Last year (2019), I published the 6th edition of my book "The Origin of Christianity" with the subtitle "An Epic Tale of the People of the Covenant," paying attention to the fact that Christianity was born from the "church movement" that had occurred in the process of the people of the Covenant scattered all over the world after they had migrated from the Fertile Crescent at the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to the Promised Land Canaan. However, later, it became clear that the Ephraim and Manasseh, only who possess the genetic characteristics of Paleo-Mongoloid among the twelve tribes of Israel, played an important role not only in the conquest of Canaan but also in the eastern transmission of Christianity. Thus, this time, I deliver this 7th edition with the main title of "An Epic Tale of the People of the Covenant."
In creating the augmented part of the 7th edition, I got many hints from the blog of Protestant Bible commentator Mr. Arimasa Kubo (久保有政), who was the first pastor of the Ikebukuro-Nishi Church, and used them as the reference.
December 2020
Atsushi Murakami
[Preface] In the region from Mesopotamia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river to Palestine, city states, where agricultural and nomadic people had lived together, have risen and fallen since ancient times. The agricultural people played leading role in the most of these city states. However, the nomads traded not only with Egypt in the west but also with India and China in the east and served as catalysts for cross-cultural fusion.
These nomads include not only tribes of Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Zebulun, Issachar, Dan, Gad, Asher, Naphtali, Joseph and Benjamin, who have cultural backgrounds of Mesopotamia and Egypt, but also Manasseh and Ephraim, who have the Y chromosome gene D, which is characteristic of the Tibetans and the Jomon people (縄文人), the indigenous people of the Japanese archipelago, and seem to have been belonged to the Paleo-Mongoloids. They had also believed in different patron gods. But they formed a union of independent tribes and established the unity of religion and politics based on the covenant of the single founder Abraham and God from 3,000 to 4,000 years ago in Palestine region and appeared on history's center stage replacing agricultural people. Thus the People of the Covenant was born.
Though Judaism was originally an exclusive and introvert religion, as the twelve tribes of Israel incorporated the extroverted and harmonious Ephraim and Manasseh tribes of Paleo-Mongoloid, Judaism and Christianity were propagated to not only the Mediterranean region, but also to Central Asia, India, China, and even Japanese archipelago. Moreover, Jingjiao (景教Luminous Religion), which is considered to be the origin of the Oriental Christian churches, played a role as a catalyst for the birth of Islam and the Mahayana Buddhist movement. As a result, the total number of the People of the Covenant, that is, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is said to be 3.4 billion now.
