Richard Hardison said,

“Peter a follower of Mani, before Mani was born? Have you been into the lemonade again?”

First, I meant Paul.

Second, it is true Mani lived long after Paul, so Paul could not have been a Manichaean.

Good save.

Please note that I spent a LOT of words below trying to explain that you simply cannot know ANYTHING about Christianity if you do not fully recognize that Christianity grew up in the six centuries before Islam.

During that period, the theologians were obsessed with chastity and self-torture. There is no way you can understand this by looking at the Old Testament, especially the obsession with chastity and sterility as a way to God.

That isn’t IN the Old Testament, no matter how hard you try to shoehorn early Christianity into it.

So where did it come from?

It came from Zoroastrianism, the religion of the only other superpower of the Roman world. That was the official religion of the Persian Empire. Its membership was strictly limited to those of the Aryan race.

Zoroastriansim also contained what we think of as new, the Aryan demand for self-destruction.

Ahriman was the Satan of Zorastrianism, but he had another name theologians may be familiar with. Ahriman was the ruler of THIS world.

When Satan tempted Jesus, he offered Christ all the kingdoms of the world.

Did you ever consider how it was that Satan COULD offer Jesus all the kingdoms of the world?

In the first century AD the seven million Jews in the Roman Empire asumed that Satan was the Lord of THIS world. He OWNED all the kingdoms of THIS world.

The Zoroastrian Good God was Ahura-Mazda, who was the ruler of the NEXT world, “My kingdom is not of this world.”

That is NOT in the Old Testament. OT’s Jehovah was dedicated to Jews and to Israel.

But over the one thousand and eight hundred years of its overpowering presence, Zoroastrianism evolved. It came to believe that everything about THIS world was evil. That is where, before there ever was a Moslem on earth, Mani got his idea for Manichaeism.

Mani was openly synthesizing the two great relgiions of his world, Christianity which dominated Rome and Zoroastrianism which ruled Persia.

Mani invented nothing. Paul was dedicated to the idea that THIS world is altogether evil. Having children was assumed to be evil for a reason no Old Testament fanatic can begin to understand.

As Elizabeth points out, Manichaeism is sick.

But it is not a SEMITIC sickness. It came straight from us Aryans.

You cannot begin to understand Christianity by obsessing on the Old Testament.