under which they had paid homage to Serapis and known as Christians,
Essenes or Therapeutae, they substituted for their Christ the name of
the Grecian Bacchus, which, composed of the letters {Greek:
IOTA,ETA,SIGMA}, signifies Yes, Ies or Jes. In composing their version
of the Gospel story, having, like their race, no inventive genius, they
appropriated that of Serapis as its basis and laid its scene in the
land of their ancestry, but inconsistently retained the sign of the
cross and the phraseology connected there with, which, having special
reference to the Nile River and its annual inundation, had no
application whatever to the sterile land of Judea. Selecting what they
conceived to be the best from other versions of the Gospel story, and
assuming the title of Eclectics, they designated their system as the
Eclectic Philosophy. In proof of the eclectic character of the Gospel
and Epistles of ancient Christianity, we refer to the Asceticism
inculcated therein, which, derived from the Oriental Gnosticism, we
find perpetuated in the scriptures of modern Christianity; we also
refer to the miracle of converting water into wine, taken from the
Gospel story of Bacchus, and to the statements that the Saviour was the
son of a carpenter and was hung between two thieves, copied from the
story of Christna, the Eighth, Avatar of the East Indian astrolatry.
Thus we see that, although the scene of the Gospel story of ancient
Christianity was laid in the land of Judea, its authors having adopted
a Greek version of that story as its basis, given a Greek title and
name to their Messiah, perpetuated a Greek name for their sect and
quoted exclusively from the Septuagint, or Greek version of the Old
Testament, the facts show conclusively that it was not Jews of Judea,
but Hellenized Jews of Alexandria, who were the real authors of the
ancient Christianity.