Meredith Sprunger's Synopsis of The Urantia Book
Synopsis of Paper 195-I
AFTER PENECOST -- GREEK AND ROMAN INFLUENCE
1. The results of Peter's preaching on the day of Pentecost were such as to decide the future policies, and to determine the plans, of the majority of the apostles in their efforts to proclaim the gospel of the kingdom. Peter was the real founder of the Christian church; Paul carried the Christian message to the gentiles, and the Greek believers carried it to the whole Roman Empire.
2. The peoples of the Western world .... could contemplate the inheritance of great accomplishments in philosophy, art, literature, and political progress. But with all these achievements they had no soul‑satisfying religion .... A new order of living was thus presented to the hungry hearts of these Western peoples. This situation meant immediate conflict .... Such a conflict must result in either decided victory for the new or for the old or in some degree of compromise. Christianity .... was not a simple spiritual appeal, such as Jesus had presented to the souls of men; it early struck a decided attitude, on religious rituals, education, magic, medicine, art, literature, law, government, morals, sex regulation, polygamy, and, in limited degree, even slavery. Christianity came not merely as a new religion—something all the Roman Empire and all the Orient were waiting for—but as a new order of human society.
3. The triumph of Christianity over the philosophic religions and the mystery cults was due to:
1. Organization. Paul was a great organizer and his successors kept up the pace he set.
2. Christianity was thoroughly Hellenized. It embraced the best in Greek philosophy as well as the cream of Hebrew theology.
3. But best of all, it contained a new and great ideal, the echo of the life bestowal of Jesus and the reflection of his message of salvation for all mankind.
4. The Christian leaders were willing to make such compromises with Mithraism that the better half of its adherents were won over to the Antioch cult.
5. Likewise did the next and later generations of Christian leaders make such further compromises with paganism that even the Roman emperor Constantine was won to the new religion.
4. Wisely or unwisely, these early leaders of Christianity deliberately compromised the ideals of Jesus in an effort to save and further many of his ideas. And they were eminently successful. But mistake not! these compromised ideals of the Master are still latent in his gospel, and they will eventually assert their full power upon the world.
5. Christianity owes much, very much, to the Greeks. It was a Greek, from Egypt, who so bravely stood up at Nicaea and so fearlessly challenged this assembly that it dared not so obscure the concept of the nature of Jesus that the real truth of his bestowal might have been in danger of being lost to the world. This Greek's name was Athanasius, and but for the eloquence and the logic of this believer, the persuasions of Arius would have triumphed.
6. 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. The Greek, at social and political emergence; Jesus, at moral and spiritual emergence. The Greek taught intellectual liberalism leading to political freedom; Jesus taught spiritual liberalism leading to religious liberty. These two ideas put together constituted a new and mighty charter for human freedom; they presaged man's social, political, and spiritual liberty.
7. Christianity came into existence and triumphed over all contending religions primarily because of two things:
1. The Greek mind was willing to borrow new and good ideas even from the Jews.
2. Paul and his successors were willing but shrewd and sagacious compromisers; they were keen theologic traders.
Never forget that at first the Romans fought Christianity, while the Greeks embraced it, and that it was the Greeks who literally forced the Romans subsequently to accept this new religion, as then modified, as a part of Greek Culture.
8. The art and philosophy of Greece were fully equal to the task of imperial expansion, but not so with Greek political administration or religion .... 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.
9. Much of the early persecution of Christians in Rome was due solely to their unfortunate use of the term "kingdom' in their preaching. The Romans were tolerant of any and all religions but very resentful of anything that savored of political rivalry .... he (the Roman) cared little for either art or religion, but he was unusually tolerant of both.
10. The early Romans were politically devoted and sublimely consecrated individuals. They were honest, zealous, and dedicated to their ideals, but without a religion worthy of the name .... these Romans were a great people. They could govern the Occident because they did govern themselves .... It was easy for these Greco‑Romans to become just as spiritually devoted to an institutional church as they were politically devoted to the state .... Christianity became the moral culture of Rome but hardly its religion in the sense of being the individual experience in spiritual growth of those who embraced the new religion in such a wholesale manner.
11. The Stoic and his sturdy appeal to "nature and conscience" had only the better prepared all Rome to receive Christ, at least in an intellectual sense. The Roman was by nature and training a lawyer; he revered even the laws of nature. And now, in Christianity, he discerned in the laws of nature the laws of God. A people that could produce Cicero and Virgil were ripe for Paul's Hellenized Christianity.
12. The Roman provided a unity of political rule; the Greek, a unity of culture and learning; Christianity, a unity of religious thought and practice .... That which, gave greatest power to Christianity was the way its believers lived lives of service and even the way they died for their faith during the earlier times of drastic persecution.
13. The second century after Christ was the best time in all the world's history for a good religion to make progress in the Western world .... There was religious liberty; travel was universal and thought was untrammeled .... Even a good religion could not save a great empire from the sure results of lack of individual participation in the affairs of government, from overmuch paternalism, over taxation and gross collection abuses, unbalanced trade with the Levant which drained away the gold, amusement madness, Roman standardization, the degradation of woman, slavery and race decadence, physical plagues, and a state church which became institutionalized nearly to the point of spiritual barrenness.
14. Conditions, however, were not so bad in Alexandria. The early schools continued to hold much of Jesus' teachings free from compromise .... While some of the ideals of Jesus were sacrificed in the building of Christianity, it should in all fairness be recorded that, by the end of the second century, practically all the great minds of the Greco‑Roman world had become Christian .... we have often conjectured what would have happened in Rome and in the world if it had been the gospel of the kingdom which had been accepted in the place of Greek Christianity.
15. The church, being an adjunct to society and the ally of politics, was doomed to share in the intellectual and spiritual decline of the so‑called European "dark ages." During this time, religion became more and more monasticized, asceticized, and legalized. In a spiritual sense, Christianity was hibernating. Throughout this period there existed, alongside this slumbering and secularized religion, a continuous stream of mysticism, a fantastic spiritual experience bordering on unreality and philosophically akin to pantheism.
16. Christianity exhibits a history of having originated out of the unintended transformation of the religion of Jesus into a religion about Jesus. It further presents the history of having experienced Hellenization, paganization, secularization, institutionalization, intellectual deterioration, spiritual decadence. moral hibernation, threatened extinction, later rejuvenation, fragmentation, and more recent relative rehabilitation. Such a pedigree is indicative of inherent vitality and the possession of vast recuperative resources. And this same Christianity is now present in the civilized world of Occidental peoples and stands face to face with a struggle for existence which is even more ominous than those eventual crises which have characterized its past battles for dominance.
Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think Christianity became a new order of human society rather than simply a new religion?
2. How do you think the Fifth Epochal Revelation will change our society?
3. What kind of compromise might the students of the Urantia Synopsis of Papers make with the religions of the world?
4. What is the difference between the ideals of Jesus and his ideas?
5. Why was early Christianity accepted by the Greeks and opposed by the Romans?
6. Was the dominance of the legal-minded Romans in Christianity a prominent factor in the inclusion of dogma in the church?
7. Is this a good time in history for a new paradigm of spiritual reality to make its way in our world?
8. Does compromise further the growth of truth dominance in religion and in society?
9. What is the root of the crises in Western Civilization today?
10. Is Christianity's struggle for existence today more ominous than its crises in the "dark ages?"
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