Caesar and Christ (Story of Civilization, #3)

by Will Durant

Some men, led by gluttony, rush off to join in drinking bouts, as if they were laying in provisions for a siege. . . . The less expensive foods are always more helpful. . . . When, in a precipitate retreat, Artaxerxes Memnon had nothing to eat but barley-bread and figs, he exclaimed, “What a pleasure is this, which has never been mine before!”

Plutarch On healthy diet

Philosophy does not mean reading books about wisdom, it means training oneself in the practice of wisdom. The essence of the matter is that a man should so mold his life and conduct that his happiness shall depend as little as possible upon external things. This does not require a hermit’s solitude; on the contrary, “Epicureans and blackguards” are to be condemned for detaching men from public service; the good man will take his part in civic affairs. But he will accept with equanimity all vicissitudes of fortune—poverty, bereavement, humiliation, pain, slavery, imprisonment, or death;

Epectitus philosophy

Our English term gospel (Old English godspel, good news) is a rendering of the Greek euangelion, which is the opening word of Mark, and means “glad tidings”—that the Messiah had come, and the Kingdom of God was at hand. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are “synoptic”: their contents and episodes allow of being arranged in parallel columns and “viewed together.”

Gospel: good news

Christian writers before 100 quote the Old, but never the New, Testament. The only reference to a Christian gospel before 150 is in Papias, who, about 135, reports an unidentified “John the Elder” as saying that Mark had composed his gospel from memories conveyed to him by Peter.15 Papias adds: “Matthew transcribed in Hebrew the Logia”— apparently an early Aramaic collection of the sayings of Christ.

old christians refer to old tastement

Judaic Christianity survived for five centuries in a little group of Syriac Christians called Ebionim (“the poor”), who practiced Christian poverty and the full Jewish Law. At the end of the second century the Church condemned them as heretics.

Judiac Christianity

In Christ and Peter Christianity was Jewish; in Paul it became half Greek; in Catholicism it became half Roman. In Protestantism the Judaic element and emphasis were restored.

Evolution of Christianity

Moved by his own somber spirit and remorse, and his transforming vision of Christ; influenced perhaps by Platonist and Stoic denunciations of matter and the body as evil; recalling, it may be, Jewish and pagan customs of sacrificing a “scapegoat” for the sins of the people, Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ: that every man born of woman inherits the guilt of Adam, and can be saved from eternal damnation only by the atoning death of the Son of God.VI 50 Such a conception was more agreeable to the pagans than to the Jews. Egypt, Asia Minor, and Hellas had long since believed in gods—Osiris, Attis, Dionysus—who had died to redeem mankind; such titles as Soter (Savior) and Eleutherios (Deliverer) had been applied to these deities; and the word Kyrios (Lord), used by Paul of Christ, was the term given in Syrian-Greek cults to the dying and redeeming Dionysus.

Paul's creed

In the beginning was the Logos; the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. . . . All things were made by the Logos; without him nothing was made that was made. It was by him that all things came into existence. ... So the Logos became flesh and blood, and dwelt amongst us. Just as Philo, learned in Greek speculation, had felt a need to rephrase Judaism in forms acceptable to the logic-loving Greeks, so John, having lived for two generations in a Hellenistic environment, sought to give a Greek philosophical tinge to the mystic Jewish doctrine that the Wisdom of God was a living being,83 and to the Christian doctrine that Jesus was the Messiah. Consciously or not, he continued Paul’s work of detaching Christianity from Judaism. Christ was no longer presented as a Jew, living more or less under the Jewish Law; he was made to address the Jews as “you,” and to speak of their Law as “yours”; he was not a Messiah sent “to save the lost sheep of Israel,” he was the coeternal Son of God; not merely the future judge of mankind, but the primeval creator of the universe.

John's logos and Christ

From Egypt came the ideas of a divine trinity, the Last Judgment, and a personal immortality of reward and punishment; from Egypt the adoration of the Mother and Child, and the mystic theosophy that made Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, and obscured the Christian creed; there, too, Christian monasticism would find its exemplars and its source. From Phrygia came the worship of the Great Mother; from Syria the resurrection drama of Adonis; from Thrace, perhaps, the cult of Dionysus, the dying and saving god. From Persia came millennarianism, the “ages of the world,” the “final conflagration,” the dualism of Satan and God, of Darkness and Light; already in the Fourth Gospel Christ is the “Light shining in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out.”84 The Mithraic ritual so closely resembled the eucharistic sacrifice of the Mass that Christian fathers charged the Devil with inventing these similarities to mislead frail minds.85 Christianity was the last great creation of the ancient pagan world.

Christianity a pagan religion?