The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name

by Brian C. Muraresku

He calls it “the bizarre realm” of neo-Pythagoreanism influenced by Plato, perhaps best represented by an enigmatic thinker like Plotinus (ca. AD 205–270), who was born in Egypt and died in the Italian region of Campania in Magna Graecia. It’s still unknown if Plotinus’s roots were Roman, Greek, or Hellenized Egyptian, but it doesn’t matter. It’s just another example of the intellectual melting pot of the time. In his introduction to the Vatican’s monograph, Fabrizio Bisconti, the superintendent of Christian Catacombs, actually gives a nice shout-out to Plotinus. That bearded figure on the wall behind me, whom Father Francis and others have likened to Saint Paul? Well, Bisconti says the Aurelii must have borrowed it from the marble portraits of Plotinus that were just coming into vogue and had a major influence on all later Pauline iconography.