Man's Search For Spirituality - E Christopher Reyes (jenna bush book club .TXT) 📗

the Heavens].
BC 600-529-The Great Persian King, Cyrus, known as “The Anointed of Yahweh.” Cyrus is Non-Hebrew and perhaps is given this name of great significance due to his being a fair and just ruler and allowing the Jews to return to Israel to rebuild the Temple of Solomon. Cyrus has a revelation in which he is directed by the God of Heaven to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
BC 600-The Persian cult of Mithraism spreads the teachings of monotheism [one god.]. Their leader is Mithras, mythical son of Ahura Mazda, god of Zoroaster.
The Christian Churches have suppressed the following information for centuries. “…If Rome had not become Christian, it would have become Mithrasian.” ~D. Jason Copper, Mithras: Mysteries and Initiated Rediscovered.
At one time Mithraism is the semi-official religion of the Romans. Mithras is known as:
63. The All Knowing God who is the opponent of all evil forces on earth and associated with Astrology and Taurus the bull, which heralds the coming of spring. The blood of the bull was considered as a life force.
64. The Way, the Persian god of light in the Avesta who rides across the sky in a chariot drawn by four horses.
65. The Light
66. This religion included a baptism and sacraments of bread and wine.
67. December 25th also denotes the setting and rising of the sun, which is representative of death and resurrection.
68. His resurrection is celebrated on Easter. Regenerator of Earth, and the Creator of Life.
69. Mithra is known as “God out of a Rock,” and services are held in caves [does this sound like Saint Peter?].
70. The Mithraic celebration of the sun, “God’s Birth,” is celebrated on December 25th , the day he is born in a stable of a virgin.
71. The Sun is “Born Again” on December 25, a Holy Day, and a day of celebration.
72. Members are advanced by degrees [seven, corresponding to the seven known celestial planets] as they learn the mysteries of life. The Apostles were also advanced by degrees.
73. The Mithraic “Taurobolia” was a symbol of a divine sacrifice and of the saving effect of blood.
74. Paul later says of Jesus, “They drank from that spiritual rock and that rock was Christ.” [I Corinthians 10:4] Identical words found in Mithraic scriptures except the word Mithra is used instead of Christ.
75. He is pictured carrying a lamb on his shoulders.
76. He was born of a virgin.
77. Sunday [Sun Day] is sacred to them and is known as “The Lord’s Day.”
78. The Mithraic figure Aion is said to represent the keys to the world beyond.
79. Mithra is placed on a rock tomb called “Petra.” After three days, he is removed with celebration, festivities, and joy.
80. Mithra followers believed that there will be a day of Judgment when Non-Believers would perish and believers would live in a paradise or heaven.
Later Saint Paul, who is very knowledgeable and well traveled, adopts these teachings and consolidates them into the new religion. “He [Saint Paul] threatens, moreover, the stubborn and forward and denounces them, saying 'Whosoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily is guilty of the Body and Blood of the Lord.” ~1 Corinthians 11:27.
“The Orphic cults in Greece, the Osiris and Isis cult in Egypt, the worship of Attis and Adonis in Syria [of which Palestine is part], the purification and communion ceremonies of Mithraism, all turned about the idea of a secret means of salvation. The God dies and is resurrected; the Virgin Goddess gives birth to a Son; the members of the religious community eat of their God and gain strength from the sacred meal. “
“The Church Fathers were aware of these similarities, and sought to explain away their resemblances by means of the theory that the Devil had blasphemously imitated Christian rites and doctrines." I may pause to point out that these pagan rites long antedated the Christian analogies, and therefore the theory loses force.”
“The death and resurrection of a Savior-God was very prevalent in Tarsus, Paul's own city. The Attis Mysteries were celebrated in a season which corresponded to the end of our Lenten season and the beginning of Easter. They were preceded by fasting and began with lamentations; the votaries gathered in sorrow around the bier of the dead divinity; then followed the resurrection; and the risen God gave hope of salvation to the mystic brotherhood; and the whole service closed with the feast of rejoicing, the Hilaria.” ~Ray Wood Sellars, The Next Step in Religion: An Essay Toward the Coming Renaissance, New York, The Macmillan Co. 1918, pp. 23-24.
Jesus never wrote a Gospel nor did he ask his disciples to do so. He did , however, allegedly ask them to go to all personages to tell them about the news of salvation, although many never realized they needed it and were living quite comfortable without it. One of the most inveterate forms of imaginative creation on the part of the old Christian historiographers is the development of sayings and whole speeches, which, just as do the narrative fiction writers of today, they place entire paragraphs into the mouths of their fictional personages of whom they were writing, which discourses they often fabricate whole, but always write them in the style and manner of the writer of the epoch in question, and not in those of their ancient subjects. Thus, the Apostle Paul says, “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by His Son, whom he appointed heir of all things and through whom he made the universe.” ~Hebrews 1:1-2. A statement, which very few Jews during his time accepted. The partaking of bread and wine was part of the secret mystery performed by those who had participated in instructions and rituals leading to higher degrees of initiation and the bread and wine represented the Body and Blood of their Savior.
Mithras, after slaying the bull as a salvific blood sacrifice, had dined with the 'Sun God,' and this supper became the Mithraic ' Cultic meal,' similar to the terminology of the Christian ‘Eucharist’.
Mithrasians’ “Last Supper,” like the modern Communion or Eucharist, also included wine as a symbol of “Sacrificial Blood,” and “Bread in wafers, or small loaves marked with a cross, was used to symbolize flesh.”
Paul’s “Belief that he received the myth from the ‘Heavenly’ Jesus himself has obscured his own role in creating it.” ~ Hyam Maccoby, Paul and Hellenism.
“Was any man ever so mad, was any man ever so mad as to take that, which he feeds on for a god?” ~So says Cicero, who himself was a Roman augur and a priest
The host, or consecrated wafer, is proclaimed as the ‘Body and blood’ of the ‘Prodigious God’ of the Catholic Church. The host is enshrined in a box adorned with gold and silver and precious stones, and made manifest as that of “A god” whom even the Pope's Pagan “Fathers knew not,” who to this day honors in the very manner that which the terms of the Biblical prediction imply that he would.
Thus, when the Pope was invested with the Pagan title of ‘Pontifex,’ and set himself to make that title a certainty, he in effect fulfilled the prediction of Daniel recorded more than 900 years before. –Daniel 11:36.
It will not be until the 4th century, when the ‘Queen of Heaven,’ now enshrined as ‘Mother Mary,’ will begin to be worshipped in the Christian Church, and the “Unbloody Sacrifice” the Eucharist, will be brought in from Africa and become popular. Epiphanius states that the practice of offering and eating it began among the women of Arabia; and at the time it was well known to have been adopted from the Pagans.
The very shape of the ‘Unbloody sacrifice’ of Rome indicates whence it came, for it is a small thin, round wafer; and on its roundness the Church of Rome lays so much stress. “If, in making the roundness the ring be broken, then must another of his fellow-cakes receive that honor to be made a god, and the crazed or cracked miserable cake, that once was in hope to be made a god, must be given to a baby to play withal.” ~John Knox. The round disk, so frequently displayed in the sacred emblems of Egypt, symbolizes the Sun, and when Osiris, the ‘Sun-Divinity,’ becomes incarnate, and is born, it is not merely that he should give his life as a sacrifice for men, but that he might also be the life and nourishment of the souls of men.
“…In their hidden character, the enigmas of the Egyptians were very similar to those of the Jews.” ~Clement of Alexandria.
“The Clementine Homilies,” are considered heretical books as they show a distinct proclivity to equate Jesus with the sun and the solar year.
The Egyptians adopt many of the Greek gods and religious ways after thieir conquest by Alexander the Great, and the ‘Sun,’ as the ‘Son’ is, in addition, symbolized by the golden color of “Corn,” by the ancient Egyptians, as the ‘Sun-Divinity’ incarnate, which, according to the sacred oracles of the great goddess of Egypt state “No mortal hath lifted my veil. The fruit, which I have brought forth is the Sun.”
What is more natural then, if this incarnate divinity is symbolised as the “Bread of God,” than that he should be represented as a “Round wafer,” to identify him with the Sun? “A plate of silver, in the form of a Sun, is fixed opposite to the ‘Sacrament’ on the altar; which, with the light of the tapers, makes a most brilliant appearance.” ~Hurd.
“And they brake down the altars of Baalim in his presence, and the images [Sun-Images] that were on high above them, he cut down.” ~see 2 Chronicles 34:4.
The early Pauline Church portrays Jesus is a failure because this 'Savior' is compatible with the humble Jesus of the Apostles, leaving intact the spiritual and triumphant ' Christ' of Paul. The faithless Peter and the family of Jesus, which thinks he is insane or possessed are portrayed as failures also.
For the Paulinists, “The Apostle” remained Paul, for them, the truth being drawn from Paul’s 'Mystical Union' with Christ, having never met the man, and not from the earthly Jesus as portrayed by Peter. “Dedicated to Truth, yet always mindful that all faith is false, all faith is true truth is the shattered mirrors strewn in myriad bits; while each believes his little bit the whole to own.” ~The Kasidah of Haji Abu el-Yezdi; as translated by Sir Richard F. Burton.
Neither Jesus nor the faithless relatives of Jesus threaten Paul’s 'Divine Christ' nor Paul’s leadership. Historians point out that a number of Greek and Roman writers like “Diodorus, Cicero, Livy, Pausanias, and Strabo” thought that mythic figures such as, “Theseus, Herakles, Odysseus, Minos, Dionysus, Castor, and Pollux...” must have had a historical basis, which was eventually mythologized, the job of the historian being to discard the fictional elements, leaving the biographical core exposed, as Herodotus attempted to do for Herakles [Hercules].
In Mark II, the associates of Jesus, who were illiterate and naive are also rehabilitated. ~Acts 4:13. Peter replaces Paul as the founder of the new religion, and in Matthew, Jesus says he will build his church upon Peter, and in Luke the Apostles do not desert Jesus at his arrest and death, and by the end of the 1st century the Jesus and Pauline