The Urantia Book
PAPER 95
THE MELCHIZEDEK TEACHINGS IN THE
LEVANT
Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.
95:0.1 AS INDIA gave rise to many of the
religions and philosophies of eastern Asia, so the Levant was
the homeland of the faiths of the Occidental world. The Salem
missionaries spread out all over southwestern Asia, through
Palestine, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Iran, and Arabia, everywhere
proclaiming the good news of the gospel of Machiventa
Melchizedek. In some of these lands their teachings bore fruit;
in others they met with varying success. Sometimes their
failures were due to lack of wisdom, sometimes to circumstances
beyond their control.
1. THE SALEM RELIGION IN MESOPOTAMIA
95:1.1 By 2000 B.C. the religions of
Mesopotamia had just about lost the teachings of the Sethites
and were largely under the influence of the primitive beliefs of
two groups of invaders, the Bedouin Semites who had filtered in
from the western desert and the barbarian horsemen who had come
down from the north.
95:1.2 But the custom of the early Adamite
peoples in honoring the seventh day of the week never completely
disappeared in Mesopotamia. Only, during the Melchizedek era,
the seventh day was regarded as the worst of bad luck. It was
taboo-ridden; it was unlawful to go on a journey, cook food, or
make a fire on the evil seventh day. The Jews carried back to
Palestine many of the Mesopotamian taboos which they had found
resting on the Babylonian observance of the seventh day, the
Shabattum.
95:1.3 Although the Salem teachers did much to
refine and uplift the religions of Mesopotamia, they did not
succeed in bringing the various peoples to the permanent
recognition of one God. Such teaching gained the ascendency for
more than one hundred and fifty years and then gradually gave
way to the older belief in a multiplicity of deities.
95:1.4 The Salem teachers greatly reduced the
number of the gods of Mesopotamia, at one time bringing the
chief deities down to seven: Bel, Shamash, Nabu, Anu, Ea,
Marduk, and Sin. At the height of the new teaching they exalted
three of these gods to supremacy over all others, the Babylonian
triad: Bel, Ea, and Anu, the gods of earth, sea, and sky. Still
other triads grew up in different localities, all reminiscent of
the trinity teachings of the Andites and the Sumerians and based
on the belief of the Salemites in Melchizedek's insignia of the
three circles.
95:1.5 Never did the Salem teachers fully
overcome the popularity of Ishtar, the mother of gods and the
spirit of sex fertility. They did much to refine the worship of
this goddess, but the Babylonians and their neighbors had never
completely outgrown their disguised forms of sex worship. It had
become a universal practice throughout Mesopotamia for all women
to submit, at least once in early life, to the embrace of
strangers; this was thought to be a devotion required by Ishtar,
and it was believed that fertility was largely dependent on this
sex sacrifice.
95:1.6 The early progress of the Melchizedek
teaching was highly gratifying until Nabodad, the leader of the
school at Kish, decided to make a concerted attack upon the
prevalent practices of temple harlotry. But the Salem
missionaries failed in their effort to bring about this social
reform, and in the wreck of this failure all their more
important spiritual and philosophic teachings went down in
defeat.
95:1.7 This defeat of the Salem gospel was
immediately followed by a great increase in the cult of Ishtar,
a ritual which had already invaded Palestine as Ashtoreth, Egypt
as Isis, Greece as Aphrodite, and the northern tribes as
Astarte. And it was in connection with this revival of the
worship of Ishtar that the Babylonian priests turned anew to
stargazing; astrology experienced its last great Mesopotamian
revival, fortunetelling became the vogue, and for centuries the
priesthood increasingly deteriorated.
95:1.8 Melchizedek had warned his followers to
teach about the one God, the Father and Maker of all, and to
preach only the gospel of divine favor through faith alone. But
it has often been the error of the teachers of new truth to
attempt too much, to attempt to supplant slow evolution by
sudden revolution. The Melchizedek missionaries in Mesopotamia
raised a moral standard too high for the people; they attempted
too much, and their noble cause went down in defeat. They had
been commissioned to preach a definite gospel, to proclaim the
truth of the reality of the Universal Father, but they became
entangled in the apparently worthy cause of reforming the mores,
and thus was their great mission sidetracked and virtually lost
in frustration and oblivion.
95:1.9 In one generation the Salem
headquarters at Kish came to an end, and the propaganda of the
belief in one God virtually ceased throughout Mesopotamia. But
remnants of the Salem schools persisted. Small bands scattered
here and there continued their belief in the one Creator and
fought against the idolatry and immorality of the Mesopotamian
priests.
95:1.10 It was the Salem missionaries of the
period following the rejection of their teaching who wrote many
of the Old Testament Psalms, inscribing them on stone, where
later-day Hebrew priests found them during the captivity and
subsequently incorporated them among the collection of hymns
ascribed to Jewish authorship. These beautiful psalms from
Babylon were not written in the temples of Bel-Marduk; they were
the work of the descendants of the earlier Salem missionaries,
and they are a striking contrast to the magical conglomerations
of the Babylonian priests. The Book of Job is a fairly good
reflection of the teachings of the Salem school at Kish and
throughout Mesopotamia.
95:1.11 Much of the Mesopotamian religious
culture found its way into Hebrew literature and liturgy by way
of Egypt through the work of Amenemope and Ikhnaton. The
Egyptians remarkably preserved the teachings of social
obligation derived from the earlier Andite Mesopotamians and so
largely lost by the later Babylonians who occupied the Euphrates
valley.
2. EARLY EGYPTIAN RELIGION
95:2.1 The original Melchizedek teachings
really took their deepest root in Egypt, from where they
subsequently spread to Europe. The evolutionary religion of the
Nile valley was periodically augmented by the arrival of
superior strains of Nodite, Adamite, and later Andite peoples of
the Euphrates valley. From time to time, many of the Egyptian
civil administrators were Sumerians. As India in these days
harbored the highest mixture of the world races, so Egypt
fostered the most thoroughly blended type of religious
philosophy to be found on Urantia, and from the Nile valley it
spread to many parts of the world. The Jews received much of
their idea of the creation of the world from the Babylonians,
but they derived the concept of divine Providence from the
Egyptians.
95:2.2 It was political and moral, rather than
philosophic or religious, tendencies that rendered Egypt more
favorable to the Salem teaching than Mesopotamia. Each tribal
leader in Egypt, after fighting his way to the throne, sought to
perpetuate his dynasty by proclaiming his tribal god the
original deity and creator of all other gods. In this way the
Egyptians gradually got used to the idea of a supergod, a
steppingstone to the later doctrine of a universal creator
Deity. The idea of monotheism wavered back and forth in Egypt
for many centuries, the belief in one God always gaining ground
but never quite dominating the evolving concepts of polytheism.
95:2.3 For ages the Egyptian peoples had been
given to the worship of nature gods; more particularly did each
of the two-score separate tribes have a special group god, one
worshiping the bull, another the lion, a third the ram, and so
on. Still earlier they had been totem tribes, very much like the
Amerinds.
95:2.4 In time the Egyptians observed that
dead bodies placed in brickless graves were preserved --
embalmed -- by the action of the soda-impregnated sand, while
those buried in brick vaults decayed. These observations led to
those experiments which resulted in the later practice of
embalming the dead. The Egyptians believed that preservation of
the body facilitated one's passage through the future life. That
the individual might properly be identified in the distant
future after the decay of the body, they placed a burial statue
in the tomb along with the corpse, carving a likeness on the
coffin. The making of these burial statues led to great
improvement in Egyptian art.
95:2.5 For centuries the Egyptians placed
their faith in tombs as the safeguard of the body and of
consequent pleasurable survival after death. The later evolution
of magical practices, while burdensome to life from the cradle
to the grave, most effectually delivered them from the religion
of the tombs. The priests would inscribe the coffins with charm
texts which were believed to be protection against a "man's
having his heart taken away from him in the nether world."
Presently a diverse assortment of these magical texts was
collected and preserved as The Book of the Dead. But in the Nile
valley magical ritual early became involved with the realms of
conscience and character to a degree not often attained by the
rituals of those days. And subsequently these ethical and moral
ideals, rather than elaborate tombs, were depended upon for
salvation.
95:2.6 The superstitions of these times are
well illustrated by the general belief in the efficacy of
spittle as a healing agent, an idea which had its origin in
Egypt and spread therefrom to Arabia and Mesopotamia. In the
legendary battle of Horus with Set the young god lost his eye,
but after Set was vanquished, this eye was restored by the wise
god Thoth, who spat upon the wound and healed it.
95:2.7 The Egyptians long believed that the
stars twinkling in the night sky represented the survival of the
souls of the worthy dead; other survivors they thought were
absorbed into the sun. During a certain period, solar veneration
became a species of ancestor worship. The sloping entrance
passage of the great pyramid pointed directly toward the Pole
Star so that the soul of the king, when emerging from the tomb,
could go straight to the stationary and established
constellations of the fixed stars, the supposed abode of the
kings.
95:2.8 When the oblique rays of the sun were
observed penetrating earthward through an aperture in the
clouds, it was believed that they betokened the letting down of
a celestial stairway whereon the king and other righteous souls
might ascend. "King Pepi has put down his radiance as a stairway
under his feet whereon to ascend to his mother."
95:2.9 When Melchizedek appeared in the flesh,
the Egyptians had a religion far above that of the surrounding
peoples. They believed that a disembodied soul, if properly
armed with magic formulas, could evade the intervening evil
spirits and make its way to the judgment hall of Osiris, where,
if innocent of "murder, robbery, falsehood, adultery, theft, and
selfishness," it would be admitted to the realms of bliss. If
this soul were weighed in the balances and found wanting, it
would be consigned to hell, to the Devouress. And this was,
relatively, an advanced concept of a future life in comparison
with the beliefs of many surrounding peoples.
95:2.10 The concept of judgment in the
hereafter for the sins of one's life in the flesh on earth was
carried over into Hebrew theology from Egypt. The word judgment
appears only once in the entire Book of Hebrew Psalms, and that
particular psalm was written by an Egyptian.
3. EVOLUTION OF MORAL CONCEPTS
95:3.1 Although the culture and religion of
Egypt were chiefly derived from Andite Mesopotamia and largely
transmitted to subsequent civilizations through the Hebrews and
Greeks, much, very much, of the social and ethical idealism of
the Egyptians arose in the valley of the Nile as a purely
evolutionary development. Notwithstanding the importation of
much truth and culture of Andite origin, there evolved in Egypt
more of moral culture as a purely human development than
appeared by similar natural techniques in any other
circumscribed area prior to the bestowal of Michael.
95:3.2 Moral evolution is not wholly dependent
on revelation. High moral concepts can be derived from man's own
experience. Man can even evolve spiritual values and derive
cosmic insight from his personal experiential living because a
divine spirit indwells him. Such natural evolutions of
conscience and character were also augmented by the periodic
arrival of teachers of truth, in ancient times from the second
Eden, later on from Melchizedek's headquarters at Salem.
95:3.3 Thousands of years before the Salem
gospel penetrated to Egypt, its moral leaders taught justice,
fairness, and the avoidance of avarice. Three thousand years
before the Hebrew scriptures were written, the motto of the
Egyptians was: "Established is the man whose standard is
righteousness; who walks according to its way." They taught
gentleness, moderation, and discretion. The message of one of
the great teachers of this epoch was: "Do right and deal justly
with all." The Egyptian triad of this age was
Truth-Justice-Righteousness. Of all the purely human religions
of Urantia none ever surpassed the social ideals and the moral
grandeur of this onetime humanism of the Nile valley.
95:3.4 In the soil of these evolving ethical
ideas and moral ideals the surviving doctrines of the Salem
religion flourished. The concepts of good and evil found ready
response in the hearts of a people who believed that "Life is
given to the peaceful and death to the guilty." "The peaceful is
he who does what is loved; the guilty is he who does what is
hated." For centuries the inhabitants of the Nile valley had
lived by these emerging ethical and social standards before they
ever entertained the later concepts of right and wrong -- good
and bad.
95:3.5 Egypt was intellectual and moral but
not overly spiritual. In six thousand years only four great
prophets arose among the Egyptians. Amenemope they followed for
a season; Okhban they murdered; Ikhnaton they accepted but
halfheartedly for one short generation; Moses they rejected.
Again was it political rather than religious circumstances that
made it easy for Abraham and, later on, for Joseph to exert
great influence throughout Egypt in behalf of the Salem
teachings of one God. But when the Salem missionaries first
entered Egypt, they encountered this highly ethical culture of
evolution blended with the modified moral standards of
Mesopotamian immigrants. These early Nile valley teachers were
the first to proclaim conscience as the mandate of God, the
voice of Deity.
4. THE TEACHINGS OF AMENEMOPE
95:4.1 In due time there grew up in Egypt a
teacher called by many the "son of man" and by others Amenemope.
This seer exalted conscience to its highest pinnacle of
arbitrament between right and wrong, taught punishment for sin,
and proclaimed salvation through calling upon the solar deity.
95:4.2 Amenemope taught that riches and
fortune were the gift of God, and this concept thoroughly
colored the later appearing Hebrew philosophy. This noble
teacher believed that God-consciousness was the determining
factor in all conduct; that every moment should be lived in the
realization of the presence of, and responsibility to, God. The
teachings of this sage were subsequently translated into Hebrew
and became the sacred book of that people long before the Old
Testament was reduced to writing. The chief preachment of this
good man had to do with instructing his son in uprightness and
honesty in governmental positions of trust, and these noble
sentiments of long ago would do honor to any modern statesman.
95:4.3 This wise man of the Nile taught that
"riches take themselves wings and fly away" -- that all things
earthly are evanescent. His great prayer was to be "saved from
fear." He exhorted all to turn away from "the words of men" to
"the acts of God." In substance he taught: Man proposes but God
disposes. His teachings, translated into Hebrew, determined the
philosophy of the Old Testament Book of Proverbs. Translated
into Greek, they gave color to all subsequent Hellenic religious
philosophy. The later Alexandrian philosopher, Philo, possessed
a copy of the Book of Wisdom.
95:4.4 Amenemope functioned to conserve the
ethics of evolution and the morals of revelation and in his
writings passed them on both to the Hebrews and to the Greeks.
He was not the greatest of the religious teachers of this age,
but he was the most influential in that he colored the
subsequent thought of two vital links in the growth of
Occidental civilization -- the Hebrews, among whom evolved the
acme of Occidental religious faith, and the Greeks, who
developed pure philosophic thought to its greatest European
heights.
95:4.5 In the Book of Hebrew Proverbs,
chapters fifteen, seventeen, twenty, and chapter twenty-two,
verse seventeen, to chapter twenty-four, verse twenty-two, are
taken almost verbatim from Amenemope's Book of Wisdom. The first
psalm of the Hebrew Book of Psalms was written by Amenemope and
is the heart of the teachings of Ikhnaton.
5. THE REMARKABLE IKHNATON
95:5.1 The teachings of Amenemope were slowly
losing their hold on the Egyptian mind when, through the
influence of an Egyptian Salemite physician, a woman of the
royal family espoused the Melchizedek teachings. This woman
prevailed upon her son, Ikhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt, to accept
these doctrines of One God.
95:5.2 Since the disappearance of Melchizedek
in the flesh, no human being up to that time had possessed such
an amazingly clear concept of the revealed religion of Salem as
Ikhnaton. In some respects this young Egyptian king is one of
the most remarkable persons in human history. During this time
of increasing spiritual depression in Mesopotamia, he kept alive
the doctrine of El Elyon, the One God, in Egypt, thus
maintaining the philosophic monotheistic channel which was vital
to the religious background of the then future bestowal of
Michael. And it was in recognition of this exploit, among other
reasons, that the child Jesus was taken to Egypt, where some of
the spiritual successors of Ikhnaton saw him and to some extent
understood certain phases of his divine mission to Urantia.
95:5.3 Moses, the greatest character between
Melchizedek and Jesus, was the joint gift to the world of the
Hebrew race and the Egyptian royal family; and had Ikhnaton
possessed the versatility and ability of Moses, had he
manifested a political genius to match his surprising religious
leadership, then would Egypt have become the great monotheistic
nation of that age; and if this had happened, it is barely
possible that Jesus might have lived the greater portion of his
mortal life in Egypt.
95:5.4 Never in all history did any king so
methodically proceed to swing a whole nation from polytheism to
monotheism as did this extraordinary Ikhnaton. With the most
amazing determination this young ruler broke with the past,
changed his name, abandoned his capital, built an entirely new
city, and created a new art and literature for a whole people.
But he went too fast; he built too much, more than could stand
when he had gone. Again, he failed to provide for the material
stability and prosperity of his people, all of which reacted
unfavorably against his religious teachings when the subsequent
floods of adversity and oppression swept over the Egyptians.
95:5.5 Had this man of amazingly clear vision
and extraordinary singleness of purpose had the political
sagacity of Moses, he would have changed the whole history of
the evolution of religion and the revelation of truth in the
Occidental world. During his lifetime he was able to curb the
activities of the priests, whom he generally discredited, but
they maintained their cults in secret and sprang into action as
soon as the young king passed from power; and they were not slow
to connect all of Egypt's subsequent troubles with the
establishment of monotheism during his reign.
95:5.6 Very wisely Ikhnaton sought to
establish monotheism under the guise of the sun-god. This
decision to approach the worship of the Universal Father by
absorbing all gods into the worship of the sun was due to the
counsel of the Salemite physician. Ikhnaton took the generalized
doctrines of the then existent Aton faith regarding the
fatherhood and motherhood of Deity and created a religion which
recognized an intimate worshipful relation between man and God.
95:5.7 Ikhnaton was wise enough to maintain
the outward worship of Aton, the sun-god, while he led his
associates in the disguised worship of the One God, creator of
Aton and supreme Father of all. This young teacher-king was a
prolific writer, being author of the exposition entitled "The
One God," a book of thirty-one chapters, which the priests, when
returned to power, utterly destroyed. Ikhnaton also wrote one
hundred and thirty-seven hymns, twelve of which are now
preserved in the Old Testament Book of Psalms, credited to
Hebrew authorship.
95:5.8 The supreme word of Ikhnaton's religion
in daily life was "righteousness," and he rapidly expanded the
concept of right doing to embrace international as well as
national ethics. This was a generation of amazing personal piety
and was characterized by a genuine aspiration among the more
intelligent men and women to find God and to know him. In those
days social position or wealth gave no Egyptian any advantage in
the eyes of the law. The family life of Egypt did much to
preserve and augment moral culture and was the inspiration of
the later superb family life of the Jews in Palestine.
95:5.9 The fatal weakness of Ikhnaton's gospel
was its greatest truth, the teaching that Aton was not only the
creator of Egypt but also of the "whole world, man and beasts,
and all the foreign lands, even Syria and Kush, besides this
land of Egypt. He sets all in their place and provides all with
their needs." These concepts of Deity were high and exalted, but
they were not nationalistic. Such sentiments of internationality
in religion failed to augment the morale of the Egyptian army on
the battlefield, while they provided effective weapons for the
priests to use against the young king and his new religion. He
had a Deity concept far above that of the later Hebrews, but it
was too advanced to serve the purposes of a nation builder.
95:5.10 Though the monotheistic ideal suffered
with the passing of Ikhnaton, the idea of one God persisted in
the minds of many groups. The son-in-law of Ikhnaton went along
with the priests, back to the worship of the old gods, changing
his name to Tutankhamen. The capital returned to Thebes, and the
priests waxed fat upon the land, eventually gaining possession
of one seventh of all Egypt; and presently one of this same
order of priests made bold to seize the crown.
95:5.11 But the priests could not fully
overcome the monotheistic wave. Increasingly they were compelled
to combine and hyphenate their gods; more and more the family of
gods contracted. Ikhnaton had associated the flaming disc of the
heavens with the creator God, and this idea continued to flame
up in the hearts of men, even of the priests, long after the
young reformer had passed on. Never did the concept of
monotheism die out of the hearts of men in Egypt and in the
world. It persisted even to the arrival of the Creator Son of
that same divine Father, the one God whom Ikhnaton had so
zealously proclaimed for the worship of all Egypt.
95:5.12 The weakness of Ikhnaton's doctrine
lay in the fact that he proposed such an advanced religion that
only the educated Egyptians could fully comprehend his
teachings. The rank and file of the agricultural laborers never
really grasped his gospel and were, therefore, ready to return
with the priests to the old-time worship of Isis and her consort
Osiris, who was supposed to have been miraculously resurrected
from a cruel death at the hands of Set, the god of darkness and
evil.
95:5.13 The teaching of immortality for all
men was too advanced for the Egyptians. Only kings and the rich
were promised a resurrection; therefore did they so carefully
embalm and preserve their bodies in tombs against the day of
judgment. But the democracy of salvation and resurrection as
taught by Ikhnaton eventually prevailed, even to the extent that
the Egyptians later believed in the survival of dumb animals.
95:5.14 Although the effort of this Egyptian
ruler to impose the worship of one God upon his people appeared
to fail, it should be recorded that the repercussions of his
work persisted for centuries both in Palestine and Greece, and
that Egypt thus became the agent for transmitting the combined
evolutionary culture of the Nile and the revelatory religion of
the Euphrates to all of the subsequent peoples of the Occident.
95:5.15 The glory of this great era of moral
development and spiritual growth in the Nile valley was rapidly
passing at about the time the national life of the Hebrews was
beginning, and consequent upon their sojourn in Egypt these
Bedouins carried away much of these teachings and perpetuated
many of Ikhnaton's doctrines in their racial religion.
6. THE SALEM DOCTRINES IN IRAN
95:6.1 From Palestine some of the Melchizedek
missionaries passed on through Mesopotamia and to the great
Iranian plateau. For more than five hundred years the Salem
teachers made headway in Iran, and the whole nation was swinging
to the Melchizedek religion when a change of rulers precipitated
a bitter persecution which practically ended the monotheistic
teachings of the Salem cult. The doctrine of the Abrahamic
covenant was virtually extinct in Persia when, in that great
century of moral renaissance, the sixth before Christ, Zoroaster
appeared to revive the smouldering embers of the Salem gospel.
95:6.2 This founder of a new religion was a
virile and adventurous youth, who, on his first pilgrimage to Ur
in Mesopotamia, had learned of the traditions of the Caligastia
and the Lucifer rebellion -- along with many other traditions --
all of which had made a strong appeal to his religious nature.
Accordingly, as the result of a dream while in Ur, he settled
upon a program of returning to his northern home to undertake
the remodeling of the religion of his people. He had imbibed the
Hebraic idea of a God of justice, the Mosaic concept of
divinity. The idea of a supreme God was clear in his mind, and
he set down all other gods as devils, consigned them to the
ranks of the demons of which he had heard in Mesopotamia. He had
learned of the story of the Seven Master Spirits as the
tradition lingered in Ur, and, accordingly, he created a galaxy
of seven supreme gods with Ahura-Mazda at its head. These
subordinate gods he associated with the idealization of Right
Law, Good Thought, Noble Government, Holy Character, Health, and
Immortality.
95:6.3 And this new religion was one of action
-- work -- not prayers and rituals. Its God was a being of
supreme wisdom and the patron of civilization; it was a militant
religious philosophy which dared to battle with evil, inaction,
and backwardness.
95:6.4 Zoroaster did not teach the worship of
fire but sought to utilize the flame as a symbol of the pure and
wise Spirit of universal and supreme dominance. (All too true,
his later followers did both reverence and worship this symbolic
fire.) Finally, upon the conversion of an Iranian prince, this
new religion was spread by the sword. And Zoroaster heroically
died in battle for that which he believed was the "truth of the
Lord of light."
95:6.5 Zoroastrianism is the only Urantian
creed that perpetuates the Dalamatian and Edenic teachings about
the Seven Master Spirits. While failing to evolve the Trinity
concept, it did in a certain way approach that of God the
Sevenfold. Original Zoroastrianism was not a pure dualism;
though the early teachings did picture evil as a time
co-ordinate of goodness, it was definitely eternity-submerged in
the ultimate reality of the good. Only in later times did the
belief gain credence that good and evil contended on equal
terms.
95:6.6 The Jewish traditions of heaven and
hell and the doctrine of devils as recorded in the Hebrew
scriptures, while founded on the lingering traditions of Lucifer
and Caligastia, were principally derived from the Zoroastrians
during the times when the Jews were under the political and
cultural dominance of the Persians. Zoroaster, like the
Egyptians, taught the "day of judgment," but he connected this
event with the end of the world.
95:6.7 Even the religion which succeeded
Zoroastrianism in Persia was markedly influenced by it. When the
Iranian priests sought to overthrow the teachings of Zoroaster,
they resurrected the ancient worship of Mithra. And Mithraism
spread throughout the Levant and Mediterranean regions, being
for some time a contemporary of both Judaism and Christianity.
The teachings of Zoroaster thus came successively to impress
three great religions: Judaism and Christianity and, through
them, Mohammedanism.
95:6.8 But it is a far cry from the exalted
teachings and noble psalms of Zoroaster to the modern
perversions of his gospel by the Parsees with their great fear
of the dead, coupled with the entertainment of beliefs in
sophistries which Zoroaster never stooped to countenance.
95:6.9 This great man was one of that unique
group that sprang up in the sixth century before Christ to keep
the light of Salem from being fully and finally extinguished as
it so dimly burned to show man in his darkened world the path of
light leading to everlasting life.
7. THE SALEM TEACHINGS IN ARABIA
95:7.1 The Melchizedek teachings of the one
God became established in the Arabian desert at a comparatively
recent date. As in Greece, so in Arabia the Salem missionaries
failed because of their misunderstanding of Machiventa's
instructions regarding overorganization. But they were not thus
hindered by their interpretation of his admonition against all
efforts to extend the gospel through military force or civil
compulsion.
95:7.2 Not even in China or Rome did the
Melchizedek teachings fail more completely than in this desert
region so very near Salem itself. Long after the majority of the
peoples of the Orient and Occident had become respectively
Buddhist and Christian, the desert of Arabia continued as it had
for thousands of years. Each tribe worshiped its olden fetish,
and many individual families had their own household gods. Long
the struggle continued between Babylonian Ishtar, Hebrew Yahweh,
Iranian Ahura, and Christian Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Never was one concept able fully to displace the others.
95:7.3 Here and there throughout Arabia were
families and clans that held on to the hazy idea of the one God.
Such groups treasured the traditions of Melchizedek, Abraham,
Moses, and Zoroaster. There were numerous centers that might
have responded to the Jesusonian gospel, but the Christian
missionaries of the desert lands were an austere and unyielding
group in contrast with the compromisers and innovators who
functioned as missionaries in the Mediterranean countries. Had
the followers of Jesus taken more seriously his injunction to
"go into all the world and preach the gospel," and had they been
more gracious in that preaching, less stringent in collateral
social requirements of their own devising, then many lands would
gladly have received the simple gospel of the carpenter's son,
Arabia among them.
95:7.4 Despite the fact that the great
Levantine monotheisms failed to take root in Arabia, this desert
land was capable of producing a faith which, though less
demanding in its social requirements, was nonetheless
monotheistic.
95:7.5 There was only one factor of a tribal,
racial, or national nature about the primitive and unorganized
beliefs of the desert, and that was the peculiar and general
respect which almost all Arabian tribes were willing to pay to a
certain black stone fetish in a certain temple at Mecca. This
point of common contact and reverence subsequently led to the
establishment of the Islamic religion. What Yahweh, the volcano
spirit, was to the Jewish Semites, the Kaaba stone became to
their Arabic cousins.
95:7.6 The strength of Islam has been its
clear-cut and well-defined presentation of Allah as the one and
only Deity; its weakness, the association of military force with
its promulgation, together with its degradation of woman. But it
has steadfastly held to its presentation of the One Universal
Deity of all, "who knows the invisible and the visible. He is
the merciful and the compassionate." "Truly God is plenteous in
goodness to all men." "And when I am sick, it is he who heals
me." "For whenever as many as three speak together, God is
present as a fourth," for is he not "the first and the last,
also the seen and the hidden"?
95:7.7
Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.
