The Greek Cynics and the Surviving Salem Gospel
The Urantia Book · 98:0.2
The Melchizedek Teachings in the Occident
The Salem teachings reached Europe by many routes, but chiefly they came by way of Egypt. They were embodied in the Occidental philosophy under the Hellenic name of the Cynics, whose teachers preached the Salem gospel as embellished by the Egyptian moralists.Read the full UB paper →
Ancient Source · Hellenic
The Cynic Tradition: Diogenes, Crates, and the Cynic Epistles (~400 BCE to 200 CE)
Diogenes said: "I am a citizen of the world." He owned nothing, slept in a barrel, and called himself a dog because he barked at falsehood. He taught that virtue was the only good, that wealth and reputation were nothing, that all human beings were brothers regardless of city or race, and that the divine was discovered through living simply and honestly. Crates and Hipparchia gave away their wealth and walked the roads teaching these things.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers VI.20 to 81; The Cynic Epistles (ed. A.J. Malherbe 1977)
The term "cosmopolitan" (citizen of the world) was coined by Diogenes the Cynic and represents one of the earliest articulations of universal human brotherhood in Western thought.
The Parallel
The Cynic gospel of universal brotherhood, voluntary poverty, indifference to social rank, and the inner life of virtue is structurally identical to the Salem gospel as the UB describes it: belief in one God, faith as the price of divine favor, and the brotherhood of all humans. The Cynic preachers wandering the roads of the Hellenic world prefigure the apostolic missionaries of the early church and were sometimes mistaken for them.
Why It Matters
The Greek philosophical tradition is not merely the product of Athenian genius. The UB locates the Cynic strand specifically as a Salem inheritance routed through Egyptian moralism. When Paul preaches in Athens at Mars Hill, he is speaking into a culture that already had a recognizable Salem residue running through its popular philosophy.
Scholarship
- Branham, R. Bracht and Marie Odile Goulet Caze. The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy (California, 1996).
- Malherbe, Abraham J. The Cynic Epistles (Scholars Press, 1977).
- Downing, F. Gerald. Cynics and Christian Origins (T&T Clark, 1992).
- Long, A.A. Hellenistic Philosophy (California, 2nd ed. 1986).