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Paul and the Mysteries in Apologetics 3

Paul and Mystery
Paul, Flesh and Spirit
Paul and the Hellenizers

Abstract

Apologists say Christianity could not have been influenced by Paganism because it was an exclusive faith that demanded the sole attention, not only of the devotee, but everyone else as well! Christianity was not tolerant! Paganism on the other hand was tolerant of other tolerant religions. The gentile convert had to give up their Pagan beliefs, even if they had been sincerely held for a lifetime. Christians think converts just wiped their minds clean of all previous Pagan contamination and were born again pristine and unencumbered as Christians. The plain impossibility of this in reality is sure proof that before long Pagan practices were being introduced into Christianity, no doubt with a new interpretive gloss.

Paul and Mystery

In case you have not yet been persuaded by this fatuous Christian reasoning—reason itself being used dishonestly by Christians who do not need it to simply believe—Christians have another tack—Paul does not use many words that the mystery religions do use. In case you had not noticed, this is another shifting of the goal posts. The Christians are not now denying that Paul used some of the words used in the Pagan religions. He did not use them all and that is what is important! The Christian rogues are really setting up a new straw doll—that the critics are claiming Paul was copying the mystery religions in toto. Why otherwise would anyone expect him to use all the technical terminology of the mysteries? The straw doll is easily knocked over. Paul never used the word “mystes” as a name for a new Christian initiate. QED.

It is hard to see who would be impressed by this idiocy, but clappies obviously are, proving both their intellectual level and the abject cynicism of their evangelical caste of learned professors and doctors.

What is more interesting is that Paul was singularly interested in the word “mysterion”, translated variously as “mystery” or “secret”. The mysteries were called that because the initiates had revealed to them certain “mysteries” during their initiation ceremonies. Since Paul claims precisely the same thing—that the Christian convert would have revealed to them certain mysteries—there is no difference in the approaches of the two types of religion. Thus Paul writes:

According to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began.
Romans 16:25

Paul uses the word “mysterion” like this no less than twenty times in his letters. Since this use exactly parallels the Mysteries, it is easy to see why the Christians have to find a simpler target and so pretend that the argument is that Paul is copying the whole of the Mysteries and not simply cutting and pasting the bits he likes. The next turn the Christians use is to say that Paul did not mean the word in any sense like the mysteries—a secret to be revealed to the mystes—but simply as a mystery of God! As J G Machen puts it, it was a mystery “formerly hidden in the counsels of God” but “now was to be made known to all”. The clear headed reader will be wondering how this differs from what the Mystery initiate expected to receive, accepting that the god whose counsels were to be revealed was a different one from Yehouah.

For the sake of the inattentive renatus, the evangelists make it clear that the two were quite different because the “mysterion” of Paul was the “Good News”. You will turn to your epistles in vain to find this expressed so clearly by Paul, and it is puzzling to understand why something that was supposed to be widely acclaimed as the Good News is, should so perversely be called a mystery by God’s original missionary, especially as it was a technical term used by the hated mystery religions, and could so easily be misunderstood. The skeptic can do nothing but wonder why God, and his servant, the Holy Ghost, were so thoughtless about what they put into the vacated heads of the apostles.

The truth is that the apologists make it up as they go along. Their explanations are nothing of the sort. They are attempts at rationalizing their sacred texts, and history in a suitably “Christian” way. And this one flounders as soon as anyone cares to check the “explanation” by turning to Paul’s epistles. The explanation that “mysterion” means Good News simply does not fit in several places. The Christian intellectual, is up to the challenge—“Ah! Well, yes, sometimes it just means a secret!”

The mystery is God’s Secret, that is, his decision to save men through his son Jesus Christ.

Or so Mircea Eliade describes it. It must be clear by now that the Good News is God’s secret that should be told to all of mankind. Christians are fond of their ability to reinterpret the technical terms of the ancient religions and here they have reinterpreted “a secret” to be something which everyone must know!

Paul, Flesh and Spirit

Resurrection

Hope of a future life for the individual entered Judaism when it was founded by the Persians (Parsees, Pharisees) as hope of the resurrection of the dead. In the second of the Eighteen Benedictions of the Jewish liturgy God is praised as “Thou that quickenest the dead”. The shades of the dead already in the underworld had a new life raised again into their physical bodies clothed again in their flesh, as they were during their lifetimes, but according to different rules imagined by different parties:

all the dead would rise, or only the righteous, or only Israel, at the end of time before Judgement
first some were resurrected into a kingdom lasting a thousand years, then at the end of it everyone else would rise.

Though flesh, as the body, was renewed, it was not as it was before but incorruptible—without sickness, infirmity or physical blemish. That is what Matthew 11:5 meant by the blind will see, the lame will walk, lepers will be cleansed, the deaf will hear and the dead will be raised up, as Isaiah 35:5, its origin, makes clear because it is talking about the Day of God's Vengeance—the time when God would cleanse the earth for Judgement. Therefore, the Essenes thought they need not worry about physical sickness in respect of the next world because the righteous would be made whole when they were resurrected. When Jesus did all these things the intention could not have been that he actually did them. They need not be done. It was understood as automatic—what God did for the righteous dead when he resurrected them. What needed to be done was something to the mentalities of sinners. Thus the mentalities of sinners that needed to be dealt with were given these metaphorical names of sicknesses. If these people were to enter God's kingdom, it was not their physical sickness that needed curing but their attitude to righteousness.

But by the time of Jesus, the resurrection of the dead was disputed. The Pharisees and Essenes said that there was, but the Sadducees denied it (Acts 23:8) because they were Hellenists. They followed the Greeks in denying the Persian belief in resurrection, which Greeks thought ridiculous. Most Jews, following on the Maccabaean rebellion and the tradition founded by the Persians, still understood resurrection literally. The implication—in the stories of the empty tomb and in the passages where the risen Jesus can be touched or where he ate with, or in the presence of, his disciples—was that the living body was raised back to life. Running parallel to these are the less physical notions of the Greek, the notion of spirits. The risen Jesus was taken to be a spirit and went through closed doors. The bible fails to resolve these differences.

Paul seemed to distinguish the imperfect world of the flesh from the perfect world of the spirit. Plato believed in duality. Plato sees that the real world is imperfect and hypothesized a perfect one, but the only world he knows is the imperfect one. He saw a perfect world as the model of the imperfect material one. Ideas or forms were the content of the perfect world and existed there forever independent of the material world. The Good was a major idea and the Greatest Good equated with God. So it was that Christians and Platonists found common ground. The soul was the form of any individual person trapped in the imperfect body of the material world as if imprisoned—“soma sema”.

It is plain why Christians loved Platonism. Christianity also calls the world imperfect and invites its followers to secure immortality for themselves by believing a tissue of fancy. The similarity of Christianity to Platonism gave it a spurious respectability from an apparently independent source, though it was not really independent. Zoroastrianism is the joint source of both, and this common origin explains the similarities. But Christians insist that Christianity is not dualist.

Now Paul, the apostle, repeatedly distinguishes the flesh (sarx) from the spirit, but Christian commentators keen to keep Christianity a uniquely revealed religion insist that there is no hint in this of Plato’s dualism—the distinction between body and soul. They tell us, quite contrary to the plain words of Paul himself that “body” really means “sinful thoughts”, or some similar distortion of plain truth. Paul’s “flesh” is not Plato’s “body!” This is self-evident apparently to modern evangelists but it was not to Paul who meant solid bloody flesh when he said “sarx”, and not some circumlocution such as “sinful intent” or “abrogation of duty” which he could have said just as easily, had he wanted to. Just in case any modern Christians should wrongly imagine that “flesh” means “flesh” in Paul’s letters, the New International Version of the bible translates the perfectly clear Greek word “sarx” as “sinful nature” instead! Paul writes (Rom 7:18):

For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.

The alteration of “flesh” to “sinful nature” reads perfectly well, but surely in clarifying “me” to mean “my flesh”, Paul is emphasizing the material basis of his problem, but the alteration deliberately makes it abstract. Paul considers the material world of the flesh to be itself evil because “no good thing” dwells in it, and no effort of will can overcome it. A sinful nature can surely be overcome by living properly.

A large part of the Christian desperation here is that they want to hang on to the original Christian idea that the reward of righteousness is resurrection of the body! Yet, the body is material and, if flesh is sinful, then a resurrected body must also be. What they have lost is the idea that that flesh is not forever sinful. It is the victory of God, the hosts of heaven and the righteous in the cosmic battle against Evil that allows flesh to be resurrected as incorruptible and therefore as immortal. This was the idea held by Jesus, if he was an Essene, as seems evident. Evangelists are too stupid to accept this, because they would have to concede a long held position—that Paul refutes Plato’s hypothesis that matter is wicked. Instead to uphold Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 15:12-58, they would have to adopt the Essenes’ position, and that would show that Christianity evolved and was not revealed.

They also have to maintain that Paul also did not believe that “spirit” equated with “Good” because there were evil spirits. They forget that the “spirit” that Paul associated with the body resurrected into eternity is necessarily “Good” because only the righteous are not destroyed having been judged, resurrected wicked people being destroyed in hell at the second death! So, Paul did not “equate” spirit with Good but nevertheless is consistent when he implies or assumes that spirit is Good in the context of surviving the eschaton. The intention of this discussion is not to apologize for Paul but to show that Christians themselves are utterly confused in their own ideas, and here they find Paul confusing because he is using Essenic arguments.

Evangelists find solace in Genesis 1:31, where God pronounces the Creation as Good—pure Zoroastrianism—proving that flesh cannot be wicked. While this is true, it does not dispose of the issue. The bible’s is a false recollection of the Zoroastrian Creation which was naturally Good, but which was corrupted by the Evil Spirit and therefore became subject to decay and death. The defeat of the Evil Spirit and his hosts in the Last Battle meant that the Good Creation would be restored to its pristine state of incorruption. The absence of the full and proper reasoning of Zoroastrianism from the poor Jewish copy makes much of it unfathomable, but the Zoroastrian original is quite understandable. Paul and the Essenes understood it. Gentile Christians did not. They have continued in ignorance ever since.

Though it looked the same, the body resurrected into the incorruptible world could not be of the same flesh as the body in the world corrupted by Evil, and to signify the difference, it seems that Paul somehow considered it a “spiritual” body—though it was still an earthly body, not floating about in heaven. The phenomenon that allowed it, Jesus and the Essenes thought, was that heaven and earth would unite, but, if the gospel stories of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus mean anything, it is to confirm that the incorruptible flesh looked exactly like corruptible flesh but it no longer decayed. So, “spiritual” might be a suitable description of a body that was not subject to the laws of the material world that we are used to, but it was not what spiritualists call an “astral” body. Many modern Christians are simply spiritualists, but the churches have lost any interest in maintaining proper doctrine. The simple of the flocks can be spiritualists as long as they pay up.

It brings us to another node in the Christian litany of excuses that they call theology. The eschaton expected by Jesus and the Essenes, and believed by the followers of Jesus to have begun with the resurrection, never was completed—or rather never started at all! If Jesus was resurrected as the first fruits of the dead, then the kingdom of God had begun. Heaven had begun to join to earth and Jesus was the first of the righteous to rise in an incorruptible body. Jesus thought he would see the victory in the Garden of Gethsemane. His death necessitated a revision. The Last Battle began with the resurrection of Christ and would last forty years. Then he would return with the hosts of heaven and defeat Evil. His failure to return and defeat Evil necessitated a revision. There would be a millennium before the proper return. Two millennia have gone by, but evangelical Christians parrot that Christ will return “soon”. No further revisions are therefore necessary. The brain dead Christian believers will believe anything, consistent or not, and sing their parrot song till death.

The New Testament itself is witness to the doubts that Christians already had when its books were being written. Revelation and 2 Peter are both plainly intent on reassuring Christians 19 centuries ago that the failure of the Son to turn up is no reason not to continue believing! Should anyone have doubted it, 2 Peter 3 reminds them that the end of the world would be by fire, the belief that began in the Zoroastrian scheme.

Paul and the Hellenizers

Christian intellectual bandits try desperately to deny that the “logos” of John’s gospel is Greek. The idea was respectably Greek 500 years before the gospel was written, but its use in the gospel, a book written in the Greek language and in a Greek country is apparently not Greek! Admittedly, the idea of God’s attributes being personified and acting in their own right is not Greek but Persian, but the Greeks called the logos an attribute of God. In the Persian religion, the seven Amesha Spentas of Ahuramazda were attributes that took on independence as “yazatas”, the original angels. The idea of the Amesha Spentas appeared in Judaism as the seven archangels of Yehouah, but the logos was not one of them. Some have argued that “the word of God” could be considered a personified attribute of God, but it never clearly appears as such until it appears in a Greek gospel. Philo, who was a Hellenizing Jew of Alexandria, calls the logos, the “First Born Son”, the Mediator and the “Image of God”. Similar descriptions appear in the epistle to the Hebrews suggesting that the author had a similar background as Philo.

Professor Nash still tries to persuade his clappies that Paul was more influenced by Jerusalem than Tarsus, as if the relative degree of the respective influences, given that both were there, can be considered to have made an assessible difference. W C van Unnik is the man roped in to bear witness to the importance of Jerusalem. The Godly omniscience that all Christians, particularly of an evangelical bent, think they have says that, though Paul was born in Tarsus, he was brought up in Jerusalem and educated there. This is the omniscience that allows Christians to write complete fiction while imagining it to be somehow true—the sacred helper, the Holy Ghost planting it in their heads. The boyhood of Paul matching the boyhood of Jesus. Yet all that van Unnik seems to say is that the “possibility” that Paul was educated in Jerusalem “weakens” the hypothesis that Paul was conditioned by the city of his birth. The cow jumps another hedge. Ignatius Loyala would not have cared where Paul went as long as he had him in Tarsus until the age of seven. The Jesuit theory is that the first seven years form the mind of the adult.

Paul was not an original follower of Jesus. He spent time oppressing them, and then he did experience a sudden change in behaviour—his so called road-to-Damascus experience. Thereafter, he hardly ever met the original apostles appointed by Jesus who mostly have no role in the transmission of the new religion. The few he met, he met briefly and, as his own epistles show, he disagreed with them strongly, a disagreement played down in Acts. He chose to be the apostle to the gentiles, and began his career in the Greek metropolis, like Tarsus, of Antioch, away from the base of the Jerusalem Church.

Many Hellenized Jews lived in Antioch who were ready to believe that a Jewish messiah had arrived and had fulfilled the same function as the popular Pagan saviour gods of the mystery religions. Judaism had long been popular among gentiles but had failed to gain many proselytes because of the requirement of circumcision. Paul realized that the combination of a dying and rising messiah, a son of God, who had recently visited earth, and a relaxed form of Judaism, could be a winner among Hellenized Jews and Pagans, and so it proved. The key point about Paul’s psychology is that he overcame the guilt of his youth, casting off Judaism and any dislike he had of Paganism to forge a new synthesis of the two, acceptable to the many Hellenized Jews of particularly the eastern empire and also the godfearing Pagans. He convinced himself, if he needed to, that the religion was still Jewish even without a law of Moses, having the same High God and a new Jewish saviour. His attraction to religions like that of Attis were fulfilled by the invention (if it was his) of Christianity.

Metzger, of course, knows all this, but as a shepherd, a member of the ruling caste of Christianity, he considers it his duty to educate the under-caste of sheep in ignorance. If Metzger were a scholar and not an apologist, he would have open-endedly considered all of the influences that had a bearing on the remarkable synthesis that Paul achieved whether as its inventor or as its chief publicist. He does not do it because Christian apologists are diametrically opposed to discovering the truth about the foundation of Christianity. Objective scholarship is too dangerous and might uncover something different from their long held beliefs. Other scholars, more honest ones, have been here before and have had to leave the church, or have been obliged to leave it, through publicizing their conclusions. Most apologists have neither the courage nor the honesty to do it.

A final distraction put by Metzger is that the mysteries were influenced by Christianity. The goalposts have inevitably slipped again because professor Nash had been careful to restrict his terms of reference to the origins of Christianity and the New Testament in the first and early second centuries, but he cites Metzger with an example of the dependence of the mysteries on Christianity from the fourth century. Allow us to go that far forward and the Christian case for ritual and doctrinal purity is found to be full of holes. That is why Nash imposed his initial restrictions. In fact, Metzger is commendably cautious in saying that “in certain cases” it was “probable” that syncretism out of Christianity into the mysteries occurred, but we have already noted the syndrome of the cow. Christians do not notice that Metzger is not saying anything with any sureness.

The example they cite is the promise of immortality of the late Taurobolium in the fourth century. Considering that the apologists have argued until they are blue in the face that Christianity was not influenced by anything other than some idealized concept of Judaism, its accepted parent, they willingly admit an opposite syncretism. The truth is that they do not know that the Taurobolium and the dying and rising god associated with it did not already confer immortality on to those who undertook it, because that is what the mystery religions did, among other things.

Christians throughout history did the same as the Taliban did when they destroyed the Buddhist images that they disapproved of. Christians have destroyed and destroyed, leaving us with a thousand year long dark age when learning died and ignorance and filth became virtues. The whole of Pagan culture was erazed from the face of the earth except for a few broken pillars and a few textbooks to allow monks to learn Latin. The lack of evidence of Pagan practices that critics of Christianity can bring to bear is the result of Christian hooliganism and doctrinaire vandalism. This is a motto that everyone should remember:

The Vandals were Christians, and the Christians are Vandals.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.