Quoted By:
>gnosticism
They have a living spiritual practice strongly coloured by Greek philosophy and the other wisdom traditions and mystery schools around the region, reaching even into Proto-Iran. And the way they practiced it is very similar to what Jungian psychology leads you into.
Read Elaine Pagels. She talks about how their church had no orthodoxy and they regularly switched roles and allowed women to preach. People used their personal dreams and visions to interpret and reinterpret their myth, and they also claimed apostolic succession. Jews gained a foothold in Rome and then harshly began persecuting them, as a way to leverage Christianity to serve the jewish-roman state.
It is basically greek philosophy with a Christian veneer, probably they rightly identified Christ with their own gods, hence John using the greek philosophical designation "Logos" to appeal to them. The book of John is highly gnostic.
It's directly relevant to the criticisms (((Pagans))) have about Christians "plagiarizing". It wasn't plagiarism, it was syncretism. Yes there were conflicts as any syncretism has, but there was also friendly co-operation. We know this because the polytheists were already amenable to adopting foreign gods as their own or seeing them in terms of their own cosmology, and did so with other Polytheisms. the council of nicea was where things went wrong and it became totalitarian orthodoxy. There was no orthodoxy early on. Yes people even worshipped Christ in the morning and Athena in the evening. Caligula had a figure in his Pantheon known as "the shepherd" which was identified as a Christ-like figure. Monotheism has opened up a danger in that it caused us to dismiss the archetypes and lesser gods as demons. Christ slots in perfectly well as the head of a pantheon, where perhaps the other gods can be identified as components of him.
