Christianity
History and Meaning of Salvation 2
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 17 February, 2008
Jesus as Zurvan
Pahlavi books speak of the “coming of the four”, apparently meaning the four Saoshyants, saviors, Zoroaster being the first, and the others being successive sons. Some Sasanian gems and seals, and Pahlavi texts speak of “saved by the Three”, “saved by the Four” and “saved by the Seven”. Who these are is not known, but Zurvan was described as having four appearances, Zurvan the original or whole one and three aspects, rather like the Christian God being the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Here could be the Three, as the three aspects, and the Four as the three aspects and the whole being.
Perhaps the sets of four are connected, as the four quarters of the year, the four seasons and the four sectors of the zodiac, but the Saoshyants were a distinct four saviors. The Seven has often been considered the seven planets with no more justification than that there were seven of them, but the planets were most typically seven wicked aspects of Ahriman, so are unlikely agents of salvation. Ahuramazda was a Seven in that he had six aspects and the central one, essentially himself as the Holiest Spirit, the equivalent of the Christian Holy Ghost, and as Persian religion was dualist, it seems feasible that both Ahuramazda and Ahriman had seven aspects, one set good and one bad.
An aspect of the myth of Jesus not known by Christians but important in the cross-cultural links with Iranian religion is revealed in the full eastern myth of the Magi. Marco Polo heard the story on his trip to China when he was in Iran. The story was that the Magi arrived at the stable in Bethlehem and were admitted one at a time. Later they spoke to each other about their experience. They had not found an infant! One had met a young man, one a mature man, and one an old man. Since the time of Marco Polo, this myth has been found widely but with slight variations:
- In the Armenian Gospel of the Infancy, Jesus appears to the three Magi in different forms, as an infant, a prince and as Christ resurrected. Elsewhere in the same book, Christ miraculously changes himself into a child, and adult and an old man before resuming his usual form.
- Photius says he did the same before his miracles.
- In Acts of Peter, Jesus appears to an old woman as a child, a youth and an old man.
- In Acts of John, Jesus appears as a handsome man, a bald old man, and, to James, as a child and a youth, four stages.
- In the Martyrdom of Peter, Simon Magus did the same trick.
- In the Apocryphon of John, Jesus appears to John as a child and an old man as well as his usual form.
- In the Library of the Patriarchate in Jerusalem is an eleventh century illustrated MS (MS14 f106v) showing three Magi of different ages who saw Jesus respectively in the text, an homily of John of Euboea, as a child, a man of thirty and an old man, presumably according to their own ages.
- An illustrated gospel, also eleventh century, in the Bibliotheque Nationale (MS gr74 f167) shows Jesus in three forms, as a youth, as an adult and as an old man, with the names respectively Emmanuel, Christ and Palaios ton Hemeron, The text is an homily of John of Damascus, and explains that Jesus appeared as a three year old to the Magus who offered gold, as a thirty year old to the Magus who offered frankincense, and as an old man with white hair to the Magus who offered myrrh.
L Olschki noted that this three or fourfold appearance matched the three or fourfold appearance of the Iranian god of time, Zurvan. Here was a possible source of the notion of the Trinity. The Ishmailis also thought their imam combined the three ages in his person. J Duchesne-Guillemin thought the trimorphic depiction of Jesus was a reflection of the Hellenistic cult of Aion, the god of time, rather than Zurvan, although he concedes that Zurvan might have influenced Aion. H Puech in 1967 agreed that the trimorphic depiction was an assimilation of Jesus to Aion, who in turn was a copy of Zurvan Akarana. The three forms stood for the past the present and the future, as old man, mature man, and youth or child, respectively, and these three stages constituted the whole, as the whole of time and the whole of a life, the whole sometimes being itself represented separately, or as Jesus as he is.
The birthday of the God Aion was celebrated on 6 January, which was also considered the birthday of Christ, and the day when the visit by the Magi was celebrated originally in the east. It was, of course, the old New Year’s day, and the end of the twelve days of the New Year celebration, which became the twelve days of Christmas in Christendom. Inasmuch as Aion or Zurvan represented the sun in its annual journey, the first day of the year was its birthday. Later, Roman Christians decided to assimilate the birth date of Christ to that of Mithras who was popular in Rome as the unconquered sun, whose birthday was 25 December, the beginning of the extended New Year celebration.
Now, Mithras was not born as an infant but as a youth called Saxigenus, or Petrogenes because he was “born of a rock”. The real origin of this is probably Iranian, for the nomadic Aryan tribes generated fire, among other ways, from rocks by striking sparks from flints and considered fire an earthly manifestation of the sun. Later the rock was considered a microcosm, a miniature cosmos. The Roman Mithras was worshiped inside the rock from which he sprang, in grottos. The ceiling of the rock was decorated with the heavens, for the cosmos, to the gods, was the inside of a giant rock, and they saw it from the outside. It was the cosmic egg. So Mithras was a youth inside the cosmic egg, and as the inside of a cosmic egg was represented as a grotto, Christ was also represented as being born in a grotto, the stable often being assumed to have been a cave. Mithraists considered the solar year to begin with the birth of Mithras, the sun, and the young son was an infant, in Egypt, for example, where Horus was born on 25 December, and was shown as an infant in his mother, Isis’s arms.
The Persians and the Babylonians transferred the idea of the cyclical year to a cyclical great year, possibly because they had, through their centuries of careful astronomy, discovered the precession of the Equinoxes, and seem to have estimated it as lasting 23,000 years, not a bad guess. Four seasons of this great year lasted 6000 years each, and one of them manifested itself as the time experienced by people, the lifetime of the world. At any rate, this became the Jewish belief. With it went the idea of periodic renewal in the return of a Golden Age, a solar king and an infant savior, all beliefs that got to Rome and were used by Virgil in his Fourth Eclogue, at the start of the empire under Augustus. Augustus was depicted as the infant savior, who would become the solar king of a new Golden Age. All of this preceded Christ’s crucifixion by over half a century.
The god Aion was the god of the year and therefore a type of sun god., but more particularly standing for time, and, by extension, the whole of time, effectively the great year. So, like the sun god, Aion was born as an infant, but on 6 January, and was most often represented as a child by Heraclitus and Euripides. These early Greeks most probably had their blueprint for Aion from Zurvan in Iran. Other, later, descriptions of him are as an adult and as an old man. The three ages of man go back to the Greeks of the same period, and was familiar by the time of Aristotle. An ancient Mosaic at Antioch, described by D Levi, has Aion on a dais with three men sitting at a table before him, representing past, with a white beard, present with a black beard, and future with no beard. A much more ancient bronze plaque from Luristan, in Iran, dated to the eighth century BC and described by Ghirshman, has a figure before a congregation consisting of children, adults and old men. Ghirshman identified the figure as Zurvan for he had two faces and wings, and looked upon a manifestly aging audience. The two faces customarily look forward in time and back in time, like Janus.
The Antioch mosaic is significant because Antioch was a focus of the spread of Christianity, and, judging from its style and features, it dates from the fourth century, when Constantine made Christianity respectable. So, as a popular theme at Antioch when Christianity emerged, it offers a point of contact.
In old pictures of the Magi, they are given Phrygian caps like Mithras to denote, not that they were Phrygians but that they were Persians, no doubt because the Phrygians were the first peoples of the Persian empire next to Greece, especially the mainland Greeks. Phrygia was in Anatolia and was heavily colonized by Persians, doubtless because it was comfortably like their native land, being a high plateau. It was a source of Magian lore and magical cults long after Alexander had made it Greek. Usually only three Magi are shown to match the three gifts of Matthew, though it does not mention how many Magians there were visiting. Indeed, in another version of the myth, the number is specified as twelve just like the apostles, and they acted as the apostles of the east. A reason for the number three in Matthew would be that the author saw Christ as the Aion, and so trimorphic. Then the three Magi will have been meant to correspond with the three ages represented in Christ—youth maturity and senescence, not merely of man but of the whole of creation. It is interesting too that these were the three ages represented by the Goddess, maiden, mother and crone. In many ways, Christ, in his gentleness has female characteristics, and has replaced the original Goddess. The Holy Ghost ought to have been God the Mother, but having lost the Goddess all together, her characteristics were given to the son.
Gnosticism
The difference between the mysteries and gnosticism is said to be that the soul joins the gods in death in the mysteries, thus becoming divine, whereas in gnosticism, it already is divine and returns to the gods on death, or after some reincarnations. However, it is far from certain that the mysteries themselves did not assume the soul was divine also. Was the Orphic religion a mystery or gnostic? The Orphic soul was divine but fell for various reasons into bodily existence in the flesh, in the material impure world, where it is born, experiences its fate and dies. It continues in this cycle until it discovers the gnosis needed to escape it. The pattern is gnostic, but the mysteries of Eleusis seemed to be a ritual introduction to the gods to be met at death, thus giving the initiate hope in the afterlife.
What were once purely fertility rituals to do with seasonal growth evolved into rituals for preserving the soul after death, initially perhaps with the wheel of the year imitated in the cycle of reincarnation, until the wheel was itself cast aside with the merging with God. It suggests a sequence from fertility cults, to mystery religions, and eventually to gnosticism, with the Orphic religion somewhere between the mysteries and gnosticism. What does not appear here explicitly at all, though it must have had a huge influence, is the Persian religion, and it is probably in its profound influence on Orphism that it comes in. Thus what is imagined about the liberation of the soul beyond the planetary spheres seems the same in Mithraism, plainly indebted to the Persian religion and described by Origen, and so too the formulae of the Orphics for the soul’s journey.
In the Naassene Hymn, the soul is separated from the mind, and is pulled towards chaos through a “labyrinth”. The soul is feminine. She is saved when Jesus arrives to show her the holy way. Here femininity is no compliment to female qualities but is meant to signify the soul’s reduced and confused state. Once she reaches heaven, she becomes androgynous, like the angels. In another gnostic work called Exegesis of the Soul, she is similarly rescued by the monogenes, always translated “the only son” when it means “born of one”. The change is necessitated in Christianity by the birth narratives that make Mary the mother, but properly the son has one parent. In actuality, it could only be Mary, but the assumption is that God is the sole parent. Meanwhile, the son, having saved the soul, marries her and reconciles her to the father. In Metamorphosis by Apuleius, the soul is a beautiful princess raised up to the gods by love, a rather Christian theme as long as the love is not romantic love. Psyche’s beauty shows the purity of the soul, and her destiny as heaven, because she is the earthly reflexion of the goddess, Aphrodite. In the Apostasis of the Archons, the soul is the earthly reflexion of the heavenly Eve, the feminine aspect of God. The suggestion of the reason for the fall of these feminine souls (all souls, though, not just women’s) is meddling or indiscretion, but she also has to face up to Archontes who take advantage of her fear and confusion in a sexually suggestive way, perhaps indicating they once stood for fertility cults or, more likely, for fornication as pollution, a common metaphor in Judaism and Christianity. Dallying with false gods and idols was fornicating with them, a usage that helped to perpetuate in Christianity, Essenic prudity. And, of course, in Judaism, each nation had its own guardian angel that oppressed Israel through the nations they controlled. Angels came from Persian religion, and so too did the dualism of good and evil gods.
In the myth of Empedocles, a successor of Pythagoras, the soul falls tempted by Discord, a version of Ahriman, that tries to disrupt the world and its elements. Scholars in history of religions have always traced religions to Jewish or Greek belief, being often trained in classical scholarship, but can go no further without having to do some original research. They do sometimes nod to the fertility cults of Egypt and Mesopotamia, but rarely indeed do they consider the far more important influence of Persia on the Greeks and the Jews, even in respect of dualism.
The essence of the human being is divided even further, into body, soul and spirit. The Persian religion was fond of the heavenly double, and the gnostics seem to follow it, and even gods have doubles. One reason is the need for gods to remain separate from the polluted material world. The Jews had the Angel of the Lord, who seems to be the archangel Michael and is eventually incarnated as Christ. Plato had a triplicate scheme for the soul, but lesser souls were subject to god. The gnostics thought some manifestations were, like Ahriman, opposed to God, and an example is their Demiurgos, a role filled in Judaism by Satan, an angel who is appointed by god to tempt people.
Pauline Salvation
Most rapturous conversion experiences bring about a retreat into a childhood faith refreshed by a new conviction. What looked dull takes on a new psychedelia, like seeing the world tripping on acid. Nothing has changed except your own impressions. That is what happened to Paul, if we are to believe the three accounts of his conversion in Acts that he fails to mention himself. He was awakened to a freshened up consciousness of diaspora Judaism, with Christ fitting the role of the dying and rising god of the gentiles, superimposed on a radically liberal Judaism, perhaps influenced by Hillel. It was the antithesis of the beliefs of Jesus and his disciples, who were conservative and orthodox, albeit not of the Pharisaic school but of the Essenian one.
Christianity is the salvation religion par excellence, according to S G F Brandon, but it is Paul who made it so by emphasizing Christ’s death as being in atonement, and his resurrection the salvific reward:
Most scholars would agree that this particular aspect of the Christian message can hardly be accounted for by the Jewish background of the early church, but proceeds from non-Jewish roots—the Christian saviour appears as a very close counterpart of the pagan saviour godsM Simon
The gods of the pagan mysteries saved the mystai from death, and so are indeed saviours in the Christian sense, but they are not strictly redeemers, for their deaths seem not to be an atonement for sin. Rather the mystai were supposed to be good in the first place, to be admitted to the mystery. Paul seems to have written atonement for sin into Christianity, and thereby gained for Christianity the vast audience of crooks and perverts it has since depended on. Christ himself was adamant that Jews had to be righteous to enter the kingdom of God. He was saving them only in the sense that he was urging on them the need to ensure it, to pluck out an eye rather than contemplate a possible sin that would slam the gates of heaven in their faces. So there is no doubt that Paul taught something quite different from Jesus and John the Baptist too, and from the mysteries as far as we know, though his new concept of Christianity undoubtedly draws from them. Put simply, salvation depended on people living a holy life until Paul decided that faith in the atoning death of Christ was sufficient, and even in his own writings he constantly prescribes rules for the holy life of Christians belying the notion that faith alone sufficed to keep them good.
Pauline Christians stole the Jewish idea of God’s chosen people, applying it to themselves as chosen or elected by God, the idea the Essenes had of themselves—the Remnant or the Elect or Righteous Jews. For Jews, the law was what saves, but the law was divine wisdom (Ecclesiasticus 24). Wisdom was hypostatized as a being, and Paul identified Christ with this being (1 Cor 1:24) whose actual message was God’s new law—love one another! Love embodied the whole law in one word. That was Christ’s message and why he had not abolished the law at all. The purpose of the gospels is to show that He himself embodied love in his whole person and life. No mention of faith yet, but if faith is faith in Christ, then it is faith in the embodied law of God expressed in the one word, love.
Faith then cannot be alone. Sole Fide is empty, just as James said in his epistle. Faith is not magic. Like the law, it requires people to behave in a particular way, Christ’s way, loving other people. Merely professing faith and imagining it is a mystical cure of sin, will save no one according to these ancient sources except Paul, and even he says it, albeit without any emphasis. Faith must manifest itself as love—acts of loving kindness to other people. The message of the man supposed by Christians to be their God is that faith must show itself as love, doing unto others as you would be done by them—treating others as you would want to be treated yourself. Hatred and torture cannot be any part of it whatever any fundamentalist pastor might preach.
Paul’s main innovation, the idea of redemption, is itself present in Jewish literature before Christianity in the Apocrypha. Eleazer, being tormented in martyrdom, prayed for the redemption of the Jews:
Be gracious to your people, be satisfied with our punishment on their behalf. Make my blood a sacrifice for their purification, and take my life as a substitute for theirs.4 Macc 6:26-29
Later the author is even more explicit:
They have become, as it were, a substitute, dying for the sins of the nation, and through the blood of these godly men and their propitiatory death, divine providence saved Israel.4 Macc 17:20-22
If atoning death was already present in Jewish thought before Paul, what was Christ’s own direct answer to being saved? A young man asks how to inherit eternal life (Mark 10:17f; Matthew 19:16f; Luke 10:25f). Jesus answers that he must obey the law—the commandments. The young man says he already does, so Jesus adds that he can have treasure in heaven by selling his wealth and giving it to the poor. The young man was rich. It was too much. He could not forego his earthly riches for treasure in heaven. Jesus was telling him how he could have eternal life, and that means in heaven. Without obeying the law, and being poor, he could not be saved, but just like modern Christian millionaires, he could not care less. Being rich was what mattered to him. Nowadays Christians have convinced themselves they can have treasure on earth and in heaven! Just being in heaven is the treasure, and riches on earth does not exclude anyone from heaven. It was not Christ’s lesson!
Poverty was a spiritual principle of the Essenes, who, among various titles they gave to themselves was the Ebionim or the Poor. Jesus ended his advice to the young man saying, “Come! Follow me!” To follow Jesus, the young man had to be one of the Poor, showing that Jesus was himself one. Jesus had the same principle of poverty that the Essenes had, and he proved it in the “Sermon on the Mount” by saying to his assembled followers, “Blessed are the Poor in Spirit”. The “Poor in Spirit” means those with a spirit of poverty, those who value poverty as offering spiritual benefits—in short, the Poor, the Ebionim, the Essenes, and Lo! and Behold! the same curious sounding expression, to our ears, “Poor in Spirit”, turns up in the Dead Sea Scrolls considered by most scholars as being by the Essenes. In inviting the young man to adopt a spirit of poverty and to “follow me”, Christ was setting himself up as an exemplary Poor Man.
There could be no point in such an example, or indeed in Christ’s mission being written out in the gospels unless he was meant to be a model for the early church, and that means that faith alone is utter nonsense. Christians always had to do something in their lives to be saved. They had to follow the law, if they were Jewish, or love their neighbour as themselves, if they did not know the law, forgo all riches and become poor, and lastly follow Christ’s example. Now, Pauline Christians claim this emphasis on works is a distortion of Christ’s message by Judaizers, yet even in the holy bible, considered by many, especially evangelical Christians as infallible, God’s own perfectly simple explanation of what to do to be saved plainly contradicts their own belief. And it is what their God said that they reject! It shows that they have made Paul into God, because they chose to do what Paul told them but ignore God’s own recorded words.
The First Jewish Christians
Hippolytus records the beliefs of the Ebionites who still dwelt in the east after Jesus had been crucified, saying they…
…live according to Jewish customs, thinking they will be justified by the law, for Jesus was justified in practising it. That is why he was named by God Christ and Jesus because no one had fulfilled the law, for if anyone had done, he would be the Christ. Christ was a man like any other, so any men who did what he did could be Christs.Philosoph 7:34
It is diametrically opposed to Paul, who successfully abrogated the law for gentile Christians, after paying lip service to it and the Jerusalem Church of James, the brother of the Lord, when it suited him to do it. Jesus himself, even in the gospels refuses to let a jot or tittle of it go, and the one place he seems to abolish it in the synoptic gospels is after he showed that under stressful circumstances, when obedience of it was impossible, dangerous or damaging to life, then it could be suspended by those with pure motives. The conclusion that he thus abrogated the law is an obvious addition and non-sequitur by a Pauline Christian, that does violence to everything Jesus otherwise said and did.
Jesus did not abrogate the law, because it was the way to salvation, and he said so to the young man. Christians are now taught that Jesus only meant the Ten Commandments of the Decalogue, when he spoke of “the commandments”, but “the commandments” to a Jew, were all of them, not just a few central ones. Paul thought the law was too much for Hellenized Jews and even more so for gentiles, so dropped it, making it easier for him to get converts, and for Christianity to spread first among the unobservant Hellenized Jews of the diaspora, and then the gentiles. Paul made salvation into a mystery dependent on God being magically obliged to save the faithful merely for professing their faith in Christ!
The Ebionites described by Hippolytus had the correct ideas offered by Jesus, and they were the people he recommended to the young man for their spiritual poverty, as the route to treasure in heaven. The point is that many Jews, 400 years after the Macedonians had conquered the world, had become Hellenized and unobservant of all but the most obvious Jewish requirements, such as sending money to the temple, and visiting it occasionally on a pilgrimage. The Ebionites or Essenes kept the law punctiliously, but did not think much of the temple functionaries, the Sadduccees—who have often been changed into Pharisees in the gospels because, with the destruction of the temple by the Romans about the time the first gospel was written, the Sadduccees lost their purpose in life and disappeared. Pharisees were substituted because they continued to represent Jews, and changed Judaism into Rabbinism.
Jesus was saying to Jews that they had to be Essenes to be saved. Jewish Christians in Judaea rejected Paul. They were the members of the Jerusalem Church run by James, whom Pauline Christians smeer as Judaizers in their revision of the teachings of Christ. They were the Christians who knew and had followed their hero, and stayed loyal to his brother, James, but they lived in an unpopular backwater of the Roman empire, and after 70 AD had no influence on the gentile churches, having fled east into Arabia. The Judaizers so-called by the Paulines were the closest followers of Christ.
Paul was teaching near apostates, a thousand miles from Jerusalem, glad to be accepted despite their lack of Jewish piety. Paul had never met Christ except, he claimed, in a dream, and he taught things Christ would certainly have considered blasphemous, but he founded Christianity as a new eastern religion in the Roman empire. The mystical person of Jesus rather than his life and teaching was what was important to Paul, who indeed showed little interest in the life of Jesus at all. He was interested in his death and alleged resurrection like the dying and rising pagan saviours. Yet having abrogated the law and ignored Christ’s teachings, ignored works for faith, he was obliged to prescribe rules for his unruly converts. Having abandoned God’s laws, he had to put in place ones of his own because his flock were now expecting the End and were lawless.
Of course, Paul began as an heretical minor strand of Christianity which was properly Jewish, and led by Jews in the Jerusalem Church, but the Jerusalem Church was pretty tiny anyway. If it was essentially the Essenes, then it had around 4000 members according to classical authorities, presumably males, though, so there were a lot more when women and children are taken into account, and this 4000 are the ones in Palestine, there were probably many more in the diaspora. But Paul had an audience of millions of Hellenized Jews delighted to be recognized without having to practise the law, and he also had a large audience of “Godfearers”, gentile admirers of Judaism. Even when the Jerusalem Church was scattered by the Romans, its original influence will have been preserved by the diaspora Essenes trying to spread the true Ebionite message. The attempts by the Jerusalem Church to correct the Pauline heretics, and the subsequent attempts by loyalists, is the basis of the alleged attack on Paulinism by Judaizers:
Early Christianity is far from identifying itself with Paulinism.M Simon
Salvation through the law is not exceptional in early Christianity, and is expressed in some early writings, sometimes slightly qualified. Thus, it even appears, as we have said, in the New Testament Epistle of James, a letter apparently written to refute Paul’s empahasis on faith alone (Jas 1:25; 2:8; 12). Here is a reference to a “law of freedom”, and in the early work of Barnabas is the “new law of our Lord Jesus Christ”. The new law of Christ was to condense the law into the one act of loving. Those who love their fellow humans, and act on that love, have no need of any further law. But love is not merely faith. You have to do something to show it, and James says the same about faith. Faith alone is empty without showing it through love—and showing it through love means “works”! Pauline Christianity makes God into an idiotic megalomaniac, not a God of love.
The purpose of the “law of love” is to create social harmony, something Christianity has often prevented not encouraged. Christ as the legislator of the law of love is the equivalent in the New Testament of Moses in the Jewish scriptures, so early Christians saw a clear logic in keeping the two together but distinct as the complete revelation of God’s plan for humanity. The creeping popularity of Paul’s new synthesis, his emphasis on the mystical body of Christ, superseded Christ as a person and as a lawmaker, so that Christianity was twisted from its original intent until it is now the opposite of it. If God is believed to have sent Christ to reveal how people should live righteously in life with a valuable reward in death, then the Devil must have sent Paul with the message that you got the reward by faith alone without living righteously.
Clement of Alexandria saw the Logos, the Heavenly Christ in John, as the source of both laws, the one of the Jews supposedly brought by Moses, and the one of the New Testament brought by Jesus, so he said, “Let us take the Logos as our law”, adding that we should follow his “precepts and advices” as the best way to eternal life. What are the precepts and advices of the Logos other than what we can read in the gospels about the life of Christ. Paul said the new law was the “body of Christ” but it was meant to be what he said and did. His life was intended as the model for Christians, and they were expected to live like him. Those who succeeded, as Hippolytus said, would “become Christs”. That was the aim, whether it was possible to succeed or not, but certainly not just to give yourself the toffee of faith, and expect to be received in heaven by it and nothing more.
Should anyone doubt it, they have to ask themselves and explain the purpose of the sermons like the Sermon on the Mount, a long discourse on good behaviour. What is good about it if only faith is required, and it remains true that the sermons are pointless if faith conditions good behaviour, because the good behaviour is still pointless in itself. So how do instructions to behave in a specific way, whether those of Jesus or those of Paul, relate to faith alone? If Jesus as God knew that his death would atone for all human wrong as long as people had faith in him, why would he advocate the law or love and explicitly tell his followers what counted as good behaviour? Counted for what? Well, it counted for everything. The atoning death of Jesus was understood as atoning for those who attempted to live righteous lives as the law and the law of love prescribed. The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew is obviously meant to be the parallel of Moses at Sinai. Moses brought the law, and Jesus brought the law of love. Jesus was the new Moses of compassion and love, things that large numbers of faith-alone Christians do not comprehend. Jesus is clear in his preaching, but Paul is far from clear in his. Paul’s transfer of salvation by righteousness to salvation by faith alone must be wrong if Christ is right, and the gospel life of Christ has some purpose, and, if Christ, who is God in Christian belief, is right, then Paul is wrong.
It was the view of the Ebionites, if we accept the scholarly opinion that Ebionite views are recorded in the works of Pseudo-Clement, the Recognitions and the Homilies. There the role of Christ was to restore the law of Moses, which had been adulterated. It was knowledge of his new message that saved, and his allegedly salvific passion is not mentioned in them. Both Clement (Clement 6:1) and Pseudo-Clement (Homilies 11:11,20) blame evil on to ignorance, and ignorance they blame for the lack of salvation! If evil is ignorance, then those who preach it are acting for the Devil in this Christian thinking, and that is therefore Paul. Paul with his false teaching was leading people into hell fire, not into heaven. Ignorance is defeated by knowledge, not by faith, and the knowledge (gnosis) is knowledge of the law (Homilies 11:19). Paul does not ignore gnosis in his writings but disparages it in relation to faith, though Peter says:
We believe and know thou are the son of God.John 6:69
Thus he equates faith in Jesus with knowledge of him, and they must have been faith and knowledge gained through Jesus’s teaching and activity because he was still not dead and risen! Moreover, John summarizes the gospel message at the end with:
These things are written that you might believe that Jesus is Christ.John 20:31
It means that faith is necessarily dependent on knowledge, knowing the life and teaching of Christ. Belief comes through knowledge of Christ, but Pauline Christians then claim that once you have faith, all of that knowledge is redundant, the whole of Christ’s life and works do not matter. The passion narrative alone would have done for faith alone. The rest of it is irrelevant to Pauline Christians. They should not be surprised when they discover faith alone is irrelevant to God.
Knowledge of correct behaviour is essential to it, and equally knowledge of wrong behaviour—sin is wrong behaviour. Christians, even faith-alone ones, are concerned about sin, and say it is because God is, but sin is behaviour. If God is concerned about sin, how can he offer a reward only for faith with no attempt to correct sin, and if some attempt to correct sin has to be made then we are not talking about faith alone, are we? And, once behaviour has to change for salvation, it has to be known what acceptable behaviour consists of—a set of ordinances are needed, a law! Following the prescribed ordinances is what leads to salvation, not mere faith, and for Christians it means they must be loving to their fellow humans, not just to their kids and best friends, something that most people do naturally, but to other human beings. Jesus is not the saviour to the first Christians because he abrogated the law, or superseded it with a catholic mystery, but because he simplified the law into a single word, everyone ought to understand—love. Fundamentalists cannot get it because they do not want to. It does not match their unloving nature.
By accepting Christ, the Ebionites did not reject law, and the Pseudo-Clementines allow salvation to those who believe in either Moses or Christ. The ones most in God’s favour are themselves. The Poor Man…
…is to be reckoned rich before God, for he understands that the things of old are new in time and the things new are old.Homilies 8:6-7
Some modern scholars think the Ebionites had been somewhat influenced by Paul, for example, in that they accepted the Grace of God, but it was an Essenic belief taken by Paul. God was the absolute arbiter. No Ebionite could depend on his good works being sufficient for salvation because God could do just as he liked. Paulinist Christians have distorted this to mean no one could be saved by works, but it is just a simple acceptance that ultimately Judgement depends on God’s Grace. Doing good was the baseline position. You would not even be considered if you had been unrighteous in any way, but if you had been righteous, there was no guarantee God would save you. God will not be bound by works, but nor will he be bound by faith. God is almighty, and so cannot be bound by anything. If He were so bound, He was no longer almighty! Jews recognized this but Paul’s followers do not, or if they do, they think God doesn’t.
The Essenes’ view was that God is not bound at all, but nor was he capricious. None of them would assume God had to save them, because the decision was God’s and His mercy depended on His Grace. He was an honest judge. He was fair. It was a matter of what was in the detail, something no human could judge, and that is why they had to try to be perfect. Fail to do so and they might overlook something that seems unimportant to them, but which God accounts as vitally important. Equally, if they had done their utmost to be perfect, but had failed unwittingly, God could exercise His mercy. Even so, for them, perfection meant that they ought not to commit any sins unwittingly. It was not an excuse to them, and that is why Christ is so strict about it in the gospels.
If the bible is to be believed, God has prescribed certain ways people should behave, and those who obeyed the prescriptions would be saved. He was a fair judge, not whimsical in His decision making, but was strict over matters human beings could not foresee, and so people had to watch out for every transgression, never knowing how it might count in God’s judgement. It follows that the idea people could be saved with no reference at all to how they behaved would have been laughable to Christ. The Ebionites felt that God, being almighty, could call anyone He liked, righteous or not, so that being called required no effort on anyone’s part. Yet this calling based on faith is what Paul has emphasized to the exclusion of the rest, though the Jewish scriptures were plain that God required people to be righteous to be saved. Yes, He could save the unrighteous, but that would make Him capricious, and He was not that, but fair, so, if He did save someone unrighteous, He had done it because of something God knew that humans did not, and, of course, no one knew who God saved, anyway, so the case was purely hypothetical. The normal case was that people had to earn the right to be considered for a favourable judgement. The judgement was never automatic. The Ebionites were an Elect remnant, but they still had to do good works to be saved (Homilies 8:4). They were not saved just because they were the Elect Ones.
They went even further. Acknowledgement of Election by baptism was needed for salvation. But why? It is clarified for gentiles, for whom it removed sins of ignorance of the law, so that good people only needed to be baptized to be saved. Baptism was necessary even for righteous gentiles to be saved. What is true is that Jews had a ceremony of proselyte conversion that was considered a rebirth, a birth from death as a gentile into life as a Jew, so that the Jewish proselyte was like a new born child. It shows that Judaism itself had the character of a mystery religion for those not born into it. So it was when it was invented in the Persian empire. Judaism was a religion set up by the Persians for those absorbed into the empire peacefully—the various peoples who cooperated. It only became the religion of a particular nation when the Maccabees separated Palestine from the Syrian Greek state in the second century BC. It remained an independent state for only a hundred years until Pompey claimed it for Rome, and then Antony set up Herod as a Roman puppet.
For Jews generally, including Essenes, ritual washing was an outward symbol of inner repentance. That was obviously why John the Baptist and Jesus baptized when they called people to repent. Again it is the mystical hand of Paul at work. He knew that the mysteries involved a rebirth. Paul invented “baptism unto Christ” and eventually Christians were persuaded that was what baptism was all about.
For the Essenes, baptism was not a one-off event. They had to remain ritually pure too, and baptism of the righteous seems to be a later version of it, perhaps introduced in the anticipation of an early End Time and Judgement. Thus a single ritual washing would serve converts for ritual cleanliness, if the world would suddenly come to an end. It is a relic of a legal obligation to be ritually clean to be saved. As water, like fire, an holy element in Persian religion, was the natural counter to flames, the Ebionites maybe felt it gave them an immunity from the conflagration at the End of Time, that burnt up the wicked. The Homilies and Recognitions had a lot to say to justify water as a salvific agent, all of which emphasises the role of John the Baptist and the later baptizing sect that followed him, also called Nazarenes and who became Mandaeans. The New Testament is careful to distinguish John as merely the herald of Christ, when it gaves them both the same job and message, before Paul changed it, and Christian baptism, allegedly of the spirit, replaced John’s.
In the Shepherd of Hermas, the law is identified with the son of God, but it is the archangel Michael who presents the law. It confirms the Essene view that the messiah was an incarnation of the angel, and that it was Michael who came with the hosts of heaven at the End. Christians have given that role to Christ at his parousia or Second Coming, so they identified Christ with Michael the angel, like the Essenes. In the Shepherd of Hermas, it is the law that gives salvation, yet it is considered a Christian work. It was considered canonical among Church Fathers and was bound into the Codex Sinaiticus. People have to overcome evil in themselves, or repent to be saved.
