Note 75 — VII SYMBOLS OF THE MESSIAH: THE LAMB AND THE CROSS THE CHRISTIAN JESUS I THE PAULINE JESUS

In the same way Vollers also, in his work on “Die Weltreligionen” (1907), seeks to explain the faith of the original Christian sects in Jesus’ death and resurrection as a blend of the Adonis (Attis) and Christ faiths. He regards this as the essence of that faith, that the existing views of the Messiah and the Resurrection were transferred to one and the same person; and shows from this of what great importance it must be that this faith met a well-prepared ground, in North Syria, Anatolia, and Egypt, where it naturally spread. But he treats the Jewish Diaspora of these lands as the natural mediator of the new preaching or “message of Salvation” (Gospel), and finds a proof of his view in this, “that the sphere of the greatest density of the Diaspora almost completely coincides with those lands where the growing and rising youthful God was honoured, and that these same districts are also the places in which we meet, only a generation after Jesus’ death, the most numerous, flourishing, and fruitful communities of the new form of belief.” It is the Eastern Mediterranean or Levantine horse-shoe shaped line which stretches from Ephesus and Bithynia through Anatolia to Tarsus and Antioch, thence through Syria and Palestine by way of the cult-centres Bubastes and Sais to Alexandria. Almost directly in the middle of these lands lies Aphaka, where was the chief sanctuary of the “Lord” Adonis, and a little south of this spot lies the country where the Saviour of the Gospels was born (op. cit., 152). ↑