This is the second volume of Amin Ramin’s “Man in Islam”. The first volume can be purchased on Amazon at this link.
The original environment in which Jesus lived and preached was Aramean Palestine. During that time, Palestine was the home of the Jews, the only monotheistic believers in the ancient world. In 66 B.C., Pompey conquered Palestine, and it has been a province of the Roman Empire ever since. And so, the preaching of Jesus took place within that Empire.
As we can see even from the canonical Christian Gospels, Jesus positioned himself as a Prophet, preaching correction and moral improvement, speaking of the One God of Abrahamic revelation and the threat of punishment for violating moral standards. This is what all the Prophets did. His preaching also often speaks of the approach of the kingdom of God, in which all men are equal and into which everyone can enter, provided he is morally purified and believes in the One God. Jesus’ mission was to transform the Jewish people – in other words, to create a new Israel, a new people of God. He clearly alludes to the “Paraclete” who was to come after him. His purpose was to create a community, forming a kind of “temporary administration” until other sacral figures came who would create the expected kingdom of God.
The language Jesus spoke was Aramaic, that is, Western Semitic, a language very close to Arabic. The difference does not exceed the difference in dialects. That the real Christ spoke actually in Arabic would surprise most Christians, though it is a fact.
The canonical Christian Gospels sometimes contain original Aramaic phrases. For example, Christ says: Talitha kumi, “maiden, arise” (Mk. 5:41) when raising the girl. In Arabic, it would sound like fata kumi, where “kumi” is the imperative verb “arise” in the feminine gender. Also, during the “crucifixion,” the evangelist puts into his mouth the phrase Elohi! Lamma sawahfani? – “God, God, why have You forsaken me?” (Mk. 15:34). “Elohi” is actually “Allah.” In Arabic, the phrase looks like this: Allah! Lima taraktani?
Thus, the language of Jesus was practically the same language in which the Quran was sent down and the Seal of the Prophets Muhammad (S) spoke.
The first scrolls of his sayings were also written in Aramaic. However, because of Paul’s activities and the transfer of Christian preaching to the pagan Hellenistic area, all of the extant Gospels were written in Greek, which became the language of the church (along with Latin). Nothing has survived of the sermons, sayings, or prayers of Jesus in his native Aramaic.
This is what can be briefly said about the person of Jesus himself. As for the religion speaking on his behalf, it began to take shape when his message penetrated the circles of Hellenistic Greek-speaking Jews. That is, to give you a rough idea of the picture… There was Palestine as the sacred center of the Jewish community. And there was also a large and influential Jewish diaspora scattered throughout the major cities of the Empire. According to some estimates, its size was one-tenth of the total urban population. The Diaspora spoke not so much Aramaic or Hebrew as Greek, the universal language of the time. And so, from Palestine, news of the appearance of a person like Jesus and his preaching began to spread throughout the Jewish Diaspora. Because they spoke Greek and were already very much part of a different culture (Pagan culture based on Monism), the very figure of Christ and the essence of his message begin to be reinterpreted and changed according to the culture of that milieu.
In the spirit of Hellenistic manifestationistic discourse in these circles, they began to ascribe features of divinity to him. The legend of his miraculous resurrection was also invented. The main spokesman for this trend was the Hellenized Jew Paul. If anyone could be called the “founder of Christianity,” it would be him.
Paul, or Saul, was born in Tarsus, among immigrant Jews, five or ten years after the birth of Christ. He studied under the famous rabbis in Palestine (the same rabbis who, according to the Christian version, condemned Jesus to execution). Saul then becomes a persecutor of his followers, taking part in the massacres against them. But suddenly, on the road to Damascus, an ecstatic vision hits him, after which he is imbued with the idea that he himself should speak in the name of Jesus. Remember, he had never been a disciple of Christ or even seen him. And so, filled with this idea, Paul begins going from city to city throughout the Roman Empire and preaching his teachings among the Jewish population. He writes a series of epistles that have survived and are still part of Christian scriptures today (the New Testament). In these letters, the story of Jesus is reworked in the spirit of the story of the suffering, dying, and resurrecting god – what is called the “mystery myth.” This myth was widespread throughout the Empire. There were cults of dozens of deities who descended into this world, endured suffering, died, and then miraculously resurrected – Dionysus, Orpheus, Osiris, Adonis, Attis, Mithras…
The plot of the mystery myth is as follows: the divine order has been lost, disaster has struck, and evil has entered the world. A divine messenger comes from the higher worlds to save mankind. Collision with the evil of this world ends in his death, crucifixion, dismemberment. However, through the intervention of the forces of light, the divine messenger is resurrected, the world is saved, and harmony is restored. This general story is repeated in many variations throughout the world. Paul transfers it to Jesus. Christ is a demigod, with nothing human in him anymore. Although Paul lived at one time with him and interacted with his disciples, he does not mention any biographical details about his life. He is no longer a real person but an impersonal deity, the world’s savior.
The overall picture from Paul’s confusing, pretentious epistles is this. The world of the flesh in which man is immersed is fundamentally evil. Evil arose as a consequence of Adam’s fall into sin. But it is not all bad: Christ came into this world to save us from evil raising us up to a world of light and goodness in spiritual union with himself. However, this is not possible for everyone, but only for a special category of “spiritual” and “chosen” people, such as Christians. For this salvation, keeping the law (i.e., the Jewish Sharia) is not important: love for Christ, spiritual and mystical union with him is enough. This unity is thought of in the spirit of communion with the deity typical of mystery cults (for which bread and wine were often used as symbols of god’s flesh and blood).
It is only natural that with this teaching, borrowed entirely from pagan mystery discourse, Paul would come into conflict with the Abrahamic circle of the true disciples of Christ, who saw him as a false apostle. He himself mentions this in his Epistle to the Galatians.
Thus, if the real Christ was a Prophet of the One God, Paul makes a momentous rearrangement: he makes Christ a god and calls himself a prophet of God-Christ. He turns the doctrine of Jesus into a doctrine about Jesus, a cult of Christ that is known today as “Christianity.” He creates an original dualistic theological system “based on” Christ. The main difference here is that Jesus himself never thought of founding a new religion. He came as a Prophet to the people of Israel, calling them to repent and wait for the Kingdom. It was Paul who founded the new religion. It is with him that the motif of “all things new,” absent even in Gospels written under the influence of his circle, is first insistent and repeated many times.
The subject of the compilation of the Gospels is worth touching upon separately. As we know, there were many of them, and most have been lost or deliberately destroyed in the course of history. Of these, the church has selected four. The four canonical Gospels were all written outside of Palestine, much later than the events described (not before 70 A.D.), by people who were most likely part of Paul’s circle. This is evident from the numerous anachronisms and contradictions, as well as the rather poor familiarity of the Gospel writers with the geography and way of life of the people in the places they describe.
Here we cannot parse these instances: the relevant literature is very extensive. The words put by the authors of the Gospels into the mouth of Jesus with the offer to eat his body and drink his blood would have caused ritual terror in any pious Jew. Such things were possible in the mystical cults of Attis, Mithras, and Isis, but not in the Abrahamic environment of Palestine. Another fictional subject is the resurrection, which also belongs to the myth of the dying and resurrecting gods.
We do not speak of the fact that for a Palestinian Jew to declare himself “God” or “son of God” would have been the most terrible crime, punishable by immediate death. But such a phenomenon was normal in the pagan sea surrounding Palestine, where the people’s minds were filled with numerous god-men and god-mothers. Therefore, it is not surprising that the image of Jesus the Messiah, whose message spread through the Jewish diasporas of the oikumene, gradually dissolved into the story of yet another god-man like Mithras or Osiris.
As early as the 19th century, the “two sources” hypothesis was formulated. According to it, the first Gospel was Mark. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke used Mark plus another written source that has not survived, commonly referred to as Q (from the German Quelle – source). This Q was most likely a record of Jesus’ sayings, the “logia.” The important thing for us is that there was nothing in it about the crucifixion and resurrection, which means that this whole plot was made up and added later on the basis of the myth of the dying-resurrection gods. This is what led the mythological school of Drevs to argue that Jesus as a historical person never existed and that the Gospel stories are built on the impartation of a mythical figure with biographical details. The truth is exactly the opposite: the real man and prophet Jesus was mythologized, deified and inscribed into the legend of the crucifixion-resurrection.
The only book most likely to go back to the circle of the disciples of Jesus is the Apocalypse, which has a spiritual style quite different from the Gospels and conveys an authentic Abrahamic message. Apocalypse is also the oldest book of the New Testament. It is no accident that Hellenistic proponents of the monistic paradigm demanded the removal of this book from the Christian canon. We should also mention that the Apocalypse contains many encoded predictions about Muhammad (S) and the Infallible Imams of his Family.
Overall, the canonical Gospels give us a reworking of the story of Jesus in a manifestationalist-dualistic way by authors who, nevertheless, had not yet broken away from Judaism. They record precisely this stage in the development of Christianity – when, on the one hand, the real Jesus the Prophet has not yet been far removed, but, on the other hand, his story has already been “illuminated” by the colors of monistic and black discourses. Here Christianity, from being an Aramaic-Jewish religion, becomes a Greek-Pagan one.
At this point, the opposition was forming from the disciples of Jesus himself and their followers, who insisted that Christ’s message must remain in the monotheistic field. This group was known as the “Ebionites” or “Judeo-Christians.” Finally, however, the worldwide pagan faction under Paul’s leadership triumphed, and the monotheistic party faded into the shadows and gradually disappeared. It was subsequently declared a “heresy,” and all documents and traces connected with it were sought out and consistently destroyed by the official church.
In the second stage, which begins around the 80s, under the decisive influence of Paul, Christianity, having broken with Judaism, begins to spread to the non-Jewish, Greek-speaking environments of the Empire cities (“the Gentiles”). Since these environments were very far from a monotheistic, Abrahamic beginning, the message of Jesus at this point is even more colored by pagan discourses (mixed together so that they were difficult to distinguish).
In the second century, Christian communities were already present in all the eastern cities of the Roman Empire and, to a lesser extent, in the western cities (dominated by Mithraism, a rival of Christianity).
Greek finally became the main language of the new religion. During this period, there are frequent reports of the adoption of Christianity by nobles and intellectuals, up to and including the imperial family. In Christian communities, a special spiritual estate, the clergy, was formed.
This period ends in 235.
The next stage is 235-325: the time when Christianity became the dominant religion of the Empire. During this period, Christians begin to constitute a majority in some cities; in others, they are a significant proportion of the population. Church organization becomes highly centralized. The choice of bishops passes from the community to the clergy. This period ends in 325 with the official adoption of Christianity by the emperor Constantine.
Already at the first stage, Christianity faced the so-called “persecution.” Later Christian historians have greatly exaggerated the scale and significance of these events; in addition, they have directed the thoughts of scholars to a false understanding of Christianity as a religion supposedly opposed to Rome and the Empire. In reality, such things as Neronian persecution were purely accidental because the emperor needed to shift to someone else the blame for the burning of Rome, in which he himself was involved. Christians were persecuted not because they saw them as a systemic threat to the Empire but as any of the sects or cults that were organizing their own network, independent of the central authorities. Every despotic state is suspicious of the independent activity of its subordinates and even more so of their attempts to unite in some larger structure. Other cults were periodically persecuted in the same way in Rome. Taking all this into account, we can say that the Empire was generally loyal to Christianity.
Finally, the next period, beginning in 325, is the final victory of Christianity as the universal ideology of the Roman Empire. Its dogmas are enshrined in the “Ecumenical Councils” as universally binding. Persecutions against pagans replace the former anti-Christian persecutions. Christianity and “paganism” de facto change roles. Christianity becomes the ideological contour of the West for almost a thousand and a half years.
Thus, we have traced the historical stages of the formation of Christianity as an integral cult of the Roman Empire. Despite all their differences, these stages had one thing in common – in each of them, Christianity acted as a magnet, absorbing the religions, ideologies, and cults of the Roman Empire, trying to mold them into a kind of unity. The old cults and religions were not destroyed – they simply dissolved into a single integral cult. Christian churches and monasteries were built on the site of pagan temples, and the old gods and heroes were assimilated under the guise of saints and martyrs. Antique philosophy took on the appearance of theology.
If we look at Christianity’s main rival, Mithraism, we see that this religion was not so much defeated as integrated by Christianity within itself. Everything that was in Mithraism is also found in Christianity: the plot of the suffering and resurrecting god, the atoning sacrifice, the logos as a divine mediator, the ascension of the god-man to heaven, the communion of bread and wine (Justin sees in the ritual use of bread and water by Mithraists “diabolical intrigues”), sprinkling with holy water, priestly worship, the anointing, the veneration of the seventh day of the week. Mithra is born in a grotto, and shepherds and magicians bring him gifts – gold and incense. The symbol of Mithraism was the cross – the ancient solar sign – depicted in a circle. The Nativity of Mithras was celebrated on 25 December, the darkest night of the year, as a symbol of the birth of light in the darkness: on the same day, Christianity began to celebrate the birth of Christ. Christianity borrowed its strict priestly organization and the idea of a “militant church” from Mithraism. The title of the Roman high priest, Pater, that is, “pope,” is taken from Mithraism (where it meant the highest degree of initiation), as is the office of “metropolitans” and the specific headdress of Christian bishops, still called the “mitre.”
This similarity goes so far – right down to the details – that there have been those who have called Christianity a “copy from Mithraism.” And yet this is wrong. Mithraism lacked the most important element present in Christianity, the Monotheistic line. And so it lost.
This concludes our brief review of the history of Christianity, and in the next part, we will look at the results of its one and a half thousand years of dominance as the ideological outline of the West.
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