Some Andites entered Europe by way of the islands of the Aegean and up the Danube valley, but the majority of the earlier and purer strains migrated to northwestern Europe by the northern route across the grazing lands of the Volga and the Don. [1]
No wonder the Greeks had mythological traditions that they were directly descended from gods and superhuman beings. Thery were descendants of Adamson, superior son of Adam and Eve, and Ratta, Nodite descendant of Caligastia's staff. [2]
Circa 10,000 B.C. a group of 375 superior tall descendants of Adamson made their way over the northern islands to Greece, coming almost directly from their highland home north of Mesopotamia. These progenitors of the Greeks were led westward by Sato, a direct descendant of Adamson and Ratta. [3]
All the art and genius of Greeks is a direct legacy of the posterity of Adamson, the first son of Adam and Eve, and his extraordinary second wife, Ratta, a daughter descended in an unbroken line from the pure Nodite staff of Prince Caligastia. [4]
As it was in Egypt, practically all of the art and science of the Aegean world was derived from Mesopotamia except for the culture of the Adamsonite forerunners of the Greeks. [5] By 5000 B. C. the three purest strains of Adam’s descendants were in Sumeria, northern Europe, and Greece. [6]
The Aegean region passed through five distinct cultural stages, each less spiritual than the preceding, and erelong the last glorious era of art perished beneath the weight of the rapidly multiplying mediocre descendants of the Danubian slaves who had been imported by the later generations of Greeks. [7] Egypt suffered a Greek naval invasion from the north and a Libyan attack from the south that were used by Moses for his exodus. [8]
Athens was the center of Greek science and learning. [9] Corinth was the capital of the Roman province of Achaia. [10] Andrew the apostle was crucified in Achaia. [11]
Jesus spoke, read and wrote in Greek. [12] New Testament was recorded in Greek. [13] Greek was spoken by the educated classes and the better strata of Jews in times of Jesus. [14]
The Hebrew scriptures were fully translated into Greek at the time of Jesus, and Jesus himself possessed one of these valuable copies, a gift from his friends in Alexandria. [15] In the centuries just prior to Jesus times Greek culture and the Greek language had spread over Occident and near Orient. [16]
The Greek religion had a watchword “Know yourself”. [17] Greek religion was was trivial and venal. [18] Exalted beauty. [19] The Greek religion promised salvation from disharmony, ugliness, by the realization of beauty. [20] They practiced an annual ritual bathing. [21] They had philosophy and science, but hardly a religion with a personal God. [22] Intelligent Greeks never regarded Greek gods seriously. [23] The Greek mythology was more aesthetic than ethic. [24]
In Greece, the almost complete absence of priests and “sacred scriptures” left the human mind free and unfettered, resulting in a startling development in depth of thought. The Hellenic Greeks never evolved a centralized worship system; the ritual was local; they had no priesthood and no “sacred book.”. [25]
No nation ever attained such heights of artistic philosophy in so short a time; none ever created such an advanced system of ethics practically without Deity and entirely devoid of the promise of human salvation. [26]
In Palestine, human thought was so priest-controlled and scripture-directed that philosophy and aesthetics were entirely submerged in religion and morality. In Greece, the almost complete absence of priests and “sacred scriptures” left the human mind free and unfettered, resulting in a startling development in depth of thought. But religion as a personal experience failed to keep pace with the intellectual probings into the nature and reality of the cosmos. In Greece, believing was subordinated to thinking; in Palestine, thinking was held subject to believing. In Palestine, religious dogma became so crystallized as to jeopardize further growth; in Greece, human thought became so abstract that the concept of God resolved itself into a misty vapor of pantheistic speculation. [27] But they made a terrible orgiastic plunge into the follies of the mystery cults which were then overspreading the Mediterranean lands. [28] The Olympian religion did not promise salvation, nor did it quench the spiritual thirst of its believers; therefore was it doomed to perish. [29]
A gropu of 30 stones were reverenced in Greece. [30]
All peoples treated menstruating women with contempt. Even the Greeks held the menstruating woman as one of the three great causes of defilement, the other two being pork and garlic. [31] The Greeks themselves believed in three souls; the vegetative resided in the stomach, the animal in the heart, the intellectual in the head. [32] The Greeks, in contrast with the Jews and many other peoples, had long provisionally believed in immortality, some sort of survival after death. [33] The Greeks believed in the efficacy of oracular advice. [34] The Greeks and others taught you that man is descending from godly perfection steadily down toward oblivion or destruction. [35] Greeks distinguised between animate and inanimate, the spirit and the energy. [36] They considered the material as the shadow of the more real spirit substance. [37] Like other peoples, the Greeks also had gods that formed triads. [38]
The Greeks believed that weak men must have weak souls; so they invented Hades as a fit place for the reception of such anemic souls; these unrobust specimens were also supposed to have shorter shadows. [39]
The early influence of the Salem teachers was nearly destroyed by the so-called Aryan invasion from southern Europe and the East. These Hellenic invaders brought along with them anthropomorphic God concepts similar to those which their Aryan fellows had carried to India. This importation inaugurated the evolution of the Greek family of gods and goddesses. This new religion was partly based on the cults of the incoming Hellenic barbarians, but it also shared in the myths of the older inhabitants of Greece. [40] Amenemope transmitted the ethics of evolution and the morals of revelation to the Greeks. [41]
Although the effort of Ikhnaton to impose the worship of one God upon his people appeared to fail, the repercussions of his work persisted for centuries both in Palestine and Greece. [42]
Roman religion was greatly influenced by extensive cultural importations from Greece. Eventually most of the Olympian gods were transplanted and incorporated into the Latin pantheon. The Greeks long worshiped the fire of the family hearth—Hestia was the virgin goddess of the hearth; Vesta was the Roman goddess of the home. Zeus became Jupiter; Aphrodite, Venus; and so on down through the many Olympian deities. [43]
Greek philosophy greatly influenced Christianity. Greek philosophy, united with Paul's theology, still forms the basis of European ethics. The ideals of Jesus were reinterpreted by Greek philosophy and socialized in Christianity. [44]
There was something strangely alike in Greek philosophy and many of the teachings of Jesus. They had a common goal—both aimed at the emergence of the individual. [45]
The Hellenistic Empire, as such, could not endure. Its cultural sway continued on, but it endured only after securing from the West the Roman political genius for empire administration and after obtaining from the East a religion whose one God possessed empire dignity. [46]