Greeks

Blindness

Matthew 8:10 And hearing Yahshua marveled and said to those following: “Truly I say to you, from no one in Israel have I found such faith!

Christ seems to have meant Israel in the geographic sense here, or possibly in a sense referring to those of Judaea who had kept the law and the prophets. While many Greeks, Romans, Kelts, etc. were indeed descended from Israelites dispersed long beforetime, who had for the most part already forgotten their identity in their blindness, as Paul said in his epistle to the Ephesians, they were alienated from the civic life of Israel, and therefore being divorced from Yahweh they truly were not counted as Israel. As Hosea says, they were His people, but they were called “Not His people” until the time when they would accept Christ and be reconciled to God.

Culture

Immerson

Baptism was also a pagan ritual. One could assert that in the Christian era, the pagan idea has been brought into Christianity. In Christianity, the priests were cleansed before the sacrifice, not the people, and John the Baptist fulfilled that. We have taken the power to cleanse our sins which belongs to the sacrifice – which is what Yahshua is – and we have wrongly transferred it to the priests themselves, who merely conducted the ritual! We are cleansed through Yahshua's sacrifice, and not through the rituals of the priests. There are many ancient documents revealing baptism to be a pagan ritual. Here I will show that baptism was employed by our pagan ancestors in four of our own ancient cultures, Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, and Germanic.

From the ancient play Eumenides, by the fifth-century B.C. Greek poet Aeschylus, his character Orestes says at lines 448-452:

“It is the law that he who is defiled by shedding blood shall be debarred all speech until the blood of a suckling victim shall have besprinkled him by the ministrations of one empowered to purify from murder. Long since, at other houses, have I been thus purified both by victims and flowing streams.” (Loeb Library edition of Aeschylus).

Here we see that the Greeks believed that one may be cleansed of sin either by baptism (“flowing streams”) or by the blood of sacrifice, for which we shall compare Heb. 9:13-14:

“ 13 For if sprinkling those who are defiled with the blood of goats and bulls and ashes of a heifer sanctifies for purity of the flesh, 14 by how much more shall the blood of the Christ, who through the eternal Spirit has offered Himself blameless to Yahweh, purify our consciences - apart from dead rituals - for which to serve Yahweh who lives? ”

Physical Fitness

Matthew 10:40 He receiving you receives Me, and he receiving Me receives He who has sent Me.

Paul of Tarsus has often been criticized for saying at Galatians 4:14: “and of my trial in my flesh you did not despise or loathe, but as a messenger of Yahweh you accepted me, like Yahshua Christ.” People accuse Paul of claiming to be “like Christ”, but that is not what Paul was saying at all. Rather, Paul was commending the Galatians, that in spite of Paul's fleshly trials – in this case his very poor eyesight – they nevertheless received him as a messenger of Christ, and they received him as they would have received Christ Himself. In other words, the Galatians were fulfilling these very words which Christ uttered to His followers here in Matthew 10:40, and Paul was recognizing that on their behalf! This is understood further once one realizes the importance which Greek culture placed upon physical perfection. Paul's poor eyesight was a great reproach to him, and a burden placed upon one claiming to be a messenger of God. We often bear this same prejudice today, even though it is not spoken of openly.