To those people who only like to look at the surface of things and imagine that 'Christianity,' 'Judaism' and 'Islam' were all monolithic blocks with no secret traditions maintaining older mystical beliefs should read this. Mohammed's teachers were also identified as hanifs. They preserved older teachings which the Melkites tried their best to exterminate. I am not saying that we all shared EVERYTHING in common. But the idea that you just need to take Irenaeus' statements about the state of Church orthodoxy at face value is idiotic. There was an Alexandrian mystical tradition rooted in Jewish mysticism which was perpetuated into the fourth century. This accounts for why Origen, 'the Origenists,' the Arians all have accusation of 'going over to Jewish lies' leveled against them. Jesus was not the messiah of these Christians because they knew how impossible it was to reconcile a figure like Jesus with the traditional expectation of a Davidic messiah. I suspect that the traditional Alexandrian devotion to St Mark has something to do with this 'Jewish mystical truths' but what do I know. I am, according to my detractors, a 'Jew with an agenda.' Of course, my theory that St. Mark was likely one and the same with Marcus Agrippa and Marqe the son of Tite, the man who established the Samaritan religion is a well established 'Jewish agenda.' You know how much the Jews loved the Herods and their Samaritan neighbors.
It is amazing how the idea of a 'Jewish agenda' or 'Jewish conspiracy' inevitably roll of the lips of religious teachers.
And so the question still remains - how can these 'experts' whose knowledge of Judaism is only limited to 'ideal models' divorced from any historical reality having any meaningful knowledge about their own tradition - i.e. Christianity? As I have noted innumerable times - where is the Jewish soil from which the tree of Irenaeus' Christianity is supposed to have developed?
With the Marcosians - i.e. Clement of Alexandria - it is obvious, their seed was planted in Alexandria, in the soil of the Boucolia, where the Church of St Mark still lies buried. But aside from paying lip service to 'the Creator' where's any sign of a substantive connection with Judaism on the part of the Catholic Church?
Indeed that's the point - it's all based in the clouds, in the wind or spirit which is ultimately from a scientific perspective the same as saying it never existed, it was all made up ...
