The decline of the West, Volume 2 : $b Perspectives of world-historySpengler, Oswald
History
The decline of the West, Volume 2 : $b Perspectives of world-history
Spengler, Oswald
Civilization -- History
It is easy to see which of these conceptions was that of Jesus’s
oldest friends, for they established themselves as a community of the
Last Days in Jerusalem and frequented the Temple. For these simple
folk--amongst them his brothers, who erstwhile had openly rejected him,
and his mother, who now believed in her executed Son[366]--the power of
the Judaic tradition was even stronger than the spirit of Apocalypse.
In their object of convincing the Jews they failed (although at first
even Pharisees came over to them) and so they remained as one of the
numerous sects within Judaism, and their product, the “Confession of
Peter,” may fairly be characterized as an express assertion that they
themselves were the true Jewry and the Synedrion the false.[367]
The final destiny of this circle[368] was to fall into oblivion when,
as very soon happened, the whole world of Magian thought and feeling
responded to the new apocalyptic teaching. Amongst the later disciples
of Jesus were many who were definitely and purely Magian, and wholly
free from the Pharisaic spirit. Long before Paul, they had tacitly
settled the mission question. Not to preach, for them, was not to live
at all, and presently they had assembled, everywhere from the Tigris
to the Tiber, small circles in which the figure of Jesus, in every
conceivable presentation, merged with the mass of prior visions.[369]
Out of this, a new discord arose, as between mission to the heathen and
mission to the Jews, and this was far more important than the conflict
between Judea and the world on issues already decided. Jesus had lived
in Galilee. Was his teaching to look west or east? Was it to be a
Jesus-cult or an Order of the Saviour? Was it to seek intimacy with the
Persian or with the Syncretic Church, both of which were in process of
formation?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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