PAPER 98
THE MELCHIZEDEK TEACHINGS IN THE OCCIDENT
98:0.1 THE Melchizedek teachings entered Europe
along many routes, but chiefly they came by way of Egypt and were embodied in
Occidental philosophy after being thoroughly Hellenized and later
Christianized. The ideals of the Western world were basically Socratic, and
its later religious philosophy became that of Jesus as it was modified and
compromised through contact with evolving Occidental philosophy and religion,
all of which culminated in the Christian church.
98:0.2 For a long time in Europe the Salem
missionaries carried on their activities, becoming gradually absorbed into
many of the cults and ritual groups which periodically arose. Among those who
maintained the Salem teachings in the purest form must be mentioned the
Cynics. These preachers of faith and trust in God were still functioning in
Roman Europe in the first century after Christ, being later incorporated into
the newly forming Christian religion.
98:0.3 Much of the Salem doctrine was spread in
Europe by the Jewish mercenary soldiers who fought in so many of the
Occidental military struggles. In ancient times the Jews were famed as much
for military valor as for theologic peculiarities.
98:0.4 The basic doctrines of Greek philosophy,
Jewish theology, and Christian ethics were fundamentally repercussions of the
earlier Melchizedek teachings.
1. THE SALEM RELIGION AMONG THE GREEKS
98:1.1 The Salem missionaries might have built up a
great religious structure among the Greeks had it not been for their strict
interpretation of their oath of ordination, a pledge imposed by Machiventa
which forbade the organization of exclusive congregations for worship, and
which exacted the promise of each teacher never to function as a priest, never
to receive fees for religious service, only food, clothing, and shelter. When
the Melchizedek teachers penetrated to pre-Hellenic Greece, they found a
people who still fostered the traditions of Adamson and the days of the
Andites, but these teachings had become greatly adulterated with the notions
and beliefs of the hordes of inferior slaves that had been brought to the
Greek shores in increasing numbers. This adulteration produced a reversion to
a crude animism with bloody rites, the lower classes even making ceremonial
out of the execution of condemned criminals.
98:1.2 The early influence of the Salem teachers was
nearly destroyed by the so-called Aryan invasion from southern Europe and the
East. These Hellenic invaders brought along with them anthropomorphic God
concepts similar to those which their Aryan fellows had carried to India. This
importation inaugurated the evolution of the Greek family of gods and
goddesses. This new religion was partly based on the cults of the incoming
Hellenic barbarians, but it also shared in the myths of the older inhabitants
of Greece.
98:1.3 The Hellenic Greeks found the Mediterranean
world largely dominated by the mother cult, and they imposed upon these
peoples their man-god, Dyaus-Zeus, who had already become, like Yahweh among
the henotheistic Semites, head of the whole Greek pantheon of subordinate
gods. And the Greeks would have eventually achieved a true monotheism in the
concept of Zeus except for their retention of the overcontrol of Fate. A God
of final value must, himself, be the arbiter of fate and the creator of
destiny.
98:1.4 As a consequence of these factors in
religious evolution, there presently developed the popular belief in the
happy-go-lucky gods of Mount Olympus, gods more human than divine, and gods
which the intelligent Greeks never did regard very seriously. They neither
greatly loved nor greatly feared these divinities of their own creation. They
had a patriotic and racial feeling for Zeus and his family of half men and
half gods, but they hardly reverenced or worshiped them.
98:1.5 The Hellenes became so impregnated with the
antipriestcraft doctrines of the earlier Salem teachers that no priesthood of
any importance ever arose in Greece. Even the making of images to the gods
became more of a work in art than a matter of worship.
98:1.6 The Olympian gods illustrate man's typical
anthropomorphism. But the Greek mythology was more aesthetic than ethic. The
Greek religion was helpful in that it portrayed a universe governed by a deity
group. But Greek morals, ethics, and philosophy presently advanced far beyond
the god concept, and this imbalance between intellectual and spiritual growth
was as hazardous to Greece as it had proved to be in India.
2. GREEK PHILOSOPHIC THOUGHT
98:2.1 A lightly regarded and superficial religion
cannot endure, especially when it has no priesthood to foster its forms and to
fill the hearts of the devotees with fear and awe. The Olympian religion did
not promise salvation, nor did it quench the spiritual thirst of its
believers; therefore was it doomed to perish. Within a millennium of its
inception it had nearly vanished, and the Greeks were without a national
religion, the gods of Olympus having lost their hold upon the better
minds.
98:2.2 This was the situation when, during the sixth
century before Christ, the Orient and the Levant experienced a revival of
spiritual consciousness and a new awakening to the recognition of monotheism.
But the West did not share in this new development; neither Europe nor
northern Africa extensively participated in this religious renaissance. The
Greeks, however, did engage in a magnificent intellectual advancement. They
had begun to master fear and no longer sought religion as an antidote
therefor, but they did not perceive that true religion is the cure for soul
hunger, spiritual disquiet, and moral despair. They sought for the solace of
the soul in deep thinking -- philosophy and metaphysics. They turned from the
contemplation of self-preservation -- salvation -- to self-realization and
self-understanding.
98:2.3 By rigorous thought the Greeks attempted to
attain that consciousness of security which would serve as a substitute for
the belief in survival, but they utterly failed. Only the more intelligent
among the higher classes of the Hellenic peoples could grasp this new
teaching; the rank and file of the progeny of the slaves of former generations
had no capacity for the reception of this new substitute for religion.
98:2.4 The philosophers disdained all forms of
worship, notwithstanding that they practically all held loosely to the
background of a belief in the Salem doctrine of "the Intelligence of the
universe," "the idea of God," and "the Great Source." In so far as the Greek
philosophers gave recognition to the divine and the superfinite, they were
frankly monotheistic; they gave scant recognition to the whole galaxy of
Olympian gods and goddesses.
98:2.5 The Greek poets of the fifth and sixth
centuries, notably Pindar, attempted the reformation of Greek religion. They
elevated its ideals, but they were more artists than religionists. They failed
to develop a technique for fostering and conserving supreme values.
98:2.6 Xenophanes taught one God, but his deity
concept was too pantheistic to be a personal Father to mortal man. Anaxagoras
was a mechanist except that he did recognize a First Cause, an Initial Mind.
Socrates and his successors, Plato and Aristotle, taught that virtue is
knowledge; goodness, health of the soul; that it is better to suffer injustice
than to be guilty of it, that it is wrong to return evil for evil, and that
the gods are wise and good. Their cardinal virtues were: wisdom, courage,
temperance, and justice.
98:2.7 The evolution of religious philosophy among
the Hellenic and Hebrew peoples affords a contrastive illustration of the
function of the church as an institution in the shaping of cultural progress.
In Palestine, human thought was so priest-controlled and scripture-directed
that philosophy and aesthetics were entirely submerged in religion and
morality. In Greece, the almost complete absence of priests and "sacred
scriptures" left the human mind free and unfettered, resulting in a startling
development in depth of thought. But religion as a personal experience failed
to keep pace with the intellectual probings into the nature and reality of the
cosmos.
98:2.8 In Greece, believing was subordinated to
thinking; in Palestine, thinking was held subject to believing. Much of the
strength of Christianity is due to its having borrowed heavily from both
Hebrew morality and Greek thought.
98:2.9 In Palestine, religious dogma became so
crystallized as to jeopardize further growth; in Greece, human thought became
so abstract that the concept of God resolved itself into a misty vapor of
pantheistic speculation not at all unlike the impersonal Infinity of the
Brahman philosophers.
98:2.10 But the average men of these times could not
grasp, nor were they much interested in, the Greek philosophy of
self-realization and an abstract Deity; they rather craved promises of
salvation, coupled with a personal God who could hear their prayers. They
exiled the philosophers, persecuted the remnants of the Salem cult, both
doctrines having become much blended, and made ready for that terrible
orgiastic plunge into the follies of the mystery cults which were then
overspreading the Mediterranean lands. The Eleusinian mysteries grew up within
the Olympian pantheon, a Greek version of the worship of fertility; Dionysus
nature worship flourished; the best of the cults was the Orphic brotherhood,
whose moral preachments and promises of salvation made a great appeal to
many.
98:2.11 All Greece became involved in these new
methods of attaining salvation, these emotional and fiery ceremonials. No
nation ever attained such heights of artistic philosophy in so short a time;
none ever created such an advanced system of ethics practically without Deity
and entirely devoid of the promise of human salvation; no nation ever plunged
so quickly, deeply, and violently into such depths of intellectual stagnation,
moral depravity, and spiritual poverty as these same Greek peoples when they
flung themselves into the mad whirl of the mystery cults.
98:2.12 Religions have long endured without
philosophical support, but few philosophies, as such, have long persisted
without some identification with religion. Philosophy is to religion as
conception is to action. But the ideal human estate is that in which
philosophy, religion, and science are welded into a meaningful unity by the
conjoined action of wisdom, faith, and experience.
3. THE MELCHIZEDEK TEACHINGS IN ROME
98:3.1 Having grown out of the earlier religious
forms of worship of the family gods into the tribal reverence for Mars, the
god of war, it was natural that the later religion of the Latins was more of a
political observance than were the intellectual systems of the Greeks and
Brahmans or the more spiritual religions of several other peoples.
98:3.2 In the great monotheistic renaissance of
Melchizedek's gospel during the sixth century before Christ, too few of the
Salem missionaries penetrated Italy, and those who did were unable to overcome
the influence of the rapidly spreading Etruscan priesthood with its new galaxy
of gods and temples, all of which became organized into the Roman state
religion. This religion of the Latin tribes was not trivial and venal like
that of the Greeks, neither was it austere and tyrannical like that of the
Hebrews; it consisted for the most part in the observance of mere forms, vows,
and taboos.
98:3.3 Roman religion was greatly influenced by
extensive cultural importations from Greece. Eventually most of the Olympian
gods were transplanted and incorporated into the Latin pantheon. The Greeks
long worshiped the fire of the family hearth -- Hestia was the virgin goddess
of the hearth; Vesta was the Roman goddess of the home. Zeus became Jupiter;
Aphrodite, Venus; and so on down through the many Olympian deities.
98:3.4 The religious initiation of Roman youths was
the occasion of their solemn consecration to the service of the state. Oaths
and admissions to citizenship were in reality religious ceremonies. The Latin
peoples maintained temples, altars, and shrines and, in a crisis, would
consult the oracles. They preserved the bones of heroes and later on those of
the Christian saints.
98:3.5 This formal and unemotional form of
pseudoreligious patriotism was doomed to collapse, even as the highly
intellectual and artistic worship of the Greeks had gone down before the
fervid and deeply emotional worship of the mystery cults. The greatest of
these devastating cults was the mystery religion of the Mother of God sect,
which had its headquarters, in those days, on the exact site of the present
church of St. Peter's in Rome.
98:3.6 The emerging Roman state conquered
politically but was in turn conquered by the cults, rituals, mysteries, and
god concepts of Egypt, Greece, and the Levant. These imported cults continued
to flourish throughout the Roman state up to the time of Augustus, who, purely
for political and civic reasons, made a heroic and somewhat successful effort
to destroy the mysteries and revive the older political religion.
98:3.7 One of the priests of the state religion told
Augustus of the earlier attempts of the Salem teachers to spread the doctrine
of one God, a final Deity presiding over all supernatural beings; and this
idea took such a firm hold on the emperor that he built many temples, stocked
them well with beautiful images, reorganized the state priesthood,
re-established the state religion, appointed himself acting high priest of
all, and as emperor did not hesitate to proclaim himself the supreme
god.
98:3.8 This new religion of Augustus worship
flourished and was observed throughout the empire during his lifetime except
in Palestine, the home of the Jews. And this era of the human gods continued
until the official Roman cult had a roster of more than twoscore self-elevated
human deities, all claiming miraculous births and other superhuman attributes.
98:3.9 The last stand of the dwindling band of Salem
believers was made by an earnest group of preachers, the Cynics, who exhorted
the Romans to abandon their wild and senseless religious rituals and return to
a form of worship embodying Melchizedek's gospel as it had been modified and
contaminated through contact with the philosophy of the Greeks. But the people
at large rejected the Cynics; they preferred to plunge into the rituals of the
mysteries, which not only offered hopes of personal salvation but also
gratified the desire for diversion, excitement, and entertainment.
4. THE MYSTERY CULTS
98:4.1 The majority of people in the Graeco-Roman
world, having lost their primitive family and state religions and being unable
or unwilling to grasp the meaning of Greek philosophy, turned their attention
to the spectacular and emotional mystery cults from Egypt and the Levant. The
common people craved promises of salvation -- religious consolation for today
and assurances of hope for immortality after death.
98:4.2 The three mystery cults which became most
popular were:
1. The Phrygian cult of Cybele and her son Attis.
2. The Egyptian cult of Osiris and his mother
Isis.
3. The Iranian cult of the worship of Mithras as
the savior and redeemer of sinful mankind.
98:4.3 The Phrygian and Egyptian mysteries taught
that the divine son (respectively Attis and Osiris) had experienced death and
had been resurrected by divine power, and further that all who were properly
initiated into the mystery, and who reverently celebrated the anniversary of
the god's death and resurrection, would thereby become partakers of his divine
nature and his immortality.
98:4.4 The Phrygian ceremonies were imposing but
degrading; their bloody festivals indicate how degraded and primitive these
Levantine mysteries became. The most holy day was Black Friday, the "day of
blood," commemorating the self-inflicted death of Attis. After three days of
the celebration of the sacrifice and death of Attis the festival was turned to
joy in honor of his resurrection.
98:4.5 The rituals of the worship of Isis and Osiris
were more refined and impressive than were those of the Phrygian cult. This
Egyptian ritual was built around the legend of the Nile god of old, a god who
died and was resurrected, which concept was derived from the observation of
the annually recurring stoppage of vegetation growth followed by the
springtime restoration of all living plants. The frenzy of the observance of
these mystery cults and the orgies of their ceremonials, which were supposed
to lead up to the "enthusiasm" of the realization of divinity, were sometimes
most revolting.
5. THE CULT OF MITHRAS
98:5.1 The Phrygian and Egyptian mysteries
eventually gave way before the greatest of all the mystery cults, the worship
of Mithras. The Mithraic cult made its appeal to a wide range of human nature
and gradually supplanted both of its predecessors. Mithraism spread over the
Roman Empire through the propagandizing of Roman legions recruited in the
Levant, where this religion was the vogue, for they carried this belief
wherever they went. And this new religious ritual was a great improvement over
the earlier mystery cults.
98:5.2 The cult of Mithras arose in Iran and long
persisted in its homeland despite the militant opposition of the followers of
Zoroaster. But by the time Mithraism reached Rome, it had become greatly
improved by the absorption of many of Zoroaster's teachings. It was chiefly
through the Mithraic cult that Zoroaster's religion exerted an influence upon
later appearing Christianity.
98:5.3 The Mithraic cult portrayed a militant god
taking origin in a great rock, engaging in valiant exploits, and causing water
to gush forth from a rock struck with his arrows. There was a flood from which
one man escaped in a specially built boat and a last supper which Mithras
celebrated with the sun-god before he ascended into the heavens. This sun-god,
or Sol Invictus, was a degeneration of the Ahura-Mazda deity concept of
Zoroastrianism. Mithras was conceived as the surviving champion of the sun-god
in his struggle with the god of darkness. And in recognition of his slaying
the mythical sacred bull, Mithras was made immortal, being exalted to the
station of intercessor for the human race among the gods on high.
98:5.4 The adherents of this cult worshiped in caves
and other secret places, chanting hymns, mumbling magic, eating the flesh of
the sacrificial animals, and drinking the blood. Three times a day they
worshiped, with special weekly ceremonials on the day of the sun-god and with
the most elaborate observance of all on the annual festival of Mithras,
December twenty-fifth. It was believed that the partaking of the sacrament
ensured eternal life, the immediate passing, after death, to the bosom of
Mithras, there to tarry in bliss until the judgment day. On the judgment day
the Mithraic keys of heaven would unlock the gates of Paradise for the
reception of the faithful; whereupon all the unbaptized of the living and the
dead would be annihilated upon the return of Mithras to earth. It was taught
that, when a man died, he went before Mithras for judgment, and that at the
end of the world Mithras would summon all the dead from their graves to face
the last judgment. The wicked would be destroyed by fire, and the righteous
would reign with Mithras forever.
98:5.5 At first it was a religion only for men, and
there were seven different orders into which believers could be successively
initiated. Later on, the wives and daughters of believers were admitted to the
temples of the Great Mother, which adjoined the Mithraic temples. The women's
cult was a mixture of Mithraic ritual and the ceremonies of the Phrygian cult
of Cybele, the mother of Attis.
6. MITHRAISM AND CHRISTIANITY
98:6.1 Prior to the coming of the mystery cults and
Christianity, personal religion hardly developed as an independent institution
in the civilized lands of North Africa and Europe; it was more of a family,
city-state, political, and imperial affair. The Hellenic Greeks never evolved
a centralized worship system; the ritual was local; they had no priesthood and
no "sacred book." Much as the Romans, their religious institutions lacked a
powerful driving agency for the preservation of higher moral and spiritual
values. While it is true that the institutionalization of religion has usually
detracted from its spiritual quality, it is also a fact that no religion has
thus far succeeded in surviving without the aid of institutional organization
of some degree, greater or lesser.
98:6.2 Occidental religion thus languished until the
days of the Skeptics, Cynics, Epicureans, and Stoics, but most important of
all, until the times of the great contest between Mithraism and Paul's new
religion of Christianity.
98:6.3 During the third century after Christ,
Mithraic and Christian churches were very similar both in appearance and in
the character of their ritual. A majority of such places of worship were
underground, and both contained altars whose backgrounds variously depicted
the sufferings of the savior who had brought salvation to a sin-cursed human
race.
98:6.4 Always had it been the practice of Mithraic
worshipers, on entering the temple, to dip their fingers in holy water. And
since in some districts there were those who at one time belonged to both
religions, they introduced this custom into the majority of the Christian
churches in the vicinity of Rome. Both religions employed baptism and partook
of the sacrament of bread and wine. The one great difference between Mithraism
and Christianity, aside from the characters of Mithras and Jesus, was that the
one encouraged militarism while the other was ultrapacific. Mithraism's
tolerance for other religions (except later Christianity) led to its final
undoing. But the deciding factor in the struggle between the two was the
admission of women into the full fellowship of the Christian faith.
98:6.5 In the end the nominal Christian faith
dominated the Occident. Greek philosophy supplied the concepts of ethical
value; Mithraism, the ritual of worship observance; and Christianity, as such,
the technique for the conservation of moral and social values.
7. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION
98:7.1 A Creator Son did not incarnate in the
likeness of mortal flesh and bestow himself upon the humanity of Urantia to
reconcile an angry God but rather to win all mankind to the recognition of the
Father's love and to the realization of their sonship with God. After all,
even the great advocate of the atonement doctrine realized something of this
truth, for he declared that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to
himself."
98:7.2 It is not the province of this paper to deal
with the origin and dissemination of the Christian religion. Suffice it to say
that it is built around the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the humanly incarnate
Michael Son of Nebadon, known to Urantia as the Christ, the anointed one.
Christianity was spread throughout the Levant and Occident by the followers of
this Galilean, and their missionary zeal equaled that of their illustrious
predecessors, the Sethites and Salemites, as well as that of their earnest
Asiatic contemporaries, the Buddhist teachers.
98:7.3 The Christian religion, as a Urantian system
of belief, arose through the compounding of the following teachings,
influences, beliefs, cults, and personal individual attitudes:
98:7.4 1. The Melchizedek teachings, which are a
basic factor in all the religions of Occident and Orient that have arisen in
the last four thousand years.
98:7.5 2. The Hebraic system of morality, ethics,
theology, and belief in both Providence and the supreme Yahweh.
98:7.6 3. The Zoroastrian conception of the struggle
between cosmic good and evil, which had already left its imprint on both
Judaism and Mithraism. Through prolonged contact attendant upon the struggles
between Mithraism and Christianity, the doctrines of the Iranian prophet
became a potent factor in determining the theologic and philosophic cast and
structure of the dogmas, tenets, and cosmology of the Hellenized and Latinized
versions of the teachings of Jesus.
98:7.7 4. The mystery cults, especially Mithraism
but also the worship of the Great Mother in the Phrygian cult. Even the
legends of the birth of Jesus on Urantia became tainted with the Roman version
of the miraculous birth of the Iranian savior-hero, Mithras, whose advent on
earth was supposed to have been witnessed by only a handful of gift-bearing
shepherds who had been informed of this impending event by angels.
98:7.8 5. The historic fact of the human life of
Joshua ben Joseph, the reality of Jesus of Nazareth as the glorified Christ,
the Son of God.
98:7.9 6. The personal viewpoint of Paul of Tarsus.
And it should be recorded that Mithraism was the dominant religion of Tarsus
during his adolescence. Paul little dreamed that his well-intentioned letters
to his converts would someday be regarded by still later Christians as the
"word of God." Such well-meaning teachers must not be held accountable for the
use made of their writings by later-day successors.
98:7.10 7. The philosophic thought of the
Hellenistic peoples, from Alexandria and Antioch through Greece to Syracuse
and Rome. The philosophy of the Greeks was more in harmony with Paul's version
of Christianity than with any other current religious system and became an
important factor in the success of Christianity in the Occident. Greek
philosophy, coupled with Paul's theology, still forms the basis of European
ethics.
98:7.11 As the original teachings of Jesus
penetrated the Occident, they became Occidentalized, and as they became
Occidentalized, they began to lose their potentially universal appeal to all
races and kinds of men. Christianity, today, has become a religion well
adapted to the social, economic, and political mores of the white races. It
has long since ceased to be the religion of Jesus, although it still valiantly
portrays a beautiful religion about Jesus to such individuals as sincerely
seek to follow in the way of its teaching. It has glorified Jesus as the
Christ, the Messianic anointed one from God, but has largely forgotten the
Master's personal gospel: the Fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood
of all men.
98:7.12 And this is the long story of the teachings
of Machiventa Melchizedek on Urantia. It is nearly four thousand years since
this emergency Son of Nebadon bestowed himself on Urantia, and in that time
the teachings of the "priest of El Elyon, the Most High God," have penetrated
to all races and peoples. And Machiventa was successful in achieving the
purpose of his unusual bestowal; when Michael made ready to appear on Urantia,
the God concept was existent in the hearts of men and women, the same God
concept that still flames anew in the living spiritual experience of the
manifold children of the Universal Father as they live their intriguing
temporal lives on the whirling planets of space.
98:7.13 Presented
by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.
