The Birth of Christendom--a different Son of God

Karl W. Luckert
copyright for website edition  1999

Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire: Theological and Philosophical Roots of Christendom in Evolutionary Perspective was a book published in 1991 by the State University of New York Press. It has since gone out of print. All the while, inquiries about its availability are on the increase. Inasmuch as no scholar likes to see his most significant piece of work die a premature or unnecessary death, I have begun to revise its five portions to be displayed as separate "booklets" (or "pages") on the Internet. I have no illusions that this fresh exposure will in some miraculous manner make the content much easier to read. But as it was, the original book had a serious flaw that hereby can be remedied. The 1991 edition roams enthusiastically across no less than five academic disciplines. Not all the readers have appreciated this scope and complexity—and among potential reviewers only a courageous few have accepted the challenge. Inasmuch as the Internet presents itself as a perfect medium for virtual illusions I shall pretend here, for a while, that the book's five sections are separate booklets that can stand by themselves. So, for the time being my 1991 publication has become again a manuscript in progress. This means, what you read here today may not be exactly what you will find here tomorrow.    KWL 2001 

What actually happened 2000 years ago? Of course, the founder of the Christian religion was born. While everyone seems to be wrangling about the details and probabilities of this event, I rather skip some of the uncertain preliminaries and focus the story at the point where we actually have a Christian theology in a shape that became orthodoxy. And at that point the features of ancient Egyptian imperial theology become clearly visible. So while, figuratively speaking, Judaism can be visualized as the "father religion" of Christendom, structural family resemblances clearly point to ancient Egypt as the home of its "mother." 

All the Footnotes have been renumbered and gathered at the end of the essay, followed by the Bibliography and the Table of Contents for Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire... 

Karl W. Luckert,    February 1999

Return to Luckert-bibliography

The Kingdom of Heaven at Hand

Premonitions in Jewish Mythology

        Christian theology and soteriology, their indebtedness to ancient Egypt, are the primary focus in Part Four of this book. At the same time, our exposition aims not in the least at diminishing the significance of the life and teachings of Jesus, Christianity's founder. And most certainly, his personal religious impulses and contributions have come to us by way of Judaism.

        Nevertheless, to understand the formative years of Christendom, as a world religion, it is necessary to distinguish between Hebrew and Egyptian contributions. The primary Hebrew seed element, imparted to the Christian movement by Jesus, has been his personal dedication to the "kingdom of heaven" or the "kingdom of God." Popular angelology at the time of Jesus, information about God's heavenly entourage, may be considered a good indicator of how the nature of God's kingdom was understood by Jesus and his Jewish contemporaries.

        Other Jewish contributions also must be mentioned in this connection, in passing. The memory meal, which the apostles and the Christian Church have continued to celebrate after their Lord's departure, was modeled formally after the Jewish rite of Passover—even though the food mysticism of bread and wine, as such, goes beyond Judaism. But, as it began, by virtue of this revised Passover ritual and by accepting the Hebrew Bible as "old testament," the Christian Church was able to appropriate much of the ancient Abrahamic reform tradition. That reform tradition began early on to delimit the types of sacrifice that supposedly God Almighty still expected of humankind.

        The heavenly Father of Jesus Christ reformed sacrificial rites beyond Jewish expectations, at least beyond what was expected by Sadducees. Even though the early Jewish Christians still went to worship at the temple (as in Acts 2:42ff), the consensus gradually prevailed that Christ not only came to endorse Abraham's abolishment of human sacrifices, but to disregard animal sacrifices and circumcision as well. In the sacred meal celebrated by Christians, the plant substances of bread and wine came to substitute for the meat of lambs. Moreover, to underwrite the new Christian gospel and the new world order, the execution of Jesus came to be viewed as the last efficacious and redemptive human sacrifice necessary under God's heaven. Christ's death was understood as the supreme sacrifice intended by God to end all human sacrifices. His death was understood as culmination of the Abrahamic tradition of sacrificial reforms.

        The "kingdom of heaven" idea continued to change after the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus, to accommodate the fact that churches had evolved instead. There is nothing unusual about this change, inasmuch as the "kingdom of heaven" concept had been fluid all along. It had begun to change in Jewish consciousness in the direction of Christian radicalism already in the thought of Hebrew prophets. The larger process by which kingdom of heaven awareness was effectively transformed, in the teachings of John the Baptizer as well as in those of Jesus, also can be perceived in light of what before their time had happened to the Jewish belief in angels. Angels in Judaism staffed and populated God's kingdom of heaven.

*        *           *

        Ancient Hebrew narrators, plain domesticators, who told stories about the patriarchal age, were still unspoiled by worldly and otherworldly royal glories. As far as these ancients were concerned, the messenger angels of God Almighty appeared regularly in the guise of ordinary human travelers.

        Nevertheless, during the formative period of Israel's monarchy, during her grand domestication phase, God increasingly was acclaimed as a "Lord of hosts." Inasmuch as the godhead was then honored as a deity of war, his angelic hosts were understood, accordingly, to be of the warrior type as well. As a result, the distinction between angelic warriors and Israelite human warriors became blurred. So for example, it is said that when the warrior David faced the Philistine giant, Goliath, he spoke confident words like these:

        The prophet Isaiah, who still lived in the bright afterglow of the Davidic monarchy, envisioned Almighty God as sitting on a high cosmic throne. The earth was God's footstool and the entire universe was his monarchy. The prophet saw and heard God's messenger angels shout toward one another. Their shouts of praise and glory, in those moments, modified their original military posture:

        In post-canonical Jewish literature, angelology reached new and sometimes amazingly beautiful heights. The philosopher Philo, having come under the spell of Egyptian emanationalism in Alexandria, has arranged Yahweh's angels in a hierarchy of created beings. Generous readers could easily have reconciled Philo's angelology with so-called Heliopolitan polytheism. In the Egyptian perspective, their religion has been monotheism with polymanifestations all along. It may in the final analysis not matter whether, historically considered, certain divine beings are being called gods or angels. For religions that belong to the family of Egyptian tradition, only the function of these beings in the larger divine emanational hierarchy matters.

        The primary differences between ancient Egyptian theology and the later intertestamental Jewish version of angelology concerned, foremostly, the mode of divine creation and the style of divine government. The Egyptian godhead first generated divine offspring and then, remaining still actively and "organically" involved within his offspring, generated the visible world through the latter. By contrast, in Jewish perspective the divine creator simply commanded, inorganically and somewhat despotically, that there should be creatures. By that same voice method he also decreed that there be angels to serve him as his messengers.

        The distinction therefore turns on only the small question as to what came first in God's world. Was it the presence of his servants in the divine hierarchy? Or was it the Lord's autocratic commandeering that brought them into being, first, to serve?

        In contrast to Egyptian emanational theology, Jewish apocalyptic literature presented the angels of God with a tinge of Zoroastrian confrontationalism. This situation can be accounted for easily by considering Persian-Jewish relations during the postexilic period. Inasmuch as all commands, including the divine commands of the Creator, could be disobeyed by strong minds it became necessary for Jews to define what in Egypt used to be distant emanations of God—to define them as more or less estranged and disobedient creatures. Not only humankind, but also some angels, henceforth had to be counted among God's disobedient or fallen creatures. God's obedient angels were those who continued to dwell in his realm of light, whereas the disobedient Satan and his angelic accomplices existed in darkness. Both types of angels were interacting in constant strife.

        Theogonically explained, and still somewhat in accord with Egyptian emanational "polytheistic" logic, the dark and evil angels were those who had descended from the presence of God to defile themselves in union with human maidens (Genesis 6:1–4).

        In the Egyptian context this would have meant only that for the time being these angels went too far out in the emanational process, in the direction of nonbeing. However, according to the Jewish perspective their behavior was more tragic. It meant that the offspring of such estranged angels became monsters, and that these monsters were responsible for introducing warfare among humankind.(1) Altogether, this amounts to a wonderful Hebrew diatribe on aristocratic warriors anywhere; namely, on heroes and cutthroats who were in the habit of claiming descent from the gods. All the while, when seen under a beam of Zoroastrian light, sideways, with stark contrasts and shadows, some of these far-estranged angels appeared to be devils.

        The book of Jubilees (2:2), a late second century B.C.E. source, identifies a number of angels as spirits (life principles or souls) embodied in natural phenomena; that is, embodied in fire, winds, clouds, darkness, snow, hail, hoar frost, voices, thunder, lightning, cold, heat, winter, spring, autumn, and summer.(2) The acknowledgment of the presence of an "angel of fire" echoes the Torah story of Moses and the burning bush. But then, in a wider historical perspective, this Jewish angelology represents already a translation of the so-called Egyptian polytheism, along with Jewish angelology as its twin, into the idiom of Hellenistic "naturalism." Angels here correspond to natural phenomena and forces of nature.

        The changing perception of angelic beings has thoroughly redefined the idea of God's kingdom of heaven. This much is suggested in Second Enoch.(3) It is said that during his visionary journey through ten heavens, Enoch traversed space in the upward direction and explored the entire heavenly hierarchy. At the level of the third heaven he found three hundred angels worshipping the Lord with "never-ceasing voice and pleasant singing" (8:8). In the fourth heaven, whenever the Lord commanded, phoenix and khalkedra birds burst forth into song (15:1).

        Angelic hosts might still be seen carrying Bronze Age weapons, but the basic importance of arms increasingly has been upstaged by the prominence of musical instruments. Accordingly, Enoch saw in the "middle" of the heavens:

        From the sixth heaven, seven bands of archangels gave orders on how to maintain order in the world. They were informed by "the goings of the stars, and the alteration of the moon, by the revolution of the sun, and the good government of the world." Apparently, ancient Babylonian wisdom supplied the writer of Second Enoch with rudimentary information about astrology in the first place. But be that as it may, it is important to note that order in this heavenly world was maintained musically.

        Angelic men then lifted Enoch up and onward to the seventh heaven, the very stairway to the Lord's own dwelling:

        Enoch's vision in the tenth heaven is expressed in terms of humble insufficiency. Incomprehensibility is explained no further than to a point of "indescribability":

Thus, along heaven's entire hierarchy, from the very face of God all the way down to the third heaven, the visionary Enoch is said to have heard God's kingdom break forth with singing and musical joy.

*        *           *

        All this constitutes marvelous background information for understanding the Jewish context from which the Christian gospel of the kingdom of heaven sprouted forth and whence it was first introduced. Even though the intertestamental Jewish notion of the kingdom of heaven still contained armed soldiers—an assumption that also still has been ascribed to Jesus in Matthew 26:53—the divine monarchy was no longer thought of as essentially a military regime. All the same, to the extent that the writer of Second Enoch has shared his secrets with mortal humankind, his "kingdom of heaven" idea had to be communicated to a world where some kind of soldiers were still necessary for defense and for a people's collective survival.

        The important progression in kingdom of heaven symbolism, during the intertestamental period, called for angels breaking forth into the world of human awareness with singing. Eventually, in the gospel story told by Christians, angels could be heard bursting forth, singing, even downward and earthward from the lower levels of heaven, all the way down to earth where their messages and songs reached the ears of lowly humankind.

        The Christian story about the birth of Christ Jesus, of course, originally was a Jewish story, and it took off precisely at this point in the evolution of Jewish angelology. According to Luke, the new "kingdom of heaven" music had been heard, no longer audible only to scribes who composed pseudonymous stories about the trance journeys of ancient holy men, but heard instead by unsophisticated shepherd folk (2:13f). Luke's introduction to the Christian gospel, by way of his story about the birth of Jesus, thus made the new "heavenly kingdom" idea accessible at the level of common folk. At the same time, Luke added nothing that is essentially different from the angelology implied elsewhere among the sayings of Jesus.

        The announcement of God's messenger angel was heard during the night, on earth—therefore in darkness. And a multitude of heavenly hosts appeared from on high, radiating the glory of God that was about to tingle some of the lowliest among human ears. Momentarily the kingdom of heaven erupted with gentle music—explicitly not with the commotion or violence of a heavenly army. The reign of God was made manifest as an otherworldly kinder regime that intruded from beyond. A gentler kind of kingdom broke into our world with the birth of a helpless baby boy. The story of that humble event, which came to introduce the new Christian universalism, has God's own great messenger angel appear and announce the new world order at the level of lowly herder folk. The simple story speaks for itself:

 Jesus and the Kingdom of Heaven

        The Christian universalism spread into the Greco-Roman world with time-conscious proclamations, such as the one quoted next from a letter written by the apostle Paul to Christians in Galatia, Asia Minor:

        An awareness of time and history all along has been an integral dimension in the rational structure of the Hebrew-Christian tradition. Hebrew Torah mythology begins with the creation of the world and moves on from there, along a linear time line, to visions of divine election that, in due time, resulted in a people's liberation from Egyptian grand domestication. God's interference in human history set up a group of Hebrew slaves as his divinely chosen people. Other Hebrew writings report on the establishment and demise of their monarchy. They also describe exile in Babylonia and the return of a remnant people to their homeland of Judea.

        Similarly, the Christian good news story broke forth from Judaism during the first century C.E. with the confidence of a cosmo-political event. It happened "when the time had fully come" and when conditions were ripe. Of course it may be said that, with hindsight, all significant events in human history, as well as in human awareness, happen in kairos or when the time is ripe.

        A man named Jesus in his early thirties, from Nazareth in Galilee, appeared among the followers of John the Baptizer somewhere along the Jordan River. John led an ascetic life; he also led a popular "kingdom of heaven" movement that his followers joined by way of an initiation rite. The simple ritual required immersion in water, and those who participated in this procedure expressed repentance thereby. Ritualized bathing in water came to symbolize some kind of preparation in anticipation of the kingdom of heaven. In light of the general Egyptian background to Jewish piety, delineated in Part One of this book, we have now come to suspect that the Jordan River flowed for John the Baptizer somewhat like an extension of Atum's primordial Nile.

        The Jordan waters probably represented God's creative "water of life," after the manner in which such waters were recognized in Genesis (2:10ff) and in the gospel of John (4:10 and 7:38). It is significant that the "fourth gospel," John, happens also to be the most Egyptian tinted among the canonical gospels. All in all, the baptism of John appears to have signified an initiation into the kingdom of heaven, a dimension of "transformation" into divine life, rather than mere cleansing or purification from old sin. By contrast, the notion of baptism as "purification," as such, may constitute a later dualistic Indo-European interpretation.

        For a less Egyptianized and more Hebrew account we may turn to Matthew. John the Baptizer's mission is there summarized as follows:

        Then we obtain our first historical glimpse of the man Jesus as he appeared among the followers of John. Like numerous others, so too Jesus participated in the conspicuous hippie preacher's rite of immersion. And perhaps in accordance with his prior expectations this experience became extraordinarily meaningful to him:

        Matthew was a disciple of Jesus and, notwithstanding the possibility of subsequent editorial adjustments in the gospel text attributed to him, it is likely that either he or a fellow disciple obtained this tidbit of information directly from his beloved rabbi. This means that the original experience of Jesus presupposes a divine auditory revelation that originally had been cast in the second- and first-person singular: "You are my beloved Son, I like you!" The narrative continues to tell us precisely what effect these very personal words, heard by Jesus as spoken by God, have had on him:

        The three temptations that Jesus in the wilderness was said to have resisted concerned (1) the avoidance of hunger and suffering, (2) stuntmanship and heroism, and finally (3) grand domesticator ambitions on an imperialistic scale. According to this story, the tempter's allurements progressed from the satisfaction of physical hunger to craving for public notoriety, and thence to the added glamour of ruling the world with absolute power.

        Jesus emerged from his wilderness ordeal with a resolution; that is, with a renewed commitment to John the Baptizer's cause. This development is attested a few sentences later:

Even a small amount of thoughtful reading in the canonical gospels will render it obvious that the retreat of Jesus to the desert, and his temptations there, were a direct consequence of his baptismal experience. Somehow he had heard God's endorsement of himself as a "beloved Son." And this endorsement in the mind of Jesus, and among his followers later on, became the historical seed from which the Christian religion sprouted and grew.

        The existential question that drove Jesus into solitude thus was a logical result of divine revelation: What does it really mean to be God's Son? The resolution at which Jesus arrived in the course of his wilderness solitude, by prayer and fasting, answers precisely this question. Thus, it is implied that Jesus rejected and condemned all "satanic" schemes of overlordship, such as military might, slavery, and all the vestments of grand domestication together with their concomitant institutionalized cultic legitimizations. Elsewhere Jesus identified his principal opponent as the "ruler of this world" (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11).

        For three thousand years, in the Near East, large civilizations had been emerging, blossoming here and there into mighty empires. Invariably they were organized by ambitious grand domesticators and were maintained, generally, with support from some kind of priestly hype. All these civilizations and grand domestication systems were supervised by leaders who played ambitious roles of god-representation or god-impersonation. Hereditary rulers insisted on being the legitimate sons of God, or gods.

        During periods when separate religious organizations were strong enough to define divinity and divine sonship, the overdomesticator ambitions of "secular" military kings sometimes could be contained. Such kings were legitimized in a limited sense as human executive arms in the service of God, on earth. High priests in such grand domestication schemes claimed the status of "representatives" of God, and they insisted on being the mediators between God and humankind. In the best-balanced grand domestication systems such priestly representatives of God would keep the ruling impersonators of God, divine kings or "sons of God," somewhat in check.

        Startled by his baptismal experience and revealed audition, and sensitized even more during his long fast in the desert, the man Jesus of Nazareth achieved clarity about his indeed being God's son. In addition, he resolved that his filial relationship with God did not call for grand domestication behavior, neither did it require aristocratic pretense or priestly hype. Unpretentiously he therefore got into the habit of addressing his divine Father in Heaven with the Hebrew-Aramaic "Abba!" This appellation was an expression of familiarity and endearment. In English it compares with "Daddy!"

        No prudent grand domesticator would refer in public to his own divinized and mortal sire as if he were only a soft and gentle daddy. Grand domesticators always have ruled by sacerdotal hype, all the while fully conscious of their assumed honor and distinction. They have played their roles as heroes and gods and have so generated fear in the souls of their subjects.

        Of course, when measured by the standards of average civilized and overdomesticated citizens, the self-awareness and personal theology of Jesus seemed conceited, if not downright perverted. And in relation to Pharisaic theology it appeared blasphemous as well. No transient penniless rabbi was entitled to such transroyal status, much less to intimate filial proximity with the one and only God on High.

        Empires generate their own definitions, and definitions accepted by herds of people make, unmake, or reshape empires. Jesus staunchly taught the immediate arrival of heaven's kingdom—he announced a real and a more genuine kingdom than the ones that hitherto scored in the annals of human history. The meek, who ordinarily in kingdoms of this world reap scorn, were assured by Jesus that they would inherit the earth; that is, inherit an earth that increasingly would come under the influence of God's heavenly rule. People who were poor in spirit, who were not shrewd analytic predators or exploiters, would belong in this heavenly and real kingdom. It was a peaceable kingdom, where leaders behaved like humble servants, and where servants and masters had equal status. In short, it was a kingdom where even the majestic heavenly Father of Christianity's founder did not mind being "daddy" to the offspring of ordinary humankind. And this kind of an antithetical kingdom, Jesus insisted, was now at hand.

        The words of the apostle Paul quoted at the beginning of this section proceeded to extend the divine kingdom, or humanly speaking the divinized human family under "Daddy" Almighty, to a point where it included all those who love God.

        Surely, according to Jesus' own words which he spoke during his trial, and according to sound reasoning, such a kingdom was "not of this world." In the full English metaphorical sense it was something very much "out of this world." But precisely with regard to this kind of a kingdom Jesus claimed, unabashedly, that he was its "king." He could as well have claimed to be a slave in that kingdom—as Paul explained in Romans 15:8, and as in turn he also claimed to be a slave of Jesus Christ (Romans 1:1). King or servant, or servant to the servant, meant one and the same thing in that kingdom of heaven. All these teachings together express the absence of status and power play in the kingdom of God.

        If that is so, why then has Jesus insisted explicitly on the title of "king" in that otherworldly kingdom? The answer is far more straightforward and obvious than most Christians and their detractors hitherto have comprehended.

        As long as there were some kind of kingdoms or grand domestication systems in this world, and as long as people were abused in these systems by "Son of God" pretenders and divine representatives, Jesus deemed it necessary—inasmuch as he knew himself to be a different kind of Son of God—to insist on a different definition of "kingship." He based that new definition on his new definition of kingdom, relative to God and heaven, which was equally radical.

        Jesus knew perfectly well that he was misunderstood by his judges. Yet, instead of trying to clear himself of the charge of sedition, he intentionally provoked and amplified their misunderstanding. Defiantly he put high priest and Sanhedrin on trial, and he threw into his cauldron of judgment the divine Roman emperor's procurator to boot. On behalf of his overall contrary message, Jesus refused to avoid an avoidable death sentence. He gave what to his accusers were obviously ambiguous answers; and his accusers, obligingly, convicted him.

        All the while, as a result of Jesus having announced a "kingdom of heaven," a new socio-political order emerged and became a real fact of history. That which initially was "not of this world" produced a movement that was very much "in this world."

        For Jesus, personally, the kingdom of heaven remained the normative Kingdom, by which all kingdoms henceforth were to be measured and judged. From the perspective of his revised Son of God consciousness, he explained his Father's kingdom to people who were still caught up in corrupt kingdoms of this world. With his view of universalized divine-human dignity Jesus confronted, and he judged, what he regarded to be an inverted divinized status of worldly emperors. Implicitly he rejected and undercut their fake heavenly mandates and their cruel empires.

        Jesus was crucified for stirring up the people and speaking blasphemy. And indeed, if such unsettling and balancing activities deserve the death sentence, as often in civilized grand domestication systems they do, then Jesus at any rate received due process under civil law. It was his stubborn insistence on his divinely inspired and revised standards for kingdom, for Son of God, for king, for King of kings and divine emperor, that provoked condemnation by the Jewish as well as Roman authorities. His obstinate endurance, his unswerving commitment to act out a divine call and parody, to be another type of Son of God, in the final analysis, brought him the penalty of death.

        The life and message of Jesus was based on his vision of a fulfilled pantheistic ontology, of a realized kingdom of heaven. His heavenly Father's claim on him proceeded on the basis of this vision. For the duration of his life on earth Jesus was caught up in an ordinary double-layered grand domestication system. Within that system all kinds of human victims were being judged and damned, here below, by judges who reigned as if speaking from on high. All the while, Jesus simply refused to live in their grand domesticated world. He refused to recognize their world as something real. By not recognizing earthly kingdoms he denied their legitimacy.(4)

        In the new universalistic awareness that Jesus had of the kingdom of heaven, all grand domestication systems in the longer run stood damned and doomed. The historical records testify that impoverished folk listened to Jesus gladly. All the while, the status of grand domesticators was being undercut and eroded by his radical insistence on heavenly over earthly standards. The masses of people who followed Jesus grew larger, and it was only a matter of time before his "kingdom of heaven" definition became unbearably popular. On account of this new glimmer of egalitarian and rational insight, cast in the form of a religio-political parody, mighty emperors abdicated and disclaimed their divine status, eventually.(5)

        Amazingly, the man Jesus who over and beyond the horizons of grand domesticated society has lived his life as a divinely graced parody, in opposition to established royal Sons of God, has electrified and even transcended human mortality itself—while he was at it. Divine-royal status, and return to the All-Father after death, were interdependent notions in orthodox Egyptian religion. Thus, after the dead body of Jesus hung transfixed at a Roman cross, and after his corpse had been laid to rest in a Jewish tomb, fresh excitement erupted among his followers while they were still in mourning. A few among them testified to the fact that the tomb of Jesus had been seen empty; and in consequence many more people told of encounters with their resurrected Lord.

        When speculating about the source of the Pharisaic belief in resurrection, scholars usually point to Iranian Mazdaism. Indeed, Persian influence on the history of Judaism is a fact of history, so too is Persia's contact with Egypt. Mircea Eliade was correct when he renamed the Iranian belief in the "resurrection of the dead" as "recreation of bodies." Elsewhere he has summarized how, according to Mazdaism, after the final judgment a human soul "will recover a resuscitated and glorious body."(6)

        While influences from Mazdaism on Pharisaic Judaism and on early Christian belief need not be ruled out completely, the specific resurrection gospel that got Christendom started was definitely something more. First, the apparitions of Christ's resurrection body were temporary; they represented not a re-created and permanent state, precipitated on him by divine Judgment. His apparitions ceased when he returned to his Father. Second, in the Christian context, the savior's resurrection and ascension were notions very much dependent on his earlier descent. The Father's begetting and the Son's returning constitute a single gospel event, a single round-trip journey. From ancient Egypt we can derive the model for this entire round trip, whereas from latter-day Iran we can derive only the return journey. The probability of an ideological link with Egyptian soteriology therefore is considerably stronger.

        Translated into Egyptian concepts, the Christian story of resurrection means that after Christ's resurrection as a ba apparition, between the moment of his resurrection and his ascension as ka essence to the Father, his ba appearances lingered a while longer. The neo-Egyptian Plotinus still understands this process very well.(7)

        Joy of victory over the world's evils and death, wrought by God the Father who had raised his only-begotten Son, became the propellant of the revived Kingdom of Heaven movement from that first exciting Easter Sunday onward. Far and wide in the overdomesticated world Christian apostles proclaimed their kerygma: "Christ is risen!" and "Christ is Lord!"

        Jewish leaders, particularly the Hellenized party of Sadducees whom the (Egyptianized) resurrection tale spoofed most of all, were infuriated about this resumption of irrational populist commotion. The Roman authorities, who had accommodated the Jewish accusers of Jesus, and who along a path of least resistance had furnished a death sentence in hope of maintaining order in the province, were puzzled even more by this ever-so-strange Hebrew behavior. They knew well how to deal with straightforward insurrection. Outright refusal to concede divine rights to the Roman emperor they could have identified and judged with reasonable precision. If someone shouted "Down with Caesar!" they knew how to crucify or behead the usurper, depending on his citizenship status within the empire.

        But in this new commotion hundreds of people, and soon thousands, professed the puzzling kerygma of "Christ is risen!" The Roman civil authorities had no effective rational method with which to respond to this apparent absurdity. Christians therefore were alternately tolerated and persecuted in the provinces, and finally under Decius (250 C.E.) hunted with the full weight of Roman authority. Many lost their lives and, at the same time, many found the real fulfillment of their lives in the glories of martyrdom and heaven.

        To this very day non-Christian philosophers, nesting comfortably in the underbrush that remains of the old forest of Christendom, still are puzzled by the fact that the Christian resurrection faith has spread so far and wide among genuine homines sapientes. Try as they may, they cannot ignore the fact that at a certain moment in Western history many educated Greco-Roman citizens converted to this absurdity that, back then, somehow must have seemed reasonable. But how was it reasonable?

        The essence of this apparent foolishness lies with latter-day political naivete and the increasing distance from bygone reality configurations. Indeed, if viewed in the context of the larger evolutionary and historical process, within the commonsense context of classic Egyptian ontology, the resurrection kerygma of Christendom makes excellent political sense.

        Finally, or "in the fullness of time" as the gospel writers expressed that sentiment, after three millennia of grand domestication efforts on the part of mortal tyrants who paraded as sons of God, the Christian resurrection story provided an alternate way of judging imperialism, militarism, human sacrifice, slavery, and other modes of overdomestication. And appraising the gospel story's intent, in light of Christendom's own subsequent lapses into methods of over-domestication, this kerygma of resurrection certainly was not destined to be the last of its kind.

        For the time being, those who felt like damning the divine emperor in Rome no longer needed to join the small and hopeless schemes of zealotry or consistently suffer the bad news concerning setbacks among revolutions. In the company of angry freedom fighters, they no longer needed to shout "Down with Caesar!" From Jesus they learned the secret of how to look at the brighter side of God's creation and evolutionary process. By welcoming the Father's intruding heavenly kingdom, they knew themselves to be on the winning side, for a change. Thus they subscribed to the divine power of positive political thinking. They could just as well shout "Christ is risen!" It was much more effective. It was much less dangerous. And in the longer run it meant and accomplished the same thing, even better.

        By way of adapting to its new function as a check and balance to traditional imperial administration, this kerygma—with its new songs and prayers, learned from reformed angel voices and new visions of the kingdom of heaven—gradually reformed the rhythms and rites of life in Near Eastern, Mediterranean, and Western civilizations.

        In its secularized form the Christian ethos still has been unfolding, in recent centuries, in the form of modern democratic ideals, even in democratic revolutions that have pitted reformed grand domestication presidents and folk heroes over against older houses of royalty. Violent democracies and republics have revolted against older violent and imperial sacerdotal enterprises. More threats and more sounds of guns, more reverberations from the primal greater-than-human Big Bang attested to by modern scientific mythology; and less songs of angels are being heard by human ears these days. More spectacular fireworks, flares, and less divine glories are being seen reflected in frightened human eyes.

The Gnosis Competition

        Defining gnosticism or gnosis, humanly speaking, is an impossibility. It may be said that the task of studying gnosticism is even more difficult than, for instance, trying to comprehend a religion like "Hinduism." The latter generally is defined by a method of subtraction. One subtracts from all the religious life of India, past and present, those religious movements that can be classified under Jainism, Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism, and Christianity. What remains, for lack of any quick alternative, may be lumped together under the label of Hinduism or Induism. By comparison, a definition of gnosticism or gnosis is more difficult to attain because, thus far, the place of origin for this particular "ism" has not been ascertained or linked geographically with a known culture area, as this has been possible in the case of Hinduism in relation to India.

        The reader will have noticed, however, that this situation gradually may be changing. No longer is it necessary to define gnosticism vaguely as a general milieu of thought or "syncretism" that somehow, as if coming from nowhere, permeated the Greco-Roman mixture of Hellenistic culture. Moreover, gnosticism's root notions hereby reveal themselves not merely as having belonged to a larger family of Near Eastern religions. We now know that ancient Egyptian religion was the matriarch of that family.

 
Gnosticism versus Christianity

        In published commentaries, thus far, gnosticism still is being presented as the same many-headed hydra recognized already by the earliest Christian heresiologists. Such vagueness on the subject matter prevails because there never has been an organized "gnostic" church identified with certainty and to everyone's satisfaction; nor has an authoritative "gnostic" canon of scripture ever been compiled.

        Gnostic "others" were first identified and classified as heretical folk by Christian catalogers of heresies—Irenaeus of Lyons (ca. 130–200) being foremost among them. They were people who had not adequately subscribed and conformed to the precepts and mores of the Christian majority. This fact naturally begs the question as to who, on the other hand, were that majority and these Christian heresiologists.

        I already have explained how, during the first century C.E., a "kingdom of heaven" movement emerged from within Judaism and spread quickly. It then became dialectically involved with the larger Greco-Roman world of religious and political aspirations. Followers of that religion gathered in churches that initially were modeled after Jewish synagogues. Outsiders, disparagingly, began to call these church-going people Christians, that is, Christ followers. The label stuck and became a badge of honor for those who followed and worshipped Christ Jesus. And, of course, these Christians were "gnostics" in the sense that they "knew" something about God's saving revelation through Christ Jesus.

        The ambiguity concerning gnosticism shows up, nowadays, as soon as one attributes an ability to know—thus "gnosis"—to homines sapientes in general. Christians knew a few things about God and his plan of salvation for humankind, whereas other folk knew a few other things about how God saves people from different predicaments. Faced by this wider ambiguity and the fact that other people were known to subscribe to other and yet similar soteriologies, Paul warned in 1 Corinthians 8:1ff against an overreliance on gnosis. The deutero-Pauline pastoral letters have offered a similar warning against "gnostics" who do not really know what they say they know:

        What is meant here by knowledge (gnosis) in contrast to false knowledge? What is false knowledge in contrast to the Christian faith? And is not faith the Christian equivalent of what may be recognized as revealed knowledge elsewhere? And what gnosis could not be regarded as also having been revealed? Such questions all were destined to quickly glide off into the realm of religious ontology. They had to be resolved as questions that require the ontological content of a distinct religious faith—or the entire field of gnosis.

        There is at least a nominal difference between those who aspired to Christian faith and those who stood apart as gnostics. Faithful "Christians" clung to their name as a badge of honor and thereby became a distinct and identifiable group, whereas the so-called gnostics remained less organized and unspecified knowers at large. Although this superficial classification served the old Christian catalogers of heresies reasonably well, it has become quite misleading to later historians. There may never have been a religious movement, anywhere in the world, that reasonably could be distinguished from other religions in terms of certainty of "knowledge." To substitute the label of gnosis for gnosticism does not seem to resolve that basic difficulty.

        Kurt Rudolph alerted us to the fact that already in 1699, with Gottfried Arnold's Unparteiische Ketzer und Kirchen-historie, "the ground was prepared for an independent consideration of the gnostics."(8) And indeed Rudolph himself still has treated gnosticism essentially as the same unique other-than-Christian phenomenon—as multiple syncretisms with many tributaries. It seems remarkable that the primary stream, ancient Egyptian orthodoxy, has not yet been recognized among these tributaries.(9) Indeed, that stream is so wide that it easily can be mistaken for the ocean itself.

Egyptian Christianity

        The most problematic area for the study of early Christian history is Egypt—and that fact should alert students of that history to possible surprises. Of all the Christian mission fields, boundary lines between Christianity and "gnosticism" are most difficult to draw in the ancient land of Egypt.

        In his History and Literature of Early Christianity, Helmut Koester commented on the apparent absence of Christianity in Egypt during the first decades of missionary expansion: "It is indeed unthinkable that the Christian mission should have bypassed Alexandria for decades." But then, as Walter Bauer already had suggested in 1934, our historical lacuna may have been determined by the different perspectives current within the early catholic church. Well defined perspectives on what had become orthodox Christendom, generally, have been used to sort out the source materials for church historians. "The beginnings of Christianity in Egypt"—so Koester summarizes Bauer—"were `heretical,' and therefore Christian writings composed in Egypt in this early period were not preserved."(10) Fortunately for historians, copies of some of these early "heretical" Egyptian documents have since come to light. The Nag Hammadi library contains a number of them.

*        *           *

        In a broad overview, such as is attempted by this book, it is not possible to revisit the entire field of gnosis studies. Let it suffice to say, however, that many apparently related data hitherto have been gathered, harvested like sheaves, and brought home under the rubric of "gnosticism." Academicians built a stately "gnosticism" barn to contain all these data. But then, the act of gathering a large mixed group of non-Christian "knowers," from the first century C.E. onward, into a single hypothetical barn, or sheave, may be an excellent task for barn builders and harvesters. But for most serious historians the outcome of these labors has remained an indigestible and ambiguous plethora of "all-data."

        Hans Jonas and more recently Kurt Rudolph brought a measure of order into the hypothetical "gnosis barn"—the construct into which a wealth of data from the early Christian era have been gathered. This book attempts no rebuttal of their accomplishments. The immense task of rebundling the total hypothetical sheave of gnosticism, in light of distinct strains of ingredients, has been accomplished effectively by these two scholars. But, obviously, their work remains incomplete and must be carried forward and revised wherever fresh historical connections come into view.

        Several fallout effects from Egyptian religion, for Israelite religion and Judaism, have been sketched already in Part Two. Part Three provided a similar revised sketch for Greek philosophy and Neoplatonism. As a result of new oblique "Egyptian light" streaming from those directions, much of traditional Christian theology now stands better illuminated as well. The distances between ancient Egypt, Christendom, and gnostic doctrines have been lessened in the process.

        Also, with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library, in Upper Egypt, the general profile of "gnosticism" has come into better view. All these texts eventually must be reexamined in light of possible ancient Egyptian antecedents. In addition to some specific Nag Hammadi texts that allude directly to Egypt—for example, "On the Origin of the World," "The Exegesis on the Soul," "The Gospel of the Egyptians," "The Thunder, Perfect Mind," "Asclepius," "Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth"—at least another dozen or so treatises contained in this "gnostic" library clearly are indebted to ancient Egyptian theology. Even a superficial discussion of all of these would call for writing another hefty volume.

        Thus, instead of becoming sidetracked to yet another major enterprise, we shall rather turn to Simon Magus as an exemplary figure singled out by early Christian heresiologists as the foremost among these "gnostics." But before that can be undertaken it will be helpful to review how gnosticism has been summarized persistently by two prominent scholars, as containing a little of everything, dualism as well as monism. Before we can hope to understand the spiritual inheritances that have become the chosen content and subject matter for our academic disciplines, we must pay attention to the history of our presuppositions.

Hans Jonas

        Statements by this scholar have been quoted repeatedly in the Gnostic Studies field, especially his characterization of gnosticism as dualistic. This unfortunate misconception has to be put aside before anything more can be done.

        In support of his "dualistic" definition, the gnosticism sheave of Hans Jonas contains strains of data garnered from as far away as Zoroastrianism. Iranian dualism has been counted, with Manichaeism serving as proxy, as having been an important dimension in the larger Hellenistic syncretism:

        This much Hans Jonas has summarized concerning gnostic "theology" as such. He then proceeded to delineate gnostic cosmology, anthropology, eschatology, and morality. How much damage his fivefold imposition of categories has inflicted on the larger historical picture is still difficult to assess. Although we are concerned here with ancient Egyptian central notions, in theology and soteriology, we nevertheless have come to suspect, as a result of Jonas' approach, some unnecessary fragmentation of the larger phenomenon. Dualism has been projected into soteriology; that is, into its ontological dimension, where it least likely belongs:

        It is to his eternal credit that Hans Jonas has seen an obvious need to supplement his earlier abstraction, of cosmic dualism, with this postscript on soteriology. Now, after both cards have been placed on the table by him—dualism as well as soteriology—his authoritative pronouncement about gnostic dualism well may be in need of some backward adjustment. The entire problem reduces to the question of whether one is to think about this "dualistic gnostic" theology from the perspective of an estranged individual soul or rather listen to a reconciled soul who is returning home. In the former case the epithet dualism is appropriate, whereas in the latter instance the dualism of estrangement is in process of being overcome.

        In any case, Hans Jonas has summarized some more his own summary of gnostic eschatology with a famous Valentinian formula. But incidently, this bit of gnostic advice reveals to us no "dualistic" worries on the part of its author. That person was concerned merely with getting from here to there within a rationally coherent dimension of reality:

Kurt Rudolph

        Responding obviously to Hans Jonas, and in some ways also echoing his words, this scholar has disassembled and rebundled the sheave of gnosticism by way of acknowledging a larger number of basic strains. To that effect he introduced his "basic framework" of gnosticism with an excellent trim quote from the 1966 Messina conference, On the Origins of Gnosticism. He points to the central idea, or the central myth, of gnosticism:

        Amazingly, after this beautiful summary of what to us appears to be genuine monistic ancient Egyptian soteriology, Rudolph continues with repeating the old Jonas cliche to the effect that gnosticism is dualistic. Rudolph, for a moment, even pretends to derive dualism from the passage just quoted:

        But wait a minute! That is not so! The scholar merely began with his conclusion of gnostic dualism to position it "on a monistic background." A puzzled reader might wish to ask why anyone could not begin, as well, with introducing gnosticism first as monism, and then worry about the secondary ambiguity of its "dualism" later. Whence, all of a sudden, came Rudolph's "monistic background"? Why could that background not be understood as the essence of gnosticism? If a universal monad is being contemplated, starting at one of its ends in terms of far and near, up and down, high and low, does that necessarily make it a dualism?

        Nevertheless, one can only be impressed by the wonderful authoritative support Kurt Rudolph has provided for our thesis in spite of himself. He has, in fact, summarized the basic emanational unity of ancient Heliopolitan religion in gnostic teachings.

Simon Magus

        Posterity probably will judge that too much attention is being given in this book to Simon Magus. Nevertheless, the necessary task of reexamining the "gnosis" phenomenon in light of fresh "Egyptian light" may begin just as easily with him as with any other. After all, Simon Magus scored in the history of Christendom as its one-time arch opponent. As the "father of all heresy," he must now be restudied not merely as an opponent, but also as a conspicuous competitor of Christ in the early Christian church—possibly even as a potential ally. Christian theology and christology together have driven their roots deep into ancient Egyptian religion, as had the theology of Simon Magus. From the fact of their common Egyptian heritage may be derived the very strength of Simon Magus's threat. The danger amounted to the possibility that he could be confused with the Christ figure itself. The teachings of Simon therefore had to be differentiated unequivocally from the Christian gospel.(16)

        Simon Magus, the person, is not a very sure historical datum. Nevertheless, his personal presence in history has been defined by Christian heresiologists as "father of all heresy." Thus, he definitely scores in our context as a historical datum in heresiology. Whether this arch foe of Christianity was identical with the personage in Acts 8 is difficult to discern for sure. On the other hand, the mere question of whether one is dealing here with a literary construct, a foil to Christian orthodox doctrine, or with a singular historical figure for the moment may be suspended. Both possibilities eventually will have to be reexamined in light of a common Egyptian religious heritage.

        The Simon Magus cult mentioned in Christian heresiology, having emerged from the works of recent gnosticism scholars more clearly, has had—as it now turns out—its ideological roots deep in the theology of ancient Egypt. For the sake of beginning the Simon Magus discourse afresh we shall assume, for the moment, the historical identity of the personage mentioned in Acts 8 with the one described by later heresiologists. We engage in this hypothetical exercise because it is conceivable that "Egyptian light" may further illuminate the historicity of this personage. Definitive conclusions obviously will have to be left to future scholarship.

        According to the Church Fathers Irenaeus and Hippolytus, the man Simon Magus was founder of a first century cult in Samaria.(17) As of late, this cult has been classified among the so-called gnostic religions. Actually, he was much more than only its founder. He was the movement's central divine figure, its messiah, and its God. The divine status of Simon was deduced directly from a variant of Egyptian ontology. For introducing Simon's basic teachings, and for the sake of brevity, we shall avail ourselves here of the masterful assortment Hans Jonas has compiled.(18)

        The ancient Egyptian root of this credal statement is difficult to miss. Even Hans Jonas, who divided Gnosticism into Syrian-Egyptian and Iranian branches, has exegeted here from all the Simon Magus documents something that very closely resembles ancient Egyptian process theology, without explicit "Syrian" or "Iranian" traces.

        The most peculiar element in this Samaritan cult theology, of course, was the offspring that the ancient Egyptian "Tefnut-Mahet" hypostasis has engendered—the Ennoia.(20) It is necessary to review for a moment the Egyptian prehistory of this feminine dimension in the godhead.

        The association of Tefnut with Mahet is as ancient as are the Coffin Texts.(21) In later Egyptian times the goddess Mahet, as a personal manifestation of justice, right, rightness, order, and truth has been brought into companionship with Thoth, the masculine patron of knowledge and scribalism. She has become the feminine associate of Thoth. Some kind of reconciled male-female relationship, such as was supposed to exist between Mahet and Thoth, appears also to have stood as model for the theology and soteriology of Simon Magus.

        But there was another important dimension to divine womanhood—already embryonically present in traditional Egyptian religion. It went beyond the intellectual virtues expressed by the personification of Mahet. Isis, as mother of Horus and member of the Heliopolitan Ennead, represented divine womanhood in Egypt like no other goddess. She did so generally under the guise of her anthropomorphic ba, wearing a horned headdress. As the Enneadean goddess nearest to humankind, Isis embodied the basic function of feminine creativity as well as confidence. In offbeat traditions she did so even to the point of self-sufficiency in procreation.

        For example, a late text of a typical "lamentation of Isis" mentions this self-sufficiency in relation to her generation of Horus. Hers was an almost parthenogenetic act. Isis says, "I made myself into a man, even though I was a woman."(22) The basic myth tells that it was Isis who retrieved the corpse of her brother-husband Osiris, it was she who gathered up his scattered portions. It was she who revived his sexual potency. According to Plutarch's later version, the phallus of Osiris was not among the gathered and reassembled parts. Isis therefore substituted on him a phallus of her own making whereby subsequently she conceived Horus. This could mean that Horus essentially was generated by her alone.

        An even more free-spirited Isis can be found mentioned in a spell used against scorpion and snake venom, on a number of papyri from the Nineteenth Dynasty (1320–1200 B.C.E.). We find the goddess plotting for her share of power; that is, for status and partnership with the godhead Amun-Ra himself. Before the clever Isis took matters into her own hands, the godhead had not yet divulged his powerful secret name to any of the gods.

        Isis knew everything in heaven and earth, like Amun-Ra himself, except his own hidden name.(24) In arranging her plot, Isis gathered up some of the God's spittle and kneaded it together with earth into a venomous snake. This most dangerous creature she laid, immobile, on the path the high deity frequented. The snake stung. The God became ill. And in return for his health the godhead "Atum and Horus-of-Praise" divulged to Isis his secret namesis is the only one besides Amun-Ra himself who now knows this .(25) Iname. Of course, the God's secret is safe. Isis who, seen from a human perspective also functions in the cosmic dimension as Tefnut or Mahet, is very wise. Motivated by her own enlightened self-interest, she keeps the divine name secret from all the other gods. This measure assures her second-rank status and power in the created universe next to the godhead himself.

        Thus the theme of the self-willed feminine hypostasis of the godhead, which was exploited by Simon Magus, has been well-enough foreboded in Egyptian religion and mythology. The name that Simon Magus gave to his feminine hypostasis was Ennoia. It is somewhat tempting to interpret this name historically as a feminine derivative from the larger Egyptian Ennead, but for the time being we shall refrain from doing so. In any case, this particular estranged female personage was the First Thought on God's mind. From what else we know about the incarnated godhead Simon Magus, she also might have been the foremost thing on his mind.

        We must summarize Simon's gospel more coherently, and in doing so we shall avail ourselves of the synthesis of texts that Hans Jonas put together. In accordance with the gospel of this Samaritan cult, its founding magus has been identical with God Manifest. This quaint proclamation by the man Simon instantly will be brought into clearer focus, simply by transcribing it into his First Person Singular. For that purpose the text will be freely abbreviated here and paraphrased.(26) Simon Magus reasoned thusly and spoke:

        My mind (i.e., God's mind) is captivated by this feminine hypostasis of mine (i.e., the Ennoia). Initially I had in mind to create angels and archangels through her. But, anticipating my intentions, this female Ennoia descended to the lowest regions of my outreach; and there this unruly divine female hastened to beat me to the act of procreation, by herself. Relying on her own feminine potentials alone, she generated angels and powers by whom, in turn, this world was made. And these her offspring, having been generated by her in estrangement and freedom from me, were totally ignorant of my presence; that is, of me who is the All-Father. Therefore, in turn, my Thought became preoccupied with those angels and powers, with those who had come into being through her—through her who is my first Thought and preoccupation. And my Thought thereby was dragged from its highest heaven down toward those secondary creative principalities who scurry about to alter phenomena in the nether regions of the cosmos.

        The Ennoia, on the other hand, has suffered at their hands all manner of abuse, so that she might be hindered from returning home to me, the Father. And their abuse of her went so far as to even wrap her in human flesh. For centuries she migrated on earth from one female body into a next one. Thus degraded, in one instance, she was Helen on account of whom the Trojan War was fought. But as of late this Ennoia had been a whore in Tyre. And I, God Father, having descended to earth in human form as Simon Magus to find her, have come to save and return her home unto myself.

*         *           *

        Let us hypothesize, for the sake of this discussion, a scenario by which Simon Magus has begun his religious career with Hebrew theology and a general Hebrew mind set, and that subsequently along the way he heard rumors of Philo's angelology. And then let us also assume that he might have become better acquainted with an extant strain of orthodox Egyptian theology. The upshot could have been his very musings about what possibly could have gone wrong in the Heliopolitan theogony. It became Simon's mission to fix that which at first possibly, and then definitely, must have gone wrong; namely, the estrangement of the entire female Tefnut-Mahet-Nut-Isis dimension from the masculine godhead.

        With the mother of the world's creator-angels having been saved through the religion of Simon Magus, surely, the consequent world and humankind—that is, the more distant offspring of bastard creators born from the estranged spouse of the godhead—thereby also were given an opportunity to become reconciled again with God.

        Hans Jonas and many other scholars doubt whether the gnostic Simon Magus could have been the Samaritan magician mentioned in Acts 8:9–24. Be that as it may, in light of the Egyptian background of Simon's theology, we now may be a little less sure about rejecting this possibility. According to our Christian source, this magician Simon formerly had amazed the nation of Samaria. But he lost his followers to a Christian teacher, Philip, and either in the aftermath of his followers' desertion or by honest momentary excitement, the magus himself is said to have joined the Christian movement.(27)

        Perhaps after realizing that his followers have deserted him and perhaps because a process of aging had diminished his infatuation for his incarnate Ennoia, this opportunistic cult leader might realistically have assessed his possibilities.(28) If he ever was to become a religious celebrity again, it would have had to be by joining the Christian movement to which his former admirers had converted. Nevertheless, the episode of a later visit by Peter and John (Acts 14–24) further humiliated and checked the flamboyant Simon Magus.

        Our well-nigh literal consideration of the aforementioned narrative in Acts, for the sake of discussion, does not rely, as most commentators do, on the probability of whether the character of Simon could be reformed. The theological differences between the Simon of heresiology and the Christian gospel were not insurmountable. In fact, a Simon Magus in the generous tailwind of Egyptian theology could have adjusted to the christology of his competitors with relative ease. Egyptian theology had for its core notion a process of divine begetting. And on that orthodox Egyptian dimension, it appears, Simon formerly asserted his own identity with the godhead.

        Christians, too, have asserted such an identity with the godhead on behalf of their Lord. Jesus Christ as Son of the Father, in the Egyptian theological context, would have added up to being Shu or Life (cf. John 1:4). In addition, all the followers of Jesus were adopted as fellow siblings; that is, as brothers and sisters of Christ and as divinized children of God.

        Because of his chauvinism, Simon Magus initially may have divided his ontology, to match, into a male upper and a female lower portion. But let us give Simon the benefit of doubt. Let us assume for the moment that on joining the Christians he actually dropped for a time his outrageous self-theological posture. In that case his outright claim for divinity could have been redefined easily enough as brotherhood with Christ. After all, the hypostases of Atum, Shu, Geb, Osiris, and Horus were all manifestations of the same divine Enneadean masculinity.(29)

        Moreover, the concept of a world symbolized by a whore in need of her Father's rescue and salvation—and the Father's damnation of her upon her refusal—has persisted in Hebrew as well as Christian thought. That idea echoes from the eighth century prophet Hosea; it can be found prominently in Nag Hammadi texts; and it has been adopted by Christians, openly, in Revelation 17:1.(30)

        Thus, when and if Philip encountered Simon Magus in Samaria, both their gospels would have been based on the same internal logic, derived from the Egyptian theogony. They both would have been indebted to the mythological fact of a godhead's extended self-begetting. Both cults would have appeared logical and convincing over against this Egyptian background.

        Moreover, because both Christ and Simon have identified their own persons with the godhead, more or less, both their cults implicitly also would have preempted the claims of grand domesticator kings and emperors, of being legitimate special sons of God. The gospels of both founders so would have managed to dance, nay gyrate, circles around established grand domesticators whom summarily they judged as serving some lower "principalities and powers." Their respective divine claims parodied the mandates of imperial Sons of God.

        The greatest difference between the two cult founders lay in Simon's opportunistic effrontery, of course. His ontology and theology had been adapted all too flippantly to suit his infatuation with this uninhibited woman whom he had picked up in Tyre to keep him company.

        In sharp contrast, the divine claim of Jesus had been established with deadly seriousness. It had been paid for with the founder's own life and blood. As a result, Christian salvation not only had been more dramatically established, it also was more unselfishly universalistic. Christian salvation could not be bought with silver—hence the balancing addendum of Acts 8:14–24. Christian soteriology went far beyond the privilege of founders and leaders to ensure everyone's rescue from sin and death. It embraced and exceeded everything that might have pertained to salvation within the scope of Simon's gospel—the gospel of a playboy savior. Christian soteriology embraced the fact of death as well as resurrection.

        The depth of Jesus's existential involvement over a larger range of possible human problems, including the agony of his real death—with the subsequent joy of resurrection added for contrast—is what gave Christendom its popular advantage. More lighthearted gnostic cults, such as Simon's, thereby were put morally on the defensive. They had no other choice but try, whenever they could, to undercut this greater relevance of the Christian gospel. They therefore, in principle, denied that Jesus Christ actually died his impressive sacrificial death.

        It remains noteworthy that specifically Christ's death, not his resurrection, evoked the most severe objections to Christianity from the side of the gnostic competition. The resurrection of an incarnate God posed no problem to minds who already reasoned on the basis of orthodox Egyptian theology. Such resurrection was self-evident and a matter of common sense.

        We must return to the Simon story in Acts to ask only one more question: Is it really improbable that the notorious Simon Magus would at some time have been welcomed by the Christians? The question may be asked and answered as well the other way around. Where else but in Christianity, at the time, would the founder of a defunct competitor cult have been welcome? Where else but under an extremely gracious and reconciling Fathergod? The theological reaches and embracings of Simon Magus were surpassed by the even more magnanimous and practical embrace offered by the Christ story and the Christian community.

        Does this sound unbelievable? Not at all. We know that another far more deadly enemy of Christendom, Saul of Tarsus, succumbed to that embrace and became a leading apostle, Paul. Thus, Acts 8:9–13, even if as a literary product it may express wishful thinking, signifies nevertheless the Christian welcome extended ideally to all of its former opponents. Such openness and love was a direct consequence of the new and expanded vision of God the Father Almighty and his kingdom. The gospel of Jesus presented the godhead as the loving Father of estranged humanity and the world.

The Kingdom of Heaven Spreading

        The first of these introductory quotations renders words of Jesus that express his hope that Kingdom of Heaven enthusiasm might spread. He envisioned his good news to spread like fire—like an all-consuming Hebrew wildfire. The second quotation provides a glimpse of an early moment in Christian history when that Kingdom of Heaven wildfire had begun to spread beyond the confines of Judaism. Its flames in northern gentile lands were sustained by the presence of "spirit," a category of thought that had become especially significant in dualistic Indo-European contexts, including Hellenic philosophy.

Jewish Piety a Challenge to Hellas

        How did the skirmish between philosophy and the remnant gods of Greek grand domestication finally end? This battle never came to a real conclusion. The gradual demise of philosophy in Greece was accompanied by a new round of grand domestication and conflict, beginning with Alexander the Great. Even this very book is being written and will be read and criticized still in the melee of ensuing hopes and conflicts. Cronos with his progeny of analytic imitators and critics, and the All-Father with a great variety of priestly imitators and reformers still are facing each other on the same battlefield.

        It is a curious war in which most people change sides, eventually. The same combatants desire to be left in heavenly peace as, intermittently, they become accustomed to thinking of themselves as redeemed and harmless grazing animals, sheep or such like. But then again they rise up to celebrate victory as if, all along, they had been justified predator-heroes, crusaders, and holy warriors. Their uniforms and methods of aggression, their slogans and battle cries, often are altered. Now you find wolves in sheepskins, and then again you can find sheep clothed in wolfskins. But it is still a war similar to that which has erupted, some four to five millennia ago, between roaming cowboy-bandits on horseback and sedentary planter folk (see Chapter 11). The conflict is faith in weapons versus faith in a dignified and peaceful perpetuation of sedentary life, holistically understood.

        Fortunes in this "battle of Hellas," won early on by Cronos and his grand domesticator progeny at the level of basic mythology, were reversed by a simple gospel rumor that began to spread from along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. This rumor sharply undercut the Hesiodic narrative that proclaimed the severance of Father Heaven from Mother Earth at the hand of Cronos—of Cronos the divinely begotten son of the old Greek religion.

        Jewish and Christian folk knew differently. They knew that humankind, having eaten from the forbidden tree of life and the tree of analytic knowledge, by their own fault generated their estrangement from God. Jews and Christians knew that earth, not heaven, had been spoiled and mutilated by this process of human emancipation. They also knew, contrary to Hesiodic tradition, that God on High himself has actively pursued an independent plan to heal the humanmade wounds of rebellion and separation.

        Half a millennium after Socrates, the philosophical battlefield of Hellas was still strewn with the mutilated bodies of gods. Mythologists had castrated them. Sculptors had chiseled, melted, cast, and left them transfixed, immovable, and sometimes in rather compromising positions. Later poets have ridiculed these artistic caricatures as if they were the actual remains of gods and as if these artifacts were their immediate manifestations. Undoubtedly, to earlier faithfuls in Hellas their gods had been vibrantly alive. But in the end philosophers inflicted their analysis on the entire culture of artistic mockery; that is, on these concretizations and cadavers of divine mythological personages.

        At the same time, philosophers generously undertook to "upgrade" ancient gods and rescue them from popular ridicule. They elevated them to an altitude of respectable philosophical "concepts" or "principles." To that end they transformed ancient personal gods into abstractions. Inevitably, by doing so, they reduced them as well to the size of thinkable entities, to principles or concepts small enough to be grasped by finite human minds. Everywhere in the world philosophical principles are but abstracted and recycled caricatures of ancient gods, who formerly were known to be alive. In Greece these abstractions were conceptualized by professed "lovers of wisdom"; they were worked over by the wily minds of Cronos' younger human progeny.

        For a number of centuries Near Eastern peoples have come under the spell and mission of Alexander the Great and his cultural expansion. Alexander's military and cultural campaigns, presumably, were inspired by the self-confident display of Greek genius. Part of their Hellenic confidence was inspired by the impressive mental legacy of Greek philosophers, such as Socrates and Plato, or by Aristotle who was Alexander's one-time mentor.

        By contrast, Jews by and large remained devoutly monotheistic. But even at that, as members of the Homo sapiens species, some among them have been wondering a thing or two about the personal life-style of their God who, singularly, was known to sit enthroned in heaven. They wondered about him in conjunction with what they had learned from other Mediterranean and Near Eastern mythologies. According to prevailing Hellenistic traditions, including those of Egypt, certain ancient father-gods were reputed to have begotten human sons.

        Although down-to-earth Jewish prudence suggested that one could expect only a human messiah, one who was an offspring of good old king David, the actual political liberation of a god-fearing minority within the larger Greco-Roman environs demanded something more. In the wider Mediterranean world divine kings flaunted several millennia old traditions and claimed to have been born of human as well as divine parentage. Many of these kings sat on imperial thrones as sons of God. Therefore, a stronger antithetical role than "Son of Man" eventually was required of the founder of Christian universalism. Only a corporeal and an equally divine Son of God, a more decent one, could hope to eventually usurp the divine mandate of seated imperial grand domesticators—of Son of God pretenders.

        Suddenly during the first century C.E., across the Hellenistic battlefield littered with impotent divine bodies and corpses from an earlier grand domestication era, a fresh religious breeze, a whiff of new life—or "Shu"—blew in from the east.

        On the Hellenic battlefield, strewn with mutilated divinities, the new Christian rumor generated stirrings of fresh life. It spread as a theistic gospel formostly along the Mediterranean coastlands, and it triumphed precisely in lands where the aggressive builders of Hellenistic culture, philosophers and scientists, in the wake of their rationalism had left a severe religious void—the rationalized castration legacy of Cronos. Notwithstanding the chisels of skilled artists, the analytic habits of philosophers, and the sharp scalpels of butchers, barbers, and scientists alike, the earth on which common people lived continued to produce myriads of living and growing creatures. The colorful spectacle of clouds, of azure heaven, of life-giving breath and heavenly sunlight continued unperturbed.

        Together, all these wonderful phenomena demonstrated to sensitive Hebrews how their God, who created heaven and earth, has been coaxing earth into "bringing forth" continuously. The question arose, necessarily: Should among all of God's creatures the human species alone remain forever estranged, analytically and rebelliously, from the total glory of this creative heavenly splendor? The answer of faith was: Of course not!

        The new Christian rumor spread with commonsense ease. It spread as "good news" concerning the recent stirrings of the only God and creator of the world. It spread on the basis of ancient Egyptian theological presuppositions.

        God, the Father in Heaven, and the Creator of our world is alive and well! He has in reality never been transfixed into a craven or artificial image. He has never been defined or reduced by human wit to the manageable dimensions of philosophical abstractions or principles. He has never been castrated by tellers of ever so wondersome Greek tales.

        The heavenly Father of Jesus Christ, who by extension of his divine grace is recognized as the Father of all humankind, has shown himself to be more than just a contemplative Aristotelian first mover. God the heavenly Father has demonstrated anew how his life and his virility endure, that he is alive and well, forever. As proof to that effect he has begotten, and has presented for the whole world to see, his son Jesus Christ!

        Many hitherto insignificant people—most of them sons, understandably—since that time have risen to testify to this fact. And it was this simple and concrete theophany, the birth of a different and kinder Son of God, that breathed new life and hope into the religiously depleted and overanalyzed world of Hellenism.

        Some among the followers of Jesus recognized his divine status—"his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father" (John 1:14). And thanks to Egyptian theology, by means of which the analytic temper of Greek philosophy was discretely pushed into the background, all of this made good sense.

        All the while, the essentially holistic Christian gospel, the story of the heavenly Father who sent his Son, had to be communicated to a predominantly dualistic Indo-European audience. This audience consisted of people who were in a habit of radically distinguishing between "soul" and "body," and between "spirit" and "matter." The basic Hesiodic severance—that is, the castration, abstraction, or "spiritualization" of Father Heaven and his severance from an increasingly "materialized" Mother Earth—could not be avoided when Christian apostles began to communicate and to explain their gospel to people who reasoned abstractly and philosophically.

        Greco-Roman philosophers naturally criticized the Christian story from their own dualistic perspective. Thus, for purposes of communicating and defending the Christian gospel in Hellas, the spirit-matter dichotomy had to be acknowledged first, as Paul had done in 1 Corinthians 15:44, and had to be skirted subsequently at the abstract philosophical level. The Christian apostles had no choice but to define deity as being somehow "spiritual." To communicate a Father-Son theophany, in Indo-European lands, was an impossible task without first acknowledging spirituality as an essential divine attribute. Paul's treatise in 1 Corinthians 15 on the resurrection of "spiritual bodies"—of all things!—is an early instance of this very necessary communicational adjustment. A holistic Father-and-Son story, which concluded with the resurrection of Christ Jesus as a whole person, had to be explained in Hellas nevertheless half dualistically, as if body and spirit were at once separate and unified.

        The doctrines concerning the Holy Spirit and the Holy Trinity represent the larger theological umbrella of this missionary accomodation. With these doctrines it has become possible to discuss deity as being "spiritual." Theologically, the Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit therefore may be explained as a necessary emergency revelation sent by God Almighty, specifically to impress Indo-European dualists and accommodate them in the Christian fold.

        Beyond trinitarian theology it remains historically also significant that much of Mediterranean Christendom has continued to revere, alongside the predominantly masculine trinity of Father and Son, and the feminine-neuter Spirit, also a "Mother of God." Her full name has been kept conveniently ambiguous. Her official title is Mother of God—an appellation that, over against the backdrop of Egyptian-Hellenistic process theology, specifies precisely neither human nor divine attributes. For many among simple and faithful folk the descriptive title Virgin has become her first name. The name Mary, which according to tradition has been her given name, consequently was shifted to the position of a middle name. She has become Virgin Mary Mother of God.

        Meanwhile some stalwart catholic Christians have become convinced that she has now caught up with her divine Son and ascended into heaven as well. Indeed, this dogma may be evaluated as a significant achievement for Christians who belong to the feminine gender or to an egalitarian persuasion!

Universal Salvation Religion

        Reactionary universalistic tendencies toward reform have been evoked in all oppressive grand domestication systems from the start. Human self-respect and dignity were not simply surrendered to the first grand domesticator who happened to come along.

        Nevertheless, most "civilized" peoples have fallen under the sway of grand domestication enterprises voluntarily and often with great enthusiasm—in moments before grand domesticators became selfish overdomesticators. Then in the course of time some reactionary murmurs and protests, some liberating notions of universalistic salvation, surfaced in Egyptian as well as Hebrew grand domestication religion. They were present even in Greek philosophy.

        Grand domestication, as it has been defined earlier in this book, means that domestication efforts have been overdone. Domestication tricks have been turned against groups of humankind and inflicted on even the guardian gods of such groups. Wherever in this world the injustices of this sort are on the increase, there the human spirit in some way or other will resist. Alterations in people's religions, that is, changes in their general retreat behavior and retreat thinking, therefore provide the first signals of dissatisfaction and hope for a better lot. Oppressed people will lament to their God long before they will endanger themselves by complaining directly to their overdomesticators.

        Thus, the readiness for universal salvation religiosity begins invariably in response to oppressive overdomestication. It begins with only weak stirrings at first. But universalism may eventually consummate its destiny with a more complete reformation of a people's hopes, mores, and rites of living.

        Seen within a narrower historical perspective, the universalism of Christianity has had its initial beginnings in the religiosity of ancient Israelite rebel prophets—also in tendencies within postexilic Judaism. It was the eventual outcome of the collective aspirations of prehistoric patriarchs, of Moses, priests, warrior kings, scribes, prophets, and a founder who dared to be a different kind of Son of God.

Greater Asia for Comparison

        In a wider historical perspective, it is important to note that domestication cultures have matured into grand domestication civilizations at several places on the globe. At one time or other all these civilizations degenerated into oppressive overdomestication schemes. In the Near East, South Asia, and China, protest movements of the universal salvation type sprang up almost contemporaneously during the first millennium B.C.E. Thus, some of the murmurs and protests that have predisposed the Mediterranean world in the direction of Christendom can be detected in other grand domesticated areas of the world as well; for example, in fifth century India and China.

        Five centuries before the Christian era, South Asia became the cradle for a number of universalistic religious movements. Hippie-monks there dropped out from civilized society in droves. They followed universalistic paths of escape, of asceticism and yoga for spiritual liberation. The religiously bankrupt theology of the Vedic grand domestication cult, managed by groups of Brahmana priests, had degenerated to the point of near homonymy between the name of their caste and the name of their godhead, Brahmana and Brahman. Implicitly, regarding their personal religiosity, these priests thereby reduced the godhead to their own kind of "brahmana power," and as a matter of course, they thereby inflated their priestly authority. Exploitative theology of this sort was rejected emphatically by the new generation of sensitized religious dropouts.

        The universalistic salvationism of reform-minded reactionaries in India, of the fifth century B.C.E., therefore frequently was tinged with atheism. Gotama, the Buddha, denied the reality of Brahman. He even denied the reality of the human "soul." Apparently the Buddha felt a need to block the path on which a grand domesticator's deity, once denied, might somehow return under the guise of "soul."(31) Such a remote possibility was left open in Jainism and in some other Hindu universalistic teachings.

        Impulses from Indian ways on Mediterranean thought and culture were not unknown during the centuries preceding Alexander's military campaign eastward. Pythagorean philosophy and some of Plato's dialogues attest to this fact. Nevertheless, as a backlash effect against Alexander's "missionary" campaign, South Asian ideas began to trickle more freely into the Near East. Indirectly they might even have affected religious ferment in Judaism.

In Palestine

        But, in contrast to Indo-European theologies, Jewish theology evolved and was institutionalized as a reaction specifically against Near Eastern overdomestication schemes, especially against Egypt. As such, especially among Pharisees and Essenes, it had not yet become as bankrupt as Brahmanic theology had become by way of justifying the extravagances of the Vedic sacrificial cult. Nevertheless, John the Baptizer and Jesus of Nazareth came as close to being an Indian dropout as such a thing was possible in Palestine at the time among sons of pious Jewish parents. One must remember that John and Jesus still had inherited a viable Jewish theology for their ideological umbrella.(32) Their universalistic reactions, as far as theology was concerned, therefore easily could remain on the theistic side.

        All the same, Jesus ventured as far from Jewish orthodoxy as a wandering hippie-rabbi could, modifying high Jewish theology along the way by insisting on lowly and selfless intimacy, for himself, with the traditional God on High. Jesus approached the supreme deity as his "Daddy." In addition, the kingdom of heaven ideal that inspired his life-style contradicted and challenged every kingdom on earth. It challenged every grand domestication scheme and civilizational organization. The harbinger of such a radical heavenly kingdom, of course, was promptly put to death.

        Measured by the standards of cultural progress Jesus was an apparent failure. But at the moment when he died his real contribution to human history had only begun to take form. His dying was part of his life, as much as were his teachings. Followers of Jesus suddenly proclaimed that, though he was crucified and had died, their Lord remained alive by the eternal power of his Father God. This meant that some of Jesus' followers finally had gotten the point their rabbi was trying to make all along—that the kingdom of heaven was a contrary kingdom and, therefore, not subject to the rules by which ordinary grand domestication kingdoms were run.

        The utter selflessness of Jesus, his poverty and vulnerability, made him an ideal, different, and most desirable king of the downtrodden. He was well suited to be king of this new anti-imperial kingdom that he himself had proclaimed. Moreover, the only good king (of the overdomesticator type) being a dead king, one who somehow has died, Jesus competed with them on that negative score as well.

        In any case, with having an earthly loser now enthroned as eternal king, the Christian kingdom movement indeed was, demonstrably, not of this world. But it nevertheless was in the world to stay. During the centuries that followed, other God-kings were dethroned right and left, on account of people who preferred this loser king.

Bequest of the Mother Religion

"Out of Egypt have I called my son," a sentence from Hosea 11:1, was quoted in Matthew 2:13–15 to support the story about the flight of the holy family into Egypt. Has this brief addendum to the nativity tradition of Christ Jesus been intended to hint at the broader nativity of Christian theology in Egypt? Did some of the first Christians actually sense the Egyptian direction into which their theologizing tended to move? A turning point in sacred Jewish history, an Exodus in reverse from Palestine to Egypt, is implied even in the surface meaning of this story.

        Subsequently, there in Egypt—if we permit ourselves an additional historical allegory—Isis as the Egyptian divine madonna with her Horus child (see Figure), as a representative of the feminine Enneadean "Tefnut-Nut-Isis" lineage, passed on her mantle to the unsuspecting mother of Jesus. Let us leave these obvious hints aside, for a while, and turn to less tangible and nevertheless historical glimpses.

Figures. Isis with Horus child. Photo by author: Cairo Museum.

Figures. Roman Madonna, from Egypt. Transitional types between
Isis iconography, above, and the Christian Madonna with child. 
Photo by author: Cairo Museum.

        Undeniably, Christianity was first inspired by Hebrew "kingdom of heaven" radicalism. But the first apostles of Christ drew their enthusiasm not so much from their Lord's teachings about the kingdom of heaven as from his personal participation in death and resurrection. With a few exceptions, the apostle Paul discontinued mentioning the "kingdom of God." He preferred the less political and more personal "body of Christ" mysticism instead. This provided Christians an opportunity to participate more intimately in the death and resurrection of Christ—and in Christianized Egyptian soteriology. The kerygma—of God having begotten a Son, of that Son having been born, having died, risen, and ascended to the Father—is what has received an encouraging resonance from the broad background spectrum of ancient Egyptian ontology.

        It long has been suspected by historians of religions that a general knowledge about death and resurrection, associated specifically with Osiris mythology in Egyptian religion, may have aided the success of the Christian story in the wider Hellenistic world.(33)

        The well-established structure of ancient Egyptian ontology, eschatology, and soteriology, which was widely regarded as common sense, made it possible to believe that the Son of God rose from death (as his essential ka) and thus returned to the Father. It explained also why for a while, before he completely ascended into heaven, some of the Christ apparitions have been seen as a visible ba. Also in tune with Egyptian logic was the notion that, even though Christ Jesus had now returned to the Father, he nevertheless eternally remains present among his followers. Deceased Egyptian pharaohs continued to dispense divine Mahet (Maat) in a similar manner. Christ had been present, emanationally speaking, as Father essence or ka in the Son, and he continued to radiate this same essence as divine love and holy spirit. The radiation of this divine light is celebrated, visibly, with many symbolic candles and Easter sunrises.

        When Greek philosopher minds listened to the apostle Paul in Athens (Acts 17:32), they mocked him as soon as he began to talk about Christ's resurrection from death. For Hellenic dualists, and rationalists, the human soul was being separated at death from its material body. In contrast, Paul, who reasoned after the mode of Egyptian ka essences and ba apparitions, saw the visible world still contained in the larger emanation of divinely given life, redemption, and resurrection. In his Christian "Egyptianness" the apostle Paul was essentially free from the Greek Hesiodic habit of radically distinguishing Father Heaven or spirit from a material realm beneath.

        On the one hand, Indo-European dualism has forced the category of "spirit" into prominence within Christendom. On the other hand, Egyptian ontology and logic have made it possible to believe in one God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The presence of the Holy Spirit in the Holy Trinity was not only a missionary adaptation of the concept of deity to Indo-European dualism, as has been suggested earlier; in addition, the third person in the Christian trinity could be recognized as well in the institution of the Christian church, the new visible "city of God" on earth. As such the three divine hypostases together resemble closely the Egyptian trinity of Atum the Father, Shu the Son, and Tefnut-Mahet the divine wisdom and the congregational order. Thus, the Holy Spirit within the Christian Holy Trinity gradually absorbed into itself all of the following: the kingdom of heaven as it was represented in the communion of saints and the church, the Indo-European domain of spirit, as well as the entire Hand-Tefnut-Nut-Isis dimension of the Enneadean godhead.

        We now are ready to contemplate Paul's own amplification of his doctrine of resurrection, according to the aforementioned episode in Acts 17. And we are given no uncertain hints that Paul's reasoning about these matters was a spinoff from Egyptian theology, by way of Epimenides and Aratus. Their words communicated to Paul what appeared to be true theology:

        Egyptian theology, based on a theogony of emanation and begetting, made it possible for educated Hellenistic Christians to believe in an only-begotten Son who came into the world as the logos, as the divine creative command, or the Word made visible. It seems safe to say that in all the religious literature from the so-called Hellenistic Period, there is no better summary of ancient orthodox Egyptian theology than the prologue to the Gospel of John:

        Another favorite creed from this same, and most Egyptianized among the Christian gospels, resonates still in perfect harmony with ancient Egyptian soteriology. And what harm is there in knowing, now, that this love which the Father has shown toward his world has been anticipated, millennia earlier, by the creative fatherly activity and the self-love of Atum? That divine sentiment was described clumsily, and inconsistently enough, by the ancient Heliopolitan theologians to have remained a mystery. The incarnation of Christ still is explained in terms of a quasi-sexual metaphor as well, that is, as a process of divine begetting—as a fact to be believed if not understood. Nevertheless, the total pattern of divine activity—of God's creation by logos, of God begetting his Son, and his presentation of eternal life to wayward humankind—are Egyptian soteriology throughout. Here is an orthodox Christian summary statement:

        Although on the one hand, the Christian "kingdom of heaven" enthusiasm was internalized by Egyptian-style soteriology, its political dimension eventually was compromised in exchange for a new kind, a more livable, Holy Roman Empire. This Christianized empire, at the same time, was checked and balanced and stabilized by whatever retreat-oriented counterweights the Christian religion could provide. As the Holy Roman Empire evolved, amidst philosophized remnants of Indo-European dichotomies, Christendom's reliance on proven ancient Egyptian theological structures became even more obvious. The Egyptian theological heritage, as it has been philosophized by Neoplatonism, provided the emerging Christian church organization and the Holy Roman Empire with much-needed doctrinal structure and ontological substance.

        Following the lead of earlier Alexandrian theologians, Augustine of Hippo infused Egyptian ontology into Christian soteriology to a point where its presence no longer can be overlooked. He personalized Egyptian soteriology and thereby clarified how all estranged human hearts, while they live here on earth, are doomed to be restless until they will have found their rest in God.

        Thus, at the hands of Christian apologists and church fathers, Neoplatonism was destined to become the serum with which the Christian doctrine immunized itself against Hellenic philosophy's own god-killing venom. The scarcely disguised brand of Egyptian mystic philosophy, in Neoplatonism, shielded Christian theology against philosophy's own digestive acids of more arrogant analysis. Because the designation Neoplatonism appeals to Plato as the school's god-father, the same secular cover that at one time protected Ammonius and Plotinus at Alexandria against the bonafide Greek intelligentsia continued to protect Christian apologists against the same.

        A full history of Christian beginnings, in Egypt, would have to pay special attention to pioneer theologians in Alexandria, such as Clement, Origen, Dionysius the Great, and others—and to their influence upon the belief systems of later North Africans such as Tertullian of Carthage and Augustine of Hippo. Any attempt to do justice to all of these, in this book, obviously would lead beyond its present scope. In light of what already has been suggested concerning Egyptian antecedents, other scholars sooner or later will want to reconsider all of these church fathers, one by one.

        This book is intended merely as a rough sketch of four large Near Eastern religious and philosophical traditions, viewed together over long periods of time. Therefore, Part Four of this book hopes to provide no more than bare hints of Egyptian influence on early Christian theology. The remaining tasks must be left in the hands of specialized historians of these traditions.

        From here on the general Egyptian influence can be sketched more boldly if one skips the first few centuries of Christian history and points directly to what the Christian orthodox creed actually has become. The formative struggles for Christian theology, christology, mariology, and numenology all demonstrate the intrusion of ancient Egyptian emanationalism among Mediterranean peoples, who at the time also had been challenged by Indo-European dualism. These struggles and controversies demonstrate the gradual triumph of basic notions that once belonged to the theological legacy of Egypt. The strong theological bequest of Christendom's mother religion has evoked, quite expectedly, a series of very interesting birthright controversies. You may think of them as ideological bi