How Greek Philosophy Shaped Early Christianity

What did you learn about Greek and Roman religions? >> So I started to realize through wor through worshiping through studying the Gnostics that they were a lot of these Gnostics were attributing a lot of the ideas of Christianity for example the Valentinians attribute the Christian thinking to Greek thought. So the Valentinians, the Carpatians and a few other groups thought that Plato, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Thales, those guys, these are prescratics and post postplato thinkers who were teaching ideas about theology and philosophy. And there's a there's a whole unified branch of philosophy called middle platonism. And it's basically stoicism plus platonism. And it's like this universal thought of philosophy that is dominating the first century. And Christianity seems to come out of that way of thinking. Um so when I started to think about Christianity, why is it why is it so popular? What's so good about it? And I started to take apart the look under the hood and look on look what are the nuts and bolts of Christianity. You find that it's not just this Jewish fulfillment of messianic promises. There's a lot of Greek thought interwoven in it. Uh you know ideas of salvation of sin. You find that in orphism. The orphix taught that in the beginning of time Zeus was going to impregnate a um this the the queen of the underworld named Pphanie. So you have Zeus who's the king of the heavens of Olympus and Pphanie who is the queen of the underworld. And there's going to be a a royal marriage between the underworld and the heavens. This is the the start of a new golden age, if you will. And he gets her pregnant. And Pphanie gives birth to this child called Zagrias. And Zagrias is a fruit god. It's basically it's baby Dianisis. He is a fruit god, a vegetation god, a god of life, a god of the growing and swelling of fruits. That's what Zagrias is. The word Zagar means life. Zagrias. And he's the prince of Olympus. He's going to be the next king of Olympus after Zeus. He's next in line. His mother's the queen of the underworld and his father's the queen of Olymp king of Olympus. He is he has it all in his hands. He is the divine child. >> He's the heir. >> The Titans under the behest of Hera. Now Hera is the jealous h wife of Zeus who's jealous of Pphanie. She tells the Titans to go and kill Zagrias. And they go and they they they first they entice him with little toys like he's a baby. And they show him toys and he's looking at the toys and he gets enticed by them. Then they rip him apart limb from limb and they ritually eat him and sacrifice him. And then they eat they eat the fruit of knowledge. He's the fruit god. And they eat this is the beginning of time. And these titans eat the fruit. And then Zeus gets so angry that they ate the fruit god that he sends a deluge and wipes out all of the cosmos. And he takes the bodies of these titans who just ate the fruit. and he rips them apart and he uses them to construct the material world because this is a pre this is a pre-spiritual world that I'm talking about. So he then he takes the Titans and he creates this the material world and because of this everything that lives on this on this world that we live in has Titan flesh. Our flesh is all Titan and our spirit is Zagrias or Dian Isis. So we are half spirit and half flesh and because of our flesh we have eternal sin um um primordial sin and the only way to be saved from our primordial sin is to be initiated into the mysteries of Dionis.