- Klaussner has shown how thorough he was part of his time, and how he inherited the heroic tradition of the prophets and moralists of Israel. Hillel, grandfather of the Gamaliel who taught St. Paul, speaks occasionally with the very words of Christ, a generation before Christ. “Judge not thy neighbor until thou has been in his place”. “My humility is my exaltation and my exaltation is my humility”. “Do not do unto others what thou wouldst not they should do unto thee; this is the whole of the law – the rest is only commentary”. “Jesus was not a Christian”, said Wellhausen, “he was a Jew”. “Christianity “, said Renan, “is the masterpiece of Judaism”. It is, in Heine’s phrase a “Jewish heresy”. (The Pleasures of Philosophy by Will Durant, page 362)
The idea of a Sons of God, a Savior born of a virgin, dying in atonement for the sins of men, and rising again from the grave, is found in a great many religions before Christianity, or independent of Christianity: In India, for example, Krishna; In Egypt, Horus; in Mexico Quetsalcoatl. (The Pleasures of Philosophy by Will Durant, page 364
Having made Christ a god, the early Christians were driven to certain theological subtleties in order to meet two demands; one for the logical symmetry of the holy number three; the other for a monotheistic creed. To reconcile his universality with the existence of evil it was necessary to invent, after the manner of Persians, a god of evil – Satan, or Lucifer. At the same time the new creed had to fall in with the custom, among the Mediterranean peoples, of worshipping a triad of gods. The Hindus, the Egyptians, The Phoenicians, the Assyrians, and the Romans had worshipped three gods as three gods; but the drive to unity, particularly among the Jews, required a synthesis of the three Christian gods into a trinity; and the Philosophers of Alexandria affected this on the lines of Greek philosophy and legend.
So the scholars among the Christians interpreted the new religion as monotheistic, while the people saw in it a lovely variation of their familiar Polytheistic themes. Mary took the place of Venus, Aphrodite, Ishtar and Isis, and the “Great Mother” of the Phrygian cult; Mars became the archangel Michael, and Mercury became Raphael and Gabriel. Later the saints were installed as heirs of the minor pagan gods; every nation, every town and every guild had its patron saint, like the local deities of old; the natural polytheism of mankind was restored.