Caustic Ramblings

This is a tentative 'speculative history' of Early Christianity I've been working on, according to my current level of knowledge and research on the religious climate of Late Antiquity Rome. This theory adopts a 'Christ Mythicist' view, which is the position that there was no 'historical Jesus' that closely matched the description of the Jesus Christ character we have in the Gospel narrative of the New Testament canon that is recognized by all variants of Mainstream Christianity that have survived to this day. The basic thesis here is that:

1. There were a great number of precursor sects, charismatic religious figures, movements, doctrines, and ideologies which led up to the formation of a distinctly-Roman Christianity; including but not limited to: The polytheistic cults of the Eastern Mediterranean and Neart East and the numinous symbolism each of them employed, Mystical Jewish sects like the Essenes and Nazarenes, Judeo-Platonic syncretistic philosophical works like those of Philo Judaeus, Alexandrian Greco-Egyptian syncretism in general, Jewish Messianic rebel movements, Jewish rabbis incorporating Stoic practices into their own teachings, ect.

2. The historical inspiration behind the Gospel narrative may have involved an Essene/Nazarene sect which played some role on the Judean revolt that began in 68 CE, and was crushed by the father-son team of Vespasian and Titus, with aid from the Herodian dynasty and allied monied interests from Alexandria. Much of this movement likely perished during the war, but the surviving elements may have spread to various Jewish diaspora communities throughout the cities of Asia Minor and other areas around the Eastern Mediterranean region. It may have been these groups who became the Ebionites. We can speculate this much: that that was probably nothing we'd today recognize as Christianity that existed during the 1st Century. Any precursor groups from that time would have been wholly Jewish in character. And then of course there was in abundance at that time, many pagan mystery cults that inspired the distinct Christianity that would form in the 2nd century.

3. Roman Chirstianity started off as a Judeo-Hellenic mystery cult during the early-mid 2nd century CE; the original structure consisted of an inner order of initiates who were able to understand the metaphors and symbolism of their "Jesus the Anointed" salvific figure that the outer teachings made references to. By this we could say that the cult had an outer order of hearers who received a more rudimentary set of teachings from the inner order; in summary, the outer circle would take spiritual and moral counsel from the inner clerical order of initiates. A religious scholar existing today who is able to time-travel back to their period would most certainly identify these first churches as being essentially 'Gnostic' in character according to contemporary definitions. Most of the initial converts to the early cult were probably thoroughly-Hellenzied diaspora Jews and gentile 'proselytes' (i.e. 'god-fearers') who had partially converted to Judaism, perhaps as a means of opting out of Roman civic society.

4. The mystery cult soon fanned out into a number of local churches scattered around the Eastern half of the Roman empire. it was in one of these churches, perhaps somewhere in an Asia Minor city where the first Gospel narrative was devised and written down. This was perhaps the first written codification of the Jesus story, which had prior been an oral legend. The scribes who penned the Gospel used a number of pre-existing literary sources, symbols, legends, and cultural motifs as a template to construct their own narrative. They re-imagined their Jesus savior figure as a parody of the life of the great first century sage and holy man, Apollonius of Tyana, combined with various stories of great Jewish rabbis from the last couple centuries prior. And for the narrative structure of the Gospel story, these scribes used the place-setting from Flavius Josephus's 'Wars of the Jews,' to provide a geographic venue for Jesus's preaching mission in the story. And finally, they employed the symbolism of the many dying-and-rising vegetation gods that were so common in the Near East during that time period. This first draft of the Gospel had many of the elements we would recognize centuries later in the version the state church would approve of as doctrinally-acceptable.

5. At some point early on there must have been a great number of schismatic movements, whereby a member (or several) from the inner order of initiates who had some sort of disagreement with the sect leadership, would split off and form their own new splinter sect. And it may have even been the case that in some instances, it was uninitiated hearers (undoubtedly ambitious and eager at the prospect of accumulating a band of followers) who branched off and formed their own churches, taking a more literalistic and matter-of-fact approach to the teachings. Lacking an understanding of the mystery symbolism and genuine spiritual teachings of the founding sect, these groups would fall back on a literal and legalistic reading of the Hebrew scriptures as a source of authority for their churches. Second century figures like Polycarp of Smyrna and Justin Martyr were probably the people who headed these counter-numinious splinter churches. Their doctrine was essentially a Stoic Judaism with a savior figure as the central focus. Some of these splinter churches took a middle ground between literalism and acknowledging mystery teachings. And among these groups, there were some that refused to acknowledge the authority of the Hebrew scriptures, much less the Mosaic laws contained within. It was Marcion of Sinope and his church which serves as a known historical example of the type of early church.

6. The early Churches which did retain their initiatory structures would increasingly incorporate Greco-Egyptian syncretistic ideas into their doctrines; ideas that were quite popular in Alexandria during the first several centuries of our common era. The Valentinian church doctrine and philosophy is likely quite indicative of what these churches were teaching at the time. These 'Gnostic' churches were certainly not so sectarian, exclusivist, and intolerant, like the more literalistic sects that would later coalesce into the state orthodoxy that formed in the 4th century. The Gnostic churches peacefully co-existed with other sects and mystery cults in what was then a vast sea of new religious movements. By the we would speculate that a wide swatch of early Christianity was indeed peaceful and respectful of the pluralistic religious climate of the Roman Empire in late antiquity. It just so happened that the more intolerant and dogmatic churches were the ones that contributed the most to the aforementioned orthodoxy that came about when Roman Christianity became THE state religion of Rome.

7. In summary, there was no one single Early Christianity, Early Christian Doctrine, or Early Christian church, going by the above facts and informed speculations. Rather, there was a constellation of different Christian sects, each having different doctrines and teachings. The Roman church's assertion that there was an unbroken chain of 'apostolic succession' going all the way back to the 1st century CE is a completely unfounded assertion, when we take all of the above information into consideration. There was especially not unbroken chain of doctrines and teachings going back that far that is ideologically compatible with any of the post-Nicene dogmas, proclamations, catechisms, ect. We know quite well from examining contemporary religious movements that the assertion of spurious lineages and pedigrees is all too common. Historical religious movements shouldn't be seen as being any exception to this general rule. And to claim that post-4th-century Roman Christianity is unique from this general trend would be a very clear use of the 'special pleading' fallacy.

I've been crisscrossing numerous theories in my head about how Christianity may have actually gotten its start; here I mean whatever was the real proto-Christianity that took root and spread around the Eastern area of the Roman Empire during the several centuries prior to its consolidation and codification as an official state doctrine with all the dogmas we recognize today as being mainstream Christianity.

Taking much inspiration from the so-called Mythicist school of critical Biblical scholarship, I'm pretty much now settled on the position that the personage of Jesus Christ, as depicted in the New Testament writings, was indeed a fictitious person and not a historical one. Now that is not to say that there were real people in and around 1st century CE Judea and the surrounding region that did not fit at least some aspects of the Jesus character. But that itself being true does not validate a literal, historical Jesus Christ.

So my basic working hypothesis now is that what we could today recognize as early forms of Christianity started during the early-mid second century somewhere in the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. My best guess was somewhere in Asia Minor (Anatolia). And this first movement did not just emerge out of a vacuum, but rather it branched off from an existing continuum of religious sects. So this first proto-Christian church probably came about as a Hellenic-style mystery school for either Proselyte Jews (gentiles who converted to Judaism, which seemed to be a big thing at the time) or Hellenized Jews who had become somewhat lax on strict law-adherence. Either of those choices would point to a location where a Jewish diaspora community awash in Hellenic culture might have been. The Mystery School would have been the core inner-circle of this new church, and the outer outer would have been a lay community of congregants who most likely lacked much of any knowledge of the mystery rites and practices of the core group. And what set this group apart from similar off-Jewish sects of the time would have been the use of Jesus narrative of the Gospels that we would recognize today. Though the original gospel story would probably not have looked exactly like the 4 that got officially canonized during the post-Nicean era, it may have somewhat resembled Mark without the obviously-interpolated ending part. In fact, most critical Biblical researchers these days agree that the other two 'synoptic' Gospels, Matthew and Luke, were probably based on Mark (or a similar older version, like the supposed "Q" source text). In other words, Luke and Matthew have source dependency on Mark.

Now, what would have this group based their savior myth and other doctrines on? Most likely, on numerous sources, which would have been in abundance from within the existing religions of the time. Dying/rising vegetation deities had been a thing for quite some time all over the Mediterranean and Middle East for millennia. The concept of a savior-incarnate would have drawn from very old heroic myths, with perhaps a borrowing from the mystical traditions of India; the stories of Krishna and the Buddha would have certainly spread into the rather-cosmopolitan Roman Empire of the first several centuries CE. Secondly, in the great cosmopolitan hub of Alexandria, there had already been a number of Greco-Egyptian and Judeo-Hellenic syncretist movements underway; a lot of the Jews living there had become so thoroughly Hellenized that some of the intellectually and mystically-inclined among them would have started mixing the Greco-Egyptian hodgepodge doctrines into their own Hebraic beliefs. Proto-Christianity would have certainly drawn from something along these lines. In fact, it was probably Alexandria and Asia Minor that were the two main starting epicenters of the early Christian movements.

One thing that does seem clear from reading the Gospel narrative is the pro-Roman attitude oozing out of the text (in contrast to the virulently anti-Roman sentiment of Jewish messianic groups of the time). If not due to later redactions and interpolations, this attitude might suggest that the original Gospel writer favored a doctrine that was not antagonistic toward the Roman authorities. And if we accept an early-mid 2nd century CE time for the initial writing of the first gospel, this would overlap directly with the several Roman-Jewish conflicts of that time period. First the uprising that took place in Judea from 66-70, which the Romans totally crushed, under the command of Vespasian and Titus. And several decades after that was the diaspora rebellion of 115-117, which we today refer to as the Kitos War. And then finally was the Bar Kokhba revolt which took place from 132-136. In other words this period was one of intense conflict between a rather vocal Jewish minority and their Greek/Roman rulers and the all-but-ubiquitous Hellenistic culture. During the heat of these conflicts it might have very well been a death sentence in any of the diaspora communities to belong to any Jewish group or sect that was overtly-hostile to Roman authority. And conversely, it would have been advantageous for Jews of the period to adopt a Roman and Hellenic-friendly variant of their own religion. By the later portion of the second century we already see approach clearly reflected in the rather-Stoic writings of Justin Martyr, whom later Church authorities considered to be one of their founding fathers. Though whether or not Justin Martyr was in actuality someone we could classify as Chirstian is perhaps a mystery that will never be solved; as 4th century Church scribes with a penchant for memory-holing earlier writings which conflicted with the post-Nicene narrative, maybe have simply retconned Justin's writings to fit said narrative. Anyway, I digress.

So let's say this new Roman-friendly Jewish cult became quite the sensation during the period of Roman-Jewish conflicts. Surely, many diaspora Jews and gentile converts were quite averse to being seen as rebels or people hostile to Roman rule; yet at the same time they wished to practice a type of religiosity that at the core was quite at odds with the traditional Greco-Roman religion and pretty much every established "pagan" religion (Many Romans considered Jews to be atheists, owing to their disbelief and/or disregard of the Gods). What a tough position to be in. But here with proto-Christianity, these people found a balance of sorts. And this early cult may have had the patronage of wealthy Roman citizens, or at least a few affluent and literate Jews who were thoroughly Hellenized, culturally-speaking.

And now we get to one of the core reasons I consider the first Gospel document to have been composed during the 2nd century, at the earliest. In his book The Christ Conspiracy, author and researcher Joseph Atwill draws an undeniable number of parallels between the Gospel story and the historical account Flavius Josepus (the Jewish turncoat who became a fixture of the Flavian court after the war) of the Roman-Jewish War of 66-70. Now I don't go as far as Atwill and thus I refrain from jumping to the conclusion that proto-Christianity was a deliberate creation of the Flavian regime, but I do see the evidence he brings to the surface as supporting the hypothesis that whichever person or group wrote the first version of the Gospel narrative, probably used the works of Josephus as source material for at least composing the story's setting. No conspiracy theory is required to support this explanation. Any person or group with sufficient resources (like access to a major library) and basic literary acumen could have composed new religious texts using already-existent source works. (This is pretty much how all new religions come about anyway)

So by this we can speculate that the first wave of proto-Christian efforts had a wealthy sponsor or two. And now we arrive at the curious figure of Marcion of Sinope (Asia Minor), who was a very-wealthy shipping magnate said to have headed his own Church. Marcion was later disavowed and declared a 'heretic' by the post-Nicean state church. Anyway, a man like Marcion would have certainly had the resources to employ a few scribes and researchers; enough of an effort to throw together some new religious literature. From what little we know it seems that Marcion's variant of early Christianity took a rather anti-Torah approach and likely appealed to both Jews and Proselyte converts who had quite a zeal for Jewish-like religiosity, yet harbored little love for any pedantic approach to the Mosaic Law and the legalistic tradition built around it. By the 2nd century, the major cities of the Empire had become full of malcontents who were ripe to jump aboard any new social movement which postured itself as a rebuke to the established and decadent mainstream institutions of the time. Proto-Christianity would have been one among many movements of this type. Roman Mithraism, and the the Cults of Isis and Cybele, were among other examples of this type. As an overall trend, it seems there was a sort of "Orientalism" of late antiquity that took hold of the popular imagination.

We can see in the 'authentic' letters (epistles) of 'Paul' the forensic clues of how the first Christian groups likely spread around the map. I've seen Mythicist author and researcher Robert M. Price speculate that the 'Paul' of those epistles may have in fact been a pseudonym and alter-ego of Marcion himself; perhaps with the memory of a few authentic historical people tossed into this probable composite character of 'Paul'. We know from observing the ways new religious movements are formed in our current era, that contrived and concocted pedigrees and lineages is a common method of persuading new members of the religious group in question that the tradition is much older than it actually is. And we can easily apply this MO to the formation process of Christianity. Come to think of it, how are the supposed 'Apostles' any more real (in the literal sense) than HP Blavatsky's 'Mahatmas' or the 'Ascended Masters' of the various New Age groups which spawned from her fraudulent works?

So whomever this 'Paul' figure is supposed to represent, was the mean by which the Jesus story first spread around; it's evangelists started 'churches' in various locales and certainly after that there were a number of copycat movements purporting to be the original lineage. These various groups likely hit up the Jewish communities as their first targets of evangelizing and then after that, disaffected gentiles. The proto-Christian movement would have featured a wide spectrum of different beliefs, and most importantly, different approaches to interpreting and incorporating the Jewish Canon (i.e. the Old Testament) into their respective doctrines and practices. This would have run the gamut from outright Torah rejection (the Marcionites, various 'Gnostic' sects, among others) to full Torah adherence (Ebionites and similar groups). And somewhere in the middle would have been the approach of harmonizing the inclusion of the Torah and Tanakh and authoritative revelatory texts, while at the same time placing emphasis on and precedence of the new Christ revelation. This middle position seems to have been the basis of what would later evolve into the 'Orthodoxy' which the post-Nicean state church would champion. Another spectrum within Early Christianity to consider would have been the range of esotericism to literalism practiced within the group in question. Again, this differed a lot by group/sect. It very well may have been that the first proto-sect to spread the Gospel story around did indeed intepret it in a totally allegorical manner, and that the later literlization and historicization of that story was a corruption rather than something based on an authentic view of the earliest users of the Jesus myth.

Regarding the OT question, it's actually quite logical that the 4th century state Chuch would pick the middle approach, as it would be the most appealing to the greatest number of Christian. But as a result of this process, all the various Churches (and their differing doctrines) which would comprise early Christianity, would have to be harmonized, and thus homogenized, into a single unifying doctrine. And thus we see today why there are so many contradictions and plot holes on the NT canon when its looked at as a whole corpus.

So by this we can picture Early Christianity as being quite doctrinally-diverse, and not a homogeneous orthodoxy later Church historians would pretend it was. Much of what would have been authentic Early Christian belief and practice would have eventually been dumbed down or even lost as the state-sponsored orthodoxy both assimilated and snuffed out the earlier variants of Christianity. And thus, what we know today as Christianity should really be called Churchianity.

Note: the following is from an archived web page. In other words, I am not the author of this. However I thought it would be nice to mirror this chronology here, as it quite well demonstrates up close how the mess of epic proportions known as Constantinian-Pauline-Abrahamism gradually/incrementally unfolded and metastasized.

Beginning of text:

The idea that Christians persecuted Pagans is a fairly new one in the world of scholarship. Ramsay MacMullen dates its inception to 1986 with Noethlichs and says that “Christian readiness for action carried to no matter what extremes has not always received the acknowledgment it deserves in modern accounts of the period” and that “prior to the 1980s, readers will be hard put to find Firmicus’ word ‘persecution’ describing the conduct of the Christian empire toward its non-Christian subjects.” He notes that R.M. Price in 1993 attributes the “’absence of continuous religious strife’ to ‘a general determination in Late Roman society to minimize the divisiveness of religious differences’ (yes, by extermination).” It is almost a certainty that most Christians are unaware of this process of genocide carried out by their religion.[1]

In the end, neither alleged (but wholly mythical) social egalitarianism nor thirst for a superior religious experience drove conversion in the fourth century; fear did. Ramsay MacMullen has noted the penalties and incentives used by the Christian authorities to speed conversion:
Government…at the urging of the bishops weighed in with threats, and more than threats, of fines, confiscation, exile, imprisonment,flogging, torture, beheading, and crucifixion. What more could be imagined? Nothing. The extremes of conceivable pressure were brought to bear. Thus, over the course of many centuries, compliance was eventually secured and the empire made Christian in truth.[2]
What this list demonstrates is not only the long history of persecution of ethnic religion in the Christian Roman Empire, but also the enduring nature of Paganism in the face of these persecutions.

Note: This list is incomplete and will continue to be updated. It is also limited to the persecution of classical Mediterranean Paganism; it does not begin to address the genocide of European Paganism after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

All dates given are C.E. (Common Era). Permission is granted to reproduce this table by the author so long as authorship remains intact.

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Some thoughts of mine on one of those "religion vs. evolution" debates I recently came across on a Discord chat:

Orthodoxy, or really any Abrahamic religion, is fundamentally about maintaining a dominant frame in the eyes of a mass following; an outward face of certitude and absolute correctness on all things, whereby anything less comes off as weakness and wavering. The reason why is because these religions came about primarily as ways of ideologically herding flocks of unskillful and unmindful human followers (compare say to Buddhism, where pandering to the laziest and dumb of the laity was never a part of the religion). And thus the way these religions must interpret their own scriptures must be in the form of a lowest-common-denominator dogma that even its brutish 80 IQ followers can make some sense of.

So for an orthodox Abrahamic religion to even admit one error on something like scientific understanding, is to give up that frame of certitude and admit that has indeed been wrong about something, and this of course begs the next question, "well, what else are you guys wrong on?" In other words, a Pandora's Box of incessant probing and questioning. When a religion based on literalist dogma and historicized mythological narratives becomes the object of an inquisition, then it's light's out. When the average unthinking mass follower smells blood in the water, they just might wander off to some other ideological camp.

Religions that are fundamentally pluralistic, and/or based on a universal natural law, are far more flexible when it comes to adapting to the changes in understanding of the physical universe and thus can work very well with science.

In summary, the wholesale denial/dismissal of scientific theories like evolution only really seems to be an Abrahamic problem. And of course anyone who has studied comparitive religions and metaphysics has probably arrived at that conclusion that Science and Spirituality are not mutually exclusive.

In my view, paranoia and fundamentalism so often go hand in hand. Take internet conspiracy culture as a prime example of this. One can find no shortage of youtube videos pages and webpages full of rantings and raving about "occult" and "pagan" symbolism being everywhere in pop culture. The cranks, lunatics and opportunists peddling this paranoia would insist that these symbols are mendaciously hidden in plain sight by a cabal of dark-evil-elite conspirators who have infiltrated mass media and big entertainment and are thus using their influence to openly gloat about all the secret occult knowledge they supposedly possess. And go to any video on youtube about any spiritual or religious topic imaginable and you'll see the comments section full of the same type of rabidly-incoherent, frothing-at-the-mouth rants, typically colored by a motley assortment of out-of-context Bible quotations, often in the form of just one or two isolated verses.

The central paranoia of the Christian fundamentalist in particular, is that every type of expression out there in the big bad world of pop culture, media and shared ideas, is an affront to or an attack upon the paranoid person's adopted version of whatever variant of Christianity they happen to adhere to. And of course there are those snowflakes who claim not to follow any particular domination; in their own words their rationalization might be something along the lines of, "I just follow the Bible, plain and simple!" Well, quite simple expect for the annoying fact that there are now more than 40,000 different ways of interpreting that "plain and simple" body of scripture. If this many disagreements do exist, then which one is correct? By what standard is an interpretation correct or incorrect? Who exactly should be vested with the authority of determining which interpretation is the most correct? (Entire massive bloody wars have been fought over this very question) Come on now, if the Bible was a clear and unambiguous message any average Joe could easy understand, then why isn't there just one Christian sect? The clear answer is that anyone claiming that they follow "nothing but the Bible" is either totally full of shit or they have self-deluded their mind into a pretzel.

Essentially, modern Westerners are supremely averse to genuine spirituality, and this is especially true for the most fervently "religious" Westerners. They are in fact the greatest enemies of spirituality. Modern modern people are materialists in one form or another. At least secular modern people are just ambivalent about or lackadaisically dismissive of spirituality, as opposed to wanting to wage "holy" wars against it. Literalist Christian fundamentalists are materialists and empiricists when it comes to everything in existence except the what they believe their scriptures say. And even then they glean a mostly-materialist worldview from the Bible. Jesus Christ **had** to have been a literal historical person, and the events depicted in the Gospel narrative **had** to have happened literally, word-for-word. The oh-so-lofty concepts of allegory and archetypes be damned!

People in general tend to be fearful toward what they cannot (or simply refuse to) understand. And thus they may project and lash out all their inner insecurities and psychic impurities toward anything reeking of higher wisdom. Think of the envious student who speaks using the worst of profanities against the teacher who flunked them for poor performance. And with the modern cultural take on Western individualism, so many people are cursed with a puerile entitlement complex that beams into their minds the notion that they are "owed" things for the mere feat of existing as an **individual**. And thus, in the realm of metaphysical matters, the Truth should simply fall into one's lap, regardless of their own particularity moral character, in-born temperament or level of accumulated merit. Nothing should be rightfully earned through effort and struggle; everything should be freely given out, because reasons.

The age-old Master/Apprentice dynamic has been pissed upon many times over by the hyper-entitled man/woman-child Westerner. And perhaps we could state that the 60s counterculture "revolution" only fanned the flames of this noxious adolescent mentality; everything thereafter became all about "me, me, me, me, myself, and I." The postwar (WWII) economic bonanza, coupled with the rapid advance in material high-technology, was the gasoline that made these flames 100x higher. And now with the internet, where everyone had all the information (or porn) they could ever want at their fingertips, the demand for instant answers to everything is even more magnified than before.

The self-righteous fundamentalist feels a seething rage toward any type of religious knowledge that is directly out of his reach. According his passion-ridden materialist mind, if **he** doesn't see it then it simply isn't there. And anyone who does insist it is indeed there must have some kind of hidden, nefarious agenda up his sleeve. Obvious the fundamentalist's personal God is an egalitarian and democrat who freely puts out all the secrets of the universe for anyone to effortlessly comprehend without any serious effort required. Within the paradigm of modern materialist science, if the scientist (in all likelihood, a glorified technician or doctor of rote memorization) can't read something with the instruments available to the practitioners of his field, then the proposed phenomenon in question simply doesn't exist, rather than being something that may or may not exist.

Homo Hubris is the man of the current era.

Great little comment I just spotted today:

The Bible from creation to the crowning of Solomon is a grand cosmic myth, a story book of the constellations. YHWH is the moon god. The Akkadians deified their kings, combined them with gods and placed them in the constellations. The text was expanded like the Gilgamesh epic through expansion by parallelism and resumptive repetition. Scholars have yet to figure out the original text and it is not that hard to do. The stories went from Akkadia to the Amorites, Hittites, and finally the Assyrians who changed the name from Sin to YHWH, Marduk to Moses.

I will have to look more into the Sin/Yahweh association. But let's run with it for now, if just for the purpose of hypothetical games. Sin was an old Akkadian moon god that became especially revered by the Imperial Assyrian regime that dominated the Iron Age Near East. The Egyptian name for Moon was "Iah" (pronounced, "Yah" and of course one of the top Sumerian-Akkadian gods was "Ea" (also pronounced "Yah"). Yahweh as a major Hebrew god may have came about as a play on words, so to speak.

It seems as if the Jerusalem priesthood the came to be during the Persian period (right after the fall of the Assyrians and Babylonians) created a new national god that in function was an amalgamation of other gods of the time. It would have made much sense to use a god-name that was familiar in the broader region. As evidenced by the Elephantine papyri, the Persian rulers may have stationed a group of Semitic-speaking scribes in Egypt to assist with administering the newly-annexed territory. These scribes may have been the founding element of the later Jerusalem priesthood. If these scribes were Sin-worshippers they may have adapted the local (in this case Egyptian) Iah for their moon-worship.

If the proto-Jewish priests were indeed Sin worshipers then their origins may have been among the scribal ruling element of the old Assyrian regime! The Persians were quite known for their mercy and tolerance, in sharp contrast to their Assyrian predecessors. So instead of wholesale- massacring the old regime, they may have very well retained the useful elements (like scribes) and relocated them to a faraway part of the empire where they wouldn't have the opportunity to stir up any local revolts or be a general nuisance. Egypt would have been quite a safe distance from Northern Mesopotamia. But the Persians weren't able to hold Egypt for very long after the initial conquest due to a series of local revolts. The Persian administration would have been bounced right out of there and the southern Levant would have been the closest Persian-run area to Egypt to resettle in, where their next job would have been helping the Persian crown conduct administrative affairs over groups of Phoenician/Canaanite subjects. Jerusalem would have been the new abode for the Sin/Iah scribes. The peoples to the area to the north of them, in Israel/Samaria would have been following the old Canaanite pantheon, i.e. the pantheon of El, known as the Elohim. Yah(weh) would have been a minor or nonexistent god to these people. Eventually, through a series of events we don't really know the true nature of yet, the Yahweh priests in Jerusalem eventually came to dominate the religious affairs of the whole region all the way from northern limits of the Sinai border up the border with Phoenicia proper.

I'll have to further explore this thought-stream in more detail in the future.

I adopted this list from "The Dharma Manifesto", which is a book by the American Vedic guru and scholar, Sri Dharma Pravartaka Acharya. I expanded on each of the 10 points:

1. All three Abrahamic religions have a shared acceptance of the teachings of the Old Testament (Hebrew) prophets. In addition to that, Christians have Jesus, and Muslims have Mohammad. The prophetic narrative places the historical Hebrew/Jewish people (whether they were a real nation or merely a literary contrivance of the post-exile priesthood) at the very center of both earthly and cosmic affairs. This narrative promotes the supremacy of Hebrew mythology and legal tradition over that of all other historical cultures.

2. Anthropomorphic Monotheism: The supreme god of Abrahamism is seen in very human terms, including his exhibition of such very human emotions as anger, jealously, prejudice and jealously. According to various Natural Way traditions, God is vastly beyond (to put it lightly) anything resembling human characteristics or attributes, and the association of God with such base things should be seen by any genuine seeker as being both supremely perverted and abominable. In a higher metaphysical sense, the vulgar anthropomorphization of the Godhead could be seen as the ultimate blasphemy.

3. Abrahamism, and its atheistic offshoot known as Marxism, promotes a profound sense of religious and ideological exclusivity, creating two strictly delineated camps of “believers” in opposition to everyone else. All of these religions and ideologies aim, in one way or another, at achieving some form of world domination. This renders all mobile and expansionist Abrahamic religions as globalist ideologies in both form and function. The largest of these religions have tirelessly worked over the centuries to subvert, undermine and destroy countless local cultures and their Natural Way traditions. By design, totalizing/monolithic religions will always undermine tribal, national and familial bonds, in favor of some abstract, globalized collective entity.

4. Sectarianism: The belief that there is only one true faith, and that any other form of religious expression external to the one truth faith is necessarily wrong. This belief has long been the wellspring of countless acts of religious fanaticism and the aggressive erasing of any and all history and tradition that contradicts the sectarian ideology being promoted.

5. And thus the acceptance of terrorism, violence, mob action, and aggressive missionary tactics to spread their religion. In other words, religion is spread “by any means necessary”; real harm and destructive consequences be damned.

6. A common sense of being at war to the death with the Dharmic (“pagan”), Gnostic and Perennialist world that preceded Abrahamic ascendancy. Again, there is the inherent tendency of Abrahamic ideology, in addition to its Marxist offshoots, to ruthlessly memory-hole anything that contradicts or questions the ideology in question. Those aspects of earlier traditions which don't overtly conflict with the ideology, are incorporated and re-contextualized as being a product of (as opposed to pre-exisiting) the ideology being promoted.

7. The centrality of unidirectional prayer to commune with their god, with systemic meditation practice playing either little or no part in the practice of their respective religions. Abrahamic ideology asserts a “one size fits all” spiritual regimen which ignores real differences in human personality type, the innate aptitudes of different individuals and other predispositions, in addition to glossing over the differing cultural and ethnic characteristics of various human populations. Every human group everywhere on the planet gets monolithically stamped with the same exact religious and spiritual mandate.

8. A rigid belief in the existence of angels, the devil, demonic spirits, and the like. Non-human spiritual beings or entities from other traditions usually get demonized or anathematized unless they are re-branded as angelic or sanitly figures. This inflexible cosmic dualism allows for no middle ground or nuance in the realm of various psychic and spiritual phenomena. Every form of intelligence in the universe is presented as being unequivocally good or evil.

9. All three teach bodily resurrection, the Final Judgment, the creation of the soul at the time of conception or birth (as opposed to the soul's pre-existence), the binding effects of sin, and so forth. These positions, when presented as literal dogma, contradict the teachings of the world's great Natural Way traditions. For example, Hindusim, Buddhism, Gnosticism and various Pagan/Native traditions have teachings of things like soul preexistence, soul transmigration and karma, in one form or another.

10. The importance of a holy day of the week set aside for prayer and rest, and the imposition of non-local and ideology-based holidays and festivals onto converted peoples. In all traditions preceding Abrahamic ascendancy, nearly all religious holidays and festivals were based on the changing of the seasons and natural cycles in general. The first stage in alienating various peoples from nature started with the redirection of religious festivities away from nature and instead toward the celebration of book-based events and other ideological features.

Quite simple: I can never become what I do not believe in. Here are some very simple reasons, from a Pagan and Gnostic perspective:

1. I do not believe an ancient Hebrew tribal god created the cosmos. Nor did this entity create everything within the cosmos, including humans. Nor do I believe this Hebrew tribal god is anything more real than a literary creation.

2. I do not believe that the Hebrew scriptural canon, i.e. the Tanakh, which is known to Christians as the Old Testament, is the inerrant "word" of any divine being, much less a single divine being who created the cosmos.

3. Because I do not believe that the Hebrew canon as a complete narrative is of a divine source, nor do I believe that ANY of the stories or myths contained within should ever be taken at literal face value as matter-of-fact historical accounts or ontological axioms, I cannot buy into concepts like "original sin" as being real or relevant to the human condition. And most importantly, I do not believe that one culture's gods, religion or mythology should be forced upon other peoples, nor should any dualistic "us vs. them" ideology be built around the acceptance or rejection of a particular belief system.

4. I do not believe in the factual reality of Hebrew prophecy, as depicted by the prophetic books contained with the Tanakh. I do believe that Jewish temple priest-scribes did write these prophetic accounts several centuries after the events depicted within each respective accounts; they wrote these stories as a way of explaining real historical events as having divine significance in accord with the overall religious and political narrative they wanted to convey.

5. Because I do not believe Hebrew prophecy to be anything more than mere myths, I do not see any validity or significance in the attempts of the New Testament to tie in the Gospel narrative of Jesus Christ with Hebrew prophecy. My own take on this is that the early churches concocted the prophecy narrative out of thin air in order to sell their new cult (i.e. gain converts) to the many Hellenized Jewish communities spread throughout the Eastern Mediterranean region of the Roman Empire. These prophecy shenanigans were nothing more than a cheap conversion tactic.

6. I do not believe the Gospel narrative of Jesus Christ to be a factual depiction of real historical events. Since I don't believe in original sin, I cannot believe that Jesus came to die for our nonexistent sins. I do not believe that Jesus even "came" in the first place, at least not in any fashion as depicted in the Bible. I am however open to the idea that the Jesus character may have been based on one or more real historical figures from the 1st century CE Levant region.

7. Since I don't believe that the Jesus of the Gospels was a real historical person, I cannot believe he was the son of anyone, be it a mortal or a god. Of course I don't believe that humans can ever be the offspring of anyone other than other humans. However, I do recognize that a person being a "son of" a god or gods is a mythological trope that long predates Christianity. IMHO, there is great allegorical value contained within this trope.

In short, I don't believe Jesus existed according to the canonical Gospel accounts. I don't believe Jesus was the "son of God." I don't believe the Hebrew god is real, much less that he/it created the entire cosmos. I don't believe that Hebrew prophecy is anything more than mythology or a literary narrative. And I wholeheartedly believe that sectarianism is poison, along with all the nasty trappings that come with sectarianism.

Basically, I'd fail every checkbox requirement for having faith in any variant of mainstream Christianity.

But having said all that I do earnestly believe there's many wonderful teachings contained within the New Testament and that from an archetypal perspective, the figure (what I like to term a 'godform') of Jesus Christ has been an unceasing source of goodness/righteousness, love, divine inspiration and blessings upon people for many centuries. Hopefully a church body devoted only to the archetype and magical essence of Jesus will live on long after the institutional religion and all its assorted baggage dies off. This body can live on side-by-side with religious orders devote to many of the other great teachers, sages and divine personages that have graced humanity over the many centuries.

My short answer is the first question is: No. Well, not unless the speech in question starts to demonize and dehumanize people who don't follow the religion of the speaker. Attacking mere ideas does not mean the denigration of people and groups. The second question I'll address further down.

First off, I need to state that "hate speech" has become a horribly-abused weasel term and has thus lost whatever meaningfulness it once had. The regressive left (SJWs, Neomarxists, Intersectional cultists, ect.) considers "hate speech" to be any form of speech which challenges their ideology and agenda. And of course big corporations (particularly Silicon Valley) have jumped on the "hateful bigots are under every couch cushion" moral panic bandwagon and used it as an excuse to engage in draconian censorship campaigns.

Having gotten that out of the way, I can get to my main point here: that many conservatives today can be rather schizophrenic and hypocritical when it comes to the hate speech concept. Take the popular conservative stance on Islam, for example. More specifically, the role of Muslim communities in Western countries. Christian conservatives in particular will waste no time in getting outraged at any unflattering things Islamic preachers say about the Christian religion, yet fail to apply that standard to Christian preachers who constantly denigrate other religions and worldviews like atheism.

I would argue that when an Imam tells his congregation things like, "the belief that Jesus was the son of God is offensive/blasphemous!" Zzzzzzz....boring. Such utterances are no worse or extreme than Christians claiming that nonbelievers are going to burn in hell for eternity. Islamic preaching in the West however becomes dicey when preachers:

(1) tell their congregants to self-segregate and resist assimilation, and worse,
(2) incite their followers into committing violent acts. Any responsible Western government would be vigilant toward discovering and rooting about those above two actions.

The first is a direct violation of the good-will and good-faith inclusiveness of Western society. And of course the second is a manifest national security threat. The second can easily be classified as hate speech when violent rhetoric and open calls for violence is directed toward specific groups of people.

What conservatives do rightfully point out though is the fact that Muslim hate speech often gets treated leniently or is even gets a free pass nowadays. Under the new "rules" dictated by intersectional leftist/SJW dogma, Muslims are monlithically deemed to be an "oppressed group," because a lot of Muslims happen to have brown skin or something (yeah, Islam isn't a race), and that the Muslim world as a whole is much poorer and undeveloped compared to the West. And voila, Muslims as a whole are victims of the evil West!! (and white people by proxy). As a result of this nonsensical leftist ideology, Muslims are now free to spew the most vile hate speech imaginable, while anything a white Christian says that doesn't bend the knee to Neoliberal globalism is put under a microscope and scrutinized down to every last detail. Islamist ideologues in the West have taken advantage of this new (anti)intellectual climate and have used it to advance their own agenda. The can freely spew their own bigotry and can act in bad faith all they want; but when any non-Muslim dares to call it out, they can simply claim the challenger is being a hateful bigot who is "punching down" at their poor little oppressed self. And the cultural left today totally eats up that (non)argument. Farcically, many regressive leftists now consider Islamists to be their "allies" in fighting "the man." This should be the dictionary definition of Useful Idiot.

In all fairness, if any speech criticizing Islam is "hate speech," then the same can be said of, any speech critical of the ideas/doctrine contained within ANY religion. Yeah, let's go ahead and apply that fair-and-balanced standard and see where we end up on the debate stage.

So back to the title: Is sectarian-dick waving hate speech? No, not when it merely denigrates ideas and abstract concepts. But when that speech starts going after specific people according to ethnic, racial, religious criteria, then sure. Otherwise, no idea, set of ideas, dogma or abstract concepts are sacred and protected in the general sense; there's simply too many competing belief systems among humans for that sort of thing to be even remotely tenable as enforceable policy.

Male and Female are ultimately metaphysical principles encoded into the Divine Natural Law that is the Divine Order of the cosmos. This massively transcends the petty animal aspects of human nature. We’re these weird creatures possessing both crude animal and higher divine natures; though it’s often the former we default to. In other words, the paths of least resistance.

We’ve all-but-forgotten the divine, and if we fast-forward to the Current Year, we can clearly see that Western Modernity is in a diseased state, in that there is no longer any set of divine principles that inform the way we perceive reality, much less conduct our daily affairs. The reigning ideology is an incomprehensible (and ever-morphing) hodgepodge of utilitarian/hedonistic, positivist, materialist, and relativist presuppositions.

So the normie/NPC conservative will quickly jump to the conclusion that the simple fix to this degraded state of affairs is to dive back into that cesspool known as Judeo-Christian religiosity; which we could say is the source of many of our “traditional” distorted views on gender relations.

When in reality, the so-called trad-con who believes Hebrew fairy tales to be literal truth is little more than LARPing as something that can’t really be reconstructed in a sincere manner. Nietzsche rightly observed that the Judeo-Christian concept of God is dead. And to that I would say good riddance since that particular "God" was never more than a literary contrivance a 2,500 year old priesthood of scribes conjured up as a means of mind-controlling the commoners under their charge in a small backwoods province of the Achaemenid Persian empire at the time.

From the get-go, Abrahamism considered women to be only half-human. Much of the “patriarchy” feminists today screech about incessantly is actually just the nasty legacy the Abrahamic ideology cursed us with. Our Pagan ancestors tended to have much more balanced religious views on gender, even if their cultural practices were very much centered on male political power.

To restore the natural gender balance, we need to rediscover Divinity in a manner that’s in harmony with Natural Law, not a bunch of made up laws some corrupted priesthood pulled out of their asses several millennia ago.