5. GREEK RELIGION
I believe this has undergone revival in modern Greece.
Within Judaism, Sadduceeism and Essenism died out after AD 70, although the latter was a major contributor to early Christianity.
Have any religions in history ever died out?
by mamalove 22 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Leolaia
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fulltimestudent
I think we can safely say that the Manichaean religion has died out. The last known temple has been identified in Quanzhou, Fuzhou province in China, but the people using the temple are essentially Buddhists. That temple (or its predecessors) could be some 1200 years old.
Here's a web-site maintained by Macquarie University, Sydney whose staff have researched the (temple) site.
http://www.anchist.mq.edu.au/doccentre/Zayton.htm
Professor Sam Lieu from that university led the research and is an acknowledged expert on Mani and his followers.
The first pik you see on the above web-site is the temple site modernised, but I understand tha the real temple has not been modernised and is behind the more modern facade. Scroll down and you will find a photograph of a representation of Mani from within the temple.
Quanzhou (btw) once played host to the largest concentration of businessmen in the pre-modern world, when perhaps a 100,000 merchants and traders concentrated there at the eastern end of the maritime silk road. Manichaeanism could have arrived in China by that route, but it seems more likely to have come to China over the land Silk road.
Have not got time to write a lot this morning, but will try to write something later about the religion. It certainly worried the early church (Augustine was a member for some years and then converted to Christianity) who spent a lot of time opposing it. My personal view though, was that it would never have been successful in a popular sense as the beliefs were just so, so complicated.
One of their beliefs was to do with freeing particles of light, and I must admit that I was somewhat shaken earlier this year to find a reference to a scientific lab having photographed a photon (of light) leaving a cell in the body. (light may possibly have a function in cell communications).
And quite likely Manichaeanism may have have influenced Islam.
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Kenneson
The following link shows those Bible Students groups that made it and those that didn't.