The Pagan Development of Christianity

A. The ministry of Jesus the Jewish Reformer and his traditional 11(12) apostles were failures. From the death of Jesus (between 30 -32 CE), it took 30 to 40 years for the first Gospel of Mark to write a life of Jesus. The very limited function of (Saint) Peter the Jew is totally eclipsed by the Hellenistic / Greek Paul (or a school of Pauline thought) wrote half of the New Testament. By Acts chapter 14, the last apostle (Peter who was to have been taught by the master Jesus himself) is totally drop in favor of the Greek Jew, Paul who redefines a limited Jewish Jesus into a universal and gentile "Christ". The rest of Jesus’ Jewish apostles appear only in non-canonical pseudepigraphic and apocryphal literature...

B. Only Christianity as it survived in Greek Asia Minor (the home of Paul or the philosophical east) and Rome (the seat of power) was accepted as orthodox as defined at the Nicaea Council in 325 CE. From 325 CE onwards, Christology is defined by the later church councils directly from the rhetoric and philosophy drawn from Neo-Platonism. This mode of thinking becomes the language to the orthodox Church Fathers and of salvation. This is particularly true in light of the Hebrew Bible’s concept of Sheol or the Land of the Shades where all decent in the after life. Platonic philosophy as found in the Phaedo has the soul returning to above spiritual world of absolute true: The Forms. Thus, eternal life for the righteous soul based on a philosophical understanding of Christ is moved from underground Sheol / the Pit to accent in the heavens / Heaven. Sheol is now Hell (since down is bad, thus the place for the fall of the soul in Plato and the land of the Forms is now Heaven (since up is good and the source of divine light in Plotinus of which we all seek to return to). Paul’s accent into the “third Heaven” (2 Corinthians 12:2) is attested from a structure of the Plotinian Universe. Further, Paul’s exclusive concept of a Jewish midrash reading of the Genesis’ story of Eden and the talking snake (Genesis 3) provided the foundation for what the Church Fathers defined as Original Sin (as derived from Plato’s Phaedrus).

C. The limited anthropomorphic god of Israel is given expanded attributes such as "all knowing", "all loving", "all present", "all powerful", and any and all other positive absolutes are drawn directly from the Classical Greek philosophical traditions of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus as a ultimate philosophical universality (again note St. Paul’s theology). Little wonder there is no known Greek or Latin manuscript used in the translation of the New Testament where the name of Israel's god Yahweh is recorded. The Hebrew Yahweh as a historical actor is now dead and the Greek philosophical and Classical term theos or “God” is now front and center.

D. In the late Gospel of John, Jesus is the "logos" (Greek for word) pulled by the writer of this gospel directly from Greek philosophy. This logos or word has no birth, but always was from the beginning (John chapter 1). The old Greco-Roman myth where a god impregnates a woman (as record in Mathew and Luke) to make a half man and half god (such as in the case with Heracles and many other Greco-Roman demigods) was rejected as crude myth in the Platonic view. Thus, the Classical myths with their flawed gods and demigods are given the boot in favor of the pure term logos. This logos is now totally identified as God or the Classical Greek generic term for the highest level of pure universal of concept of light and mind (John 1:9). In this Fourth Gospel, Jesus (unlike in Matthew, Mark and Luke) has no parables to tell, but is made to speak as a Greek philosopher. In fact, the word faith used so often in the Synoptic Gospels never occurs in John. The famous statement use by Evangelicals and most likely formed by the writer of John as recorded in John 3:16 (For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that who so ever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life." is a statement where the limited Hebrew god Yahweh and his chosen people (the Israelites) are now cast out being replaced by the universal absolutes of Platonic philosophy. This God of Philo of Alexandria and the Gospel of John have been totally transformed from the God of Noah (Genesis 6 -9) who hated his own creation to universal logos of love.

For those Christians who argue that God never changes need only to study the ancient world of Judaism and Christianity more openly and objectively in dialogue with the text of the ancient Near East and the Classical worlds. (Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today and forever. Hebrews 13:8) Really?

Harry McCall