You Shall Be as Gods: The Ancient Lie from Tyre to Babylon

The prophetic “King of Tyre” described by Ezekiel 28 likely corresponds to Ithobaal III, who ruled Tyre in the *sixth century BC during the prophet’s lifetime. The name Ithobaal, meaning “With Baal,” already reveals his religious association. The kings of Tyre were not merely political rulers but priest-kings of Baal Melqart, the city’s chief deity.

Melqart, whose name means “King of the City,” was Tyre’s divine patron, a god of kingship and renewal whom the Greeks later identified with Heracles. The king of Tyre was seen as Melqart’s representative or son on earth, ruling by divine right. This belief united political authority with spiritual pretension, for the monarch of Tyre did not merely govern; he embodied the god.

Alongside Melqart stood Astarte, also called Ashtart or Ishtar, the great goddess and consort of the god-king. She was the Queen of Heaven, the goddess of fertility, sexuality, war, and the morning star. Known to the Greeks as Aphrodite and to the Romans as Venus, she personified beauty, desire, and false divine light. Every king of Tyre ruled in her name, as her consort and high priest. Thus, in the mythic sense, the throne of Tyre was shared between Baal and Astarte, between the self-deified man and the false goddess.

When Ezekiel condemns the King of Tyre, saying, “You have said, I am a god; I sit in the seat of God,” he is addressing both the historical ruler and the spiritual power behind him. The prophet’s words expose the same sin that began in Eden; the desire to exalt oneself to divinity. Ithobaal, whose very name declared union with Baal, represents humanity’s oldest delusion: the belief that through wisdom, wealth, and sorcery a man can become a god. This is the power of the devil, the “prince of the power of the air,” who exalts men through pride and deception.

The real queen of Tyre was not a woman of flesh but Astarte, the city’s invisible sovereign. Her temples employed sacred courtesans who embodied the goddess during ritual, blurring the line between priestess and royalty. Outsiders often mistook these women for literal queens, and over time the "divine" consort became a mythic monarch in her own right. As Tyrian religion spread westward, Astarte reappeared as Aphrodite of Cyprus, Tanit of Carthage, and Venus of Rome; the “Queen of Heaven” enthroned in every land she touched.

The city itself was personified as a woman; beautiful, adorned in purple and gold, trading with all nations. Isaiah and Ezekiel both call Tyre a harlot who plays the prostitute with many lovers, an image later echoed in the Book of Revelation, where Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots, rides the beast of worldly power.

The symbolism deepens when we look to the heavens. Venus, the morning star, is the celestial body behind the Latin term “Lucifer,” meaning “light-bringer.” In Isaiah 14, the fall of the Babylonian king is described in words later applied to the fall of Satan: “How you have fallen from heaven, O shining one, son of the dawn.” The myths of Astarte and Ishtar mirror this same ascent and descent. In Mesopotamian legend, the goddess of light exalts herself to the heavens only to be cast down into the underworld; the eternal cycle of pride, fall, and attempted rebirth.

Tyre’s very name and legacy reflect this drama. The Greeks called the land Phoenicia, from the word phoinix, meaning both “purple” and “phoenix.” The purple dye that made Tyre rich came from the blood of sea snails, crushed by the thousands along her rocky shores. From this tiny creature, the murex, the merchants of Phoenicia drew the color that clothed kings and priests; the deep, burning hue of royalty and sacrifice. It was the most precious dye in the world, worth its weight in silver, the very emblem of empire. Yet its beauty was born of blood and decay. The stench of the dye pits filled the harbors while the traders of Tyre wrapped themselves in garments of purple and gold. In that color the prophets saw more than wealth; they saw worship turned into commerce, sacrifice turned into vanity. The robes of the kings were dyed with death. When Ezekiel cried against Tyre, he named her “perfect in beauty” and “clothed in fine linen with broidered work and in blue and purple.” And when John beheld Babylon the Great, “arrayed in purple and scarlet,” trading in “the souls of men,” he was looking upon Tyre reborn.

In all of this, we see the theology of pride: man enthroned by Satan, ruling over matter yet enslaved to illusion. The king of Tyre claimed divine wisdom and glory; his consort embodied the light of beauty and seduction. Together they mirror Lucifer, the shining one who exalts herself above the stars of God and is cast down. Tyre’s wealth, its purple garments, its trade in spices and gold, became the outward manifestation of this inward corruption; the sorcery of self-deification.

Ezekiel’s lament tears away the veil: “You were the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God. You were blameless in your ways until iniquity was found in you.” The prophet unmasks Baal’s priest-king as nothing more than dust animated by pride. What fell from heaven in Lucifer falls again in every earthly throne that dares to take the seat of God. Thus, Tyre stands as the prototype of Babylon; the city of trade, of sorcery, of self-worship, judged for her spiritual harlotry.

All known rulers of Tyre were men. From the city’s earliest king lists; preserved by the Phoenician historian Menander of Ephesus and quoted by Josephus in Against Apion; every recorded monarch of Tyre is male. Abibaal, father of Hiram I, and Hiram I himself, ally of Solomon, ruled during Israel’s golden age. After them came Baal-Eser, Ethbaal the priest of Astarte and father of Jezebel, and later rulers such as Pygmalion and Elulaios. No ancient source mentions a reigning queen of Tyre in the political sense. Tyre, like most Phoenician city-states, was a hereditary monarchy and temple-priesthood led by men.

Yet spiritually, Tyre always had a queen. The true sovereign of the city was not a woman of flesh but its patron goddess; Astarte, called Ishtar, Ashtoreth, or later Venus. Every king of Tyre ruled in her name as her consort and high priest. When Ezekiel condemned the King of Tyre in chapter 28, he was not only describing a proud monarch but a man who had taken on her divine prerogatives; saying in his heart, “I am a god; I sit in the seat of God.” Though no mortal queen sat beside him, the divine feminine ruled symbolically over his throne. The king was merely the visible arm of an invisible goddess.

Astarte was the light of Tyre, the embodiment of the morning star; the luminous spirit the ancients later called Lucifer, the bringer of dawn. She represented the beauty and brilliance of divine light, yet hers was a reflected and deceptive light: the splendor of pride. Lucifer, in this sense, is not Satan himself but the radiant counterpart of his rebellion; the false illumination that seduces men to worship what glitters rather than what is true. The King of Tyre, through sorcery and pride, became her earthly vessel, joining himself to her power and calling it godhood.

This is why later tradition often speaks of a “Queen of Tyre.” Astarte’s temples employed sacred courtesans who embodied the goddess in ritual. To outsiders, these women appeared as royal figures, and the boundary between priestess and queen blurred. Over time, the woman who represented the goddess became the goddess herself in story. When the Phoenician cult spread westward, Astarte reappeared as Aphrodite of Cyprus, Tanit of Carthage, and finally as Venus of Rome; the Queen of Heaven enthroned in every land she conquered through beauty and desire.

Ezekiel and Isaiah both lament Tyre as a harlot; a once-glorious city turned to spiritual prostitution. In prophetic language, the city becomes feminine: the Bride who has become an adulteress, the false Queen who sells her glory to the nations. The king’s arrogance and the goddess’s seduction merge into one identity, a single spirit of self-exaltation. In Revelation, this fusion returns as Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth, adorned in purple and scarlet; the same colors once traded by Tyre’s merchants.

So while history records no Queen of Tyre, prophecy reveals her everywhere. She is Astarte, Ishtar, Venus—Lucifer, the light-bringer, the Queen of Heaven. She is the spirit of pride and seduction that crowns kings and topples empires, the feminine face of rebellion against the Most High. Tyre, a male-ruled kingdom, thus became remembered as the realm of a fallen goddess; the city where man and the radiant false light united to claim divinity.

Tyre’s religion revolved around Astarte, whom the Hebrews called Ashtoreth and the prophets also denounced as the Queen of Heaven. She was both virgin and harlot, mother and lover, goddess of fertility and war. In her temples, sacred prostitution was performed as ritual; women, and at times men, symbolically embodying the goddess in acts of worship. To her devotees, they were brides of the god; to Israel’s prophets, they were prostitutes selling what was holy for hire.

Because Tyre’s royal line descended from her priesthood, the boundary between queen and temple courtesan vanished. The goddess herself was enthroned as the Queen of Heaven, and her living representatives; queens like Jezebel and the sacred women of Tyre; acted out her myth in flesh. The spiritual and the sensual became one and the same; holiness was made merchandise.

Within this cult also served the eunuch-priests, men who had renounced their masculinity and taken on the garments and gestures of women. Ancient writers such as Lucian and Herodotus describe how the galli of Astarte and Atargatis mutilated themselves in ecstatic frenzy, dedicating their bodies to the goddess. To the Phoenicians, these eunuchs represented a mystical transformation; the merging of male and female. But to the prophets of Israel, their self-castration was a visible symbol of spiritual impotence: the strength of man surrendered to a false divinity. These eunuchs stood as living parables of Tyre’s condition; humanity stripped of its God-given power, devoted instead to the illusion of self-deification.

When Ezekiel speaks of Tyre as “a harlot who made her beauty perfect,” he is describing more than the city’s trade in purple and gold. He is exposing its soul. Tyre sold luxury and lust alike; her markets trafficked not only in goods, but, as Revelation later says, “in gold and silver, fine linen and purple, and the souls of men.” The prophet’s lament over the merchant city becomes the seed of John’s vision in Revelation 17 and 18, where the great prostitute sits upon many waters, clothed in scarlet and adorned with jewels, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations. She is called Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots and of the abominations of the earth.

The Phoenicians carried Astarte’s worship westward with their ships and colonies. At Cyprus she rose from the sea-foam as Aphrodite (the beast from the sea/abyss); at Carthage she became Tanit; and in Rome, she was enthroned as Venus. Each name masked the same spirit: the "divine" feminine divorced from the Creator, the light-bearer ruling by her own beauty.

From Tyre’s purple trade came her color and her symbol; the hue of kings and prostitutes alike. From her perfumed rituals came the incense and myrrh of later pagan rites. The same golden cup that once overflowed in her temples reappears in Revelation, brimming with the filth of her fornication. Julius Caesar would later claim descent from Venus Genetrix, building her temple in his forum; the emperor who ruled the world bowed to the spirit of Tyre. The prostitute of Tyre had become the divine mother of Rome, the Queen of Heaven crowned anew.

Centuries later, Eusebius looked upon the ruins of Phoenician shrines and saw their spirit still alive. He wrote of Simon Magus, the Samaritan magician who came to Rome, performed wonders through demonic power, and was worshipped as a god. Inscriptions were raised to “Simon the Holy God.” By his side was Helena, once a slave or courtesan, whom Simon declared to be the “First Thought” of the divine mind, the embodiment of his power. To Eusebius, this Helena was none other than the old goddess in a new guise; the Queen of Heaven reborn, the same spirit that had ruled Tyre and Rome alike. Simon was her Baal, the magician-priest; she, his Astarte, the visible form of invisible rebellion.

In them, the pattern of Tyre returned: the male magician as the false god, the woman as the radiant lie; the "divine" feminine enthroned apart from the Creator. What Ezekiel saw in Tyre and John saw in Babylon, Eusebius saw in Simon and Helena: the endless recurrence of the same delusion, the self-deification of flesh joined to the seduction of spirit.

Together they are the archetype of Babylon: power and pleasure, joined in rebellion, arrayed in splendor, and doomed to fall. “For her sins have reached unto heaven,” says Revelation, “and God has remembered her iniquities. Therefore shall her plagues come in one day; death, mourning, and famine—and she shall be utterly burned with fire.”

The prostitute of Tyre is the same spirit that rides the beast of Revelation. She is Venus-Lucifer, the light of self-glory and the seduction of all kingdoms. Her purple and scarlet, her gold and pearls, her eunuchs and her merchants, her sorceries and her songs; all are echoes of the old Phoenician harlot who made her beauty perfect. In the end, her light is extinguished: “The light of a lamp shall shine in you no more, and the voice of bridegroom and bride shall not be heard in you again, for your merchants were the great men of the earth, and by your sorceries were all nations deceived.”

The Romans inherited not only the Phoenician goddess but also her myths of color, perfume, and rebirth. The Greeks had called the Tyrian coast Phoinix, a word meaning both “purple” and “phoenix.” The name was taken from the crimson dye that made Tyre rich, but poets later said that Venus herself had given the land its name, for the bird and the color alike were her emblems. The phoenix, reborn from its own ashes, became the living symbol of the goddess’s promise of renewal through fire; a mirror of Tyre’s own rise from the sea and of every empire that claimed immortal glory.

Tyre’s merchants had traded in the same materials that perfumed her worship: frankincense, myrrh, cinnamon, cassia, calamus, and nard. These spices filled the censers of Astarte’s shrines and later the altars of Venus and Isis in Rome. Revelation lists them among Babylon’s wares; “cinnamon and incense, and perfume, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and the souls of men.” The fragrance of commerce and of sacrifice was the same; what was sold in Tyre’s markets was burned in her temples.

In the Roman world Venus merged with the Egyptian Isis, another face of the same Queen of Heaven. Isis was said to have gathered the dismembered body of Osiris, anointed it with oils and spices, and by the power of heka; ritual magic and divine speech; breathed life into him again. This myth of resurrection through sorcery gave her a new prestige in Rome: she was the mother who could raise the dead, the mistress of secret wisdom, the eternal feminine that conquered even death. Her priests burned the same incense once offered in Tyre and wore the same purple linen dyed at its ports. The spell of Isis was the perfume of Phoenicia reborn.

Thus the empire’s devotion to Venus-Isis united all the emblems of Tyre: the purple dye of the phoenix, the spices of her trade, the eunuch-priests of her service, and the promise of immortality through ritual power. To the early Church this union was the heart of Babylon; the worship of creation as creator, the resurrection of flesh through sorcery instead of through God. The same scent of myrrh that embalmed Osiris clung to the markets of Rome; the same golden cup that once overflowed in Tyre’s temples shone again in the hands of the woman arrayed in scarlet, “having a cup full of abominations.”

And so the myth completed its circle. Tyre had given the world her purple, her perfume, her goddess, and her pride. Rome clothed itself in them all, proclaiming the eternal city and the immortal mother. But the prophets saw beneath the beauty: the fire of the phoenix that consumes its own nest, the incense that rises for idols instead of for God, the resurrection that ends in ashes. The spirit of Tyre had found her throne in Rome, and her name, said John, was Babylon the Great.

The mystery of Isis and Osiris, of Astarte and Baal, was the ancient world’s imitation of resurrection. Through magic, ritual, and the power of the goddess, the slain god was raised; but only into the shadow realm, the kingdom of darkness. Life was prolonged, not redeemed. The cycle turned endlessly: descent, revival, and decay again. The Phoenix burned itself to be reborn; the goddess wept and rejoiced, and men celebrated their own mortality as immortality. It was the promise of eternal life without holiness, the triumph of the creature without the Creator.

Luke 11:34–35 (KJV):

“The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness.Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness.”

The early Christians saw in this the final counterfeit of resurrection. Isis’s magic could gather what was lost, but it could not give new life. She could restore a body, not renew a soul. Where Christ’s resurrection conquered death, hers only rearranged it. Her Osiris reigned in the underworld, not in heaven; her light, like that of Lucifer, shone from the ashes of pride. Revelation unveils the difference: the harlot who sits upon many waters promises life, but her cup brings death; the Bride who descends from heaven brings the water of life itself.

The Queen of Heaven sought to lift man by enchantment; the Lamb lifts him by sacrifice. The one enthrones herself upon the beast; the other writes His name upon the forehead of His servants. The one traffics in purple, gold, incense, and the souls of men; the other gives the river of life freely to all who thirst. The false resurrection is achieved through heka and the sorceries of the earth; the true resurrection is given through the Spirit and the Word of God.

In the end the two women of prophecy stand opposed: Babylon the Great, adorned with pearls and drunk with her own glory, and the New Jerusalem, prepared as a bride for her husband, clothed in righteousness. The first rises from the sea/abyss like Venus, radiant and doomed; the second descends from heaven, humble and eternal. The first claims to be a goddess and is burned with fire; the second is the dwelling place of God with men, where every tear is wiped away.

As the cults of Isis and Venus flourished, sorcery itself rose to prominence in the heart of Rome. The empire that crowned beauty as divinity also enthroned the magician as priest. Eusebius, the careful chronicler of the early Church, records that in the days when the faith of Christ was spreading through the world, “the enemy of human salvation, devising to seize beforehand the imperial city, brought there Simon, the man already mentioned, and by his artful enchantments drew away many of those who dwelt in Rome.”

He cites the testimony of Justin Martyr, who wrote that after the ascension of Christ, “the demons sent forth men who said of themselves that they were gods. They were not persecuted by you Romans, but even honored. There was a certain Simon, a Samaritan from a village called Gitta, who, in the days of Claudius Caesar, performed magical works in your royal city by the art of demons, and was considered a god, and by you was honored with a statue on the Tiber between the two bridges, bearing the inscription in Latin: Simoni Deo Sancto; To Simon the Holy God.”

So Rome, heir of Tyre’s commerce and Egypt’s rites, became also the capital of sorcery. The Queen of Heaven (not the humble Virgin, Mary) who had ruled from the coast of Phoenicia now found her prophet in a magician. Simon proclaimed that his companion Helena, once a slave and prostitute, was the First Thought of the divine mind; the same luminous spirit that had been imprisoned in matter and redeemed through his power. In her, Eusebius saw the reincarnation of the ancient goddess, the prostitute of Tyre walking once more in human form. Simon himself was Baal reborn, uniting with his celestial consort to counterfeit the mystery of Christ and His Bride.

The miracles of Simon were the old heka of Isis revived: the manipulation of spirits, the illusions of light, the promise of resurrection through magic rather than through the cross. As Isis raised Osiris by spells and spices, Simon sought to raise humanity through enchantment and knowledge. His gospel was the gospel of Tyre, the religion of self-deification; man enthroned by his own art. And Rome, the city of Venus, received him gladly.

Thus Eusebius concludes that the ancient sorcery of the nations reached its summit in Rome. The same forces that had inspired Astarte’s temples, Isis’s rites, and the magic of the Phoenicians now took flesh in the magician who claimed to be God. The empire of commerce had become the empire of illusion. And so the prophet’s words were fulfilled: “By their sorceries were all nations deceived.”

Simon the First False God of Rome revealed something greater than one man’s delusion; he unveiled the pattern of all future apostasy. The sorcerer from Samaria became the mirror of the King of Tyre, the living icon of that same Luciferian pride that had once enthroned Astarte above the heavens. As Tyre had worshiped its merchant-priest, so Rome adored its magician. The Queen of Heaven, long enthroned in mystery, now found her consort in a man of flesh who called himself divine.

In Simon and Helena, the Tyrian myth returned in human form. The male who sought godhood joined himself to the woman who claimed to be the First Thought, the false eternal feminine, false divine wisdom. The false Queen of Heaven.

Eusebius saw this not as myth but as a spiritual contagion. The devil, he wrote, “sought to preoccupy the imperial city,” setting his throne where the apostles would soon shed their blood. In the city of law and empire, sorcery reigned. Rome, which had ruled the nations by sword and statute, now ruled them by illusion. The same hand that stamped coins with Caesar’s image raised altars to a false god whose only power was deception.

Simon’s arrival in Rome marked the meeting of all the world’s old corruptions; Phoenician commerce, Egyptian sorcery, Greek philosophy, and Roman power. He stood as their synthesis, their culmination, the first “god” of a universal empire. In him the spirit of Tyre, Babylon, and Egypt found its voice: the magician-priest who promises divinity without repentance, power without holiness, knowledge without truth.

Early Christian writers would later see in Simon the shadow of the Antichrist; the man who exalts himself above all that is called God, who sits in the temple of God showing himself that he is God. His union with Helena was the parody of the Incarnation: not the Word made flesh to redeem, but flesh pretending to be Word in order to enslave. The statue in the Tiber was more than marble; it was the emblem of man’s eternal temptation to worship himself.

Rome’s embrace of Simon was the logical fruit of her worship of Venus and Isis. The empire that had crowned the goddess of beauty now deified the magician who claimed her power. The Queen of Heaven, the harlot of Tyre, the mistress of sorceries, had found in him her priest and prophet. And through their union, the whole city drank again from her golden cup; the cup of false wisdom and forbidden power.

Revelation’s words echo with new force: “By your sorceries were all nations deceived.” For the magic of Rome was not only in her spells and idols, but in her persuasion; her ability to make men believe that empire is eternal and that man can be God. The sorcery of Simon was the sorcery of civilization itself, the intoxication of power and knowledge severed from the fear of the Lord.

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After the death of Simon, the writers of the second and third centuries said that his teaching did not die with him. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, began his Against Heresies by naming Simon “the father of all heresies.” He described how Simon’s followers blended fragments of philosophy, mythology, and Christian language into a new religion of self-knowledge. They called their revelation gnosis; and claimed that salvation came through secret insight rather than through faith, repentance, and the Word. To Irenaeus, this was the same deception that had once crowned Simon in Rome: the belief that enlightenment itself could make a person divine.

Hippolytus of Rome wrote more precisely in his Refutation of All Heresies.  He traced entire sects; the Simonians, the Valentinians, the Sethians; back to the magician of Samaria. Their cosmologies, he said, repeated the old myths of Tyre and Egypt in philosophical form. The “Father” and “First Thought” of the Gnostics were Simon and Helena renamed; the heavenly “aeons” were the old gods of the nations abstracted into Greek metaphysics.

Augustine, writing two centuries later, saw the same impulse working through the whole history of Rome. In The City of God he contrasted two cities: the earthly city, founded on the love of self to the contempt of God, and the heavenly city, founded on the love of God to the contempt of self. The first was Babylon, the second Jerusalem. The first was built by pride, the second by humility. To Augustine the Gnostic exaltation of intellect, the imperial cult of divinized rulers, and the pagan rites of Venus and Isis were all expressions of that same “earthly city” that began with Cain and ended with Babylon the Great (Rome).

The early Fathers did not deny that such wisdom was dazzling. Like the purple of Tyre, it caught the light. But they warned that beneath the brilliance lay the same fatal promise: “you shall be as gods.” For them, the true knowledge was not secret illumination but the humility of Christ; the true union of divine and human was not magic but incarnation.

The Voice of a God, Not of a Man

Eusebius’s Warning Against Human Divinization

In the Acts of the Apostles, King Herod Agrippa steps onto a platform in silver robes that flash in the sunlight. The people cry, “The voice of a god, not of a man!”  He accepts their worship and, as the story says, falls dead before them. For Eusebius this episode summed up the sickness of the age: mankind’s endless urge to turn power into godhood.

Herod only repeated what emperors had done before him. Caligula, drunk on his own image, ordered that the Jerusalem Temple be rededicated to himself as Zeus Epiphanes Gaius—“Gaius, the God Made Manifest.” Philosophers praised his divinity, soldiers carried his likeness, and governors enforced sacrifices to his statue. Philo of Alexandria called it phrenoblabeia, madness of mind. Eusebius later quoted the story as a warning: once authority and deity are confused, tyranny follows; once a people accept the confusion, idolatry is born.

Rome institutionalized that confusion. Tertullian, writing two centuries before Eusebius, mocked the procedure. “No one is made a god,” he said, “until the Senate approves.” The gods of Rome were created by decree as easily as new taxes or laws. Holiness was a matter of politics; immortality, a privilege of state. Eusebius repeats this with grim irony: divinity granted by human vote is no divinity at all.

For him, these scenes exposed the same spiritual delusion that had filled Tyre with its sorceries and Rome with its magicians; the belief that through power, philosophy, or ritual a man could become divine. Caligula, Herod, and the senate’s manufactured gods were heirs of the same spirit that animated Simon Magus. Sorcery and politics met in the same creed: homo deus, man as god.

Eusebius contrasts them with the Gospel’s inversion of that idea. The true God, he says, did not ascend from man’s will but descended in humility. Christ, though being in the form of God, emptied Himself and took the form of a servant. Where Caligula enthroned himself in marble, Christ allowed His image to be marred on a cross. That difference, Eusebius insists, is the measure of all theology: the empire made gods out of men; the Gospel revealed the God who became man.

The early Christians understood. They would not burn incense to the emperor, kiss no imperial ring, and call no mortal “lord of heaven and earth.” Their refusal was an act of sanity: to worship the Creator rather than the creature. For every time a ruler, priest, or philosopher receives honors that belong to God alone, he stands again beside Herod in that sun-lit square, listening to the same fatal chorus—“The voice of a god, not of a man.”

Eusebius’s moral is clear. Whenever institutions clothe themselves in divine language or demand sacred obedience, the worms of decay are already waiting. The Church’s safety lies in remembering the gulf between the God who humbled Himself and the men who try to be gods. The empire manufactured divinity by vote; the Kingdom of God reveals it through love.

When Emperors Became Gods and Gods Became Men

Eusebius on Pagan Deification and Imperial Idolatry

Eusebius lived at the turning point of history. The world he inherited had crowned emperors as gods, philosophers as oracles, and heroes as immortals. His task was to unmask that entire system; to show that every altar and every title of divine majesty bestowed on mortal men was nothing but the echo of the same old lie: “You shall be as gods.”

In his Church History, he exposes how that lie found its way into the heart of Rome. Caligula called himself Zeus Epiphanes, “the god made manifest.” Domitian demanded to be hailed as Dominus et Deus noster — “our Lord and God.” Even Constantine, though baptized late in life and remembered as the first Christian emperor, felt the pull of sacred kingship. Coins bore his image crowned with light, and poets called him the “sun of righteousness.” Eusebius, though loyal to him, never allowed such language to replace the truth of the Gospel. He warned that majesty belongs to God alone, and that every ruler must kneel before the King of Kings.

But Eusebius’s greatest work on this theme was not his history but his fifteen-volume Praeparatio Evangelica; The Preparation for the Gospel.  It is one of the most ambitious works of the ancient world: a vast apologetic meant to show that Christianity was not a new superstition but the fulfillment of all human wisdom. In it, Eusebius turned the weapons of pagan learning against itself. He quoted the philosophers, historians, and priests of Egypt, Phoenicia, and Greece; then demonstrated that their gods were once mortal men, kings and queens whom their subjects had turned into idols.

In Book II, he cites Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch on the worship of Osiris and Isis.  “The Egyptians,” he writes, “call Osiris Dionysus and Isis Demeter. These were rulers who benefited Egypt, and when they died, men honored them with temples and sacrifices.” The supposed resurrection of Osiris, he argues, was not a divine mystery but a demonic imitation; the same kind of false miracle that Simon Magus later performed in Rome. For Eusebius, Egypt was the birthplace of idolatry, where reason was replaced by ritual and men bowed to beasts and corpses.

In Book I and IV he turns to Astarte, Ishtar, and Venus, drawing from Philo of Byblos. There he shows that the Phoenician goddess; the same Queen of Heaven once adored in Tyre; had been a mortal woman, a queen deified by her followers. Her cult, he says, turned lust into religion and beauty into a form of worship. To Eusebius this was proof that the world’s oldest religions were not revelations from heaven but humans corrupted by demons.

He also speaks of the gods of Greece and Rome; Jupiter, Mercury, Apollo, Venus; as personifications of passion and natural force. “How can gods who lust, rage, and die,” he asks, “be eternal?” The stories of Olympus, he says, are evidence not of divine greatness but of moral decay: proof that the nations have worshiped their own desires under gilded names.

Through all these examples, Eusebius weaves a single argument: paganism is the worship of man in disguise.  Whether the idol is a statue of Osiris, a temple to Astarte, or a throne for Caesar, the center is always the same; humanity enthroned as divine. The gods of the nations were either dead kings remembered as deities or spirits that fed on human adoration. The emperors of Rome were their latest incarnation, men who by sorcery, conquest, or flattery claimed the honors of heaven.

And so, for Eusebius, history was not a collection of separate religions but one long rebellion, beginning in Eden and culminating in the Roman Empire. The magicians of Egypt, the priest-kings of Tyre, the philosophers of Greece, and the Caesars of Rome were all expressions of the same counterfeit faith: the belief that divinity can be manufactured by human power.

Against all this he sets the Gospel’s paradox; the true God who became man.  While the Senate voted its gods and the emperors demanded worship, Christ emptied Himself of glory and took the form of a servant. Where Osiris was raised by enchantment and Constantine crowned himself with light, Christ was raised by the Father’s Spirit and crowned with thorns. The empire that manufactured gods becomes the field where the true God reveals Himself. And so the old prophecy is fulfilled: “The idols shall utterly perish, and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day.”

Epilogue

The Fall of the Gods and the Triumph of the Word

Eusebius stood at the twilight of the ancient world. Behind him stretched the long history of men who made themselves gods; the kings of Tyre who sat in the seat of God, the pharaohs embalmed as Ra, the Caesars crowned with rays of the sun. Before him rose a new dawn, faint and fragile, yet unquenchable: the worship of the One who had truly come down from heaven.

For him, the destruction of the temples was not the victory of one religion over another, but the unveiling of truth over illusion. The idols had no life in them; their voices were the echoes of men’s ambitions and demons’ deceit. When Constantine dismantled the shrines and lifted the cross over the empire, Eusebius saw prophecy fulfilled: “The gods of the nations are demons, but the Lord made the heavens.” It was, in his eyes, the historical moment when Babylon version 1.0 fell.

Yet he knew that Babylon’s spirit would rise again in subtler forms; whenever men crowned themselves with divine titles, whenever institutions turned power into piety, whenever sorcery took the name of science and pride the guise of enlightenment. For him, Revelation was not a myth of the future but the pattern of all history: the woman in purple, the cup of enchantments, the merchants of the earth lamenting her fall. Tyre had been her beginning; Rome her second throne. The world would see her again, until every false light was extinguished by the true.

In the Praeparatio Evangelica, Eusebius wrote that the Gospel had been prepared through centuries of failure; that all human attempts to grasp divinity by reason, ritual, or rule had ended in ruin so that the divine condescension of Christ might be revealed as the only way. The fall of Osiris, the death of Melqart, the madness of Caligula, the sorcery of Simon, the apotheosis of emperors; all were rehearsals in the same tragic drama, the story of man seeking to raise himself by his own hand. And each collapse was a prelude to the descent of grace.

Revelation’s last vision completes what Eusebius began. The harlot who said, “I sit as queen and shall see no sorrow,” is silenced; the Bride who waited in purity is revealed. The kings of the earth who once cried, “The voice of a god, not of a man,” fall upon their faces before the Lamb who was slain. The magic of Isis, the wisdom of Simon, the power of Rome; all vanish like smoke, and only one Name remains.

“The kingdoms of this world,” says the final trumpet, “have become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.” The light of Venus is darkened; the phoenix of Phoenicia rises no more. In their place shines the city that needs no sun, for the Lord Himself is its light.

So ends the long rebellion that began in Tyre and was enthroned in Rome. The idols of the nations are shattered, the sorceries broken, the false gods unmasked.

The Apostle Paul’s warning to the Thessalonians is among the most haunting in all Scripture.

“Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.” 2 Thessalonians 2:3–4

Paul saw that the greatest threat to faith would not be paganism reborn, but religion corrupted from within; a man or institution claiming divine prerogatives while still seated in the temple of God. Eusebius’s generation had already seen such things: emperors deified, priests invoking spirits, philosophers turning wisdom into idolatry. But the warning echoed far beyond the Roman age, into every century where divine authority is confused with human power.

The earliest Christian teachers read Paul’s prophecy as a symbol of pride enthroned. Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Chrysostom taught that the man of sin would arise in a time when worship was blended with politics; a ruler or priest who magnified himself above God. For them it was not only a prophecy of one future figure, but a pattern: the spirit of self-deification repeating through history.

As the empire gave way to Christendom, that old temptation reappeared in new language. The Church, inheriting Rome’s vocabulary of power, began to speak of its leaders as vicars of Christ, standing in the place of God upon earth. What began as a theological metaphor; the duty to represent divine mercy; sometimes drifted into exaltation.

Medieval records preserve striking phrases. Pope Innocent III, in a sermon on Luke 12:42, declared, “The pope holds the place of the true God on earth.” Pope Boniface VIII, in his bull Unam Sanctam, wrote, “We declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” Such statements, in context, were meant to affirm spiritual supremacy, not personal divinity, yet they reveal how easily reverence could slide toward the language of omnipotence and infallibility. The same temptation that Eusebius saw in the Caesars whispered again from within the altar: power clothed in sacred robes.

Had Eusebius lived to see those centuries, his response would likely have been the same. True authority, he wrote, is measured by humility, not by claims of divinity. Christ; the one Being who truly could call Himself God on earth; chose instead the form of a servant. Therefore any ruler, priest, or philosopher who accepts divine honors stands beside Herod in Caesarea, listening to the same fatal cry: “The voice of a god, not of a man.”

The man of sin, for Eusebius, was not confined to one throne or one age. It was the archetype of every system that replaces obedience with pride, grace with power, and service with sovereignty. Whether in Tyre’s temples, Rome’s senate, or Christendom’s cathedrals, the danger is the same: man sitting in God’s seat.

Paul’s prophecy ends not with despair but with the revelation of the true King. “Then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of His mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of His coming.” 2 Thessalonians 2:8 For Eusebius, that spirit of His mouth was already at work in the Gospel; truth exposing illusion, light dissolving magic, humility overthrowing pride. When the Church remembers that it is the temple of the living God, not the throne of men, the man of sin is cast down again.

For the Scriptures declare, “The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his Anointed.” Psalm 2:2 Yet they are warned: “Ye are gods, and all of you are children of the most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.” Psalm 82:6–7 And in the vision of John, “These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them: for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings.” Revelation 17:14

The final victory is not of empire but of grace. All who once said, “I am a god,” shall be silent, and the One who truly was God made man shall reign. The kings of the earth, who exalted themselves against Him, shall fall; their thrones will crumble; their names will fade. But the Lamb who was slain shall live forever, and His servants shall see His face.

The temple of God will not be the seat of men but the dwelling of God with men. The idols of pride will be gone, and every crown will be cast before the throne. Then shall be fulfilled the word that undoes all self-deification: “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with them, and be their God.” Revelation 21:3

*Lactantius (Divine Institutes 7.14, c. 300 AD) said:

“The world was made in six days, and so it shall last six thousand years. After six thousand years, all wickedness shall be abolished, and righteousness shall reign for a thousand years.”