The Resurrection itself was a confirmation of all the biblical prophecy up to that point. And so for this reality to be presented only to those who witnessed it, it was bound to strike concern and dispute among the various factions of Magian faith. The teachings of Christ fell into the background as he himself took centre stage, as the factual presence of Christ among them became a memory of the disciples and thus fell into the abstract world of truths. On this the Jews and Mandaeans objected: their Messiah was still yet to come, but for the Christians their Messiah had already passed. For good reason, the Jews objected on the grounds that their Messiah was a Jew and would arrive only the Jews, and this seeming imposter made the Jews that followed him non-Jews but of a different and wholly new kind of nationality. For the Christians their faith was to be spread as a mission, but the Pharisees still clung to their legalistic and tribal idea of nation, one which negated the mission entirely, and discriminated against the whole of the gentiles whilst the Christians welcomed them in warm embrace.

Though failing to convince Jerusalem, those they did appeal to were those in the East who, as previously mentioned, were of a different kind of Jew to the Legalists of the West, who created the Apocalypse as express means to help their desire to convert those to their faith. In Jerusalem, the failure to convert the Jewish people resulted in its apprehension as just another section of Judaism, here Spengler cites Matthew as his is the only gospel that uses the term “Ecclesia”, denoting a community of true jews in contradistinction to the masses that didn’t accept Christ. There is therefore a tribal element to this that was rejected soundly by the greater community. The Aramaean world however was more than potent enough to accept Christs teachings because they were not merely looking for a saviour of the Jews but a saviour of humanity as a whole, and thus various small communities arose in the early years reflecting this.

But the question remained whether Christianity ought to look Westwards or Eastwards. To the West was the Roman Empire in its early twilight and to the east was the land bound peasantry, waiting for their saviour; “Was it to be a Jesus-cult or an Order of the Saviour?”. This decision was made by Paul, who for Spengler was “the first who had the sense not only of truths, but of facts”. Previously a young Rabbi, Paul was the first to see the resurrection as a problem to be worked upon, to be interpreted and systematized and have seeming contradictions explained to a consistency. He showed within his work an intellect typical of a late stage civilisational mindset, the idea that the Pharisee was “wrong” and that the Nazarenes were “right” is unfathomable to the early Christian communities, and though they couldn’t fathom it, residing on and off of the land, Paul would take Christianity into the cities, never going from village to village but only preaching to the citizens and freemen of the Romes and Corinths. Because of Paul, Christianity chose the West; the classically adept and intelligent man cosied the faith by letter and pen and word of mouth up to the Roman Empire. Paul’s Jesus Christ was not the man the disciples knew, who lived and breathed with the peasantry and country-folk but was from the start a set of principles to be worked upon.

“In the ambiance of pure Apocalyptic there is no “intellect.” For the old comrades it was simply not possible to understand [Jesus] in the least – and mournfully and doubtfully they must have looked at him while he was addressing them. Their living image of Jesus (whom Paul had never seen) paled in this bright, hard light of concepts and propositions. Thenceforward the holy memory faded into a Scholastic system.”

It is no small matter that Christians would later begin to refer to the heathens as “Pagani”, which broadly translates to “country-folk”. It shows that Paul’s presence in the faith was so monumental that it converted the faith of small communities into a city-religion, and all the worse, only a mere generation after Jesus, who knew nothing of the sort and had nothing but contempt for its ways.

Whilst Paul would be the first of the great personalities of Christianity, who would form and direct the religion head first into a pseudomorphosis with the Roman intellect, in 65AD, Mark became the second, solidifying various Greek and Aramaic notes on Christ into potentially the first Gospel, which overrided all that came before it. By demand of Pauline circles for writings on Christ, the lived experience of the man himself became a narrative to tell. Instead of the words of Mark being the words of Jesus, it becomes the doctrine of Jesus, and the apocalyptic undertones, among other simple country tendencies, become muffled by the city noise.

The persian myth of the saviour of man attested to him being born of a virgin, and so too is Christ attested to be born of the virgin Mary, who herself becomes an unexpected character of equal importance to Jesus himself. Towering above all the virgin goddesses of the syncretic faith of the pseudomorphised Greek faith, she is touted to be of indescribable importance by the later Christian philosophers and theologians.

“For Irenaeus she is the Eve of a new mankind. Origen champions her continued virginity. By giving birth to Redeemer-God it is she really who has redeemed the world.”

It is notable that she became a problem for the pure Christianity unarrested by the Classical world, the old Europe, resulting in disputes by the Monophysites and Nestorians, but the return of a new European civilisation in the Faustian, which ever aimed to acquire a symbol for infinite time and thus the bonds of parent and child, took Mary as the pivot of the Germanic-Catholic and Gothic Christianity, and Spengler dares to suggest that “Even today in the ritual and the prayers of the Roman Catholic Church, and above all in the thoughts of its people, Jesus takes second place after the Madonna.”

Overall, what is to be digested in this final section of Spengler’s chapter on the pseudomorphosis is that Christs message presented itself in living form to his disciples, but following the resurrection, the fact of his godhood became an abstract truth to be considered and debated, determined hostile to the Pharisees and acceptable to those further to the East. Paul’s intellect was capable of pushing Christianity from a small set of spiritual communities to a clear doctrine with solved for contradictions, setting off the faith in the direction of a set of problems to be figured out akin to any good science, but his influence also brought Christianity into the fold of the Roman Empire, bringing its matters to the heart of the pseudomorphosis and tethering it with late state intellectualism whilst Christianity did not perform so well in the East. This brought demand for clear and concise narratives on the life of Christ in an albeit unique literature form so that the scattered sayings held dear by the disciples in memory were crystalized into a definitive historical account of Jesus’ life.

In this section on Jesus and his aftermath, there is a subtle allusion back to Spengler’s writing on language. It may have been very clear what the Son of Man said during his lifetime and the Resurrection could have absolutely happened, but first memory, then the rejections on religious legal grounds, then the intellectualisation by Paul could easily work together to distort the facts of his life before a single generation had passed. Spiritual experience, clearly worked out philosophical proofs and rigid and empirical scientific evidence can reveal three very different forms of God, and not withstanding the Classical, Magian and Faustian conceptions of Christianity, sin, if it should exist, would certainly begin with the innately imperfect understanding humans possess of reality which may distort and dispute even the word of God.