Trade Routes
This map indicates trading routes used around the 1st century CE centred on the Silk Road. The routes remain largely valid for the period 500 BCE to 500 CE. Geographical labels for regions are adapted from the Geography of Ptolemy (c. 150 CE), some trading centre names date from later (c. 400 CE). Relying on Ptolemy's names is wrong but neutral.
The Silk Routes (collectively known as the 'Silk Road') were not only conduits for silk, but also for many other products. They were very important paths for cultural and technological transmission that linked traders, merchants, pilgrims, missionaries, soldiers, nomads and urban dwellers among China, India, Persia and Mediterranean countries for almost 3,000 years. (Travellers on the Silk Road, The Silk Road Foundation) The Persian Royal Road linked into many other routes and some of these, such as the routes to India and Central Asia, were also protected by the Achaemenids, encouraging regular contact between India, Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. Trade in such goods as Arabic incenses, Indian spices and Gandharan gems carried with it the associated mythologies and belief systems, and brought about cultural diffusion. Trade in aromatic trees, herbs and oils, and luxury goods bought wealth to the kingdoms of Arabia. (Archibald 2001: 168) Much of the Roman gold went to India (where coins were turned into jewellery) and China (for silk), never to return. BudhaBudha is the god of merchandise. In Vedic astrology, the colour of Budha is emerald, a gem for which Gandhara is famous even to this day. Gandharan gems were traded with ancient Greece and Rome.Mercury in India is Budha and to the Greeks, Mercury was Hermes, patron of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, of thieves and road travelers, of orators, wit and invention, of literature and poets, of athletics, of weights and measures, and of general commerce. They are the perfect patrons of East-West trade.
In Late Antiquity, Hermetism emerged in parallel with Gnosticism, Neoplatonism and early Christianity, and Hermetic tradition leads to the Kabbalah, the school of thought concerned with the mystical aspect of Judaism.
According to the linguist Zacharias P. Thundy the word "Theravada" - the oldest surviving Buddhist school - may have been Hellenized into "Therapeutae", which provides a direct link from the Buddhism of Greco-India, to Judaism, then Christianity and Islam. EssenesAsceticism was adopted in Judaea by the Essenes, who flourished from the 2nd century BCE to the 1st century CE.Some modern scholars argue that the Essenes, Zealots and Nazorenes or early Christians in first-century Palestine weren't different Jewish sects but were, rather, various sobriquets for members of a broad messianic nationalistic movement dedicated to upholding the Law of Moses and determined to violently overthrow the Roman occupiers. According to Eisenman, the Dead Sea Scrolls stem from the mid to late first century CE and represent the sectarian baptisers known variously as the Essenes, Zealots, Nasoreans, Masbotheans, Sabaeans and Jewish Christians headed by James the Just: The Scrolls are the legacy of the Jerusalem Christians led by the Heirs of Jesus: James the Just, Simeon bar Cleophas, and Judas Thomas. The Teacher of Righteous was James the Just, the successor of John the Baptist. The Wicked Priest was Ananus ben Ananus, whom Josephus credits with lynching James on the Day of Atonement. James' execution was the trigger for Jesus ben Ananias, the mad prophet predicting Jerusalem's demise, to begin his doom-crying. In James the Brother of Jesus, Robert Eisenman tells the long-lost tale of formative "prehistoric" Christianity as it emerged from the crucible of revolutionary Palestine and from the internecine hostilities between Pauline and Ebionite Christianities. After the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the Essenes became known as the Ebionites and some scholars argue that the Ebionites can be identified with a sect encountered by the historian Abd al-Jabbar around the year 1000.(Shlomo Pines (1966). The Jewish Christians Of The Early Centuries Of Christianity According To A New Source. Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities II, No. 13.) The Desert Fathers were the first Christian hermits and based much of their practises on John the Baptist, who according to Barbara Thiering, was an Essene Teacher of Righteousness before James the Just. The Therapeutae, described by Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE - 50 CE), were long established in the harsh environments by the Lake Mareotis close to Alexandria, and in other less-accessible regions. EbionitesSome scholars argue that the Ebionites contributed to the development of the Islamic view of Jesus due to exchanges of Ebionite remnants with the first Muslims. (O. Cullmann, "Ebioniten", in: Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, p. 7435 (vol. 2); Hans-Joachim Schoeps (1969). Jewish Christianity: Factional Disputes in the Early Church. Translation Douglas R. A. Hare. Fortress Press.)Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik in 2007 offered a fine study of the Ebionites in their Jewish believers in Jesus: the early centuries, which concluded that they did not believe in his divinity: On closer inspection, the apparently very rich patristic material on the Ebionites boils down to the information contained in Irenaeus and Hippolytus to be supplemented also by evidence in Justin of unnamed Jewish believers who held Ebionite points of view. The name of this group may originally not have been peculiar to it, but could well be a self-designation current among Jewish believers in the land of Israel in general. Origen, living in the land of Israel in the third century, apparently still knows that there were Ebionites (Jew believers) who did not share the “Ebionite” doctrines attributed to all Ebionites by Irenaeus. Ascetics at Wadi El NatrunWadi El Natrun (Greek: Scetis or Scetes; English: the ascetics) is a valley near Alexandria, Egypt that produces natron salt. The modern chemical symbol for sodium, Na, is an abbreviation of that element's Latin name natrium. In ancient times, natron was mined here for use in Egyptian burial rites. Copts believe that the Holy family visited Wadi El Natrun during their flight into Egypt.
 The region of Wadi El Natrun was and remains one of the most sacred regions in Christianity. Between the 4th century, when Saint Macarius of Egypt retired to the desert, and the 7th century, the region attracted hundreds of thousands of people from the world over to join the hundreds of monasteries of the Nitrian Desert. The desolate region became a sanctuary for the Desert Fathers and for cenobitic monastic communities.
British, French and American archaeological projects have been studying the area, especially the monasteries and the production of glass using the natrun.
The process of vitrification was discovered but once and throughout antiquity, glass-making was a Jewish craft.
The wadi which has become such a centre of Christianity was made famous in antiquity by Jews. The first ascetics there were the Therapeutae - the Essenes. The Monastery of Glass, named for its glass-workshop excavated by archaeologist Gyozo Vörös, therefore employed Jews.
 Roman aureus depicting Elagabalus. The reverse depicts a four-horse, gold chariot carrying the holy stone of the Emesa temple and the ancestors of Julia Domna were its kingly priests. Emesa was a trade centre of Syria and where Elagabalus was initially venerated; it was was assimilated with the Roman sun god known as Sol Invictus. Sacred stones are mentioned with great frequency in the Old Testament. Muslims pray towards the Kaaba, in the center of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the eastern cornerstone of which is the Black Stone, a Muslim relic which according to Islamic tradition dates back to the time of Adam and Eve. ArabiaThere were important Jewish settlements in Arabia, such as those at Medina and Tayma.
The Qur'anKhadijah was an important merchant based in Mecca and Muhammad managed her caravans between Syria and the Homerite kingdom (now Yemen). In 1972, construction workers renovating a wall in the attic of the Great Mosque of Sana'a in Yemen found what are considered by some to be the oldest existent version of the Qur'an. Restoration of the manuscript has been organized by specialist Gerd R. Puin of Saarland University: My idea is that the Koran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad. Many of them may even be a hundred years older than Islam itself. Even within the Islamic traditions there is a huge body of contradictory information, including a significant Christian substrate; one can derive a whole Islamic anti-history from them if one wants. Following the publication in 2000 of The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran, which argues that at its inception, the Qur'an was drawn from Christian Syro-Aramaic texts in a mixed Arabic-Syriac language, experts have been quietly investigating its origins and offering radically new theories about the text's meaning and the rise of Islam. Indeed, many scholars who are not revisionists agree that Islam must be placed back into the wider historical context of the religions of the Middle East rather than seeing it as the spontaneous product of the pristine Arabian desert. ''I think there is increasing acceptance, even on the part of many Muslims, that Islam emerged out of the wider monotheistic soup of the Middle East,'' says Roy Mottahedeh, a professor of Islamic history at Harvard University. - Scholars Are Quietly Offering New Theories of the Koran (NY Times 18 Septmber 2009) Patricia Crone and Michael Cook - drawing on archaeological evidence and contemporary documents in Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin and Syriac - argue that Islam developed as an attempt to find a common identity among peoples united in conquests that began when the Arabs joined Messianic Judaism in an attempt to retake the Promised Land. The result of their research is described in Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977). The major thesis of this work is that Muhammad preached a message of Jewish Messianism and became involved in a joint attempt by Jews and Arabs, citing common Abrahamic decent, to reconquer Palestine. Asceticism is a thread running along the trade routes from the Alexandrian cities of Greco-India to Alexandria in Egypt, opposed to Zoroastrianism, reflecting two conflicting world views: otherworldly and worldly.
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Divine MenApotheosis: to raise to godlike stature, to be made divine. Kings were divine in Achaemenid Persia, which included territories of Afghanistan and Pakistan, parts of Central Asia, Asia Minor, Thrace, much of the Black Sea coastal regions, Iraq, northern Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and all significant population centers of ancient Egypt as far west as Libya. Previously, both Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia had imperial cults, where rulers were worshiped as messiahs. AlexanderIn the Greek world, the first leader who accorded himself divine honours was Philip II of Macedon, who had extensive economic and military ties with Achaemenid Persia, where kings were divine. Alexander's claim to have a divine father was well-known and he publicly sacrificed to Zeus as his father before the battle of Gaugamela in 331 BCE. Alexander's conquest and occupation of Persia, then further east of what became known as India (Gandhara), brought about a fusion of beliefs between those of East and West.
The Mir Zakah coin, believed to be the only lifetime portrait of Alexander the Great, clearly shows both the horn of Amon - indicating his status as a god - and the elephant scalp and the aegis that symbolized the divine intervention that won him victory at the Hydaspes River.
SerapisIn the disputed death scene of Alexander (323 BCE), Serapis has a temple at Babylon and is of such importance that he alone is named as being consulted on behalf of the dying king.Serapis won an important place in the Greek world. (In his Description of Greece, Pausanias notes two Serapeia on the slopes of Acrocorinth, above the rebuilt Roman city of Corinth (2.4.5) and one at Copae in Boeotia (9.24.1).) In Rome, Serapis was worshiped in the Iseum Campense, the sanctuary of the goddess Isis. The Roman cults of Isis and Serapis gained in popularity late in the first century thanks to the god's role in the miracles that Vespasian experienced in the city of Alexandria. From the Flavian Dynasty on, Serapis sometimes appeared on imperial coinage with the reigning emperor. The great cult survived until 385, when a Christian mob destroyed the Serapeum of Alexandria and subsequently the cult was forbidden by the Theodosian decree. Persian influenceThe ancient Greeks and Romans made a distinction between humans and the immortals, with a kind of in-between class of (almost) divine men. The heroes described by Homer, from which Alexander claimed to descend, belonged to this category, but also sages like Pythagoras and the founders of cities.Proskynesis, formed from the Ancient Greek words pros and kunyo literally means "kissing towards", and refers to the traditional Persian act of prostrating oneself before a person of higher social rank. Alexander the Great proposed this practice during his lifetime, in adapting to the Persian cities he conquered. During the Roman Empire, the emperor Diocletian (284-305 CE) introduced the practice, forming a break with the Republican institutions of the principate, which preserved the form, if not the intent, of a representative government. The emperor was hailed no longer as "(Imp)erator" on coins, which meant 'commander in chief' but as "(D)ominus (N)oster" - 'Our Lord.' With the conversion of Constantine I to Christianity, proskynesis became part of an elaborate ritual, as asserted by historian John Julius Norwich, whereby the emperor became God's vice-regent on Earth. Titular inflation affected the other principal offices of the Empire. Dr Ranajit Pal has offered fresh insights on Persian history.  The Persepolis Fortification Tablets, is a collection from Persepolis of 30,000 cuneiform administrative tablets in a variety of Elamite, Aramaic and Akkadian, dating to 509-494 BCE, during the reign of Darius I. Pal claims that important religious figures like Gotama Buddha, Tissa and Zoroaster are present in the tablets. In his opinion, Sedda-Saramana in the tablets is Sedda-arta or Siddhartha Gotama, and Sudda-yauda-saramana, cited in numerous tablets, is his father Suddhodana. Pal observes that Damidadda or Devadatta of PF1752 may be Zoroaster, who is Devadatta, the adversary of Gotama Buddha in the Buddhist texts. 'Deva' has often the same sense as 'Baga' and Devadatta may correspond to Bakadadda of many tablets. The seal PFS 1243 which Garrison and Root ascribe to Bakadada may in fact have belonged to Zoroaster. Asoka the Great
Asoka is renowned for his Edicts on a series of columns dispersed throughout the northern Indian subcontinent. Pal believes that at least one of them was an altar of Alexander brought from Topra near Chandigarh. These edicts set out the organisation of a state religion which would be recognisable in the West today. They include: Everywhere in my domain the Yuktas, the Rajjukas and the Pradesikas shall go on inspection tours every five years for the purpose of Dhamma instruction and also to conduct other business. There is no country, except among the Greeks, where these two groups, Brahmans and ascetics, are not found, and there is no country where people are not devoted to one or another religion. Antiochus IV EpiphanesHe ruled the Seleucid ( Hellenistic) Empire from 175 BCE until his death in 164 BCE and assumed divine epithets, which no other Hellenistic king had done, such as Theos Epiphanes (Greek: ΘΕΟΣ ΕΠΙΦΑΝΗΣ mean "God Manifest"). (Rome and the Mediterranean to 133 B.C. By A. E. Astin, F. W. Walbank, M. W. Frederiksen, p. 341) Coin of Antiochus IV.
The Greek inscription ΑΝΤΙΟΧΟΥ ΘΕΟΥ ΕΠΙΦΑΝΟΥ ΝΙΚΗΦΟΡΟΥ means "of Antiochus, God Manifest, Bearer of Victory".
It was his sacking of Jerusalem in 167 BCE and persecution of Jews that instigated the Maccabean Revolt, the authorship of the books of Maccabees, Scroll of Antiochus and Daniel; and the formation of the Essenes.
Divine men make up a new category of characters and as noted (above), includes Pythagoras: |
| The use of the Ichthys symbol by early Christians. Ichthus (ΙΧΘΥΣ, Greek for fish) can be read as an acrostic. It compiles to "Jesus Christ, God's son, savior," in ancient Greek "Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ ͑Υιός, Σωτήρ", Iēsous Khristos Theou Huios, Sōtēr. |
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| Example carved into marble in the ruins of Ephesus. |
| The symbol contains the Bhavacakra, the Wheel of Becoming in Buddhism. Some believe there is a particularly close affinity between Buddhism and the doctrine of Gnostic texts such as The Gospel of Thomas. |
When Plato uses the terms γνωστικοί – gnostikoi and γνωστικὴ ἐπιστήμη – gnostike episteme in the text Politikos, the word means the "knowledge to influence and control".
The Edicts of Asoka are gnostic, in that they are a series of political declarations, from the king, describing a state religion and its organisation.
In many expressions of Christianity, such as Catholicism and Anglicanism, knowledge is one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. (Part Three, No. 1831, Catechism of the Catholic Church.)
Among the sectarian gnostics, gnosis was first and foremost a matter of self-knowledge which was considered the path leading to the goal of enlightenment.
In the formation of Christianity, various sectarian groups, labeled "gnostics" by their opponents, emphasised spiritual knowledge (gnosis) over faith (pistis). Paul of Tarsus introduced a new concept of knowledge: through faith.
Maccoby theorised that Paul synthesized Judaism, Gnosticism and mysticism to create Christianity as a cosmic saviour religion.
During the early formation of Christianity, the Church Fathers exerted considerable amounts of energy attempting to weed out what were considered to be false doctrines (e.g. Irenaeus On the Detection and Overthrow of False Gnosis).
Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, proposes in The Gnostic Paul that Paul of Tarsus was a source for Gnosticism whose influence on the direction of the early Christian church was great enough to inspire the creation of pseudonymous writings such as the Pastoral Epistles (1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus), in order to make it appear as if Paul was anti-Gnostic.
Eisenman identifies Paul as Herodian and in the Dead Sea Scrolls as the "Spouter of Lies":
There are materials in the New Testament, early Church literature, Rabbinic literature, and Josephus which point to some connection between Paul and so-called "Herodians." These materials provide valuable insight into problems related to Paul's origins, his Roman citizenship, the power he conspicuously wields in Jerusalem when still a young man, and the "Herodian" thrust of his doctrines (and as a consequence those of the New Testament) envisioning a community in which both Greeks and Jews would enjoy equal promises and privileges.
- Paul as Herodian, Robert Eisenman (JHC 3/1 (Spring, 1996), 110-122.)
If both what we have conventionally dubbed Essenes and Zealots were included in this movement, so were the Nazoreans, Ebionites, or Jewish Christians, though "Christian" is an anachronistic term better applied to the Hellenized offshoot religion as it began to take form under the sculpting hands of the pro-Roman, pro-Herod libertine, Paul. In fact, as Eisenman reads them, Paul himself figures quite prominently in the Scrolls as "the Man of the Lie" or "the Spouter of Lies" or "the Scoffer" who repudiated the Torah in the midst of the Congregation, becoming the Enemy by making himself the friend of men, pursuing "smooth things" rather than the rigor of the Law.
- Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise (editors), The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered (Element Books, 1992) Reviewed by Robert M. Price