Temple of Zeus · Zevism: True Primordial Spirituality

The Borrowed Testament

Author: High Priest Zevios Metathronos

How the New Testament was written in botched Greek, built on stolen Pythagorean teachings, and why the West's affinity with Christianity is actually a buried memory of the Greek religion it replaced.

Written in Greek. About Greeks. By People Who Knew Greeks.

The New Testament is a Greek text. Not a Hebrew text. Not an Aramaic text. A Greek text. Every book, every epistle, every gospel was composed in Koine Greek: the common Greek of the Hellenistic Mediterranean.¹² The earliest manuscripts are Greek. The theological vocabulary is Greek. The conceptual framework is Greek.

This is the foundational fact that the Christian tradition obscures at every turn. Christianity presents itself as a continuation of the Hebrew prophetic tradition, rooted in the Torah and the Psalms. But the actual text of its founding documents is written in the language of Plato, composed by authors steeped in Hellenistic culture, and structured using philosophical concepts that have no origin in Hebrew thought.

The Koine Greek of the New Testament is functional but rough. It lacks the syntactical elegance of Plato or the rhetorical precision of Demosthenes. Nineteenth-century scholars dismissed it as "bad Greek," even "Holy Ghost Greek," a broken pidgin of the Levant. Then the papyri were dug out of the Egyptian sand, and the sneer collapsed. Adolf Deissmann demonstrated that the language of the Gospels is the ordinary vernacular of the Mediterranean world, word for word the same Greek found on thousands of everyday letters, receipts, and petitions.¹ Moulton and Milligan completed the demonstration across the entire vocabulary.² The New Testament's Greek is not failed Attic. It is the demotic tongue of a Hellenized world: blunt, functional, and everywhere.

And the audience was Hellenized too. Martin Hengel's monumental study established, from inscriptions, papyri, and the literary record, that Hellenism had penetrated Palestine itself from the early third century BCE: the Greek language in Jerusalem, Greek education, Greek institutions, Greek loanwords throughout the later rabbinic literature.³ Lee Levine confirmed the picture for the Roman period.⁴ The old wall between "Jewish Palestine" and "Greek Diaspora" is a scholarly ruin. The New Testament was written in Greek because Greek was the air its world breathed.

And yet, beneath this rough surface, the ideas are unmistakably Greek.

The Text Confesses Its Teachers

The proof is not inference. It is quotation. At its most solemn moments, the New Testament cites pagan Greek poetry by the line.

Standing before the Areopagus in Athens, Paul grounds his sermon in an altar inscribed to an unknown god and then quotes a Stoic hymn to Zeus: τοῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος ἐσμέν, "for we are indeed his offspring" (Acts 17:28). The line is Aratus of Soli, Phaenomena 5, from a poem whose opening invocation is addressed to Zeus himself.⁵ The companion phrase in the same verse, "in him we live and move and have our being," descends from the Epimenides tradition of Crete.⁷ Paul preaching the Hebrew God in Athens reached for Greek verse about Greek gods, because Greek verse was the language in which the audience knew the divine.

τοῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος ἐσμέν: "For we are indeed his offspring."

Aratus of Soli, Phaenomena 5, addressed to Zeus; quoted verbatim by Paul, Acts 17:28.

Twice more the text signs its debts. First Corinthians 15:33 quotes Menander's comedy Thais word for word: φθείρουσιν ἤθη χρήσθ᾽ ὁμιλίαι κακαί, "bad company ruins good character."⁶ Titus 1:12 quotes Epimenides of Crete and calls him "a prophet of their own": Κρῆτες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται, "Cretans are always liars."⁷ Three pagan Greek authors, quoted approvingly, inside the sacred text itself. The New Testament does not merely think in Greek. It quotes Greeks at its most serious moments.

The Teachings the Gospels Took

The core ethical and spiritual teachings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels are, point by point, restatements of teachings that existed in the Greek philosophical tradition centuries earlier. This is not a matter of vague similarity. It is a matter of specific, identifiable correspondence.

The Borrowed Teachings

Christian Teaching	Greek Predecessor
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" (Matt. 7:12)	Thales of Miletus, asked how one lives best and most justly: "If we do not ourselves do what we blame in others" (Diogenes Laertius 1.36). Isocrates, Nicocles 61: "Do not do to others what angers you when you experience it at their hands." The Stoics made reciprocity cosmic law.⁸
"Love your enemies" (Matt. 5:44)	Socrates in Plato's Crito (49c-d): "One must never do wrong, even in return for wrong done to oneself."⁹ The Stoics taught universal benevolence toward all rational beings.
"The kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21)	Plato, Republic IX: the just city exists first within the soul.¹⁰ The Stoics: the ἡγεμονικόν (ruling principle) within each person is a fragment of the divine λόγος. Plotinus: the One is found by turning inward.
"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom" (Matt. 19:24)	Pythagorean communalism: initiates surrendered private property, and κοινὰ τὰ φίλων ("friends hold all things in common") was the school's watchword (Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras 72, 168-169).¹¹ The Cynics (Diogenes, Crates) rejected wealth entirely. Plato's guardians in the Republic hold no personal property.
"The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit" (1 Cor. 6:19)	Plato, Timaeus 70a: the body houses the divine soul. Pythagorean doctrine: the body is a vessel for the transmigrating soul. σῶμα σῆμα (soma sema: "the body is a tomb/sign"), which Plato attributes to the Orphic tradition itself (Cratylus 400c; Gorgias 493a).¹²
"In the beginning was the Logos" (John 1:1)	Heraclitus (c. 535-475 BCE): "This Λόγος holds always but humans always prove unable to understand it" (B1), and "listening not to me but to the Λόγος, it is wise to agree that all things are one" (B50).¹³ The Stoics: the Λόγος is the rational principle pervading all reality. Philo of Alexandria fused the Stoic Λόγος with Jewish theology and called it God's "firstborn Son" (πρωτόγονος υἱός) before the Gospels were written.¹⁵ C.H. Dodd's standard study of the Fourth Gospel traces the prologue's lineage through exactly this Philonic and Stoic channel.¹⁴
"I am the Light of the world" (John 8:12)	Plato, Republic VI (508a-509b): The Good is to the intelligible world as the Sun is to the visible world.¹⁰ Light = truth = divinity is a Platonic equation centuries older than the Gospels.
"Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom" (Matt. 18:3)	The Orphic-Pythagorean emphasis on spiritual purity and the shedding of worldly attachment as prerequisite for divine communion. The Mysteries required fasting, purification, simplicity.¹⁸
The communion meal (bread and wine as body and blood)	The Dionysian rites: wine received as the god himself, "poured out to the gods" so that through him mortals might have good things (Euripides, Bacchae 385-387, 650-654).¹⁶ The kykeon of Eleusis.¹⁸ And the hostile witness that seals it: Justin Martyr, a Christian, conceded that the mysteries of Mithras offered bread and a cup of water in deliberate parallel to the Christian Eucharist (First Apology 66).¹⁷ Ritual communion through the fruit of the vine was Greek before it was Christian.
Resurrection after three days	Dionysos: torn apart, descended to Hades, returned. Persephone: descended, returned. Orpheus: descended, returned. Heracles: descended, returned.¹⁹ Mettinger's reassessment, conducted in full knowledge of the modern critique, confirmed the dying-and-rising pattern in the primary ancient evidence.²⁰ The descent-and-return grammar is older than Christianity by a millennium.

Every one of these teachings was available in the Greek world before the Gospels were composed. The authors of the New Testament wrote in Greek, for Greek-speaking audiences, in cities saturated with Greek philosophy. The idea that they independently arrived at identical teachings through divine revelation, while surrounded by those teachings in their daily intellectual environment, requires a suspension of critical thinking that no serious historian can sustain.

Apollonius of Tyana: The Greek Christ

Apollonius of Tyana (c. 15-100 CE) was a Greek Neopythagorean philosopher, miracle worker, and wandering teacher who lived at exactly the same time as Jesus. His biography, written by Philostratus at the request of the empress Julia Domna, describes a life that parallels the Gospel accounts point by point.²²

Before his birth, a divine messenger appeared to his mother announcing that her son would be divine (Life of Apollonius 1.4-5). He gathered disciples. He traveled, teaching wisdom and performing healings. He cast out spirits. He raised a dead girl in Rome, touching her and speaking softly at the funeral bier (4.45). He was put on trial before Roman authority, before Domitian himself (8.1-8). He could not be killed: he vanished from the courtroom (8.8). He ascended to heaven, called upward by a chorus of voices (8.30). And after his departure he appeared to a doubting young follower to prove that the soul is immortal (8.31).²²

Apollonius was a follower of Pythagoras. He practiced vegetarianism, wore only linen, took vows of silence, and taught that God is pure intellect, accessible only through the intellect. He traveled to India and studied with the Brahmins. He was, in every respect, a Greek holy man operating within the Greek spiritual tradition.²⁴

Christian apologists argue that Philostratus wrote his biography after the Gospels and therefore copied from them. The chronology is more complicated than that. Apollonius and Jesus were contemporaries. The oral traditions about both circulated simultaneously. Apollonius had temples dedicated to him across the Mediterranean world. He was compared to Jesus by pagan and Christian writers from the 3rd century onward: Hierocles drew the parallel to attack Christianity, and Eusebius wrote an entire treatise, Against Hierocles, to answer him.²²²³

The question is not "who copied whom." The question is: why do a Greek philosopher and a Jewish teacher produce identical biographical patterns? Because the pattern itself is Greek: the θεῖος ἀνήρ (theios aner, "divine man") archetype that was fully developed in Greek culture centuries before either figure was born.²³ Jesus was cast in a Greek mold. The mold existed before he did.

The Name That Echoes Zeus

IE-ZEUS: The Invocation Hidden in the Name

The Greek form of the name "Jesus" is Ἰησοῦς (Iesous). Mainstream etymologists trace this from Hebrew Yeshua through Aramaic into Greek. The "Ie" prefix, they say, derives from the Hebrew theophoric element Yah (from YHWH). The laboratory etymology can stand. What follows here is a reading of what Greek ears heard, and such readings belong to the oldest hermeneutic tradition of the Greeks themselves: Plato's Cratylus devotes its longest argument to letters and names as carriers of divine meaning (424e-427e),¹² and the Marcosian mystics of the second century mapped the vowels of the alphabet onto the heavens and the harmony of the cosmos (Irenaeus, Against Heresies I.14-15).²⁵

The Greek-speaking world heard Ἰη-σοῦς. The exclamation Ἰή (Ie) is attested in Greek as a ritual cry, particularly in the Dionysian rites (ἰὴ Βάκχε, "Ie Bakkhe!"). And the phonetic proximity to Ζεύς (Zeus) is unmistakable. Whether or not the etymology is direct, the phonetic resonance operated powerfully on Greek ears. A Greek convert hearing "Iesous" heard an echo of Zeus. The name sounded native. It sounded divine. It sounded Greek.

The vocative form Ἰησοῦ (Iesou, "O Jesus!") would have functioned as an invocatory cry in Greek religious experience indistinguishable in form from how one might call upon a god. The theological content was Jewish. The phonetic container was Greek. And this mattered enormously for conversion.

IAO and YHWH: The Vowels of Zeus

The Greek rendering of the Tetragrammaton YHWH appears in Greek magical and theological texts as ΙΑΩ (IAO). This form is found in the Greek Magical Papyri,²⁸²⁹ in Gnostic texts, in Diodorus Siculus, who reports that the God of the Jews is invoked as Ἰαώ (Bibliotheca 1.94.2),²⁶ and in Clement of Alexandria.²⁷ ΙΑΩ consists of three Greek vowels: Iota, Alpha, Omega. It is pure vocalism: pure breath, pure πνεῦμα.

The connection to Zeus is deeper than phonetics. Ζεύς in the accusative is Δία (Dia), and the genitive is Διός (Dios). The root *Dyeu- (from PIE, meaning "sky, shine, divine") is the same root that gives us the Latin Deus, Dios in Spanish, Dieu in French, and the Sanskrit Deva.³⁰ The vowel pattern IA (as in ΙΑΩ) maps onto the phonetic space of the Zeus theonym. ΙΑΩ is, in this reading, not merely a Greek vocalization of a Hebrew name. It is the Greek vowel-soul breathed into a Semitic consonantal skeleton. The consonants are Hebrew. The breath is Greek.

The Gods Became "Daemons"

The Greek word δαίμων (daimon) originally meant a divine being, a spirit intermediate between gods and humans. In Hesiod, the δαίμονες are the spirits of the Golden Age, benevolent guardians of mortals (Works and Days 121-126).³¹ In Plato, the δαίμων is a guiding spirit (Socrates' δαιμόνιον, Apology 31c-d),³² and Diotima defines the whole race of daimones as the interpreters and ferrymen of all traffic between gods and men (Symposium 202d-203a).³³ In Neoplatonism, δαίμονες are cosmic intermediaries in the hierarchy between the One and matter.

Christianity inverted the term. The δαίμονες became "demons": evil spirits, agents of Satan, enemies of God. This was a deliberate theological operation, and the smoking gun survives in the Greek Bible itself. The Septuagint renders Psalm 95:5 as πάντες οἱ θεοὶ τῶν ἐθνῶν δαιμόνια: "all the gods of the nations are demons."³⁴ Paul repeats the formula to the Corinthians: what the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God (1 Cor. 10:20).³⁴ By reclassifying the entire intermediate divine hierarchy of the Greek world as demonic, Christianity eliminated the competition. Every guardian spirit, every local deity, every nature divinity, every ancestral god became an enemy of the one true God.

The gods of Greece didn't disappear. They were rebranded as the enemies of humanity. This is the most successful propaganda operation in the history of religion. Athena, goddess of wisdom, became a demon. Aphrodite, goddess of love, became a demon. Apollo, god of light, music, healing, and prophecy, became a demon. Pan, god of nature, became the visual template for Satan himself: hooves, horns, and goat-legs.

What was sacred became evil by decree. Not by argument. Not by evidence. By power.

Why the West Loved Christianity

There is a question that few historians ask honestly. Why did Christianity succeed in the Greco-Roman world? Why did a small Jewish sect from the Levant conquer the cultural heirs of Homer, Plato, and Aristotle?

The standard answers (Roman political adoption, Constantine's conversion, persecution of competitors) explain the mechanics. They don't explain the emotional resonance. Millions of people in the Roman world chose Christianity before Constantine. They chose it freely, often at great personal cost. Why?

Because Christianity, stripped of its corruptions, is Greek religion in Jewish clothing.

The dying-and-rising god: Dionysos. The savior who descends to the underworld and returns: Orpheus, Persephone, Heracles. The communion meal where the god is consumed: the Dionysian rites. The promise that initiates will conquer death: the Eleusinian Mysteries. The concept of a divine Logos that structures all reality: Heraclitus, the Stoics, Philo. The idea that God is beyond being: Plato's ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας. The triadic divine structure: Neoplatonic One-Nous-Psyche mapped onto Father-Son-Spirit. Werner Jaeger documented how Greek paideia became the vessel of Christian theology;³⁵ Edwin Hatch demonstrated the same transfusion from within the church's own scholarly tradition.³⁶

The Greco-Roman world recognized Christianity because it already knew these ideas. The teaching was familiar. The stories resonated. The rituals felt right. The West didn't convert to something alien. It converted to a simplified, monotheistic, ethicized version of what it already believed. Christianity succeeded in the Greek world because it was the Greek world, reduced, repackaged, and given a Hebrew origin story.

The last pagan emperor said as much, from the throne. Julian, writing Against the Galileans, charged that the Christians had assembled their doctrine out of Greek philosophy and Hebrew scripture while disowning both sources, teaching nothing that the Greeks had not taught first.³⁷ A hostile witness, from the highest seat of power, confirming the genealogy.

What was lost in the repackaging was precision. The Mysteries had levels. Christianity flattened them. The philosophical tradition had nuance. Christianity dogmatized it. The Greek gods were many, each governing a domain with specific expertise. Christianity collapsed them all into one God and consigned the rest to Hell. The rich, multi-leveled architecture of Greek spiritual science became a single story with a single moral: believe or be damned.

This is Izfet: the entropy of the sacred. The reduction of a complex, living tradition into a rigid, simplified, weaponized form. The cult-makers (Yehubor) took what worked, stripped what was dangerous (the Mysteries, the initiatory practices, the direct experience of the divine), and packaged the remainder as a mass-market religion that required obedience rather than transformation.

Christianity didn't defeat Greek religion. It ate it. It consumed the body and discarded the soul. The dying-and-rising god, the communion meal, the Logos, the Trinity, the promise of eternal life: all Greek. What Christianity added was the threat. Believe, or burn forever. That addition is not Greek. It is Izfet wearing a cross.

The Corruption: Hell

The Greek afterlife was not a binary of heaven and hell. It was a graduated system: the Elysian Fields for the virtuous, Tartarus for the wicked (specifically those who offended the gods directly), and the Asphodel Meadows for the ordinary, from Homer's grey realm of shades in Odyssey 11 onward. Plato's judgment myths in the Gorgias (523a-527a) and the Republic (Book X, 614b-621d) formalize the proportionality: punishment fits the offense, most souls rest, and nearly all sentences are finite.³⁸ The Mysteries taught that the initiated soul could navigate the afterlife consciously and ascend rather than merely drift.

The Christian Hell is something else entirely. Eternal, infinite, irrevocable punishment for finite offenses. A place designed not for cosmic justice but for cosmic terror. The purpose of Hell is not correction (the punishment never ends, so the soul can never improve). The purpose of Hell is control. Believe, or suffer forever.

This concept does not come from Greek thought. It does not come from the Hebrew Bible either (Sheol in the Tanakh is a grey, neutral underworld, not a place of torment). It emerges in the intertestamental period, influenced by Zoroastrian dualism, and is fully weaponized by the early Church as a tool of psychological dominance.³⁹

Hell is the signature of the Yehubor hand on a Greek body. Everything that resonates in Christianity (love, sacrifice, eternal life, the indwelling divine) is Greek. The one element that has no Greek root, no philosophical justification, no proportionality, no mercy: Hell. That element is the chain.

Objections and Replies

Objection One: "The Dying-and-Rising God Is a Scholarly Mirage"

The strongest modern attack on this essay's central parallel is Jonathan Z. Smith's Drudgery Divine (1990). Smith demonstrated that the older "dying-and-rising god" category, as Frazer and the early history-of-religions school built it, rested on late, tendentious, and heavily Christianized evidence, and that the category itself was largely manufactured to imply that Christianity was derivative.²¹ Steelmanned, the objection says: the parallel is an artifact of the comparer's agenda, not a fact of the ancient world.

The reply is precision. This essay's argument does not rest on Frazer, and it does not need him. Tryggve Mettinger's The Riddle of Resurrection (2001) re-examined the primary Near Eastern evidence in full knowledge of Smith's critique and concluded that the dying-and-rising pattern is genuinely attested for Osiris, Dumuzi, Baal, Melqart, and Adonis, though in forms more varied than Frazer admitted.²⁰ And for the Greek descent-and-return grammar this essay actually invokes, Persephone, Orpheus, Dionysos Zagreus, Heracles, no scholar of any school disputes the primary texts.¹⁸ Smith demolished a caricature. The ancient evidence remains standing.

Objection Two: "Palestinian Judaism Was Not Hellenistic"

E.P. Sanders' Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977) established that the Judaism from which Christianity emerged was Torah-centered and covenantal, not a Greek philosophy in disguise, and that Paul's categories must be read within that Jewish matrix.⁴⁰ Steelmanned, the objection says: the Gospels' roots run to Jerusalem, not Athens.

The reply dissolves the false binary the objection needs. Hengel's Judaism and Hellenism demonstrated that there was no unhellenized Judaism left by the first century: Greek was spoken in Jerusalem, Greek institutions had been planted in the city a generation before the Maccabees, and the rabbinic literature itself is saturated with Greek loanwords and Greek literary forms.³ Levine confirmed the depth of the fusion for the Roman period.⁴ Sanders' "Palestinian Judaism" was itself a Hellenistic Judaism, one that wrote, argued, and quoted its own scriptures in Greek. The dichotomy between Jerusalem and Athens is a modern construction. The ancient world had already merged the files.

Objection Three: "Parallelomania Proves Nothing"

Samuel Sandmel's famous 1962 address warned that lists of parallels are cheap: resemblance is not dependence, and extravagant parallel-hunting had become a disease of biblical scholarship.⁴¹ Steelmanned, the objection says: this essay's table of correspondences is exactly the disease Sandmel named.

The reply meets Sandmel on his own ground, because his warning presupposes the tests that distinguish dependence from coincidence: priority, contact, and specificity. Priority: every Greek source cited in this essay predates the New Testament by centuries. Contact: the New Testament is written in Koine Greek, cites the Septuagint as its Bible, and quotes Aratus, Menander, and Epimenides verbatim.⁵⁶⁷ Contact is not a hypothesis here; it is the text. Specificity: a divine Logos as God's firstborn intermediary, light as the signature of the Good, the daimon hierarchy rebranded as demons, these are technical doctrines with pedigrees, not generic human notions. Sandmel's warning convicts careless parallel-hunting. It does not touch documented literary dependence.

Continue Reading →

All of Christian Mysticism is Stolen from Ancient Greek and Neoplatonic Thought

Pseudo-Dionysius, the Celestial Hierarchy, apophatic theology, and the entire contemplative tradition of Christianity: every thread leads back to Plotinus, Proclus, and the Academy.

Sources & References

Deissmann, Adolf. Light from the Ancient East. 4th German ed. 1922; English translation, Hodder & Stoughton, 1927. The papyrus evidence that the Greek of the New Testament is the living vernacular Koine of the Mediterranean world.
Moulton, James Hope, and George Milligan. The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament Illustrated from the Papyri and Other Non-Literary Sources. Hodder & Stoughton, 1914-1929.
Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period. 2 vols. Fortress Press, 1974. The decisive demonstration that even Palestinian Judaism was deeply Hellenized.
Levine, Lee I. Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity: Conflict or Confluence? University of Washington Press, 1998.
Aratus of Soli, Phaenomena 5. τοῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος ἐσμέν, from the hymn to Zeus, quoted by Paul at the Areopagus (Acts 17:28).
Menander, Thais, fragment 218 (Kock). φθείρουσιν ἤθη χρήσθ᾽ ὁμιλίαι κακαί, quoted verbatim in 1 Corinthians 15:33.
Epimenides of Crete (DK 3B1). Κρῆτες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται, quoted in Titus 1:12; the same Cretan tradition stands behind "in him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28a).
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 1.36 (Thales on living justly); Isocrates, Nicocles 61. The golden rule in Greek moral teaching, centuries before the Gospels.
Plato, Crito 49c-d. Socrates: one must never do wrong, even in return for wrong.
Plato, Republic VI (508a-509b). The Good as the Sun of the intelligible world. IX: the just city within the soul.
Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras 72, 168-169. κοινὰ τὰ φίλων: the Pythagorean community of goods and the surrender of private property by initiates.
Plato, Cratylus 400c (the Orphic σῶμα σῆμα) and 424e-427e (letters as first names carrying meaning); Gorgias 493a.
Heraclitus, Fragments B1 and B50 (DK). On the Λόγος that holds always but humans fail to understand, and the Λόγος according to which all things are one.
Dodd, C.H. The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel. Cambridge University Press, 1953. The standard study of the Johannine prologue's Stoic and Philonic lineage.
Philo of Alexandria, On the Confusion of Tongues 146-147. The Logos as God's "firstborn Son" (πρωτόγονος υἱός), written before the Gospels.
Euripides, Bacchae 385-387, 650-654. Wine as the god himself, poured out to the gods so that through him mortals receive good things.
Justin Martyr, First Apology 66. The Christian concession that the mysteries of Mithras prescribed bread and a cup of water in parallel to the Eucharist.
Burkert, Walter. Ancient Mystery Cults. Harvard University Press, 1987.
Nilsson, Martin P. Geschichte der griechischen Religion. 2 vols. C.H. Beck, 1941/1950.
Mettinger, Tryggve N.D. The Riddle of Resurrection: "Dying and Rising Gods" in the Ancient Near East. Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2001. A reassessment written after the modern critique, confirming the pattern in the primary evidence.
Smith, Jonathan Z. Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity. University of Chicago Press, 1990. The strongest modern attack on the dying-and-rising parallel; engaged head-on in Objections and Replies.
Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana. c. 220 CE, commissioned by Julia Domna. Birth annunciation 1.4-5; the raised girl 4.45; the trial before Domitian 8.1-8; the ascension 8.30; the posthumous appearance 8.31. Cf. Eusebius of Caesarea, Against Hierocles.
Ehrman, Bart. How Jesus Became God. HarperOne, 2014. Classroom exercise comparing Apollonius and Jesus.
Mead, G.R.S. Apollonius of Tyana. 1901. Detailed study of the Life and its relationship to Gospel narratives.
Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies I.14-15. Marcus the Marcosian on the letters, the vowels mapped onto the heavens, and the alphabet as cosmic structure: letter-mysticism as an attested ancient Greek practice.
Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica 1.94.2. On ΙΑΩ as the Greek form of the divine name among the Jews.
Clement of Alexandria, Stromata V.6. On ΙΑΩ and the pronunciation of the divine name.
Greek Magical Papyri (PGM). Multiple instances of ΙΑΩ as divine invocation in Hellenistic magical practice.
Betz, Hans Dieter, ed. The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation. University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Fortson, Benjamin. Indo-European Language and Culture. 2nd ed. Blackwell, 2010. On PIE *Dyeus as root of Zeus, Deus, Dyaus.
Hesiod, Works and Days 109-126. The δαίμονες of the Golden Age as benevolent guardians.
Plato, Apology 31c-d. Socrates' δαιμόνιον as divine guiding spirit.
Plato, Symposium 202d-203a. Diotima: the daimones as interpreters and ferrymen of all that passes between gods and men.
Septuagint, Psalm 95:5 (Hebrew 96:5). πάντες οἱ θεοὶ τῶν ἐθνῶν δαιμόνια: "all the gods of the nations are demons"; echoed by Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:20.
Jaeger, Werner. Early Christianity and Greek Paideia. Harvard University Press, 1961.
Hatch, Edwin. The Influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity. 1890. Repr. Harper, 1957. Classic study of Hellenistic influence on early Christian theology.
Julian the Emperor, Against the Galileans (fragments). In Wilmer Cave Wright, ed., The Works of the Emperor Julian, vol. 3, Loeb Classical Library, 1923. The last pagan emperor's charge that Christianity taught nothing the Greeks had not taught first.
Homer, Odyssey 11; Plato, Gorgias 523a-527a; Republic X 614b-621d (the Myth of Er). The graduated, proportional Greek afterlife.
Cohn, Norman. Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith. Yale University Press, 1993. Zoroastrian dualism and the intertestamental transformation of the afterlife.
Sanders, E.P. Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion. Fortress Press, 1977. The scholarly benchmark for the Jewish matrix of Paul's thought; engaged in Objections and Replies.
Sandmel, Samuel. "Parallelomania." Journal of Biblical Literature 81 (1962): 1-13. The canonical warning against extravagant parallel-hunting; answered on its own terms in Objections and Replies.

Page & Holy Texts : High Priest Zevios Metathronos