I see a clear progression from allegorizing to historicizing happening in that sequence according to the historical record that we do have to go by.

This meshes with my understanding of human behavior. Hmm, those words sound shallow....

I can see how allegorical wisdom could be refined, altered, changed. At some point, there would be a seed. Some novel element of the crafted story that pulls people deeper into it. As they become more and more passionate about the story the focus would shift. More interest would be had in whatever "memes" were floating around concerning the storytelling elements. It would become more popular, and blanks would be filled in. Much of the allegory would remain, but would be usurped and blended. A critical threshold would be reached when someone with a lot of power pushed for a certain perspective to be dominant. Constantine, for example, even though I'd think the shift happened before his time.

This brings me back to a review during a corporate presentation. The panelist made one point very clear. If you're giving a sales pitch, the strongest facts in the world won't do a thing if they are emotionless. Tell a story, because people respond to stories. Stories evoke emotion, and emotion(s) is the carrot on a stick for all facets of our existence. Allegorical wisdom would lose in a competition to a passionate story, with the human mind as the playing field. Even better is a passionate story which included

I'd be interested in the highlights. Well, does "historicizing" mean that the authors presented the text as historically accurate, where before it was more allegorical?

Three factors in astrotheology and myth

In considering whether Christianity is based on observation of the slow movement of the stars seen in precession of the equinox, there are three distinct factors to consider. These are:
1.Did the writers of the New Testament use their observation of precession as a framework for their ideas?
2.If so, what was the change process that led to these ideas being concealed?
3.Is there any physical basis for the ‘as above so below’ correlations that are apparently presented in the Bible?

Separating the questions in this way is essential, because otherwise it is too easy to blur the distinctions. There is absolutely no need to assume a positive answer to the third question has any effect on the first two questions. This is important, because it remains entirely possible that the Bible authors saw precession, imagined that precession drove cultural change on earth, and used this as a basis for their imaginative depiction of Jesus Christ, without this whole framework having any dynamic basis in actual material causality. Yet, the implication for the claim that Jesus Christ did not exist remains significant, regardless of whether or not precession actually affects culture other than through imaginative observation.

For the first question, on the use of stellar precession, the general consensus is that it was not a factor in New Testament composition, but evidence suggests this general consensus is wrong. Already in this thread I have discussed several themes in the Bible that make no sense on face value, but provide a consistent story if seen as allegory for precession. These include the alpha and omega, the loaves and fishes, and the twelve jewels of the holy city, just for a start. It is possible to read the entire New Testament using precessional cosmology as a filter, producing abundant new consistent meanings. One further example is the beast like a leopard-lion-bear, which takes the ‘power and seat and authority of the dragon.’ Literally this is ridiculous, but in terms of precession, it provides a precise and accurate description of the movement of the North Celestial Pole.

The reason I emphasize this claim that the writers used precession is that it provides a logical explanation of how a myth morphed into a belief. It is readily explicable that an original stellar story of ‘incarnation’ accreted details over the decades which led to a confident belief that this stellar story was about history. The idea is that the moment of apparent celestial harmony at the turning point of the Great Years signified an equally momentous turning point in the affairs of our earth, a shift from an old ‘false’ vision to a new ‘true’ one. This 'moment of harmony' was when the signs matched the seasons, when the sun entered the sign of Aries exactly at the spring equinox. Before Christ, the sun was already in Aries at the equinox, and after Christ, the sun spent some time in Pisces before reaching the equinox. This vision of celestial harmony, the grand cosmic alignment of the ages, does not require any material basis for it to take hold. It provides a basis to say the time of Christ was the beginning and end of the Great Year, a vision that could readily form the seed for imagining that this beginning and end was manifest in a single great man. This imagined expansion into historizing would be far more easy for people to grasp than the astronomy considered alone.

The concealment of this stellar material by the early church suggests a conspiracy on grand scale. Evidence standards for proof of conspiracy are high. Comparing to real crackpot conspiracies, such as alien abductions and moon landing fakery, the interesting thing here is that the evidence entirely supports the conspiracy claim. The Apollo mission has abundant corroborated evidence; Jesus Christ has none. Yes, none. Just as much as 'alien abductions'.

The only “evidence” is the self-serving propaganda in the Bible itself and its apocrypha, none of which qualifies as independent and reliable, but which contains aggressive slander of critics as Satanists, etc. As well, this Biblical “evidence” dates several generations after the purported events, as if today I wrote a story about events in 1950 based only on hearsay and asked people to accept it as proof. There is nothing in the earlier texts to even prove that writers such as Paul really believed Jesus was an actual person.

Why did the Bible writers censor out its stellar origins? For a start, Jewish monotheism was resolutely opposed to worship of nature. In order to build on Jewish traditions about Jehovah, suggesting that God was beyond nature was a key enabling doctrine for a popular movement. It appears that the desire to indicate a clean break from paganism involved a clean break from astrology, even though astrology it appears was a main building block for the doctrine.

If the non-stellar consensus of orthodox theology is based on a systematic early concealment of stellar motifs, as clearly happened with the suppression of heresy, then there is every possibility that the orthodox consensus on this topic is wrong. Orthodox literal consensus has several motives to ignore this topic. The legitimacy of the church would come into question if it were established that Christianity is based on massive fraud and deception in its origins. If all the miracles are actually allegory for real cosmological observation, the scale of re-thinking required is huge.

On the third question, whether any of this material about precession affecting the earth has a dynamic physical basis, we simply cannot know. Precession does drive natural climate change over 21,000 year cycles, but as to affecting history we have no real evidence. If there is an effect, it is extremely weak, so any signal would require incredibly sensitive and sophisticated methods to verify. We cannot prove any astrological effects whatsoever, so proving effects of such slow pace as the cycle of precession is more difficult by orders of magnitude.

This does not, however, prove that such effects do not exist. Indeed, these effects have a theoretical logic, namely that our solar system is a fractal unity, so all parts reflect the whole. This is why Jesus taught us to pray 'thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven', meaning, what we see in the cosmos is reflected on earth, as part of the same temporal process.

I'm puzzled because the trend in the discussion is to assume a beginning in allegory or symbolism followed by an accretion of ordinary details that bring the god down to earth so that it can be better grasped by the people. It seems just as possible, and to me more common, for the process to happen in reverse. We see this on a smaller scale with the mythologizing or deifying of figures such as Haile Selassie, Bahaullah (Baha'i founder), even Bob Marley. With Jesus, there appears to have been a movement of from Jesus to Christ, from a figure more closely associated with an actual man to one whose godness is more exaggerated. That movement is reflected in the Gospels from the earliest to the latest. The grafted-on pieces could have come from pagan mystery cults. That's the opinion of a book reviewer in an old issue (2000) of Skeptic.

"There have been quite a few attempts in the last hundred years to cast doubt on the historical existence of Jesus, but this book goes further than most in seeking to make a link between the Scriptural account of Jesus and the Mystery cults of antiquity. In the early years of Christianity there were numerous Gnostic sects claiming esoteric knowledge. These sects were subsequently declared heretical by mainstream Christians but the authors' thesis is that Christianity was Gnostic at its origin. They suggest that at some time before the Christian era a group of Jews produced a Jewish version of a pagan Mystery cult, based on the Messiah, with a fictional Jesus as a dying and resurrecting godman resembling Osiris-Dionysus. In time, this esoteric teaching came to be interpreted as historical fact and what they term Literalist Christianity was the result.

It has of course often been remarked that the theme of the dying and resurrected god is not original to Christianity but was widely found in Near Eastern religions. However, the book cites more parallels than this. Dionysus is hailed as 'The Saviour of Mankind' and 'The Son of God'; his father is God and his mother is a mortal virgin who is later worshipped as the 'Mother of God'; he is born in a cowshed; he drives out demons, turns water into wine, and raises people from the dead; and he rides triumphantly into town while people wave palm fronds to welcome him. The first Christians revered Dionysus's birthday as Jesus's birthday and the three-day Spring festival of Dionysus, celebrating his death and resurrection, coincides with Easter. There are resemblances between Dionysian rites and the Last Supper and Eucharist.

Striking though these parallels are, the major difficulty with the authors' theory is its sheer improbability. Would the Jews of this era have adopted such pagan ideas? Freke and Gandy acknowledge this problem but claim that there were many points of contact between Jews, especially diaspora Jews, and contemporary pagans. However, this evidence is all indirect; the only direct evidence for their theory is the Jesus story itself, and that cannot be adduced in support of the thesis without falling into circularity.

I have to say that their argument seems to me to be pretty far-fetched, at least in the 'strong' form that they advance it. However, it might become more plausible in a 'weaker' form, if we postulate that there was a historical figure called Jesus on whose life story a number of elements from the Mystery religions were later grafted. But whether or not the theory appears persuasive, the book is better than some of the rather lurid publicity about it might suggest. It contains some surprising information and is well referenced, although curiously the (singularly unappealing) translation of the New Testament which is cited throughout is not specified."

http://www.acampbell.ukfsn.org/bookrevi ... gandy.html

tat tvam asi wrote: That's what is dealt with in the chapter on the Alexandrian roots of Christianity. If you could get the kindle version of the book or something and read through that chapter you'd see what we keep referring to as a new hypothesis unique to Murdocks studies. You'd be surprised to see what we can find happening in the first century and how it penetrated Jewish culture. It's sort of crucial when trying to understand people like us and why we think it's entirely possible that there were proto-gospels that were pure allegory which evolved into the second century and finally began to emerge into history as the gospels very late. Now that I've been through all of this I see a clear progression from allegorizing to historicizing happening in that sequence according to the historical record that we do have to go by. I'm out and about right now but when I'm home again I'll try to go through some of the quotes from the chapter progressively addressing Philo and the Therapuets...

Yeah, it probably is time for me to dig into the material you're talking about. I appreciate the guidance.

On the third question, whether any of this material about precession affecting the earth has a dynamic physical basis, we simply cannot know.

There is no need to postulate it. It's as if you're trying to show that a piece of toast with a dark area resembling mother mary is more nutritious. There need not be any actual physical phenomena behind the patterns we find meaning in. I apologize for always jumping on this point, but it doesn't mesh with me. A whisper of a breeze give you a jolt of barely detectable inertia. The beat of your heart jostles you around. Pressure differences change perception of inertia, and change density. Walking a single step is a million times the inertia than a distant heavenly body's effect. Every time you move your head, every time you do anything whatsoever. Changes in altitude give different gravitational readings as well. Every second that passes, each heavenly body is in a different place in the sky. And a different location relative to each other, throwing all the readings off. Each time you move location, any long term pattern would be lost in the referential frame. Gravity waves crossing the cosmic ocean would throw more chaos into the mix.

Inertia and gravity are identical influences, indistinquishable to the human body. A massively weak and constantly moving distant gravitational source that is only cyclical on a timeframe longer than a human life... we simply would not be able to sense it organically. It is one "extremely weak" possible starting condition amongst billions or trillions of possible weak starting conditions. Why do you propose this effect has been amplified into an influence powerful enough to be critical? Because this one trillionth of a loose end idea is quivering it's tendrils towards another idea, hoping to meet it halfway. Which means you're pursuing the idea as the end, and hoping to fill in the middle. Your saving grace from committing the same rationalizations as other people is that you also adhere strictly to the process.

But this creates some cognitive dissonance. You desperately want for such a thing to be true. Well, I agree with you there. It's elegant and perhaps even profound. A naturalistic effect as powerful as the tides, but diluted over greater timescales. But Robert, I simply don't see it. The recoil of a flea jumping off the tip of my nose is a greater force than a distant star. I lose my ability to sense the direction of gravity quite frequently. Not just any gravity, but Earth gravity. Stand up too fast or spin too fast and it happens. I know the idea isn't that we consciously and continuously sense the zeitgeber, but what I'm saying is that you would have an exceptionally difficult time sensing it with scientific equipment let alone organically and reliably.

The final problem is that if you could actually show the zeitgeber to be able to be sensed by an organic, you'd have to hypothesize a process that utilizes it for change. Is there a change in a certain direction, along a certain spectrum? In what way, how? Which spectrum? Would all plant life become a bit greener? Would all organisms with neurons become .0001% smarter? What would the point of demarcation be? How could an organic sense any point of demarcation such as the year 2150? If it is a much more subtle change over 20,000 years, what would change, and how? This is the type of evidence that must come "before" speculation, because it is the crux of the idea.

Every step further I consider this idea, the more the difficult and perhaps impossible questions arise.

DWill and Interbane, thanks for your comments. The issues here are whether the causality of production of the New Testament went 'from Jesus to Christ' or 'from Christ to Jesus' and whether the observation of astral parallels requires some dynamic basis.

The Bible certainly wants us to think the path of causality was from history to cosmology, that observation of the deeds of the man led to the ideas such as 'Before Abraham was, I am', and 'I and the Father are One', etc etc. But the evidence shows the actual causality was the reverse - in Paul the cosmic Christ is primary, and the historical Jesus is barely known or mentioned. Paul lived before the Gospel writers, but the Bible puts the Epistles after the Gospels precisely to reverse the actual causality. They started with a big abstract idea, the harmony of earth with the heavens through Christ, and proceeded to 'flesh it out' to make it believable and impactful.

On the physics, the fact is that it does not make a difference, and I am far from desperate about it. As I said, we cannot know. The issue is that this astrotheological framework, recognising that the signs matched the seasons at the time of Christ, is purely cultural, and does not require any dynamic basis. For hundreds of years before the time of Christ, astronomers could see as a simple fact of observation that the sun had already entered its matching constellation before the time of the year assigned to it. This gap steadily got smaller until at the time of Christ the seasons exactly matched the stars. Since Christ the gap has widened in the opposite direction, so now we see the sun does not reach each constellation until nearly four weeks after the seasonal signs.

This is all about the cultural role of astrology, and does not imply that astrology has any physical basis. The Old Testament prophets predicted the advent of Christ, and it appears from this astronomical framework that there was an astrological backstory to the prediction, a backstory that has been systematically eliminated from view. What is hard to understand is how this destruction of evidence could have been so successful. It relies on the observation that this knowledge was held in a mystery cult, and was subject to taboos about secrecy, as were all the cults, making it highly vulnerable to suppression by the concerted effort that we know was carried out by the church.

This cosmic alignment at the time of Christ is extremely simple to understand, as shown in the star map I shared earlier. In this map, showing the equinox at the time of Christ, we see the traditional constellation of Aries is drawn with a foot extending to the exact equinox point as the sun crosses the line of the fish in Pisces. What we have to understand is that the annual path of the sun is the reverse of its precessional path. Annually, at the time of Christ, the sun entered Aries at the spring equinox, while precessionally, it entered Pisces. This has not been the case at any time before or since. Here we see the cosmic vision of unity between the earth and the heavens that was reified into the historical Jesus.

As I mentioned earlier, the only visible dynamic effect of precession is that it is the main cause of ice ages, leading to impacts on earth such as placing a mile of ice on top of New York City and pushing sea level down by 140 meters, both of which actually occurred twenty thousand years ago at the last glacial maximum. This is certainly a big effect.

The 21,000 year climate cycle of precession reached its high point about ten thousand years ago, causing the dawn of the Holocene, and its low point about 700 years ago. Matching it against history, we can speculate that this low point, marked by the passage of the solstice past the perihelion, constitutes the dawn of another geological epoch, the Anthropocene, where human impacts become decisive for climate. The challenge now is whether we continue the falling path hardwired into our culture from the late Holocene, or shift to a rising path for a new epoch. Such a transformation of human society requires a paradigm shift in our use of energy and our relation to nature. My view is that this transformation is predicted in symbolic terms as the Biblical understanding of the dawn of the Age of Aquarius as the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

I don't see particular strength, in argument terms, on either side of the debate, actually. Paul's non-mention of a Jesus story could be significant, but taking a similar instance--the non-mention in the Gospels of the destruction of the 2nd temple--we can perhaps conclude that the event just wasn't considered on-topic and so was omitted. But nearly everyone would put the writing of the gospels after that event. So, too, Paul might not have considered the life of Jesus something needing to be talked about in any detail. But although details are lacking, it's clear that Paul saw the incarnation of the Christ in Jesus as quite important ("the man Jesus Christ," in 1 Timothy).

We're probably forced back onto our sense of the matter, our estimation of the dynamics of the situation, even onto our biases. I'm pretty firmly in the Robert Wright mode of "facts on the ground," whereas you, and mythicists in general, are more in the "intellectualist" camp. I struggle to account for what happened, looking at the Jewish need for fulfillment of the predictions of a messiah and the vicious enmity of Jews and Christians, as the product of divergences in mythic understandings. I look for something closer to the bone, which can more readily be supplied by belief in the reality of concrete events, such as a man who once walked among us, but who was never really of us. That is the powerful stuff that can make people go to their deaths for the faith, and when they gain the ascendency, make others die for their their failure to believe.

CiE page 439

...This fascinating information provides more flesh on the bones of the era's milieu, painting a fuller picture of life in the Roman Empire at the time...

The chapter on the Alexandrian roots of Christianity is extensive Dwill. And that was actually the first chapter I read when I received the book because I already knew the correspondences between the Egyptian religion and Christianity pretty well and wanted to get right down to the concluding chapters of the book first to see where she took it. Some of you guys might enjoy doing the same since you're not really in doubt about the parallels dealt with in the beginning of the book. But when I went back and read from the beginning forward I enjoyed seeing how she set up for the ending.

In short, there were brotherhood networks connected around the Roman Empire before the common era. There is a lot covered from Philo's writings about the "Therapuetae" monks in Alexandria and how they fit into the community of "Israelitish" peoples who lived in Alexandria. Philo estimated that 50 percent of Alexandria was Jewish in his day, of an estimated total population of 500,000 at that time. These were mainly Hellenized Jews in Alexandria and Philo was the most well known speaking from this Graeco-Jewish community. The Therapuet's wrote allegorical writings and indeed interpreted the Jewish scriptures allegorically. They also resembled the ancient astrotheological Egyptian priests in a variety of ways.

What was going on in the Roman Empire before and during the early first century, is then linked into what was going in the Pauline writings that we credit to the latter part of the first century, and even then the entire New Testament could well be an entirely second century composition as GodAlmighty has pointed out in his extensive video series. But no matter, a very straight-forward linear progression can be understood when all of the available evidence is considered and weighed:

*Therapeut's (allegorical based Jewish mystics) in Alexandria writing early "short works" which are likely to have been the early proto-gospels.

*Philo writing about the divine "logos", which, is never yet brought down into incarnation and to which nothing is ascribed to any person living in Israel during the early first century. Nothing about any such person as an historical Jesus is ever mentioned, although a complete blueprint for creating such a figure is laid out in his writings.

*The Pauline epistles arriving which are extremely vague on any historical data about Jesus, even to the point where the sparse references that are found are highly suspect as added in later after Christianity rose to power.

*Then the gospels begin to appear into the historical record in the second century behind all of this and indeed behind even Marcion.

We're clearly looking at mystical beliefs eventually being presented as historical as an esoteric type of system from before and during the first century is eventually over taken by a newly forming orthodox system during the second century, which simply took esoteric writings, expanded on them, and gave them an exoteric interpretation to the masses. If you can manage to read through CiE from the Alexandrian Roots of Christianity through the conclusion then we may have a much better time understanding one another, Dwill. Until then you probably won't be able to follow along with the perspective being presented here because you couldn't have possibly crossed paths with it previously without going through Murdocks work. Freke and Gandy do not help in terms of understanding the Alexandrian Hypothesis in CiE. That's one of the main reasons for wanting to discuss it here because it's a discussion of something new which hasn't really been touched on...

tat tvam asi wrote:This thread is interesting as it is based on attempting to throw out a life raft to those sinking into a meaningless abyss due to discovering the mythicist arguments and how Christianity is a re-hash of older mythology - stated in the opening thread. A newer and bigger meaning based in objective observation coming from these ancient myths. The problem is coming to terms with what exactly this new meaning is. So far it seems so obscure that it's difficult pin down. I can tell that it most certainly isn't a replacement for the traditional Christian view of "The Meaning of Life" because that view is simply that life was created to praise and glorify God. The angels and man were created for no other reason as per scripture. Obviously this meaning is suddenly lost with the loss of taking scripture literally.

The 'meaning of life' is how human existence fits into a bigger framework that provides purpose and direction. Religion claims that meaning is objective, while secular philosophy holds that meaning is purely created by imagination. Science, in its strict form as logical positivism, holds that meaning is a property of facts, that there is no meaning outside science, and that all statements of value are unscientific and strictly meaningless. If we reject the traditional religious doctrine of the meaning of life, that we exist to give glory to God, we are left with the problem of the subjectivity of values, and the absence of any unifying story to generate objective meaning.

The response I've received has not been for a replacement for "The Meaning of Life" but instead a meaning for life right now based in humanitarian efforts viewed from the precession of the equinoxes. The new proposed underlying meaning of life is absent at this point and simply left avoided in the rebuttle. I'm not sure how well that will sit with people wanting to know more about this shift of meaning from a traditional Christian view to this re-formed Christian view.

The comment I made earlier on this topic suggested that if precession provides a cosmology that is at the foundation of mythic ideation, then it is reasonable to look at the structure of precession to see how consciousness is shaped over the long course of history. Expanding on this idea, we see that precession has a high point, when the earth is warmest, and a low point, when the earth is coldest. This stable 21,000 year pattern is complicated by other orbital cycles (obliquity and eccentricity) to create the long term cosmic patterns that structure the cycles of climate. Setting this long term cycle of climate as the temporal horizon for history gives a basis to speculate about how religious identity changes over time. The idea is that just as the annual cycle has a regularity, with summer having a different character to winter, so does the spin wobble period. What I meant by suggesting that 'innovative humanitarian knowledge' provides a fixed meaning for existence was that this regularity has a unique character at this moment in time. I will expand on this further.

Dwill wrote:I'm puzzled because the trend in the discussion is to assume a beginning in allegory or symbolism followed by an accretion of ordinary details that bring the god down to earth so that it can be better grasped by the people...

CiE p. 433
"...International Standard Bible Encyclopedia states:

It was in Alexandria that the Jews first came so powerfully under the influence of Hellenism, and here that the peculiar Graeco-Jewish philosophy sprang up of which Philo was the most notable representative.

Indeed, Hellenistic judaism had its "cheif seat" at Alexandria, where also the Jewish bible was translated into Greek and called the Sepuagint. In describing the translation at Alexandria of the Septuagint some two to three centuries prior to the common era, Morenz states, "It can be demonstrated that the place of translation left its mark on many passages." One of these marks included the invocation, "Lord, Lord, King of the gods," which would be a strange statement for a monotheistic people. However, the Hebrews and Israelites were not always strict monotheists but continually "whored after other gods." The Jews who translated the Septuagint were likely Egyptians, rather than Palestinians, as their knowledge of Hebrew was very poor. At the disposal of Jewish Hellenizing efforts were the University and Library of Alexandria, presenting potential edification from around the known world. As concerns the Egyptian religion, Alexandria and Christianity, Morenz remarks:

Without abandoning our principle that Egyptian influence made itself felt as an undercurrent throughout Hellenism, we may nevertheless claim pride of place for Alexandria and so consider Alexandrian theology as the intermediary between the Egyptian religious heritage and Christianity.

As we can see, this respected Egyptologist is not timid in his declaration as to the influence of Egyptian religion upon Christianity, or about Alexandria as beig the "crucible" for this new creation."

Then Murdock moves towards the Therapuet's of Alexandria:

"One group of Hellenizing Egyptian Jews, or, rather, "Hebrews of a fashion," was deemed the "Therapuets," as a type of monastic community centered at Alexandria, with similar groups elsewhere around the Mediterranean. ...However, the Encyclopedia Britannica sees the fact that the origin of the Therapeutan name was not known in Philo's time to serve as proof of the sect's antiquity:

Philo himself was uncertain as to the meaning of the name, whether it was given to them because they were "physicians" of souls or because they were "servants" of the One God.... That the origin of the name of these ascetics was unknown in Philo's time goes to prove their antiquity.

...Regarding the Therapeutan studies, Philo states (X,28-29):

They read the Holy Scriptures and apply themselves to their ancestral philosophy by means of allegory, since they believe that the words of the literal text are symbols of a hidden nature, revealed through its underlying meanings.
They have also writings of men of old, who were the founders of their sect and had left behind many memorials of the type of treatment employed in allegory, and taking these as a sort of archetype they imitate the method of this principle of interpretation...

Since the Therapeuts were essentially Jews, Hebrews, Israelites or Samaritans who lived in the Diaspora, their scriptures constituted the Hebrew Bible, while their own writings may have comprised some of the Jewish apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, among others. ...In other words, the Therapeuts interpreted biblical scriptures and their own writings allegorically, which means that they did not necessarily perceive them as "history."

Murdock then goes into the collegia brotherhood system and how wide spread it was around the Roman Empire and how the Therapeuts fit into that system. Much of the tales of Paul's Journey's are noted as going to these various points of interest among the "collegia." She then goes over some of the "mysteries" promoted by these Therapeuts on page 448:

"One of the mysteries was God as a "Trinity in Unity," a doctrine predating the founding of Christianity, despite that religions's claim of being "unique, divine revelation." Another of the mysteries, as we have seen, was the supposed ability of a virgn to "bring forth" as well as that of a woman becoming a "born-again virgin" by virtue of the grace of God. Again, in this regard we possess ancient testimony from Christian writers, e.g., Epiphanius and the Chronicle author, that there was at Alexandria a temple to the maiden goddess Kore in which a virgin brought forth a newborn baby at the winter solstice. The evidence points to the Egyptian Therapeuts constituting a poweful group of paganizing Jews "of a fashion" whose affiliation extended around the Mediterranean and included non-Jewish religious groups and organizations as well. These organizations, a evidenced by the Egyptian Therapeuts, possessed a structure very similar to the later Christian religion. Indeed, there are a number of important and profound similarities between the Therapeuts and the later Christians, again, a comparison noted in antiquity as well."

I'll pick up later with highlights from "The Proto-Christians?"