Secret_History

Chapter 5: Whose world is it, anyway? 147
his idea were perceived as a threat to ecclesiastical authority. Hippolytus, writing
in 215 AD accused the Montanist believers of heresy, including listening to
revelations from female seers. Montanism continued to spread, especially after
Tertullian - the brilliant legal scholar who had been born in Carthage and
converted to Christianity in 196 AD. - joined the movement. He too reported a
vision of this heavenly city descending from the sky, a metaphor that has persisted
for centuries.
The ubiquity of this vision is interesting for a lot of reasons, most particularly
when one considers the possibility that these early Christians may have been
interacting with hyperdimensional realities. While some Gnostic groups
“spiritualized” the events foretold in Revelation, there were still those who insisted
that this paradise was quite real and physical and could exist on earth. This idea
became known as chiliasm, a form of apocalyptic vision that depicted the
millennium as a physical and material period.
A Gnostic prophet named Cerinthus said that there would be an earthly kingdom
of Christ, and that the flesh of human beings again inhabiting Jerusalem would be
subject to desires and pleasure. He added, “The kingdom of Christ would ...
consist in the satisfaction of the stomach and of even lower organs, in eating, and
drinking and nuptial pleasures”. One writer described Cerinthus and his followers
by noting, “there was great enthusiasm among his supporters for that end...”.
No doubt.
Many chiliasts believed that in the millennium all manner of physical craving
would be satiated, that men would find all women beautiful and willing to partake
in carnal delights. Others taught that women would bear many children, but
without the pain of childbirth or even the inconvenience of sex. It can be noted
that there is a thread of sexual allusions in the millennialist vision that - through
the centuries - has emerged again and again.
It is fairly simple to see in the “seed” of the primitive chiliasm of the early
Christian ideas the concept of Time Loops and hyperdimensional realities as well
as the idea of cyclical catastrophes signaling both the end and the beginning of
“worlds”. However, there seems to have been something else about this early
Christianity that created problems for church fathers who were busy codifying
dogma and constructing a far-flung ecclesiastical empire. Since “end time fever”
would not go away, it was codified as “believe in our dogmas, and you will go to
heaven at the End Time”. “It will only happen once, and we are the agents of the
god who is going to destroy everybody who does not belong to our club.”
The question is: if the early Church fathers eliminated “primitive chiliasm” from
Christianity, what ELSE did they eliminate? As noted, what we know as
Christianity today is, according to many experts, little more than an amalgamation
of many mythical representations of the dying and resurrecting god theme. More
than anything, it reflects the Tammuz drama with a major overlay of the Egyptian
religion of the time.
What is most revealing is the fact that the only writings contemporary to the
times of early Christianity which mention it specifically, remark that it was a “vile
superstition”. Yet, what we have as Christianity today is nothing more or less than
the same religious practices of the peoples who branded it a “vile superstition”.
Tacitus tells us that in the time of Nero: