Succumbed to jazz of theater

Along with Filo, Clement of Alexandria (150-215 A.D.), a teacher of Origen, is the father of the allegorical study of the Bible.

According to Wikipedia, "Clement was influenced by Hellenistic philosophy to a greater extent than any other Christian thinker of his time, and in particular, by Plato and the Stoics. His secret works suggest that he was familiar with pre-Christian Jewish esotericism and Gnosticism as well. In one of his works he argued that Greek philosophy had its origin among non-Greeks, claiming that both Plato and Pythagoras were taught by Egyptian scholars."

“What these guys (Clement, Origen, etc.) do is they become the fount of intermingling the Word of God with Greek philosophy and producing the corruptions that come with that," says Richard Jordan. “A dispensationalist says, ‘Well, when it talks about Adam and Eve, it means there's a real couple by that name.’ The allegorist says, ‘It don’t make any difference if there’s a real Adam or Eve or not; it’s the spiritual story behind it that’s the issue.' 

“In 313 A.D. there was the Edict of Milan with Constantine. Christianity was persecuted and the statement, ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seedbed of the church,’ comes from the era with Titian.

"Constantine came along and said he had a vision--the sign of the Cross--and the message was that ‘in this sign conquer’ and he did what every good Roman Catholic does. He just said, ‘You’re all Christians now.’ And through the Edict of Milan he declared the Roman Empire to be Christian.

“Rome is Christianized and what that did was take the persecution away but it also established . . . If your church is in the capital city of the empire, who do you think eventually is going to win out? So by 500, you’ve got the first pope; a dude named Leo. And they declare the Roman church and the hierarchy of the Roman system. The established church becomes the Roman-dominated church and that’s how all of that came about.

“In 380, a guy by the name of Jerome produced what’s called the Latin vulgate. That became the official Bible of the Roman Empire. That’s the Roman bible.

“Nine hundred years later, in the 1200s, there is in southern France the Council of Toulouse, which gathered together a persecution of those who were using bibles from Antioch (the center of literal interpretation of God's Word). And the Council was a crusade in southern France and northern Italy to destroy these bibles and replace them with the Roman bible.

“The Dark Ages are the dark ages because . . . you remember the Vandals and the Visgoths? One of the things that happened when these pagans came down and overthrew and wiped out Rome is they were arrested. Overawed by the pomp and the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church, they succumbed and submitted themselves to the Roman system of religion.

“They were barbarians, basically, who gave themselves over to the splendor and the ‘jazz’ of the theater and took back with them Romanism, run by Catholicism, and Jerome’s Alexandrian bible became their bible. And so it prevailed as the standard bible of the church in feudal Europe all through the Dark Ages."