The Urantia Book
PAPER 98
THE MELCHIZEDEK TEACHINGS IN THE
OCCIDENT
Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.
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.
