102 Jesus, Prophet ofIslam
• Declared the Roman 'sun' day to be the Christian
Sabbath - which is why it is called Sunday, and not
because Jesus gave it that name;• Adopted the traditional birthday of the sun-god, the
twenty-fifth of December, as the birthday of Jesus, for
by then no one could remember which day his real
birth day had been;• Borrowed the emblem of the sun-god, the cross
of light, to be the emblern of Christianity; and• Although the statue of Jesus replaced the idol of the
sun-god, decided to incorporate many of the ceremo
nies which were perforrned at the sun-god's birth
day celebrations into their own ceremonies.It must have been very comforting for Constantine to see the gulf
which existed between Christianity and the religion of the Empire
narrowed so considerably. The PaulineChurch especially must have
gone up in his estimation, and the likelihood of his continued sup
port for that Church, once apparently weak, was now much firmer.
Finally, the new beliefs and concepts which underpinned the
dogma of Trinity were accepted as fundamental doctrines of what
could now be termed 'official Christianity'.
It is possible that even at this relatively late stage sorne of the
advocates of the Paulinian beliefs and concepts still had a degree
of direct experience of the Divine Unity, and that they still affirmed
it, in spite of the language they were now using. For them, the new
doctrines, which were to eventually become enshrined in the offi
cial doctrine of Trinity, were in fact no more or less than the means
by which they were attempting to describe what they witnessed.
Since the language of Unity which Jesus had once used was by
now largely lost, they had resorted to using the terminology of
neo-Platonic philosophy which, although it was not really adequate
for the purpose, was all that they had left at their disposal to indi
cate what they knew. Such a perspective, however, was only open
to very few people. '1 pass over in silence,' wrote Apuleius, 'those
sublime and Platonic doctrines understood by very few of the pi
ous, and absolutely unknown to every one of the profane: 24
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