A traveler to Asia and to points east, Hippolytus (c.160-235) in his Dan., iv. 9, visualizes a moral battleground between the people who will follow Jesus, representative of God, and the people who will follow Augustus, Emperor of Rome, a worldly king, a representative of Satan.  In so doing he describes the earliest Christians as wearing the bindi, the mark of victory on their forehead.  His statement that Christians "bear a new name" may also refer to initiates being given a new spiritual name, which is customary among the newly initiated in both the Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

"For as our Lord was born in the forty-second year of the emperor Augustus, whence the Roman empire developed, and as the Lord also called all nations and all tongues by means of the apostles and fashioned believing Christians into a people, the people of the Lord, and the people which consists of those who bear a new name--so was all this imitated to the letter by the empire of that day, ruling `according to the working of Satan': for it also collected to itself the noblest of every nation, and, dubbing them Romans, got ready for the fray.  And that is the reason why the first census took place under Augustus, when our Lord was born at Bethlehem; it was to get the men of this world, who enrolled for our earthly king, called Romans, while those who believed in a heavenly king were termed Christians, bearing on their foreheads the sign of victory over death." (Emphasis mine) Dan. iv. 9.

  This passage immediately reminds one of the sharply defined morality underlying the battle of the final times described in the Essenes' "War Scroll," a battle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness.  There is an unbroken line, a discernible lineage, leading from the Hindus as well as from vegetarian Sumerians and vegetarian Egyptians, to the writers of the original vegetarian Old Testament writers, such as the original writer of "Genesis," whether Moses or a school of Moses, to some of the psalmists, to the author of the "Book of Job" (minus its patently false ending), to virtually all the late prophets, and to the Essenes and to the early Christians as well.
 

  The Essenes had a teaching regarding the two spirits, one good, and evil either of which one could choose to follow.  So did the strict Jesus of the New Testament.  There are, as virtually all scholars acknowledge, several different portrayals of Jesus in the New Testament, each of them corresponding in some way with the personality and ideals of each evangelist, and each in some way was changed by the bishops of the fourth century under Constantine in order to fit comfortably with Roman doctrine. The fact that the brutal emperor Constantine published the New Testament at the empire's expense is in itself an admission that it was the teachings of Rome, and not the original teachings of Jesus and his disciples, that were being spread.  So we have the rather evil irony of slavery, resentment-breeding societies of rich and poor, male chauvenism, bigotry towards homosexuals and the disease-promoting diet of carnivorism, all being preached in the name of the vegetarian Jesus who cleansed the temple of the animals to be sacrificed, who constantly quoted the late vegetarian prophets, and whose mission in "Epistle to the Hebrews" is bluntly affirmed to be the abolition of the animal sacrifices.

   Those who still falsely claim that Christianity converted Rome need to be reminded that the Christian bishops who catered to Constantine prostituted themselves to an emperor who paid them well.  Those bishops were like the scribes and pharisees Jesus addressed, clean on the outside but inside filled with the bones of the dead.  These bishops, like the scribes of Judaism and Islam, would turn away from compassion and embrace the doctrines of oppression and evil towards other creatures, not to mention the subjugation of women and the enslavement of their own human kind.

   The sharply defined distinction between good and evil, the power of God and the powers of this world, which undeniably was a trait of the Essenes, is also seen in the strict Jesus of the New Testament.

"No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.  You cannot serve God and mammon." Jesus, Matthew 6: 24.

  Paul, on the other hand, the rhetorician, makes the authority [which God allows] as equal to the authority which God desires.  One need answer Paul only with the recognition that God allows evil in this world, but God does not desire it.

"Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.  For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God..."  Paul, Romans 13.