THREE BOUGHS; ONE TREE
There are three primary witnesses of the eternal ordinances of the Kingdom of God. Authority was derived by corroboration between all three of these witnesses. The rest of hierarchical administrations have been conventions of human agency, for good and bad. The witnesses of eternal ordinances are:
- The Heavens
The heavenly witness is the cosmos, and astronomy is its language. “He telleth the numbers of the stars: he calleth them all by their names” (Psalm 147:4).
- The Stones
Temples are the stone witnesses of the eternal ordinances in antiquity and modern times. “Then David gave to Solomon his son the pattern of the porch, and of the houses thereof, and of the treasuries thereof, and of the upper chambers thereof, and of the inner parlors thereof, and of the place of the mercy seat, and the pattern of all that he had by the spirit…All this, said David, the Lord made me understand in writing by his hand upon me, even all the works of this pattern. And David said to Solomon his son, Be strong and of good courage, and do it: fear not, nor be dismayed: for the Lord God, even my God, will be with thee; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee, until thou hast finished all the work for the service of the house of the Lord” (1 Chronicles 28: 11-12, 19-20).
- The Clay
The human body is the witness of the eternal ordinances in clay. “Jesus answered them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days? But he spake of the temple of his body” (John 2:19-21).
Of all of the billions of humans that have inhabited Earth, and despite the suffering and ecstasy in human experience from age to age, many have recognized Jesus Christ as the quintessential embodiment of all three witnesses of the eternal ordinances. “By his self-abasement, God transubstantiated refined Spirit into the most vulgarized human matter, shredded by whips, crowned with thorns, and eye-plucked, naked, stretched thin and dislocated, convulsed and self-soiled. The Crucified thus sanctified, is the antithesis of a Roman god, the opposite of the bodiless and impersonal Yahweh, and above the Unmoved Mover. To come down at all, God had to descend to the very depth. It is the most conclusive proof of his exalted origins. Compared to a God willing to embody such a paradox, the proper response to any of these others was atheism” (Tom Holland, “Why I changed my mind about Christianity,” Edictum Conference, March 14, 2023).
Expanding further on a tripartite theme, the Fourth Seal of the Apotheosis Scroll will draw a distinction between three different types of first century Christianities, their founding cities, and their apostolic archetypes:
- Messianic Jewish Christianity
Jerusalem
James:
The teachings of Messianic Jewish Christianity were based on the Hebrew Testament, the baptism of John, and the sayings of Jesus. Disciples of this movement anticipated that Yahweh’s heavenly host of angelic warriors would meet them in the desert, and this gathering would overcome the superior Roman armies to usher in the messianic rule of the Davidic servant. In the Jewish-Roman War (66-73 AD), the Temple was utterly destroyed, and, in a crushing blow to the Jewish-nationalist movement, Jews were mercilessly massacred by the tens of thousands.
- The Mysteries of Godliness
Caesarea Maritima
John:
A separate Christian movement took root at exactly this time in Caesarea Maritima, the Roman capitol of Judea. Caesarea Maritima was built by the Jewish King Herod to glorify the emperor. It was built on the Mediterranean Sea where all of the Mediterranean peoples intermingled to trade goods and ideas in a pluralistic cosmopolitan coastal city, a “new Jerusalem” enriched by international commerce. The law and the armies went out from Caesarea. The ancient mysteries of godliness were reintroduced via the Mystery of Mithras in a Gentile Christian/Anti-nationalist Jewish Christian context. The worthy initiate ascended a series of ordinances, or seals within a system administered by initiates who had already ascended the seals themselves. The Mystery initiation was modeled after other ancient mysteries that had preceded it and was based on the three corroborating witnesses of the cosmos, the stones, and the clay. Based on Zoroastrian covenant astronomy, the Mystery cast Jesus Christ as the archetypal ascended man and Saoshyant Messiah.
- The synoptic Gospels and the Platonized Christian Church
Rome
Peter and Paul:
More has been written about the third type of Christianity, the Platonized Roman Christian Church, than any other. This was the Christianity of Paul, the Church Fathers, the early Christian martyrs, and the credal councils. It supplied the doctrine of the Trinity, of Grace, and the penal substitution law of Atonement. This bough of the Christian tree has defined Christianity for the last two thousand years. Civic and government administrations have interlocked with its priesthoods by authority bestowed in Peter’s name since its earliest days and its doctrines were created over time. When Christianized Rome went to war against Persia in the fourth century it homogenized Christianity under its authority, cut all ties to its Persian, gnostic, and pagan roots, and persecuted the Mystery into extinction.
According to Roger Beck, Tiberius Claudius Balbillus (b. Alexandria Egypt c. 3-79 AD) was the founding father of the Roman Mystery of Mithras (see The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun). Balbillus was the court astrologer to the first century emperors Claudius, Nero, and Vespasian. These emperors cover the forty-year Christian Mystery gestation that spanned from Jesus’ ministry and crucifixion through the first Jewish-Roman War four decades later. Vespasian, the last of these emperors, established the Flavian dynasty.
While serving the Flavian court in Caesarea Maritima, Balbillus would have guided the emperors with cosmic rationalization for the suppression of the Jewish revolt. It is possible that Balbillus created the Mystery of Mithras as one element of the campaign to assimilate the remainder of the Jews and other conquered peoples-turned-slaves in the Pax Romana. As such, Balbillus may have cast Jesus as Mithras, the archetypal god of covenant ascension from humble birth to exalted man. In the allegory Balbillus created, Christ was transformed from a Jewish-nationalist leader of an earthly kingdom into a Son of God of virgin birth. This Jewish savior would instruct every willing human soul in preparation for Frashokereti, the cyclical remodeling of the earth in the seventh seal. Balbillus chose Jesus because Balbillus honored Jesus’ uncommon holiness and recognized him as the Saoshyant Messiah. In a new reading of the Jewish scriptures, the Hebrew Testament was used as a proof text to convince Jews and gentile God-fearers that Jesus was the Christ. The ascended Jesus became a model of proper, even transcendent Roman obeisance. The question isn’t whether Rome had a part in the eventual administration of Christianity, the question is whether Christianity was a deliberate Roman project, for which Paul was but an emissary, as early as the first century. The Zoroastrian Magus (Tiberius Claudius Balbillus), is the common denominator to all of this potentiality.
The Christian mystery expanded the almost superhuman spiritual and stoic capacity of a flayed and crucified historical man into a cosmic principle. The Lamb, whose sacrifice would close out the age of Aries, was a savior of the world and a new variety of grain in the bread of life. In an innovative and antithetical reformulation of Jewish messianic prophecy, the kingdom of God was restored through Israel’s pre-exilic familial polytheism still sacred and unforgotten to many of Abraham’s descendants. The Son of God theology attributed to Jesus undermined the militant monotheism of James and the rebellion by cleaving Judaism along Yahwist and patriarchal lines. A generation of slaughtered Jews escaped total elimination if they forsook their zeal for the Law of Moses and acquiesced to Roman rule and the pluralistic values described in the New Testament.
To cast the crucified leader of an insurrectionist movement as the hero of a new astronomical mystery was radically innovative, but immensely successful. Crucifixion was common. The idea that a god was among those suffering along the highway, someone from whom one would want to turn their eyes away, was inconceivable. Nevertheless, the road to Calvary was the straight and narrow way, and Jesus was the shepherd at the most ignominious gate. The path to godliness was not in the soft places with the fine food and reclined sofas, and not in the buildings where discourses on the law of God were heard. Rather, the path of ascent began in hell and any one of those mangled and suffering slaves and rebels on the outskirts of the town could have been the God they sought in their innermost heart. As we can see from Paul’s stridently pro-Roman vision of Christ, the Christian church among the gentiles was originally based, not on the messianic cause of the historical Jesus, but on Jesus fulfilling the cosmic role of the resurrected Christ in Balbillus’ grand astronomical mystery.
The existential pressure pot of the first century Roman Empire and the political response to it is independent of the transcendent Mystery of human ascension to deification. The Mystery drew from an international and pluralistic well and is so old that no one knows its beginning. The original Mystery was an ancient form of Zoroastrianism, the parent religion that sired the monotheistic Abrahamic religions as well as the Vedic/Hindu religions. In this new incarnation of ancient Zoroastrianism, Jesus personified the Mystery. Jesus was an avatar of Mithras, the god at the intersection of everything, the mediator of the everlasting covenant. This intersection, of heaven and earth, of spirit and matter, of Roman and Jew, of humankind and God, of male and female, of suffering and ecstasy, of ascent and descent, of crucifixion and sovereignty, of the light of the sun and the darkness of the dampened soil, was the singularity from which the seed of creation springs. Mithraic exaltation and Christian salvation are thus linked. Initiates in the Mithras cult knew this paradox axiomatically as “Harmony of tension in opposition” as shown in the inscriptions on the walls and monuments of mithraea. This nexus of creativity wrought by the explosion of seemingly irreconcilable forces is the Shepherd’s gate hinge: the fourth of seven seals, with the three seals of heaven above and the three seals of earth, sea, and the underworld below.
By design, as the cult of Mithras spread throughout the empire, it assimilated and adapted locally. A variant of Mithraism here or there did not necessarily mean conformity with that variant elsewhere. Yet, the primary astronomical motifs of Balbillus’ allegory remained phenomenally consistent across lands and seas through the first several centuries after Jesus. This allegory may yet inform Christian discipleship after two millennia of institutional dominion and canonical confinement and help to break open the revelation of Christ in infinitely varied expressions. As the genuine offspring of divine parentage, the Christian disciple is a daughter or a son of Christ, and each is a unique personification of the Christian mystery. “Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ” (Galatians 4:1).
KAMRON COLEMAN ART 