonal opin­ions have long in­flu­enced the teach­ings of a great world re­li­gion. If the ad­vice of the tent­maker-teacher were to be lit­er­ally and uni­ver­sally obeyed, then would the hu­man race come to a sud­den and in­glo­ri­ous end. Fur­ther­more, the in­volve­ment of a re­li­gion with the an­cient con­ti­nence cult leads di­rectly to a war against mar­riage and the home, so­ci­ety’s ver­i­ta­ble foun­da­tion and the ba­sic in­sti­tu­tion of hu­man prog­ress. And it is not to be won­dered at that all such be­liefs fos­tered the for­ma­tion of celi­bate priest­hoods in the many re­li­gions of var­i­ous peo­ples.

• Jews
• Paul
• Philo
• Plato, Greeks
• Simon Peter
• Zoroastrians

92:6.18The Chris­tian re­li­gion is the re­li­gion about the life and teach­ings of Christ based upon the the­ol­ogy of Ju­daism, mod­i­fied fur­ther through the as­sim­i­la­tion of cer­tain Zoroas­trian teach­ings and Greek phi­los­o­phy, and for­mu­lated pri­mar­ily by three in­di­vid­u­als: Philo, Pe­ter, and Paul. It has passed through many phases of evo­lu­tion since the time of Paul and has be­come so thor­oughly Oc­ci­den­tal­ized that many non-Eu­ro­pean peo­ples very nat­u­rally look upon Chris­tian­ity as a strange rev­e­la­tion of a strange God and for strangers.

• erroneous philosophy

94:12.1The great weak­ness in the cos­mol­ogy of Bud­dhism was two­fold: its con­tam­i­na­tion with many of the su­per­sti­tions of In­dia and China and its sub­li­ma­tion of Gau­tama, first as the en­light­ened one, and then as the Eter­nal Bud­dha. Just as Chris­tian­ity has suf­fered from the ab­sorp­tion of much er­ro­neous hu­man phi­los­o­phy, so does Bud­dhism bear its hu­man birth­mark. But the teach­ings of Gau­tama have con­tin­ued to evolve dur­ing the past two and one-half mil­len­ni­ums. The con­cept of Bud­dha, to an en­light­ened Bud­dhist, is no more the hu­man per­son­al­ity of Gau­tama than the con­cept of Je­ho­vah is iden­ti­cal with the spirit de­mon of Ho­reb to an en­light­ened Chris­tian. Paucity of ter­mi­nol­ogy, to­gether with the sen­ti­men­tal re­ten­tion of olden nomen­cla­ture, is of­ten provoca­tive of the fail­ure to un­der­stand the true sig­nif­i­cance of the evo­lu­tion of re­li­gious con­cepts.

• Zoroastrians

95:6.7Even the re­li­gion which suc­ceeded Zoroas­tri­an­ism in Per­sia was markedly in­flu­enced by it. When the Ira­nian priests sought to over­throw the teach­ings of Zoroaster, they res­ur­rected the an­cient wor­ship of Mithra. And Mith­ra­ism spread through­out the Lev­ant and Med­i­ter­ra­nean re­gions, be­ing for some time a con­tem­po­rary of both Ju­daism and Chris­tian­ity. The teach­ings of Zoroaster thus came suc­ces­sively to im­press three great re­li­gions: Ju­daism and Chris­tian­ity and, through them, Mo­hammedanism.

• Jews

97:10.6The Jews loved jus­tice, wis­dom, truth, and righ­teous­ness as have few peo­ples, but they con­tributed least of all peo­ples to the in­tel­lec­tual com­pre­hen­sion and to the spir­i­tual un­der­stand­ing of these di­vine qual­i­ties. Though He­brew the­ol­ogy re­fused to ex­pand, it played an im­por­tant part in the de­vel­op­ment of two other world re­li­gions, Chris­tian­ity and Mo­hammedanism.

• Plato, Greeks
• Salem teachings

98:0.1The Mel­chiz­e­dek teach­ings en­tered Eu­rope along many routes, but chiefly they came by way of Egypt and were em­bod­ied in Oc­ci­den­tal phi­los­o­phy af­ter be­ing thor­oughly Hel­le­nized and later Chris­tian­ized. The ide­als of the West­ern world were ba­si­cally So­cratic, and its later re­li­gious phi­los­o­phy be­came that of Je­sus as it was mod­i­fied and com­pro­mised through con­tact with evolv­ing Oc­ci­den­tal phi­los­o­phy and re­li­gion, all of which cul­mi­nated in the Chris­tian church.

• Cynics

98:0.2For a long time in Eu­rope the Salem mis­sion­ar­ies car­ried on their ac­tiv­i­ties, be­com­ing grad­u­ally ab­sorbed into many of the cults and rit­ual groups which pe­ri­od­i­cally arose. Among those who main­tained the Salem teach­ings in the purest form must be men­tioned the Cyn­ics. These preach­ers of faith and trust in God were still func­tion­ing in Ro­man Eu­rope in the first cen­tury af­ter Christ, be­ing later in­cor­po­rated into the newly form­ing Chris­tian re­li­gion.

• Jews
• Plato, Greeks

98:2.8In Greece, be­liev­ing was sub­or­di­nated to think­ing; in Pales­tine, think­ing was held sub­ject to be­liev­ing. Much of the strength of Chris­tian­ity is due to its hav­ing bor­rowed heav­ily from both He­brew moral­ity and Greek thought.

• Mithraics
• Zoroastrians

98:5.2The cult of Mithras arose in Iran and long per­sisted in its home­land de­spite the mil­i­tant op­po­si­tion of the fol­low­ers of Zoroaster. But by the time Mith­ra­ism reached Rome, it had be­come greatly im­proved by the ab­sorp­tion of many of Zoroaster’s teach­ings. It was chiefly through the Mith­raic cult that Zoroaster’s re­li­gion ex­erted an in­flu­ence upon later ap­pear­ing Chris­tian­ity.

• Mithraics

98:5.4The ad­her­ents of this cult wor­shiped in caves and other se­cret places, chant­ing hymns, mum­bling magic, eat­ing the flesh of the sac­ri­fi­cial an­i­mals, and drink­ing the blood. Three times a day they wor­shiped, with spe­cial weekly cer­e­mo­ni­als on the day of the sun-god and with the most elab­o­rate ob­ser­vance of all on the an­nual fes­ti­val of Mithras, De­cem­ber twenty-fifth. It was be­lieved that the par­tak­ing of the sacra­ment en­sured eter­nal life, the im­me­di­ate pass­ing, af­ter death, to the bo­som of Mithras, there to tarry in bliss un­til the judg­ment day. On the judg­ment day the Mith­raic keys of heaven would un­lock the gates of Par­a­dise for the re­cep­tion of the faith­ful; where­upon all the un­bap­tized of the liv­ing and the dead would be an­ni­hi­lated upon the re­turn of Mithras to earth. It was taught that, when a man died, he went be­fore Mithras for judg­ment, and that at the end of the world Mithras would sum­mon all the dead from their graves to face the last judg­ment. The wicked would be de­stroyed by fire, and the righ­teous would reign with Mithras for­ever.

98:6.1Prior to the com­ing of the mys­tery cults and Chris­tian­ity, per­sonal re­li­gion hardly de­vel­oped as an in­de­pen­dent in­sti­tu­tion in the civ­i­lized lands of North Africa and Eu­rope; it was more of a fam­ily, city-state, po­lit­i­cal, and im­pe­rial af­fair. The Hel­lenic Greeks never evolved a cen­tral­ized wor­ship sys­tem; the rit­ual was lo­cal; they had no priest­hood and no “sa­cred book.” Much as the Ro­mans, their re­li­gious in­sti­tu­tions lacked a pow­er­ful driv­ing agency for the preser­va­tion of higher moral and spir­i­tual val­ues. While it is true that the in­sti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion of re­li­gion has usu­ally de­tracted from its spir­i­tual qual­ity, it is also a fact that no re­li­gion has thus far suc­ceeded in sur­viv­ing with­out the aid of in­sti­tu­tional or­ga­ni­za­tion of some de­gree, greater or lesser.

98:6.2Oc­ci­den­tal re­li­gion thus lan­guished un­til the days of the Skep­tics, Cyn­ics, Epi­cure­ans, and Sto­ics, but most im­por­tant of all, un­til the times of the great con­test be­tween Mith­ra­ism and Paul’s new re­li­gion of Chris­tian­ity.

98:6.3Dur­ing the third cen­tury af­ter Christ, Mith­raic and Chris­tian churches were very sim­i­lar both in ap­pear­ance and in the char­ac­ter of their rit­ual. A ma­jor­ity of such places of wor­ship were un­der­ground, and both con­tained al­tars whose back­grounds var­i­ously de­picted the suf­fer­ings of the sav­ior who had brought sal­va­tion to a sin-cursed hu­man race.

98:6.4Al­ways had it been the prac­tice of Mith­raic wor­shipers, on en­ter­ing the tem­ple, to dip their fin­gers in holy wa­ter. And since in some dis­tricts there were those who at one time be­longed to both re­li­gions, they in­tro­duced this cus­tom into the ma­jor­ity of the Chris­tian churches in the vicin­ity of Rome. Both re­li­gions em­ployed bap­tism and par­took of the sacra­ment of bread and wine. The one great dif­fer­ence be­tween Mith­ra­ism and Chris­tian­ity, aside from the char­ac­ters of Mithras and Je­sus, was that the one en­cour­aged mil­i­tarism while the other was ul­tra­pa­cific. Mith­ra­ism’s tol­er­ance for other re­li­gions (ex­cept later Chris­tian­ity) led to its fi­nal un­do­ing. But the de­cid­ing fac­tor in the strug­gle be­tween the two was the ad­mis­sion of women into the full fel­low­ship of the Chris­tian faith.

98:6.5In the end the nom­i­nal Chris­tian faith dom­i­nated the Oc­ci­dent. Greek phi­los­o­phy sup­plied the con­cepts of eth­i­cal value; Mith­ra­ism, the rit­ual of wor­ship ob­ser­vance; and Chris­tian­ity, as such, the tech­nique for the con­ser­va­tion of moral and so­cial val­ues.

• beginnings

98:7.3The Chris­tian re­li­gion, as a Uran­tian sys­tem of be­lief, arose through the com­pound­ing of the fol­low­ing teach­ings, in­flu­ences, be­liefs, cults, and per­sonal in­di­vid­ual at­ti­tudes:

• Salem teachings

98:7.41. The Mel­chiz­e­dek teach­ings, which are a ba­sic fac­tor in all the re­li­gions of Oc­ci­dent and Ori­ent that have arisen in the last four thou­sand years.

• Jews

98:7.52. The He­braic sys­tem of moral­ity, ethics, the­ol­ogy, and be­lief in both Prov­i­dence and the su­preme Yah­weh.

• Zoroastrians

98:7.63. The Zoroas­trian con­cep­tion of the strug­gle be­tween cos­mic good and evil, which had al­ready left its im­print on both Ju­daism and Mith­ra­ism. Through pro­longed con­tact at­ten­dant upon the strug­gles be­tween Mith­ra­ism and Chris­tian­ity, the doc­trines of the Ira­nian prophet be­came a po­tent fac­tor in de­ter­min­ing the the­o­logic and philo­sophic cast and struc­ture of the dog­mas, tenets, and cos­mol­ogy of the Hel­le­nized and La­tinized ver­sions of the teach­ings of Je­sus.

• Mithraics
• Phrygian Great Mother cult

98:7.74. The mys­tery cults, es­pe­cially Mith­ra­ism but also the wor­ship of the Great Mother in the Phry­gian cult. Even the leg­ends of the birth of Je­sus on Uran­tia be­came tainted with the Ro­man ver­sion of the mirac­u­lous birth of the Ira­nian sav­ior-hero, Mithras, whose ad­vent on earth was sup­posed to have been wit­nessed by only a hand­ful of gift-bear­ing shep­herds who had been in­formed of this im­pend­ing event by an­gels.

• Paul

98:7.96. The per­sonal view­point of Paul of Tar­sus. And it should be re­corded that Mith­ra­ism was the dom­i­nant re­li­gion of Tar­sus dur­ing his ado­les­cence. Paul lit­tle dreamed that his well-in­ten­tioned let­ters to his con­verts would some­day be re­garded by still later Chris­tians as the “word of God.” Such well-mean­ing teach­ers must not be held ac­count­able for the use made of their writ­ings by later-day suc­ces­sors.

• Plato, Greeks

98:7.107. The philo­sophic thought of the Hel­lenis­tic peo­ples, from Alexan­dria and An­ti­och through Greece to Syra­cuse and Rome. The phi­los­o­phy of the Greeks was more in har­mony with Paul’s ver­sion of Chris­tian­ity than with any other cur­rent re­li­gious sys­tem and be­came an im­por­tant fac­tor in the suc­cess of Chris­tian­ity in the Oc­ci­dent. Greek phi­los­o­phy, cou­pled with Paul’s the­ol­ogy, still forms the ba­sis of Eu­ro­pean ethics.

• Hebraic prejudice against Trinity concept

104:1.10Je­sus taught his apos­tles the truth re­gard­ing the per­sons of the Par­a­dise Trin­ity, but they thought he spoke fig­u­ra­tively and sym­bol­i­cally. Hav­ing been nur­tured in He­braic mono­the­ism, they found it dif­fi­cult to en­ter­tain any be­lief that seemed to con­flict with their dom­i­nat­ing con­cept of Yah­weh. And the early Chris­tians in­her­ited the He­braic prej­u­dice against the Trin­ity con­cept.

• Paul

121:5.13Paul, in an ef­fort to uti­lize the wide­spread ad­her­ence to the bet­ter types of the mys­tery re­li­gions, made cer­tain adap­ta­tions of the teach­ings of Je­sus so as to ren­der them more ac­cept­able to a larger num­ber of prospec­tive con­verts. But even Paul’s com­pro­mise of Je­sus’ teach­ings (Chris­tian­ity) was su­pe­rior to the best in the mys­ter­ies in that:

121:5.141. Paul taught a moral re­demp­tion, an eth­i­cal sal­va­tion. Chris­tian­ity pointed to a new life and pro­claimed a new ideal. Paul for­sook magic rites and cer­e­mo­nial en­chant­ments.

121:5.152. Chris­tian­ity pre­sented a re­li­gion which grap­pled with fi­nal so­lu­tions of the hu­man prob­lem, for it not only of­fered sal­va­tion from sor­row and even from death, but it also prom­ised de­liv­er­ance from sin fol­lowed by the en­dow­ment of a righ­teous char­ac­ter of eter­nal sur­vival qual­i­ties.

121:5.163. The mys­ter­ies were built upon myths. Chris­tian­ity, as Paul preached it, was founded upon a his­toric fact: the be­stowal of Mi­chael, the Son of God, upon man­kind.

• Jews
• Plato, Greeks
• Romans

121:7.6And so a dif­fer­ent peo­ple were called upon to carry an ad­vanc­ing the­ol­ogy to the world, a sys­tem of teach­ing em­body­ing the phi­los­o­phy of the Greeks, the law of the Ro­mans, the moral­ity of the He­brews, and the gospel of per­son­al­ity sanc­tity and spir­i­tual lib­erty for­mu­lated by Paul and based on the teach­ings of Je­sus.

121:7.7Paul’s cult of Chris­tian­ity ex­hib­ited its moral­ity as a Jew­ish birth­mark. The Jews viewed his­tory as the prov­i­dence of God—Yah­weh at work. The Greeks brought to the new teach­ing clearer con­cepts of the eter­nal life. Paul’s doc­trines were in­flu­enced in the­ol­ogy and phi­los­o­phy not only by Je­sus’ teach­ings but also by Plato and Philo. In ethics he was in­spired not only by Christ but also by the Sto­ics.

121:7.8The gospel of Je­sus, as it was em­bod­ied in Paul’s cult of An­ti­och Chris­tian­ity, be­came blended with the fol­low­ing teach­ings:

121:7.91. The philo­sophic rea­son­ing of the Greek pros­e­lytes to Ju­daism, in­clud­ing some of their con­cepts of the eter­nal life.

• Mithraics

121:7.102. The ap­peal­ing teach­ings of the pre­vail­ing mys­tery cults, es­pe­cially the Mith­raic doc­trines of re­demp­tion, atone­ment, and sal­va­tion by the sac­ri­fice made by some god.

121:7.113. The sturdy moral­ity of the es­tab­lished Jew­ish re­li­gion.

• 30 Jesus-taught Roman religious leaders

132:0.4Je­sus learned much about men while in Rome, but the most valu­able of all the man­i­fold ex­pe­ri­ences of his six months’ so­journ in that city was his con­tact with, and in­flu­ence upon, the re­li­gious lead­ers of the em­pire’s cap­i­tal. Be­fore the end of the first week in Rome Je­sus had sought out, and had made the ac­quain­tance of, the worth-while lead­ers of the Cyn­ics, the Sto­ics, and the mys­tery cults, in par­tic­u­lar the Mith­raic group. Whether or not it was ap­par­ent to Je­sus that the Jews were go­ing to re­ject his mis­sion, he most cer­tainly fore­saw that his mes­sen­gers were pres­ently com­ing to Rome to pro­claim the king­dom of heaven; and he there­fore set about, in the most amaz­ing man­ner, to pre­pare the way for the bet­ter and more cer­tain re­cep­tion of their mes­sage. He se­lected five of the lead­ing Sto­ics, eleven of the Cyn­ics, and six­teen of the mys­tery-cult lead­ers and spent much of his spare time for al­most six months in in­ti­mate as­so­ci­a­tion with these re­li­gious teach­ers. And this was his method of in­struc­tion: Never once did he at­tack their er­rors or even men­tion the flaws in their teach­ings. In each case he would se­lect the truth in what they taught and then pro­ceed so to em­bel­lish and il­lu­mi­nate this truth in their minds that in a very short time this en­hance­ment of the truth ef­fec­tively crowded out the as­so­ci­ated er­ror; and thus were these Je­sus-taught men and women pre­pared for the sub­se­quent rec­og­ni­tion of ad­di­tional and sim­i­lar truths in the teach­ings of the early Chris­tian mis­sion­ar­ies. It was this early ac­cep­tance of the teach­ings of the gospel preach­ers which gave that pow­er­ful im­pe­tus to the rapid spread of Chris­tian­ity in Rome and from there through­out the em­pire.

• Babylonian and Persian ideas of good and evil
• Plato, Greeks

146:1.3Many of the bet­ter of the Baby­lo­nian and Per­sian ideas of light and dark­ness, good and evil, time and eter­nity, were later in­cor­po­rated in the doc­trines of so-called Chris­tian­ity, and their in­clu­sion ren­dered the Chris­tian teach­ings more im­me­di­ately ac­cept­able to the peo­ples of the Near East. In like man­ner, the in­clu­sion of many of Plato’s the­o­ries of the ideal spirit or in­vis­i­ble pat­terns of all things vis­i­ble and ma­te­rial, as later adapted by Philo to the He­brew the­ol­ogy, made Paul’s Chris­tian teach­ings more easy of ac­cep­tance by the west­ern Greeks.

• Plato, Greeks

170:5.2Through­out the first cen­turies of the Chris­tian pro­pa­ganda, the idea of the king­dom of heaven was tremen­dously in­flu­enced by the then rapidly spread­ing no­tions of Greek ide­al­ism, the idea of the nat­u­ral as the shadow of the spir­i­tual—the tem­po­ral as the time shadow of the eter­nal.

• Paul
• Philo
• Zoroastrians

170:5.3But the great step which marked the trans­plan­ta­tion of the teach­ings of Je­sus from a Jew­ish to a gen­tile soil was taken when the Mes­siah of the king­dom be­came the Re­deemer of the church, a re­li­gious and so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion grow­ing out of the ac­tiv­i­ties of Paul and his suc­ces­sors and based on the teach­ings of Je­sus as they were sup­ple­mented by the ideas of Philo and the Per­sian doc­trines of good and evil.

170:5.4The ideas and ide­als of Je­sus, em­bod­ied in the teach­ing of the gospel of the king­dom, nearly failed of re­al­iza­tion as his fol­low­ers pro­gres­sively dis­torted his pro­nounce­ments. The Mas­ter’s con­cept of the king­dom was no­tably mod­i­fied by two great ten­den­cies:

170:5.51. The Jew­ish be­liev­ers per­sisted in re­gard­ing him as the Mes­siah. They be­lieved that Je­sus would very soon re­turn ac­tu­ally to es­tab­lish the world-wide and more or less ma­te­rial king­dom.

170:5.62. The gen­tile Chris­tians be­gan very early to ac­cept the doc­trines of Paul, which led in­creas­ingly to the gen­eral be­lief that Je­sus was the Re­deemer of the chil­dren of the church, the new and in­sti­tu­tional suc­ces­sor of the ear­lier con­cept of the purely spir­i­tual broth­er­hood of the king­dom.

• Jews

194:1.5Pen­te­cost was the great fes­ti­val of bap­tism, the time for fel­low­ship­ping the pros­e­lytes of the gate, those gen­tiles who de­sired to serve Yah­weh. It was, there­fore, the more easy for large num­bers of both the Jews and be­liev­ing gen­tiles to sub­mit to bap­tism on this day. In do­ing this, they were in no way dis­con­nect­ing them­selves from the Jew­ish faith. Even for some time af­ter this the be­liev­ers in Je­sus were a sect within Ju­daism. All of them, in­clud­ing the apos­tles, were still loyal to the es­sen­tial re­quire­ments of the Jew­ish cer­e­mo­nial sys­tem.

194:4.1When Je­sus was so sud­denly seized by his en­e­mies and so quickly cru­ci­fied be­tween two thieves, his apos­tles and dis­ci­ples were com­pletely de­mor­al­ized. The thought of the Mas­ter, ar­rested, bound, scourged, and cru­ci­fied, was too much for even the apos­tles. They for­got his teach­ings and his warn­ings. He might, in­deed, have been “a prophet mighty in deed and word be­fore God and all the peo­ple,” but he could hardly be the Mes­siah they had hoped would re­store the king­dom of Is­rael.

194:4.3“Day by day they con­tin­ued stead­fastly and with one ac­cord in the tem­ple and break­ing bread at home. They took their food with glad­ness and sin­gle­ness of heart, prais­ing God and hav­ing fa­vor with all the peo­ple. They were all filled with the spirit, and they spoke the word of God with bold­ness. And the mul­ti­tudes of those who be­lieved were of one heart and soul; and not one of them said that aught of the things which he pos­sessed was his own, and they had all things in com­mon.”

194:4.8In these days they cel­e­brated the Lord’s Sup­per af­ter the man­ner of its es­tab­lish­ment; that is, they as­sem­bled for a so­cial meal of good fel­low­ship and par­took of the sacra­ment at the end of the meal.

194:4.10This Je­sus sect was grow­ing rapidly, and once more the Sad­ducees took no­tice of them. The Phar­isees were lit­tle both­ered about the sit­u­a­tion, see­ing that none of the teach­ings in any way in­ter­fered with the ob­ser­vance of the Jew­ish laws. But the Sad­ducees be­gan to put the lead­ers of the Je­sus sect in jail un­til they were pre­vailed upon to ac­cept the coun­sel of one of the lead­ing rab­bis, Gamaliel, who ad­vised them: “Re­frain from these men and let them alone, for if this coun­sel or this work is of men, it will be over­thrown; but if it is of God, you will not be able to over­throw them, lest haply you be found even to be fight­ing against God.” They de­cided to fol­low Gamaliel’s coun­sel, and there en­sued a time of peace and quiet in Je­ru­sa­lem, dur­ing which the new gospel about Je­sus spread rapidly.

194:4.11And so all went well in Je­ru­sa­lem un­til the time of the com­ing of the Greeks in large num­bers from Alexan­dria. Two of the pupils of Ro­dan ar­rived in Je­ru­sa­lem and made many con­verts from among the Hel­lenists. Among their early con­verts were Stephen and Bar­na­bas. These able Greeks did not so much have the Jew­ish view­point, and they did not so well con­form to the Jew­ish mode of wor­ship and other cer­e­mo­nial prac­tices. And it was the do­ings of these Greek be­liev­ers that ter­mi­nated the peace­ful re­la­tions be­tween the Je­sus broth­er­hood and the Phar­isees and Sad­ducees. Stephen and his Greek as­so­ciate be­gan to preach more as Je­sus taught, and this brought them into im­me­di­ate con­flict with the Jew­ish rulers. In one of Stephen’s pub­lic ser­mons, when he reached the ob­jec­tion­able part of the dis­course, they dis­pensed with all for­mal­i­ties of trial and pro­ceeded to stone him to death on the spot.

194:4.12Stephen, the leader of the Greek colony of Je­sus’ be­liev­ers in Je­ru­sa­lem, thus be­came the first mar­tyr to the new faith and the spe­cific cause for the for­mal or­ga­ni­za­tion of the early Chris­tian church. This new cri­sis was met by the rec­og­ni­tion that be­liev­ers could not longer go on as a sect within the Jew­ish faith. They all agreed that they must sep­a­rate them­selves from un­be­liev­ers; and within one month from the death of Stephen the church at Je­ru­sa­lem had been or­ga­nized un­der the lead­er­ship of Pe­ter, and James the brother of Je­sus had been in­stalled as its tit­u­lar head.

195:0.1The re­sults of Pe­ter’s preach­ing on the day of Pen­te­cost were such as to de­cide the fu­ture poli­cies, and to de­ter­mine the plans, of the ma­jor­ity of the apos­tles in their ef­forts to pro­claim the gospel of the king­dom. Pe­ter was the real founder of the Chris­tian church; Paul car­ried the Chris­tian mes­sage to the gen­tiles, and the Greek be­liev­ers car­ried it to the whole Ro­man Em­pire.

195:0.2Al­though the tra­di­tion-bound and priest-rid­den He­brews, as a peo­ple, re­fused to ac­cept ei­ther Je­sus’ gospel of the fa­ther­hood of God and the broth­er­hood of man or Pe­ter’s and Paul’s procla­ma­tion of the res­ur­rec­tion and as­cen­sion of Christ (sub­se­quent Chris­tian­ity), the rest of the Ro­man Em­pire was found to be re­cep­tive to the evolv­ing Chris­tian teach­ings. West­ern civ­i­liza­tion was at this time in­tel­lec­tual, war weary, and thor­oughly skep­ti­cal of all ex­ist­ing re­li­gions and uni­verse philoso­phies. The peo­ples of the West­ern world, the ben­e­fi­cia­ries of Greek cul­ture, had a revered tra­di­tion of a great past. They could con­tem­plate the in­her­i­tance of great ac­com­plish­ments in phi­los­o­phy, art, lit­er­a­ture, and po­lit­i­cal prog­ress. But with all these achieve­ments they had no soul-sat­is­fy­ing re­li­gion. Their spir­i­tual long­ings re­mained un­sat­is­fied.

195:0.4At first, Chris­tian­ity won as con­verts only the lower so­cial and eco­nomic strata. But by the be­gin­ning of the sec­ond cen­tury the very best of Greco-Ro­man cul­ture was in­creas­ingly turn­ing to this new or­der of Chris­tian be­lief, this new con­cept of the pur­pose of liv­ing and the goal of ex­is­tence.

195:1.1The Hel­l­eniza­tion of Chris­tian­ity started in earnest on that event­ful day when the Apos­tle Paul stood be­fore the coun­cil of the Are­opa­gus in Athens and told the Athe­ni­ans about “the Un­known God.” There, un­der the shadow of the Acrop­o­lis, this Ro­man cit­i­zen pro­claimed to these Greeks his ver­sion of the new re­li­gion which had taken ori­gin in the Jew­ish land of Gal­i­lee. And there was some­thing strangely alike in Greek phi­los­o­phy and many of the teach­ings of Je­sus. They had a com­mon goal—both aimed at the emer­gence of the in­di­vid­ual. The Greek, at so­cial and po­lit­i­cal emer­gence; Je­sus, at moral and spir­i­tual emer­gence. The Greek taught in­tel­lec­tual lib­er­al­ism lead­ing to po­lit­i­cal free­dom; Je­sus taught spir­i­tual lib­er­al­ism lead­ing to re­li­gious lib­erty. These two ideas put to­gether con­sti­tuted a new and mighty char­ter for hu­man free­dom; they pre­saged man’s so­cial, po­lit­i­cal, and spir­i­tual lib­erty.

195:1.5At the time Paul stood up in Athens preach­ing “Christ and Him Cru­ci­fied,” the Greeks were spir­i­tu­ally hun­gry; they were in­quir­ing, in­ter­ested, and ac­tu­ally look­ing for spir­i­tual truth. Never for­get that at first the Ro­mans fought Chris­tian­ity, while the Greeks em­braced it, and that it was the Greeks who lit­er­ally forced the Ro­mans sub­se­quently to ac­cept this new re­li­gion, as then mod­i­fied, as a part of Greek cul­ture.

195:1.6The Greek revered beauty, the Jew ho­li­ness, but both peo­ples loved truth. For cen­turies the Greek had se­ri­ously thought and earnestly de­bated about all hu­man prob­lems—so­cial, eco­nomic, po­lit­i­cal, and philo­sophic—ex­cept re­li­gion. Few Greeks had paid much at­ten­tion to re­li­gion; they did not take even their own re­li­gion very se­ri­ously. For cen­turies the Jews had ne­glected these other fields of thought while they de­voted their minds to re­li­gion. They took their re­li­gion very se­ri­ously, too se­ri­ously. As il­lu­mi­nated by the con­tent of Je­sus’ mes­sage, the united prod­uct of the cen­turies of the thought of these two peo­ples now be­came the driv­ing power of a new or­der of hu­man so­ci­ety and, to a cer­tain ex­tent, of a new or­der of hu­man re­li­gious be­lief and prac­tice.

195:1.7The in­flu­ence of Greek cul­ture had al­ready pen­e­trated the lands of the west­ern Med­i­ter­ra­nean when Alexan­der spread Hel­lenis­tic civ­i­liza­tion over the near-East­ern world. The Greeks did very well with their re­li­gion and their pol­i­tics as long as they lived in small city-states, but when the Mace­do­nian king dared to ex­pand Greece into an em­pire, stretch­ing from the Adri­atic to the In­dus, trou­ble be­gan. The art and phi­los­o­phy of Greece were fully equal to the task of im­pe­rial ex­pan­sion, but not so with Greek po­lit­i­cal ad­min­is­tra­tion or re­li­gion. Af­ter the city-states of Greece had ex­panded into em­pire, their rather parochial gods seemed a lit­tle queer. The Greeks were re­ally search­ing for one God, a greater and bet­ter God, when the Chris­tian­ized ver­sion of the older Jew­ish re­li­gion came to them.

195:1.8The Hel­lenis­tic Em­pire, as such, could not en­dure. Its cul­tural sway con­tin­ued on, but it en­dured only af­ter se­cur­ing from the West the Ro­man po­lit­i­cal ge­nius for em­pire ad­min­is­tra­tion and af­ter ob­tain­ing from the East a re­li­gion whose one God pos­sessed em­pire dig­nity.

• Mithraics

195:1.9In the first cen­tury af­ter Christ, Hel­lenis­tic cul­ture had al­ready at­tained its high­est lev­els; its ret­ro­gres­sion had be­gun; learn­ing was ad­vanc­ing but ge­nius was de­clin­ing. It was at this very time that the ideas and ide­als of Je­sus, which were par­tially em­bod­ied in Chris­tian­ity, be­came a part of the sal­vage of Greek cul­ture and learn­ing.

195:1.10Alexan­der had charged on the East with the cul­tural gift of the civ­i­liza­tion of Greece; Paul as­saulted the West with the Chris­tian ver­sion of the gospel of Je­sus. And wher­ever the Greek cul­ture pre­vailed through­out the West, there Hel­le­nized Chris­tian­ity took root.

195:2.1The Ro­mans bod­ily took over Greek cul­ture, putting rep­re­sen­ta­tive gov­ern­ment in the place of gov­ern­ment by lot. And pres­ently this change fa­vored Chris­tian­ity in that Rome brought into the whole West­ern world a new tol­er­ance for strange lan­guages, peo­ples, and even re­li­gions.

195:2.2Much of the early per­se­cu­tion of Chris­tians in Rome was due solely to their un­for­tu­nate use of the term “king­dom” in their preach­ing. The Ro­mans were tol­er­ant of any and all re­li­gions but very re­sent­ful of any­thing that sa­vored of po­lit­i­cal ri­valry. And so, when these early per­se­cu­tions, due so largely to mis­un­der­stand­ing, died out, the field for re­li­gious pro­pa­ganda was wide open. The Ro­man was in­ter­ested in po­lit­i­cal ad­min­is­tra­tion; he cared lit­tle for ei­ther art or re­li­gion, but he was un­usu­ally tol­er­ant of both.

195:2.3Ori­en­tal law was stern and ar­bi­trary; Greek law was fluid and artis­tic; Ro­man law was dig­ni­fied and re­spect-breed­ing. Ro­man ed­u­ca­tion bred an un­heard-of and stolid loy­alty. The early Ro­mans were po­lit­i­cally de­voted and sub­limely con­se­crated in­di­vid­u­als. They were hon­est, zeal­ous, and ded­i­cated to their ide­als, but with­out a re­li­gion wor­thy of the name. Small won­der that their Greek teach­ers were able to per­suade them to ac­cept Paul’s Chris­tian­ity.

195:2.4And these Ro­mans were a great peo­ple. They could gov­ern the Oc­ci­dent be­cause they did gov­ern them­selves. Such un­par­al­leled hon­esty, de­vo­tion, and stal­wart self-con­trol was ideal soil for the re­cep­tion and growth of Chris­tian­ity.

195:2.5It was easy for these Greco-Ro­mans to be­come just as spir­i­tu­ally de­voted to an in­sti­tu­tional church as they were po­lit­i­cally de­voted to the state. The Ro­mans fought the church only when they feared it as a com­peti­tor of the state. Rome, hav­ing lit­tle na­tional phi­los­o­phy or na­tive cul­ture, took over Greek cul­ture for its own and boldly adopted Christ as its moral phi­los­o­phy. Chris­tian­ity be­came the moral cul­ture of Rome but hardly its re­li­gion in the sense of be­ing the in­di­vid­ual ex­pe­ri­ence in spir­i­tual growth of those who em­braced the new re­li­gion in such a whole­sale man­ner. True, in­deed, many in­di­vid­u­als did pen­e­trate be­neath the sur­face of all this state re­li­gion and found for the nour­ish­ment of their souls the real val­ues of the hid­den mean­ings held within the la­tent truths of Hel­le­nized and pa­ganized Chris­tian­ity.

195:2.6The Stoic and his sturdy ap­peal to “na­ture and con­science” had only the bet­ter pre­pared all Rome to re­ceive Christ, at least in an in­tel­lec­tual sense. The Ro­man was by na­ture and train­ing a lawyer; he revered even the laws of na­ture. And now, in Chris­tian­ity, he dis­cerned in the laws of na­ture the laws of God. A peo­ple that could pro­duce Ci­cero and Vergil were ripe for Paul’s Hel­le­nized Chris­tian­ity.

195:2.7And so did these Ro­man­ized Greeks force both Jews and Chris­tians to phi­los­o­phize their re­li­gion, to co-or­di­nate its ideas and sys­tem­atize its ide­als, to adapt re­li­gious prac­tices to the ex­ist­ing cur­rent of life. And all this was enor­mously helped by trans­la­tion of the He­brew scrip­tures into Greek and by the later record­ing of the New Tes­ta­ment in the Greek tongue.

195:2.8The Greeks, in con­trast with the Jews and many other peo­ples, had long pro­vi­sion­ally be­lieved in im­mor­tal­ity, some sort of sur­vival af­ter death, and since this was the very heart of Je­sus’ teach­ing, it was cer­tain that Chris­tian­ity would make a strong ap­peal to them.

195:2.9A suc­ces­sion of Greek-cul­tural and Ro­man-po­lit­i­cal vic­to­ries had con­sol­i­dated the Med­i­ter­ra­nean lands into one em­pire, with one lan­guage and one cul­ture, and had made the West­ern world ready for one God. Ju­daism pro­vided this God, but Ju­daism was not ac­cept­able as a re­li­gion to these Ro­man­ized Greeks. Philo helped some to mit­i­gate their ob­jec­tions, but Chris­tian­ity re­vealed to them an even bet­ter con­cept of one God, and they em­braced it read­ily.

• pagan ritual

195:9.11So-called Chris­tian­ity has be­come a so­cial and cul­tural move­ment as well as a re­li­gious be­lief and prac­tice. The stream of mod­ern Chris­tian­ity drains many an an­cient pa­gan swamp and many a bar­bar­ian morass; many olden cul­tural wa­ter­sheds drain into this pres­ent-day cul­tural stream as well as the high Galilean table­lands which are sup­posed to be its ex­clu­sive source.

176:1.3Since Je­ru­sa­lem was to be­come the cra­dle of the early gospel move­ment, Je­sus did not want its teach­ers and preach­ers to per­ish in the ter­ri­ble over­throw of the Jew­ish peo­ple in con­nec­tion with the de­struc­tion of Je­ru­sa­lem; where­fore did he give these in­struc­tions to his fol­low­ers. Je­sus was much con­cerned lest some of his dis­ci­ples be­come in­volved in these soon-com­ing re­volts and so per­ish in the down­fall of Je­ru­sa­lem.

133:3.10Thus did Je­sus and Ga­nid take leave of the women. So far the two cour­te­sans had said noth­ing; like­wise was Ga­nid speech­less. And for a few mo­ments so was Martha, but pres­ently she rose to the oc­ca­sion and did ev­ery­thing for these strangers that Je­sus had hoped for. The el­der of these two women died a short time there­after, with bright hopes of eter­nal sur­vival, and the younger woman worked at Jus­tus’ place of busi­ness and later be­came a life­long mem­ber of the first Chris­tian church in Corinth.

133:3.11Sev­eral times in the home of Cris­pus, Je­sus and Ga­nid met one Gaius, who sub­se­quently be­came a loyal sup­porter of Paul. Dur­ing these two months in Corinth they held in­ti­mate con­ver­sa­tions with scores of worth-while in­di­vid­u­als, and as a re­sult of all these ap­par­ently ca­sual con­tacts more than half of the in­di­vid­u­als so af­fected be­came mem­bers of the sub­se­quent Chris­tian com­mu­nity.

133:3.12When Paul first went to Corinth, he had not in­tended to make a pro­longed visit. But he did not know how well the Jew­ish tu­tor had pre­pared the way for his labors. And fur­ther, he dis­cov­ered that great in­ter­est had al­ready been aroused by Aquila and Priscilla, Aquila be­ing one of the Cyn­ics with whom Je­sus had come in con­tact when in Rome. This cou­ple were Jew­ish refugees from Rome, and they quickly em­braced Paul’s teach­ings. He lived with them and worked with them, for they were also tent­mak­ers. It was be­cause of these cir­cum­stances that Paul pro­longed his stay in Corinth.

121:3.7Slav­ery, even of su­pe­rior peo­ples, was a fea­ture of Ro­man mil­i­tary con­quest. The power of the mas­ter over his slave was un­qual­i­fied. The early Chris­tian church was largely com­posed of the lower classes and these slaves.

121:5.81. Some myth­i­cal leg­end, a mys­tery—whence their name. As a rule this mys­tery per­tained to the story of some god’s life and death and re­turn to life, as il­lus­trated by the teach­ings of Mith­ra­ism, which, for a time, were con­tem­po­rary with, and a com­peti­tor of, Paul’s ris­ing cult of Chris­tian­ity.

163:2.7Al­most ev­ery hu­man be­ing has some one thing which is held on to as a pet evil, and which the en­trance into the king­dom of heaven re­quires as a part of the price of ad­mis­sion. If Mata­dor­mus had parted with his wealth, it prob­a­bly would have been put right back into his hands for ad­min­is­tra­tion as trea­surer of the sev­enty. For later on, af­ter the es­tab­lish­ment of the church at Je­ru­sa­lem, he did obey the Mas­ter’s in­junc­tion, al­though it was then too late to en­joy mem­ber­ship in the sev­enty, and he be­came the trea­surer of the Je­ru­sa­lem church, of which James the Lord’s brother in the flesh was the head.

143:6.6Je­sus and the twelve camped on Mount Ger­izim un­til the end of Au­gust. They preached the good news of the king­dom—the fa­ther­hood of God—to the Samar­i­tans in the cities by day and spent the nights at the camp. The work which Je­sus and the twelve did in these Samar­i­tan cities yielded many souls for the king­dom and did much to pre­pare the way for the mar­velous work of Philip in these re­gions af­ter Je­sus’ death and res­ur­rec­tion, sub­se­quent to the dis­per­sion of the apos­tles to the ends of the earth by the bit­ter per­se­cu­tion of be­liev­ers at Je­ru­sa­lem.

170:2.24By the time the Apos­tle John be­gan to write the story of Je­sus’ life and teach­ings, the early Chris­tians had ex­pe­ri­enced so much trou­ble with the king­dom-of-God idea as a breeder of per­se­cu­tion that they had largely aban­doned the use of the term. John talks much about the “eter­nal life.” Je­sus of­ten spoke of it as the “king­dom of life.” He also fre­quently re­ferred to “the king­dom of God within you.” He once spoke of such an ex­pe­ri­ence as “fam­ily fel­low­ship with God the Fa­ther.” Je­sus sought to sub­sti­tute many terms for the king­dom but al­ways with­out suc­cess. Among oth­ers, he used: the fam­ily of God, the Fa­ther’s will, the friends of God, the fel­low­ship of be­liev­ers, the broth­er­hood of man, the Fa­ther’s fold, the chil­dren of God, the fel­low­ship of the faith­ful, the Fa­ther’s ser­vice, and the lib­er­ated sons of God.

170:2.25But he could not es­cape the use of the king­dom idea. It was more than fifty years later, not un­til af­ter the de­struc­tion of Je­ru­sa­lem by the Ro­man armies, that this con­cept of the king­dom be­gan to change into the cult of eter­nal life as its so­cial and in­sti­tu­tional as­pects were taken over by the rapidly ex­pand­ing and crys­tal­liz­ing Chris­tian church.

5:4.8The Greek re­li­gion had a watch­word “Know your­self”; the He­brews cen­tered their teach­ing on “Know your God”; the Chris­tians preach a gospel aimed at a “knowl­edge of the Lord Je­sus Christ”; Je­sus pro­claimed the good news of “know­ing God, and your­self as a son of God.” These dif­fer­ing con­cepts of the pur­pose of re­li­gion de­ter­mine the in­di­vid­ual’s at­ti­tude in var­i­ous life sit­u­a­tions and fore­shadow the depth of wor­ship and the na­ture of his per­sonal habits of prayer. The spir­i­tual sta­tus of any re­li­gion may be de­ter­mined by the na­ture of its prayers.

89:9.2In con­nec­tion with the Mother of God cult, in Mex­ico and else­where, a sacra­ment of cakes and wine was even­tu­ally uti­lized in lieu of the flesh and blood of the older hu­man sac­ri­fices. The He­brews long prac­ticed this rit­ual as a part of their Pass­over cer­e­monies, and it was from this cer­e­mo­nial that the later Chris­tian ver­sion of the sacra­ment took its ori­gin.

170:2.1The Mas­ter made it clear that the king­dom of heaven must be­gin with, and be cen­tered in, the dual con­cept of the truth of the fa­ther­hood of God and the cor­re­lated fact of the broth­er­hood of man. The ac­cep­tance of such a teach­ing, Je­sus de­clared, would lib­er­ate man from the age-long bond­age of an­i­mal fear and at the same time en­rich hu­man liv­ing with the fol­low­ing en­dow­ments of the new life of spir­i­tual lib­erty:

• first to proclaim the poor could survive

69:9.42. Re­li­gious ten­den­cies. Prim­i­tive man also wanted to save up prop­erty as a nu­cleus for start­ing life in the next ex­is­tence. This mo­tive ex­plains why it was so long the cus­tom to bury a man’s per­sonal be­long­ings with him. The an­cients be­lieved that only the rich sur­vived death with any im­me­di­ate plea­sure and dig­nity. The teach­ers of re­vealed re­li­gion, more es­pe­cially the Chris­tian teach­ers, were the first to pro­claim that the poor could have sal­va­tion on equal terms with the rich.

• imposed more stringent sex obligations upon men

84:5.6The early Chi­nese and the Greeks treated women bet­ter than did most sur­round­ing peo­ples. But the He­brews were ex­ceed­ingly dis­trust­ful of them. In the Oc­ci­dent woman has had a dif­fi­cult climb un­der the Pauline doc­trines which be­came at­tached to Chris­tian­ity, al­though Chris­tian­ity did ad­vance the mores by im­pos­ing more strin­gent sex obli­ga­tions upon man. Woman’s es­tate is lit­tle short of hope­less un­der the pe­cu­liar degra­da­tion which at­taches to her in Mo­hammedanism, and she fares even worse un­der the teach­ings of sev­eral other Ori­en­tal re­li­gions.

• most appealing and enduring cult ever conceived

87:7.4The early Chris­tian cult was the most ef­fec­tive, ap­peal­ing, and en­dur­ing of any rit­ual ever con­ceived or de­vised, but much of its value has been de­stroyed in a sci­en­tific age by the de­struc­tion of so many of its orig­i­nal un­der­ly­ing tenets. The Chris­tian cult has been de­vi­tal­ized by the loss of many fun­da­men­tal ideas.

• free from civil entanglements, economic alliances

99:3.1Early Chris­tian­ity was en­tirely free from all civil en­tan­gle­ments, so­cial com­mit­ments, and eco­nomic al­liances. Only did later in­sti­tu­tion­al­ized Chris­tian­ity be­come an or­ganic part of the po­lit­i­cal and so­cial struc­ture of Oc­ci­den­tal civ­i­liza­tion.

• in no sense an economic movement

121:3.9There was no wide­spread so­cial prob­lem in the Ro­man Em­pire in the first cen­tury af­ter Christ. The ma­jor por­tion of the pop­u­lace re­garded them­selves as be­long­ing in that group into which they chanced to be born. There was al­ways the open door through which tal­ented and able in­di­vid­u­als could as­cend from the lower to the higher strata of Ro­man so­ci­ety, but the peo­ple were gen­er­ally con­tent with their so­cial rank. They were not class con­scious, nei­ther did they look upon these class dis­tinc­tions as be­ing un­just or wrong. Chris­tian­ity was in no sense an eco­nomic move­ment hav­ing for its pur­pose the ame­lio­ra­tion of the mis­eries of the de­pressed classes.

• vastly superior to existing religions

121:5.64. The mys­tery re­li­gions. Upon such a spir­i­tu­ally hun­gry world a flood of mys­tery cults had bro­ken, new and strange re­li­gions from the Lev­ant, which had en­am­ored the com­mon peo­ple and had prom­ised them in­di­vid­ual sal­va­tion. These re­li­gions rapidly be­came the ac­cepted be­lief of the lower classes of the Greco-Ro­man world. And they did much to pre­pare the way for the rapid spread of the vastly su­pe­rior Chris­tian teach­ings, which pre­sented a ma­jes­tic con­cept of De­ity, as­so­ci­ated with an in­trigu­ing the­ol­ogy for the in­tel­li­gent and a pro­found prof­fer of sal­va­tion for all, in­clud­ing the ig­no­rant but spir­i­tu­ally hun­gry av­er­age man of those days.

• women admitted into full fellowship

150:1.3It was most as­tound­ing in that day, when women were not even al­lowed on the main floor of the syn­a­gogue (be­ing con­fined to the women’s gallery), to be­hold them be­ing rec­og­nized as au­tho­rized teach­ers of the new gospel of the king­dom. The charge which Je­sus gave these ten women as he set them apart for gospel teach­ing and min­istry was the eman­ci­pa­tion procla­ma­tion which set free all women and for all time; no more was man to look upon woman as his spir­i­tual in­fe­rior. This was a de­cided shock to even the twelve apos­tles. Not­with­stand­ing they had many times heard the Mas­ter say that “in the king­dom of heaven there is nei­ther rich nor poor, free nor bond, male nor fe­male, all are equally the sons and daugh­ters of God,” they were lit­er­ally stunned when he pro­posed for­mally to com­mis­sion these ten women as re­li­gious teach­ers and even to per­mit their trav­el­ing about with them. The whole coun­try was stirred up by this pro­ceed­ing, the en­e­mies of Je­sus mak­ing great cap­i­tal out of this move, but ev­ery­where the women be­liev­ers in the good news stood stanchly be­hind their cho­sen sis­ters and voiced no un­cer­tain ap­proval of this tardy ac­knowl­edg­ment of woman’s place in re­li­gious work. And this lib­er­a­tion of women, giv­ing them due rec­og­ni­tion, was prac­ticed by the apos­tles im­me­di­ately af­ter the Mas­ter’s de­par­ture, al­beit they fell back to the olden cus­toms in sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions. Through­out the early days of the Chris­tian church women teach­ers and min­is­ters were called dea­conesses and were ac­corded gen­eral rec­og­ni­tion. But Paul, de­spite the fact that he con­ceded all this in the­ory, never re­ally in­cor­po­rated it into his own at­ti­tude and per­son­ally found it dif­fi­cult to carry out in prac­tice.

• one of most progressive societies ever

170:5.16Je­sus’ ideal con­cept largely failed, but upon the foun­da­tion of the Mas­ter’s per­sonal life and teach­ings, sup­ple­mented by the Greek and Per­sian con­cepts of eter­nal life and aug­mented by Philo’s doc­trine of the tem­po­ral con­trasted with the spir­i­tual, Paul went forth to build up one of the most pro­gres­sive hu­man so­ci­eties which has ever ex­isted on Uran­tia.

• faith in resurrection was cardinal feature of

190:0.4Abid­ing faith in the res­ur­rec­tion of Je­sus was the car­di­nal fea­ture of the faith of all branches of the early gospel teach­ing. In Je­ru­sa­lem, Alexan­dria, An­ti­och, and Phil­a­del­phia all the gospel teach­ers united in this im­plicit faith in the Mas­ter’s res­ur­rec­tion.

• power in unique lives, the way believers lived and died

195:3.4That which gave great­est power to Chris­tian­ity was the way its be­liev­ers lived lives of ser­vice and even the way they died for their faith dur­ing the ear­lier times of dras­tic per­se­cu­tion.

• conquered Roman Empire, almost all great minds Christian in 300 years

195:3.10Con­di­tions, how­ever, were not so bad at Alexan­dria. The early schools con­tin­ued to hold much of Je­sus’ teach­ings free from com­pro­mise. Pan­taenus taught Clement and then went on to fol­low Na­than­iel in pro­claim­ing Christ in In­dia. While some of the ide­als of Je­sus were sac­ri­ficed in the build­ing of Chris­tian­ity, it should in all fair­ness be re­corded that, by the end of the sec­ond cen­tury, prac­ti­cally all the great minds of the Greco-Ro­man world had be­come Chris­tian. The tri­umph was ap­proach­ing com­ple­tion.

• conquered Roman Empire, almost all great minds Christian in 300 years

195:10.18Chris­tian­ity is an ex­tem­po­rized re­li­gion, and there­fore must it op­er­ate in low gear. High-gear spir­i­tual per­for­mances must await the new rev­e­la­tion and the more gen­eral ac­cep­tance of the real re­li­gion of Je­sus. But Chris­tian­ity is a mighty re­li­gion, see­ing that the com­mon­place dis­ci­ples of a cru­ci­fied car­pen­ter set in mo­tion those teach­ings which con­quered the Ro­man world in three hun­dred years and then went on to tri­umph over the bar­bar­ians who over­threw Rome. This same Chris­tian­ity con­quered—ab­sorbed and ex­alted—the whole stream of He­brew the­ol­ogy and Greek phi­los­o­phy. And then, when this Chris­tian re­li­gion be­came co­matose for more than a thou­sand years as a re­sult of an over­dose of mys­ter­ies and pa­gan­ism, it res­ur­rected it­self and vir­tu­ally re­con­quered the whole West­ern world. Chris­tian­ity con­tains enough of Je­sus’ teach­ings to im­mor­tal­ize it.

104:1.11The first Trin­ity of Chris­tian­ity was pro­claimed at An­ti­och and con­sisted of God, his Word, and his Wis­dom. Paul knew of the Par­a­dise Trin­ity of Fa­ther, Son, and Spirit, but he sel­dom preached about it and made men­tion thereof in only a few of his let­ters to the newly form­ing churches. Even then, as did his fel­low apos­tles, Paul con­fused Je­sus, the Cre­ator Son of the lo­cal uni­verse, with the Sec­ond Per­son of De­ity, the Eter­nal Son of Par­a­dise.

104:1.12The Chris­tian con­cept of the Trin­ity, which be­gan to gain rec­og­ni­tion near the close of the first cen­tury af­ter Christ, was com­prised of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther, the Cre­ator Son of Neb­a­don, and the Di­vine Min­is­ter of Sal­ving­ton—Mother Spirit of the lo­cal uni­verse and cre­ative con­sort of the Cre­ator Son.

104:1.13Not since the times of Je­sus has the fac­tual iden­tity of the Par­a­dise Trin­ity been known on Uran­tia (ex­cept by a few in­di­vid­u­als to whom it was es­pe­cially re­vealed) un­til its pre­sen­ta­tion in these rev­e­la­tory dis­clo­sures. But though the Chris­tian con­cept of the Trin­ity erred in fact, it was prac­ti­cally true with re­spect to spir­i­tual re­la­tion­ships. Only in its philo­sophic im­pli­ca­tions and cos­mo­log­i­cal con­se­quences did this con­cept suf­fer em­bar­rass­ment: It has been dif­fi­cult for many who are cos­mic minded to be­lieve that the Sec­ond Per­son of De­ity, the sec­ond mem­ber of an in­fi­nite Trin­ity, once dwelt on Uran­tia; and while in spirit this is true, in ac­tu­al­ity it is not a fact. The Mi­chael Cre­ators fully em­body the di­vin­ity of the Eter­nal Son, but they are not the ab­so­lute per­son­al­ity.

195:3.1Af­ter the con­sol­i­da­tion of Ro­man po­lit­i­cal rule and af­ter the dis­sem­i­na­tion of Chris­tian­ity, the Chris­tians found them­selves with one God, a great re­li­gious con­cept, but with­out em­pire. The Greco-Ro­mans found them­selves with a great em­pire but with­out a God to serve as the suit­able re­li­gious con­cept for em­pire wor­ship and spir­i­tual uni­fi­ca­tion. The Chris­tians ac­cepted the em­pire; the em­pire adopted Chris­tian­ity. The Ro­man pro­vided a unity of po­lit­i­cal rule; the Greek, a unity of cul­ture and learn­ing; Chris­tian­ity, a unity of re­li­gious thought and prac­tice.

195:3.2Rome over­came the tra­di­tion of na­tion­al­ism by im­pe­rial uni­ver­sal­ism and for the first time in his­tory made it pos­si­ble for dif­fer­ent races and na­tions at least nom­i­nally to ac­cept one re­li­gion.

195:3.3Chris­tian­ity came into fa­vor in Rome at a time when there was great con­tention be­tween the vig­or­ous teach­ings of the Sto­ics and the sal­va­tion promises of the mys­tery cults. Chris­tian­ity came with re­fresh­ing com­fort and lib­er­at­ing power to a spir­i­tu­ally hun­gry peo­ple whose lan­guage had no word for “un­selfish­ness.”

195:3.5The teach­ing re­gard­ing Christ’s love for chil­dren soon put an end to the wide­spread prac­tice of ex­pos­ing chil­dren to death when they were not wanted, par­tic­u­larly girl ba­bies.

195:3.7The sec­ond cen­tury af­ter Christ was the best time in all the world’s his­tory for a good re­li­gion to make prog­ress in the West­ern world. Dur­ing the first cen­tury Chris­tian­ity had pre­pared it­self, by strug­gle and com­pro­mise, to take root and rapidly spread. Chris­tian­ity adopted the em­peror; later, he adopted Chris­tian­ity. This was a great age for the spread of a new re­li­gion. There was re­li­gious lib­erty; travel was uni­ver­sal and thought was un­tram­meled.

195:3.8The spir­i­tual im­pe­tus of nom­i­nally ac­cept­ing Hel­le­nized Chris­tian­ity came to Rome too late to pre­vent the well-started moral de­cline or to com­pen­sate for the al­ready well-es­tab­lished and in­creas­ing racial de­te­ri­o­ra­tion. This new re­li­gion was a cul­tural ne­ces­sity for im­pe­rial Rome, and it is ex­ceed­ingly un­for­tu­nate that it did not be­come a means of spir­i­tual sal­va­tion in a larger sense.

195:3.9Even a good re­li­gion could not save a great em­pire from the sure re­sults of lack of in­di­vid­ual par­tic­i­pa­tion in the af­fairs of gov­ern­ment, from over­much pa­ter­nal­ism, over­tax­a­tion and gross col­lec­tion abuses, un­bal­anced trade with the Lev­ant which drained away the gold, amuse­ment mad­ness, Ro­man stan­dard­iza­tion, the degra­da­tion of woman, slav­ery and race deca­dence, phys­i­cal plagues, and a state church which be­came in­sti­tu­tion­al­ized nearly to the point of spir­i­tual bar­ren­ness.

195:3.11And this Ro­man Em­pire lasted suf­fi­ciently long to in­sure the sur­vival of Chris­tian­ity even af­ter the em­pire col­lapsed. But we have of­ten con­jec­tured what would have hap­pened in Rome and in the world if it had been the gospel of the king­dom which had been ac­cepted in the place of Greek Chris­tian­ity.