I think the word 'God' is very significant. When Christianity was founded there were thousands of gods and they all had a personal name including the Jewish OT god. The Christian god does
not have a personal name. There was a realisation within pagan philosophy that whether all the gods existed or not (and whatever they were or what
exist might mean in their case) there had to be some kind of Ultimate Principle, some Foundation that everything was a form of and for want of a better words call it
The God beyond the gods.
That is
always the Christian usage. It's often usage in the Dead Sea Scrolls as well (and the word for 'god' is El or Al, as in Al-Lah). Whatever its 'real' origins, Christianity was a 'new dispensation' in that it dealt with a Principle beyond depiction or naming. There are similar concepts in related an unrelated religions. In Qabbala
The Infinite Light of Nothing in Hinduism & Buddhism
The Undifferentiated. Christianity treats
the gods as at best fictions, at worst actual evil forces distracting us from greater understanding. St. Paul even says to go through 'Scripture' and what acts of YHWH fit Christian ethics and understanding of
The Divinity actually are 'of the god', what do not are 'of man' - justifications for ancient conquests and royal decrees. If you want a 'depiction' or 'image' of the divinity, you have to go
through The Christ as represented by Jesus. That covers the 'simple' in need of gods they can see and imagine.
'God' is
nota name: it is a
label, a 'description' of some Priinciple that by definition cannot be defined
(There's worse things in mathematical logic!). That is how Christianity comes to be a radical development of public religions of the time, though the initiatory Mystery religions taught similar ideas - and how, in pagan terms, it was seen as Atheism.
Fine. But not everybody did think along those mystical lines. Christianity had its 'militant fundamentalists' then too. We hear about them as martyrs bravely resisting wicked Romans pleading with them to just even pray to their god for the Emperor's well-being. Not so hard: most modern states include prayers for their Head of State. We hear far less about the ones who found no problem with this or with accepting the official gods as part of the doings of normal life. They made no trouble so there's nothing to hear.
Well not quite
nothing. We
do hear of them as
heretics, backsliders, traitors to the Cause - all the things we might expect a suicide bomber to call the typical Muslim who says his prayers but doesn't mind the occasional forbidden drink and thinks Shariya Law was an improvement in the desert of the First Century AH but now that's where it should stay.
I submit that it's
these people who really understood the original Christian message and the kids took the school over over and eliminated their teachers. The militants had (and needed) better organisation and they flourished during sixty years when the Roman Empire fell apart in almost permanent civil war before being put back together in a new form that became the Byzantine Empire. It's notable that the first thing that happened then was a persecution of Christians and the second their legalisation leading to becoming obligatory State Religion.
Why? Because those Christians probably had a better working organisation than the State. People looked to their Bishop for protection and justice, not to unreliable cash-starved bribable official magistrates. They constituted a state within the State and had to be either crushed (which didn't work) or absorbed (which worked mightily!)
At the same time, those Christians had long since lost touch with a lot of the inner meanings and returned to the kind of personal god called
God that pagans had. As the religion spread to non-Romans they replaced Thor with Christ, Woden with God and so on. The Orthodox and Catholic churches retain some vestige of deity as a Principle beyond some Zeus on a cloud interfering with the world. By the time you come to descendants of these 'Barbarians' in Switzerland and Holland and get Zwingli and Calvin, their God is a Person Up There with a very definite character (and not a nice one either!).
So, to try and sum up, I think the
Abrahamic Personification was just what Christianity was intended to get beyond with a much more philosophical 'god' considered Atheistic at the time. The idea got lost and instead they restored the old kind of personified deity using God as a personal name instead of a title. The worst of them took their ideas across the Atlantic where they became ever more primitive and ever more crazy so that some of them can read passages talking about Jews and the Promissed Land as applying to themselves while denouncing real Jews as cursed. We should really think of 'The God' in the New Testament as something much vaguer and greater than the Personage imagined in the Old.
That doesn't make me a 'Christian' in any usual sense. It makes be an outright heretic. But I feel that taken that way,
all religions reconcile up to a point, given the different societies they have developed in. Europeans and Middle Easterners are far too dynamic to have developed anything like Buddhism. Indians have a tradition of philosophy and mysticism going back too far to develop something as formalised as Islam. Even where they have taken to it, they were among the first to develop Sufi mysticism. And so on.
(not really but yeah)
