But Browne has yet stranger things in store. He proceeds to write the history of the Church. 4. THE CHURCH AS SCAPEGOAT Paul, says Browne, “had spent perhaps thirty years in the labor of spreading the idea of Christ, and by the time of his death that idea had already struck root far and wide in the Empire. It had divorced itself from Judaism, taking over the Sunday of the Mithraists in place of the Jewish Sabbath, and substituting Mithraist ritual for the Temple sacrifice.”[189] [The Mithraist ritual centered in the slaughter of a bull!] “Through Judaism, the religion of Persia left its mark also on Christianity; and not merely through Judaism, but also through Mithraism.”[190] [Mithra is personified diffused sunshine!] “In most of the cities there were already thriving christian brotherhoods, little secret societies much like those of the mysteries.... With the passing of the years, the pagan element grew.... The life-story of Jesus was embellished with a whole new array of marvels and miracles, and the man himself was made over into a veritable mystery savior-god. His character and nature fell into the maw of an alien philosophy, and then came drooling out in sodden and swollen distortion. He became the Lamb whose blood washed away all sin. He became the Son of God supernaturally conceived by the Virgin.... He became the Logos and the Avatar and the Savior.”[191] Browne here is complaining of alleged corruptions from Persian and other sources, all largely Oriental; as were in their origin the Greek and Roman “mysteries,” of which he has complained hitherto. But he goes on to allege that “Although the religion of Jesus and of the first disciples was distinctly Oriental, although the whole Messiah idea was markedly a thing of the East, the religion about a Savior Christ was largely European.... Indeed, one gravely doubts whether Jesus, the simple peasant teacher in hilly Galilee, would have known who in the world that Savior Christ was.” Geography is evidently too much for Browne. Persia has suddenly become European. And St. Paul, with his “more than passing acquaintance” with the Logos philosophy of Philo, the Alexandrian Jew, and his subsequent conversion to the “distinctly Oriental ... Messiah idea,” is of the West. Perhaps Alexandria was not in Africa in the early days of the Christian era, and maybe Persia was then in the extreme Occident. “It was inevitable for that change to come about. Christianity ... was gaining too many converts too rapidly.... It would not have been so bad had they been converts from a world of ignorance.... But they were converts instead from a world of what we would call stupidity.”[192]