Coming Home · For Christians

For Christians: The Faith Before the Faith

author: High Priest Zevios Metathronos

You are welcome in the house of Zeus. The Church’s own writers preserved the faith that came before theirs: read their words, settle your questions, and begin your return to Zeus and the Gods today.

For

Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants and those raised in the Church

You Will Find

3 witnesses, your questions answered, Jesus and Apollonius, the forefathers

Next Step

Begin Your Return

Augustine, Retractationes I.13.3, translated for this page

Nam res ipsa quae nunc christiana religio nuncupatur, erat apud antiquos, nec defuit ab initio generis humani, quousque ipse Christus veniret in carne, unde vera religio quae jam erat, coepit appellari christiana.

For the thing itself which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and was not absent from the beginning of the human race until Christ himself came in the flesh; from then the true religion, which already existed, began to be called Christian.

I. The Welcome and the Offer

The Greeks honoured Zeus Xenios, guardian of the law of hospitality.^[1] The Temple receives you under that name, as a guest with your questions.

The offer is definite: a living relationship with Zeus, Father and King of the Gods, and with the Gods; a discipline for the soul; truth as the rule of your character; and an inheritance of philosophy, sacred art, prayer and festivals to live in.

Carry forward love of family, of beauty and of worthy conduct. Some beliefs will change: you set down the claim that one institution holds the only door to the Divine. The Temple’s criticism falls on doctrines and institutions, never on you: We reject these doctrines, not the people who follow them.^[2]

II. 3 Witnesses from the Church’s Own Record

Read each passage. Then follow what it shows.

The Verse about Zeus in Acts

Aratus, Phaenomena 1 to 5, tr. G. R. Mair (1921) · Read the passage

Ἐκ Διὸς ἀρχώμεσθα, τὸν οὐδέποτ’ ἄνδρες ἐῶμεν
ἄρρητον· μεσταὶ δὲ Διὸς πᾶσαι μὲν ἀγυιαί,
πᾶσαι δ’ ἀνθρώπων ἀγοραί, μεστὴ δὲ θάλασσα
καὶ λιμένες· πάντη δὲ Διὸς κεχρήμεθα πάντες.
τοῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος εἰμέν.

From Zeus let us begin; him do we mortals never leave unnamed; full of Zeus are all the streets and all the market-places of men; full is the sea and the havens thereof; always we all have need of Zeus. For we are also his offspring…

Acts 17:28, Greek text Nestle 1904, tr. King James Version · Read the verse

ἐν αὐτῷ γὰρ ζῶμεν καὶ κινούμεθα καὶ ἐσμέν, ὡς καί τινες τῶν καθ’ ὑμᾶς ποιητῶν εἰρήκασιν Τοῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος ἐσμέν.

For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.

Acts sets Paul on the Areopagus at Athens, quoting your own poets.^[3] The poet is Aratus of Soli, whose Phaenomena opens From Zeus let us begin; the line is his 5th.^[4] Acts gives the half-line word for word, with the common ἐσμέν for the poet’s εἰμέν.

What it establishes. Acts puts a Greek verse addressed to Zeus in the apostle’s mouth as proof of human kinship with God.

The Zevist conclusion. The Father whose offspring you are was named in that poem’s first word. Come to know Him by His name.

The likely reply. Paul applied the line to the God of Israel. Acts tells you what the speaker meant; Aratus tells you whom the line praised. Aristobulus, a Jewish philosopher of Alexandria, quoted the same opening and made it serve his God by taking away the name of Zeus which runs through the poems.^[5] A name has to be removed only where it stands.

Justin’s Comparisons with the Sons of Zeus

Justin Martyr, First Apology 21, tr. M. Dods and G. Reith (ANF 1) · Read the passage

And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter.

Justin addressed his First Apology to the emperor Antoninus Pius. He lists the sons of Jupiter, the Roman Zeus: Mercury, Asclepius, Bacchus, Hercules, the Dioscuri, Perseus, Bellerophon. In chapter 22 he asks the emperor to accept the virgin birth in common with what you accept of Perseus, and grants that Christ’s cures are very similar to the deeds said to have been done by Æsculapius.^[6]

In chapter 54 he explains: demons, having heard the prophets announce the Christ, put forward many to be called sons of Jupiter, and when they learned He would heal every sickness, and raise the dead, they produced Aesculapius.^[6]

What it establishes. A 2nd-century apologist concedes the parallels in sonship, birth, healing and ascent, and calls them demonic imitation.

The Zevist conclusion. The sons of Zeus came first. The demonic explanation is the inversion at work, recasting the elder sacred figures as counterfeits of the later one.

The likely reply. Justin was building a bridge for pagans. The bridge is the evidence: he needed demons because he couldn’t deny the likeness.

Gregory’s Instructions for the Temples

Gregory the Great to Abbot Mellitus, 601, in Bede, Ecclesiastical History I.30, tr. A. M. Sellar (1907) · Read the letter

… the temples of the idols in that nation ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let water be consecrated and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed there.

Gregory sent these instructions for the mission to the English, with their purpose: that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may remove error from their hearts. The feasts follow the same rule: because the people are used to slaughter many oxen in sacrifice to devils, some solemnity must be given them in exchange for this, with huts of boughs about those churches which have been turned to that use from being temples.^[7]

What it establishes. A papal policy kept the sacred places and festal customs and replaced their worship.

The Zevist conclusion. The sacred setting was appropriated and its worship displaced. Wherever a church stands in a temple, it holds a place that belonged to the Gods.

The likely reply. This is missionary accommodation. Call it that. The conclusion needs no endorsement from Gregory: the places and feasts were kept because the people loved them, and their worship was taken away.

III. The Inheritance Within Reach

Much of what you loved in church is older than the Church. Make its older layers part of your life.

• The name. Deus, Dios, Dieu and Jupiter belong to one inherited family of divine words: The Name You Already Speak.
• The language. The New Testament is Greek. Paul calls Christ τὸ πάσχα ἡμῶν, our passover.^[8] Clement preached Christ in the language of the mysteries: O truly sacred mysteries!^[9]
• The philosophy. Justin counted Socrates and Heraclitus among those who lived reasonably before Christ.^[6] Clement called philosophy a preparation, paving the way for him who is perfected in Christ.^[10] Aquinas cites Aristotle simply as the Philosopher.^[11] The writings under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, Paul’s Athenian convert, date from between 485 and 528, by an author most probably a pupil of Proclus.^[12]
• The admissions. Augustine wrote that the thing now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients.^[13] He meant his own God; the Temple takes him at his word: the true religion is older than the name. The Second Vatican Council declared in 1965 that the Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in other religions, which often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.^[14] In 2006 Benedict XVI called the rapprochement of biblical faith and Greek philosophy an event of decisive importance.^[15] These statements confess no Zevist doctrine; they concede the ground on which Zevism stands.
• The places. In Rome, Bede records, Pope Boniface obtained from the emperor Phocas the temple at Rome called by the ancients Pantheon and dedicated it to the Mother of God and all the martyrs.^[16]

Each feast has its own history.

• Christmas. The Chronograph of 354 marks 25 December twice: its calendar reads N·INVICTI·CM·XXX, the birthday of the Unconquered, with 30 races; its list of burials opens VIII kal. Ian. natus Christus in Betleem Iudeae.^[17] The calculation theory starts from 25 March, taken as the day of Christ’s conception and death; 25 December falls 9 months later.^[18] A century later Leo complained that worshippers at Saint Peter’s turn round and bow themselves towards the rising sun.^[19] The record holds both: a calculation, and the Unconquered’s birthday on the same day in the same calendar.
• Easter. The English name carries a Goddess. Bede wrote that Eosturmonath was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, honoured with feasts in that month.^[20]
• Pascha. The Greek and Latin πάσχα, pascha, is the Passover, the name Paul gives to Christ.^[8]
• The equinox. The sky set the Paschal date. Anatolius of Laodicea reports Jewish writers, Aristobulus among them, who taught that all alike ought to sacrifice the Passover after the vernal equinox in the middle of the first month.^[21] The Temple keeps the Spring Equinox as its own festival.

The Zevist Teaching

The Church kept the language, the philosophy, the places and the feasts, and forbade the Gods to whom they belonged. Return restores the inheritance with its centre: Zeus.

IV. The Questions That Decide the Choice

Am I Leaving God?

No. You are returning to the Father and the Gods.

The Father whose offspring Acts declares you to be is the Zeus of Aratus’s first line. Zeus is Father, the Gods are His family, and you are kin to Them. The Rite of Dedication calls Him the One God who Protects the Many Gods, the source from whom all Gods proceed.^[22] You lose no Father. You learn His name.

Your place in the divine family · How to begin

Am I Leaving My Heritage?

No. You are entering its older layers.

Your language keeps the divine name in Deus, Dios and Dieu; your year keeps the solstice and equinox. If missionaries reached your people later, seek your own sacred history and family memory.

The name you already speak

Why Was I Taught This Was Evil?

Because the texts behind your teaching named the Gods demons, and rulers enforced the ban.

The Greek Psalm says πάντες οἱ θεοὶ τῶν ἐθνῶν δαιμόνια, all the gods of the nations are demons; Paul, that the Gentiles sacrifice to devils, and not to God.^[23] Charlemagne’s Saxon law of 775 to 790 ordered death for the Saxon who shall have wished to remain a pagan.^[24] The label was political, and it took your spiritual inheritance. Δαίμων means a divine spirit; demon is its hostile revaluation.^[2]

The Inversion Was Politics

Is This Satanism?

No. The Temple of Zeus worships Zeus and the Gods.

In its own words: The Temple of Zeus does not worship Satan, the adversary of the Abrahamic religions. SATANAMA, chanted SA TA NA MA, is the mantra of Kirtan Kriya in Kundalini Yoga, the seed form of SAT NAM, True Name. The Hebrew śāṭān is an ordinary noun meaning adversary, used even of the angel in Balaam’s road (Numbers 22:22).^[25]

SATANAMA: The Mantra and the Word · What is Zevism?

Isn’t God One?

Zevism teaches one divine Head and many Gods under Him.

All the Gods and Daemons serve under Zeus.^[22] Unity is His sovereignty; plurality is the order of the cosmos. The Trinity is a different doctrine, 3 persons in 1 divine essence, which Christians don’t count as 3 Gods. Yet your Gospel keeps the older language: Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?^[26]

Zeus and the Gods

What about the Immoral Myths?

Sacred myth veils truth, and the Gods are good.

Plato ruled that God is not the author of all things, but of good only.^[27] Sallustius wrote that one may call the World a Myth, in which bodies and things are visible, but souls and minds hidden.^[28] The Temple’s standard is Satya, the True and the Good; a story read against it has been read too literally.

The Declaration of Principles

Will I Be Damned for Leaving?

No. The Gods are good, and They receive those who return.

The threat has a text and an institution behind it: Matthew’s everlasting fire, and the Catechism’s The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity.^[29] It guards an exclusive claim, and that claim is what you are examining. In the Temple’s words, the Gods are reaching toward those who return, not punishing them.^[30]

The history of the threat, C27 to C31 · First Steps

What If Jesus Existed?

Then a preacher lived, and the Gods remain.

The Temple leans strongly to the answer that he did not. Either way, a preacher’s existence establishes neither the Church’s exclusive claim nor the end of the Gods.

Jesus: Zeus in a form of inversion

What about the Resurrection Witnesses?

Paul reports a list of witnesses. Their own testimony doesn’t survive.

Paul lists Cephas, the 12, more than 500 at once, of whom the greater part remain unto this present, James, the apostles and himself.^[31] None of the 500 is named or quoted. The Gospels differ on who came to the tomb and where the risen Jesus appeared.

The narratives compared, C11 · Mark’s ending, C4

Would the Apostles Die for a Lie?

Sincerity proves conviction. It doesn’t prove an exclusive claim.

Few deaths are attested early. Herod killed James the brother of John with the sword; Ananus had James, the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, delivered to be stoned; 1 Clement says Peter and Paul suffered martyrdom, naming neither place nor method.^[32] The rest is later tradition, and people of every religion have died for their beliefs.

Paul’s authority, C23

Was Jesus the Highest Moral Teacher?

The Temple judges the forefathers greater, and sets their works before you.

Before the Gospels, Socrates taught in the Crito that one must not, when injured injure in return, as the many imagine; for we must injure no one at all.^[33]

The forefathers by their works

Wasn’t Christianity Spread by Love?

Its first preaching spread under persecution. Its later victories used law and force.

Nero inflicted the most exquisite tortures on the Christians of Rome.^[34] Christianity was in Europe before any emperor established it; once rulers took it up, they used the sword. Of the Saxon who refused baptism, Charlemagne’s law decreed: let him be punished by death.^[24]

The Inversion Was Politics

Doesn’t Prophecy Prove the Bible?

Read the prophecy in its own setting.

Isaiah 7:14 gives King Ahaz a sign: in the Hebrew, עַלְמָה, the young woman is with child, and before the child knows good from evil, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted. Matthew 1:23 reads the Greek παρθένος, virgin, and applies the sign to Jesus centuries later.^[35]

Isaiah’s sign, C12 and C13 · The expected end, C17

Don’t the Many Manuscripts Prove Every Sentence?

Many copies show what was copied. They don’t show identical wording.

Open your Bible at Mark 16. The note in the NRSV Updated Edition reads: Some of the most ancient authorities bring the book to a close at the end of 16.8.^[36] Verses 9 to 20, with their resurrection appearances, are absent from those witnesses.

The manuscript dossiers, C3 to C6

I Felt the Divine in Church

Keep that experience. The Divine was real, and no institution owns it.

The Gods have continued to guide humanity, even through the Dark Ages and times of spiritual suppression.^[2] What reached you in the hymn and the silence came from the Divine; the claim that it comes only through that door came from the institution.

Discover a Life with the Gods

What Happens to My Family and Marriage?

Your love stays. Disclosure is your own considered decision.

Zevism requires no public announcement. Freedom of belief is ordained by the Gods, and the Temple doesn’t force, aggressively convert or psychologically coerce.^[2] Your spouse’s belief is their own. Choose your time and your words, and lead by example.

Family, marriage and children

Can I Keep Family Festivals?

Yes. Family affection and gatherings continue.

Sit at the table with the people you love. Your Zevist observance is a separate act: the Temple keeps the Winter Solstice as the Holy Night of Zeus, and the Spring Equinox, with rites for one person or a gathering.

Festivals at home

Must I Hate Christians?

No. The Temple welcomes Christians and invites them home.

Its teaching: Christians are not your enemies. And: The Zevist position is not to hate Christians.^[37] Opposition belongs to doctrines and institutions, never to the guests this page was written for.

The welcome

Is It Only for Greeks?

No. Belonging is open to everyone who chooses the Gods.

Whatever your ancestry or nationality, you are welcome to study this inheritance and take part in its continuation.^[38] And: The door is not barred by blood.^[39]

Belonging without pedigree

Why Should I Join This Temple Now?

Because it gives your return a teaching, a practice and a community today.

The Temple calls the Gods by Their names, teaches Satya and Ma’at, publishes its prayers, meditation programmes and rites openly, and keeps a community. There are no required mediators between you and the Gods.^[38]

Why this Temple

What Will I Do Tomorrow?

Speak a prayer to Zeus, then follow the 7-day orientation.

Each day has 1 question and 1 short task; day 7 brings a conscious decision about dedication. No registration, purchase or public declaration.

The first orientation

V. Jesus: Zeus in a Form of Inversion

The Zevist Teaching

Jesus is Zeus in a form of inversion. The Father’s kingship, the sonship and healing of His sons, the sun’s light and the Greeks’ sacred language were gathered into one figure, in whose name the worship of Zeus was forbidden. The attributes were kept; the God was denied.

• Divine kingship and imagery. The Christ Pantocrator of Saint Catherine’s Monastery at Sinai is a mid-6th-century encaustic icon.^[40] The Zeus of Otricoli in the Vatican Museums is a Roman marble after a Greek original of about the 4th century BCE.^[41] Robin Jensen, following Thomas Mathews’s reading of early Christian art as a contest with the Gods, describes images of Jesus as both Jupiter and Apollo, and finds that the bearded type most closely parallels images of the senior, enthroned father gods.^[42] The resemblance shows shared imagery; the Temple names its meaning: the Father’s face placed on the Son.

• The solar image. Beneath Saint Peter’s, the vault of Mausoleum M, the Tomb of the Julii, holds a 3rd-century mosaic: a figure with a rayed nimbus driving a chariot, among Christian scenes of Jonah, a shepherd and a fisherman, read as Christ in the image of the Sun.^[43] Clement had already preached Christ as the Sun of Righteousness, who drives His chariot over all.^[44]

• Healing and divine sonship. Justin’s comparison does the work: nothing different from the sons of Jupiter, cures very similar to those of Asclepius.^[6]
• The Greek religious language. Ἰησοῦς is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Joshua, Yeshua; translating Hebrews 4:8, the King James Version writes For if Jesus had given them rest where Joshua is meant. Χριστός means anointed: John glosses the Hebrew Messias as Χριστός.^[45] Christian teachers then preached them with Greek meanings. Cyril of Jerusalem taught: Jesus then means according to the Hebrew “Saviour,” but in the Greek tongue “The Healer”, since He is physician of souls and bodies, curer of spirits.^[46] Clement proclaimed: The Lord is the hierophant, and seals while illuminating him who is initiated.^[9]
• The older narrative world. A sage of the same century was announced before birth, raised a bride, faced an emperor and ascended. His life follows.
• The historicity question. Richard Carrier argues in On the Historicity of Jesus (2014) that a model in which Jesus began as a heavenly being, later given an earthly biography, explains the evidence at least as well as historicity.^[47] Robert M. Price concluded in Deconstructing Jesus (2000): There may have been a real figure there, but there is simply no longer any way of being sure.^[48] The prevailing historical position holds that a Jewish preacher named Jesus lived and was crucified under Pilate.^[49] Its texts deserve an answer. Paul says he saw James the Lord’s brother (Galatians 1:19); Carrier reads the phrase as a believer’s title, and his critics read it as kinship.^[50] Josephus names the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James (Antiquities 20.200); Carrier argues the original meant the brother of the high priest Jesus, the son of Damneus, named in the same passage.^[51] Tacitus writes that Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus (Annals 15.44);^[34] mythicists, Carrier among them, answer that Tacitus wrote decades later and preserves no independent tradition.^[49] The Temple leans strongly to the mythicist answer and states it as its judgement.
• The decisive choice. The argument for return survives either answer. If no preacher lived, the Gospel figure is the older sacred world retold. If one lived, his existence grants no institution possession of the Divine and annuls none of the Gods.

VI. 2 Lives: Apollonius of Tyana and Jesus

Apollonius of Tyana, a Pythagorean sage, lived about 15 to 100. Philostratus wrote his Life in the early 3rd century, after the Gospels, for the empress Julia Domna (1.3).^[52][53]

• Apollonius is attested outside Philostratus. Moeragenes wrote memoirs of the magician and philosopher Apollonius of Tyana, as Origen reports.^[54] Lucian names the teacher of the false prophet Alexander a native of Tyana, an associate of the great Apollonius.^[55] Cassius Dio tells how Apollonius, on a lofty rock at Ephesus or elsewhere, cried out as Domitian was murdered, Good, Stephanus! Bravo, Stephanus!, and how Caracalla honoured Apollonius of Cappadocia, the province of Tyana, and erected a shrine to him.^[56]
• The Greeks drew the comparison first. Lactantius, without naming him, answers a writer of the persecution who titled his books truth-loving and wished to show that Apollonius performed equal or even greater deeds than Christ.^[57] Eusebius names him, Hierocles, author of the Lover of Truth, and wrote Against Hierocles to answer his parallel between the man of Tyana and our own Saviour.^[58]
• A late biography’s report. The Historia Augusta says the emperor Severus Alexander kept in his household shrine certain holy souls, among them Apollonius, and, according to a contemporary writer, Christ, Abraham, Orpheus.^[59] The report is the late biography’s own witness.
• The older divine sage and healer. Pythagoras appeared at Croton and at Metapontum on the same day and at the same hour, in a wonder-collection whose chapter on Pythagoras draws on Aristotle.^[60] Heraclides told how Empedocles kept a woman 30 days without pulsation though she never breathed, and how, after a sacrifice, he vanished, a voice called his name, a light shone in the heavens, and Pausanias declared it was their duty to sacrifice to him since he was now a god.^[61] Pindar sang that Asclepius was paid to bring back from death a man who was already caught.^[62]

By themselves the parallels prove neither a lost document nor a direction of copying. Their force lies in the older witnesses: the divine sage, the healer who raised the dead and the man taken among the Gods were Greek centuries before the Gospels.

The Zevist Teaching

The Gospel figure reworks the older sacred world and its powers of healing, wisdom and ascent. The Temple restores your access to that wider world, and to the Gods who stood behind it.

VII. The Measure of Men: The Forefathers by Their Works

The Temple’s judgement is plain: the forefathers of Hellas and the ancient world stand higher than the Gospel figure in wisdom, and nearer to the Gods. Test it against works you can open today.

Compare contributions, not birthplaces. The Gospel figure is known only through others, and Socrates also wrote nothing, so authorship can’t be the rule of greatness. The measure is the breadth, depth and lasting use of the works. By that measure the Temple chooses its forefathers, and invites you to read them as your own.

VIII. Your Next Day in Zevism

Tomorrow morning you speak to Zeus by name and place the day under His protection. You read 1 page: Epictetus on kinship, or Plato on becoming like God. At work you keep a hard commitment, because Ma’at is kept in small acts. In the evening you review the day and close it with a prayer. On the 7th day you decide what comes next.

That is the return: a Father named, a practice kept, a life ordered by truth.

Examine the full record: Things Nobody Wants to Accept about Christianity gathers 52 dossiers on scripture, doctrine and institutional power. Reading it is never a condition of entry.

You are returning to the Father and the Gods. Begin with Zeus today.

Continue

• Next. The first prayer and a 7-day orientation. Begin Your Return
• The Positive Case. What Zevism gives your life. Why Zevism
• The Full Record. 52 historical dossiers. Christianity Review