Who is this
King of Glory?
A Critical Study of the
Christos-Messiah Tradition
"What profit hath not that fable of Christ
brought us!"
—Pope Leo X
Alvin Boyd Kuhn
Electronically typed and edited by
Juan Schoch for educational research purposes. I can be contacted at
pc93@bellsouth.net. I will be greatly indebted to the individual who can put me
in touch with the Estate of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn and/or any of the following
works:
The Mighty Symbol of the Horizon,
Nature as Symbol, The Tree of Knowledge, The Rebellion of the Angels, The Ark
and the Deluge, The True Meaning of Genesis, The Law of the Two Truths, At
Sixes and Sevens, Adam Old and New, The Real and the Actual, Immortality: Yes -
But How?, The Mummy Speaks at Last, Symbolism of the Four Elements, Through
Science to Religion, Creation in Six Days?, Rudolph Steiner's "Mystery of
Golgotha", Krishnamurti and Theosophy, A. B. Kuhn's graduation address at
Chambersburg Academy "The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn's unpublished
autobiography, Great Pan Returns.
To
THE MANY
THOUSANDS OF STU-
DENTS WHO ARE EARNESTLY
STRIVING TO RESTORE THE ANCIENT
ESOTERIC INTERPRETATION OF THE SCRIP-
TURES OF THE WORLD THIS WORK
IS SINCERELY DEDI-
CATED
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ix
I. FAITH WEDS FOLLY 1
II. MYTH TRUER THAN HISTORY 14
III. TRUTH WEARS A MASK 48
IV. WISDOM HAUNTS THE COUNTRYSIDE 80
V. FANCY’S FABRIC TURNS INTO HISTORY
90
VI. CANONIZED ROMANTICISM 129
VII. THROES OF A BAD CONSCIENCE 169
VIII. SUBLIME MYTH MAKES GROTESQUE
HISTORY 181
IX. FAITH’S ODD WONDERLAND 226
X. COSMIC MAJESTY WITH LOCAL ITEMS
248
XI. STAGGERING
XII. THE SHOUT OF PAUL’S SILENCE 276
XIII. ROBBING PAUL TO PAY PETER 301
XIV. A QUEEN DETHRONED 312
XV. A STAR--AND LUNA 332
XVI. AN EPOCHAL DISCOVERY 372
XVII. TRUTH EXORCISES DEMONIAC
OBSESSIONS 388
XVIII. THE ANOINTING OF MAN 401
XIX. LOST CYCLES OF THE SUN 419
XX. TWELVE LAMPS OF DEITY 432
XXI. ORION AND HIS DOG 457
XXII. OUR DAY-STAR RISES 469
INDEX 487
INTRODUCTION
The pick that struck the Rosetta Stone in the loamy soil of the
ix
rises from the dead past to charge
its ungenerous offspring with faithlessness and deceit. And Christianity, as
Edward Carpenter so frankly asserts, must now acknowledge its parentage in a
pagan past or, failing to do so, must perish.
The entire Christian Bible, creation
legend, descent into and exodus from "Egypt," ark and flood allegory,
Israelite "history," Hebrew prophecy and poetry, Gospels, Epistles
and Revelation imagery, all are now proven to have been the transmission
of ancient Egypt’s scrolls and papyri into the hands of later generations which
knew neither their true origin nor their fathomless meaning. Long after
There can be no question of this
necessity on its part. Almost alone one significant item enforces it. From the
scrolls of papyri five thousand to ten thousand years old there comes stalking
forth to view the whole story of an Egyptian Jesus raising from the dead an
Egyptian Lazarus at an Egyptian Bethany, with two Egyptian Maries present, the
non-historical prototype of the incident related (only) in John’s Gospel. From
the walls of the temple of Luxor, carved there at a date at least 1700 years
B.C., there faces Christianity a group of four scenes that spell the
non-historicity of four episodes purveyed as history in the Gospel’s recital of
the Christ nativity: the angel’s pronouncement to the shepherds tending their
flocks by night in the fields; the annunciation of the angel to the virgin; the
adoration of the infant by three Magi; and the nativity scene itself.
x
adored a Christ who had raised the
dead and healed the lame, halt, blind, paralytic, leprous and all afflicted,
who had restored speech to the dumb, exorcized demons from the possessed,
dispersed his enemies with a word or look, wrestled with his Satan adversary,
overcome all temptation and performed the works of his heavenly Father to the
victorious end. Egypt had long known a Jesus, Iusa, who had been born amid
celestial portents of an immaculate parenthood, circumcised, baptized, tempted,
glorified on the mount, persecuted, arrested, tried, condemned, crucified,
buried, resurrected and elevated to heaven.
But
The ineptitude of scholarly acumen
in the face of the mountainous evidence supplied by the study of comparative
religion, especially since the recovery of Chaldean and Egyptian antiquities,
surpasses all belief and flouts all conscience. It has been exhibited on so
colossal a scale, with consequences of the direst nature, that the question
whether ignorance or deliberate chicanery engineered the total suppression of
truth that has glared its overwhelming obviousness in the face of studentship,
inevitably rises to the foreground of thought. It must be assumed that both
ignorance and disingenuousness combined to produce the catastrophic result. A
thousand big and little items of comparative religion, many of them sufficient
in their single weight to
xi
clinch decisive determinations fatal
to Christian claims, conspire to erect a positively impregnable fortress of
proof of Christian errancy. This mass of data has been blithely ignored,
brazenly flouted, or damned with slighting notice, by the ecclesiastical regime
which would lose its easy hold on the masses by honest recognition of the
truth.
The lesson of European Renaissance
history has not been assimilated in its full import. Christian Europe, groping
in early Medieval darkness for centuries following the violent extinction of
Platonic Academies and schools of esoteric philosophy and religion, regained a
portion of the lost light in the fourteenth century when re-established contact
with Greek literature brought to light the long-buried works of classic
Hellenic wisdom. This recouping of cultural status went far to illuminate the
night of Christian gloom. But it can be seen now that it did not go far or deep
enough to effect a complete restoration of the full glory of ancient
intellectual brilliance.
The primary truth of human culture
which is presented by all sage religions of antiquity is the fact that there
resides deeply embedded in the core of man’s constitution a nucleus of what,
for want of a better designation, must be called a divine spark or sun. The
glow of Christliness--a thing at once both chemically radio-active and
intellectual--in us is indeed the hope of our glory. Modern science, through
the work of Dr. George W. Crile, late head of the Cleveland Medical
laboratories, has rediscovered what the ancient sages were familiar with--the
radiant SUN in man. "Every man," proclaimed the ancients and the
Medieval "Fire Philosophers," "has a little SUN within his own
breast." This sun is the Christ in man, a nucleus of fiery divine
spirit-energy. All the Christs in antiquity were denominated "Sun-
xii
Gods." The names of nearly all
of them are the immediate words for the sun, or epithets appropriate to the
solar orb. "All things are the products of one primordial Fire,"
assert the Chaldean Oracles. Life nucleates glowing centers of this fire
throughout the universe in the radiant cells of its physical body, which are
the suns. Every creature that his life shares a portion of this pervasive fire,
which is the rock of its hope for evolution to its greater glory.
The rock of human culture thus being
established as a fiery power within man’s own breast, Christianity becomes
chargeable with the most opprobrious of all possible accusations. It can be
indicted for the crime of being the only religion that in large measure
destroyed the force of man’s inspiration and incentive to cultivate this divine
solar light within his own bosom. It did this by diverting the direction of its
followers’ effort from the inner self-culture of a purely subjective
consciousness to the worship of the Christ as embodied in one man in history.
Granted that there is a powerful and effective psychology in the adoration of
an ideal model of perfection, the main issue here involved can never be dodged.
No matter how emotionally, how fanatically the worshipper pours out adoration
to a person in objective life, the work of his own evolution is not
accomplished until he effectuates the ultimate divinization of the nuclear
potentiality of deific fire within his own self-controlled area of
consciousness.
The balanced forces of human uplift
would be thrown into immediate chaos if it were in the end possible for a man
to achieve his apotheosization vicariously, or in any other way than through
his own effort. By virtue of the fact that man was provided from the start with
the presence of a unit of divine fire within the heart of his conscious being,
he was adequately equipped to fight his own way to the goal of glory. The only
treason of which religious devotion could become capable was the setting up of
a fetish outside the life of consciousness, which would divert a single
iota of resolute will from the
xiii
culture of the resident deity.
Christianity is the only religion in the civilized world that has perpetuated
this treason. The point is inexorably established by logical thought as well as
demonstrated by the historical sequel. The matter is beyond debate. By so much
as the exaltation of a personal Jesus has beguiled human devotion away from the
inner direction in the individual’s task of perfecting his own innate divinity,
by precisely that much has the outer presentation weakened the strength of
mortal struggle to the light. It is psychological, but it is mathematically
measurable. The amount measured is the item that ends all argument. If the
worship of a Judean carpenter has taken any time and absorbed any psychic
effort that could have been expended in the culture of divine graciousness
within the heart of humanity, it has by so much held back the evolution of the
race.
Christianity has taught its
adherents, so to say, to play around the fringes of the cultural problem
instead of bearing with all their psychic force directly upon its heart. It has
hypnotized their devotional mentality under the spell of a promise of
vicariousness which is itself subtly conducive to the weakening of the native
nobility of man’s true selfhood. It has made of its millions--what Nietzsche so
thoroughly detested--groveling beggars, reveling in the turpitude of
sin-confession and praying for God to have mercy on their unworthiness. It has
made them wretches pleading piteously to be saved. How it has ever been assumed
that a God of good sense would enjoy seeing his creatures, whom he has himself
divinely endowed with a portion of his own Mind, writhing in worm-of-the-dust
sycophancy at his feet, is beyond rational understanding. It is naturally to be
presumed that he would take far greater delight in seeing them standing up in
the might of their incipient divinity and making a fight of it. The morbid cast
of mentation generated in millions of Christians over sixteen centuries by the
doctrinal falsification of the esoteric meaning of "sin" is perhaps
the most lamentable spectacle presented to the world in all time. That a
religion could so far lose touch with sober sanity as to expect that it could
exalt and edify man’s spirit by grinding it down into the dust is evidence at
once of its complete divagation from basic sound truth.
It is a grave question whether the
ecclesiastical system and movement known as Christianity has any right to its
name. So far from being the cult that brought in a true Christ-worship for the
first time
xiv
in "heathen" darkness, it
was indeed--after the third century--the one system that destroyed such a true
worship. Ancient cults bent all effort upon the cultivation of the god within
man. This is the nucleus of the only true Christianity. In its genuine sense
there has been no Christianity in the Occident since that fatal third century.
Historical Christianity has substituted a personal fetish for the real
Christos, the inner Fire of Love. No matter how appealing the figure
substituted, it never can do the work of actual soul culture. And history has
sealed this verdict. It is almost certainly true that in no quarter of human
life has history so obviously and glaringly demonstrated the want of mankind’s
reliance upon the god instinct in the heart of the nations as has been
evidenced by the horrifying spectacle of inhumanity and animal savagery put on
display by the so-called Christianized nations. Christianity has never led the fight
for culture. On the contrary, it has hung like a drag-wheel on the car of real
cultural and scientific advance for many centuries. It has struck at every
pioneer in the progress of true culture. Its highest practical aim has rather
been to maintain an average level of decency in traditional forms of social
life. Much incidental good of course has emerged from an effort to which
millions of good people, in more or less ignorance of historic truth, have
consecrated their life’s devotion. But never has it been the single aim and
objective of the Christian ecclesiastical system to ground the aspirational
life of its devotees upon the one-pointed quickening of the Christ within all
hearts.
A fairly considerable number of
books have been written to defend the thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus,
George Brandes’ Jesus a Myth being a typical example. All of them have
advanced data of weight and validity. But none of them has presented the real
argument in the case. This springs from the material now available from ancient
xv
background of esoteric religionism.
The allegation that the publication of the Gospels can not be explained or accounted
for unless a great Teacher had lived whose life inspired their writing, must
give way before the understanding that their appearance was due to the
breakdown of esotericism, or the violent popular incursion into the secrecy of
esoteric polity, and the dragging forth of the arcane books and the dramas of
the occult spiritual life from the Mystery holy of holies.
A noted present-day clergyman in New
York City, the eminent Dr. John Haynes Holmes, has declared in a printed
sermon--Christianity’s Debt to Judaism; Why Not Acknowledge It?--that
Christianity drew its Founder from the Jewish people, along with five-sixths of
its Bible, the Hebrew Old Testament, as well as everything that the character
Jesus has spoken in the New Testament. Practically every word uttered by the
Christ figure in the Gospels is to be found in the Mishna, the Gemara, the
Talmud and the Hagadoth of the Jews, he asserted. But what now must be the
astonishment of the eminent minister to be confronted with the mountainous
evidence that all the material of both Christian and Hebrew systems has
emanated from ancient
It is a sign of the aberration in
religious thinking now prevailing that the presentation of the case for the
non-historic Christ will run afoul of many persons of general probity who, even
when measurably convinced that the Jesus story is a fable, as Pope Leo X so
glibly asserted, will still adhere to the persuasion that it is better to
suppress the bald and revolutionary truth and prolong the "beautiful
illusion" of the Christ’s personal existence. The original perpetration
and now the perpetuation of blank falsehood concerning the fact of Jesus’
existence is argued to be morally justifiable, even highly good, on the ground
that it has wrought a prodigious psychological and moral beneficence. But this
is, at bottom, to argue that Christianity can be better promoted by a lie than
by the truth. We are adjured by the holy scriptures of that same faith that our
only freedom comes from knowing the truth. While the world is hoping and
planning to establish the better course of its life upon four fundamental
freedoms, it might
xvi
be well to remind ourselves that in
a democracy there is a fifth freedom upon which the salutary influences of the
four and all other freedoms are dependent and contingent, and that is the
freedom of all to be put in possession of the truth, to the farthest limit of
its availability. In minor situations it often appears both judicious and
beneficent to withhold the truth. But the justification is always secondary to
larger objectives and temporary. Every situation must ultimately be resolved by
a facing of the truth. Final issues ever demand that life be met on its own
terms. The extensive concealment of historical truth at once argues something
unlovely and sinister. A great world faith, soliciting the loyalty of millions,
could offer no surer evidence of its integrity than an unbroken record of
instant eagerness to examine and accept every sincere presentment of the truth.
This work is given forth with no other motive than to present the available
evidence beating upon an issue of transcendent importance. In the hurly-burly
of human affairs truth is not always welcome or pleasant. That is
understandable. But far more vital is the understanding that it must be faced.
Our attitude toward truth-seeking is one of the supreme tests of our worthiness
to take on the responsibilities and enjoy the liberties of a democracy.
Lest it be assumed that the author’s
implied charges of dishonesty in Christian leadership spring from a personal
animosity against Christianity, he takes the liberty to insert here a few
sentences taken from a brief article in The New York Times of present
date (Nov. 29, 1943) reported from a sermon of the Rev. Bernard Iddings Bell,
eminent Episcopalian clergyman, preached in St. Paul’s Chapel of Columbia
University on Nov. 28. By inference Dr. Bell charges the Church with
dishonesty, and nobody believes that he does it from "spleen." He
said that present-day civilization "needs above all things a restored
humility and a renewed honesty in two high places--the universities and the
churches." "From kindergarten to the Ph.D. degree," he added,
"our educators help their students to run away from ultimate decisions. .
. . The universities have become resorts for the pursuit of instrumental tricks
rather than of fundamental and immutable truth. And then our educators, having
abdicated from their ancient and honorable post as keepers of the sanctities of
truth, cry out in their pride their all-sufficient greatness.
"The churches, too . . . make
of themselves pious clubs, daring not
xvii
to rebuke the brazen multitudes for
fear of loss of membership and money; and having sunk to the low estate of men
pleasers, insist they hold the future of mankind in their proud hands."
The sun of man can not be too long
beclouded with the fogs of hypocrisy and bigotry. Its mighty power will dispel
them in due season. A new day of its shining arises with the accidental stroke
of a soldier’s pick on a slab of stone.
xviii
Chapter I
FAITH
WEDS FOLLY
To the conscientious student who
will give to the matter sufficient time and reflection it becomes a conviction
that the most devastating cultural calamity that has befallen the human race in
all its history was the degradation of the esoteric spiritual purport of
ancient scripture into a debased literal and historical sense, entailing
centuries of mental benightedness and spiritual thwarting, that took place at
about the third century of the Christian era. And in this catastrophic
conversion of cosmography, evolutionary pictography and racial history over
into alleged factual occurrence, the single feature most signally fruitful of
age-long fatuity was the transformation of the dramatic figure of the Christos,
or divine essence of man’s nature, over into a historical person. It is not too
much to say that the withering wind of this distorted doctrine spread its
blight upon all sane comprehension of the sublime message of ancient sacred
literature over all the sixteen centuries since that fatal epoch. Indeed the
truth of the situation warrants the statement that the injection of a living
man into the spiritual drama in the place of the personified divine Ego in man
has held the rational mind of the Western world in the grip of the most arrant
superstition to be found in the history of civilized humanity. This work will
amass the data to support the sharp asseveration that this was the central item
in the entire debacle of theological systematism which then ensued and which
must be rated as the most tragic catastrophe in world history. The causes that
led to the fatal transference of character from the dramatic personification of
an element in human consciousness into an alleged man of historical
entification will be the central theme of this essay. To what inadequate degree
the iniquitous consequences of the blunder can be seen and delineated, these
will be dealt with in the unfoldment. But the task involves little less than
the penetrating analysis of all ancient sacred writ, and the amassing of a vast
array of factual data and basic argument in support of the momentous
conclusions adduced in the sequel.
1
The power of tradition, and more
especially religious tradition indoctrinated in the childhood of many
generations, is so overwhelming that the effort of this work to clarify the
status of the great doctrine of divine Messiahship in ancient scripture will
almost certainly be received with the cry of blasphemy from the shocked
partisans of orthodoxy. All the obloquy that has been concentrated in the word
"Anti-Christ" will be flung upon the undertaking. For this reason it
is desirable to state at the outset that, on the contrary, the task is
motivated by the highest possible reverence for the Christ ideal as the core of
all religious culture. So far from being an attempt to devastate the benignant
efficacy of the role of the Christ in religious practique, it is expressly the
aim of the study to establish that efficacy upon its true psychological bases.
This purpose entails the revelation of the true in place of the false grounds
of the claim of the Christ ideal upon our reverence. Instead of being a vicious
attack upon the sanctified name and function of Christhood, it is directly an
effort to redeem that name and function from centuries of impious desecration
that should have been seen all along as the real grounds for horrified
indignation. When rightly viewed in relation to all the facts in the case, it
must be conceded that the justification for resentment at a real sacrilege
against the Sonship of God weighs heavily on the side of the book, and is not
on the side of the inevitable hue and cry of violent condemnation that will
greet it. In the face of this anticipated raucous chorus of vilification of the
book’s aim and intent there is hurled the forthright declaration that this is
an utterly sincere and consecrated attempt to rescue the sacred name of the
Christ from an ignominy already heaped upon it over long centuries. There is
abundant warrant for asserting the righteous character of the motive on the
ground of its aim to redeem the conception of Christhood from the incredible
error and falsification that have befouled it for ages. As Socrates and Plato
so thoroughly demonstrated by a masterly dialectic, the only source of evil in
connection with anything is the failure to grasp its true status and function
in a perfect balance between excess and deficiency. Nothing is good, say these
two profound thinkers, unless its basic raison d’être is clearly
apprehended and its use fulfilled in exactly balanced proportion. The record of
historical frightfulness that has emerged into actuality over many centuries
because of the unbelievable miscarriage of the first true conception of the
character and office of the
2
Messiah is overwhelming
justification of a sincere effort to remold the mistaken view to its original
truth and beauty. In final curt statement the high intent of this work is to
end the sway of an entirely false and stultifying idea of the nature of the
Christ and inaugurate the dominance of the only conception that truly honors
it. The thesis, then, is to demonstrate that the Christ was a grade of
distinctly divine consciousness that is coming gradually into rulership in
humanity, and being this, it was nothing else. It was not a man.
Just as the conception of the
Biblical Adam as man, generic, is a true envisagement of the meaning of
the term and yields intelligible significance in exegesis of ancient scripts,
but becomes both ridiculous and unintelligible when taken to mean "a man,"
so with the Christos. The conception of the Christ as man in his divine
genius, or the God in man, opens at once the whole of scripture to lucid
and consistent intelligibility. It is indeed the "key" to any true
grasp of the whole sense of that revered body of primeval literature. But the
instant the concept is shifted from man divine to a divine man in an
historical personage, dire confusion, entanglement in contradiction, ridiculous
inconsistency and the eeriest "historical" nonsense are thrust into
the structure. The concept of the Christos as the godly higher Self in man
meets the tangled riddle of the exegesis of the Bibles with complete
satisfaction of every intellectual demand, and no other concept does so. The
concept of Christ as a man immediately afflicts the entire exegetical
situation with hopeless sabotage. Used as the "key," it jams the lock
and opens nothing to the reasoning intelligence. But it does open something to
the unreasoning psychic and emotional aptitudes of less intelligent folk: the
hypnotic gullibility of religious piety and a pitiable slavery to religious
superstition. And the quantity of the tragedy wrought in the world by the
prevalence of these two psychological forces makes perhaps the most lugubrious
chapter in human history.
The concept of the Christ as "a
man," who ate, drank, slept, walked and spoke as any mortal, is beyond any
possibility of refutation the most fatuous ideation that ever found a place in
the effort to rationalize human religious experience. No less has it been at
the same time the most baneful influence in blocking the cultural enterprise of
grasping the central power and fullest unction of that experience. Here again
the truth of the situation runs in a direction exactly counter
3
to that commonly believed. Pious
orthodox opinion is wholly aligned to the idea that the historical Jesus is the
most positive assurance of the individual Christian’s salvation and the active
agent of its realization. This work ventures, doubtless for the first time in
religious discussion, to fly directly in the face of that presumption with the
claim that it is this very idea of the Christ as a historical person that has
stood as the most concrete obstacle in the way of that salvation! The whole
essay must be taken as the evidence advanced in support of that amazing
reversal of all accepted belief. The basis of this strong contention will be
the undeniable fact that the thesis of the historical Jesus has taken the mind
and aspiration of all devotees outside themselves to an alleged man of
4
trophe? Failure in religion’s
practical effort is certain to follow as long as a meaningless worship is paid
out to the divinity alleged to be embodied in one single historical savior,
while the principle of divine mind within the self is left totally
uncultivated. Granting some psychological virtue to the adoration of a
historical paragon, it is still admitted in all religious discussion that men
can be saved in the end only by their own righteousness. No world savior was ever
sent into the world to save men from the task of saving themselves. Ever
memorable and oft quoted are the lines of Angelus Silesius, Medieval mystic:
Though Christ a thousand times in
But not within thyself, thy soul
shall be forlorn;
The cross on
Unless within thyself it be set up
again.
If any actual vicarious atonement or
salvation were possible, the whole purpose for which souls from the celestial
empyrean migrate to earth to further their evolution would be thwarted. Each
soul must become the dynamo and citadel of its own strength, or there would be
inequity and chaos in the counsels of evolution. Life grants nothing to any
unit of being that it has not earned. To do so would be to introduce favoritism
and particularity into the universal economy. The importance of this argument
merits a fuller consideration, and additional treatment of it will enter the
study later on.
The enormous fatuity of the concept
of humanity’s Savior as a man must be examined in the light of a more
candid scrutiny than any to which it has heretofore been subjected. Indeed one
of the bases of quarrel with it is the very fact of its having been accepted
without either psychological or historical critique of a thoroughgoing kind.
The closer and more keenly one brings reason and data to bear upon the matter
the more clearly it is seen that the very vogue and sway of the idea has been
made possible only through the almost total default of the rational faculty and
its displacement by sheer unction of faith. It is perhaps the most notable
example and instance of the power of the psychological elements of mystical
pietism to override and paralyze the rational elements in religion. For at any
time in many centuries it needed only a half minute’s cool and steady facing of
the realities of the situation to bring to view in the sharpest of
5
outlines the utter irrationality of
the presupposition that the power able to redeem human weakness to godlike
status could be embodied and expressed, wielded and effectuated to its grand
purpose, in the person of a man. The sheer thought that the savior of
mankind from evolutionary undevelopment to perfection could be a man, or
a power, no matter how divine, lodged in the body of a man in history,
is such an anomaly, so out of line with all known natural process, that merely
to pose the idea to the mind and hold it steadfastly there in the light of all
its ancillary implications, is to see it for what it is--an utterly baseless
creation of distorted religious fantasy. Merely to face the thought that the
whole evolutionary advance of mankind across the gulf of undeveloped capacities
from animal through human to divine nature was alleged to be effectuated and
instrumentalized by the forces embodied in a single man at a given date in
history, is to see the notion in all the glaring baldness of its inherent
absurdity. The human mind can readily enough envisage as a modus consonant with
reality the elevation of humanity from brute to philosopher, from savagery to
Christhood, through the injection from without or the regeneration from within
of a light and power to change base selfishness to divine charity, and thus
redeem the race. But it can contemplate this process as operative only through
the sweep of an influence which pervades the mass of mankind, animating all
hearts and enlightening all minds, after the natural analogy of a little leaven
raising the whole lump. That is a methodology which the human mind can grasp
and accredit as harmonious with veritude. But that this vast regeneration of
the race should be implemented by and dependent upon the birth and existence of
a single historic individual, even through the inspiration of his resplendent
example, is a concept that grows more weird, crass and chimerical the longer it
is held in the focus of thought. It has in fact held its grip upon millions of
minds solely by virtue of the total dearth of intellectual candor and the
mental paralysis induced by rabid elements of emotional religiosity. It can not
for a moment bear the light of reason. It can live only in the dim twilight of
intellectual stultification wherein the clear outlines of the rational problem
can not be distinctly discerned.
There is indeed a natural revolt in
the character of all normal men and women against the thought of their
accepting salvation purchased for them by another, the more so if the price of
the ransom is for the
6
vicar pain and suffering. What
person of wholesome instincts wants to be saved by the sacrifice and oblation
of another free being? Who that has the slightest iota of moral integrity would
wish to live under the obligation of indebtedness for his evolutionary
redemption to the sacrifice of another? Mankind cherishes a natural sense of
the moral turpitude of taking what one has not won. It introduces whim into the
normal order wherein man looks confidently for the reign of law. It is
repugnant to man’s inherent sense of right. Vicarious salvation was one of the
items of theology that led Nietzsche to cry out his bitter denunciation of
Christianity as "slave morality." Not merely the superman, but any
man worthy of the name wants to face life and nature on their own terms and
with his own resources, and will hold in contempt the man or faith that accepts
the boon of salvation in the spirit of a craven. The purchase of man’s
redemption by the "shed blood of Christ," in the literal sense in
which it stands as a doctrine of Christianity, is indeed one of the heaviest
marks of Christianity’s doctrinal degradation. (Happily it can be made
rationally acceptable, as can all other doctrines, through a restoration of the
true esoteric significance.) The learned Celsus in the third century tells us
that Christianity appealed to and welcomed only the slaves of Roman tyranny,
men and women of the most abject position. It was held in the lowest contempt
by Pliny, Seneca, Tacitus, Suetonius and the more intelligent groups generally.
It was rejected by all who were genuine enough to despise the self-confessed
ignominy of letting a historical scapegoat bear the burden of achieving their
karmic immunity. The gross teaching of an ersatz salvation of man, the
race’s restoration to its lost
7
All this irrational thesis was held
for centuries in spite of the total dearth of any logical answer to the difficulties
involved in the practical problem as to how the divinity historically embodied
in one person could become and remain effectual for the evolutionary
divinization of all the other children of humanity. Jesus might be in himself a
mighty reservoir of divine essence, a veritable dynamo of godly unction. But
how it was to be made available for all other men, how transferred from him to
a distribution amongst all others, by what transmission wires or channels it
was to pass from him into the lives of those "believing on him," on
what conditions it was to be received by some and denied to others, or what
pleas, prayers, sacrifices or cajolery were necessary to draw it forth from
him,--all these elements of the practical or factual operation of Jesus’ saving
grace to deify all men have never had an answer. And they can never have a
rational answer. The groundplan and framework of Christian theology has ever
had an artificiality that has rendered it a weird and fantastic thing in all
conscientious effort at rationale. The spectacle of an omnipotent creator of
all the worlds setting a trap to catch his own creatures by tempting them to
sin, then condemning them to eternal misery in consequence of their inevitable
"fall," and afterwards negotiating with them to appease his wrath on
condition that his own Son, only begotten, consent to die in their stead, has
stood for sixteen centuries as the rock foundation of that religion which
shouts down all others with its vociferous claims to all-highest excellence
among the faiths of earth. Through the force of the wholly unaccountable
magnanimity of the man Christ in sacrificing himself to save a reprobate
humanity, the minds of the countless millions of Christian devotees over the
centuries since his "death" may have been, as the hymn sings,
Lost in wonder, love and praise.
But it is even more certain that
they have been hopelessly lost in total incomprehension. Forced to swallow it
by the overwhelming combination of ecclesiastical authority and unreasoning
faith, they have yet been nearly choked by its unpalatability.
It is probably the opinion of
millions of votaries of the atoning blood of Christ the man, that his saving
grace has been made accessible to them, distributed to them, by his
still-living active presence and his personal attention to their lives
individually. Granting the continued
8
existence of his individual
personality after these two thousand years on some "spiritual" plane
of being assumedly in touch with earthly affairs, there must be faced the infinitely
complex problem of explaining how the consciousness of one man is able to give
attention to the multitudinous details in the lives of millions of mortals at
every moment of every day without cessation; how he is able to read the
conscious content of innumerable minds and hearts with particularity and
accuracy and adopt appropriate measures of spiritual strategy to answer the
spoken and unbroken prayers of all these; how, in short, he is able to be a
very present help in trouble in millions of complex situations all the time,
and act in relation to all of them with impeccable accuracy and unfailing
justice. Blind zealotry blots out this problem from the uncritical minds of the
masses and priestcraft is warily content to let the dangerous dog lie asleep.
It is not made the subject of debate. But if occasionally a hint of the dilemma
is ventured, such a minor obstacle to piety is swept lightly aside with the
ever-handy reminder to such intellectual temerity that with God all things are
possible, and with the only-begotten Son of God no less. Surely the almighty
hand of Supreme Deity could manage a trifling difficulty of the sort, and at
any rate
God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform.
To minds submerged in the aura of
miracle and overborne by pious authority and sacerdotal glamor, all things in a
mysterious theology were made palatable. Jesus’ pronouncement that "thy
faith hath made thee whole" and his assurance that by faith we can move
mountains into the sea had paved the way for the triumphant march of religious
gullibility and the obscuration of reason. It is granted that we must have
faith where we do not yet have knowledge. What else can a dependent mortal
creature do but have faith in the beneficence of the universe? But a
universal Power that is itself an all-embracing intelligence would not ask its
creatures, who are destined to embody all degrees of that same intelligence, to
hold to any specific formulations of faith the substance of which contravenes
our reason and the regular courses of natural law. Our faith must rest upon and
be supported by the inviolability of law and not take its stand upon any
fantastic scheme that flouts what we do know and sets at odds all our reason-
9
ing faculties. With either flaming
zealotry or stolid indifference holding the critical faculty of the masses in
abeyance, and occasional outbreak of rational inquiry smitten down with
vengeful violence, the problem of how the man Jesus, dead ages ago, could still
be the divine guest in billions of human hearts all at once and all the time,
was held in leash.
Again, it is undoubtedly the thought
of hosts of minds adjusted to miraculous possibilities of many sorts that
Jesus’ still-potent spirit was detached from the limitations of his personality
or even his earthly mind and, continuing to float about in some form of a
ubiquitous presence like a permeating atmosphere, functions with a sort of
automatism like air rushing in, wherever there is a spiritual vacuum or
spiritual pressure. It is conceived that somehow that mind which St. Paul
adjures us to let "be in" us as it was also in Christ Jesus pervades
the world like a stratosphere and is there for us to register and lay hold of
after the fashion of tuning in spiritually with the proper wave-length. But how
the efficacy of such a vibrational force could be linked with and still
dependent upon the personal Jesus of history, is in no way apparent or
explainable. There is no necessary or factual connection. Divine consciousness
or grades or rates of it may indeed conceivably be about us, bathing us in the
universal aura of their supernal vibrations. But that any of them should have
derived their origin and their present presence and operation from a man in
history is again a matter that asks for our acceptance of a wholly irrational
theological dictum.
This general notion receives some
support from Jesus’ own assurance that when he left earth he would send the
Paraclete, the Comforter, who would guide us into all truth and be the
ever-solicitous monitor at our elbow. But all that this does is simply to
rename the ubiquitous influence. It transfers the generative power from the
personal Jesus to an impersonal principle. The new divine comforter must
distribute his consciousness over as much ground as the personal mind of the
risen Jesus would have to cover. Strangely enough one of the very phrases which
the Greek theologians of the ancient philosophical religion used to picture the
pervasive scope and functioning of a divine element in humanity was that
"the gods distribute divinity." But this was in reference to the
distribution of a seed fragment of God’s infinite and universal mind to every
creature according to its
10
rank in evolution. The presence of
potential divinity distributively in all levels of life is not a crotchety but
a quite reasonable and natural procedure. It is indeed one of the great
features in the early philosophies that gave form to basic Christianity. It is
readily conceivable that a type or degree of supernal mind or consciousness
does pervade the universe, an ethereal essence, so to say, of which evolving
entities such as man can partake through the development of a receptive
capacity in their own brain and nerve mechanism. To make God’s infinite
largesse available to man some such method of impartation on the one hand and
appropriation on the other must be conceived as provided by the Oversoul of the
world. But this is not the problem that is crucial to the tenability of the
idea of a historical Jesus carrying out the part assigned to him in theology.
He is there alleged to fulfill the function of saving millions of souls through
his individual agency both during his life and for thousands of years after his
death. If to substantiate the still operative power of Jesus Christ when he is
no longer living, recourse must be had to the hypostatization of his personal
mind as a universally pervasive cosmic atmosphere, the entire force of the
method of explanation goes to weaken still further the claim for his historic
personal existence and to strengthen that for his purely spiritual nature. It
is not conceivable that the mind of one personal human being could reach and
save billions of mortals. Therefore, to postulate a conceivable method by which
such a mind could administer salvation to myriads in all ages, that mind must
be released from any attachment to personality and characterized anew as a
cosmic mental emanation or diffusion of mental substance. This deduction from
the premises at once erases the personal Jesus from the picture of theology, if
not in his life, then certainly from the moment of his death. If to render his
mind operable for salvation its connection with his personality must be
severed, then its connection with any personality is seen to be a clearly
unnecessary, indeed impossible requirement. And this brings us face to face
with the final outcome of this argument, which is that that mind which was in
Christ Jesus would have existed, has existed and does exist, entirely
independently of the fact or the question of any man’s historical presence on
earth. For no more did Jesus originate that mind than does the radio mechanism
originate the sonata that it renders in your room. Any man can catch it, as
does the radio, from an omnipresent univer-
11
sal vibration, register it and give
it expression on this plane of being. The vibration-wave of the sonata is in
your room whether there is a radio present to reproduce it on the plane of your
senses or not. The Christ consciousness was present as a cosmic outflow of
divine thought energization, whether or not any man of requisite organic
sensitivity lived to become its tubes and amplifier. The best that can be done
for Jesus’ uniqueness in this purview is to assume that perhaps he was the
first man in history (if he lived) who was equal to making that register and
that expression. But such a claim is bizarre from the first instant. It would
have to rest on pure conjecture and assumption. And against it would be arrayed
a host of vital considerations, such as that research now discloses that all the
highest and truest sermons he allegedly preached to found a saving religion had
been uttered by sage men centuries before him. If his message was the first
release of the wisdom of supernal divine mind to humanity, it should have
towered in grandeur and beauty to immeasurable height above anything taught
antecedently. Organized ecclesiasticism has been bold enough for centuries to
flaunt this legend before its following. But the discovery of the Rosetta Stone
and the Behistun Rock has put an entirely new complexion on the study of
comparative religion, opening up whole vast areas of ancient literature from
which it is seen that Christianity itself drew the body of its material. The
disconcerting result of all this for the Christian position is that it definitely
refutes the claims as to Jesus’ founding the first true religion and, far to
the contrary, thrusts upon the apologists for these claims the difficult task
of defending this sole emissary of deity to earth against the charge of
wholesale literary plagiarism! If when he came to uplift humanity with a
shining spirituality never before dreamed of, the best he could do was to
repeat the sagas of early Greek, Chaldean, Persian, Hindu, Chinese and
especially Egyptian wisdom, on what does the claim for his supreme uniqueness
and matchless exaltation rest?
Then, of course, there is that other
predicament arising from the egregious claims of the Christian party, which,
had it ever been frankly faced by ecclesiasticism, would have left the
Occidental world in better situation. It is the matter of God’s leaving the
world prior to the year thirty-three or thereabouts without any chance to be
saved by appropriating the mind of Christ. That the mere opportunity for the
operation in humanity’s evolution of the saving principle of God’s
12
grace should have been held off until the birth of
a babe in
Late in time behold him come,
Offspring of the Virgin’s womb.
It is of course an absurd idea that
the road to human elevation was not opened until the man-Christ, Jesus, landed
on the planet at a late epoch in the race’s career. This is one of many twists
and quirks which Christian dogma has asked its votaries to accept, to the
dislocation of their rational mentality.
13
Chapter II
MYTH
TRUER THAN HISTORY
It would seem to remove the
discussion from the province of rational dialectic and throw it into the field
of abnormal and precarious psychic phenomenalism to introduce an argument that
has been frequently advanced by a number of people that is by no means
inconsiderable. It must, however, be given a place in the debate if only for
the reason that it arises from a special type of experience that appears to be
actual among a surprising number of people who are at any rate sincere in their
report and interpretation of it. It falls in a domain of psychology that has
for the most part been shunned by academic investigation, its phenomena being
commonly rated as abnormal, eccentric and unauthentic, categorized in fact as
mostly self-delusion or hallucination. It has lately received some open
countenance from scholastic authority and has been admitted to the field of
legitimate study under the name of parapsychology. It may be better recognized
under the designation of psychic phenomena. At any rate the phenomenon in
question has been presented by many persons in modern religious groups of
spiritistic character as a real experience of themselves or others testifying
to them, and such is the veridical and empirical nature of the occurrence that
for them it settles the entire debate categorically and summarily. The
arguments based on it sway the attitude of thousands on the theme of this work
and it therefore merits presentation and critique.
The point is advanced by mediums,
psychics, clairvoyants and sensitives, to the effect that they can testify
directly to the fact of Jesus’ historical existence because, forsooth, they
have seen him and talked with him, in inner vision! His personality is not a
matter of doubt or speculation, because he has appeared to them in his shining
form! They have seen him as
14
This phenomenal experience, commoner
than is generally supposed, must, however, be subjected to a critical scrutiny
that it apparently has not hitherto received. This is the more desirable
because these reports of the appearance of a radiant personage to the inner
sight of many people are both too voluminous and seem too sincerely founded to
be thrust aside with the cry of hallucination. As evidently veridical psychic
phenomena they prove an interesting theme in themselves. It seems to be
necessary to concede that visions of the sort are actually seen. The shining
apparition seems to these seers to be present in reality. Whatever it may truly
be and however to be explained, it is evidently actually seen. The point at
issue for our discussion is not the veritude of the experience or the veracity
of the psychics; but what the thing proves. The critique is not directed at the
fact, but at its interpretation. The position taken is that such apparitions
present no necessary or valid evidence for the existence of the Gospel Jesus in
The identity of the personage of
light in the radiant vision can not be other than a matter of presumption. Upon
asking any of those who have "seen Jesus" in their subjective world
how they have identified their spiritual visitant with the man of
Looking first at the latter, the
"varieties of religious experience" include a wide range of
phenomenalistic susceptibility. Old men have dreamed dreams and young men have
seen visions. Saints have had rapturous exaltations, seers have beheld
apocalypses and mystics have been wafted aloft in ecstasies. These experiences
have abounded in
15
great multiplicity, variety and
profusion--unless the record is one long train of fiction and falsity, delirium
and delusion. There is Joan d’Arc, there is Swedenborg, there is Madame Guyon
and a legion of others. Modern students of this side of psychology assert that
a thought is in reality a shaped figure in the mental ether; and assert that if
thousands of people hold the same picture of such a person as the Christ in
mind with great intensity and devotion for a continued period, the thought-form
will become reified, hypostatized or substantialized to the extent that it will
drift into the mental purview of psychic sensitives and be seen and mistaken
for a veridical appearance. Modern psychology might catalogue it as an entification
of the unconscious or subconscious object of much devotion. There are strange
and uncanny possibilities in nature’s bag of tricks. There are denizens in more
worlds than the solid physical. It seems evident that many people have seen a
personage of luminous tenuousness in their subjective world. But all proof is
wanting that their testimony as to the identity of the apparition has any
validity.
There is no field in which people
generally are more gullible than in that of religion. Nowhere else are the bars
of the critical judgment so quickly and completely let down for the entry of
superstition, the supernatural, miracle, magic and marvel. Indeed no Christly
claimant would be accredited unless he could do "mighty works" to awe
the multitudes. If he can not heal the sick and raise the dead he is no Christ.
But the impotence to which these tendencies reduce the reasoning faculty in
devotees is perhaps nowhere better seen than in the situation here portrayed.
These psychics testify unhesitatingly and with total conviction that the figure
of light they have seen is the still-living Jesus of Nazareth, without a
moment’s pause to reflect that no one can identify a figure seen now with
another person never seen at all! Identification can function only on the basis
of previous knowledge or acquaintance. No one can identify the figure seen in a
vision with the historical Jesus. The assumption that they can do so is
ridiculous. Logic rules it out. Their claim that the figure is that of Jesus is
based on pious assumption and can be nothing but sheer guess. The eyes can not
identify the appearance of a person unless the eyes have seen him before, or
his photograph or likeness. The figure seen matches the popularly conceived
appearance of Jesus, and Jesus is the only historical person they can think to
call it.
16
The claim that the apparition
resembles the pictures of Jesus in books and prints is the weakest item in the
"identification." In fact it reduces the entire claim to blank folly.
In spite of gratuitous assertions of the existence of portraits of the
Galilean, assuredly there has never been an authentic picture of the man, even
if he lived. How can the apparitional Jesus look like his portraits when there
were no portraits? If even in hallucination the visionary Jesus does resemble
the conventional portrayals, we may have before us here an interesting
psychological phenomenon. For the fact would seem to lend some support to the
"occult" theory that the general communal thought-picture of Jesus,
based on the customary portraits seen for centuries, has actually entified a
spiritual thought-formation of the man in the image of his published
likenesses. The allegation of pictorial resemblance is final proof of the
purely subjective character of the visions and their inadmissibility as
testimony in the case. What they give evidence of is some extraordinary
capacities of the human psyche, not remote past history. The proof of
connection between present subjective event in these cases and past objective
event is totally wanting. The phenomena manifest in this realm are far too
uncertain, undependable, even dangerous, for the practical uses of life. As a
final observation on the point, one is permitted to express a robust doubt
whether, if the living spiritual counterpart of some other ancient personage,
unknown and unpictured through the centuries, should present itself before the
inner gaze of these psychics, they would have any ability or means of
identifying the specter. Could they identify, say, Apollonius of Tyana?
There is, however, another
consideration that falls within the realm of psychology which has far more
direct pertinence to the great question. The inquiry faces the task of
evaluating the psychological influence and spiritual or cultural
serviceableness of the idea of the personal Jesus as against the conception
that makes "him" to be a high type of universal consciousness or
principle. The defense of the historical point of view invariably lays vast
store upon the claim that any vital religion, at any rate Christianity, could
never have generated effective psychological dynamism among millions of
followers if based only upon the characterization of the Christos as sheer
principle. It required the living Jesus to generate in the Christian movement
the driving power that it has become. Jesus must have lived, is the
argu-
17
ment, if only because such a life in
actuality was necessary to give the religion based on it just that vital
psychological reinforcement that it has manifested. He must have lived because
it can be shown that it was most eminently desirable, from a psychological
point of view, that he should have lived. The conception of Christ as principle
could never have developed enough dynamic force or fervor to have enabled
Christianity, so to say, to effectuate itself.
It must be stated that the outcome
of this phase of the argument can have no direct evidential bearing upon the
question of the historicity of the Christ. To prove that his existence was
highly desirable does not prove that it was a fact. But the point is given a
quite extraordinary importance in the debate, and this not without reason. It
strikes close to the central nerve of the whole Christian system. That system
bases its unique efficacy upon the claim that it alone of religions offers to
believers a living God. The only time God ever came to earth in person, he
outlined for humanity its true religion, the Christian. By many people this
point of the psychological power of the historical Christ is maneuvered into
the place of central importance in the whole discussion. They urge the claim
that the Christ was sent into personal embodiment for the express purpose of
providing mankind with one historical example of divine perfection, and assert
that the whole argument stands or falls with the question of the psychological
value of his example. Such an example was necessary to effectuate the religious
salvation of the world. Jesus must have lived because such an ensampler was a
psychological necessity. God had to send his Son in answer to this inherent
need. It would be unthinkable that such a need would not have been
providentially met. Therefore Jesus did live. The broad prevalence and strength
of this position calls for an exhaustive critique.
It can be conceded at the outset
that in the effort of a divine hierarchy of overlords to humanize and
eventually divinize an animal-born race, the advantage of the employment of a
living example would be evident. God or his hierarchical agents, archangels,
demi-gods, heroes, divine men, could not but be fully aware of the powerful
force and virtue of a concrete example of perfection set before the eyes of
mankind. It would both quicken and stabilize the general human inclination to
strive after the ideal. It would give solid and constructive form to that
aspiration by focusing its drive upon a spe-
18
cific set of ideal characteristics
embodied and manifested in the exemplar. It would thus prevent the waste of
infinite quantities of devotional force spent in direction toward ill-defined
goals. The great divine man would stand before the world and lure all men unto
him by the attractive power of his shining beauty. No other impartation of
inspiration from God to man could make its salutary influence so effectively
fruitful of constant good stimulus. A divine model of perfection would uplift
the world through the magnetically moving force of his example. The gods must
know that humanity is psychologically set and disposed to ape a paragon. The
dynamic moral power of an embodied ideal is ever great. This psychological
disposition well prepared the stage for the presentation to the world of its
ideal hero, the Christos.
The gods did know that man would
ape the divine paragon, and they did present the hero, the great sunlit figure
of Christos, in every religion of antiquity.
With the keenest incisiveness it
must be contended, as perhaps the prime spiritual motive of this study, that
the argument based on the psychological beneficence of a divine ensampler for
the human race falls out in favor of the non-historicity, and not, as almost
unanimously believed, of the historicity. This astounding assertion must be
vindicated against the general mass of contrary opinion.
If all other things were equal,
naturally the impressive force of an ideal of perfection embodied in a living
man would be conceded to be more effective for character in the lives of
devotees than would the same paragon depicted only in the figure of a drama. A
life lived on the same terms as our own would emotionally impress all mortals
more powerfully than would any fictional representation. But all other things
are not equal in the case of the Christ. There are elements in the theological
situation environing the figure of the Gospel Jesus that make the difference
between the two quite abysmal.
The first great divergence is in the
fact that theology has made of the historical divine man the only possible such
figure in the human record. Jesus is in the religion that exploited him the only-begotten
Son of God. He is the only embodiment of the Father’s glory and cosmic presence
ever manifested in human form. He is totally unique and lonely. No man can
match his perfection.
This fact of his solitary uniqueness
at once destroys whatever psy-
19
chological value his incarnation in
a man of flesh might otherwise have. It defeats the very purpose for which an
ensampler is designed--the effective working of the lure of his perfection
under the force of the assurance that by striving the aspirant may achieve
identity or equality with the ideal one. If it is published beforehand that the
worshipped Personage is the unattainable and forever unapproachable Ideal, the
springs of devotion and zeal are dried up at their very source. Why strive, why
aspire, why copy, if it is to be all in vain? The glistening paragon becomes
only a romantic ideal, the more radiant and bright-hued because of its eternal
remoteness and inaccessibility. It is placed there only for mortals to gaze and
gape at in awe and marvel. But it is rendered useless for the very thing
claimed as the strength of the argument from psychology, the inspirational
power of the life lived to be a moving example for us. The manipulators of the
psychological factors in the ecclesiastical enterprise, in straining to assure
the Christly figure of perennial reverence and worship of the romantic sort by
placing him on an inimitable level of perfection and uniqueness, unwittingly
sacrificed the very element in the psychological situation that it was most
ardently hoped to gain by the procedure. To keep him secure in his lofty place
of adoration they weakened the force of his ability to stimulate emulation. He
is the stainless One, incapable of sin; men are doomed sinners, who must in
craven fashion plead with him for salvation from innate degeneracy. Thus the
luminous picture of the mighty paragon has not worked out, and can not work
out, as a triumphant force designed to elevate character by the cogency of its
living reality. It has in fact operated directly to defeat that effect. It has
left men facing a hopeless effort and turning from resolute zeal for attainment
to sunken morbidity expressed in the conventional theological ideas of sin and
its dog, remorse. Before the Ideal the eyes of sinning man have been lowered to
the ground with sense of unworthiness and self-depreciation; they have not been
lifted up to face the revealed divinity as the possibility of man’s own
accomplishment. Before the figure of the man-Christ man has made himself
abject, groveling in unmanly beggarliness before the unbearable glory of the One
who stands clothed in unattainable majesty.
The psychological influence of this
only-begotten manifestation is further decisively emasculated by the
accompanying theological doc-
20
trine that this one epiphany of
God’s nature was not a man of our own earthly evolution, but came directly from
the hand of supreme Deity, a product of divine fiat from another world. Though
frequently emphasis is laid upon his community of nature with us, still he is
exotic, a transplantation from the empyrean. He did not need to go through the
long evolutionary gateway of our humanity, but was already a citizen of the
cosmos, a dweller with God before the worlds were, existent before Abraham was.
Though so high, he yet condescended, abased himself, to become for a generation
one among us, sharing our immature nature without yielding to its seductions.
He had not come up the long road of development from unicell or moneron to man,
but came down from the skies full-panoplied in cosmic resplendence, to lay for
the time being his glory mildly by, as the Christmas hymn has it. His coming
was not an act of common brotherhood of a creature kindred with us, but a
condescension and a gratuity, arbitrary in cosmic counsels and unrelated to
natural contingency. He was a pure gift from the Gods. The Father’s whim and
his own munificent spirit of self-sacrifice brought him here. The merit was
his; ours the unmerited benefit. So again the alleged great psychological
efficacy of his exemplary life is annulled by the strangeness and vast remoteness
of his nature from our own. He is no brother but a distant ambassador who
deigns to visit us for a season and labor with us, but can not abide with us
forever. He must in a moment return to the celestial palace, sending a
substitute to remind us of his one charming sojourn with us.
But the crux of the debate on the
psychological efficacy of a paragon is not reached until the matter is
approached from the side of the great question of the relative potency of two
forces, one operative from without the subject, the other from within. This
crucial point of discussion must be given thorough treatment. Though it is not
critical or decisive for the question of Christ historicity, it looms as
perhaps the most portentous phase of the entire survey. It is not too sweeping
an assertion to aver that the whole psychological beneficence of religion
stands or falls with the outcome of the discussion of the historicity of the
Messiah. It stands if the world savior be proven an element, a divine leaven,
within the soul and conscience of all humanity. It falls if he be reduced to
the futile stature of a man in history. For it is the contention of this study
that the moral effect
21
upon general humanity of being
taught to look for salvation to a savior in the person of a historical man is
inherently and inevitably degrading to the immanent divinity of man. Beyond
doubt this strong asseveration will be violently disputed. It will be contended
that it runs counter to every obvious envisagement in the situation.
Nevertheless it is urged here that these alleged obvious implications seem
obvious only in consequence of many centuries of inculcation of a false view
which has overridden and subjugated open minds, and that they would lose their
obviousness if they could be considered in the light of pure reason and apart
from ingrained habitudes of pious assumption. Had the opposite view been
sanctified by such age-long approbation it, rather than the first, would carry
the weight of obvious rectitude with it. For, of the two possibilities, surely
the method of human salvation that would instinctively at first sight commend
itself as the obviously more natural one would be that which places the agency
of universal salvation from evolutionary dereliction in a power lodged within
all men, as against an extraneous and uncertain influence somehow, but in
no understandable way, shed upon us under certain peculiar conditions by one
person in history. Obviousness is obviously with the method of a general
distribution of a divine spirit among all men to act as a leaven of
righteousness and self-transformation, and it is certainly less clearly with a
method that makes all men dependent upon the unaccountable self-immolation of
one only-begotten Son of God. The one is in consonance with man’s every normal
instinct of natural procedure; the other strains at blind faith to swallow its
artificially bizarre and fantastic features. The latter view, be it averred,
has only won its place in the acceptance of millions of purblind devotees
through the stultification of their reason by the ceaseless exploitation of the
forces of religious faith. The irrational flaunting of the Biblical text
"for with God all things are possible" has further tended to keep the
door open to the influx into less critical minds of every conceivable absurdity
in the theological field. The introduction of boundless irrationality in
doctrinism was initially made when in the third and fourth centuries the
esoteric interpretation of scripture yielded to the frightful debasement of exoteric
literalism. The whale’s swallowing of Jonah was no more difficult for piety
than the ecclesiastical swallowing of the Jonah allegory and all its brother
myths in their literal form. The tragedy of its successful accomplish-
22
ment--as far as it has been
successful--has lain in the necessary preliminary derationalization and
paralysis of millions of simple minds before the natural gagging and choking
could be overcome. Blind faith and the peculiar weakness of the human mind in
face of the alleged supernatural were the instruments of the tragic
intellectual dupery. The noble scriptures were intended to gain and hold the
perennial reverence of all intelligent minds; they were never designed to
enslave minds with the fatal fascination of a fetish.
Once the historical status was
assigned to the Christ principle the words, "look to Jesus, the author and
finisher of our faith," have exercised a damaging sway over countless
minds. To those who knew that Jesus, esoterically comprehended, was the
dramatic type-figure of the divinity within us, the words carried not fatality
but uplift and inspiration. The difference in the two cases clearly limns the
difference in the psychological character of the two influences. This work
advances the proposition that it is psychologically hazardous at any time for
people to place their divinity in a person or locale outside themselves. To do
so involves the inevitable repercussion on average minds that their salvation
is to be vicariously won. The disastrous consequence of this reaction must in
the end be the enervation and atrophy of spiritual effort and initiative on the
part of the individual to win his own redemption. The effect of the doctrine of
salvation through the intercession of the Son of God--a salvation which the
doctrine implies we had in no wise ourselves earned--could not be, as claimed,
an intensification of the personal effort at righteousness. The very words of
scripture were to the effect that man’s righteousness in the sight of God is as
filthy rags. Every presupposition of the doctrine as presented emphasized the
uselessness of effort and the casting of our burden upon Jesus’ shoulders.
"What a friend we have in Jesus!" has been sung in full-throated
unctuousness. His own invitation to the weary and heavy-laden to come unto him
and find rest has had an all-too-ready response in the literal sense. Taken
wrongly these words have gone far to impair the natural sturdiness of spiritual
character in millions. By a psychology that was hardly subtle, but simple and
direct, they militated to turn the conscientious resolution of the individual
away from the actual cultus of his own immanent deity in thought, word and
deed, while he pursued the chimera of vicarious salvation through pleading with
his personal Redeemer. He
23
was told that the more abjectly he
confessed his own folly and failure, the more effective would be his plea in
the ears of the compassionate Savior of men. In looking to Jesus in a man of
flesh the devotee neglected the indwelling Jesus, and would inevitably do so in
the exact ratio of his ignorance and his gullibility.
This is a simple proposition and is
quite self-evident. It is the law of nature that an organism or a function not
used atrophies. Man has in a lifetime only a given quantity of psychic energy.
If he expends it in one direction, the possibility of expending it in another
is diminished by so much. The only Christos that is available for him is that
hidden divine love within him. If he wastes his soul-force in straining to
induce an exterior personage to intervene in his evolutionary effort on his
behalf, he loses by so much the fleeting opportunity to cultivate his
indwelling guest. It is necessary to put this with categorical cogency, because
it will be brushed aside as inconsequential. It is close to being the crux of
the entire problem under discussion. A man can not at one and the same time
serve two masters, the one within and the other without. Neither can he reap
the fruit of an ardent cultivation of his potential divinity while pouring out
all his psychic ardor upon the person of a Galilean peasant.
Not only will it be said that this
can be done, but it will be claimed in addition that the adoration of the
Judaean carpenter is itself the prime stimulus and incentive to the end of
one’s inner spiritual culture. This brings us back to the question of the
relative psychological power of a living or of a mythical and dramatic Christ.
The great cry of the proponents of the historicity is that the psychological
power of a living historical example must surely be greater and more beneficent
than that of a purely dramatic figure. History, it is urged, is real, whereas a
myth is fictional. This debate is of critical importance, because if the
Christos of the Bible was not a person of flesh, he becomes, as would be said,
nothing but a character of pure fiction. He is a myth. And many books have been
written to prove that he is only a myth. How, it will be asked in
vigorous spirit, can a mythical figure be presumed to exert as strong a psychological
force upon the world as a Jesus in real life? As hinted briefly before, the
unique strength of the position of Christianity is claimed to lie in this one
item of the reality of Jesus’ living demonstration or epiphany of God in
humanity. It holds up to its following the assurance of ultimate victory based
on the
24
one divine fait accompli in
history. Jesus was a living example, and not a mere theological promise
unaccompanied by accomplishment. Jesus’ life is the one solid rock of veritude
upon which mortal man can build his hopes. What is a myth compared with this?
This is the argumentative situation
as viewed from the point of naïve exoteric simplicity. It is not, however, the
view revealed to deeper esoteric reflection. Esotericism understands something
about the myth that is quite unknown to the uninitiated general mind. The
ancient sages knew something concerning the myth that the modern mind has never
grasped. It can now be said with certitude that the whole genius of religious
and philosophical culture escaped the grasp of Occidental civilization as a
result of the third-century loss of this certain understanding of the nature
and utility of the myth. It is time, after centuries of stupid nescience, that
modern ignorance of a vital matter be enlightened. Enlightenment on this detail
may yet save religion and humanitarian culture, menaced dangerously by our
blind failure to concentrate upon the one cultus of a higher selfhood in man
that alone can redeem the world from immersion in the lower levels of
consciousness and motivation.
What was known of old, and must now
be proclaimed anew with clarion blast, is that the myth, as employed by ancient
illuminati in Biblical scripture, is not fiction, but the truest of all
history! So far from being fiction in the sense of a story that never happened
and is therefore false to fact, it is the only story that is completely and
wholly true! The myth is the only true narrative of the reality of human
experience. It is the only ultimately true history ever written. It is a
picture and portrayal of the only veridical history ever lived. All other
so-called history, the record of people’s acts and movements, buildings and
destructions, marchings and settlings, is less truly history than the myth! The
latter is the realest of history, as it is the account of the actual experience
of life in evolution. Real as history is, it is finally less true than
the myth. The myth is always and forever true; actual history is never more
than an imperfect approximation to the truth of life. Even as a perfectly
faithful record of what actually happened, book history is far from being true.
This is an admission so commonplace that every courtroom is on guard against
the testimony of witnesses because of the incapacity of the human senses in
making an impeccable record of event. No history book ever contained a
precisely
25
true account of occurrence. No two
historians ever wrote identical narratives of a war or a nation’s life. The
writing of actual history has never been other than the more or less careful
exercise of the chronicler’s constructive imagination.
On the other hand the myth is, as
nearly as the highest human-divine genius can construct it, a clear picture of
the more real import of life itself. It is possible for conscious beings such
as men to live through actual events of history and yet largely, at times
completely, miss the reality, in a profounder philosophical sense, of the very
experience they undergo. What history thus misses the myth expresses. History
is never more than a partial slap-stick comic or heavy tragic flirtation with
the deep realities; the myth is a clear delineation of them. The myth is no
more a fiction than a good photograph is a fiction. It is a true picture. In
the hands of semi-divine mythicists of old it was a splendid photograph of
something that is of far greater utility to men whose divine destiny entails a
struggle for spiritual culture than any uncertain chronicle of man’s tawdry
fights and scrambles could ever be. It was made to be a glowing pictograph of
those basic archai, those eternal principles of truth, those immutable
laws of growth and structure which are the everlasting essence of all being. So
the myth is ever truer than history. It is a portrayal of the meaning and
structure of all history. It pictures and preserves forever for the grasp of
unfolding divine consciousness in man that golden light of true realization
which alone elevates his historical experience above animal sensuousness and
vegetative existence.
With this revised comprehension of
the myth it is now possible to approach with better qualification for a
successful resolution of difficulties the matter of the historicity and the
psychological potency of the central figure in the early Christian and all
antecedent systems. That central figure was in the myths and in the religious
dramas of most ancient nations for thousands of years B.C. It stood there drawn
and limned by the astutest dramatic genius the race has ever produced, to be
the perennial reminder to all men of all religions of their own divine
endowment, and to serve as dynamic instruction in the methods of attaining its
progressive evolution in and through history.
In the counsels of the Sages, who
were men of our own humanity graduated in earlier cycles to the place of
mastership and perfected knowledge of the whole earthly evolution--
26
perfect"--the problem facing
them in their task of giving to early humanity compendia of truth and wisdom
that should guide the race through the course of self-controlled unfoldment was
one that called for a determination of the best practical method of both
holding before man the ideal of all his striving and stimulating his steady
zeal to pursue it. It is not known now as it was in ancient days that a grade
and council of perfected men, risen through humanity to divinity, stood in the
relation of tutors and teachers to infant humanity, and prescribed codes of
morals, religion, philosophy, law, mythology, literature and art, as well as
mathematics, science and physics, not to forget agriculture, for the beginnings
in civilization and culture. These are the authors of the great sacred books of
antiquity, the instructors in pyramid building, the founders of human progress.
Their graduate status at once explains the otherwise inexplicable phenomenon
that has bewildered and confounded the savants of modern knowledge,--how it was
that races that were still in the semi-barbaric stage already held in their
possession tomes of the most exalted wisdom and philosophical insight, as well
as moral purity, which their own undeveloped mentality could not have produced.
These men, both by evolutionary
selection and by humanitarian choice on their own part, performed the function
of formulating the cultural heritage of the human race, particularly in the
domain of religion and philosophy. One of the greatest of the problems
confronting them in their sublime work was the choice of method by which
mankind could be most deeply impressed with the sublimity of the divine goal toward
which the race was struggling and most intelligently spurred on to attain it.
The plan adopted by the counsels of the most august wisdom was based on the
decision to place before the world systems of religion, in which the outline of
the drama of life, the place of the world in the cosmos, the place of man in
the hierarchy of being, the moral conflict leading to evolution, and the
eventual deification of humanity at the "end of the age" or cycle,
should be clearly set forth for the behoof of all generations. In order that
there should be no possibility of man’s missing the mark, or failing to
understand exactly the goal of perfection to which his whole incarnational
series was destined to lift him, the Sages resorted to the measure of placing
at the very heart of every religious system an ideal personage who should
typify and personify man himself, in his dual nature as human and divine,
27
struggling forward to the
consummation of his high glory. This central character embodied the divine
element that was to deify mankind, and the drama depicted the final victory of
the god within over the lower forces in the human compound. The figure was of
course that of the Christos, who in his last triumph is clothed in robes of
solar light, to indicate that the deity within man is of kindred essence with
the sun and that as man progresses toward his final exaltation in glory his
garments shall be white as the light and his righteousness shall cause him to
shine like the sun in the kingdom of his Father. In this glorious character men
could see pictured their history, their destiny and their eventual conversion
into angels of light. This was the model, the archetype, the paragon of
excellence decided upon by the council of perfected men to be made central in
every religion given to the early nations, as their chosen means of most
cogently impressing humanity’s millions through the ages to strive after the
shining ideal of divinity. In order that historical man could never forget that
ideal or drift away from it, the Sages incorporated in every religion this very
copy and replica of the man become God, so that it needed only for men to look
at the model to see the image of their own life and their apotheosization. If
mankind needed to be stimulated to the good life by the force of a divine
ensampler, the Sages saw to it that the great spiritual allurement was
provided. The radiant figure of the Sun-God, man himself divinized, stood at
the heart of every old religion. High wisdom comprehended that mortal men
needed to have a picture of their own glorious goal set before their eyes. The
picture was given. The psychological power of a paragon to lure impressionable
mankind was recognized and the paragon supplied. The whole history of man was
diagrammed and with consummate genius depicted in a great drama, with the
Sun-God always the central and significant character. It is known that the
features and play of the drama were of such impressiveness and moving power
that no device of human conception could have transcended the purificatory, or
as the Greeks called it, the cathartic moral efficacy of this representation.
It was a veritable baptism of the spectator and candidate in transfiguring
elevation of consciousness.
It will presumably still be urged
that if these exalted personages possessed the wisdom attributed to them they
must have known that the example of one living Christ on earth would be
more effective for
28
salutary influence than any number
of dramatic figures. At least two considerations weighed against their holding
any such opinion or acting upon it. They realized for one thing that merely to
present to the world one living example of perfect humanity would defeat
the very psychology they aimed at. It would have been pointless and superfluous
in a world that was to be taught that the rough road of evolution would bring
every man to Christhood. Again they knew that it would be both confusing and
disconcerting to intelligent people everywhere to proclaim the advent of one
perfected soul in unique isolation, when it was already the general
knowledge of instructed men in early days that more than one of humanity’s
chain had reached the mark of the high calling of God in the Christos, that a
number would attain it in every age, and that all men would eventually do so. The
proclamation and the production of one only example of accomplished
divinization would have been meaningless and lacking in significant virtue in a
world that was intended to be rightly instructed on fundamental verities. If
there were but one living paragon, only one generation would see him, and if he
was an obscure person like the Galilean, only a few hundred persons would know
of him through personal contact. The sheer difficulty of having his name, fame
and life and teaching advertised to the rest of humanity would have to be
managed against real obstacles. If he himself proclaimed his unique divinity,
how could he make ignorant, blind humanity accept him? His heralding by angels
and portents might readily fall afoul of the general ancient vogue of such
things, and pass unheeded.
It was not perhaps even considered
for a moment that a purely typical ideal figure would serve to inspire men less
than a living example, because every man, it was known, became a living example
in the proportion in which he embodied the ideal in his life and person.
Nothing was thus to be gained by a historical example that could not be better
won by the ideal type impersonation. There was no point in producing one living
paragon to prove to the world that man could become divine, when it was
already known that all men would in due time become divine. All mortals, as
they became intelligent, knew that they had the struggle of evolution before
them and that perseverance would land them at the gates of godlikeness. What
they needed was the vivid dramatization of the quality and character of that
perfection toward which they were to aspire. These were clearly and
impressively
29
outlined in the dramatic type
figure. The essential ingredients for compounding the most efficacious virtue
in an ensampler were all present in this situation. Nothing was lacking that a
living man-Christ could have supplied. The prime element was the knowledge that
every man must be his own savior. This item of philosophical truth being known,
the dramatic model possessed more sanely compelling force than a living
personation. The knowledge of universal salvation robbed the latter of any
advantage over the other. An embodied Christ would have been an impressive
spectacle, but not overwhelmingly or inordinately so, for the knowledge that
men were advancing into the highest stages of purity and illumination
everywhere at all times deprived the fact of its uniqueness. One perfected man
would not have been one alone, but one among many.
It is sharply to be recognized that
the mere presumption of superior psychological advantage in a living type
figure became possible only with the decay of knowledge that man’s upward
progress is the work of the individual himself in conjunction with nature, and
the consequent entry of the vicarious concept through the corruption of ancient
divine philosophy. In the end the orthodox presupposition that human salvation
demanded the driving force of a personal God in the flesh, so far from proving
its natural correctness, demonstrates only that the world’s keenness of
philosophical insight had been blunted to the degree that a totally
insupportable thesis could be imposed upon the millions without a chance for
successful repudiation.
The momentous task of providing
nations and peoples with a divine model and exemplar was accomplished by the
sagacious tutors of the race through the institution of a ritual drama designed
and formulated to produce the most beneficent effect. It was adopted as the
method that most readily met the terms of natural expediency and
practicability. It would minister in full to the psychological needs of a race
endowed and constituted as mankind was. With transcendent genius the Sages
formulated the systems of myths, allegories, fables, parables, numerological structures
and astrological pictographs such as the zodiac and the planispheres or
uranographs to supplement the central ceremonial drama. The whole structure
was, however, fabricated with such esoteric subtlety that, the keys once lost,
the system has defied the best of medieval and modern acumen to recapture its
cryptic import. The divinity in man being a portion of the ineffable glory of
30
the sun, and necessarily therefore
typified by it, the great scenic portrayal was built upon the solar allegory,
and the successive phases of man’s divinization were enacted around the solar
year in accordance with the significance of the orb’s monthly and seasonal
positions. Ancient religion was for this reason called solar religion or
"sun-worship."
31
to the south in the autumn and its
succeeding return northward in the spring, all prefigure the descent of the
soul, a unit of God’s own conscious mind, into incarnation in its
"night" or "winter" of "death" and its subsequent
resurrection from the tomb of the body. The fact that ancient insight allied
tomb and body in one meaning is astonishingly indicated by the identity of the
Greek words, soma, body and sema, tomb.
In this ceremonial drama the central
figure was the sun-god, or Son of God, the Christos, Messiah. He was likewise
the Avatar, the Bodhisattva, the World-Savior. A generic term for him was The
Coming One, or "The Comer" in
Treated cursorily already, the
argument that for full inspirational suggestiveness humans must have their
faith fortified by the assurance that one man at least actually did attain to
Christhood and manifest the ideal of perfection, must receive somewhat fuller
scrutiny. Its force was already weakened by the consideration that the one character
in history alleged to have furnished mortals this assurance was not a man of
our own evolution, and had not attained his divinity over the same pathway that
we must tread, but was an immaculate emissary from
32
inaccessible heavens, a guest from
remote empyreans. It must be accentuated that this situation introduces into
the picture the negative depressing influence of man’s realization of his own
hopeless inferiority, the impossibility of his stepping up beside the Christ.
In striking contrast to this the method adopted by the Sages obviated any such
disastrous negativism. It carried with it the invincible certainty of
attainment for every man. There was never a question of achievement, but only
of effort, method and perseverance. The very manner of the presentation of the
ideal figure carried the presupposition of final victory to the aspirant. The
type was exhibited on no other grounds than that it was the picture of what could
be achieved by all. Obviously there could be no sense or reason in holding before
all men in all religions the type of what they could not attain.
Attainment was an inevitable implication of the representation from the outset.
One man’s superb attainment could only add evidence to what was already known.
But the proclamation that only one man had ever reached the goal would have
thrown dismay into minds long assured of the high destiny of all. Heraclitus’
discerning observation that "man’s genius is a deity" had placed a
god in potentiality deep within the heart of every life, and the envisaged
prospect of divinization was simply a long growth of latent into active powers
and faculties, a process that could be in no wise affected by the birth of any
exceptional personage. That the eventual deification of all humanity should be
considered to depend upon such a birth would have been received in ancient
times with bewilderment and total incomprehension. When the true nature and
terms of the problem of human spiritual advancement were succinctly understood,
there was no way in which the
It will be seen that the entire
argument for the historicity on the grounds of its superior psychological
influence collapses finally under the force of the admission, which must be
made by all parties, that even if Jesus of Nazareth lived and is the Vicar of
God on earth, every man must work out his own salvation on exactly the same
terms as though he had not existed! Since Jesus can not come to any man and
take his evolutionary problem off his shoulders and effect his salvation for
him, the only psychological value left to the fact of the historicity is
reduced to the mere force of a sort of hero-worship. The
33
Jesus life and character, his
sufferings and virtues, can stimulate devotion and desire to emulate. His lofty
moral preachment sets a norm for ideal human attainment. The very contemplation
of his pure life and radiant divinity inspires an answering nobility in
millions of lives.
The power of a noble example, the
more especially one enhanced in beauty by centuries of pious glorification, is
not questioned. But the same beauty and indeed the same lofty spiritual
preachment was afforded imitative devotion in the case of the sun-god figure.
In the end the sublime figure of the type character was there purely for
inspirational incentive, standing free from any suggestion of vicarious
salvation for the adorer. It moved to noble effort, but in not the least hint
did it delude the worshipper with the fatuous notion that any power save his
own consecrated struggle could win his salvation for him. The greater the
claimed psychological power of the historical Jesus over the devotee, the
greater the tragedy of delusion thus wrought upon millions, since this
stimulating influence has never been detached from the concomitant imputations
of vicariousness inseparably linked with it in Christian theology. Thus the
greater part of the alleged beneficent force of the living example in the end
evaporates into pure delusion not unattended with disastrous consequences.
A few sentences in the preceding
chapter alluded to a situation brought to light by the study of Comparative
Religion and Mythology which adds further vast weight to the probability that
the whole enormous body of psychological prestige exerted by the belief in the
historical Jesus is grounded on a chimera and not on a fact. The events in the
alleged life of Jesus are pushed closer and closer to the point of myth by the
astounding fact that, as the ever-clearer implications of these studies show,
they are seen to match with nearly perfect fidelity the similar cycles of
purely allegorical "events" in the dramatic and mythic
representations of some sixteen or more--indeed probably fifty or more--earlier
type figures recorded in ancient sacred Bibles of the nations. It is certainly
to be regarded as more than passing strange that when the only-begotten Son of
God did descend to earth to implant the genius of the one true religion to save
mankind, his life only copied or matched in great detail the dramatized
typal characters or sun-gods of antecedent religions. And the earlier
figures whose careers he repeated were definitely non-historical or at best
legendarily semi-
34
historical, such as Zoroaster,
Orpheus and Hermes. The Christians of the third and fourth centuries were
plagued to distraction by the recurrent appearance of evidence that revealed
the disconcerting identity of the Gospel narrative in many places with
incidents in the "lives" of Horus, Izdubar, Mithra, Sabazius, Adonis,
Witoba, Hercules, Marduk, Krishna, Buddha and other divine messengers to early
nations. They answered the challenge of this situation with the desperate
allegation that the similarity was the work of the devil! The findings of
comparative religion and mythology constitute at this epoch a far more deadly
challenge than they did in the third century, for there is the massive body of
the Egyptian religious literature to increase the mountain of identities
between Christian and antecedent pagan gospels and there is less of
Christian hypnotism to overcome now than at the earlier date. In more
formidable form than ever before the Christian proponents must face the open
implications of the query that springs to mind out of these comparative
religion discoveries, why, if the model life had already been proclaimed by
numerous Avatars before Jesus and he therefore had nothing new to add, the need
or occasion for his passionate sacrifice at all? The model he displayed had
already been on view in nearly every ancient nation for centuries! So far
from being the climax and grand consummation of a series of ever fuller
revelations, his advent was rather an anti-climax. The enlightened and
emancipated study of comparative religion, vitally reinforced by the discovery
of the Rosetta Stone, bids fair to become a veritable Nemesis to the exorbitant
claims of Christianity. It was these momentous disclosures of identity in the
material of Christian and pagan literature that gave impetus to the present
undertaking, provided the data for proof and lent overwhelming warrant to all
the major conclusions to be reached. And it is this body of evidence that
sweeps in with crushing force to devastate every one of the arguments from
psychology that have been considered. In its totality it constitutes a bulwark
of strength on the side of the non-historicity that must be rated virtually
inexpugnable.
It can now be stated with little
chance of refutation that the Gospel "life" of Jesus had been
written, in substance, for five thousand years before he came. The record is in
35
cient land that were extant at least
five thousand years B.C. And a carving in relief, depicting scenes of angels
announcing from the skies to shepherds in the fields a deific advent, of an
angel, Gabriel, foretelling to a virgin that she should be the mother of the Christos,
of the nativity in the cave, and of three sages kneeling in adoration before
the infant deity, had been on the walls of the temple of Luxor at least
seventeen hundred years B.C. The Virgin Mother had held the divine child in her
arms in zodiacs on temple ceilings for millennia before the Galilean babe saw
the light. What indeed becomes of the grandiose message he brought and the
shining light of deific perfection that he flashed on the world, if both were
already here long before he came?
There remains another spectacular
aspect of the psychological problem to be dealt with, not now of the influence
of the divine personal advent, but this time having to do with the
psychological phases connected with the sheer fact of how the world could
recognize the Christ in Jesus or any other embodiment. How could he be known
and identified on the historical arena? The amount of mental ineptitude
displayed by votaries with minds drugged into doltishness by the overweening
power of "faith" and literalism is everywhere great in religion. But
hardly everywhere does it show itself in such glaring inanity as in this item.
In the process of converting myth over into "history" the
transformers swallowed many a camel of factual ridiculousness or impossibility without
choking. But surely it must occur to even palsied minds that the matter of
knowing or recognizing as the one divine Avatar in all history a man who is
declared to have been in all respects like other men save without sin, is a
thing that lies beyond the realm of all human practicability. The whole matter
of his recognition and identification as uniquely divine has been so aureoled
with romantic suggestiveness, so exotically perfumed with semi-celestial
fragrance, that it is quite impossible for votaries to bring their minds to
take a realistic view of the practical possibilities in the case. It seems
impossible to bring them out of the shimmering roseate light of adoration and
mental sycophancy and have them face the blunt realities of such a situation.
Not a man or women of them but would say that if Jesus appeared to them
tomorrow as he appeared in his daily mien in Judea, they would immediately
recognize him and be so overwhelmed that they would instantly prostrate
themselves in adoration at his feet. This
36
is questionable; but what is not
questionable is that if another cosmic figure equally divine appeared tomorrow
in the guise of ordinary humanity these folks would not recognize him.
By what credentials would any man of "regular" human appearance, even
with the saintliest of faces, enable us to distinguish him from the commonalty
of the race and accept him as the one cosmic divine being, God’s only Son, come
to earth? How could any spectator determine from looking at him that he was the
one person in all ages set apart from the generality of mankind and really a
god from the skies? Such a rating and such a distinctive uniqueness could not
be determined from looking at any man in mortal flesh. Every age, indeed every
community, has seen men of not only saintly appearance and bearing and wisdom,
but of saintly life. Thousands of such people have lived lives essentially as
blameless, innocent and charitable as his. How could any man in person exhibit
unmistakably the marks of the supra-human distinctions claimed for Jesus in his
life by Christian ecclesiasticism? These claims included first his uniqueness
in all history as the only-begotten Son of God; then the totally novel and only
single instance of a life utterly sinless and pure; then his cosmic election as
the Logos of God, according to John’s first chapter description; then his role
as the second person of the cosmic Trinity; then his commission as the agent of
man’s evolutionary salvation; and finally as the embodied fulfillment of all
ancient Messianic hope and realization. How could such qualities and functions
be seen by merely looking at a man of ordinary human constitution? What
stupefaction of mind is necessary to nurse the belief that the people of his
day could identity him as the impersonation of all the exceptional and wholly
unnatural characterization ascribed by religious fetishism to him must be left
to the students of abnormal psychology to determine. It will be howled at this
analysis that it is an attempt to treat a sacred thing in ribald fashion. On
the contrary it is an attempt to take the situation exactly as Christian
apologists represent it. If caricature is introduced it emanates from the side
of ebullient faith and not from honest realism. The travesty of all natural
possibility in the case is created by that naïveté of mind which even the
learned theologians of every age down to the present have displayed in this
matter. They have based many an argument or exegesis on the bald assumption
that any person coming in sight of the man Jesus would have been at once
overpowered with awe and
37
would have known that he was looking
at the only cosmic deity ever seen on earth. The sheer sight of his person
would elucidate at once all the theological implications of his celestial
errand. Forsooth he carried unmistakable credentials of his cosmic character
with him in look, speech, majesty. Cosmic character shone all about him, glowed
in his face, bearing, speech. The universal ascription to him of such egregious
persuasion raises the next question as to how, if these were so, the humble
people he was alleged to have contacted came to be instructed in the difficult
art of recognizing cosmic characteristics. There is no evidence that the public
of today has knowledge of any way to identify cosmic character.
Part of the rejoinder to this would
be that he told the multitudes that he was the Son of God, the Messiah
they were eagerly waiting for, the true vine, the celestial shepherd, the door
and the way. They did not have to surmise; he gave them explicit information.
In answer to this argument it need only be suggested that if people and popular
attitudes of that day were in any way like what they are today, there is
nothing that could have advanced the evidence of his cosmic mission that would
so unfailingly have discredited his professions as his own statement
that he was the one and only Son of God. It is the one sure token that the
present age would accept as certain evidence of his not being what he
claimed. Words that could appropriately and impressively flow from the mouth of
the personified solar deity in a great ritual drama would create a riot in an
actual street scene. One has but to use constructive imagination realistically
for a moment to be assured of the vast improbability of the personal Christ’s
being recognized for what he is claimed to have been in theology. If this is
not convincing enough, let some claimant to divine status try it today! Were he
the man with the saintliest mien, with the spiritual mystic’s benignant
physiognomy and uttering the holiest of precepts, the moment he went about
proclaiming his unique cosmic status a police call would in an hour be
necessary to rescue him from the clownish roughness of the crowd. And the thing
that would arouse both pity and subtle resentment in the crowd would be the
evidence of general witlessness and lack of good sense thus flaunted in their
faces. It is of course easy to ridicule or cheapen an essentially holy thing or
a sincere action. Raillery is no true answer to real sincerity. Still pious
religionism has asked us to accept without smiling a host of situations in
38
the context of theological and Biblical
interpretation that are wholly outlandish or screamingly ridiculous (such as
the picture of Jesus riding into
39
pious indoctrination affords one of
the sorriest spectacles in all history. The cry for sanity in religion through
the play of keen critical faculty will be met with violent reprobation by
offended traditionalists. "There is no wild beast like an angry
theologian" was the comment of the philosophic Julian, the Roman Emperor
following
This matter of the impossibility of
the recognition of God’s only Son in mortal flesh has been treated with
sufficient cogency, yet it is of such importance that it needs all the
elaboration it can receive. It is difficult to present it with adequate
impressiveness. It will be next to impossible to bring minds habituated to
wholesale acceptance of the romanticism that has been built like a halo around
the person of the Jesus figure to any fully detached and emotionally
unprejudiced view of the matter. Psychology knows full well the hypnotizing
force of religious inculcations implanted on the sensitive plate of the mind in
childhood. They produce what the psychologists have called a conditioned
reflex. This is hard to supplant or overcome by any merely mental presentation.
It often persists even when the reason negates it. Said W. J. Bryan, "I
would accept every statement in the Bible literally, no matter how it
contravened my reason." This well illustrates the massive emotional
predisposition that is being dealt with here. "A man convinced against his
will is of the same opinion still." Reason has an almost insuperable
weight of psychological skullduggery to overcome and push aside before it can
gain a hearing at all. In the religious domain the reign of reason has been
challenged and its sovereignty abrogated by the usurpation of irrational
elements that spring from mysticism, and that carry an alleged higher authority
than "mere" intellectuality. The mind itself is supposed to be
transcended and overridden by something called spiritual intuition or direct
vision of God. The failure of the effort to harmonize the rational and
irrational elements in religion has been the crux of the great debacle of human
sanity in this most important area of culture. It is a question demanding a
volume for adequate handling; but as touching the subject under discussion it
may be summed up with the statement that even if there are aspects of cognition
and realization that transcend reason, their deposit in consciousness can not
be presumed to have authority or credence in flat despite of reason. Evolution
developed reason as an instrument for the guidance and safe progress of the
human monad in the
40
earthly life. It would be working at
odds with its own purposes if it at the same time deployed another faculty that
proved reason unsafe. Anything that is salutary to the welfare of the organism
must in the end prove to be in consonance with reason; otherwise there would
be, so to say, a self-contradiction within the constitution of being itself.
Yet it is believed that in spite of
arrant psychologization and mental obsessions of the deepest tenure a
movement’s vivid imagination used in the reconstruction of the "life"
of Jesus in its every-day aspects will carry home to any sane mind the full and
indisputable truth of the assertion that the world could not possibly recognize
a Person of the Cosmic Trinity if such a Person could be supposed to come to
earth in human body. Ages do somewhat differ in set and temper, but it could
hardly be contended that there ever was an age in which the appearance of a
self-proclaimed cosmic Avatar would not be greeted with the utmost skepticism
and derision by all classes of people. There are not rationally conceivable any
credentials such a claimant could present that would allay incredulity,
overcome suspicion, implant credence and carry certitude. The impregnable truth
of the matter is that such a claimant could not be accepted in seriousness,
could not be identified in the character and role claimed, could not be
recognized and known as outside the category of a human being of ordinary
stature. In Eastern lands where yoga phenomena of healing and other
extraordinary occurrences were common and understood without marvel, not even
his performance of miracles and the incidence of portents would prove to be
cosmic credentials. The argument is long, but it can be condensed and concluded
with the bald assertion, supported by every common sense consideration, that
the presupposition posited by nearly all writers on "the life of
Christ" as to Jesus’ being recognized by the populace or the age as the
only-begotten Son of God ever to appear on the planet merely by seeing his
person, is from bottom to top the most outlandish chimera of nonsense ever to
creep into the deluded minds of pious people.
So drugged indeed is the
traditionally indoctrinated mind of religious susceptibility that it has no
intelligent comprehension whatever of the great body of peculiar doctrine that
it has, like a boa-constrictor, attempted to swallow. It is in no sense
realistically aware that in upholding the historical Jesus it is accepting not
only the personalization of a divine principle, cosmic love, but also of the
cosmic Aeon of the
41
Gnostics, the Demiurgus or
Cosmocrator of the Greeks, the Ra of Egypt and finally the Logos of John and
the second person of the creative Trinity. The unthinkable crassness of this
acceptance has never once occurred to people in whom "faith" operates
in place of thought. When the sarcolatrae or worshipers of a Christ in
the flesh, transformed the Christly principle into a mortal man, they did not
know or consider what went naturally with it, what mighty powers and functions
the slender body of the man Jesus would have to carry. They did not reckon with
the many ancillary implications of the transfer. It did not occur to them that
the character claimed for Jesus had to cover also the power and range of the
Lord of the Cosmos, and that his body would then have to contain the
unimaginable creative energy assigned to this person in the hierarchy. For what
is the Logos? God the Father is the supreme generator, planner, designer and
creator of the universe. God the Son, the Logos, is that universe in its manifested
creation. The Logos is God’s boundless power and wisdom deployed in the active
work of creation. The Logos is the infinite force that upholds the galaxies of
countless solar systems and carries on their evolution. It needs only a moment
of sober reflection to reveal the degree of stupefaction necessary to induce
any mind to believe that the cosmic power great enough to create the infinite
hosts of the suns and their planets could have been contained in the tiny body
of a Judean peasant on one of the smallest of planets! If the tiniest billionth
of such a mighty force were infused somehow into the mortal body of a man on
this earth it would burn it to a crisp in a second. This idea that Jesus the
man could be the second Person of the Trinity is as dire a hallucination as any
that has ever been perpetrated even in the name of religion. Allegiance to a
doctrine that has to be secured by an ecclesiastical system at the price of so
frightful an obfuscation of the thinking genius of man is itself a tragic affliction.
The whole situation which has made such an abnormality possible is an enormity
of ghastly proportions and of ominous portent. The Logos, forsooth, embodied in
the person of a carpenter! We hold the Greeks in derision for--as we
allege--believing that Jupiter, the God of heaven, was a man who ran off with
Io and other beautiful maidens and could be jealous or vindictive. It is now
known that the Greeks were only toying with a marvelous imagery. But modern
moronism is not saved by allegory. In
42
sober earnest we have claimed that
the unimaginable cosmic might of the Logos that swings the galaxies through
their orbits came to earth and was a man of flesh! Jesus, the second Person of
the Trinity! That millions have for centuries been made to "believe"
such folly is a sickening realization. This was one item in the catastrophe
that was precipitated on half a world for sixteen centuries as a result of
turning myth and drama into alleged "history." A heavy price to pay
for bad scholarship! The pious faith of the ignorant Church Fathers did not
save them from precipitating the Western world into the Dark Ages, the blame
for which has been laid at the door of an innocuous "paganism" of the
northern lands of
Perhaps it is now possible to round
out the argument as to the comparative psychological influence of a historical
Christ and a dramatized typical Christ figure. Since the indwelling activity of
Christos is the basic indispensable factor in salvation, anything that weakens
it must be held detrimental to critically vital values. The great struggle in
the human breast between the impulses of the natural man and the implanted seed
of divine growth is ever so critical, the forces of "evil" resident
in the carnal man so persistently powerful, and the issue of the conflict at
all stages so delicately balanced, that any influence which in the least degree
lessens the developing strength of the inner god, or which detracts from the
personal effort to exercise its powers, dangerously imperils the outcome and
the individual’s evolutionary destiny. As the worship of the historical Jesus
does, by the very measure of its sincerity, divert attention from the culture
of the inner spirit, it becomes perilous to that degree. In the end there is no
dodging this issue in the moral field of our life. It is incontestable that the
exact amount of psychic energy that we expend in actualizing our reliance upon
a historical savior is so much less available for our task of developing the
inner deity. While the outer savior is receiving our devotion, the inner Christ
is permitted to lie unawakened. Mankind is so constituted psychologically that
by so much as it can lean upon extraneous help it will not exert itself in its
own behalf. The purpose of life in the flesh is to force souls who have come
here from the empyrean to exert themselves against pressure, stress and strain
in order to develop their greater potential divinity. It needs to be said in
43
clarion tones for the benefit of
overweening piety and uncritical faith, that any influence which in the least
degree diminishes the individual’s conviction of the necessity of reliance upon
his own hidden divinity must inexorably be calamitous for his progress. The
image of Jesus the man and the theological teaching of his power to save us
intrude to break the force of the knowledge that our only savior is within. And
never will the mortal man be able to bring the full resultant of his living
experience in the world to bear upon the problem of his evolutionary growth
until he divests himself of all artificial props and stands squarely on his own
feet, making his fight alone. Only when he meets the exigencies of his life
here by calling upon the resources of his potential savior within him will he
be fulfilling the conditions requisite to cultivate that savior’s dynamic
possibilities. If in the stress of experience he habitually looks to a
hypothetical power outside himself, he lets the real powers of his own divinity
lie fallow.
Much so-called "spiritual
science" of current development has worked on the assumption that a
technique adequate for attainment of consummate results in this field involves
only subjective effort. In the wake of the popularization of Hindu mysticism in
the West practice has taken the direction of an inward retirement. Values in
consciousness are sought by way of detachment from sensual experience and
contemplation of purely spiritual things. But this movement stands sorely in
need of the reminder that the seed power or sheer potentiality of Godhood in
man requires for its development something more than mere meditation upon
divine things. The spirit might dwell eternally in the world of abstraction if
it could follow its own inclination, as a man might choose to lie comfortably
in bed instead of getting up and exerting himself for desirable ends. But if it
did so it would never achieve its evolution. It would never grow. God could
have no children if his spirit did not go forth into an intercourse with
matter, the eternal Mother, and implant the seed of a new birth in her
universal womb. For the birthing of his progeny, the gods, archangels, angels,
heroes and men, there is needed the conjunction of spiritual potentiality with
the active energies of what the Greeks called physis, or nature. Clear
down the diapason from God to atom every power of mind or soul has to be linked
with its sakti, or physical energy, if it is to implement its ideal
structure for creative purposes. Spirit can not evolve when not in relation to
matter. It lies static, inactive; it is sheer
44
ideal abstraction. To actualize its
thought structures, to bring its creative designs to pass, it must be wedded
with matter. It must use the energies loaded in the atom of matter to realize
its entelechy (Aristotle), or final purpose. The whole flow of evolution,
therefore, depends upon the stimuli provided by the contingencies arising in
and from the soul’s experiences in material body. Without matter spirit can
have no experience. Not the transcendent but the immanent deity grows. Says
Emerson, "The true doctrine of the Omnipresence is that God exists in all
his parts in every moss and cobweb."
The conditions of experience bring
latent spiritual capacity to active expression under the impact of the strong
forces at play in the world of nature. Spirit awakes and exerts itself by
virtue of the necessity of responding to the incidence of blows from the side
of matter. Even the dangers threatening the existence or welfare of its own
body, its instrument, on the good state of which its own unfoldment depends,
elicits its unexercised powers.
The concept of world salvation by a
personal redeemer not one’s own inner deity is thus inexpressibly wide of the
mark for the basic meaning of religion. If the one and only begotten Son of God
performed the racial redemption, the god within each man would be deprived of
the opportunity for growth which is created only with the dawn of full
consciousness of its own entire responsibility for the consequences of acts.
Any influence that depletes the utter reliance of the outer personality upon
the inner deity is an interference with the planned economics of moral and
spiritual evolution. It should have been noted in the study of homiletics that
manifestations of divine help, as if coming from an outside savior assumed
to be Jesus--in olden times the tribal god--generally occur when one has
exhausted all known or available helps and is forced by dire anguish to call
upon some spiritual or cosmic agency in last despair. From this it might be
assumed that a degree of inner agony is just the stress needed to arouse
sleeping divinity to active exertion. Thus the exigencies of the outer man in
mortal experience prove to be the agencies of the divinization of the inner
man. And the Christ of the age-old ritual dramas was the type of the
divine Self in humanity undergoing the strain, stress and strife requisite to
bring to light the grand epiphany of his solar glory.
What can be said for the
psychological influence of the historical
45
Christ is that the concept has
engendered in Western civilization for sixteen centuries a massive emotionalism
and sentimentalism arising from thought of his personal life and sufferings, which,
if it can be shown that the Gospels are not histories but spiritual dramas,
that their contents were in existence thousands of years before his alleged
date, must be seen at last as the most prodigious waste of psychic force, the
most devastating hallucination and the most stinging humiliation of pride in
human history.
It may be appropriate to close this
preliminary survey of the more obvious features of the discussion with
consideration of another item that is closely related to the psychological utility
of the Christ conception. In fact it is the nub and core of the final judicial
determination of the relative merit of the two opposing theories. If it can be
determined finally that, of the two, one is entirely necessary for the
beneficent working of its effects on humanity, and the other not indispensable,
but only an adventitious accompaniment of the first, the verdict for superior
utility must go to the necessary one. As between the Christ in the heart of all
children of God and the Christ in one man, the first is the one both primarily
and ultimately necessary for the redemption of the individual. It is a
condition sine qua non; the other is merely superfluous and accessory at
best. Had there been one personal Christ or a thousand, it is still the leaven
of Christliness in the soul of a man that must save him. It is the agency that
must be present and operative even if the other be extant. The other could be
dispensed with and salvation still be effected. This could not be put vice
versa. If the immanent Christos be not a reality in consciousness, the
historic Jesus can avail nothing for the suppliant. Salvation could be won
without his existence--as it must have been done before he lived! For all his
life and death it could never be won without the saving grace of the impersonal
Immanuel. The historical Christ is therefore only a superadded and
supernumerary theological luxury. He is a negligible element in the system of
redemption, in no wise indispensable. So far from being true that the scheme of
human salvation rests critically and centrally upon him, the truth is that it
does not even vitally need him. It could do without him. He is surely not the
keystone of the arch or the cornerstone of the temple. The structure rests
solidly on the presence in all men of the deific leaven, and if he enters the
picture it is as mere adornment. He is not basic but extraneous and decorative.
46
His addition to the theological
equipment makes the house of religion more attractive to people of emotional
susceptibilities. His humanity, especially his infancy, babyhood, childhood and
the imagined pains his frail body suffered in Passion Week, make a strong
appeal to emotional sympathies and thus help perpetuate the institution of
religion.
The story is a long one, but to it
this work is dedicated, with the motive of restoring Christianity to its
original exalted purity and of redeeming it from the degradation of having
crucified anew the spiritual Christ in the heart on the cross of a material
concept in human thought as "wooden" as the alleged "tree of
The Logos was made flesh, yes, but
not only one hundred and eighty pounds of it.
47
Chapter III
TRUTH
WEARS A MASK
The logical point of departure for
the investigation is the study of ancient methodology in the writing of sacred
literature. It has been quite largely due to modern ignorance of a special
methodology employed in such writing, one bearing no relation or kinship to any
known technique in our period, that misinterpretation of arcane books has come about.
In spite of voluminous authentic testimony to the fact of such an extraordinary
literary method, scholars down to the present day have failed to take note of
the evidence for it, and have with unmitigated obduracy flouted the claims for
the fact and its overwhelming implications for our understanding the whole of
ancient lore. The consequences have been disastrous over the whole range of
religious interest. It is therefore necessary to begin with a scrutiny of the
peculiar style of representation which was indigenous to the ancient mind and
its approach to the grasp and expression of religious truth.
If it can be shown that the ancient
sages wrote their great books of wisdom in a form that was purely typological
or representative, and in no sense objectively historical, a presumptive
argument of nearly clinching force will be established in favor of the
non-existence of Jesus, as far as the New Testament is concerned. If
practically the only documents in which his "life" is recorded are
proven to be non-historical literature, the presupposition is well grounded
from the start that he was not a living man but a typical personification of
the god in man. The entrenched interests of ecclesiastical orthodoxy have
persistently withstood the claims and the evidence for the correctness of this
thesis, but it can be said in the face of such resistance that the case for it
is established beyond the point of speculation or further controversy. If this
is still controverted, it is designed to present in the work at hand a volume
of data that will render the case virtually impregnable at last.
The purpose of this chapter is to
adduce plentiful witness that the
48
sages of antiquity wrote their
Bibles in a method of designed cryptology and as much to hide their real
meaning as to reveal it. Contrary to all modern reasoning and expectation, they
did not write for the obvious purpose of informing, instructing or enlightening
the largest number of people. Rather it is evident that they wrote primarily to
preserve from popular desecration a treasure of recondite spiritual wisdom and
cosmological truth, that was designed to be transmitted as nearly intact as
possible from early antiquity to all later ages. Ancient literary interest
centered about the safety and purity of a great jewel of knowledge, and not, as
in modern days, about the most rapid general purveying of every item of
discovery to the largest number of people possible. The golden motive in
writing the sacred books was not how quickest to get truth to the populace, but
how most surely to keep the great secrets of divine teaching untarnished by the
populace, for the benefit of those of every age who would use them aright. To
preserve the heritage of truth intact, and not to disseminate it among the
illiterate and unappreciative masses, was the primary aim of the writers of the
arcane books.
This aim and purpose dictated a
peculiar type of writing, obviously one not directly open and simple in
meaning, but one of indirection and disguise. Books were therefore composed in
what is known as the esoteric method. An inner profounder and always more
spiritual meaning than the one ostensibly carried by the outward sense of the
words was intended to be embodied, and the expectation was that it would be
divined by the more intelligent segment of society and missed by the unworthy
and uncultured. For the attainment of this end the great cosmic, evolutionary,
philosophical and religious truths, along with the vital data for
understanding, were expressed, "not in dialogues, but in a wide variety of
typical representations, the main forms of which were drama, myth, allegory,
nomenology (or name structure), number formulations (as chiefly in the
Pythagorean system), and astrographs, or pictorial designs drawn on the open
face of the sky about the star clusters. The aim was to dramatize or
pictorialize truth and evolutionary process, and to this end there was
invented, through the exercise of the most profoundly astute insight ever
exhibited by the illumined human brain, an entire language of symbolism,
composed of an alphabet of symbolic characters drawn
49
from living nature, ranging from
atom to earth-worm or beetle to stars and gods. The great archaic texts of
wisdom were therefore not only collections of myths, allegories and dramas, but
they were couched in a language of the most extreme subtlety, ability to read
which conditioned upon the profoundest knowledge of the science of natural
analogy. The symbolic characters in this cryptic alphabet were by no means mere
algebraic x’s in the fashion of a cipher code or system. They were actual
biographs of the idea to be expressed, living and objective types of the thing
connoted. This very fact alone presupposes as the foundation for adeptship in
the handling of such a language a knowledge of life and of nature that would be
the acquirement of only the most perspicacious philosophical genius. It would
require a volume in itself to reconstruct the science of correspondences or analogy
resting on the kinship or parallelism known to subsist between the two worlds
of objective and subjective reality, or as Emerson puts it, "betwixt the
inner spirit and the outer matter," by virtue of which the discerning mind
of man can interpret the outer phenomena as the counterparts or reflection of
the inner consciousness. Nature is the analogue of the spirit; the world is the
antitype of the soul. The universe is the physical construct of the Creator’s
thought, and therefore he who can handle the alphabet of the hieroglyphs of
divine ideation in the objective presentment of nature can read God’s mind
after him. Natural forms thus become a living language of the most nearly
divine comprehension man is capable of, and afford him the most voluble vehicles
or symbols of the clearest expression he can frame. As the most penetrating
insight into the profounder aspects of both consciousness and nature were prime
essentials for such usage, obviously the mastery of a science so recondite
would be confined to a minority of the most developed individuals. These were
of course the philosophers, the illuminati, the hierophants of the temples and
the initiates in the Mysteries. They were the members of the group to which was
entrusted the custodianship and transmission of the Arcane Philosophy.
A cryptic typology and a symbolic
alphabet or language were then the essential structural features of the ancient
esoteric literary methodology. The logos of esotericism is a theme of
the utmost profundity, which taxes the human mind to grasp its rational
essence. It again would take a volume to expound, since its analysis would run
deep
50
and broad into the nature of life
and consciousness alike. There is no room in this work for any full attempt at
elucidation of the abstruse subject, though much of the work bears pretty
closely upon the central answer. It may be in the end the gist of all effort at
comprehension of the secrecy of initial world wisdom to understand simply that
as the full inner meaning of life is as deep as the deepest mind of man, the
attempt to render that full meaning for the grasp of lesser minds must be
couched in terms and forms that will lay the heaviest toll of intelligence and
sagacity upon the faculties of the student or aspirant. The answer is in part
also inwoven with human psychology, by the conditions of which nothing but
these living symbols can in the ultimate awaken in sluggish men the quickened
flare of genius for the apprehension of the most real sense and values. It is
recognized in all education that the drama carries far greater psychic
impressiveness than the best of spoken language. We can learn a mighty lesson
from the Greeks who in their dramatic rituals effectuated a mighty moral
purgation in the consciousness and character of the auditors which was spoken
of under the designation of "catharsis." It was known to them that
the drama could be used to work a purification of the innermost springs of
thought and conduct in the individual, as the beholder was made to live over vicariously
in the persons of the actors the crises and heroic or tragic episodes of the
human moral conflict depicted on the stage. The whole intent of the drama and
the Mystery ceremonials was to bring the force of the most impressive living
realization home to the inner consciousness of the audience personnel, and to
stamp in the most vivid manner upon the susceptibilities of the participants
the deepest sense of the incarnational drama in which all mortals are
adventuring. It needs no elaborate dialectic to make clear the perception that
drama carries a far more effective power for impressing moral issues upon the
mind than any language can achieve. It is a copy of living reality; it is life
itself in the particular and in miniature; and it is all drawn up in such a
form as to present to the mind the structural nature of both action and
meaning. In pain and its happiness. It gathers up a tangled or loose thread of
unrelated occurrence and displays the fateful pattern of weal or woe into which
it is being woven by the shuttle of life--or, as most ancients saw it, of many
lives.
51
As to the symbolism in language, it
was of the same order of rationale as the drama, but cast in smaller scale.
Both the drama and symbolism draw their dynamic psychological effectiveness from
the fact that they bear to truth in the large the relation of truth in
miniature. It was the knowledge of the early teachers of mankind that all
smaller process was a diminutive copy of all larger process, or of life process
in any measure. The law of life was universal. Therefore all forms of its
expression, large or small, exemplified the same one law. The microcosm, they
said, was a tiny reflection of the macrocosm. The fragment bore the image of
the whole. Man was made in the image of God. The atom and the world are alike
descriptive of the universe. Each revealed the pattern, and there is but one
pattern, though it has endless modifications in minor detail. Man is looking at
the whole of truth when he looks at any living part of creation. It is more than
a poet’s fancy that all of God is present everywhere, and that every common
bush is aflame with deity.
Hence all nature is an alphabetic
language, and every form is a symbol. Autumn is the eternal symbol of death and
spring of resurrection. The leaf is the alphabetic character that reads
repeated incarnation for the life of the tree. The seed is the greatest of all
hieroglyphs, for it is the end product of one cycle and at the same time the
beginning stage of the next, thus furnishing the key to the whole ongoing
process of life. The career of a dragon-fly is the whole epic of human life
lived in the four worlds of sense, emotion, thought and spirit, typed in the
old language by earth, water, air and fire. The symbol is therefore a
powerfully moving photograph of life and reality, a thumb-nail portraiture of
the whole vast meaning of the cosmos. Language is itself nothing but a designed
set of symbols. But symbols taken directly from nature have the additional
cogency of being parts of life itself in immediate view. In dealing with
symbols man constantly bathes his mind in reality. They are his safeguards
against folly and error. They are his perennial instructors. They unfold before
his eyes the forms and designs of the pattern of life. Says Emerson: "A good
symbol is a missionary to convince thousands."
In its power over the human mind
language comes close to deserving the term magical. Symbols, therefore, have
been employed in the sphere of philosophy and religion to wield upon general
consciousness a kind of potent charm akin to spiritual "magic." This
is
52
indeed the true magic. For thought
is the great Magician of the cosmos, transforming one thing into another and
calling the worlds into being by the wand of its vibrational power. The simple
and natural meaning of the word "magic" is this power of mind to
throw matter into the form outlined by thought. Thought makes or mars lives; it
is the eternal prestidigitator. Its legerdemain brings the invisible to visible
appearance.
All this is implicit in the nature
and use of the symbol. The picture of truth presented by it imprints its image
upon the open tablet of the mind. Through the rapport which the part feels with
the whole, the unit of consciousness with the entirety of consciousness, and
the instinctive urge of the fragment to re-become one with the All, the impact
of a symbol upon mind anywhere is inevitably to awaken in it a stir of latent
cognitive delight, the impulsive thrill of its recognition of its harmony with
all being. This recognition and delight become life’s truest guide to
rectitude. Symbols keep the mind aligned with truth. They hold it in line with
verity. They save it from vagary and fantasy. Such is the magic might of the
symbol.
This magic is finally the ground of
esotericism. It is admissible without cavil that mystic susceptibility to the
wizardry of symbols would be developed and become operative in even step with
the individual’s growth in culture. It would be a manifestation of strength of
genius and a high degree of intellectuality. Obvious it is then that a
literature conceived on the basis of a science so profound, expressed in its
recondite symbology and dependent finally upon the possession in its recipients
of the astute faculty requisite for its due appreciation, would have to be cast
in a language of esotericism. Inevitably failing of comprehension amongst the
populace, it would appeal to the more sagacious and the more illuminated. The
norms of culture were set by the more intelligent minority, as they must ever
be. The wardship of culture is in the hands of a small group, whose deeper
criteria of value at once set store by things which are beyond the mob, and
thus esotericism is inexorably introduced into the cultural or religious
situation.
It has been necessary to elucidate
the nature and bases of esotericism because the stubborn recalcitrancy of
savants in the time since the closing of the Platonic Academies in the fifth
century has imposed on a truth-seeking scholar the task of vindicating it
against the in-
53
orthodox refutation of its
legitimacy. It remains next to array in considerable volume a mass of data that
will establish beyond further evasion or quibbling the fact of its
ancient prevalence and its place in the methodology of scripture writing.
It is to be understood at the outset
of this enterprise that, considerable as is the evidence amassed here, it is
only a tiny portion of what might be assembled if all books could be consulted.
Indeed that presented here is merely additional to what has been collected in
an earlier work, The Lost Light. It is by no means the main body of such
authentication. The quantity given here could easily be trebled or quadrupled.
In the face of such an amount of testimony the question will arise in many
minds why the scholars of our day and previous periods should have so
obdurately held out against the indisputable regnancy of esotericism in the
ancient literary field. Substantiation of the position taken will call for much
quotation of documents and authorities.
A modern theologian agrees with the
fundamental rationale of the esoteric method. Benjamin W. Bacon, of Yale
Divinity School, in his valuable work, Jesus and Paul, (p. 207) says
that just as in modern times we are conscious that truth may be imparted often
more effectively by fiction than by plain statement, so it was with the ancient
world, but in much higher degree. To this another modern, the Harvard
Santayana (Dialogues in Limbo, p. 185) adds his confession that
"allegory has its charms when we know the facts it symbolizes, but as a
guide to unknown facts it is perplexing; and I am another lost in your
beautiful imagery." Strange that the philosopher should admit his
incapacity to follow natural imagery when he himself employs it in many
beautiful analogies, and the general requirement of intelligence is no greater
than necessary to see the fine allegorism in such a quotation as this from the
same work of his (p. 56): "The soul, too, has her virginity and must bleed
a little before bearing fruit." Are we to assume that natural parallelism
is permissible when used by modern poets, but to be distrusted when employed by
the philosophic sages with more systematic handling?
How truly the same thinker came to
stating the full truth with regard to a greater chapter of history shown in his
statement (Winds of Doctrine, p. 50) that "it seems to many of us
that Christianity is indeed a fable, yet full of meaning if you take it as
such." This is
54
forthright corroboration of the
basic thesis of this study, which claims that the scriptures yield their true
meaning only when taken as allegory and fable, and yield nonsense when taken as
history. It is worth completing his statement: "for what scraps of
historical truth there may be in the Bible or of metaphysical truth in theology
are of little importance; whilst the true greatness and beauty of this,
as of all religions, is to be found in its moral idealisms, I mean, in the
expression it gives, under cover of legends, prophecies, or mysteries, of the
efforts, tragedy and the consolations of human life. Such a moral fable is what
Christianity is in fact; . . ." Here is great sanity of discernment, and
it largely tells the whole story of religion. Yet the same mind shows confusion
again when he writes (Winds of Doctrine, p. 33): "Even the pagan
poets, when they devised a myth, half believed in it for a fact." There is
no tangible evidence anywhere to vindicate this stricture. To be sure, they
"believed" in their myths when comprehended esoterically; but surely
none but the grossest of ignorant folk ever "believed" in them as
factual occurrence. That enormity of childish folly was reserved for the modern
academicians.
Bishop Laurence in the preface to
his work on the Book of Enoch (p. xlvi) says that the singular and
fascinating "system of allegorical subtleties" predominant in the
philosophies of the East is as inseparable from Oriental modes of thought and
expression "as the shadow is from the substance."
Bulfinch (Age of Fable, p.
12), in writing of the creation of the world, says that "the ancient
pagans, not having the information on the subject which we derive from the
pages of Scripture, had their own way of telling the story." As to which
it may be observed that it is possible to say now that the ancient pagans had
these same and many more scriptures long before we had them, and knew
infinitely better what they meant than we do. But it is noteworthy that he
admits they had their own peculiar method of writing the account.
One of the most direct revelations
of the basic interrelation of symbols with consciousness is given in a sentence
from Proclus, the fourth century expounder of Platonism who was nearly equal in
esoteric wisdom to the master himself, in which he says that "the paternal
nature disseminated symbols in souls," and through the world. This
statement pierces closer to the heart of the rationale of the science of
symbolism than anything ever likely to be said in the elucidation of
55
that abstruse science. The divine
creative or paternal mind, or Logos, has scattered symbols through the world
and placed in souls a power capable of being excited by their impingement on
the outer sense. This is an item of Greek philosophy that could profitably be
brooded over by thinkers today. It would tend to dispose us to a more friendly
and harmonious relationship with outer nature, and would reveal to us anew the
indispensable truth known to the Egyptians that, as Gerald Massey puts it,
"the symbolical can only be interpreted by the natural." This must be
so for the very sound reason that generally the symbolical is the
natural. For nature is herself the greatest lexicon of symbols extant. Massey
enlarges upon this theme when he says (Book of Beginnings, II, p. 37)
that "typology consists of various things set forth by means of one
original type. Symbolism was a mode necessitated, not a system designed,
because the one principal type had to serve many purposes of expression."
This, it has been seen, was true because there is but one universal law, and
this one law, seen in every phenomenon, has to serve as the one norm of
interpretation.
This discernment of Massey is
corroborated by the observations of C. O. Müller, who is quoted by Lundy (Monumental
Christianity, p. 18):
"Ancient Greece possessed only
two means of representing and communicating ideas of the Deity--Mythus and
Symbol. The mythus relates an action, by which the Divine Being
reveals himself in his power and individuality; the symbol renders it visible
to the sense by means of an object placed in connection therewith. . . . The
symbol is an external visible sign with which a spiritual emotion, feeling or
idea is connected. The mythic representation can never rest upon arbitrary
choice of expression; so, too, the connection of an idea with a sign in Symbolism,
was natural and necessary to the ancient world; it occurred
involuntarily; and the essence of the symbol consists in this supposed
connection of the sign with the thing signified. Symbols in this sense are
evidently coeval with the human race; they result from the union of the
soul with the body of man: nature has implanted the feeling for them in the
human heart. The human face expresses spiritual peculiarities; and so all
nature wore to the ancients a physiognomical aspect."
With the art or science of the
interpretation of nature’s physiognomy the ancient sages were profoundly
conversant. It is one of the greatest of all "lost arts." Lundy adds
to Müller’s perspicacious analysis the
56
observation that "if the mythos
has no spiritual meaning, then all religion becomes mere idolatry, or the
worship of material things," i.e., the symbols in their literal reference.
"But we have seen symbols of Oriental Pagan religions which indicate a
supreme Power and Intelligence above matter; and also how early Christianity
abhorred idolatry."
Proclus in his great work on the
theology of Plato speaks of "all the fables, therefore, of Plato, guarding
the truth in concealment." And he adds that
"if certain persons introduce
to us physical hypotheses of Platonic fables . . . we must say that they
entirely wander from the intention of the philosopher, and that those
hypotheses alone are interpreters of the truth contained in these fables, which
have for their scope a divine, immaterial and separate hypostasis and which, looking
to this, make the compositions and analyses of fables adapted to our inherent
anticipations of divine concerns."
Which is to say in plainer terms
that those who take a physical or historical meaning out of the allegories,
mistake the intent of the great dramatist and blindly miss the sense; while the
true import is to be found in a mystagogical perception of truth deeply veiled.
The same great philosopher, speaking
of the "mystic ceremonies" of the Mysteries, says that "every
part is full of symbolical representation, as in a drama." Thomas Taylor,
editing Proclus’ work, says
"the reader may perceive how
adultery and rapes, as represented in the machinery of the Mysteries, are to be
understood when applied to the gods; and that they mean nothing more than
communication of divine energies, either between a superior and subordinate, or
subordinate and superior divinity."
He adds that the "apparent
indecency" of these symbolic depictions had nothing to do with their
"mystic meaning," but that they were indeed "designed as a
remedy for the passions of the soul; and hence mystic ceremonies were very
properly called akea, medicines, by the obscure and noble
Heraclitus." Drama and symbol used as moral medicines!
Taylor in his Introduction to the
philosophy and writings of Plato, quotes Proclus as saying that those who treat
of divine concerns either
57
speak symbolically and fabulously,
or through images. Some, he asserts, speak according to science, but others
according to inspiration from the gods. He states that those who attempt to set
forth the nature of the gods through symbols are Orphic, whilst those who use
"images" are Pythagoric.
"For the mathematical
disciplines were invented by the Pythagoreans in order to a reminiscence of
divine concerns, to which, through these as images, they endeavor to ascend.
For they refer both numbers and figures to the gods."
It is notable that the Platonic
philosophers rated the mathematical discipline and the contemplation of the
numerological structure of the universe as the very highest and most direct
path by which the human mind could approach a rapport with the divine.1
Proclus then elucidates the reasons
"when the ancients were induced to devise fables," and this
remarkable passage is worth quoting if only for the sake of reminding a
science-ridden age that it is utterly wrong in continuing to hold in contempt
one of the greatest of all sciences, analogy.
"In answer, then, it is
necessary to know that the ancients employed fables, looking to two things,
viz., nature and our soul. They employed them by looking to nature and the
fabrication of things as follows: Things inapparent are believed from things
apparent and incorporeal natures from bodies. For seeing the orderly
arrangement of bodies, we understand that a certain incorporeal power presides
over them; as with respect to the celestial bodies, they have a certain
presiding motive power. As we, therefore, see that our body is moved, but is no
longer so after death, we perceive that it was a certain incorporeal power
which moved it. Hence, perceiving that we believe things inapparent from things
apparent and corporeal, fables came to be adopted that we might come from
things apparent to certain inapparent natures; as, for instance, that on
hearing the adulteries, bonds and lacerations of the gods, castrations of
heaven and the like, we might not rest satisfied with the apparent meaning of
such like
_______
1 In the light of which statement it
may perhaps be true that Albert Einstein, the famed physicist of our day, when,
in response to his challenge to the clergy to put an end to their preachment of
an anthropomorphic God, he was bluntly told by them to stay in his own
mathematical field and not presume to invade one in which he was not
intelligent, might be considered to stand closer to an apprehension of divinity
than his clerical detractors.
58
particulars, but may proceed to the
inapparent, and investigate the true signification. After this manner,
therefore, looking to the nature of things, were fables employed."
There are passages in the books of
the ancient philosophers that fairly shout--to the discerning student--their
regal wisdom in our ears, and this is one of them. Had the potential
enlightenment in these words been caught and held by the scholars of the earlier
centuries and incorporated in western philosophy, the entire history of
Christian Europe and America would have run a happier course. The fogs of
religious insanity would surely have been dissipated by the intelligence that
would have arisen from contemplation of God’s natural handiwork, seen as the
analogue of the verities of the unseen spiritual world. The irrational and
fanatical mysticism inspired by the preachment of sheer faith would have been
replaced by a mysticism of rational foundation, springing from the reading of
the eternal mind in the open book of natural revelation. And Paul’s adjuration
to add knowledge to faith would have averted the endless sickening horrors of
pious bigotry and persecution. The great science of analogy has been contemned
even in spite of St. Paul’s complete endorsement of Greek insight in his
amazingly clear and simple statement that "that which may be known of God is
manifest," and that "the invisible things of Him" may be
clearly seen, by looking at the visible world around us. The long and gruesome
train of ills that have been engendered by the medieval and modern contempt for
ancient "paganism," the mawkish and revolting scorn heaped upon the
alleged "primitive" child-mindedness of past civilizations
spiritually more enlightened than our own, would have given way to a cultural
sensitivity that must surely have kept the pages of the historical record free
from the black stains they now bear. The spectacle of the supercilious contempt
shown toward an ancient culture by a civilization that has not even evolved the
intelligence to comprehend its subtleties has darkened the human outlook on
life and defeated the power of the light to break through the darkness and shed
its benignant rays of intelligence and sanity upon the world. It was so much
easier for a mentality that could not comprehend the Greek myths to cast the
stigma of its own incapacity upon the framers of the myths than to admit its
proper applicability to itself. It is time that it be proclaimed in ringing tones
59
that the alleged incomprehensibility
of the myths is due to modern doltishness and not to ancient ignorance. Wisdom
was so deeply grasped that the symbols which alone could awaken its cognition
have left us gaping and mocking, incredulous and uncomprehending.
Had not the illustrious Platonic
literature been pushed aside for a spurious and emasculated version of it, we
could have been better instructed by such a sentence as this, which Proclus
adds to the foregoing: "It may always be said that a fable is nothing else
than a false discourse shadowing forth the truth, for a fable is the image of
truth." Had we the discerning sense to lay hold of the great fact
expressed in his next sentence--"But the soul is the image of the natures
prior to herself"--for a grasp of which the study of the whole of the
great Orphic-Platonic system is requisite--we would be in better position to
accept his conclusion that "hence the soul very properly rejoices in
fables, as an image of an image." And we could then follow his last
sentence in the paragraph: "As we are therefore from our childhood
nourished in fables, it is necessary that they should be introduced."
Staggering rebuke to the stolidity
of this age is implied in his further exposition:
"The poetic fable abounds in
this, that we must not rest satisfied with the apparent meaning, but pass on to
the occult truth. . . . But it is defective in this, that it deceives those
of a juvenile age. Plato therefore neglects fables of this kind and
banished Homer from his Republic, because youth, on hearing such fables, will
not be able to distinguish what is allegorical from what is not."
As it was unthinkable for us of the
modern world in 1914 to believe that in a few years the whole fabric of human
liberty that had been built up by centuries of struggle against tyranny would
be toppling to ruin, so it must have seemed unthinkable to Plato and, seven
hundred years later, to Proclus that the long-enduring structure of esoteric
philosophy could be torn down and its ruins submerged under the debris of
literal and historical nonsense. A juvenile age indeed!
What could be clearer than Proclus’
statement that "the Orphic method aimed at revealing divine things by
means of symbols, a method common to all writers of divine lore (theomythias)?"
[The word means "God-myth."] And he quotes Plutarch (De Pyth.
Orac., xviii):
60
"Formerly the wisdom-lovers
exposed their doctrines and teachings in poetical fiction, as for example
Orpheus and Hesiod and Parmenides and Julian, the so-called Apostate. . . .
Many of the philosophers and theologians were myth-makers. . . . Concerning the
myths of the Mysteries which Orpheus handed down to us, in the very things
which in these myths are most incongruous, he drew nearest to the truth. For
just in proportion as the enigma is more paradoxical and wonderful, so does he
warn us to distrust the appearance and seek for the hidden meaning.
Philostratus asserts that in the Iliad the poet was philosophizing in
the Orphic manner."
Plutarch (De Daedal., Frag.
lx, 1, 754) writes that
"the most ancient philosophers
covered up their teachings in a lattice work of fables and symbols, especially
instancing the Orphic writings and the Phrygian myths."
"That ancient natural science
both among the Greeks and foreigners was for the most part hidden in myths of
an occult and mysterious theology containing an enigmatical and hidden meaning,
is clear from the Orphic poems and the Egyptian and Phrygian treatises."
G. R. S. Mead, in Orpheus (p.
51) quotes Pico della Mirandolo, Italian occultist of the Renaissance, as
writing:
"He who does not know perfectly
how to intellectualize sensible properties by the method of occult analogy, will
never arrive at the real meaning of the Hymns of Orpheus."
Mead further endorses Thomas Taylor,
the enlightened interpreter of Plato:
"Taylor says that the Grecian
theology was first ‘mystically and symbolically’ promulgated by Orpheus. . . .
To understand that theology, therefore, we must treat it from the point of view
of mysticism and symbolism, for no other method is capable of extracting its
meaning."
And Mead adds Proclus’ assertion
that
"the whole theology of the
Greeks is the child of Orphic mystagogy, Pythagoras being first taught
the ‘orgies’ of the gods (‘orgies’ signifying ‘burstings forth,’ or
‘emanations,’ from @insert greek) by Aglaophemus, and next Plato receiving the
perfect science concerning such things from the Pythagorean and Orphic
writings."
In his book New Platonism and
Alchemy (p. 6), Alexander Wilder makes the unequivocal statement:
61
"There was in every ancient
country having claims to civilization an esoteric doctrine, a system that was
designated WISDOM, and those who were devoted to its prosecution were first
denominated Sages or wise men. . . . Pythagoras termed the system he gnosis
ton onton, the Gnosis or knowledge of things that are. Under the noble
designation of WISDOM the ancient teachers, the sages of India, the magians of
Persia and Babylon, the seers and prophets of Israel, the hierophants of Egypt
and Arabia and the philosophers of Greece and the West included all knowledge
which they considered as essentially divine; classifying a part as esoteric and
the remainder as exoteric. The Rabbis called the exterior and secular series
the Mercavah, as being the body or vehicle which contained the higher
knowledge."
Clement of Alexandria, Christian
philosopher of the third century tersely said that "it is requisite to
hide in a mystery the wisdom spoken." This is the echo of St. Paul’s
"wisdom hidden in a mystery." No statement could be more explicit
than Clement’s:
"All, then, in a word, who have
spoken of divine things, both barbarians and Greeks, have veiled the first
principles of things and delivered the truth in enigmas and symbols and
allegories and metaphors and such like tropes."
In speaking of the exoteric version
of the fables and allegories Origen, Clement’s learned pupil and one of the
prime formulators of early Christian theology, asks: "What better could
you have for the instruction of the masses?" Paracelsus (Vol. I, p. 17)
centuries later wrote that it was "the property of the common herd to take
false views of things." It is certainly true that almost every conception
harbored in the minds of the "average man" today, as in the past,
concerning the true meaning of the deeper things of theology, is atrociously in
error.
In Orpheus (1, p. 60) Mead
declares: "These myths are not only set forth in verse and prose, but were
also represented pictorially and in sculpture in the Adyta of the
temples."
"Myriads on myriads of
enigmatical utterances by both poets and philosophers are to be found; and
there are also whole books which present the mind of the writer veiled as that
of Heraclitus’ ‘On Nature,’ which on this very account is called ‘the
Obscure.’ Similar to this book is the Theology of Pherecydes of Samos. And
so also the work of Euphorion, the Causae of Callimachus, and the Alexandra
of Lycophion."
62
Mead follows these statements with
the observation that while the veiling of high truth under gross outer symbols
could in a pure state of society be done without moral damage, nevertheless a
degenerate age would run the risk of stopping at the outer symbol, forgetting
the inner reference and thus would plunge religion into grave dangers of fatal
misconceptions.
Also in Orpheus (p. 24) Mead,
describing the discipline enforced in the Mysteries, says:
"Another and most important
part of the discipline was the training in the interpretation of myths, symbols
and allegory, the letters of the mystical language in which the secrets of
nature and the soul were written so plainly for the initiated, so obscurely for
the generality. Without this instruction the mythical recitals and legends were
unintelligible."
Sixteen centuries of
unintelligibility that still enshrouds the great myths of antiquity surely add
unimpeachable corroboration to Mead’s assertion. Mead says the allegories may
be interpreted either microcosmically or macrocosmically, but in either case
yield the meaning of the evolution of mind.
In his magnificent Encyclopedia of
ancient symbolic literature Manly P. Hall declares that nearly every religion
of the world shows traces of astrological influences, and that the Old
Testament of the Jews, its writings breathing the aura of earlier Egyptian
culture, is a mass of astrological and astronomical allegories.
In a long passage in his great work
on the theology of Plato Proclus points out how the master philosopher holds
back the use of fables among those who through incapacity and shallowness would
conceive only a perverted meaning from reading them, yet assents to their
employment among those who are able to penetrate into the hidden mystic truth
veiled by them. So, he says, Plato rejects the "apparatus of the
fables" in the Republic and in certain dialogues, but admits them
in the Cratylus, where "these things Socrates indicates in the Cratylus,
jesting and at the same time being serious in what he says." Proclus
says that in the Fourth Book of The Laws Plato celebrates the life under
Saturn, obscurely signifying the hidden meaning "through fabulous
fictions." The Cratylus is a splendid example of the easy
victimization of the alleged towering modern intelligence by ancient astuteness
in concealment. Present academic opinion still contends
63
that in the Cratylus Socrates
spent an afternoon in punning. He points out such "puns" as that the
Greeks called the body soma and the tomb sema, and the pundits of
today still can see no suggestive connection between the two words, in spite of
the fact that hundreds of times the Greek philosophers have told us that in
Orphic theology the soul while in incarnation in the body was as though
dead in its tomb. "The body is the sepulcher of the soul" is
almost an axiom of Greek philosophy. Behind every one of Socrates’
"puns" hides some great and luminous item of the piercing Platonic
insight into deep mysteries.
A vivid forecast of all later
imbecility of the masses in religious superstition is made by Proclus for Plato
when he says that while Plato "allows the poets that are inspired by
Phoebus to signify things of this kind obscurely and mystically, he excludes
the multitudes from hearing these things because they believe without
examination in the fabulous veils of truth." Proclus speaks of the proper
intelligence "unfolding the concealed theory which they contain."
Socrates hints at the deep
psychological springs of the symbolic methodology when he writes in the Phaedrus
"that an alliance to the demoniacal genus, prepared the soul for the
reception of divine light, excites the phantasy to symbolic narration."
Proclus states that Orpheus
"greatly availed himself of the license of fables." And once more he
avers that Socrates (Plato?) "narrating the types and laws of divine
fables, which afford this apparent meaning, and the inward concealed scope,
which regards as its end the beautiful and natural in the fictions about the
gods," dodges the mental stolidity of the crass to reach the subtler
intelligence of the initiated.
The second-century esotericist,
Plutarch, says that "so cautious and reserved was the Egyptian wisdom in
those things which pertained to religion"; "and like them Pythagoras
conveyed his doctrines to the world in a kind of riddle." In reference to
Plato’s last book, The Laws, written "when he was now grown
old," Plutarch says that Plato threw off the esoteric mask, spoke not
"in riddles and emblems, but in plain and proper terms" of the more
recondite aspects of truth. In De Iside et Osiride (IX) Plutarch states
that if the choice of king fell upon a soldier,
64
"he was immediately initiated
into the order of the priests and by them instructed in their abstruse and
hidden philosophy, a philosophy for the most part involved in fable and
allegories and exhibiting only dark hints to us in many instances, particularly
by the sphinxes, which they seem to have placed designedly before their temples
as types of the enigmatical nature of their theology."
In the same work (XI) Plutarch
elucidates one of the animal representations of a god in such a fashion as to
enable the dullest brain to catch a concealed meaning behind a symbol and to
get an inkling as to how they operated the symbolic language.
"When you hear, therefore, the
mythological tales which the Egyptians tell of their gods, their wanderings,
their mutilations and many other disasters which befell them, remember what has
just been said, and be assured that nothing of what is thus told you is really
true or ever happened in fact. For can it be imagined that it is the ‘dog’
itself which is reverenced by them under the name of Hermes? It is the question
of this animal, his constant vigilance and his acumen in distinguishing his
friends from his foes, which have ever rendered him, as Plato says, a meet
emblem of that god who is the chief patron of intelligence."
And in another passage Plutarch
tells his age that if one will hear and entertain the story of these gods from
those who know how to explain it consistently with religion and philosophy, and
will steadily persist in the observance of all those holy rites which the law
requires, and moreover will be disposed to the conviction that to form true
notions of divine natures is more acceptable to them than any sacrifice or mere
external act of worship can be, one will by this means be entirely exempt from
any danger of falling into superstition, an evil no less to be avoided than
atheism itself.
Gerald Massey, the profoundest and
most discerning of Egyptologists, in his fine work, The Natural Genesis (Vol.
II, p. 378 ff.) writes:
"The lost language of celestial
allegory can now be restored, chiefly through the resurrection of ancient
Egypt; the scriptures can be read as they were originally written, according to
the secret wisdom, and we now know how the history was first written as
mythology."
He adds that the Revelation assigned
to John the Divine is the Christian form of the Mithraic Revelation, that in
the Parsee sacred books the original scriptures are always referred to as the
"Revelation,"
65
and that the Bahman Yasht contains
the same drama of mystery that is drawn out and magnified in the Bible Revelation.
He asserts that the personages, scenes, circumstances and transactions are
identical in both. Each revelation relates to the Kronian allegory and in both
the prophecy is solely astronomical. He explains that Egypt is the mother of
the world’s primeval religion and that the myths of Egypt were the origin of
the Mysteries of the world. The main theme of most of his voluminous work is
that the Hebrew "miracles" are nothing but the original myths of
Egypt, misread as history. In his Reply to Prof. A. H. Sayce he says:
"I have amply demonstrated the
fact that the myths were no mere products of ancient ignorance, but are the
deposited results of a primitive knowledge; that they were founded upon natural
phenomena and remain the register of the earliest scientific observation."
He hammers endlessly on the point
that the whole grand structure of luminous ancient doctrine crashed to ruin on
the rocks of the early Christian stupidity which converted into literal history
a vast body of drama and allegory that "was never anything but frankly
mythological." And he has written thousands of pages to support his
contention that what purports to be "history" in Christian
systematism was actually pre-extant as Egyptian mythology. He cites as proof of
his main thesis the fact that the Biblical material is found to be nonsensical
and chimerical, in fact impossible, as history, but becomes lucidly
intelligible and possible as myth. The massed material of his great volumes
goes far to substantiate this claim.
He calls attention to the fact that
the Jesus character both in the Gospels and in the Gnostic Christian work, the Pistis
Sophia, announces to the inner circle of his initiated disciples that he
will speak with them freely "from the beginning of the truth unto the
completion thereof . . . face to face without parable." Parable was the
declared method of his speaking to "them that are without" the circle
of the initiated. In the full release of light and knowledge to the trained
disciples parable and myth could be discarded for direct revelation.
We need the directness of Massey’s
phrasing of the following passage, the truth of which is of ominous import for
civilization:
66
"The human mind has long
suffered an eclipse and been darkened and dwarfed in the shadow of ideas the
real meaning of which has been lost to the moderns. Myths and allegories whose
significance was once unfolded to initiates in the Mysteries, have been adopted
in ignorance and reissued as real truths directly and divinely vouchsafed to
mankind for the first and only time! The early religions had their myths
interpreted. We have ours misinterpreted. And a great deal of what has been
imposed on us as God’s own true and sole revelation to man is a mass of
inverted myths. . . . Much of our folk-lore and most of our popular beliefs are
fossilized symbolism."
His great contention--with Max
Müller--was that the Märchen and folk tales are not reflections, but
refractions, or distorted popularizations of the original mythos, and that,
contrary to Müller’s assertions, it was the mythos that passed into the folk
tale and not the folk tale into the mythos. The myths were first and the Märchen
were their product, through the inevitable deterioration which all esoteric
truth sooner or later undergoes when floated among the unlettered masses.
"Typology and mythology are twins from their birth and one in their
fundamental rootage." (Nat. Gen. I, 313.)
In the same volume, preceding page,
Massey has a long and enlightening dissertation on the nature of the gods as
just the "elementary powers of nature," and he reads the logical
conclusions from the fact that they were represented symbolically by the animal
types. Much other material is assembled to depict the wide variety of figures
under which the gods and goddesses were exhibited. The hundreds of religious
insignia, emblems, types and figures which Sir James Frazer presents but is
powerless to interpret in his famous The Golden Bough, Massey clarifies
with astute penetration into cryptic meanings. "Mythology" he says,
"is one as a system of representation, one as a mold of thought, one as a
mode of expression, and all its great primordial types are practically
universal."
Testimony of another life-long
research student in the field of archaic philosophy confirms Massey’s
conclusions. Godfrey Higgins, in his monumental work, The Anacalypsis, (p.
441) says that
"one thing is clear--the mythos
of the Hindus, the mythos of the Jews and the mythos of the Greeks are all at
bottom the same; and what are called their early histories are not histories of
man, but are contrivances under the appearance of histories to
perpetuate doctrines . . . in a man-
67
ner understood by those only who had
a key to the enigma. Of this we shall see many additional proofs
hereafter."
The Anacalypsis is some 830 pages of additional proofs. Page
446 of this work gives his final summation of his life of investigation:
"When all the curious
circumstances have been considered, an unprejudiced person will, I think, be
obliged to admit that the ancient epic poems are oriental allegories, all
allusive to the same mythos, and that many of these works which we have been
accustomed to call histories are but allegorical representations of
mythologies, of the secret doctrines of which I am in pursuit and which have
been . . . concealed and perpetuated . . . for the initiated, under the veil of
history."
He makes the unequivocal statement
that "two clear and distinct meanings of the words will be found; one for
the initiated and one for the people. This is of the first importance to be
remembered." He quotes Niebuhr as showing that what we call early Roman
history was "mere mythos," and explains that this will account for
what on any other thesis is incredible, the "degree of superstition"
evidenced by the Romans. He cites an Englishman, Lumsden, as saying that events
purporting to be Roman history are drawn from the heroical legends of Greece
and therefore must have been copied from them; that they were not copies of one
another, but all drawn from a common source; and were in fact the
remnants of a mythos almost lost but constantly renewed, discoverable
everywhere in the East and West--"new Argonauts, new Trojan Wars,"
and the like. The works of early writers without exception were "deeply
tainted with allegory," he declares elsewhere. "The mythos, not
history, is the object of the writer."
It is to be presumed that Higgins
erred in saying that the ancient sages Plato, Pythagoras and others disguised
the doctrines of wisdom because they were too sublime for the mass of mankind;
but he agrees that they did disguise them, alleging that this concealment laid
the foundation for the priesthoods "whose interest it became to take care,
by keeping the people in ignorance, that the doctrines should always remain too
sublime for them." Higgins seems not quite to have arrived at the point of
seeing that mystic truth is by its own nature esoteric, and disguise is
not entirely artificial, but rather natural to it. He contends that there have
been writers against "the modern or
68
exoteric Christianity,"
"but never have we had a Hobbes, a Herbert or a Bolingbroke to endeavor to
discover their secret." He earlier states that the Oriental sects were in
the habit of using figurative language to disguise their metaphysical doctrines
from the vulgar, but he says this gave their enemies the opportunity, by
construing them literally, to represent them as absurd and outlandish. He
connects the myths closely with astrology. He states that the book of Genesis
was considered by most if not all of the ancient Jewish philosophers and
Christian Fathers as an allegory.
What testimony could be more
explicit than that of the Psalmist (Psalm 78) who says: "I will
open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings of old which we have
heard and known and our fathers have told us"? And how could he have
anticipated that these "dark sayings" would lead to sixteen centuries
of a nearly total obfuscation of sense and sanity in the religion of half the
world? In the wake of this quotation Massey observes:
"It was the same with the
Hebrew teachings brought out of Egypt as with the Egyptian writings, of
which Origen observes, ‘the priests have a secret philosophy concerning their
religion contained in their national scriptures, while the common people only
hear fables which they do not understand. If these fables were heard from a
private man without the gloss of the priest, they would appear exceedingly
absurd.’"
Moses, avers Massey, received two
laws on the mountain, the written and the oral. This oral law was the primitive
tradition that contained the Apocrypha, the secret doctrines of the dark
sayings and parables, the clue and key to all their hidden wisdom. That
which was written was intended only for the ignorant outsiders; the
interpretation was for the initiated. With the written version of the Jewish
sacred books alone in our possession, we have been locked outside and left
there without the key.
Origen’s teacher, Clement, speaks of
the necessity of hiding in a mystery the wisdom which the Son of God had
taught; of the hindrances which there were in his day to his writing about this
wisdom, lest he should cast pearls before swine; of the reason why the
Christian Mysteries were celebrated at night, like the Pagan ones, because then
the soul, released from the dominion of the senses, turns in upon itself and
has a truer intelligence of the mystery of God "hid for ages
69
under allegory and
prophecy," but now
revealed by Jesus Christ, and only spoken of by St. Paul "among such as
were perfect" (perfected in the Mystery initiations), giving milk to the
babes and meat to men of understanding; and of those mysteries as entered upon
through the tradition of the Lord, or the great oral transmission from those
divinely illuminated. Massey insists we can not understand the thought of
primitive man without first learning the language of symbols in which it was
expressed, and says that "the wisdom, or Gnosis, so carefully hidden and
zealously guarded in the past" can not be regained by mere pious
lucubration. To recover it we must resort to the aid of the same nature-logic
that the sages used to give it expression.
Origen makes a categorical
declaration of the esoteric sense when he says (Contra Celsum):
"The learned may penetrate into
the significance of all oriental mysteries, but the vulgar can only see the
exterior symbol. It is allowed by all who have any knowledge of the scriptures
that everything is conveyed enigmatically."
We turn to Philo and Josephus, both
living about the time of the "historical" Jesus. There is a tradition
that Philo was converted to Christianity by Peter. If it is credible it would
put him in close touch with the very earliest Christian sentiment. His
testimony should carry considerable weight in the argument. He writes (D.V.C.):
"Now the interpretation of the
sacred scriptures is based upon the understanding in the allegorical narratives;
for these men look upon the whole of their law-codes being like to a living
thing, having for the body the spoken commands, and for the soul the unseen
thought stored up in the words . . . unwrapping and unrobing of the symbols . .
. and bringing to light the naked inner meanings, for those who are able with a
little suggestion to arrive at the intuition of the hidden sense from the
apparent meaning."
Massey says that Philo
"Platonizes the myths," reading new ethical meanings into them. But
Philo’s forthright declaration on the esoteric method is found in his terse
assertion, when speaking of the rib of Adam: "The literal statement is a
fabulous one; and it is in the mythical that we shall find the true." For
those who in spite of a mass of such testimony from eminent and godly men of
the past continue
70
to assert that there never was any
genuine and sincere esoteric knowledge, it is desirable to quote another
statement from Philo:
"Now I bid ye, initiated men,
who are purified as to your ears, to receive these things as mysteries which
are really sacred, in your inmost souls, and reveal them not to any one who is
of the number of uninitiated, but guard them as a sacred treasure."
"In the Mosaic writings,"
says Josephus (Preface to Antiq.) "everything is adapted to the
nature of the whole, whilst the lawgiver most adroitly suggests some things as
in a riddle and represents some things with solemnity as in an allegory;
those, however, who desire to dive into the cause of each of these things,
will have to use much and deep philosophical speculation."
He again (Ibid.) says that
all the sacred writings have a reference to the nature of the universe; whilst
the legislator, Moses, speaks some things wisely but enigmatically and others
under a fitting allegory.
What authority from antiquity can be
cited with more weight than the first historian, Herodotus? In dealing with the
Mystery celebrations of the Egyptians held on a lake within the sacred
precincts of the temple as Sais, dramatizing the birth, life, death and
regeneration of Osiris, he says that he considers it impious to divulge the
name of the god.
"On these matters," he
goes on, "though accurately acquainted with the particulars of them, I
must observe a discreet silence. So, too, with regard to the Mysteries of
Demeter [celebrated at Eleusis in Greece], which the Greeks term ‘The
Thesmophoria,’ I know them, but I shall not mention them, except so far as may
be done without impiety."
One must ask why such direct
testimony from credible men of the ancient world should be flouted by modern
savants. The effort to discredit the existence of a real esoteric system in the
ancient day makes liars of nearly all the outstanding philosophers of the early
world.
H. Y. Evans-Wentz, in his work The
Tibetan Book of the Dead, states that archaeological research has now
proven that the Mysteries consisted of symbolical dramatic performances open
only to the initiates and neophytes fit for initiation, illustrating the
universally diffused esoteric teachings concerning death and resurrection; and
that the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul into animal bodies was not
intended to be taken, as it has been by the uninitiated, literally,
71
but symbolically, as in Plato’s Republic.
Herodotus (ii, 122) is cited as documentary support for the statement.
Alexander Wilder, previously quoted,
in reference to the Bacchic Mysteries says that every act, rite and person
engaged in them was symbolical; and the individual revealing them was put to
death without mercy. So also, he adds, was any uninitiated person who happened
to have heard them. Here is strong evidence that the ancients surely believed
they had a secret supremely worth safeguarding from desecration.
The noted modern Egyptologist A. E.
W. Budge, says that every act of the ceremonial dramas was symbolical in
character and represented some ancient belief or tradition.
"And there was not the smallest
action on the part of any member of the band who acted the Miracle Play of
Osiris, and not a sentence in the Liturgy which did not possess importance or
vital significance to the followers of Osiris."
Again he says that it is this
"emblemism," spoken of by moderns as fetishism and idolatry, that has
had a false construction put upon it, mainly by missionaries and travelers,
although the Christian religion, he asserts, has been evolved from the same
identical germ and on somewhat similar lines. Emblemism he explains as a merely
external formula of an inner cult worship.
Though the charge would have far
more fitness if made against the Christians after the third century, it was
made even in the days of Grecian philosophy by Diodorus Siculus, who tells us
that the Egyptians treated the Greeks as impostors because they reissued the
Egyptian mythology as their own history. If the Greeks were guilty of
converting myth into history, it merely indicates that that process of esoteric
degeneration which inevitably set in in every occult religion had begun early
and has continued ever since. Celsus, the learned Jew in debate with Origen,
chuckles over the (literal) account of the Christian deluge with its ridiculous
ark and impossible physical details, finding it a part of his own mythology
literalized and amplified. Tom Paine, Voltaire and Ingersol chuckled in the
same fashion later.
The Roman poet Sallust even
classifies the fables as theology of the physical and animistic sort. He
enlarges on the characteristics of each. He says the theological belongs to
philosophers, the physical and
72
spiritual to poets, but an
intermediate mixture of both belongs to the initiatory rites (Greek: teletais),
"since the intention of all mystic ceremonies is to conjoin us with the
world of the gods."
The Jewish Maimonides comes up with
the declaration that Genesis, taken according to the letter, is absurd
and extravagant. Whoever should find the true sense of it ought to take care
not to divulge it. This, he says, is a maxim which all the sages repeat to us,
respecting the exact meaning of the work of the six days. If anyone should
discover the true meaning, he should be silent, or speak of it only obscurely
and in an enigmatical manner.
An important statement is found in
that venerated work on the first three centuries of Christian history, Baron
Von Mosheim’s "History."
"It is not, therefore, Origen who
ought to be termed the parent of allegories amongst the Christians, but Philo .
. . many of the Jews, and in particular the Pharisees and Essenes, had indulged
much in allegories before the time of Philo, but of this there can be no doubt,
that the praefects of the Alexandrian school caught the idea of interpreting
Scripture upon philosophical principles, or of eliciting philosophical maxims
from the sacred writers by means of allegory, and that by them it was gradually
propagated amongst the Christians at large. It is also equally certain that by
the writings and example of Philo the fondness for allegories was vastly
augmented and confirmed throughout the whole Christian world; and it
moreover appears that it was he who first inspired the Christians with that
degree of temerity which led them not infrequently to violate the faith of
history and wilfully to close their eyes against the obvious and proper
sense of terms and words . . . particular instances of it . . . may be shown
from Origen and others, who took him for their guide, and who, manifestly,
considered a great part both of the Old and New Testaments as not exhibiting a
representation of things that really occurred, but merely the images of moral
actions."
One can express with a sigh the wish
that the discerning practice of Origen and Philo had persisted down the
centuries!
The Schaff-Herzog dictionary of
religious terms gives four meanings for such a name as "Jerusalem,"
following the gradient of classification laid down by Philo. Literally the name
means the city in Palestine; morally, the believing soul; allegorically, the
Church; and anagogically the city of heavenly peace, located only of course in
consciousness. While this scheme of interpretation permits it to mean the geo-
73
graphical town, it by no means
confines it to that rendering, which the historical view does.
In the Anti-Nicene Library (Vol.
XXIV, p. 127) in the section of Selections from the Prophetic Scriptures we
read:
"We must therefore search the
Scriptures accurately, since they are admitted to be expressed in parables, and
from the names hunt out the thoughts which the Holy Spirit . . . teaches by
imprinting his mind, so to speak, on the expressions . . . that the names . . .
may be explained and that which is hidden under many integuments may, being
handled and learned, come to light and gleam forth."
Jowett, Plato’s academically
accredited interpreter (Thomas Taylor’s most discerning work being frowned
upon) writes: "I am not one of those who believe Plato to have been a mystic
or to have had hidden meanings,"--this in the face of evidence that is
mountainous in height and weight.
It is now far over a century since
C. F. Dupuis published his once-famous and still valuable work, L’Origine de
Tous Les Cultes, in which he asserted that John the Baptist was a purely
mythical personage, and identified his name with that of the Babylonian
Fish-God, Ioannes, of the Berosan account.
We should not omit reference to a
statement by Isaac Myer, the learned Kabalist scholar, in his work The
Oldest Books in the World (VII):
"There was undoubtedly an
extremely subtle and sublimated thought in existence among the learned of the
ancient Egyptians which modern thinkers have not yet fully grasped and which
busied itself mostly with endeavors to arrive at the bond uniting the unknown
and the known or materially existing; this was more especially limited to a
religious philosophy and in that mostly to the spiritual nature in man. The
mural paintings on the walls in ancient Egyptian tombs are not for decoration;
they are symbolical and mystic and the figures thereon are intended for a
religious purpose."
In the Gemara of the Jews, it is
said that he who has learned the scripture and not the Mishna "is a
blockhead." The Bible, they say, is like water, the Mishna like wine, the
Gemara liked spiced wine. The law is as salt, the Mishna as pepper, the Gemara
as balmy spice. To study the Bible can scarcely be considered a virtue; to
study the Mishna
74
is a virtue that will be rewarded,
but the study of the Gemara is a virtue never to be surpassed. Some of the
Talmudists assert that to study the Bible is nothing but a waste of time. The
Gemara embodied the anagogical or esoteric interpretation.
Rabbi Simeon Ben-Jochai, compiler of
the Zohar, taught only the esoteric signification of doctrines, orally
and to a limited few, holding that without the final instruction in the
Mercavah the study of the Kabalah would be incomplete. The Kabalah itself
says (iii-folio 1526, quoted in Myer’s Qabbalah, p. 102):
"Each word of the Torah
contains an elevated meaning and a sublime mystery."
"The recitals of the Torah are
the vestments of the Torah. Woe to him who takes this garment for the Torah
itself. The simple take notice only of the garments or recitals of the Torah,
they know no other thing, they see not that which is concealed under the
vestment. The more instructed men do not pay attention to the vestment but to
the body which it envelops."
Godbey, in his searching work, The
Lost Tribes a Myth (p. 697), asserts that the Jews lost the origin and
meaning of the term "Israel" more than two thousand years ago.
"There is no agreement in their
ancient literature upon that point. All record and tradition of the old Peniel
sanctuary where Jacob became ‘an Israel’ has been lost."
But one of the most revealing
intimations that the Christian movement early departed from the genius and
spirit of the well-known esoteric methodology is found in a sensational passage
quoted in Mead’s Orpheus from Origen in his work Contra Celsum:
"The story of Dionysus and the
Titans is a dramatic history of the wanderings of the ‘Pilgrim-Soul.’ And
curiously enough we find the story of the resurrection of Dionysus . . .
compared by the most learned of the Christian Fathers with the resurrection of
Christ. Thus Origen (Contra Celsum IV, 171, Spenc.), after making the
comparison, remarks apologetically and somewhat bitterly: ‘Or, forsooth, are
the Greeks to be allowed to use such words with regard to the soul, and speak in
allegorical fashion (tropolegein), and we forbidden to do so?’ .
. . thus clearly declaring that the resurrection was an allegory of the soul
and not historical." (Orpheus, pp. 185-6).
75
It will be well to place alongside
of Origen’s lament over the deterioration of splendid allegory into crass
literalism the unguarded utterance of Synesius, a Bishop of Alexandria after
Origen’s time: "In my capacity as Bishop of the Church I shall continue to
disseminate the fables of our religion, but in my private capacity I shall
remain a philosopher to the end." By the "fables" he meant the
mass of literalized legend which the Fathers purveyed to the ignorant laity, of
which Celsus says that they were so outlandish that even a stupid child’s-nurse
would be ashamed to tell them to children. And what he meant by remaining a
"philosopher" would shock the churchmen who have for centuries
decried the great Platonic and Neo-Platonic systems which, in spite of their
protestations, have contributed so much to the foundations of Christianity. The
unedifying spectacle of a Bishop fooling the populace with fables he knew were
fictions, whilst he fed his own mind upon the deeper meanings of philosophy
from pagan schools, goes far to support the claims made in this work and
elsewhere as to the nature and causes of the terrible calamity that befell
Christianity in the third century, ending in the conversion of allegory into a
literalized Gospel and the befuddlement of the world.
From current reading we take a
remark made by G. R. G. Mure, in his small work on Aristotle (p. 230),
relative to the force of figurative or symbolic language:
"The eye for an effective
metaphor is, in fact, a mark of genius and unteachable. And in devoting more
space to illustrating that form of metaphor which depends upon analogy,--as
when old age is described as ‘Life’s sunset,’--Aristotle means, perhaps, to
mark the manifestation within the poet’s imaginative world of that hierarchic
order of analogous stages which pervades the whole Aristotelian universe. The
last and least important element in tragedy is spectacle."
From Esdras (XIV, 6, 26 and
45) we take the following passages:
"These words shalt thou
declare, and these shalt thou hide. And when thou hast done, some things shalt
thou publish and some things shalt thou show secretly to the Wise."
". . . . and Highest spake,
saying, The first that thou hast written publish openly, that the worthy and
the unworthy may read it: but keep the seventy last, that thou mayest deliver
them only to such as be wise among the people. For in them is the spring of
understanding, the fountain of wisdom."
76
It is Mosheim who in his famous
history of the early Church (Vol. II, 167) discloses how the matter of esoteric
writing and cryptic meaning became a nub of controversy between Origen and his
opponents. It is well to quote Mosheim’s statements in full for the sake of
their explicitness. He is referring to Origen when he says:
"Certainly he would have had no
enemies if he had merely affirmed, what no one then called in question, that in
addition to the sense which the words of Scripture convey, another sense latent
in the things described is to be diligently sought for. This will be manifest
if we consider who were the men that inveighed so bitterly against Origen’s
allegories after he was dead. I refer to Eustatius, Epiphanius, Jerome,
Augustine and many others. All these were themselves allegorists, if I may use
that term; and would undoubtedly have commended any man, as a great errorist,
who would have dared to impugn the arcane sense of Scripture. . . . There must,
therefore, have been something new and unusual in Origen’s exigetics, which
appeared to them pernicious and very dangerous.
"The first and chief was, that
he pronounced a great part of the sacred books to be void of meaning if taken
literally, and that only the things indicated by the words were the signs
and emblems of higher objects. The Christians who had previously followed after
mystic interpretation let the truth of the sacred narratives and the proper
sense of the divine laws and precepts remain in full force; but he turned
much of the sacred history into moral fables, and no small part of the divine
precepts into mere allegories.
"Nearly allied to this first
fault was another; namely, that he lauded immoderately the recondite and
mystical sense of Scripture, and unreasonably depreciated the grammatical or
historical sense. The latter he compared to earth, mud, the body and other
things of little value; but the former he compared to the soul, heaven, gold
and the most precious objects. By such representations he induced the
expositors of Scripture to think little about the literal sense of passages and
to run enthusiastically after the sublimer interpretations."
All this is so directly valuable a
contribution to the inner story of the great catastrophe that overtook early
Christianity that the long quotations can be forgiven. Here we see the most
learned of the Christian Fathers, Origen, clinging tenaciously to what he knew
was the true method of esoteric interpretation, but already beset by the
subversive and crippling insistence on the literal and historical rendering
which spelled devastation for the true meaning of scripture. This was the
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beginning of the tragedy that has
engulfed all spiritual exegesis of holy writ ever since. Origen was the last
champion of a true Christianity going down to defeat under the swelling tide of
Philistine crudity of mind.
A good part of the reason why the
literalists feared Origen’s method escapes in a naïve paragraph from Mosheim,
who says that it appears strange that a man of so much discernment as Origen
was should not have seen that his use of allegories and denial of the
historicity of scripture would place directly into the hands of the Gnostics
and others whom he sought to persuade to Christianity "the very means of
overthrowing the entire history of the life and death of Christ."
Unquestionably this strikes close to the heart of the whole matter. Once having
committed itself to the personal and historical resolution of the Christos
figure, the ecclesiastical power could not give countenance to the allegorical
interpretation. The validation of the latter would present an immediate and
constant menace to the whole historical structure of Christianity. Ever since
early times it has had to battle with the implications of comparative religion
study to avoid the general acceptance of conclusions massively obvious on the
side of allegorism. With Egypt’s evidence now available, the day of reckoning
can no longer be held off.
Mosheim sets forth Origen’s stated
view that, as "the philosophical grounds of Christian doctrine are wrapt
up in figures, images and facts in the sacred volume," if "we adhere
to the literal meaning, that harmony between religion and philosophy can not be
found." Mosheim admits that "in the objections of the enemies of
Christianity, there are not a few things which can in no way be fully cleared
up and confuted, unless we abandon the grammatical and historical sense and
resort to allegories." This goes far forward strengthening Origen’s (and
this work’s) general position, and is recommended to the close attention of all
modern literalists and fundamentalists.
So extended an array of data has
been necessary to establish the existence and influence of the esoteric method
in the whole of ancient literature. It must be kept in mind that, lengthened as
it is to the point of prolixity, it is only a tiny segment of what could be
adduced. The significant fact in reference to it is that in spite of the mass
of authentic evidence the effort has persisted in academic circles to maintain
a denial of both the employment of such a distinctive method and its
78
obvious and momentous involvements.
It is by no means an unwarranted assertion to hint that the hostile attitude
toward esotericism has been an item in the policy of a great conspiracy,
operative ever since the third century, to diminish the influence of the pagan
teachings. Evidence to support such a forthright statement is not wanting,
although, as Sir Gilbert Murray has noted, most of the evidence supporting the
pagan side has been destroyed by the Christians. Whatever the motive actuating
a resort to the method of violence to negate an important fact in religious
history, it must be held in any case a hazardous enterprise to flout the truth.
It argues something less than full intellectual integrity, something sinister
and disquieting. The world is still waiting for a good and adequate explanation
of the harsh measure that prompted the closing of schools that purveyed such
lofty wisdom and sage philosophy as the Platonic Academies of sapient Greece in
the fifth century. According to von Mosheim, Origen "introduced the whole
of the Academy into Christian theology." Bishop Synesius preferred
"philosophy" to lying legend. Neo-Platonism brought to the modern
Dean Inge his highest illumination in religion. It will call for a good case
indeed to defend the suppression of truth and light of this sort.
In our longer view it becomes ever
more patent that in the ignorant policy by the Church the world witnessed the
triumph of irrational piety and fanatical zealotry over rational religion. The
mystical and the rational sides of the religious motive, expressed in general
by two quite diverse types of human beings--the one the feeling, the other the
thinking--have always been at variance and often in conflict in the movement,
and the resurgent sweep of one or the other has marked the epic of religious
history. Hardly any event in the annals of mankind has wrought more serious
consequences than that sudden and overwhelming change of character in early
Christianity from a philosophical religion to one of devotion and feeling, so
fateful for later times. The Christian world is still enthralled by the
iniquitous influences to which this portentous event gave birth. It is with the
design of breaking the deadening spell of much of this irrational enchantment
still operative today that the great massing of data in this work is
undertaken.
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Chapter IV
WISDOM
HAUNTS THE COUNTRYSIDE
It might be presumed that the
authentic status of myth and religious allegory had been sufficiently
demonstrated. But it should further greatly strengthen the whole case and prove
of vital worth on its own account to assemble additional data that will reveal
an even closer tie between the myths and the basic genius of all religion. This
research will enable us to establish a connection between myths and another
ancient mode of religious expression, a link which is little known or suspected
by modern students. Indeed it will answer in large part the great question as
to the origin of the myths. The conclusion reached by the investigation will
again almost certainly be warmly disputed. A shorter chapter will suffice to
present what must surely be considered an important body of evidence.
The collated data point to an origin
of the myths in a place which itself vastly enhances their innate and
fundamental kinship with religion. Lacking more accurate knowledge about them,
we have been disposed to think that the myths were an independent and whimsical
creation of the free fancy and childish imagination of peoples whom we have
insisted on dubbing "primitive." That they were not thus an arbitrary
product, unrelated to the profoundest philosophical wisdom and the highest
spiritual insight of the ancient world, is evidenced by the material here
collected. The evidence almost indisputably indicates their origin from an
older religious institution or expression--the ritual drama. The myths find
their basic character and their unity at last in the features of a great
universal dramatic rite, the importance of which has been too stubbornly
belittled and neglected through the force of Christian prejudice, even where
its very existence has been granted.
First spokesman is no less an
authority than Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough. From his
lectures (p. 374) we take his item:
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"We shall probably not err in
assuming that many myths, which we now know only as myths, had once their
counterpart in magic; in other words, that they used to be acted as a means of
producing in fact the events which they described in figurative language.
Ceremonies often die out while myths survive, and thus we are left to infer the
dead ceremony from the living myth."
Corroboration is added by H. J. Rose
(Folk-Lore, p. 104): "The legend has pretty certainly grown out of
the rite, as usually happens." Says Miss J. E. Harrison in her Themis (p.
328): "A mythos of the Greeks was primarily just a thing spoken,
uttered by the mouth. Its antithesis or rather correlative is the thing
done, enacted."
Significant is the sentence from
Prof. A. B. Cook (quoted in Lord Raglan’s work, The Hero): "Behind
the myth (of the Minotaur), as is so often the case, we may detect a ritual
performance." J. A. K. Thomson, in Studies in the Odyssey (p. 54)
states that not only is the myth the explanation of the rite; it is at the same
time the explanation of the god,--the central character in the rite. Forthright
is the testimony of A. M. Hocart in The Progress of Man (p. 223):
"If we turn to the living myth,
that is, the myth that is believed in, we find that it has no existence apart
from the ritual. The ritual is always derived from some one and its validity
must be established from its derivation. . . . Knowledge of the myth is
essential to the ritual, because it has to be recited at the ritual."
Prof. Malmouski (Notes and
Queries in Anthropology) writes:
"Psychologists like Wundt,
sociologists like Durkheim, Herbert and Mause, anthropologists like Crawley,
classical scholars like Miss Jane Harrison, have all understood the ultimate
association between myth and ritual, between sacred tradition and the norms of
social structure. . . . Myth as it exists in a savage community, that is, in
its living primitive form, is not merely a story told but a reality lived. It
is not of the nature of fiction such as we read today in a novel, but it is a
living reality, believed to have once happened in primeval times and continuing
ever since to influence the world and human destinies."
It must be pointed out that lack of
keen discernment is shown in claiming that an intelligent view of the
myths ever accepted them as having actually occurred, or that they were not
known to be pure fiction in their outward form. Error and confusion at once
enter the
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moment we attribute to them any
other than typical reality. The whole miscarriage of ancient meaning
sprang from the incorrigible tendency to assert that the ancient intelligent
people believed their myths. There is the great chasm of difference
between saying they believed them and saying they believed in them, and
the chasm is that between truth and error. Never did intelligent people believe
them; they believed what they represented, typified, adumbrated. The
whole issue of right and wrong appraisal and judgment of them and the ancient
hangs on this distinction. This work for the first time insists that this
distinction is the critical point in the evaluation of all ancient literature.
The first blows in the wreckage of archaic spiritual systems fell when the
shadow of this misconception crept in upon the mind of the early Christian
following.
Correcting the apparently slight,
but really formidable misconception, it is necessary next to repudiate utterly
this same writer’s views on the myths, as thus expressed:
"We can certainly discard all
explanatory as well as all symbolical ex-interpretations of these myths of
origins. The personages and beings which we find are what they appear to be on
the surface, and not symbols of hidden realities. As to any explanatory
function of these myths, there is no problem which they cover, no curiosity
which they satisfy, no theory which they contain."
This opinion needs refutation
because it will be seconded by many readers who are instant in opposition to
anything that extols the religion of "paganism." How any scholar
acquainted with the facts of the ancient ritualism, and possessed of ordinary
reasoning power, could asseverate that the ceremonies were entirely
meaningless, is beyond comprehension. This is to accuse Plato, Euripides,
Sophocles, Aeschylus and a long list of antiquity’s most celebrated men of
perpetrating a performance, presented annually before thousands of people, that
was in the end nothing but gibberish. The actions and speeches in the drama
reenacted the experience of mankind in its evolutionary cycle; yet this critic
asserts that there was no problem or construction bearing relation to reality
in the mythic representation. Criticism of this sort is farcical, and
represents a total failure to grasp meanings which, however faintly apprehended
by the unschooled, can still be discerned by any intelligent mind. So gross a
misjudgment of a great form of an-
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cient culture is inexcusable. From a
stupendous amount of such biased incompetence in assessing the value of early
formulations in religion and philosophy the world has suffered incredibly.
While putting forth the questionable
conjecture that the myth had nothing to do with speculation or exegesis, any
more than with historical data, the next witness, Lord Raglan, English author
of a most valuable work, The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama, contributes
to the discussion a body of data, comment and cited material that goes far to
make the case impregnable. His work stands as one of the first open-minded
approaches to the investigation of the world’s hero-legends, folk lore and
Märchen, and adduces evidence which negates the historical view of the hero
stories. He is perhaps the first modern to clarify the distinction between
legend and real history.
He classifies the myth roughly as
little else than the form of words which accompanies the performance of a rite.
Citing the incongruity of the content and form of the myth with the ordinary
products of the folk (to whom all previous consensus had assigned their
origin), he states the highly important conclusion that the literature of the
folk is not their own production, but comes down to them from a source above
them. The author here brings out in clear and irrefutable fashion the
discernment that it has been a great error to attribute the creation of folk
lore to the folk themselves. The myths were made for the folk, but not by
the folk. They were constructed with a view to catch the popular fancy and
be retained easily in the folk memory. To claim that they were originated by
the folk is to argue that the products of the highest cleverness and genius
came from the ranks of the untutored and ignorant. The tales and ballads lived
amongst the folk, but they were not their creation.
But to the modern student Raglan’s
statement that, since they were not an indigenous folk production, they must
have come down to them from above, is mystifying. This is due to the
failure of modern thought to envisage properly the ancient prevalence of
esoteric spirit and methodology. There should be no more skepticism about the
realities of esoteric truth and teaching than about the situation in any
college, where faculty, representing the acquired wisdom and maturity of an
older generation, presides over and instructs the members of a younger
generation, its pupils. The from above in Raglan’s pronounce-
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ment hints at nothing more weird and
exceptional than the fact that more enlightened sages from time to time since
remote days have contrived to issue for the benefit of the general mass of
uninstructed humanity bodies of truth encased in the amber of popular legend,
ballad, castle-tale and household fable. From above here signifies no
super-intelligence achieved by the spiritually illumined aspirants, whether in
ancient days or since.
The myths came down through the ages
from a distant source in a mountain-spring of attained wisdom. Raglan presents
this view and strengthens his conviction regarding it by a citation from Budge,
the Egyptologist, who says (From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p.
156):
"It would be wrong to say that
the Egyptians borrowed from the Sumerians, or the Sumerians from the Egyptians,
but it may be submitted that the literati of both peoples borrowed their
theological systems from some common but exceedingly ancient source."
Budge here spoke more truly than he
has done at other times. His words are indeed the truth on this matter, so
largely missed otherwise. Raglan declares that a dozen learned writers show
that the religious systems of many countries possessed many fundamental
characteristics in common. They were obviously systems designed for the good of
the community by the proper performance of the given ritual. This possession of
a common religious denominator by many nations looms as vitally important,
since it becomes the backbone of the argument that all the myths had one common
origin in a primal construction wherein all the ingredients were at hand from
the beginning.
Raglan’s outline of the pervasive
features of the ritual is a valuable summary. He says in effect that the basic
pattern consisted of a dramatic ritual in which the death and resurrection of
the king, who was also the god, performed by priests and members of the royal
family, were the central events. There was also a sacred combat, in which the
victory of the god over his enemies was won, and a triumphal procession,
participated in by the neighboring gods, also an enthronement, with a ceremony
by which the destinies of the state for the year ahead were determined, and
finally a sacred marriage. Somewhere in the drama was interjected the
recitation of the story whose outlines were
84
enacted in the ritual. This was the
myth, and its repetition engendered a strong psychic potency equal to that of
the ritual itself. From the start the words and the actions were inseparably
united, although in the course of time they became separated and each gave rise
to its own literary, artistic and religious forms.
He states a little farther on (p.
154) that while the separation of Greek myth from its accompanying ritual may
be due in part to the ancient philosophers, who composed allegories which
seemed to tear the myth apart from the ritual, the divorcement of the two is
chiefly due to modern classical scholars who have failed to recognize the close
connection between Greek poetry and Greek religion and who have likewise missed
the fact that the Greek descriptive writers such as Herodotus and Pausanius never
cite a myth apart from a reference to some rite or to some sacred locality.
If at any time the sages composed
myths that had no connection with the ritual, it could only have been that
there was no structural or organic linkage with it. It is hardly possible to
conceive how they could have composed myths unrelated to the ritual, for all
the myths were picturizations of the same elements of meaning which the ritual
portrayed. Perhaps not distinctly related in form, but related in meaning, to
the ritual they must have been.
Raglan says that Miss Jennie Weston
(From Ritual to Romance, p. 176), after dealing with a large group of
Grail stories, concludes that these stories "repose eventually not upon a
poet’s imagination, but upon the ruins of an august and ancient ritual, a
ritual which once claimed to be the accredited guardian of the deepest secrets
of life." But so strong is the inveterate tendency to assume that history
must somehow be interwoven in ancient constructions that Miss Weston supposes
that certain historical outlines have crept into these narratives. Nothing but
later ignorance and exoteric degeneracy ever compromised with the pure myth to
the extent of insinuating historical reference into it.
A penetrating judgment is pronounced
by Raglan (p. 225) when he definitely asserts that the myth took its rise
from the dramatic features of the ritual, and that all traditional
narratives show, by both form and content, that they derive neither from
historical fact nor from imaginative fiction, but from acted ritual. There
can be little doubt, he states, that all drama is the product of ritual drama.
The dramatis personae,
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even when they are given historical
names, are not individuals but types.
The Homeric poems, he says, have the
form of dramas. The drama, he insists, was originally a religious ceremony, and
the whole community shared in it. (The Hero, p. 240.)
Mr. MacCulloch, in alluding to the
Algonquin stories, says: "All form part of a mythological cycle dealing
with the life of the hero-divinity, Manabush." Raglan subjoins that the
Homeric poems are all mythological cycles dealing with the lives of
hero-divinities; but, he ventures, nothing so arouses the fury of scholars as
the suggestion that these cycles are based on ritual, or sprang from it. He
says they take the Tale of Troy as sober record of historical fact, woven
together from scraps of romantic fiction. As there is nothing in the Bible that
can not be found in antecedent literature, so, Raglan contends, there is
nothing in "Homer" that can not be found elsewhere. Who was
Homer?--he asks. And he answers with the pronouncement of Prof. J. A. K.
Thomson, that "Homer" was the title given to the victor in the
minstrelsy contest held at the festival of Apollo at Delos. He was the eponymous-hero
of the hymn-singers and sacred dancers, and was a personification of the Delian
Apollo.
"The hymn," says Prof.
Thomson, "has given birth to the heroic-epos. For these ‘men and women’
are the old local Daimones,--Achilles, Helen and the rest. Their legends have
combined to form one great legend recited at the Delian festival in honor of
Apollo, the father-god of all the Ionians. . . . The hymn gradually added to
itself more and more of the inherited or borrowed legends of the Ionian race
until it grew into the proportions of all ‘Homer.’ And as Homer was the
traditional author of the original hymn, so he remained the traditional author
of all the rest."
Mr. W. F. J. Wright is cited as
saying that the name of Troy is widely associated with mazes and labyrinths,
and that various instances in the Iliad correspond with known features
of a once widespread maze ritual. And Prof. Hocart is drawn on as authority for
the datum that there are twenty-six common features which characterize the
installation of kings in all parts of the world; and the inference is that
these common features stem from a common source, the ancient spiritual drama.
Raglan says the conclusion is
inevitable that such characters as the
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ogre, giant, devil, dragon, troll,
cannibal and sorcerer are nothing but titles for a personage acting in a
liturgy, representing the terrifying demon of the initiations. There is much
indeed to support the expressed view of Raglan (p. 220) that the character
known as the Horned Man was taken from the ritual and became invested with real
life, gaining a status in popular belief far more real than that of any
historical character. Perhaps Jesus is more real as mythical hero than as a
once-living person. Anent this Raglan expresses his astonishment that Sir James
Ridgeway should have been misled into taking the stock figures of myth for
actual people.
The principal characters in the
ritual are two, a hero and a buffoon who meet with various adventures together
and live on terms of the greatest familiarity--naturally, since they represent
the god and the animal nature of man, who live together in the same body! And
this accounts for the special privilege accorded the fool to jest at the
expense of the castle baron, and for the horse-play and buffoonery permitted at
the Saturnalia and the autumn equinoctial festivals (surviving in the rough
mischief of our Hallowe’en), when higher and lower, god and irresponsible joker
in man, were placed on the same level of existence. Fools were considered
sacred on the seventh day, symbolizing the raising of the animal man to his
human-divine dignity on the Sabbath, the seventh and last "day" of
the cycle.
The incarnation of the divine soul
in man’s animal body is the basis of all the legends of the sorcerers’ turning
the hero or his men into animals, or their disguising themselves as animals.
The Hallowe’en animal mask is the survival and replica of the same thing, for
the masks were originally the hides of animals! The prominence given this phase
of the drama’s meaning is attested by what Raglan writes (p. 261). He says that
a prominent feature of every type of traditional narrative is the man in
animal form, or the animal that can speak. Persons disguised as animals are so
universal a feature of ritual and drama as not to need demonstration, he avers.
And the answer to the query why ancient Egyptian ritual was performed largely
by people in animal masks, and why Greek gods and goddesses were so often
represented as animals or birds, holds in its symbolic purport one of the
central items of the drama of human life. For the religion of these early
peoples throbbed with an innate sense of kinship with nature and religious
ideas were sympathetically adumbrated and reflected by nature’s phe-
87
nomena. Participants in the Mithraic
Mysteries wore animal masks. Obviously the masks typified the outer personality
of man, for the Latin word for "mask" is persona, and man’s
personality is an animal body!
It is quite worth a moment’s digression
from data to exegesis to say that the world’s failure over many centuries to
read the simple explication of this animal typism, as dramatically depicting
the incarnation of the soul in the human-animal, and not the beast-animal,
body, has buried the trap to catch untold millions of religiously simple-minded
people in its disguised subtlety. Had the esoteric implications of the drama
been kept in ken, all that mass of lucubrated assertion by numberless writers
that the ancients endorsed the belief in transmigration of the once-human soul
into the bodies of animals at death, would not have disgraced the pages of
literature. Scholars, historians and sociologists can now be told that they
have been shooting, not at an authentic poacher in the garden, but at a
scarecrow.
Raglan cites that the Council of
Trent believed that people can take the form of animals! The ancients, as we
have seen, are accused of "believing" their myths. It was only the
later Christians that believed them, with both humorous and tragic results.
Greek drama, like Egyptian, is
predominantly tragic, because what moderns term "happiness" was not
the one supreme motif of the human experience, as envisaged by Greek
philosophy. By etymology "tragedy" means "goat-song." The
goat was of course the zodiacal Capricorn, coming at the winter solstice, when
the sun, typifying the soul in the dead "winter" of its incarnation,
was in the throes of "death" as the scapegoat to carry the onus of
man’s redemption. For obviously man’s only possible redeemer--from
benightedness, nescience, animal carnality--is his own soul. If it can not make
the grade into charity, love and compassion, what else can uplift him? Let the
Church which has gulled its childish millions by substituting a historical for
an immanent scapegoat, answer.
This concludes the limited
assemblage of data to demonstrate that the myth came from the pristine ritual
drama. If it is not enough to prove the point, there is doubtless much more
material of perhaps greater strength that could be found and presented. The
fact, if considered sufficiently demonstrated, might seem to be remote from any
bearing on the question of the Jesus historicity. It is indeed not remote. If
it can be shown that the Christ of the Gospels was a myth-
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ical character, we could then
confidently look for agreement of all aspects of this mythical figure with the
central character-personage in the ancient religious ritual, out of which the
myths grew. Comparative religion study has already demonstrated this close
relationship of the two figures, the Christ of the mythos and the Sun-God of
the ritual. Some material in the present work may further strengthen that
identity. If the ritual and the myth are shown to be in point of fact
practically identical, and the features to match closely the characterizations
of the Gospel Jesus, a strong presumptive case has already been established in
support of the conclusion that the Gospel hero was but another of the many
mythical type-figures, and not a Galilean peasant.
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Chapter V
FANCY’S
FABRIC TURNS INTO HISTORY
The story turns next to a chapter in
revelation that must strike all but a few readers as incredible beyond all
possibility of its being the simple truth. Even if the weight of the evidence
submitted seems indubitably to support the position, it will still fail
acceptance by many. It will leave even those convinced by the presentation
shocked, bewildered, incredulous. That so gross a blunder, both gigantic and
stupid, could have been perpetrated, and that it could have been foisted upon
the world’s intelligence for sixteen centuries without detection by the united
acumen of all scholars over that period, will appear impossible. It will be the
giraffe whose existence the farmer denied while looking it up and down. It will
come close to upsetting Lincoln’s witty apothegm, and almost prove that all the
people can be fooled all the time, or for sixteen centuries. It brings the
disconcerting realization that after all fifty million Frenchmen can be wrong.
The upset of cherished maxims of human polity is distressing. The foundations
of homiletics will be shaken. So vast a miscarriage of wisdom, embroiling the
mental life of millions for centuries in the darkest superstitions, setting
spiritual culture back for ages, will seem too enormous a price to pay for a
mere misreading of myths. A consequence of such enormity would seem out of all
proportion to the apparently trivial nature of the cause.
But the misreading of myths and
allegories, fables and dramas, brought the historical Christ into
hypostatization, euhemerized the central spiritual conception in all religion,
and thus emasculated what was to have been the most potent dynamic of the whole
religious life. It left the world chasing a chimera instead of focusing effort
on the culture of spirituality. It threw a possible great civilization under
the pall and handicap of the most fantastic conception that ever misdirected
the moral genius of man into eccentric and bizarre and eventually cataclysmic
channels. It killed the psychological efficacy of the whole religious
enterprise, diverting zeal from the one pivot point where zeal
90
alone counts,--the life of the inner
consciousness and seat of character, the soul.
The revelation thus heralded and now
to be substantiated by accumulated documentation, is the colossal blunder,
perpetrated from the third century on, of mistaking myth, drama, ritual,
allegory and other forms of typical representation for objective history, and
following this by turning the body of myths into alleged occurrence. This
chapter and indeed the entire work is the answer to the raucous chorus of
protestation that will arise on all sides against the possibility of such a
thing, declaring it absurd and demanding the evidence to prove it. In many
quarters the declaration will be laughed out of court and given no chance to
present its credentials. It can be said in patient appeal for examination of
the supporting data that the closer one looks into the matter, the more
completely does the apparent absurdity fade away and probability increase to
certainty. When scrutiny has been carried on penetratingly enough, the
absurdity of its being true turns quite around and gives place to the absurdity
of any other view. Not only can the mistake be established on factual evidence,
but the perception that a mistake has been made supplies the only hypothesis
that yields a full and consistent explanation of all the data extant in the
case. It alone provides a formula which solves all the difficulties and tangles
involved in the problem. If this is so, it must be accepted and accredited as
substantial proof. For if research elicits a formula which enables all the data
to be explained rationally and consistently by its key, the formula is
considered as satisfactorily established. The key that fits all locks must be
the master key. A thousand questions, complications, inconsistencies,
contradictions, illogicalities in current interpretation both of scriptural
text and historical implication are resolved into entirely consistent
intelligibility when the true key is applied. If this resultant can not be
accepted as ultimate proof of the correctness of the thesis, it at least gives
it the field over every other proposal that does not so resolve the
difficulties with half the consonance and reasonableness.
The ancient illuminati depicted the
soul’s experience in this life by means of myth, drama, allegory and pictorial
ideograph; and in the third century the increasingly ignorant Christian laity
and the decreasingly intelligent Christian priesthood conspired at last to
convert the whole into supposed history. That is the whole story in a thimble.
But
91
we can not go far with it in the
thimble. Its full detailing demands a great elaboration. It is frankly the
gigantic task to support the claim against determined and crafty opposition,
for the very obvious reason that esotericism did not openly proclaim or defend
itself, and therefore its defense is not in evidence in rebuttal of opposing
claims. The opposition also has possessed the enormous advantage of being able
to destroy all the evidence of the other side, a point which has been
strikingly mentioned by Sir Gilbert Murray in his studies. It seems clear that
a case which must be upheld by the destruction of opposing evidence stands
already prejudiced as a weak one.
But there are times when history
itself enacts an amazing drama of poetic justice in the operation of moral
forces. So long as the voice of ancient Egypt’s wisdom was hushed in silence,
so long as the Egyptian papyri and stelae could not be read, the pious
imposture could go on. Nearly two millennia passed, with Egypt’s testimony
unavailable. But in the fullness of time Napoleon’s Colonel, Broussard, dug up
the Rosetta Stone and Napoleon wisely saw its possible value. It is
questionable whether, for direct cultural value to all races, any event, battle
or reformation in human history surpasses this simple discovery of an
entablatured rock. It is fast proving the ghost of retribution, the instrument
of justice, the Nemesis of a Christianity fostered by ignorance and
superstition. It opens up the vast treasure-house of ancient Egyptian
literature, where, once exposed to view, there lies before our eyes the full
and incontestable evidence of Christianity’s false claims. That literature
supplies the direct missing links in the body of comparative religion study, a
study which proves beyond cavil that Christianity was not the first pure divine
release of the one "true religion," but only at best a badly mangled
copy of earlier Egyptian religion. So far was it from being an advance or
improvement over pagan cultures that it is possible to say it was not even a
good reprint of them, was in fact a vitiation and sheer caricature of more
perfect ancient systems. However much this sounds like the vilest heresy and
contumacy in flouting the traditional poses of orthodoxy, the truth should not
be suppressed merely because it shocks those who prefer to hold to the set
grooves of acceptation and who for a hundred reasons are unwilling to face a
humiliating readjustment. Conservatism ever finds an error, when coupled with
security, a more comfortable companion than truth admitted to the house with
disturbing consequences. Only after new truth has
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slowly crept into the general body
and settled itself commodiously amongst the former elements, will the
conservative group adopt it, with the lying manifesto that they had been
standing for the innovation all the time. Particularly has this been true of
religious conservatism. The last to yield old ground to new positions, it is
yet the loudest to extol the new form when finally it has established itself
firmly. History supports this analysis.
The Rosetta Stone and Champollion’s
marvelous work in deciphering its cryptic hieroglyphics will force Christianity
to face its pagan origins and admit at last its long-denied parentage in the
ancient Egyptian wisdom. It has spurned its true ancestry, and having in the
meantime heaped obloquy and contempt upon it, now finds it humiliating, when
the true descent is established, to accept the connection. But it must do so
or--perish. It can no longer support its claims in the face of contradictory
evidence, which, with the release of Egypt’s hidden wisdom, the rediscovery of
the "lost language of symbolism" in which all ancient scriptures were
written and the recovery of the buried esoteric meaning of all ancient
religion, has been raised in height and volume from hillock to mountain size.
With candid truth-seeking as its guiding star, there needs to be instituted a
sincere scholastic research of all available documents to trace the causes,
motives and circumstances of that devastating surge of forces which swept over
the masses in the Roman Empire about the third century and with fell violence
stamped out the cult of esoteric wisdom and closed up its schools and
academies. With dispiriting unanimity the religious historians and Christian
writers hail the suppression of the Mystery Brotherhoods and the philosophical
schools as the happy ending of a degenerate paganism and the beginning of a
Christianity of spiritual purity. By what distortions or chicanery of logic or
sophistry the extinction of the great Plato’s still unexampled wisdom,
Socrates’ magnificent dialectic of truth and Aristotle’s consummate
perspicacity can be twisted into a triumph of truth over error and the bright
dawn of a new day for humanity, is surely not easily discerned. The logical
inconsistency of the position is brought vividly to light in the historical
phenomenon that transpired a thousand years later, when the strength of the
whole Christian system was by the Medieval schoolmen built up on the
foundations of the books of the same Plato and Aristotle, the obliteration of
whose philosophies from the early Christian doctrinism was hailed as the end of
world
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benightedness and the beginning of
world enlightenment. During some earlier centuries of the Medieval period
Plato’s Timaeus was the principal authority for Christian exposition;
and for nearly a thousand years later Aristotle was the venerated master for all
the Schoolmen, with Aquinas in the lead, of the regnant Church. Forsooth, then,
it was a benison to humanity to have earlier closed their great colleges under
the sycamores of Greece! This is the crooked logic of factual history and in
the light of it the world can see at last that Christian claims and Christian
acts do not lie straight in the same bed. Had it not been for the Arabians and
Moors the Schoolmen would probably never have had a Plato or Aristotle
manuscript to found Medieval Christianity upon. The Christian propaganda office
has vociferated a thousand times that the closing of the Platonic academies in
the fifth century ended the Dark Ages of paganism and heralded the era of true
religion. The Catholic Church vociferates with equal vigor that the revival of
Aristotelian philosophy and its use as the bulwark of a rationalized
Christianity was again the end of the Dark Ages of later Europe. It is a little
confusing to be told that the world was saved by the suppression of Grecian
esoteric wisdom and saved again by its renaissance. A fuller survey of some
aspects of this muddled situation will be undertaken in a later chapter.
The marshaling of data to
corroborate the positions taken will again require much quotation of
authorities. The pointed force of documentary statements is in large measure
lost when reported indirectly. The apology for so much direct quotation is that
a work of this kind, combating universally accepted theses and putting forth
conclusions which will be everywhere challenged, has no recourse but to summon
a powerful array of authoritative statement to its side. The importance of the
issues involved will amply justify the extensive citation.
We can put confidence in the sincere
utterance of a fair-minded scholar like Mr. G. R. S. Mead, when he makes the
following impressive statement (Did Jesus Live 100 Years B.C.?, p. 12):
"Canonical Christianity
gradually evolved the mind-bewildering dogma that Jesus was in deed and in
truth very God of very God, unique and miraculous in every possible respect;
and the Church for some seventeen or eighteen centuries has boldly thrown down
this challenge to the intellect and experience of humanity. . . . It is because
of this stupendous claim, which has perhaps astonished none more than Himself,
that the
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Church has brought upon herself a
scrutiny into the history of her origins that it is totally unable to
bear."
We can do no better than continue
with some exceedingly valuable declarations from the pen of Gerald Massey,
which, however heterodoxical they may appear to the orthodox, cut to the heart
of the truth with startling incisiveness. This clear-eyed scholar, with the
open pages of Egypt’s symbolical and analogical wisdom under his gaze, showing
the complete case for the derivation of Christian material from that august
source, stood at a vantage point where few others have stood. Facing this
perspective, his decisive advantage was his possession of both penetrating
insight into things Egyptian and an unprejudiced open mind. It is to be hoped
that our return to sanity and our more piercing discernment into ancient
religion may bring us at last to see what he saw ahead of us, and may dispose
us to do belated justice to the name of this truth-seeking student whom our
blindness cheated of his legitimate honor and reward in his lifetime.
Massey says that the Mosaic account
of the creation is allowed by the most learned of Jewish Rabbis, by Philo, Paul
and certain of the Patristics to be a myth or symbolical representation; yet
the whole structure of the Christian theology is founded on the ignorant
assumption that it was not mythical but a veritable human occurrence in the
domain of fact. As history, he avers, the Pentateuch has neither head, tail nor
vertebrae. It is an indistinguishable mush of myth and mystery. He notes a
logical consideration that has been missed by blind zeal to countenance the
impossible in a religion of fanatical faith, but that must be granted much
validity as an argument. This is the fact that had the Pentateuch been a real
history, Palestine and Judea ought to have been found overstrewn with
implements of war and work, both of Hebrew manufacture and that of the
conquered races, whereas, outside of the Book, no evidence of the numberless
combats and the devastation of Jehovah’s enemies in great battles is to be
found. Also the country of a people so rich that King David in his poverty
could collect one thousand millions of pounds sterling toward building a temple
is found without art, sculptures, mosaics, bronzes, pottery or precious stones
to lend credence to the Bible story. Proofs of Bible "history" will
not be found, avers Massey, not though Palestine be dug up in the search. And
how fatuous after all to think of digging in the
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earth to find the proofs of
spiritual myths and allegories! No amount of archaeology can prove a myth.
But there was bound to come a time
when the ancient world would begin to write history of the factual sort, or
when, as recondite learning and deeper esoteric comprehension waned, the
process of weaving actual history into the texture of the myths would make
headway. In nearly every land the custodians of the myths sooner or later
intermixed some national history with the spiritual dramas. As is so clearly
evidenced in Virgil’s Aeneid, the temptation was almost unconquerable at
times for the hierophants of religion to interweave the brighter deeds or
virtues of a regnant king in the ritual drama, the more particularly since the
king in all ancient countries did become the national type and personation of
the Sun-God of the temple ceremonies. Kings were almost invariably named after
the spiritual Sun-King of the drama. The titles of the Emperor of Ethiopia and
Oriental monarchs still testify to this old custom. As nearly as can be
determined, the time when this transition from myth to history occurred in
Jewish history was in the days of Hezekiah. From then on the allegories of the
descent of the gods to earth are made to run into and blend with a line of
historical personages. This process, as Massey saw it, so confused the
impossible situations found in myth and allegory with the ostensibly possible
facts of history that to accredit the narrative as history the mind had to
entertain many bizarre and fabulous incidents under the rating of miracle. The
blending of history with myth opened the door to the entry of that
derationalizing scourge born of religious ineptitude, the belief in miracle,
Massey contends. It created the susceptibility to take stock in prodigy, the
supernatural, the ominous, which nearly all minds engender from a literal
reading of the scriptures. Massey feels that religion has unsettled men’s minds
by its glorification of the miraculous and the supernatural, when the whole
basis of its true strength and salutary influence for humanity lies in its
inculcating the majesty and divinity of the ever-present miracle of the
natural. He attests that the sane ancient religion was founded upon the
natural, the highest spiritual verities being everywhere presented in the light
of their analogy with some natural phenomenon. Massey would have endorsed
Emerson’s wise discernment that "the true mark of genius is to see the
miraculous in the common." The Hebrew writings were preserved, Massey
continues, on account of
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the sacred mystery that lay underneath
the veil of symbol, the veil that Isis boasted no man had lifted from her
person. The writings were held in sanctity because of what they veiled; but to
the Christians their sanctity goes no deeper than the veil, and is bred and
kept alive only by ignorance, "absolute, unquestioning, unsuspecting
ignorance of the meaning of symbolism." With them the veil itself is the
treasure, and they know not the real treasure beneath it. And since they have
centered all the sanctity in the veil, when that is torn off, all the sanctity
is lost for them. They have disciplined no faculty which would enable them to
see the real treasure when it is exposed to view. They howl that their treasure
has been stolen away from them, when only the ornamentally carved lid of the
treasure chest has been removed. And this indeed has been the tragedy of the
situation. Voltaire, Paine, Ingersol, the Encyclopedists, the Deists, the
atheists and the Freethinkers and religious skeptics generally have effectively
torn away and trampled under foot the outer garments of Bible myths, all
unaware that these clothed the body of truth. The revelation of the absurdity
of Bible allegory, taken as supposed history, broadcast by these efforts, set
on fire in millions of minds a burning resentment against the whole institution
of religion, and the Bible, theology and priestcraft as its criminal
accessories. They see nothing in religion worth saving. This upsweep of
rationalism, as reaction against centuries of omnicredulous faith, threatens to
abolish religion from the earth. This is the price the world is paying for the
loss of symbolic genius in the third century. Nothing will save the cult of
genuine religion from this menacing hand but the quick restoration of the
knowledge that there is no absurdity and nonsense, but only grandeur of truth,
when the scriptures are read as sublime spiritual allegories instead of
histories. Nothing will stay the besom of devastation but the quick recovery of
the lost language of symbolism. For nothing else will bring to light the
treasure beneath the veil.
Massey maintains (Book of the
Beginnings, Vol. II, p. 180) that when the Hebrew scriptures were
translated into Greek in the third century B.C. by some Alexandrian Jews, the
process of elimination of the esoteric is very visible. Dates were altered to
conceal the true sense. And after the allegories had been transformed into
histories, the true or symbolic reading according to the principles of the
secret tradition was forbidden to be taught in schools. The Pharisees were so
fearful of the
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popular despoliation of the
Apocryphal wisdom by the unworthy that they sought to prevent the teaching of
writing to the masses.
Testimony that Massey is correct in
saying that myth and history inevitably tend to merge into one is found in the
book of a writer whose aim is to disprove the mythical interpretation of the
scriptures. T. J. Thorburn, in his The Mythical Interpretation of the
Gospels (p. 120), writes:
"The myth proper is an
explanation of some occurrence in nature--not in history--which deals chiefly
with legend in its early stages. The personifications which take place in
myths, however, help to link nature with history and to parallel events and
persons in history with the phenomena of nature. Thus the legendary and even
historical stories often become paralleled, and even confused with mythical
ones. . . . In this way it is possible that John (and in a certain sense . . .
Jesus also) became analogues of personified natural phenomena."
Very instructive for us today is
Thorburn’s next sentence:
"To the modern and European
mind this process obscures and weakens the historical character of the human
counterpart; to the ancient and Oriental mind it merely added vividness and
reality to his picture."
It seems likely that the writer of
this sentence did not catch the profounder significance of his own words, which
hint at a superficial meaning when really great truth is being uttered. He did
not realize that "the human counterpart" of the mythical analogue was
man collectively, and not only some characters in Gospel narrative. And what
dialectic or logical justification there is in his using the word
"merely" in his last sentence it is difficult to see. It seems to be
there as evidence of the insatiate impulsion in orthodox minds to cast a slight
upon pagan systems at every turn. One of the high purposes of the mythicizing
tendency of ancient scripture was directly to "add vividness and
reality" to the productions. The writer’s insertion of the word
"merely" commits him to saying in effect that the adding of vividness
and reality to sacred narrative was something trivial and inconsequential. If
the method succeeded in adding vividness and reality, it at least accomplished
something that has been lamentably lacking in later presentation of religious
material. But Thorburn, in the very effort to discredit the utility of ancient
mythicism, has splendidly stated its entire validity. His charge that the
admixture of myth in scripture has obscured and
98
weakened the full force of its
educative power has a semblance of truth in it only because the interwoven myth
has been uncomprehended. The presence of myth in the record has been a
stumbling block only because all power to interpret it had been lost. It still
remains true that the understanding use of myths by the ancients did vastly
enhance the vividness and reality of the truths thus poetically embellished.
But it turns out that a statement meant to deprecate the influence of the myth
really concedes the claim for its high utility. Thorburn’s unpremeditated
admission states with great precision the signal distinction between the
ancient sagacious use of the myth and the modern ignorant miscomprehension of
its function.
Massey divides humanity into two
classes, the knowing and the simple, and says that the knowing ones kept back
the esoteric explanation of the myths to let the belief of the untutored masses
in the real history take root. "The simple ones, like Bunyan, ‘fell
suddenly into an allegory about the journey on the way to glory,’ which
allegory, they were led to believe, was purely matter of fact."
The great truth of history remains
to be faced, Massey insists, that the Gospel of "Equinoctial
Christolatry" was written before, with a totally different rendering, and
that the sayings, dogmas, doctrines, types and symbols, including both the
cross and the Christ, did not originate where we may have just made
acquaintance with them. This cryptology was written before in the books of
secret wisdom, now interpretable according to the recovered Gnosis. It was
pre-extant in the types which now have been traced from the lowest root to
highest branch. It was inscribed before in the records of the past drawn on the
starry skies. The truth is that the real origines of the cult of true
Christolatry (not Christianity) have never yet been reached; hardly indeed have
they even been suspected, because of the supposed "New Beginning" in
human history which was taken for granted by those who knew no further. The
evidence for all this, however, could not have been adduced before the
mythology, typology and Christology of Egypt were discovered in the keeping of
the mummies and disinterred from the vaults of the dead. Now, fortunately, the
lost language of celestial allegory is being restored, chiefly through the
resurrection of ancient Egypt, and scriptures can be read in the sense in which
they were originally written.
In The Book of the Beginnings (Vol.
II, p. 226) Massey says that
99
one of two things is sure:
"either the Book of Enoch contains the Hebrew history in allegory,
or the celestial allegory is the Hebrew history. The parallel is
perfect." Nor is there any escape by sticking one’s head in the sand and
foolishly fancying that the writer of the Book of Enoch amused himself
by transforming a Hebrew history into celestial allegory and concealing its
significance by leaving out all the personal names. "On the contrary it is
the allegory which has been turned into the later history." Sacred history
may and does begin with mythology; but mythology does not commence with
history.
Massey’s claim here has been
disputed as a farcical fancy; but it can not be waved aside with a mere snort
of ridicule when the evidence has to be faced. The Book of Enoch certainly
contains the same characters as the sacred and secret history of the Jews, and
as these belong to the astronomical allegory in the one book, that is good
evidence of their being mythical in the other. There is no doubt that the Book
of Enoch is what it claimed to be, the book of the revolutions of the
heavenly bodies, with no relation whatever to human history. It should be
subjoined to Massey’s last statement that he does not mean that the celestial
allegory, while it has no reference to human history objectively, is not all
the while the allegorical portrayal of the meaning of all human history. The
same is true of the book of Revelation.
Tersely he says that the Hebrew
miracles are Egyptian myths, and as such, and only as such, can they be
explained in harmony with the nature and reasoning principles of the mind. Held
as miracles they are amenable neither to natural fact nor to rational rating.
"The sacred writings of the world are not concerned with geography,
chronology or human history. The historic spirit is not there. This is so in
writing as late as the Talmud." What started out to be the type of
history came to be taken as the matter of history, as ignorance
submerged the keener diagnosis. The hidden significance fades out from less
competent mentality and slips away, letting in more and more the
"historical" assumptions. How slow the modern mind has been to see
this process at work! Massey promises to restore the lost key hidden in Egypt
by the data of comparative religion, which will be remorselessly applied.
Godfrey Higgins is found standing
beside Massey in these general conclusions. In The Anacalypsis (p. 366)
he writes his rebuke to ecclesiastical insincerity in forceful terms:
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"How can any one consider the
infinite correlations found in comparative study and not see the mythologic
nature of nearly all epic poetry and early ‘history’?"
"Mr. Faber, Mr. Bryant and
Nimrod have proved this past doubt. . . . Our priests have taken the emblems
for the reality. . . . Our priests will be very angry and deny all this. In all
nations, in all times, there has been a secret religion; in all nations, in all
time the fact has been denied."
Another passage declares vigorously
that it all raises a very unpleasant doubt in his mind, after long
consideration, as to whether "we really have one history uncontaminated
with judicial astrology." He adds that Sir William Drummond has shown that
the names of most of the places in Joshua are astrological, and Gen.
Vallency has shown that Jacob’s prophecy is astrological also, with a direct
reference to the constellations. To this probably Jacob referred when he bade
his children read in the book of the heavens the fate of themselves and their
descendants.
Higgins quotes Bryant as saying that
it is evident that most of the deified personages never existed, but were mere
titles of the Deity, or of the Sun, Deity’s universal symbol, and for our solar
system, Deity’s embodiment, as was earlier shown by Macrobius. Nor was there
ever any such folly perpetrated in ancient history as the supposition that the gods
of the Gentile world had been natives of the countries where they were
worshipped. Bryant well observes that it was a chief study of the learned to
register the legendary stories concerning the gods, to conciliate the
absurdities and to arrange the whole into a chronological series--a fruitless
and drudging labor. "For there are in these fables such inconsistencies
and contradictions as no act nor industry can remedy. . . . This misled Bishop
Cumberland, Waker, Pearson, Petavius, Scaliger, with numberless other learned
men, and among the foremost the great Newton." As to the last name, it is
not so certain that the great Newton was so completely misled. He states in his
Principia that he was led to his great discoveries by many implications
of the esoteric study, especially in the books of Jacob Böhme, the shoemaker
esotericist. Bryant then goes on to demonstrate that the whole of such
material, if literally understood, was a mass of falsity and rubbish.
Higgins makes the direct charge that
sublime philosophical truths or virtues have been clothed with bodies and
converted into living crea-
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tures. Starting with the plausible
attempt to screen them from "the vulgar eye," the purpose of
concealment worked with such thoroughness that the generality of men came at
last to treat them in a literal sense. He attributes the change which resulted
in the loss of the esoteric sense to the inevitable fluctuations that come in
the run of evolutionary progress.
But the chief fault he places where
Massey and others lay it--at the door of a designing priesthood:
"That the rabble were the
victims of a degrading superstition I have no doubt. This was produced by the
knavery of the ancient priests, and it is in order to reproduce this effect
that the modern priests have misrepresented the doctrines of their
predecessors. By vilifying and running down the religion of the ancients they
have thought they could persuade their votaries that their new religion was necessary
for the good of mankind; a religion which in consequence of their
corruptions has been found to be in practice much worse and more injurious to
the interests of society than the older."
This is frank talk, but nearly every
scholar who has covered the ground of the ancient situation with a mind not set
in advance against the pagan religions, has felt that this is essentially the
truth. One such expression may be given. It is from the pen of the modern Harry
Elmer Barnes (The Twilight of Christianity, p. 415):
"What might have happened to
western society if the teachings of Jesus had been literally applied, we can
not well know with any precision. There seems little doubt, however, that the
total results of Christianity to date have been a decisive liability to the
human race. There is no doubt whatever that Christianity has actually produced
more suffering, misery, bloodshed, intolerance and bigotry than it has ever
assuaged or suppressed.
Massey (Luniolatry, p. 2)
says there is nothing insane or irrational in mythical representation when the
allegorical connotation is thoroughly understood.
"The insanity lies in mistaking
it for human history or Divine Revelation. Mythology is the repository of man’s
most ancient science, and what concerns us chiefly is this--when truly
interpreted once more, it is destined to be the death of those false theologies
to which it has unwittingly given birth."
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Allegories misinterpreted as
supposed history have created a veritable cult of the unreal which is blindly
believed.
Commenting on the cry that he would
take the living Jesus away from believers, he retorts that we can be none the
poorer for losing that which never was a real possession, but only a
psychological wraith which deluded us with its seeming substance. To find the
true we must first let go the false. In Goethe’s words, until the half-gods go,
the whole gods can not come.
Massey says pointedly that there is
no greater fraud than that which grew out of the historical interpretation of
early legend. This factitious "history" is forever at war, he
affirms, with all that is prehistorically true. It not only misinterprets the
legend, which would have its own value if rightly scanned, but misrepresents
the actual history of early days.
Massey stands firmly on the blunt
assertion that the doctrines and dogmas of Christian theology are derived from
Egypt and its arcana, and holds that this must be admitted when better
acquaintance with that mine of recondite wisdom is made. The door to its adyta
is only now opening. The pre-Christian religion was founded on a knowledge of
natural and verifiable facts, but the Christian cult was founded on egregious
faith which swallowed all that was impossible in fact and unnatural in
phenomena. Current orthodoxy is based upon a deluding idealism, derived from
literalized legend and misconstrued mythology. The ancients handed over to
later generations the science of the human soul, and the Christians have lost
it. They substituted the phantom of faith for the knowledge of truth. They
propagated a religion that could live only on blind belief, and persecuted all
those who would not blindly believe. They shut out the light of nature from
their sealed domicile and compelled all others to live in the same dark prison.
The ancient legends and myths do not
tell us lies, Massey insists. The men who created them did not deal falsely
with us or with nature. "All the falsity lies in their having been
falsified through ignorantly mistaking mythology for divine revelation and
allegory for historic truth."
Lord Raglan cites Prof. W. Gronbeck
(Vol. I, p. 249) in a passage that shows true discernment of the situation
which has bred no end of confusion in all philosophical effort:
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"In the history of the
sacrificial hall the individual warrior is sunk in the god, or, which is the
same thing, in the ideal personification of the clan, the hero. This form of
history causes endless confusion among later historians when they try their
best to arrange the mythical traditions into chronological happenings and the
deeds of the clan into annals and lists of kings, and the confusion grows to
absurdity when rationalistic logicians strive by the light of sound sense to
extricate the kernel of history from the husks of superstition."
This is an accurate, though partial,
analysis of the general course which esoteric degeneration has taken,
supporting Massey’s robust contention that the Märchen are the distorted
wrack and debris of the myths. Until this basic perception of the truth of the
relation between general folk lore and religious origins is gained, the efforts
of modern studentship to evaluate the place and significance of this important
aspect of human interest will be so much groping in the dark and continually
missing the truth.
A part of the process of
degeneration of esoteric mythology appertaining closely to Christianity is well
delineated by G. R. S. Mead in his fine work on Gnostic Christianity, Fragments
of a Faith Forgotten (p. 118). He writes that in its popular origins the
Christian movement had deeply entangled itself with the popular Jewish
traditions, which were innocent of all philosophical or kabalistic mysticism,
that is, esotericism. But as time went on, either men of greater education
joined the ranks or the leaders were forced to study more widely to meet the
arguments of educated opponents, and consequently more liberal views obtained a
hold among a number of Christians. In time also other great religious
traditions and philosophies contributed elements to the popular stream. All
such more latitudinarian views, however, were still looked upon with suspicion
by the "orthodox." And before long even the moderate esoteric
proclivities of Clement and Origen were regarded as a grave danger; so that
with the triumph of narrow orthodoxy and the resultant hostility to learning,
Origen himself was at last anathematized. It may not be conclusive proof of the
evil transformation of good myth into bad history to cite this broad change in
Christian polity in those early centuries; but the fact that such a change of
posture took place lends to the contention that trends in the direction of
literalism and historization of scripture were strongly in current at the time.
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Express confirmation of one of the
stages described by Mead is at hand in the statement of an eminent modern
theologian, Benjamin W. Bacon, of Yale Divinity School, in his work, Jesus
and Paul (p. 23). He declares that by creditable estimate Christianity lost
one half of its following to Marcion and other Gnostic "heretics"
bent on tearing it away from its Jewish associations and making it over in the
true likeness of a Greek Mystery cult of individual spiritual realization. This
was the movement which Mead has spoken of, due to the influx of Platonic and
esoteric philosophies from Alexandria and Hellenic centers. It was an effort on
the part of the more knowing ones to save Christianity from the debacle toward
which it was fast heading through the corruption of the sound esoteric
teaching. Almost every apologist for Christianity has hailed the defeat of the
Hellenic philosophy’s incursion into the early theology of the Church as the
triumph of the faith and the salvation of Christianity. A fuller treatment of
this chapter of Christian history is reserved for other connections in the
study. It must suffice for the moment to say here that if by the repulse of
Greek philosophy the Church gained the ignorant masses of the people, it not
only failed to help their unintelligence, but further it lost its own power to
bring spiritual light and rational nourishment to the more illumined of
mankind.
It may be that there is an exoteric
rendering of spiritual allegory that would purvey true meaning to the lower
brackets in the intellectual scale. The supposition prevails that the truths of
life can be made simple, for the simple. It has rarely worked out that way. In
all historic cases where the esoteric rendition has been lost and the exoteric
substituted, the popular conceptions of the profounder purport have become, not
truth simplified, but truth distorted into untruth. There perhaps could and
should be the milk for babes as well as the meat for stronger digestion. But,
as it has worked out in actuality in the course of history, the exoteric milk,
once it is dispensed among the populace, always tends to become churned into a
little-nourishing cheese. Instead of instructing the simpler minds in simpler
aspects of the truth, it ends by plunging them into myriad forms of outright
error. In the historical sequel, it is sadly to be said, it has been proven
that esotericism has carried the true meaning and exotericism only a false
caricature. The exoteric doctrine has ever mistaught the popular mind. So
Massey says: "An exoteric rendering has taken place of the esoteric
representa-
105
tion, which contained the only true
interpretation." And he gives the reason: wisdom designed for the
enlightenment of the inner spiritual consciousness of evolved men "was
converted into history" for the secular mind and "all turned
topsy-turvy by changing" the soul of all humanity into one mortal man.
"In this way the noble, full,
flowing river of old Egypt’s wisdom ended in a quagmire of prophecies for the
Jews and a dried-up wilderness of desert sands for the Christians. And on these
shifting sands the ‘historic’ Christians reared their temple of the eternal which
is giving way at last because it was not founded on the solid rock, and because
no amount of blood would ever suffice to solidify the sand or form a concrete
foundation or even a buttress for the crumbling building."
The Gospel of the Christians, he
expounds, began with a collection of Sayings of Jesus, "fatuously
supposed to have been an historic teacher of that name." It originated, he
implies, as a set of moral apothegms, but ended as believed history. Even the
Jerusalem, which was a name to denote the heavenly Paradise of spiritual bliss,
or the Jerusalem above, became in ignorant minds the Jerusalem on the map! And
the Exodus of the children of Israel from this mundane sphere in a passage
across the Reed Sea of this mortal life to the home of celestial glory, became
the screaming farce of 2,125,000 marching men, women, children and camp
followers, parading about for forty years over Sinai’s and Arabia’s desert
sands, trailing millions of sheep, oxen, and cattle, subsisting in an arid land
with little vegetation and water! Verily "history" must be strained
to fairy-tale credulity, when it has to stretch its possibilities to
accommodate the free sweep of imaginative typology. Massey concludes one
sentence with the clause--"in an Exodus from Egypt which can no longer be
considered historical," an Exodus that he says elsewhere "was never
more than frankly allegorical." That Massey is not merely indulging in
iconoclastic swashbuckling, it is to be noted that whatever pretense the Exodus
from Egypt had to being considered as history has been demolished at one blow
by Moffatt’s proper translation of the Red Sea as the "Reed Sea," a
term used by the Egyptians to denote the human body, which is seven-eighths
water, and must be crossed by the evolving soul to reach the Promised Land.
When it is seen that the Exodus of the Old Testament is finally identical with
the Resurrection in the New, it can be
106
granted that the literal rendering
of the Israelites’ journey from Egypt’s bondage to Canaan’s milk and honey becomes
excellent material for light comedy. But light comedy comes close to turning
into heavy tragedy when it is further realized that the soul’s dramatized
bondage to the flesh in the "Egypt" of the body, has likewise been
construed into the "historical captivities" of the Jews in Assyria,
Babylon and Nineveh!
Incidentally it may be interjected
that according to the evidence so far collected in Massey’s day (at least to
1900), there has never been found on the monuments of Egypt any mention or
record of the Israelites’ sojourn in Egypt, or their having played a part in
Egyptian history save in one case. Petrie discovered on a stele erected by King
Merenptah II a reference to "the people of Ysiraal." "But,"
says Massey, "there is nothing whatever in the inscription of King
Merenptah corresponding to a corroborative of the Biblical story of the
Israelites in the land of Egypt on their exodus into the land of Canaan."
The inscription found by Petrie says that the people of Ysiraal in Syria were
cut up root and branch by Merenptah. Massey insists that "Israel in Syria
was not Israel in Egypt." Israel in Egypt was not an ethnical entity, but
the spiritual "children of Ra" in the "lower Egypt of Amenta,
which is entirely mythical." Mythical, yes; but typical of the real home
of living mortals in this "lower Egypt of Amenta" that is the
dramatic ritual name for a planet called Earth,--a fact, it must be confessed
which even Massey did not discern. Herodotus, affirms Kenealy, makes no mention
of the Israelites--nor of Solomon.
The Book of Revelation, Massey
contends, is the drama of the astrological mysteries and has been mistaken for
human history; and the mythical aeonial cataclysm at the end of the cycle has
been misread into the catastrophic "end of the world." Revelation,
he goes on, has been commonly assumed to constitute a historic link between
the Old Testament and the New.
"It has been taken as a
supplement to the Gospels, as if the history of Jesus had been continued into
the wedded life after the marriage of the Bride and the Lamb, and that they
dwelt together ever after in that New Jerusalem which ‘came down out of heaven’
‘as a bride adorned for her husband,’ when the tabernacle of God which was to
dwell with man took the place of the Old Jerusalem that was destroyed by the
Romans. The
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present contention is that the book
is and always has been inexplicable because it was based upon the symbolism of
the Egyptian astronomical mythology without the Gnosis or ‘the meaning which
hath wisdom’ that is absolutely necessary for an explanation of the
subject-matter; and because the debris of the ancient wisdom has been turned to
account as data for pre-Christian prophecy that was supposed to have had its
fulfilment in Christian history."
Besides being the parent of a mass
of false religious "history," mythicism evidently has been the father
of endless ecclesiastical folly. One aspect of this folly has been the
misinterpretation of Revelation as aspects of world history, when, as
Massey says,
"the book as it stands has no
intrinsic value and very little meaning until the fragments of ancient lore
have been collated, correlated and compared with the original mythos and
eschatology of Egypt."
Revelation has been found to be cognate with the Enoch
manuscripts and, says Massey,
"Enoch, like John, was in the
spirit. His internal sight was opened and he beheld a vision which was in the
heavens. But his vision was admittedly astronomical. In it he ‘beheld the
secrets of the heavens and of paradise according to its divisions’ (Ch. 41).
The record of his vision is called ‘the book of the revolutions of the
luminaries of heaven,’ and is said to contain ‘the entire account of the world
forever, until a new work shall have been effected, which will be eternal’"
(Ch. 71).
Much more material of the sort shows
Enoch to have been the source of Revelation and the contents of
both books to be astronomical allegory. Why scholars have been so slow to see
the intimate relation between Revelation and its obvious prototype, the Enoch,
is another of the riddles of ecclesiastical history which cry aloud for
solution.
It was no less a Christian celebrity
than Albertus Magnus of the Medieval Church who uttered the following, relative
to a connection between Christianity and astrology:
"The Mysteries of the
Incarnation, from the Conception on to the Ascension into heaven, are shown us
on the face of the sky and are signified by the stars."
The sole fulfillment of prophecy,
according to Massey, was astronomical, in the lunar and stellar cycles, marking
the stages of cosmic
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evolution. The basis of Massey’s
conclusions is well laid if his contention is true--and he presents massive
evidence for it--that all that went into the making of the Christian historical
set-up was long pre-extant as something quite other than history, was in fact
expressly non-historical, in the Egyptian mythology and eschatology. For when
the sun at the Easter equinox entered the sign of the Fishes, about 255 B.C.,
the Jesus who stands as the founder of the so-called Christianity was at least
ten thousand years of age, and had been traveling hither as the Ever Coming One
through all this preceding time. During that vast period the young Fulfiller
had been periodically mothered by the Virgin (of the zodiac!), with Seb
(equated by many symbolic indication with Joseph) for his reputed
foster-father, and with Anup, the Egyptian baptizer (equated likewise with
John) as his herald and precursor in the wilderness. All that time he had
fought the battle with Satan in the desert or on the mount during forty days
and nights each year. During those ten thousand years that same incarnation of
the divine ideal, in the character of Iusa, the Coming Son, had saturated the
mind of Egypt with its exalting influence. Little did the men of that epoch
dream that their ideal figure of man’s divinity would in time be rendered
historical as a man of flesh and be hailed as the fulfiller of astronomical
prophecy.
If more evidence be needed to show
that the origin of the data of the Christ’s "life" was in the
astronomical mythos, it is at hand in the historical datum that there was in
the early Church a diversity of opinion among the Christian Fathers as to
whether their Christ was born in the winter solstice or in the vernal equinox.
According to Clement of Alexandria the twenty-fifth of March was held by the
Christian following to have been the natal day of the Lord from heaven. Others
maintained that this was the day of the incarnation. But in Rome the festival
of Lady’s Day was celebrated on the twenty-fifth of March, in
commemoration of the miraculous conception in the womb of the virgin, who gave
birth to the divine child at Christmas, nine months afterwards. According to
the Gospel of James, or the Protevangelium, the birth was in the equinox
and consequently not at Christmas. It is as clear as any fact can be that this
uncertainty as to the birth-date of the Christos and the argument as to whether
it occurred at the solstice or the equinox imply indubitably that the birth
itself was not being considered as transpiring historically, or as an
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event, but as an item of
astronomical symbolism. The very fact that it was placed on such a cardinal
point in the year as the solstice, or the equinox, is practically decisive on
this point. Indubitably the birthday of the Messiah was hardly ever thought of
as a date, but rather always as a point of significance. This was so true in
the ancient days that almost it could be said that it was the date that was the
significant thing rather than the event allegedly transpiring on it. If the
birth of Jesus at Bethlehem had been regarded as purely historical, the only
point at issue would have been simply: on what day of the year did it
occur? Why was it held that the blessed event necessarily had to occur
at the most pivotal point in the solar allegory? Of course the only true answer
to all this is that all ancient religion was clothed in the solar myth. No
denial of this general fact can stand. On the basis of this datum, so well
known to comparative religion students, so little known to the hypnotized
occupants of church pews, how can it be denied that in the minds of all people
of intelligence in antiquity the fulfillment of sacred "prophecy" was
to come in the cloak and guise of astronomical periodicity, and not as
once-upon-a-time or once-for-all history? Not only, avers Massey, did the later
scribes follow the scheme and ground-plan of Egyptian solar mythicism, but they
seem actually to have gone so far as to copy the earlier scriptures.
Khebt, the birthplace of the child
in "lower Egypt," and Mitzraim, Egypt, are names of the old Sabaean
birthplace in the north belonging to the celestial allegory, and were later
applied geographically to Egypt the country. The Egypt of the Hebrew writings is
a "country" in the astronomical myth, the "land" of mental
bondage, bordered by a "Red Sea" that was never on any map save that
ancient uranograph or chart of the heavens picturing the details of the soul or
solar myth under astrological signatures. Khebt, Mitzraim, Egypt are names of
that lower house of nature where the soul descends to have its incubation and
death until the course of growth is finished. At the end of the cycle of
mundane experience it hears its Father’s voice exclaiming: "Out of Egypt
have I called my son." The Exodus out of Egypt, under that or another
name, "is the common property of all mythology," says Massey.
Another most important elucidation
from his pen is the following (Book of the Beginnings, I, p. 186):
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"The earliest nomes of Egypt
were astronomes, the divisions of the stars, whence came the name of astronomy;
not merely a naming but a noming of the stars into groups, divisions and nomes.
. . . Enough at present to affirm that the earliest chart was celestial and
that its divisions and names were afterwards geographically adopted in many
lands from one common Egyptian original."
Lest this critically vital
pronouncement on the science of ancient astrography fail to receive its due
consideration in the counsels of modern studentship, it should be added for
greater explicitness here that the divisions, localities, features, together
with their names, found in all ancient religiography were taken directly in the
first instance from the early allegorical charts of the starry heavens and scattered
over the maps and insinuated into the histories of all ancient civilized
lands. (Perhaps the work most clearly demonstrating this procedure and its
startling results is Godfrey Higgins’ grand old tome, The Anacalypsis, to
which reference should be had for fuller evidence.) He who would interpret the
sage scriptures must begin with the uranograph, where consummate wisdom--not
childish fancy--first wrote the allegory of man’s true history. It is a fact of
stupendous significance for those who can see what the ancient books are
teaching that in the primitive books of early Egypt Hermes instructs Taht in
the nature of the "tabernacle of the zodiacal circle."
Massey can at least cite the Gnostic
wing of early Christianity as supporting his conclusions in this field. He
writes:
"The Gnostics asserted truly
that celestial persons and scenes had been transferred to earth in the
gospel and that it is only within the pleroma or the zodiac that we can
identify the originals of both." (The Natural Genesis, II, 422.)
This does not need to rest on his
bare assertion. Christianity’s own historian, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons in the
second century, corroborates it: "The Gnostics truly declared that all the
supernatural transactions asserted in the Gospels ‘were counterparts (or
representations) of what took place above.’" (Irenaeus, Book I, Ch. VII,
p. 2.)
Further Christian testimony along
the same line comes from that other early historian of the cult, Eusebius,
whose statements are often important, however (as universally recognized and
admitted) twisted and unreliable they generally are (Eusebius, b. ii, C. XVII).
On this
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history Massey bases the statement
that "it is admitted by Eusebius that the canonical Christian gospels
and epistles were the ancient writings of the Essenes or Therapeutae reproduced
in the name of Jesus." Eusebius did not admit things he should have
admitted, and he certainly was the last historian to admit anything hostile to
the Christian movement. If he has admitted this point it was because he could
not avoid it. It must therefore be true. And if true, there are no words at
immediate command to acclaim the significance of this amazing admission. It
concedes the whole truth of Massey’s great volumes, and virtually does the same
for the contentions of the present work. The Gospels and Epistles of the New
Testament were ancient books of the Essenes! Eusebius was merely testifying to
what nearly all men of intelligence in his age knew to be the truth, that the
Gospels, Epistles and Apocrypha were just portions of the mass of arcane
esoteric wisdom transmitted, for centuries orally in the Mysteries, and later
in written form, from remote antiquity to their age. One can envision the
different, and happier, course that medieval and modern Occidental history
might have taken had this admission of the Christian historian not been hidden
out of sight for long centuries. The ghost of those dead centuries might
justifiably come forth and demand to know why this admission was buried. And
the living voice of the present generation, torn with a titanic strife that has
grown out of ideologies that were warped by the lack of fundamental truth in
traditional religions, might with ample justice rise to demand why the
admission is not proclaimed anew at this juncture.
That the Sermon on the Mount is a
derivative from ancient arcane religions is seen in the light of the fact that
the Seventh Book of Hermes is entitled: "His Secret Sermon in the Mount of
Regeneration and the Profession of Silence." The Hermetic books are of
great antiquity, perhaps the oldest in the world. Isaac Myer, the Kabalist
scholar, so declared them.
Surely the witness of such a high
Patristic as Clement of Alexandria is worthy of credence. He says that all who
have treated of divine matters have always hid the principle of things and
delivered the truth enigmatically by signs and symbols and allegories and
metaphors, "yet this foundation of primitive fable has been converted into
our basis of fact." We have already noted Diodorus’ statement that
the Egyptians
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regarded the Greeks as impostors
because they reissued the ancient mythology as their own history.
Justin Martyr, second century Church
Father, dashes the foundation stones from under many an arrant Christian claim
when he tells the Romans that by
"declaring the Logos, the first
begotten Lord, our master Jesus Christ, to be born of a virgin mother, without
any human mixture, and to be crucified and dead, and to have risen again and
ascended into heaven, we say no more than what you say of those whom you style
the sons of Jove."
This was written at the early date
of the second century, when the new cult found it desirable to emphasize its
kinship with paganism, which it did especially through the words of this same
Justin Martyr. But only two centuries later the members of this new faith could
afford to flout the pagan mythological foundations and brazenly proclaim the
uniqueness of their doctrines and rituals.
Zeal to transform allegory into
history was not daunted even by the incredible difficulties of changing
mythical personages into real human figures. Thus Sut-Typhon, or Sevekh, the
crocodile-headed divinity, type of the power of nature buried in the atom, the
energies of life submerged in water, the symbol of matter, was converted into
Satan, the personal devil. In this line hardly anything could be more
revelatory of modern mental ineptitude in the face of the myths than the
assertions of such a learned scholar as the Egyptologist, Budge, who after
reciting the details of the "life" of the Egyptian Father-God Osiris,
that he suffered death and mutilation at the hands of his enemies, that the
fourteen cut portions of his body were scattered about and buried over the land
of Egypt, that his sister-wife Isis sought him sorrowing and at length found
him, that she fanned him with her wings and gave him air, that she raised up
his reconstituted body whole and living, united anew with him and brought forth
his son Horus, and that Osiris then became God and King of the underworld,--Budge
asks us to take this as the literal history of a man on earth! He says that his
body was probably buried in the tomb at Abydos. An endless amount of similar
fabulous material we have been asked to take as factual history. Is it to be wondered
at that the counsels of sanity in a world dominated by such delusions now and
again plunge the nations into a vast general wreckage?
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Josephus argues that he is under the
necessity, when recounting one of the Mosaic "miracles," of
"relating this history as it is described in the sacred books," i.e.,
allegorically, or in the style in which it was given in the writings which were
considered divine because they did not relate to human events.
Drews, one of the writers who in the
nineteenth century worked at the mythical interpretation of the Gospels,
corroborates Massey’s identification of Joseph with the Egyptian earth-god Seb,
as the foster-father of the divine child:
"Joseph . . . was originally a
god, and in reality the whole of the family and home life of the Messiah Jesus
took place among the gods. It was only reduced to that of a human being in
lowly circumstances by the fact that Paul described the descent of the Messiah
upon earth as an assumption of poverty and a relinquishment of his heavenly
splendor. Hence when the myth was turned into history, Christ was transformed
into a poor man in the economic sense of the word, while Joseph, the divine
artificer and father of the sun, became an ordinary carpenter."
In his famous Life of Jesus (1835,
Vol. II, Sec. 48) D. F. Strauss states that in the ancient Church the most
reflective among the Fathers considered that the celestial Voice of the Old
Testament was not like an ordinary voice, produced by vibrations of the air and
apparent to the organs of sense, but an internal impression which God produced
in those with whom he designed to communicate; and it is in this way that
Origen and Theodore of Mopsuete have maintained previously that the apparition
at the time of the baptism of Jesus was a vision and not a natural reality.
Simple people, says Origen, take lightly the great cosmic processes described
in the book; but those who think more profoundly believe that in their dreams
they have had evidence by their corporeal senses "when it has simply been
a movement of their minds." Had the discriminating practical wisdom
evidenced by Origen here been generally exercised throughout the run of the
centuries by the simple and the wise alike, the annals of religion would not
have contained the record of hallucination and fanatical credulity which they
hold.
Drews and Graetz alike regard
Josephus’ mention of John the Baptist as "a shameless interpolation."
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Is it an inconsequential thing that
J. M. Robertson (Christianity and Mythology, p. 82 ff.) can write the
following?
"That Joshua is a purely
mythical personage was long ago decided by the historical criticism of the
school of Colenso and Kuenen; that he was originally a solar deity can be
established at least as satisfactorily as the solar character of Moses, if not
as that of Samson."
He notes that in the Semitic
tradition, wherein is preserved a variety of myths, which the Bible-makers, for
obvious reasons, suppressed or transformed, Joshua is the son of the mythical
Miriam, that is, he was probably an ancient Palestinian Sun-God. Dupuis (L’Origine
de Tous les Cultes) places John the Baptist among purely mythical
personages and in harmony with many other writers identifies his name with that
of Oannes, the Babylonian fish-avatar of Berosus’ account, the Ea (Hea) of the
more ancient Sumerians.
In his effort to refute the mythical
interpretation T. J. Thorburn shows glaringly the bewilderment of scholars
anent this theme when he affirms (p. 320) that in the case of the nature-cults
the spring revival of the god is simply typical of the annual resurrection of
life in nature. This is putting the cart before the horse surely. He goes on to
prove the infinite "superiority" and greater "nobility" of
Christianity over the pagan mythological idea by saying that in the Christian
resurrection (as given by St. Paul in I Corinthians, 15) both Jesus
himself and with him all believers rise to a new and more glorious life, in
which a "spiritual body" replaces the material or "natural
body." The death and revival of the cult-god is an annual matter; Jesus
and the Christian die and are raised from the dead "once for all."
How great the obtuseness which prevented the scholars from seeing that the
pagan typism did not end with the sprouting grain and budding leaf of spring,
but from that as type proceeded to the very thing that is claimed to have been
the sole possession of Christianity! It is not easy to picture sixteen
centuries of the best acumen of the western world floundering over the simple
matter of recognizing that the ancient pagans set their cycle of religious
expression to the time and tune of nature’s solar hymn, as at once the most
luminous and moving suggestion of the cyclical advance of man’s divinity.
Unless we deny to men of the stature of Plato any sagacity beyond childishness,
it is naturally assumable that they did not, as Thorburn
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thinks, lose the spiritual reality
in the natural typism. The solar myth was not to celebrate the sprouting of the
corn; the sprouting of the grain was called upon to help the mind frame a more
realistic conception of the resurrection of the divine seed that had been, like
the grain, buried in the earth of flesh and sense. The sages used nature to
vivify spiritual processes. As most poets have done, they worshipped spirit
through its reflection in nature. They saw that an approach to a lively
apprehension of the deeper aspects of truth was vastly facilitated and enhanced
by the contemplation of their counterpart in the physical world. How false to
charge that the pagan world had only the physical fact and could not go beyond
it! The evidence is mountainous in bulk that pagan eyes pierced through the
phenomena of nature to the truth of higher levels. Pagan spiritual discernment
was all the keener for its close beholding of the natural world. The assumption
that in his primitive infantilism the pagan stopped at nature, while the
Christian went on to God, is a rank heresy. It is defied by all the fact of
antiquity. Rebuttal of this gratuitous depreciation of past civilization is
firmly based upon the early production of scriptures of the most exalted
wisdom. The authors of these high revelations knew the realm of sublimer truth
that lay beyond nature, and they also knew the mighty fact that nature was the
outer visible analogue of this other world of truth. Then as now, esoteric
genius grasped the distinction between outer and inner, but ancient sapiency
recognized better than modern the essential kinship of the two.
An interesting sidelight is cast on
our discussion by G. R. S. Mead, already quoted, who in his Fragments of a
Faith Forgotten (Gnosticism), says:
"With much sincerity our
Gnostics found these numbers and processes in the prologue to Genesis
and elsewhere in the Old Covenant Library; . . . But when we find that they
treated the Gospel-legends also not as history but as allegory, and not only as
allegory but as symbolical of the drama of initiation, the matter becomes of
deep interest" to the student of religion.
In his The Story of Chaldea Zenaïde
A. Ragozin says that the tenth chapter of Genesis is the oldest and most
important document in existence concerning the origins of races and nations,
but in order properly to understand it and appreciate its value and bearing,
"it must not be
116
forgotten that each name in the list
is that of a race, a people or a tribe, not that of a man."
To substantiate his statement on
this point Ragozin cites the authority of "many scientists and
churchmen" and quotes no less a Church Father than St. Augustine, who
pointedly says that the names in the tenth chapter of Genesis represent
"nations not men." (De Civitate Dei, XVII, 3.) So again we
find racial entities or groups made to masquerade exoterically as
"men."
Much data from various sources go to
prove that the New Testament--as now known--was compiled from esoteric texts,
which were themselves covered by a thick film of allegory and even veiled
behind misleading "blinds," the "dark sayings" of fiction
and parable. It is unthinkable, impossible that any merely human brain could
have concocted the alleged "life" of the Jewish Jesus, culminating in
the awful tragedy of Calvary. How, then, came this "life" to be
written? Esoteric comprehension answers that it came from the ignorant
literalization of the story of the Christ-Aeon of the Gnostic and Essene books,
and from the writings of the ancient Tanaim, who connected the kabalistic Jesus
or Joshua with the Biblical personifications. The Gnostic records contained the
epitome of the chief scenes enacted during the Mysteries of Initiation, from
most remote times; although even that was given out invariably under the garb
of semi-allegory whenever put on paper. The ancient Tanaim, sage authors of the
Kabalah (in its oral tradition) who handed on their wisdom to the later
Talmudists, possessed the secrets of the Mystery language; and it is in this
language, as has been said earlier, that the Gospels were written. It is
possible for us to see, then, what it was that the ignorant literalizers of such
material turned into "history."
A fair parallel of the turning of
the Christos into "Christ" is seen in the cycle of stories centering
about the mythical hero Siegfried. The myths developed as popular tradition,
their mythological significance was forgotten and in course of time historical
personages were identified with the characters. (See The Perfect Way, Kingsford
and Maitland.)
Massey emphasizes the significant
fact that there is found no "fall of man" in mythology. The
devastating conception, as popularly misunderstood, came in only through the
misreading of religious allegory and dramatization. Theologians from the first
were bitterly opposed
117
to its antithesis, the ascent of man
through evolution. The scientific view of man’s ascent clashed with their
lugubrious obsession. They clung to the heavy weapon of the "fall" in
the sense of sheer "sin" and not understood as the natural, normal,
necessary and wholly salutary descent of soul into matter and body, because it
gave them a useful psychological cudgel over the laity. From the distorted
application of what should have been clear in the myth was hatched that brood
of morbid doctrines such as the fall of man into carnal sin, man’s whimsical
thwarting of God’s plan, the depravity of both man and matter, the filthy
nature of the flesh, the glorification of asceticism and bodily mortification,
original sin, the corruption of natural man, the evil of the world, and others
whose only basis of existence at all was the stupid perversion of ancient
typology and the literalization of Genesis. And Massey flings the irony
of his pen at the fact that "such literalization of mythology is continued
to be taught as God’s truth to the men and women of the future in their
ignorant and confiding childhood." Higgins (Anacalypsis, 514)
likewise expostulates against the asinine failure to distinguish between
"the real and the fabulous." "It is allowed that Cristna is the
sun, and yet they talk of him as a man." He directly charges that "It
is evidently almost the only employment of the idle priests to convert their
historical account into a riddle and again to give their doctrines and riddles
the appearance of history." The temptation to give in full his indignant
accusation on this score in his own words is difficult to resist:
"And the reason why all our
learned men have totally failed in their endeavors to discover the meaning of
the ancient mythologies is to be found in their obstinate perseverance in
attempting to construe all the mythoses, meant for enigma, to the very letter.
I have no doubt that anciently every kind of ingenuity which can be imagined
was exerted from time to time to invent and compose new riddles, till all
history became in fact a great enigma. In modern times as much ingenuity has
been exercised to conceal the enigma and by explanation to show that it was
meant for reality. . . . Before the time of Herodotus every ancient history is
a mythical performance, in short, a gospel--a work written to enforce virtue
and morality and to conceal the mythos--and every temple had one. The Iliad and
Odyssey, the plays of Aeschylus, the Cyropaedia, the Aeneid, the
early history of Rome, the Sagas of Scandinavia, the Sophis of Abra-
118
ham, the secret Book of the
Athenians, the Delphic verses of Olen, the 20,000 verses repeated by heart to
the Druids, the Vedah or Bedahs."
What has not been understood in the
declaration that Cristna is the sun, is that he is not venerated as the sun in
the heavens, but as the sun or divine spark in man. It can at last be said
positively that the ancients did not worship the sun in itself, but as the
analogical cosmic counterpart in the solar system of the central divine fire in
the human heart.
In a printed lecture entitled Gnostic
and Historic Christianity, Massey makes the positive statement that the
early Christians did convert esoteric material into history:
"The claim of Christianity to
possess divine authority rests on the ignorant belief that the mystical Christ
could and did become a Person, whereas the Gnosis proves the corporeal Christ
to be only a counterfeit presentment of the trans-corporeal man; consequently a
historical portraiture is and ever must be a fatal mode of falsifying and
discrediting the Spiritual Reality."
The last lines of this excerpt carry
the burden and gist of the effort here made to assert the psychological and
spiritual disservice of the "historical Christ." Massey goes on to
enlarge upon the theme and says that Paul chides the "foolish
Galatians" for beginning by believing in the spiritual Christos and ending
by believing in the Jesus of the flesh; and Massey declares that Paul was
himself a Gnostic, the founder of a new sect of Gnosis which recognized only a
"Christ-spirit" for the divine Avatar. One must go to the Gnostic
writings to discover the pristine teachings of the Jesus in the Mysteries. The
literal falsifiers dragged the spiritual divinity of man into matter and the
dust. And to cover their fatal work they burned--among other books--the
twenty-four volumes of the Gnostic Basilides, by order of the Church. Clement
described Basilides as "the philosopher devoted to the contemplation of
divine things." The books burned were his works on the Interpretations
of the Gospels, and they would be of priceless value to the world today.
Indications that the scriptures of
the Old and New Testament must be something far other than historical record
are found in the startling pronouncement made by the Alexandrian Clement (Stromateis,
XVII):
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"The Scriptures having perished
in the captivity of Nabuchodonozar, Esdras the Levite, priest in the times of
Artaxerxes, King of the Persians, having become inspired in the exercise of
prophecy, restored again the whole of the ancient Scriptures."
As this very claim has been made
with Ezra as the inspired prophet instead of Esdras, there is at least the
suggested possibility that Ezra and Esdras are two variants of the same name,
which could even be the "Isra-" of "Israel" with the divine
"el" dropped. In the religious myth it was of course Israel that was
to restore the lost substance of the divine revelation! However that may be, if
the whole body of scripture that covered the antiquity of the human family and
all the particulars of the "race" "chosen" by God to
exemplify his dealings with all humanity was lost, and what purports to be that
scripture is in fact only the inner vision of a man divinely inspired, the most
that can be said for it is that it is a very precarious foundation on which to
base the moral and spiritual guidance of the human race.
What meager chance the scriptures
ever had of being taken for history must be seen to be reduced to a vanishing
minimum when we consider the words of the Egyptian God, Tem or Atum.
"I am Tem," he says,
"the dweller in his Disk, or Re in his rising in the eastern horizon of the
sky. I am Yesterday; I know Today. I am the Bennu which is in Anu (Heliopolis)
and I keep the register of the things which are created and of those which are
not yet in existence."
The recording of events that have
not yet occurred is a proposal to make the modern scholar run from ghosts. It
ought to be a consideration of sufficient force to open the obdurate minds of
the deniers of the mythical structure of ancient scriptures to note that in
those scriptures much of "history" recorded is still in the womb of
time and yet unborn. This portion at any rate is not the record of that which
has happened. The answer to this will of course be that it is the record of
that which will, objectively happen. As to that, it may be interjected in
passing, there is very substantial doubt. One of the largest blind-spots before
the eyes of orthodox interpreters of scripture has ever been their fatuous
belief in the literalness of so-called Bible prophecy. There is not room for a
dissertation upon it here, but only enough space to say bluntly that, in the
usual sense of
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forecast of future objective events,
there is not and never was any historical prophecy in the Old Testament or the
New. There is some delineation by the seers and sages of the general phases and
aspects of later evolution of humanity in the cycle on earth; there is no
specific foretelling of coming events on the plane of world history.
Evolutionary typism and allegorical scenarios of the shape of things to come
can without much difficulty often be made to look like historical description.
Events do often match the frame of dramatism in which they are set. Deluded by
these appearances, thousands of religious votaries have spilled rivers of
printers’ ink in the tracing of the configuration of events in their time back
to Bible "prophecy." Philological scholarship should have corrected
this dupery long ago by announcing the correct meaning of the words
"prophecy" and "prophet." From the Greek pro-, "forth"
or "out," and phemi, "to speak," the prophet is simply
a preacher, one who speaks out the truth, proclaims, gives forth. There is
nothing in the word which has any reference to the forecasting of the future. A
prophet is simply a preacher, utterer of truth. To this can be added the
startling statement that the passages in the Bible which have always been taken
for objective prophecies are, like most other material in the scriptures,
allegorical visions or poetical depictions of the cyclical processes. This fact
should add impressiveness to the strong position here taken that an
unbelievable quantity of literal rubbish has to be cleared out of the way
before a sane approach to scriptural interpretation can even begin to be made.
There is much support for the fact
that the supposed simple origin of the name "Christians," its
adoption by a sect that sprang up in the wake of the life of the Galilean
preacher called the Christ, is by no means the truth of the matter at all. A
passage from Mead’s work, Did Jesus Live 100 Years B.C.? (p. 325) tells
us a far different story, and indicates we are dealing with something other
than history in these things:
"The followers of Jesus had
apparently hitherto been ‘ashamed’ of being called ‘Christiani.’ . . . It is
highly possible that the name Christiani was first used by the Pagans to
signify Messianists of all kinds, and was only finally adopted by the followers
of Jesus in their public dealings with the Pagans, presumably first in
apologetic literature, where we find it is of frequent occurrence from about
the second quarter of the second century."
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There is scarcely a single common or
general belief about the chief items of the Christian faith that may be called
orthodox which, on deeper scholastic inquiry, does not turn out to be a popular
falsification of something utterly different in its pristine form.
Prof. J. H. Rose is driven to admit
(Folk-Lore, Vol. XLVI, 22) that "we have not yet an agreed and
perfected technique" for distinguishing history from sagas. No wonder this
is so, comments Lord Raglan (The Hero, 61), since there is but one way
to mark the difference, and that is by checking alleged history with facts
known from other sources. When this is done the sagas break down utterly--as
history.
Another scholar, Prof. Nilsson,
complains of that utter disregard for history and geography which is peculiar
to epic poetry. But, says Raglan, history was not their concern, and geography
was an inconsequential side issue. And Prof. Hooke (Myth and Ritual, 6)
says that both the Minotaur and Perseus myths pictorialize human sacrifice and
are a product of myth and ritual united. Raglan himself states that the true
study of Homer has hardly yet begun and will not get us anywhere until students
see that the poems have no historical foundation, but are to be taken as
documents picturing the evolution of religious ideas, in which sense they
become highly important. Again he says that all the difficulties of
interpretation disappear when it is realized that these great works are ritual
narratives. He asserts that all the main incidents in the Trojan cycle take
place in the first and tenth years of the siege and that in the mythological
cycles, especially those of Troy and Thebes, all the main events are
represented as taking place at intervals of about ten years. There are many
resemblances: both cities were built where a cow lay down; both were
unsuccessfully attacked, but ten years later stormed and razed to the ground;
Hector is a leading hero of both cities. Nearly every state desired to be
founded by refugees from Troy or Thebes. There was a Troy in Egypt built by
Semiramis (Asiatic Researches, Vol. III, 454), according to Higgins.
Trojan refugees are found in Epirus, Threspotia, Cyprus, Crete, Venice, Rome,
Daunia, Calabria, Sicily, Lisbon, Asturia, Pamphylia, Arabia, Macedonia,
Holland, Auvergne, Paris, Sardinia, Alicia, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Libya.
The Trojan story was a myth, a sacred history, and became a vast conglomeration
of fable and truth.
The origin of the ten-year period so
frequently occurring in all
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these recitals is no doubt the
fabulous legend that the Titans fought with the gods for ten years. The Titans
represent of course the elementary forces of nature, and the gods stand for the
intellectual and spiritual powers. Every traditional myth sought to depict the
aspects of this universal conflict.
In Quest magazine of April
1912 a Dr. Anderson writes:
"The critic . . . will proceed
to prove that the stories of the trial, arrest and crucifixion are quite understandable
as scenes in a mystery play, but are quite inexplicable as facts of history.
The trial is represented as lasting through one night when, as Renan points
out, an Eastern city is wrapped in silence and darkness, quite natural as
scenes in a mystery-play, but not as actual history."
It represents at least some, and
possibly great, difficulty to reconcile the fact that Jesus was a Jew with the
other fact that the Gospels dealing with him were written in Greek.
"A professional Egyptologist (Dictionary
of the Bible, Smith, V. 3, p. 1018) has written respecting the passage of
the Red Sea: ‘It would be impious to attempt an explanation of what is
manifestly miraculous.’ To such a depth of degradation can Bibliolatry reduce
the human mind! Such is the spirit in which the subject has been crawled
over." (Massey: Book of the Beginnings, II, 176).
The reference to the Red Sea brings
up one of the most direct and astounding proofs that Old Testament
"history" is not history, and can by no possibility be held as such.
This has been briefly hinted at, but needs further emphasis. If the partisans
of the historical view of archaic literature insist that the Exodus narrative
is history, their insistence places them in the most ridiculous of predicaments
and in short makes simpletons of them. At the end of the debate they are left
holding the bag, the gold brick vanished. For the Red Sea, whether that of the
map or that of the myth, is no longer in the Bible! It is clean gone out of the
story. The learned scholar, James Moffatt, of Glasgow University, has dropped
it out of the correct translation, replacing it with the "Reed Sea,"
drawn direct from Egypt’s mythicism! Assumably his reasons for this rendering,
in view of the blasting consequences flowing from it, must have been quite
decisive and certain. So if there was no Red Sea in the story, the Israelites
could not have crossed it. With this change the whole story
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falls. Practically, with the
deletion from the Old Testament of the historicity of the descent into Egypt
and the Exodus from it, the entire structure of "history" in the
Bible is shot to pieces. At last the proper mythical translation of one word
tears the mask of stupid literalism off the face of ancient esoteric wisdom,
and leaves a long deluded and hypnotized world rudely shaken out of
intellectual stupor, and with eyes torn suddenly open from its dream, gaping in
stunned bewilderment at the wreckage of its illusion. Of all "rude
awakenings" this is perhaps the most shocking, but also the most salutary.
Likewise the physical
"tabernacle" of the Old Testament, in and at the door of which the
Eternal was wont to meet and confabulate with Moses, has vanished along with
the Red Sea, and we find the mythical "trysting-tent" in its stead. Male
soul and female body in the divine allegory meet and hold their tryst here in
the flesh on earth. From it they go on to the marriage, out of which the
Christos in man is born.
A word must be interposed here with
regard to the bearing of the Jewish rejection of the Messianic Jesus on the
debate. Since the wretched persecution of a whole race has gushed from the
rejection, there is no lack of warrant for giving the matter full treatment.
The work here undertaken is in the large the treatment; but a few conclusions
of Massey on the subject can be advanced here with benefit. In his great work, Ancient
Egypt, The Light of the World (p. 519) he speaks with great candor.
Referring to the Jews who in their popular trends came close to literalizing
the scriptural allegories, he says:
"They pursued their messianic
phantom to the verge of the quagmire, but drew back in time to escape. They
left it for the Christians to take the final fatal plunge into the bog in which
they have wallowed, always sinking, ever since; and if the Jews did but know
it, the writings called Jewish have wrought an appalling avengement upon their
ignorant persecutors, who are still proving themselves to be Christians . . .
by ignominiously mutilating and piteously massacring the Jews."
Massey does not mean that the
avengement of the Jewish scriptures on Christianity consists of the massacres,
of course; he means that the adoption by Christianity of the body of Hebrew
scriptures as their Old Testament has been the means of saddling on the back of
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Christianity the fatal incubus of a
vast corpus of myth adopted because it was supposed to be history, and is now
seen to be not that at all, but pagan mythology plucked from Egypt! There is no
avengement equal to that of the irony of events. The logic of events is
inexorable and merciless. Massey speaks in words momentous for the world today
and for the time to come, when he writes:
"If the Jews had only held on
to the sonship of Iu, the su or sif [the suffix su, sif, sef is
Egyptian for son, heir, prince, and the name Jesus came from the combination of
the divine Iu(Ju), the Christ, with su or sif, giving us the
Egyptian Iusu, or Iusif, Jesus or Joseph] they might have spoiled the market
for the spurious wares of the ‘historic’ Savior, and saved the world from wars
innumerable, and from countless broken hearts and immeasurable mental misery.
But they let go the sonship of @insert Hebrew [IE or JE] with the growth of
their monolatry. They could not substitute the ‘historic’ sonship; they had
lost touch with Egypt, and the wisdom that might have set them right was no
longer available against the Christian misconstruction. They failed to fight
the battle of the Gnostics and retired from the conflict dour and dumb; strong
and firm enough to suffer the blind and brutal Juden-Hetze [baiting of
Jews] of all these centuries, but powerless to bring forward their natural
allies, the Egyptian reserves, and helpless to conclude a treaty or enforce a
truce."
This was the catastrophe entailed
for both Judaism and Christianity, as well as for the whole world, in the loss
of Egypt’s august contribution.
In the finale Massey pays this
well-considered tribute to the refusal of Jewry to endorse the historization of
mythology:
"And here the present writer
would remark that, in his view, the Jewish rejection of Christianity
constitutes one of the sanest and the bravest intellectual triumphs of all
time. It is worth all that the race has suffered from the persecution of the
Christian world."
If there is the providential
rulership of the universe that misses not even the fall of a sparrow, it is to
be assumed that adjustment of a wrong so flagrant and enormous as the slaughter
over sixteen hundred years of a people who merely refused to go along with a
doltish substitution of history for allegory, will in due time be made.
Another item of most vivid
significance is brought out by Massey (B. O. B. II, 188). He discloses
the fact that at a date in the reign of
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Tahtmes III, some two and a half
centuries earlier than the "historical Exodus"--on the scholastic
insistence that there was such an event--there were inscribed on a pylon at
Thebes in a list of 1200 names of places conquered or garrisoned by the
Egyptians, the original names of the towns and districts of Canaan to the
number of 115, which, says Massey, is "nothing less than the synoptical
table of the Promised Land made 250 years before the Exodus." This comes
close to writing the geography and history of a nation before that history has
taken place on the actual scene. As we shall find that the "life" of
Jesus was in effect written before he "lived," so here we see the
geography of a nation charted before the places became the locale of the events
which gave their names fame in history. All this points to the whole catalogue
of such charts and lists and maps as being allegorical depictions and
systematic typographs covering a structure of meaning of the most esoteric and
cryptic sort. The Canaanitish names mentioned in the list are Astaroth-Karnaim,
Avilah, Berytus, Bashan, Beth-Sappuah or Tebekim, Ephron (Hebron), Hishbon,
Hamath, Judah, Kadesh, Kison, Megiddo, Sameshu (Damascus) and others.
Among hundreds of passages to be
culled out of early Patristic writing which throw doubt on the veracity of the
historical side of Christianity we have a strange statement in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue
with Trypho: "In the dialogue we find Trypho saying, ‘Ye follow an
empty rumor and make a Christ for yourselves. . . . If he was born and lived
somewhere, he is entirely unknown.’" A more straightforward report on the
true situation in the second century, marked by the claims and denials of
historians, is hardly to be had. It sounds as if the early Church Father,
taking part in the original debate as to the historicity, argues on the side
taken by the present work. It was as if he said: "The Christ of the
Gospels is the mythical and ritualistic figure; if a historical Christ did
live, you have no record of his existence." The entire present debate
might be summarized in the same words. His sentences might well be made the
concluding ones of our last page. He, too, might have said: "Ye have
reduced the cosmic majesty of the Logos to the mean stature of a Galilean
peasant."
Clement of Alexandria (Stromata VII,
7, 106) records the astounding fact that the doctrine of the Evangel was
delivered to Basilides, the consecrated student of sacred things, by the
Apostle Matthew and Glaucus, a disciple of Peter! And there is evidence that
the Gospel
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then delivered must have differed
widely from the present New Testament. Tertullian’s distorted accounts of this
deposit left to posterity are no faithful guide to a true evaluation of it. Yet
even the little this partisan fanatic gives shows the chief Gnostic doctrines
to be identical with the broader and deeper esoteric wisdom of the East.
And another proof of the claim that
the Gospel of Matthew in the usual Greek texts is not the original
Gospel written in Hebrew is found with no less an authority than St. Jerome
(Hieronymus) for support. The suspicion of a conscious and gradual
euhemerization of the Christ principle from the beginning grows into decided
conviction as one reads a certain confession contained in Book II of the Comment
of Matthew by Hieronymus. For we find in it the proof of a deliberate
substitution of the whole Gospel, the one now in the canon having been
evidently rewritten by the zealous Jerome. This is well authenticated as
genuine history. How far the rewriting and editorial tampering with the
primitive gnostic fragments which have now become the New Testament went, may
be inferred from reading Supernatural Religion, which ran through some
twenty-three editions. The authorities and documentary support cited by its
author are overwhelming in quantity and impressiveness. Jerome says that he was
sent toward the close of the fourth century by "their Felicities,"
the Bishops Chromatius and Heliodorus, to Caesarea with the mission to compare
the Greek text (the only one they ever had) with the Hebrew original version
preserved by the Nazarenes in their library and to translate it. He translated
it, but under protest; for, as he says, the Evangel "exhibited matter not
for edification, but for destruction." The destruction of what?--must be
asked. Doubtless of the doctrine that Jesus the Nazarene and the Christos are
one. Hence, for the "destruction" of the newly planned religion which
separated the two. In this same letter the Saint--the same that advised his
converts to kill their fathers and trample on the bosoms of their mothers if their
parents stood between their sons and Christ--admits that Matthew did not wish
his Gospel to be openly written, hence that the manuscript was a secret one.
Yet while admitting also that this Gospel was "written in Hebrew
characters and by the hand of himself [Matthew], in another place he
contradicts this and assures posterity that as it was tampered with and
rewritten by a disciple of Manichaeus named Seleucus . . . the ears of
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the Church properly refused to
listen to it." (Hieronymus: Commentary to Matthew, Bk. II, Chap.
XII, 13).
Gibbon, in a footnote on p. 432 of
his great history, gives us material that ought to be granted consideration. He
says:
"The modern critics are not
disposed to believe what the Fathers almost unanimously assert, that St. Matthew
composed a Hebrew Gospel, of which only the Greek translation is extant. It
seems, however, dangerous to reject their testimony."
A volume of comment might be made on
data of this sort, which could be enlarged to great proportions. There is at
any rate enough of it in the Patristic and early sectarian and polemic
literature of the Christian movement to provide a sufficient deterrent to the
open dissemination of this body of Church history among the general laity. So
extensive a policy of concealment, amounting practically to a conspiracy of
silence, argues a case difficult to defend.
It may not be inappropriate to
conclude this chapter with a reflection forced upon the mind of Gerald Massey
toward the later years of a life given to a searching study of the origins of
Christianity. It is a tribute of no mean impressiveness to the power of
religious influences even when the true inner import of the ritual expressing
them is unknown. Dilating upon the Egyptian Mystery ritual, he says:
"In this divine drama the
natural realities are represented with no perniciously destructive attempt to
conceal the characters under a mask of history. Majestically moving in their
own might, of pathetic appeal to human sympathies, they are simply represented
for what they may be worth when rightly apprehended. But so tremendous was this
tragedy in the Osirian Mysteries, so heart-melting the legend of divinest pity
that lived on with its rootage in Amenta and its flowerage in the human mind,
that an historic travesty has kept the stage and held the tearful gaze
of generation after generation for nineteen hundred years."
If the mere husk of religious truth
has exerted so amazing an influence upon mortals, what might have been the
transcendent exaltation of the mind and purgation of the life of the race if
the golden corn itself had been preserved! But the corn was lost and the husk
alone remained when the myths of truth were converted into the falsities of
"history."
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Chapter VI
CANONIZED
ROMANTICISM
Doubtless, despite the evidence
assembled, the blunt charge that so apparently impossible a transaction as the
conversion of myth into history has really occurred will still remain
incredible and unacceptable. The great cry will be raised as to how so amazing
and stupendous a blunder could have occurred. With the universal presumption of
so much honesty and integrity, and likewise high intelligence in a people
divinely inspired as the devout early Christians are believed to have been, it
becomes difficult for the general mind to comprehend how such flagrant error
could have gained the day and consummated so gross a miscarriage. To what
extent was the crime knowingly perpetrated? Was it motivated by sincerity
working in ignorance, or by intelligence working in insincerity?
The answer to these queries is by no
means simple or easy. It is involved in no end of difficulty arising mainly
from the destruction of evidence and the biases and prejudices of the reviewers
of what evidence is available. But if all the facts in the situation were truly
known, it is pretty certain that the full solution would comprise a vast jumble
and admixture of all the varying degrees of intelligence and ignorance,
sincerity and insincerity, in one grand plot. Nearly all human and historical
transactions are the resultant of a mixed group of forces actuated by every
degree of intelligence and sincerity, or the want of them. It may perhaps be
questioned whether any act or decision of people anywhere at any time is of
downright deliberate insincerity. Some allegedly justifiable "reason"
lurks behind or under every deed. People do evil things of deliberate intent,
but they hardly do them with insincerity. Justification is found somewhere in
the depth of feeling or thought. Generally it will be found that where apparent
insincerity is operative, it is unintelligence that warps the action into evil
direction. Granting inherent sincerity in human nature, its miscarriage into
foul expression must be due to want of keen in-
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telligence. This is indeed the
conclusion arrived at in the finale by Plato and Socrates in their dialectical
inquiry into the nature of the good. The basic and ultimate evil is nothing
but--in one or other of its manifold forms--ignorance. So declared Buddha,
Orpheus, Hermes, Solomon and other sage teachers of early man. It is assumed
legitimate to accuse a person if he does badly when he should know better. The
acme of all evil charge is that a person does wrong knowingly. If in the
conversion of myth into history there was this commission of knavery in spite
of better knowledge, the verdict must be rendered accordingly. Again, if the
wreckage of the myth resulted from ignorance and misguided motives, the
judgment must be more lenient, although there is no sentiment in nature and she
punishes ignorance as well as knavery.
Our glance at the possibility of
insincerity in the motive behind the alteration is actuated by no mere
truculent attitude, but is warranted by a more substantial reason. Any history
of early Christianity must face and deal with the perpetration of an extensive
series of what are known among the historians as "pious frauds" by
the Fathers and partisan leaders in the first centuries and the Church’s
connivance at them then and later. The charge is brought by many chroniclers of
the period and confessed by most Christian apologists. The assembling of data
substantiating it, while an invidious task, must be made in sufficient force to
justify the introduction of it as a count in the case against the historicity
of the Son of God. If the charge of fraudulent literary practice in the
handling of religious data in the early day can be upheld, it strengthens by so
much the likelihood that the transfer of meaning from the impersonal Christos
to the man Jesus was made. The proof of fraud and deception greatly heightens
the probability that the change occurred. If analysis of the whole situation
extant at the time reveals that the transaction was of such a nature that
knavery would be suspected of being a highly probable element in it, the discovery
of such chicanery in the immediate wake of the suspicion certainly will tend to
increase the validity of the non-historical claim. If, in point of fact, it
would seem necessary to posit fraud as accessory to the great transformation in
the character of the Christos, the disclosure of fraud in the actual situation
amounts to strong prima facie evidence that the case was as suspected.
It is surely to be agreed that
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the proven presence and practice of
religious fraud in the first centuries of Christian history must be weighed
realistically in relation to every development of the ecclesiastical polity
then and after. A superficial view would not fail to conclude that there must
be a close and perhaps immediate link between such a transaction as the personalizing
of the Messiah and the prevalent impostures in the field of religion. If fraud
is known to have been a strong feature of the picture, it becomes necessary to
determine what part it played in the historization of the Jesus character. To
many it is certain that the revelation of such an unknown and unsuspected
element in the case will serve as an all-sufficient clue to the solution of the
whole complication. It will be seized upon readily as the missing key to the
entire mystery. While this may be according too much importance to the item,
the presence of fraud is nearly always presumptive testimony to a sinister
motive or maneuver.
To begin with, an initial suspicion
and distrust is awakened in the mind of the student when he is confronted from
the start with the presence and volume of documents, books, gospels and
apocrypha bearing the prefix "Pseudo-" to their title. There is the "Pseudo-Mark,"
the "Pseudo-Acts," the "Pseudo-Dionysus" and
others in bewildering profusion. Nothing less than plagiarism and forgery are
at once suggested by this phenomenon. Then the field of early Christianity is
cluttered up with works controverting alleged "heresies" on all
sides. Indeed most of the works that stand as the chief contemporary histories
of the first centuries of Christianity bear the title "Against
Heresy." This is notably the case with the books of Eusebius, Tertullian,
Irenaeus, Hippolytus and Epiphanius, a quintet of historians on whom the Church
has relied mainly to buttress its egregious claims to unique authority and its
defamations of the "pagan" religions. But it is time to gather the
amazing data on this score.
It may be generous to present the
most favorable aspect of the evidence first. A passage of this sort is found in
Mead’s Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (88):
"It must not be supposed,
however, that the re-writers and editors of the old traditions were forgers and
falsifiers in any ordinary sense of the word. Antiquity in general had no
conception of literary morality in its modern meaning, and all writing of a
religious character was the outcome
131
of an inner impulse. . . . It should
also be remembered that the mythologizing of history and the historizing of
mythology were not peculiar to the Jews, but common to the times; what was
peculiar to them was their fanatical belief in divine favoritism and their
egregious claims to the monopoly of God’s providence."
Mead’s statement that antiquity did
not possess our modern standards of literary morality adds strength to the
general claim that the purpose of ancient writing was never strictly to record
the facts of history, but rather to depict mystical realities and intellectual
concepts. One is obviously privileged to use one’s fancy when the truth of
objective occurrence is not the theme, and the experience of the inner life is.
It may alleviate to a degree the weight of obloquy that may seem to fall upon
the perpetrators of so much literary crime to remember Mead’s explanation of
its religious background.
In The Hero Lord Raglan
briefly states that pious frauds of this (and every other conceivable) type
were a commonplace of medieval ecclesiasticism. And the medieval was but a
prolongation of ancient practice.
In The Anacalypsis (522)
Higgins, alleging that it was not uncommon for the priests to charge their
opponents with absurd opinions they never held for the purpose of disgracing
them, remarks that "this has always been considered by priests a mere
allowable ruse in religious controversy. It is yet had recourse to every
day."
In Anthon’s Classical Dictionary (Fourth
Ed. 929, Art. Oraculum) the text stands as follows:
"The only evil spirit which had
an agency in the oracular responses of antiquity was that spirit of crafty
imposture which finds so congenial a home among an artful and cunning priesthood."
From a source within the fold of
orthodoxy itself comes a confession that is singularly and creditably frank. If
all Christian authors and apologists had been as candid as von Mosheim, the
faith of the Church would have presented a better defense than unfortunately
can now be made. Speaking of the Gospel of Hermas in his celebrated
history of the early Church (p. 91), he writes:
"At the time when he wrote it
was an established maxim with many of the Christians that it was pardonable in
an advocate for religion to
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avail himself of fraud and
deception, if it were likely that they might conduce toward the attainment of
any considerable good. Of the list of silly books and stories to which this
erroneous notion gave rise, from the second to the fifteenth century, no one
who is acquainted with Christian history can be ignorant."
He says again (288) that "it is
with the greatest grief that we find ourselves compelled to acknowledge"
that some of the weaker brethren, in their zeal to assist God with all their
might, resorted to such dishonest artifices as could not admit of any just
excuse and were utterly unworthy of that sacred cause which they were
unquestionably designed to support. One of the illegitimate devices resorted
to, he charges, was the measure of composing eight books of Sibylline verses,
designed to play upon the general ancient reverence and credulity of the
populace respecting the pagan oracles and their pronouncements, in order to win
approval of the Christian claims. Some Christian, or perhaps an association of
Christians, in the reign of Antoninus Pius, "composed" the books with
a view to persuade the ignorant and unsuspecting that even so far back as the
time of Noah a Sibyl had foretold the coming of Christ and the rise and progress
of his Church. The trick succeeded, says Mosheim, with not a few, nay even some
of the principal Christian teachers themselves were imposed upon by it. But it
eventually brought great scandal on the Christian cause; since the fraud was
"too palpable to escape the searching penetration of those who gloried in
displaying their hostility to the Christian name."
Another group of zealots, he goes
on, trafficking with the great name and authority of the Egyptian Hermes
Trismegistus, concocted a work bearing the title of Poemander, and other
books, replete with Christian principles and maxims, and sent them forth into
the world. "Many other deceptions of this sort, to which custom has very
improperly given the denomination of pious frauds, are known to have
been practiced in this and the succeeding centuries." The authors, he
claims, were in all probability actuated by no ill intention, "but this is
all that can be said in their favor, for their conduct in this respect was
certainly most ill-advised and unwarrantable." He shifts the major blame
for "these forgeries on the public" to the Gnostics, but admits that
he yet can not take upon himself
133
"to acquit even the most
strictly orthodox from all participation in this species of criminality: for it
appears from evidence superior to all exception that a pernicious maxim, which
was current in the schools not only of the Egyptians, the Platonists and the
Pythagoreans, but also of the Jews, was very early recognized by the Christians
and soon found amongst them numerous patrons, namely, that those who made it
their business to deceive with a view of promoting the cause of truth, were
deserving rather of commendation than of censure."
Is it possible that we are here
standing at the very cradle of what the world has come to call
"Jesuitry"? If so it can be seen that this bad excuse for allegedly
good action had its remote birth in the methods of ancient sacred writing
depicted in our second chapter, used originally with esoteric integrity of
purpose, but twisted into fraudulent usage by later piety working with less
intelligence and probity. It is another cardinal instance and proof of what is
claimed, that all corruption of religion and theology came in through the decay
and loss of the principles of genuine esoteric schematism. The case grows more
solid with every additional observation that the major cause of all religious
decadence and perversion was this early-century transmogrification of allegory
into history. This will prove to be the mysterious key to the confusion and
chaos in the entire religious domain. Mosheim’s honesty in refusing to wash
away the knavery here recorded is commendable and will in the end serve the
interests of true Christianity.
In Vol. II (p. 5) of his work he
again admits he can not deny that pious fraud found a place in the propagation
of Christianity in the third century. And again he says it is certain that in
the earliest ages of the new faith it was "not uncommon for men to fill up
the chasms of genuine history with fictitious conceits, the mere suggestion of
their own imagination." And candor could go no further than it does in
another passage (Vol. I, 106), in which he admits that when once certain of the
Christian writers had been unfortunately tempted to have recourse to fiction,
"it was not long before the weakness of some and the arrogant presumption
of others carried forgery and imposition to an extent of which it would be
difficult to convey to the reader any adequate idea."
The eminent historian Lecky, in his History
of Rationalism (I, 164) somewhat ironically records his conclusion:
134
"Making every allowance for the
errors of the most extreme infallibility, the history of Catholicism would on
this hypothesis represent an amount of imposture probably unequalled in the
annals of the human race."
Bacon, of Yale Divinity School,
tells us that an extraordinary license was accorded in John’s day to the
preacher to employ allegory, myth, symbolism, legend, parable, whatever he
would, in the interest of religious edification. He says we know there were
others in John’s time who used the same liberty of expression.
In a work entitled Discourse of
Free Thinking (p. 96) the author, Collins, remarks that
"these frauds are very common
in all books which are published by priests or priestly men. . . . For it is
certain that they may plead the authority of the Fathers for forgery,
corruption and mangling of authors with more reason than for any other of their
articles of faith."
The Encyclopedia Britannica, dealing
with the apocryphal books, says that "since these books were
forgeries," the epithet (apocryphal) in common parlance today denotes any
story or document which is false or spurious, using the word in the disparaging
sense. It adds the significant sentence that each of them at one time or another
had been treated as canonical. This lines up a point of considerable
importance, testifying to the fact that the books were originally among those
esoterically apprehended and hence as genuine as any others, and that when the
esoteric sense was lost, their unintelligibility got them rated as false. There
is practically convincing evidence to show that the word
"apocryphal," like many another, did not have in its original usage
any connotation of falsity or baseness. It referred to those books of the
ancient wisdom which from the spiritual and mystical profundity of their
contents were held as too esoteric for the masses. The etymology of the word apo,
"from," and kryptein, "to hide" or
"conceal," indicates this fully and categorically. The Apocrypha were
the books of the recondite doctrine, hidden from the ignorant populace. This
point holds much vital significance for study in this whole field.
Gibbon (Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, 502) states that
"the most extravagant legends,
as they conduced to the honor of the Church, were applauded by the credulous
multitude, countenanced by the power of the clergy and attested by the
suspicious evidence of ecclesiastical history."
135
Such a Christian authority as The
Catholic Encyclopedia (VII, 645) says that
"even the genuine Epistles were
greatly interpolated to lend weight to the personal views of their author. For
this reason they were incapable of bearing witness to the original form."
In an enlightening lecture entitled Paul
the Gnostic Opponent of Peter, Massey reveals that
"as Irenaeus tells us, the
Gnostics, of whom Marcion was one, charged the other apostles with hypocrisy,
because they ‘framed their doctrine according to the capacity of their hearers,
fabling blind things for the blind according to their blindness; for the dull
according to their dulness; for those in error according to their
errors.’"
A strong statement is made in the History
of the Christian Religion to the Year 200, by Charles B. Waite, to the
effect that a comprehensive review of the first one hundred and seventy years
of Christianity discloses the ignorance and superstition of even the most
enlightened and best educated of the Fathers; with rare exceptions they were
men who utterly despised learning, especially that of the pagans attempting to
study the laws of the material universe. Construing in the narrowest sense the
maxim that the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God, they construed the
Jewish scriptures and sayings of Christ in the most fanciful and whimsical ways.
Their credulity was unbounded and "they had a sublime disregard for truth.
. . . Their unscrupulousness when seeking for arguments to enforce their
positions is notorious, as well as the prevalence among them of what are known
as pious frauds."
Waite says of Eusebius, the
Christian historian, that not only the most unblushing falsehoods but literary
forgeries of the vilest character darken the pages of his apologetic and
historical writings. In speaking of such and other irregularities, Miss Isabel
B. Holbrook, a capable student of esoteric religions, writes in one of her
brochures:
"Among the most notorious of
these forgeries were gross liberties and interpolations concerning Christ into
the writings of the historian Josephus, of Porphyry and other heathen and
Church writers."
Waite further declares that Eusebius
has contributed more to Christian history than any other and "no one is
guilty of more mistakes."
136
"Eusebius has a peculiar
faculty for diverging from the truth. He was ready to supply by fabrication
what was wanting in historical data."
Niebuhr terms Eusebius "a very
dishonest writer."
The thirty-second chapter of the
Twelfth Book of Anselm, Evangelical Preparation, bears for its title
this scandalous proposition: "How it may be lawful and fitting to use
falsehood as a medicine and for the benefit of those who want to be
deceived." (From Gibbon, Vindication, 76.)
Chrysostom is quoted (Comm. on I
Cor., IX, 19; Diegesis, p. 309) as saying: "Great is the force
of deceit, provided it is not excited by a treacherous intention."
Even Cardinal Newman appears to
endorse subterfuge for the glory of the faith. In the Apology for His Life (Appendix,
345) he writes: "The Greek Fathers thought that when there was a justa
causa an untruth need not be a lie."
What could be more explicit than
this entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia (XII, 768)?"
"There was need for a revision,
which is not yet complete, ranging over all that has been handed down from the
Middle Ages, under the style and title of the Fathers, Councils, Roman and
other official archives. In all these departments forgery and interpolation as
well as ignorance had wrought mischief on a great scale."
Lecky states that the Fathers laid
down as a distinct proposition that pious frauds were justifiable and even
laudable. As a consequence of the necessity of enforcing their egregious claims
to exclusive salvation, says Lecky, the Fathers immediately filled all
ecclesiastical literature with the taint of "the most unblushing mendacity."
Heathenism had to be combated, and therefore prophecies of Christ by Orpheus
and the Sibyls were forged and lying wonders were multiplied. Heretics were to
be convinced, and therefore interpolations and complete forgeries were made.
Age after age it continued until it became universally common. "It
continued till the very sense of truth and the very love of truth seemed
blotted out from the minds of men."
In The Anacalypsis Higgins
avers that
"every ancient author without
exception has come to us through the medium of Christian editors, who have,
either from roguery or folly, corrupted them all. We know that in one batch all
the Fathers of the Church
137
and all the Gospels were corrected,
that is, corrupted by the united exertions of the Roman See, Lanfranc,
Archbishop of Canterbury, and the monks of St. Maur."
As to this serious charge he writes
(Anac., 697):
"Lanfranc, a Benedictine, was
head of the monks of St. Maur about A.D. 1050, and it appears that this Society
not only corrected the Gospel histories, but they also corrected the Fathers,
in order that their Gospel corrections might not be discovered; and this was
probably the reason for the publication by them of their version of the whole
of the Fathers."
It is not difficult to see why the
labors of Higgins, Massey, Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, and others who were
unsparing in their candid handling of obscure facts of history were relegated
to oblivion as thoroughly as could be done.
Higgins further says (Anac., 522)
that nothing which appears to be told by the orthodox Fathers in a regular and
systematic manner against the heretics is credible. He berates Bishop Laurence
of the English Church for his destructive translation of the Book of Enoch, and
charges the iniquity of his having been made an archbishop, instead of being
deservedly disgraced in return for so base an act.
Higgins confesses that his exertions
to discover the truth are "in opposition to the frauds of the priests of
all religions in their efforts to suppress evidence and to keep mankind in
ignorance." He charges that Enoch was quoted by Clement and
Irenaeus like any other canonical scripture. The Christians in opposition held
it to be spurious, because it so clearly gave the prophecy of the coming of the
pagan Avatars.
Lardner is quoted by Higgins as
saying that Victor Tununensis, an African Bishop, of about the sixth century,
wrote a chronicle ending at the year 566, in which it is recorded that in the
year 506 at Constantinople, by order of the Emperor Anastasius, "the holy
Gospels, being written by illiterate Evangelists, are censured and
corrected."
What must be thought of the
declaration of Augustine, founder of Christian theology, when he writes (Civ.
Dei, Lib. IV, Cap. XXXI)?:
"There are many things that are
true which it is not useful for the vulgar crowd to know; and certain things
which although they are false it is expedient for the people to believe
otherwise."
138
In his great work Gibbon asserts
that Eusebius, "the gravest of the ecclesiastical historians"
"indirectly confesses that he has related whatever might redound to the
glory, and that he has suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace, of
religion."
Augustine wrote a treatise On
Lying, in rebuke to the clergy.
"This work," says Bishop
Wadsworth, "is a protest against the ‘pious frauds’ which have brought
discredit and damage to the Gospel, and have created prejudice against it from
the days of Augustine to our own times." (A Church History, IV,
93-4.)
Massey says he will speak of certain
things "when we begin to explore the monstrous deeds and fraudulent
machinations of the evangelists."
From the Editorial Preface to The
Lost Books of the Bible the following excerpt is culled. It is in reference
to the Gospel of Nicodemus:
"Although this Gospel is by
some among the learned supposed to have really been written by Nicodemus, who
became a disciple of Jesus Christ and conversed with him, others conjecture
that it was a forgery toward the close of the third century by some zealous
believer who, observing that there had been appeals made by the Christians of
the former age to the Acts of Pilate, but that such Acts could
not be produced, imagined it would be of service to Christianity to fabricate
and publish this Gospel; as it would both confirm the Christians under persecution
and convince the Heathens of the truth of the Christian religion. The Rev.
Jeremiah Jones says that such pious frauds were very common among the
Christians even in the third century. . . . The same author, in noticing that
Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History charges the Pagans with having
forged and published a book called ‘The Acts of Pilate,’ takes occasion
to observe that the internal evidence of this Gospel shows it was not the work
of any heathen . . . and Mr. Jones says he thinks so, more particularly as we
have innumerable instances of forgeries by the faithful in the primitive days
grounded on less plausible reasons."
A note to page 99 of The Lost
Books of the Bible states that Tertullian is authority for the allegation
that the book called the Acts of Paul and Thecla was forged by a
Presbyter of Asia, who, being convicted, "confessed that he did it out of
respect of Paul." Pope Gelasius included it in his decree against
apocryphal books. Notwithstanding
139
this a large part of the history was
credited and looked upon as genuine among primitive Christians.
Another discredited work was named The
Death of Pilate, and still another, The Paradise of Pilate, described
by Lundy (Monumental Christianity, 243), would regale the reader with
some conception of the highly "fanciful" nature of these forgeries,
if there was space. We may be pardoned for outlining briefly the first of these
two: Tiberius being grievously sick and having heard of the fame of Jesus as a
healer of diseases, dispatched a messenger to Pilate to have him send Jesus to
Rome to cure him. Pilate replied that he had crucified him as a malefactor. On
his way back to Rome with the message, the messenger met Veronica--the woman
who touched the hem of Christ’s garment--who gave him the cloth handkerchief
with which the Lord had wiped his face on the way to crucifixion, and in so
doing had impressed his features indelibly upon it. This cloth was brought to
the Emperor and he was healed. Pilate was summoned to Rome and thrown into prison,
where he killed himself with a knife. His body was thrown into the Tiber and
such terrible storms of heat, thunder and lightning followed that the Romans
took it up and sent it to Vienne where it was thrown into the Rhone(?). The
same storms and tempests recurring, the body was sent again to Lake Lucerne,
where it was sunk into the deep waters, said even yet to bubble and boil as if
by some diabolical influence.
We might ask in Jerome’s words:
Would this be matter of edification or of destruction?
Lundy (Monumental Christianity,
245) expostulates against the rejection, as spurious, of two apocryphal Letters
of Pilate found in Thilo’s and Tischendorf’s collections; one addressed to
Claudius and the other to Tiberius, in both of which Jesus’s miracles, his divine
sonship, his crucifixion and resurrection are referred to, and the supernatural
signs which attended his coming are read as indicating the end of the world.
Lundy then puts forth the question, "Are all these forgeries?" If
they are only traditions they are certainly very early ones, and their various
statements wonderfully agree, he argues. Taken in connection with early
Christian monuments, as to the whole story of our Lord’s life, death,
resurrection and ascension, they must relate facts of a then recent occurrence,
which, he thinks, can not be doubted.
140
"Were three of four generations
of men utterly deceived and mistaken? And is all Christian civilization built
upon a lie?" Look at the monuments, he says, and see what pains have been
taken to record the verities of early Christianity. "Had the things
portrayed not been facts, how could art all at once forsake her fond
mythologies and depict such wonderful inventions as these?"
How indeed, millions will ask in
concert with Lundy. The answer is--by the most incredible stupefaction of
mortal mind that ever befell humanity; through the complete blinding of insight
into the original nature of occult portrayals of the verities Lundy refers to,
which are spiritual realities and not events of objective history. The
monuments portrayed the dramatic enaction as the paintings did, and ignorance
mistook them for pictures of factual occurrence. How indeed? By the
unbelievable transfer of the hidden purport of scripture from the plane of mind
to the plane of "history"; by the whole astonishing series of
confusions which this work is written to reveal at last in their glaring
falsity and blighting power.
A modern sleuth-hound on the trail
of Christian imposture is Joseph Wheless, mainly in his work, Forgery in
Christianity, an achievement of great value for its data, but perhaps
marred by the Freethinker’s irrational hatred of all Biblical religionism. It
is a remarkable assemblage of material laying bare the falsity of Christian
claims, and all drawn directly from Christian sources. It is a strong case
which can be supported entirely upon the admissions of your opponents. On page
43 of the work he affirms that
"no one can now doubt that
Lecky, after voluminous review of Christian frauds and impostures, spoke the
precise historical truth: ‘Christianity floated into the Roman Empire on the
wave of credulity that brought with it this long train of Oriental
superstitions and legends.’"
The Catholic Encyclopedia (IV,
498) admits it was the custom of the scribes to lengthen out here and there, to
harmonize passages or to add their own explanatory material. It also maintains
that "it is the public character of all divines to mold and bend the
sacred oracles till they comply with their own fancy, spreading them . . . like
a curtain, closing together or drawing them back as they pleased."
A most curious item that comes to
light is a supposed letter prefixed
141
to the Clementine Homilies, an
epistle from Peter to James, in which Peter is made to write as follows:
"For some of the converts from
the Gentiles have rejected the preaching through me in accordance with the law,
having accepted a certain lawless and babbling doctrine of the enemy.
And these same people have attempted while I am still alive by various
interpolations to transform my words unto the overthrow of the law; as though I
also thought thus but did not preach it openly: which be far from me. . . . But
they professing somehow to know my mind, attempt to expound the words they
heard from me more wisely than I who spoke them, telling those who are
instructed by them that this is my meaning, which I never thought of. But if
they venture such falsehoods while I am still alive, how much more when I am
gone will those who come after me dare to do so!"
The Encyclopedia Britannica presumes
that the "enemy" whose lawless and babbling doctrine has exercised
Peter is none other than Paul. Massey makes much of the Peter-Paul controversy,
declaring that Paul’s advocacy of the esoteric spiritual interpretation of all
scripture made him the target for the attacks of the Petrine faction that swung
over to the exoteric view. The Encyclopedia ventures the theory that the
character of Simon Magus mentioned in the Acts and in this letter is a
cover for Paul himself, and descants on the identification.
In the article "Midrash"
the Encyclopedia testifies that "the tendency to reshape history
for the edification of later generations was no novelty" in the fourth
century B.C. Pragmatic historiography is exemplified in the earliest continuous
sources, viz., the "Deuteronomic" writers, i.e., allied to Deuteronomy,
and there are many relatively early narratives in which the details have
been modified and the heroes of the past are the mouthpieces for the thought of
a later writer or of his age. Numerous instructive examples of the active
tendency to develop tradition may be observed in the relationship between Genesis
and the Book of Jubilees, or in the embellishment of Old Testament
history in the Antiquities of Josephus, or in the widening gaps in the
diverse traditions of the famous figures of the Old Testament (Adam, Noah,
Enoch, Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Ezra, etc.) as they appear in non-canonical
writings. The Midrash of the Jews and most other ancient sacred literature
represented just this tendency to exploit a romantic sense in the old material:
142
"The rigid line between fact
and fiction in religious literature which readers often wish to draw, can not
be consistently justified, and in studying old Oriental religious narratives,
it is necessary to realize that the teaching was regarded as more essential
than the method of presenting it. ‘Midrash,’ which may be quite useless for
historical investigation may be appreciated for the light it throws upon the
forms of thought. Historical criticism does not touch the reality of the ideas,
and since they may be as worthy of study as the apparent facts they clothe,
they thus indirectly contribute to the history of their period."
This nears the statement of truth
about the theme, but misses final agreement with it, in the last sentence,
which makes the Midrashic style of dealing with truth a mere help in
understanding the "history of a period." As so often reiterated
already, the ancients were not concerned with the tawdry day-to-day eventualities
of history; their aim ever was to dramatize the genius, meaning and spirit of
all history in systematic type-forms and personifications of aspects of verity.
It is perhaps impossible that the
general public can ever be awakened to the enormity of the corruption of old
texts. None but the few scholars who have had time and occasion to go over the
immense detail of the inquiry are in position to appreciate the full import and
truth of this matter. It is well, then, to ponder deeply the sincere words of a
competent and conscientious student, G. R. S. Mead, expressed in his Fragments
of a Faith Forgotten (p. 18):
"The Received Text is proved to
have suffered in its traditions so many misfortunes at the hands of ignorant
scribes and dogmatic editors that the human reason stands amazed at the
spectacle."
On page 11 of the same work he says
with reference to the Christian religion:
The student of Christianity "is
amazed at the general ignorance of everything connected with its history and
origins. He gradually works his way to a point whence he can obtain an
unimpeded view of the remains of the first two centuries and gaze around on a
world that he has never heard of at school and of which no word is ever
breathed from the pulpit."
And certainly the truth of his next
statement (p. 14) must now be conceded:
143
"For upwards of one hundred
years liberal Christendom has witnessed the most strenuous and courageous
efforts to rescue the Bible from the hands of an ignorant obscurantism which
had in many ways degraded it to the level of a literary fetish and deprived it
of the light of reason."
It is profitable to dwell with Mead
on Marcion’s view of the Gospels. In that great Gnostic’s understanding of
theology the Christ had preached a universal doctrine, a new revelation of the
Good God, the Father of all. They who tried to graft this on to Judaism, the
imperfect creed of one small nation, were in grievous error and had totally
misunderstood the teaching of Christ. The Christ was not the Messiah promised
to the Jews. That Messiah was to be an earthly king, was intended for the Jews
alone and had not yet come. Therefore the pseudo-historical "in order that
it might be fulfilled" school had adulterated and garbled the original Sayings
of the Lord, the universal glad tidings, by the unintelligent and erroneous
glosses they had woven into their collections of teachings. "It was the
most terrific indictment of the cycle of New Testament ‘history’ that has ever
been formulated." Men were tired of all the contradictions and obscurities
of the innumerable and mutually destructive variants of the traditions
concerning the person of Jesus. (This surely points to the certainty that there
were no real facts to go upon.) No man could say what was the truth, now that "history"
had been so altered to suit the new Messiah-theory of the Jewish converts.
As to actual history, then, Marcion
started with Paul; he was the first who had really understood the mission of
the Christ, and had rescued the teaching from the obscurantism of Jewish narrow
sectarianism. Of the manifold versions of the Gospel he would have the Pauline
alone. He rejected every other recension including those now ascribed to
Matthew, Mark and John! The Gospel according to Luke, "the follower of
Paul," which he might have been expected to embrace, he also rejected,
regarding it as a recension to suit the views of the Judaizing party. His
Gospel was presumably the collection of Sayings in use among the Pauline
Churches of his day.
Mead says Marcion also rejected some
of Paul’s Epistles because they had been tampered with by the
"reconciliators of the Petro-Pauline controversy." Mead calls
Tertullian’s denunciation of Marcion’s party of intelligent people, a work
called Against Marcion, "but a sorry piece of angry rhetoric."
144
In his published lecture on Paul
Not an Apostle of Historic Christianity (p. 9) Massey says
"it becomes apparent how Paul’s
writings were made orthodox by the men who preached another gospel than his;
with whom he was at war during his lifetime and who took a bitter-sweet revenge
on his writings by suppression and addition after he was dead and gone."
Another great Gnostic teacher,
Basilides, suffered at the hands of the ignorant party bent on literalizing all
the Gospels of a spiritual Christos. Mead says that Basilides’ Exegetica
were the first commentaries on the Gospel teachings written by a Christian
philosopher, and in this, as in all other departments of theology, "the
Gnostics led the way." We can only regret, he says, that we have not the
original text of the Gnostic doctor himself before us, instead of the very
faulty copy of the text of the Church Fathers’ Refutation. Hippolytus
muddles up his own glosses and criticisms with mutilated quotations,
imperfectly summarizes important passages which treat of conceptions requiring
the greatest subtlety and nicety of language, and in other respects does scant
justice to a thinker whose faith in Christianity was so great that, far from
confining it to the narrow limits of a dogmatic theology, he would have it that
the Gospel was also a universal philosophy explanatory of the whole world
drama. In its proper interpretation such indeed it is.
Heracleon and Bardesanes were other
splendid Gnostic Christians whose work was contemned by the bigotry of the
ignorant. Bardesanes was the agent directly creditable with establishing the
first Christian state, for he induced the Prince Abgar Bar-Manu to make
Christianity his state religion. Caracalla dethroned Agbar in 216. In revulsion
against this act Bardesanes made an extensive defense of the Christian faith.
Even Epiphanius is compelled to call him "almost a confessor." He
wrote many Christian treatises in Syriac and Greek. Mead says that the Gnostics
were still in the Christian ranks, were members of the general Christian body
and desired to remain so; but bigotry finally drove them out "because they
dared to say that the teaching of the Christ contained a wisdom which
transcended the comprehension of the majority."
Mead cites the great Lepsius as
saying (Die Apocryphen Apostelgeschichte, 1883) that "almost every
fresh editor of such narratives,
145
using that freedom which all
antiquity was wont to allow itself in dealing with literary monuments, would
recast the materials which lay before him, excluding whatever might not suit
his theological point of view," and substituting "other formulae of
his own composition, and further expanding and abridging after his own
pleasure."
There was a wide circulation of
"religious romances," Mead says, in the second century. Irenaeus
himself says there was "a multitude of Gospels extant" in his day.
Considerable authority is back of
the broad statement that the Pentateuch contained material other than that now
found in it before it was re-composed by Esdras or Ezra. It is pretty certain
that even after this re-writing it was still further corrupted by ambitious
Rabbis of later times, and otherwise remodeled and tampered with. Sometimes,
according to Horne, annals and genealogies were taken from other books and
incorporated as additional matter. Such sources were used "with freedom
and independence." Indeed this author concludes with the sentence:
"They can not be said to have corrupted the text of Scripture. They made
the text." This collection made in this free fashion, observes Kenealy, is
what the Old Testament is in Horne’s view--excerpts from the writings of
unknown persons put together by those who, he says, were divinely inspired.
"No infidel has ever made so damaging a charge as this against the authenticity
of the Old Testament."
As to both the Kabalah of the Jews
and the Mosaic Bible, it is just about certain that the Western nations have
not the original documents. Both internal and external evidence demonstrates on
the testimony of the best Hebraists and the confessions of the learned Jewish
Rabbis themselves that an ancient document forms the essential basis of the
Bible, and that it received very considerable insertions and supplements in the
process of adaptation. The Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Book of
the Nabothean Agriculture are mentioned as being very close to the contents
of this basic archaic document.
Mead establishes the fact that
Celsus categorically accuses the Christians (ii-27) of changing their Gospel
story in many ways in order the better to answer the objections of their
opponents; his accusation is that "some of them, as it were in a drunken
state producing self-induced visions, remodel their Gospel from its first
written form and
146
reform it so that they may be able
to refute the objections brought against it."
Higgins sums up much data with the
conclusion that "there is undoubted evidence that our Gospel histories
underwent repeated revisions." He adds that "those who would revise
the Gospels would not scruple to revise the Sibyl." This hint is in
reference to well-founded charges that the Christians had even reached back
into the Sibylline predictions of the pagan oracles and changed them to make
them jibe with orthodox preachments.
An evidence of corruption of text is
found in an editor’s note on page 295 of Josephus’ Antiquities, which
admits that "Josephus’ copy considerably differs from ours."
Joseph Wheless (Forgery in
Christianity) is authority for the statement that eight Epistles and the Martyrium
are confessed forgeries.
"They are by common consent set
aside as forgeries which were at various dates and to serve special purposes
put forth under the name of the celebrated Bishop of Antioch."
With reference to the Christian
handling of the Sibylline Books and prophecies, one of the strongest
indictments of Christian duplicity and insincerity is framed by the facts and
the evidence. The Catholic Encyclopedia says that a letter of Polycarp
to the Philippians, authenticating the Epistle to them, may itself be a
forgery.
Says Higgins (Anac., 565):
"Among all nations of the
Western parts of the world the prophetesses called Sibyls were anciently known.
There were eight of them who were celebrated in a very peculiar manner, and a
work is extant in eight books (published by Gallaeus) which purport to contain
their prophecies. This work in several places is supposed to foretell the
coming of Jesus Christ. They have been in all times admitted to be genuine by
the Roman Church, and I believe also by that of the Greeks; in fact they have
been literally a part of the religion; but in consequence of events in very
late years not answering to the predictions, the Roman priesthood wishes to get
quit of them, if it knew how; several of its learned men (Bellarmine, for
instance) having called them forgeries."
"It is the renewed case of the
ladder: being no longer useful, it is kicked down. The Protestant Churches deny
them altogether, as Romish forgeries. These Sibyls were held in the highest
esteem by the ancient Gentiles. And it appears from the unquestionable text of
Virgil that they
147
did certainly foretell a future
Savior or something very like it. We find, on examination of the present copy
of them, that they did actually foretell in an acrostic the person called Jesus
Christ by name. The most early Fathers of the Greek and Roman Churches plead
them as genuine, authentic and unanswerable proofs of the truth of their
religion, against the Gentile philosophers who, in reply, say that they have
been interpolated by the Christians. . . . I saw pictures of the supposed
authoresses of these prophetic books in several places in Italy. Their figures
are beautifully inlaid in the marble floor of the Cathedral Church at Sienna
and their statues are placed in a fine church at Venice, formerly belonging to
the barefooted Carmelites. They are also found placed round the famous Casa
Santa at Loretto."
Higgins says that "Sibyl"
means "cycle of the sun." There was supposed to be a prophetess for
each Sibyl or Cycle. A new prophetess presided over each Cycle as it passed.
There were eight. At the time of Christ another was to come. Elsewhere it is
said that the tenth was to mark the consummation of the age.
The Anacalypsis says that The
Apostolic Constitutions quote the Sibylline Oracles and say:
"When all things shall be
reduced to dust and ashes and the immortal god, who kindles the fire, shall
have quenched it, God shall form those bones and ashes into man again, and
shall place mortal men as they were before, and then shall be the judgment, wherein
God shall do justice."
Justin Martyr, about 160 A.D., says
the Cumaean Sibyl prophesied the coming of Christ in express words. Justin
tells the Greeks that they may find the true religion in the ancient Babylonian
Sibyl, who came to Cuma and there gave her oracles, which Plato admired as
divine. Clemens of Rome also quotes the Sibyls in his Epistle to the
Corinthians. They are also quoted by Theophilus, Antiochus, Athenagoras,
Firmianus, Lactantius, Eusebius, St. Augustine and others.
"Take the Greek books, learn
the Sibyl, how she proclaims one God and those things which are to come."
Higgins says there are several works extant purporting to be the writings of
Peter, Paul and other early Christians, in which the Sibylline oracles are
quoted as authorities in support of Christianity.
Dr. Lardner admits (Higgins) that
the old Fathers call the Sibyls
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prophetesses in the strictest sense
of the word. They were known as such to Plato, Aristotle, Diodorus, Strabo,
Plutarch, Pausanius, Cicero, Varro, Virgil, Ovid, Tacitus, Juvenal and Pliny.
What can they have foretold, Higgins asks--and claims he can answer: The same
as Isaiah, as Enoch, as Zoroaster, as the Veddas, as the Irish Druid from
Bocchara, and as the Sibyl of Virgil: a renewed cycle of the sun and its hero
or divine incarnation, its presiding genius. They all admit of ten ages, yet
they are not agreed as to the time when the ages commence; some making them
begin with creation, some with the flood, but the Erythrean Sibyl is the only
one who correctly states them to begin from Adam. He says that ten periods of
600 years each make up the ten ages, or one Great Age.
Some of the testimony regarding the
Sibyls is assembled by Wheless in his Forgery in Christianity (p. 142).
He says that Justin in many chapters cites these oracles and points for
Christian proofs to "the testimony of the Sibyl," of Homer, of
Sophocles, of Pythagoras, of Plato. From the Ante-Nicene Fathers he
takes this:
"And you may in part learn the
right religion from the ancient Sibyl, who by some kind of potent inspiration
teaches you, through her oracular predictions, truths which seem to be much
akin to the teachings of the prophets. . . . ‘Ye men of Greece . . . do ye
henceforth give heed to the words of the Sibyl . . . predicting as she does in
a clear and patient manner the advent of our Savior Jesus Christ,’" as
Wheless adds--"quoting long verses of Christian-forged nonsense." (A.N.F.
i, 288-9).
"It is a fact that no critic
can deny," says Higgins, "that the Sibylline oracles have been
greatly corrupted by the Christians."
Gibbon (D. and F., p. 443)
says in re the Sibylline Oracles: "The adoption of fraud and
sophistry in the defense of revelation" is apparent in their handling by
the Christians.
There must be great significance
attaching to Wheless’ declaration (Forgery in Christianity, p. 195) that
Justin Martyr quotes no Gospels, except loose "Sayings of Jesus," in
his writings, but draws profusely from the Sibyls, Oracles, etc. Even Irenaeus
makes no mention of the four Gospels (Wheless); and according to Higgins (574)
Justin says that "the Sibyl not only expressly and clearly foretells the
future coming of our Savior Jesus Christ, but also all things that should be
done by him." (Cohort and Gr., p. 36; Lardner: Works, Chap.
XXIX.)
149
The most succinct and telling
statement concerning the Sibyls, however, is made by Higgins (576) when he
says:
"Almost every particular in the
life of Christ as detailed in our Gospels is to be found in the Sibyls, so that
it can scarcely be doubted that the Sibyls were copied from the Gospel
histories, or Gospel histories from them. It is also very certain that there
was an Erythrean Sibyl before the time of Christ, whatever it might
contain."
It is hardly probable that any
factual evidence can ever be produced at this remote date to substantiate the
charges of copying on one side or the other. But it is not reasonable to
suppose that a document vastly earlier copied from its successor, although to
uphold claims of antecedence for some of their documents, doctrines and
ceremonial rites, the Christians did actually resort to the plea of
"plagiarism by anticipation" so naïvely put forth by some of the
early Fathers. As the oracles of the pagans were adjuncts of all religion for
many centuries B.C., the implications of plagiarism fall on the Christians.
Whether copied or not, the material fact is that the contents of the oracles
and those of the Christian Gospels correspond to such a degree that comparative
religion study would rate them both as emanating from a common source and being
elements of a common tradition. Practically all the tangled problems of the
chronology of documents and priority of texts might be solved on the general
terms of this hypothesis.
An early writer bearing testimony to
much in Christian history is Papias. He emphatically declares that the
Christian Gospels were founded on and originated in the Logia or Sayings.
Massey derives "myth" from mutu (Egyptian),
"utterance," "saying," and relates it to mati, "utterance
of truth," from which he derives, it is believed with good reason, the Gospel
of Matthew (Egyptian: maatiu). There is an abundance of evidence to
support the contention that the body of the great spiritual tradition handed on
from remotest times was incorporated in collections of the most notable and
vital utterances taken from the lines assigned to be spoken by the Christos or
solar-god figure in the great astronomically-based cryptic ritual of the mighty
Mysteries of the past. These collations of sacred utterances of the divine Son
to mankind were circulated, but in secret, all over the ancient field under the
name, in Greek at any rate, of "the Logia" or "Sayings
of the Lord." It is almost beyond question that they were the root
documents
150
from which the canonical Gospels
were elaborated, or perhaps simply extracted, and to cover deterioration were
emended, interpolated, edited by many scribes in turn. In general statement
this is as near the true history of the source, origin and nature of the
Christian Gospels as can be determined. All the data bearing in any way on the
matter can be focused with complete harmony and consistency on this thesis; and
there are no data that are hostile to it. The hypothesis precisely fits and
elucidates all the data and in turn the data support the thesis. It is the only
thesis of which this happy situation can be predicated.
In this connection it seems
warrantable that the name Mu, applied (by Churchward particularly) to a
"lost continent" and age, is just a form of the word that means
"utterance of truth." In the primordial days of cosmic creation, the
Lord "uttered his voice" and his utterance was the Logos, which
prescribed the form of the universe that his voice called into being. The land
of Mu was no more a local region on a globe than "the abyss of the
waters" was the Pacific Ocean, or the Garden of the Hesperides was in
Spain or that other garden, Eden, was in Mesopotamia, or "the kingdom of
heaven" in Germany.
Since the time of the existence of
the Gospels some portions of texts have been found in Egypt, Syria and
elsewhere called Sayings or Logia, of which whole passages agree
almost verbatim with their counterparts in the Gospels. Why such a fact is not
accorded its full weight is hard to see. Of course Christian defenders
unanimously claim for these documents a date well posterior to the Christian
writings and allege they are copies of Gospel material. Yet surely documents
containing identical data were extant in very ancient pre-Christian times, and
this fact would seem to be in the end conducive for the priority of the Logia
to the Gospels.
Shirley Jackson Case, of Chicago
University Theological School, in his work to support the historicity thesis,
admits broadly that before Paul’s time pre-Christian Christianity was in
existence not only in Palestine, but also in the Diaspora. A broad admission of
this sort could include vast facts and data carrying a very definite refutation
of many Christian claims, and in fact does so.
It must have taken much strongly
evidential proof to bring Kenealy (The Book of God, p. 408) to say that
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"assuming that the copies or
rather phonographs which had been made by Hulkiah and Esdras and the various
anonymous editors were really true and genuine, they must have been wholly
exterminated by Antiochus; and the versions of the Old Testament which now
subsisted must have been made by Judas or by some unknown compilers, probably
from the Greek of the seventy, long after the appearance and death of
Jesus."
One of the Church Fathers complains
that his writings "had been falsified by the apostles of the devil; no
wonder, he adds, ‘that the Scriptures were falsified by such persons.’" (Catholic
Encyclopedia, V, p. 10.) This complainant was Bishop Dionysius.
According to Wheless, Erasmus and
Sir Isaac Newton detected fraud in the translation of passages.
It is probably a record of truth
which the Catholic Encyclopedia (VI, pp. 655-6) makes as to the
authentic authorship of the four canonical Gospels.
"The first four historical
books of the New Testament are supplied with titles (Gospel according to [Greek
kata] Matthew, etc.) which, however ancient, do not go back to the
respective authors of these sacred writings. . . . That they do not go back to
the first century of the Christian era, or at least that they are not original,
is a position generally held at the present day. . . . It thus appears that the
titles of the Gospels are not traceable to the Evangelists themselves."
While this may not point directly to
fraudulent practice, it indicates some manipulation that could possibly hide
covert intent.
On the general score of the
authenticity of the Gospels Wheless writes as follows:
"The possibility of the
pretence that the precious Four Gospels, circulated nondescript and anonymous
in the churches for a century and a half, is patently belied by the specific
instance of the ‘Gospel according to Mark,’ of which Gospel we have the precise
‘history’ recorded three centuries after the alleged notorious event. Bishop Eusebius
is our witness in his celebrated Church History. He relates that Peter preached
orally in Rome, Mark being his ‘disciple’ and companion. The people wanted a
written record of Peter’s preachments, and (probably because Peter could not
write) they importuned Mark to write down ‘that history which is called the
Gospel according to Mark.’ Mark having done so, ‘the Apostle (Peter) having
ascertained what was done by revelation of the Spirit, was delighted’ . . . and
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that history obtained his authority
for the purpose of being read in the churches." (H. E., Bk. II, Ch.
15.)
Wheless gives other data indicating
that Peter was dead at the time alleged. But he cites Eusebius from a later
passage in his Ecclesiastical History, in which this
"historian" gives another version: the people who heard Peter
"requested Mark, who remembered well what he (Peter) had said, to reduce
these things to writing . . . which when Peter understood, he directly neither
hindered nor encouraged it." (H. E., Bk. VI, Ch. 14.) "Peter
thus was alive but wholly indifferent about his alleged Gospel" (Wheless).
It evidently was not "inspired" if Mark only "remembered
well."
It is claimed that Peter was
"martyred in Rome" 64-67 A.D. The earliest date claimed for
"Mark" is some years after the fall of Jerusalem, 70 A.D. The great
Pope Clement I (died 97 A.D.?) first to fourth successor of Pope Peter, knew
nothing of his great predecessor’s "Gospel according to Mark," for,
says the Catholic Encyclopedia (IV, p. 14):
"The New Testament he never
quotes verbally. Sayings of Christ are now and then given, but not in the words
of the Gospels. It can not be proved, therefore, the he used any one of the
Synoptic Gospels."
Wheless comments on this, that of
course he did not and could not; they were not yet written. And no other Pope,
Bishop or Father (except Papias and until Irenaeus) for nearly a century after
"Pope Clement" ever mentions or quotes a Gospel, or names Matthew,
Mark, Luke or John.
"So for a century and a
half--until the books bobbed up in the hands of Bishop St. Irenaeus and were
tagged as ‘Gospels according to’ this or that Apostle, there exists not a word
of them in all the tiresome tomes of the Fathers. It is humanly and divinely
impossible that the ‘Apostolic authorship’ and hence ‘canonicity’ or divine
inspiration of these Sacred Four should have remained for a century and a half
unknown and unsuspected by every Church Father, Pope and Bishop of
Christendom--if existent. Even had they been somewhat earlier in existence,
never an inspired hint or human suspicion was there, that they were ‘Divine’ or
‘Apostolic’ or any different from the scores of ‘Apocryphal or pseudo-Biblical
writings with which the East had been flooded’--that they were indeed ‘Holy
Scripture.’ Hear this notable admission: ‘It was not until about the middle of
the
153
second century that under the rubric
of Scripture the New Testament writings were assimilated to the Old’ (C.
E., III, 275)--that is, became regarded as Apostolic, sacred, inspired and
canonical--or ‘Scriptures.’"
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were
all Jews; their Gospels were written in Greek. Also they speak of the Jews in
the style and spirit of a non-Jew. Luke adds (I, 1) that there were many other
like Gospels afloat. The Cath. Ency. confesses that no one knows why out
of many such Gospels the Sacred Four were chosen. Wheless says that Matthew was
used by the Ebionites, Mark by "those who separate Jesus from
Christ," Luke by the Marcionites, and John by the
Valentinians. Wheless will probably be disputed when he says that it is
"proven that no written Gospels existed until shortly before 185 A.D.,
when Irenaeus wrote; they are first mentioned in Chapter XXI of his Book
II."
The "heretics" were making
use of many Gospels, the orthodox claimed only four for their own. It is
claimed and likely with justice that the "gospel" up to the middle of
the second century was entirely oral and traditional, or with few written
texts, and those held in more or less secrecy by the esotericists of the day. This
would quite well accord with the thesis of the existence of Logia or Sayings
of divine authorship. The Gnostics or other "heretics" were
likely the ones who began to reduce the "gospel" to writing and to
bring it out to general use, like the "occultists" of our own age.
The orthodox, in self-defense, in all probability did likewise, selecting four
and editing them to uphold conceived positions on doctrinal matters. It is
confessed in several places that the "heretical spurious gospels"
prepared the way and doubtless furnished the incentive for the canonized four.
"The Gospels are thus anti-heretical documents of the second century after
Gnosticism first appeared." This fact makes them far other in spirit and
no doubt in contents than what the Christian populace has always innocently
believed them to be--pure historical records of factual occurrence.
Pope Papias--who said that Jesus
died at home in bed of old age!--is among the first, about 145 A.D., to name a
written Gospel. Quoting the old presbyters (whose memory must have gone pretty
far back to the first century), he says that Mark, having become the
interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatever he remembered. It is not
in
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exact order that he relates the
sayings or deeds of Christ. "For he neither heard the Lord nor
accompanied him." Matthew, he says, put the Oracles (of the Lord) in
the Hebrew language, "and each one interpreted them as best he
could." Papias did not have in his important church any other Gospels and
had only heard of such writings from the elders at second hand.
There has been much question of the
genuineness of Mark (XVI, pp. 9-20. On this the Encyclopedia
Britannica (II, p. 1880) says: "The conclusion of Mark (XVI,
9-20) is admittedly not genuine. Still less can the shorter conclusion lay
claim to genuineness." Of the 15th and 16th verses of this chapter the
"Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel" and the
"saved" and "damned" clauses, etc., are obvious
interpolations. Reinach (Orpheus, p. 221) says that it is a "late addition"
and "is not found in the best MSS." The New Standard Bible
Dictionary (p. 551) states that the longer form has against it the
testimony of the two oldest Uncial MSS. (Siniatic and Vatican) and of one of
the two earliest of the Syriac versions, all of which close the chapter at
verse 8. In addition to this is the very significant silence of Patristic
literature as to anything following verse 8. Eusebius says that the portion
after verse 8 was not contained in all the MSS. Jerome also says it was wanting
in nearly all. But Jerome put it into the Vulgate (Cath. Ency.). The
latter authority says:
"Whatever the fact be, it is
not at all certain that Mark did not write the disputed verses. It may be that
he did not; that they are from the pen of some other inspired writer and were
appended to the Gospel in the first century or the beginning of the
second."
But the Council of Trent decreed
they were part of the inspired gospel "and must be received as such by
every Catholic." (C. E., IX, pp. 677-8-9.) The New Commentary on
the Holy Scripture (Part III, pp. 122-3) comments:
"It is as certain as anything
can be in the domain of criticism that the Longer Ending did not come from the
pen of the Evangelist Mark. . . . We conclude that it is certain that the Longer
Ending is not part of the Gospel."
Massey says we learn from Origen
that during the third century there were various different versions of
Matthew’s Gospel in circula-
155
tion. Jerome, at the end of the
fourth century, asserts the same thing; and of the Latin version he says that
there were as many different texts as there were manuscripts!
Reinach contends that the episode of
Jesus and the woman taken in adultery, which was inserted in John’s Gospel in
the fourth century, was originally in the (apocryphal) Gospel according to
the Hebrews. (Orpheus, p. 235.)
As to John XXI the Ency.
Brit. has it that, as XX, 30-31 constitute a formal and solemn conclusion,
Chap. XXI is beyond question a later appendix. "We may go on to add that
it does not come from the same author with the rest of the book." (E.
B., ii, p. 2543.)
Even the conclusion of the Lord’s
Prayer ("For thine is the glory," etc.) is omitted as spurious by the
Revised Version. It is not in the Catholic "True" Version. As to that
Wheless comments: "It may be remarked that the whole of the so-called
Lord’s Prayer is not the Lord’s at all; it is a late patchwork of pieces out of
the Old Testament, as is readily shown by the marginal cross references."
Reinach, citing the Ency. Brit., under
various titles, says of the Peter, John, Jude and James Epistles--the
"Catholic Epistles"--"not one of them is authentic."
A bit shattering is the word of the
same Encyclopedia (I, p. 199):
"John . . . is not the author
of the Fourth Gospel; so, in like manner, in the Apocalypse we may have
here and there a passage that may be traced to him, but the book as a whole is
not from his pen. Gospel, Epistles and Apocalypse all come from the same
school."
This was the school of the Mysteries,
the Essene Brotherhoods, the Associations of Therapeutae, from which all the
oldest documents of a sacred character emanated, and the traditions of which
the Gnostics essayed to carry on into the new formulations of Christianity.
This is a very important datum. Reinach holds that John--or whoever poses as
"John"--is a forger.
Eusebius says that II Peter "was
controverted and not admitted into the canon." The Ency. Brit. endorses
the view and says its tardy recognition in the early Church supports the
judgment of the critical school as to its unapostolic origin.
Tertullian (Cath. Ency., XIV,
p. 525) cites the Book of Enoch as in-
156
spired, and also recognizes the IV
Esdras and the Sibyl, but does not know James and II Peter. He
attributes Hebrews to St. Barnabas.
The Apostolic Constitutions, supposed
to have been compiled by Clement of Rome and held in high esteem, were until
1563 claimed to be the genuine work of the Apostles. They were composed about
400, and were a collection of ancient ecclesiastical decrees concerning the
government and discipline of the Church, in a word, a handy summary of the
statutory legislation of the Apostles themselves, promulgated by their own
great disciple Clement. Their claim of apostolic origin is manifestly quite false
and untenable, Wheless insists. The Catholic Encyclopedia has recognized
them as the work of the Apostles and confirmed them as ecclesiastical law.
Likewise the Liber Pontificalis or
Book of the Popes, a purported history of the Popes beginning with Peter
and continued down to the fifteenth century, Wheless claims is full of spurious
correspondence, liturgical and disciplinary regulations, biographies, etc.,
which certainly must be held under suspicion.
And so the list of tamperings and
forgeries runs on down into the Middle Ages, a revelation of duplicity enough
to shake the faith of the earnest souls confiding in holy leadership, if it was
all known. Lorenzo Valla in 1440 first revealed the forgery of the Donation of
Constantine. The Symmachian Forgeries are confessed by the Catholic
Encyclopedia. Voltaire pronounced the "False Decretals" of
Isidore "the boldest and most magnificent forgery which has deceived the
world for centuries." They appeared suddenly in the ninth century, and in
them the Popes of the first three centuries are made to quote documents that
did not appear until the fourth or fifth century. They are full of
anachronisms.
Then comes the sorry recital of
lists of deceptions concerning sacred relics, starting with those of the person
of Jesus, his bones, his garments, utensils used by him, the cross, nails,
bottles of his blood and also of Mary’s nursing milk, etc., etc., which are so
obviously fraudulent that one would think the ecclesiastical system which
either forged them or winked at their exploitation would blush at the record.
The Catholic Encyclopedia does confess the policy of tolerance of
"the pious beliefs" which have helped to further Christianity and a
general indulgence toward all the fatuous superstitions connected with relics,
saints, healing and the rest. As no church was to be built without dead
157
men’s bones under the altar, so it
would seem as if indeed no church system can be historically promulgated
without the skeleton of the dead past buried deep in the core of its heart and
in its holy of holies.
The Catholic Encyclopedia announces
(III, p. 105) that Chosroes (Khosra) II, King of Persia, in 614 took Jerusalem,
massacred 90,000 good Christians, captured the cross of Christ and carried it
off whole in triumph to Persia. Yet the same authority says that we learn from
St. Cyril of Jerusalem (before 350) that the wood of the cross, discovered
about 318, was already distributed throughout the world, to show up in enough
pieces to have built a colony of summer cottages. This is indeed a miracle of
multiplication surpassing Jesus’ legerdemain with the five loaves and two
fishes. Wheless cites authority for the statement that more than seven hundred
relics of the thorns pressed on Jesus’ brow have been enumerated. For fuller detail
reference should be had to Wheless’ book, Forgery in Christianity. Draper
in his The Intellectual Development of Europe tells of the shock which
the revelation of such unblushing imposture gave to all Europe at different
times and which prepared the way for the Reformation.
The vast fraud of his Church is said
to have burst upon Luther as he ascended the twenty-eight steps of white marble
leading up to the porch of the palace of Pilate allegedly trodden by Christ,
which were brought to Rome from Jerusalem by St. Helena. It must be remembered
that the great surge of the Reformation came from the natural revolt of the
human conscience against dupery and hypocrisy. It will be admitted that the
amount of such deception necessary to cause a revulsion sufficiently strong to
overthrow a pious system consecrated and venerated by centuries of sacred
indoctrination and loyalty must have been of terrific proportions.
Higgins alleges that even the Koran
was forged twenty years after Mohammed’s death. For priestcraft it may indeed
be recognized that necessity is the mother of invention.
Among the writings of St. Anselm,
Archbishop of Canterbury in the eleventh century, has been found a verbal
description of Jesus in Latin attributed to one Lentulus, a friend of Pontius
Pilate and his predecessor in the government of Judea. The letter purports to
have been addressed to the Roman Senate by Lentulus. It has been taken to be
fictitious. No such person as Lentulus is known of in Judea.
158
Much of the alleged "historical
testimony" supporting Jesus’ human existence is material of this sort.
Origen writes that the difference
between the copies of the Gospels is considerable, partly from the carelessness
of individual scribes, partly from the impious audacity of some in correcting
what was written, as well as from "those who added or removed what seemed
good to them in the work of correction." (Origen, M. Matt., XV, p.
14.) Wheless asserts that as far as the Gospel of John was concerned, it was
not identified with the Christian Church until Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, wrote
about it A.D. 185, when the Gnostic Gospel was brought forward. This was
founded on the Egyptian Mysteries, John being the Egyptian Taht-Aan. Massey
endorses this etymology.
Grethenbach (A Secular View of the
Bible) refers to the text of Jesus’ agonized cry of heroic spirituality
from the cross--"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they
do"--and says it is omitted from the earlier copies of the Book of Luke,
and is probably an interpolation from the similar expression of Stephen (Acts,
7:60), and is missing from the other Gospels. This author likewise points
out that all the details of the crucifixion given in the four Gospels are
wholly left in silence by the epistolary authors, an extraordinarily singular
fact, since, he says, Paul himself must have been in Jerusalem at the time it
occurred, and John and Peter are known to have been there likewise.
Mead cites evidence (F. F. F., p.
166) to authenticate his statement that in the "romantic" cycle of
"Gospel" writing connected with Simon Magus, the legend of Peter’s
being in Rome in later versions is belied by data in the earlier ones, in which
Peter does not travel beyond the East. We have already noted Jerome’s admission
that the present Matthew was not the original Gospel of that name, and
that the earlier text was "re-written" by a certain Seleucus.
Another work of Mead’s--Did Jesus
Live 100 Years B.C.?--adduces the datum that the authorized translation of
"almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian" is not correct, and
that the "imperfect original of it is untranslatable."
This may be the appropriate place to
introduce the evidence that is extant as to the mishandling and juggling of the
Greek adjective chrestos, meaning "good," "just,"
"righteous," and the substitution of
159
"Christos," "the
anointed one," for it by the Christian writers. It is doubtful, however,
if much can be made for or against the historicity from the data available. It
is at any rate a matter of considerable importance that the early prevalence of
this spelling, or this word, should be known, as such things have apparently
been designedly kept from general knowledge.
The etymology of Christos has
already been outlined as meaning the "Anointed One," and its evident
derivation from the Egyptian KaRaST, the name of the mummy-babe in the coffin,
with the significance of divinity buried in flesh, has been indicated. KaRaST
has been translated as "fleshed," and it may be of cognate origin
with the Greek word for "flesh," kreas. Christos and Messiah
are equated in the similar meaning of "Anointed." Oddly enough, the
Egyptian mes and the Sanskrit kri both mean "to pour,"
"to anoint."
It seems that Chrestos is by
no means a mere variant of Christos, with the same meaning. The Greek
dictionary gives the word as meaning "good-natured,"
"kind," as applied to men, and "propitious,"
"favorable," as applied to the gods. The distinguished German savant
Lepsius gives the Egyptian nofre (more generally spelled by
Egyptologists nefer) as meaning "good," "beautiful,"
"noble," and says it is equivalent to the Greek Chrestos. He
says that one of the titles of Osiris, On-nofre (Un-nefer) must
be translated "the goodness of God made manifest," which is probably
correct.
Chrestos appears in a number of places throughout the
Bible text. In I Peter 2:3 it occurs with the translation of
"gracious." In Psalm 34:8 it is rendered "good." W.
B. Smith, in Der Vorchristliche Jesus, holds that chrestos as
found in the latter passage is equatable with Christos.
Clement of Alexandria in the second
century founded a serious argument on his paronomasia (juggling of the
spelling, or punning), by which he makes the assertion that all who believed in
Chrest (i.e., "a good man") both are and are called Chrestians,
that is, "good men." And Lactantius sets forth that it is only
through ignorance that people call themselves Christians instead of Chrestians:
"who through the mistake of the ignorant (people) are accustomed to
say Christ with the letter unchanged." (Lib. IV, Chap. VII.) It is
thus apparent that the Greeks were accustomed to call Christ by the name Chrestus,
not Christus.
160
In his The Early Days of
Christianity Canon Farrar has a footnote on the word Chrestian occurring
in I Peter 4:16, where in the revised later MSS. the word was changed
into Christian. The eminent churchman remarks here that "perhaps we
should read the ignorant brethren’s distortion, Chrestian." Most certainly
we should, as the name Christus was not distorted into Chrestus, but
it was the adjective and noun Chrestus which became distorted into Christus
and applied to Jesus. There is much evidence that the terms Christ and
Christians, spelled originally Chrest and Chrestians (Chrestianoi
in Greek) by such writers as Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Lactantius, Clement and
others, were directly borrowed from the temple terminology of the pagans and
meant the same thing, viz., "good," "honest,"
"gracious," and the noun forms from the adjective.
Philo uses the adjective-combination
theochrestos (God declared), which was worked over into theochristos (anointed
of God). There may be something in the suggestion that while Christos means
"to live" and "to be born into a new life" (the basic
meaning of "anointed"), Chrestos signified in the Mystery
phraseology the death of the lower or personal nature in man, that part of us
which must die daily, as St. Paul sees it. An interesting clue that points in
the direction of a cryptic theological meaning of the sort is given by the
fact, brought to our notice by chance, that the zodiacal sign of Scorpio was
known in esoteric studies as Chrestos-Meshiac, while Leo was called Christos-Messiah,
and that this nomenclature antedated by far the Christian era, as a
representation or dramatization in the rites of Initiation in the Mysteries. It
is clearly evident here that Scorpio stood as symbol of the sinking sun of
deity in its autumnal descent into matter, Leo standing for the glorified sun
risen to the zenith. This is further attested by a writer of penetrating
discernment of ancient structures, Ralston Skinner, who in his profound study, Sources
and Measures, brings out a parallel to the Scorpio-Leo, Chrestos-Christos
analysis. He writes:
"One (Chrestos), causing
himself to go down into the pit (of Scorpio, or incarnation in the womb) for
the salvation of the world; this was the sun, shorn of his golden rays and
crowned with blackened ones (symbolizing this loss) as of thorns; the other was
the triumphant Messiah, mounted up to the summit of the arch of heaven,
personated as the Lion of the Tribe of Judah."
161
It is more than a shrewd guess that
we have in this zodiacal characterization, which allocates Chrestos to
Scorpio and Christos to Leo symbolism, the true basis of a distinctive
use of the two words or spellings. We know well that the vowels in ancient
Egyptian, Hebrew and other languages were of quite indifferent rating and
value. There seem to have been almost no vowels in the hieroglyphics, and up to
the sixth century no vowels were written in the pre-Masoretic texts of the
Hebrew scriptures. It is not likely that there was any essentially marked or
significant difference between Chrestos and Christos. They may
have been used more or less interchangeably. But the insatiable tendency of the
ancient mind to devise constructions that would graphically pictorialize basic
principles, laws and truths, took form seemingly in this instance in seizing
upon the two names, Chrestos and Christos, as descriptive of the
two stages of incarnating and resurrected Messianic deity. This is the one
inescapable theme of ancient religious writing. It would match the many other
twofold designations, such as Sut-Horus, Horus the Elder-Horus the Younger,
Osiris-Horus, Cain-Abel, Jacob-Esau, John-Jesus, Judas-Jesus and other pairs
that represent the two opposite phases of deity, the God in matter, the Karast,
and the God restored to heaven, as the Christ. Much Christian thought even
makes the distinction between Jesus the man and Christ the God. It was in all
probability the case that the religionists referred to Jesus as the Chrestos,
or "good man" who was to be through and after his initiations and
transfigurations reborn into the true Christos. The reason, then, for
the indicated tendency of the Christians to change the term Chrestos over
to Christos is plainly seen. It was their obvious purpose to establish
the claim that their divinely prophesied and celestially born Messiah had
indeed become the fully deified Savior. This should be a notable clarification
and it has the subtle agreement of the zodiacal symbolism to support it.
Incidentally we have in Skinner’s
data the probably true significance of the symbolic "crown of thorns"
so tragically pressed down upon the brow of Jesus in the Gospels.
But it is of no little weight to
establish the datum that the term Chrestoi, meaning "good
people," full of sweetness and light, was pre-extant to Christianity. This
is in part certified by the statement of Canon Farrar in The Early Days of
Christianity that
162
"there can be little doubt that
the . . . name Christian . . . was a nickname due to the wit of the
Antiochians. . . . It is clear that the sacred writers avoided the name
(Christians) because it was employed by their enemies (Tacitus: Annals XV:44).
It only became familiar when the virtues of Christians had shed lustre upon it.
. . ."
It is quite more likely that the
Christians chose the name Christian (rather than Chrestian) for
the luster that the high name would shed on them than that their virtues shed
luster upon the name. The name needed no extraneous illumination; the
Christians (as has been seen) doubtless did.
However that may be, the fundamental
and crucial fact of the whole matter seems to center in Massey’s findings with
reference to the derivation of the stem KRST, with whatever voweling, from the
mummy KaRaST of Egypt. In the Agnostic Annual he says:
"In a fifth century
representation of the Madonna and child from the cemetery of St. Valentinus the
new-born babe lying in a box or crib is also the Karest, or mummy-type,
further identified as the divine babe of the solar mythos by the disk of the
sun and the cross of the equinox at the back of the infant’s head. This doubles
the proof that the Christ of the Christian catacombs was a survival of the
Karest of Egypt."
Justin Martyr uses the word Chrestotatoi,
meaning "most excellent." Thirlby alludes to the vulgar custom of
the early time of calling the Christians Chrestians. Higgins ventures
the supposition that "Christianoi" was likely a corruption of
the more common Chrestianoi.
Lucian in a book called Philopatris
makes a person named Triephon answer the question whether the affairs of
the Christians were recorded in heaven: "All nations are there recorded,
since Chrestos exists even among the Gentiles." The Greek is here
given as Chresos.
Dr. John Jones (Lex. in voce.)
observes that this word is found in Romans 16:18. Higgins comments:
"And in truth the composition
of it is Chrestos logia, i.e., Logia peri tou Chrestos, oracles
concerning Chrestus, that is, oracles which certain impostors in the
Church at Rome propagated concerning Christ, Chrisos being changed by
them into Chresos, the usual name given them by the Gnostics and even by
unbelievers."
Paul in this Romans passage
calls the doctrine Chresologia, and Higgins says Jesus was called Chresos
by St. Peter as well as by St. Paul.
163
Bishop Marsh says of the passage in I
Peter 2:3 that some editors give Chrestos, others Christos, "where
the preceding verb egeusasthe determines the former (Chrestos) to
be the true reading." (Marsh’s Various Readings of the New Testament, Vol.
I, p. 278.) Higgins asserts that "anointed" covers everything meant
to be described by Chrestos.
In Did Jesus Live 100 Years B.C.?
Mead states in a footnote that the most ancient dated Christian inscription
(October 1, 318, A.D.) runs: "The Lord and Savior, Jesus the Good"--(Chrestos,
not Christos). This, he says, was the legend over the door of a
Marcionite Church. And the Marcionites were anti-Jewish Gnostics and did not
confound their Chrestos with the Jewish Christos (Messiah). Mead
says elsewhere that Chrestos was a universal term of the Mysteries for
the perfected "saint," and that Christos was more especially
limited to the Jewish Messiah idea.
Mackenzie writes that
"the worship of Christ was
universal at this early date . . . but the worship of Chrestos--the Good
Principle--had preceded it by many centuries, and even survived the general
adoption of Christianity, as shown on monuments still in existence."
He cites examples of the occurrence
of the word Chreste from the catacombs.
It is notable indeed that Justin
Martyr, the earliest Christian author, in his first Apology, called his
co-religionists Chrestians, not Christians.
In a lecture entitled The Name
and Nature of the Christ, Massey writes:
"In Bockh’s Christian
Inscriptions, numbering 1,287, there is not a single instance of an earlier
date than the third century wherein the name is not written Chrest or
Chreist."
There is no manifest reason why a
fact as significant as this should not be widely recognized and publicized both
for the sake of truth and for the sake of the principle now being so
strenuously defended, that the citizens of a democracy are entitled to correct
information on matters of any importance.
It is also definitely worth noting
that in the excerpt from Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars, one of
the four alleged extra-Gospel his-
164
torical references to Jesus, the
name claimed to be an allusion to Jesus is the word Chrestus. Commenting
on this, Harry Elmer Barnes, in The Twilight of Christianity, justly
ventures the suggestion that the word in this form gives us no assurance that
the historical Jesus is the person hinted at, or indeed that it refers to a
person at all.
It is frankly in the line of
philological speculation, but with the apparent identity of root derivation of
two words to suggest its plausibility, to point to a possible relation of the
words Chrestos, Christos, with the Greek impersonal verb chre@insert
flat line over the e, "it is necessary," "it is fitting,"
"it is right," "it is good." There is a dialectical or
philosophical connection that is by no means far-fetched. All religion is
concerned primarily with the relation of the soul to body in its cycles of
descent and return. It is to be recalled that these cycles were known in the
Greek Orphic and Platonic systems as kuklos (cyclos) anagkes, "the
cycle of necessity." Chre[@see above] is kindred to the stem
of the word "cross," and the Christ on the cross was the Christ-soul
undergoing the experience of the cycle of necessity. Also the whole evolution
of the Christos is, in a very real philosophical sense, under the impulsion of
what may be, and often has been, called divine necessity. The soul advances to
divinity, stage by stage and cycle by cycle, under the necessity of its own
nature. The fact that chre@ means "it is good" as well as
"it is necessary" points to the practical certitude that it is
cosmically good for the soul to make the pilgrimage round the circle of the
cosmos, through the gamut of all values.
The final fact of basic import in
the item is that the KRS stem is cognate with the same root that yields the
word "cross." The Karest in the mummy-case was a variant
figure for the Christ on the cross, the deity in the kreas or flesh. It
occurred to some symbologists some time and somewhere to adopt a variant
spelling to set over the descending phase of divinity in the cyclical round
against the reascending phase, in which the pilgrim soul was called the Christ.
The term Chrest was adopted to designate the divine soul going down into
the tomb of the mortal body; the Christ was that same soul emerging out
of it, "on the eastern side of heaven, like a star." As the Book
of Ecclesiastes phrases it, this is almost certainly "the conclusion
of the whole matter."
In his History of the Christian
Religion to the Year 200, Waite considers certain very old texts to have
been basic for the three Synoptic
165
Gospels, and says that these source
books contain no evidence as to such matters as the miraculous conception, the physical
resurrection, or the miracles. He points out also that the early Apostolic
Fathers, Clement of Rome, Ignatius and Polycarp make no mention of the miracles
or the material resurrection. Indeed they make no reference to the Gospels or
the Acts and produce no quotations from them save such as may have been
picked up from extant collections of Logia. He comments on the account
of Mary’s life given in the Protevangelium, her being given by the
priests to the widower Joseph, then about eighty years old, with six children
by a former wife.
As to the Vulgate the Catholic
Encyclopedia (XII, p. 769) states that under Popes Sixtus V and Clement
VIII the Latin Vulgate, after years of revision, attained its present shape.
And says Wheless, this translation, which was fiercely denounced as fearfully
corrupt, was only given sanction of divine inspiration by the Council of Trent
in 1546, under the curse of God against any who questioned it. The tinkering
with the text came after the Council, but the latter’s decree was not altered
to conform to the amended rendering.
Irenaeus either misquotes Mark or
the text has been made to differ from his wording in one place, for he says
that Mark commences with a reference to the prophetic spirit, and that his is
the Gospel of Jesus Christ "as it is written in Esaias the prophet."
Eusebius admits "fraud and dissimulation" in the handling of scripts.
Wheless says the proudest boast of
the Church today with reference to its ex-Pagan Saint Augustine is that
whenever a contradiction between his philosophy and the prescribed orthodox
faith arose, "he never hesitates to subordinate his philosophy to
religion, reason to faith." (Cath. Ency., II, p. 86.) Augustine
himself flaunts his mental servitude when he says: "I would not believe
the Gospels to be true unless the authority of the Catholic Church constrained
me."
Gibbon adduces much reliable
authority to indicate that even in such a matter of historical record as the
number of their sectaries martyred in the persecutions under the several Roman
Emperors, the Christians have outrageously falsified the figures. Gibbon’s
pages should be read more generally, so that a saner view might be taken of
this item of Christian claims, which have been grossly overstated to win the
sympathy which martyrdom arouses.
Miss Holbrook asserts that
166
"Of the 150,000 various
readings which Griesbach found in the manuscripts of the New Testament,
probably 149,500 were additions and interpolations. One of the Greek
manuscripts called ‘Codex Bezal’ or ‘Cambridge Manuscript,’ is
chiefly remarkable for its bold and extensive interpolations, amounting to some
six hundred in the Acts alone."
Gibbon has testified to the
"vulgar forgery" of the insertion of the two admittedly spurious
passages regarding Christos in the text of Josephus.
Alexander Wilder (Article on Evolution)
says that
"such men as Irenaeus,
Epiphanius and Eusebius have transmitted to posterity a reputation for such
untruth and dishonest practices that the heart sickens at the story of the
crimes of that period." A commentator adds: "the more so, since the
whole Christian scheme rests upon their sayings."
It is quite possible--and lamentably
so--that Massey’s bitter words are entirely sane and true, that the
"Christian scheme (as it is aptly called) in the New Testament is a fraud,
founded on a fable in the Old."
There is a letter written by one of
the most respected Fathers of the Church, St. Gregory of Nazianzen to Jerome,
which reveals in pretty clear light the early Church’s policy of deception. Gregory
wrote to his friend and confident, Jerome, as follows:
"Nothing can impose better on
the people than verbiage; the less they understand, the more they admire. Our
Fathers and Doctors have often said, not what they thought, but what
circumstances and necessity forced them to."
Ominous indeed is Massey’s serious
indictment of Christianity’s early duplicity in one of his lectures:
"And when Eusebius recorded his
memorable boast that he had virtually made ‘all square’ for the Christians, it
was an ominous announcement of what had been done to keep out of sight the
mythical and mystical rootage of historic Christianity. The Gnostics had been
muzzled and their extant evidence as far as possible masked. He and his
co-conspirators had done their worst in destroying documents and effacing the
tell-tale records of the past, to prevent the future from learning what the
bygone ages could have said directly for themselves. They made dumb all Pagan
voices that would have cried aloud their testimony against the unparalleled
imposture then being perfected in Rome. They had almost reduced the first four
centuries
167
to silence on all matters of the
most vital importance for any proper understanding of the true origins of the
Christian superstition. The mythos having been at last published as a human
history, everything else was suppressed or forced to support the fraud."
A particularly sharp critic and
accuser of Christianity is Alan Upward in The Divine Mystery. He states
that in the interests of God and heaven "the theologians have laid their
ban on all the sciences in turn, on the lore of the stars, of the rocks, of the
atoms, of the frame of man, of his mind, of the Hebrew language and history, of
Eastern history, of the history of life." It must be confessed there is much
gravamen in this indictment. A religion claiming to be the supremely true one
should assuredly have possessed the basic data and correct knowledge which
would have enabled it to pronounce unerringly upon every department of truth,
in every branch of science. Yet no organic system has ever been found to be so
atrociously in error in every arena of knowledge. Outside its own chamber-room
of hypnotized faith it has stood for long periods as the enemy of truth in
every empirical realm. Truth has had to batter its way through the serried
array of ecclesiastical fanaticism, ignorance and stubborn bigotry over long
centuries. Truth has never been its chief and primary concern or objective.
Instead, it has aimed at psychologization and regimentation of the masses, and
to this end it has ruthlessly swept aside all the formulations of intelligence
which would have hindered the easy achievement of its goal. Besides fighting
every science it has wrecked the splendid temple of ancient mythology and
closed the doors of the schools of esoteric truth, and kept them closed to this
day. It is with regret that one has to agree with Upward in his stinging
accusation against the religion of one’s childhood: "Falsehood is found in
every religion, but only in the Catholic Christianity is it the foundation of
religion." And Upward points to the fact that since with each fresh
discovery of truth in scientific fields the cry goes up all over Christendom
that science has uprooted the bases of religion, this is sure evidence that a religion
resting so far off the center of verihood that every new factual discovery
shakes it to its fall, can not be a true or safe religion. A faith that hangs
constantly so precariously that the snapping of a single strand in the rope
will send it crashing, can not be stabilized in truth.
168
Chapter VII
THROES
OF A BAD CONSCIENCE
It is accounted an evil cause that
must support itself by violence and destruction. Unhappily this is the case
with Christianity after the third century. Repressed and harassed for about
three centuries by popular disapproval and the regnant power, when at last it
came into favor and security and a measure of power of its own, the Church of
Christ at once let loose the fury of its own virulent passion against every
group that would not bend to its narrow and fanatical orthodoxy. It then began
its long and almost uninterrupted career of persecution, to its eternal infamy.
Because they have been forgotten and largely denied, the interests of truth
call for a brief restatement of the facts of ecclesiastical vandalism. It is an
integral part of the case here advocated, along with the literary forgeries,
tampering with sacred texts and the vitiation of the ancient wisdom on every
hand.
Massey well outlines the drift of
things from the time that ignorance overwhelmed the Christian movement, cast
out the uncomprehended Gnosis, and then resorted to measures of violence to cut
all links of connection between their doctrines and antecedent pagan religions.
Innocent at first of any knowledge of the derivation of their doctrines from
reviled sources in heathenism, great was the surprise and resentment of the
Christian devotees when little by little evidence leaked out of the startling and
complete identities of their ideas and forms with the material of despised
former cults. Hotly indignant, the astonished and desperate votaries of the new
faith had to find some way to blot out the tell-tale evidences. So the orgy of
destruction set in. There are instances close at hand in our own day to enforce
upon our minds the futility and the despicableness of the gesture of burning
hated books and exiling their authors. Some of this ignominy can be passed back
upon the Christian partisans of the early centuries, when the hot fury of
fanatical zeal set fire to libraries of the most precious and irreplaceable
books in the world. A fact so well known in history as the burning of the
Alexandrian library by Christian mobs need not
169
be dilated upon here. It has not,
however, been deeply enough stamped upon general intelligence that this vandal
deed was probably the enabling cause of the incidence of fifteen centuries of
the Dark Ages, and the postponement of the Renaissance to the latter half of
that period. The destruction of a library then meant infinitely more than it
would mean today, printing not being extant at the time. It is surely not an
unfounded claim to say that the flames of those burning books threw not a light
but a murky lurid smoke and smudge over the mind of medieval Europe. The evil
consequences are still running their course. The destruction of the Alexandrian
library is the main indictment in the bill of vandalism, but there are others
not so well known.
The severe charge is made by Higgins
(Anac., p. 564) that many of the early Christians of the fourth and
fifth centuries in their "fanatical excitement" became Carmelite
monks and founded a secret corresponding society, meeting mostly at night.
(Night meetings violated Roman law and were in large measure the reason for the
persecutions.) The heads of this order, says Higgins, had enough power to
correct or destroy at pleasure any Gospel in the world not preserved by the
"heretics." This, he avers, is the reason why we have no MSS. older
than those of the sixth century. This order’s detestation of the
"heathen" books was of the deepest virulence, and the fires of their
hatred turned into physical flames first at Antioch, as described in Acts, and,
says Higgins, were repeatedly rekindled by a succession of councils up to the
last canon of the Council of Trent against heathen learning. They sequestered
many books for their later destruction. "Here we have the cause, and
almost the sole cause, which effected the darkness of the world for many
generations."
Higgins relates (p. 565) that St.
Gregory is said by John of Salisbury to have burnt the imperial library of the
Apollo. (Forsythe’s Travels, p. 134.)
The Victor Tunensis, already
mentioned, was, according to Higgins and Lardner, the agent of considerable
destruction of Gospels about the sixth century, and probably by order of the
Emperor Anastasius at Constantinople.
Some twenty-four volumes of the
works of the great Gnostic philosopher Basilides,--extolled so highly by
Clement of Alexandria--his splendid Interpretations Upon the Gospels, were
all burned by order of the Church, Eusebius tells us. These works alone might
have
170
changed the course of Western
history into pleasanter channels than those of bigotry and slaughter. Several
writers affirm that, what with generations of the most active Church Fathers
working assiduously at the destruction of old documents and the preparation of
new passages to be interpolated in those which happened to survive, there
remains of the noble Gnostic literature, the legitimate offspring of the
genuine archaic wisdom, nothing but the Pistis Sophia and some few
scattered fragments, precious, however, for the hints they give of the mighty
treasure lost.
Mead is authority for the reported
burning of the manuscripts of French Rabbis by the Inquisition. He says that
for one thousand years the Christian authorities hurled all kinds of bulls,
anathemas and edicts of confiscation and conflagration against the Talmud. He
cites, too, the vandal acts of the fanatical Crusaders, who left smoldering
piles of Hebrew scrolls behind them in their path of blood and fire. Official
burnings of Hebrew books began at Montpellier in 1233, where a Jew, an
Anti-Maimonist, persuaded the Dominicans and Franciscans of the Inquisition,
likely unaware of the purely internal conflict between exotericism and
esotericism in Jewry, to commit to the flames all the works of Maimonides. In
the same year at Paris some twelve thousand volumes of the Talmud were burned,
and in 1244 eighteen thousand various works were fed to the flames.
The story of the destruction, not
only of books, but of cities, monasteries and temples, of the early
pre-Christian Gaelic civilization in Britain, Ireland, Brittany and Gaul, is a
sorry narrative of Christian fury. A Christian mob destroyed the city of
Bibractis in 389 in Gaul, and Alesia was destroyed before that. Bibractis had a
sacred college of the Druids with forty thousand students, giving courses in
philosophy, literature, grammar, jurisprudence, medicine, astrology,
architecture and esoteric religion. Arles, founded 2000 years before Christ,
was sacked in 270 A.D.
A statement in Westrop and Wake’s Phallism
in Ancient Religions charges Cardinal Ximenes with having burned the old
Arabic manuscripts. And Draper shows that the same Ximenes "delivered to
the flames in the squares of Granada eighty thousand Arabic manuscripts, among
them translations of the classical authors." Wilder states that thirty-six
volumes written by Porphyry were destroyed by the Fathers.
A candid and unbiased witness is
Edward Carpenter, English phi-
171
losopher, who, in Pagan and
Christian Creeds (p. 204), speaks bluntly of Christian practices:
"The Christian writers, as time
went on, not only introduced new doctrines, legends, miracles and so
forth--most of which we can trace to antecedent pagan sources--but they took
pains to destroy the pagan records and so obliterate the evidence of their own
dishonesty."
J.M. Robertson (Pagan Christs, p.
325) writes that of certain books mentioned "every one of these has been
destroyed by the care of the Church." The treatise of Firmucus has been
mutilated at a passage where he has accused the Christians of following
Mithraic usages.
. . . . . . .
The invidious task of mustering a
large body of such evidence as this would seem to have been well enough
performed with what has been given. But another sizable segment of data remains
to be put on record, not at all with the mere aim of heaping disrepute on the
dominant religion of the West, but for the purpose of adding convincing reality
to the claims here advanced that the Christian system early suffered such
deterioration as to make both possible and understandable the catastrophic
changes alleged herein. The first reaction on the part of non-studious folks in
the Christian faith will undoubtedly be the feeling that a group of people so
sanctified by piety and holy faith as the early Christians are commonly reputed
to have been, could not have perpetrated the crimes against intelligence and
righteousness which this work lays at their door. It remains to be shown, then,
that the picture of elevated holiness traditionally painted of the primitive
Christians has been colored with unduly bright hues.
On the side of philosophy and
religion as an intellectual enterprise Mead has most accurately and faithfully,
as well as without undue bias, presented the true picture of the situation in
primitive Christianity. In his Fragments of a Faith Forgotten he
analyzes the effect of the sudden "throwing open" of the secret esoteric
wisdom to the untutored populace, and describes the effect of the blinding new
light on the masses. He asserts that the adherents of the new religion
professed to "throw open everything" to common view, and the
procedure left the unprepared rabble dazed by a sudden flashing of light they
could not comprehend. The upshot was that they were thrown into a fever of
excitement and emotional frenzy, similar in kind, though greater in
172
degree, to the ferment created by
every other marked preachment of new and sensational doctrines in religion. The
sage custodians of deep spiritual truth were well instructed and supported by
astute knowledge of human nature in their policy of esoteric secrecy. They had
been well counseled to this posture by witnessing the inordinate emotional
upheaval set in ferment by every untimely release of the dynamic psychological
potency of great truths imperfectly comprehended and unsteadied by knowledge.
The phenomenon is so glaringly exemplified before our eyes in this day that Mead’s
words should strike us with singular force:
"The ‘many’ had begun to play
with psychic and spiritual forces let loose from the Mysteries, and the ‘many’
went mad for a time and have not yet regained their sanity."
The bold affirmation is here made that
this comes closer to being the true analysis of the motivation and expression
of the forces that made Christianity the religion it was and gave it its
distinctive character and direction than any other estimate advanced over the
centuries. We have before us at this present so exactly similar a situation in
the ferment of extreme and fanatical ideologies exhibited by a host of modern
"spiritual" cults of many varieties that there should be little
difficulty in our seeing the obvious correctness of Mead’s analysis. It is the
very charge resounding from hundreds of pulpits today, that thousands of
semi-intelligent people are playing with psychic, "spiritual" and
"occult" forces which, if coaxed into untimely function without
competent philosophical acumen, can prove most perilous to sanity and balance.
This can be seen and possibly readily admitted by the clergy. What the clergy
will not so readily admit, however, is that its own primitive Christianity
(after the fatal third century, at any rate) was as errant, wild and misguided
a fanaticism as that of the contemporary cults. It was not so as long as it
held on to the philosophy and the esoteric Gnosis of the precedent Mysteries.
It became such the moment it destroyed the Mysteries, let down the disciplinary
safeguards and "threw open everything" sacred and profound to the
impious hands of the gullible masses. The idiotic fervor of piety unbalanced by
the intelligence requisite to hold it in line with restraint, swept
Christianity out of the channels of sanity into the maelstrom of one of the
most rabid of all religious ferments in history, and from that into currents
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that have borne it forward along
courses of violence, bigotry and inhumanity almost beyond belief.
In the same work Mead portrays the
situation that ensues when a strong ferment brews among the populace, and a new
order is instituted following the sweeping away of old barriers. This, too, can
have direct relevance and instruction for the world today. He says the new
order gives rise at the same time to a wild intolerance, a glorification of
ignorance, a wholesale condemnation of intelligent conservatism, and generally
causes a social upheaval which is taken to be the divine expression of a new
freedom. Always the peculiar mark of this new freedom is that it shortly
becomes as dogmatic as the old oppression. Every one of these stages was
manifest in the popular revolt against the conservative aristocracy of
intellect in religion which from the third century swept Christianity into the
role and spirit of an anti-cultural faith. Such would inevitably be the case
when the predominantly mystical and emotional types of religion gain the field
against the predominantly intellectual and philosophical strains. Early Gnostic
and Pauline Greek Christianity were of the latter strain; orthodox
Christianity, mostly Petrine after the third century, was of the former type.
This is primarily all that is required as datum to qualify a perfectly clear
and correct evaluation of the genius of the movement that founded Christianity.
With this view as guide and gauge, there should now be made a thorough re-study
of the genesis of Christianity. It would be a most illuminating revelation of
what perils are generated the moment reason yields the ground to faith in
religion, when piety is not balanced by rational elements, or, in broad sense,
when philosophy gives place to religion. Mead ends his treatment of the point
with the epigrammatic threnody, "Greek rationalism was lost; symbolism was
lost." Indicating the truth of both the fact and its significance may be
cited Tertullian’s brief announcement that "when one has once believed,
search should cease."
On the State of the Church is the title of a treatise written by St.
Cyprian just before the Decian persecution. He admits in it that "there
was no true devotion in the priests" . . . that the simple were deluded
and the brethren circumvented by craft and fraud. Also he declares that great
numbers of the Bishops were eager only to heap up money, to seize people’s lands
by treachery and fraud and to increase their stock by exorbitant usury. (Quoted
by Middleton, Free Inquiry.)
174
The Catholic Encyclopedia (I,
p. 555) may be cited to the effect that even in the fourth century St. John
Chrysostom testifies to the decline in fervor in the Christian family and
contends that it was no longer possible for children to obtain proper religious
and moral training in their own homes. The Encyclopedia adds at another
place (VIII, p. 426): "The Lateran was spoken of as a brothel and the
moral corruption of Rome became the subject of general odium." Practically
in every century nearly every large city in Christendom has been charged with
harboring vice and moral and political corruption till the odium mounted to
scandal. Yet alongside of this record and its own admissions of rottenness in
Christian lands and even in the Church itself, this authority (III, p. 34)
boasts that "the wonderful efficacy displayed by the religion of Christ in
purifying the morals of Europe has no parallel." Vaunting that "the
Church was the guide of the western nations from the close of the seventh
century to the beginning of the sixteenth," it can be quoted with a string
of admissions such as that on VII, p. 387:--"At the beginning of the
Reformation the condition of the clergy and consequently of the people was a
very sad one . . . the unfortunate state of the clergy . . . their corrupt
morals"--that openly belie the validity of the claim. It itself pronounces
the Middle Ages, "of all human epochs, an age of terrible corruption and
social decadence." "From the fourth century onward . . . the Agapae
gave rise to flagrant and intolerable abuses." It describes the Agapetae
as virgins who consecrated themselves to God with a vow of chastity and
associated with laymen who like themselves had taken a vow of chastity.
"It resulted in abuses and scandals." Jerome arraigns Syrian monks
for living in cities with Christian virgins. These Agapetae are
sometimes confounded with the Subintroductae or women who lived with
clerics without marriage, says the Encyclopedia (I, p. 202).
Even Eusebius refuses to record the
dissensions and follies which were rife among the many factions before the
Diocletian persecution (Eccl. Hist., Bk. 8, Ch. 2). He delineates the
unshepherdly character of the shepherds of flocks, "condemned by divine
justice as unworthy of such a charge," their ambitious aspirations for
office and the injudicious and unlawful ordinations that take place, the
divisions among the confessors themselves, the great schisms industriously
fomented by factions, heaping affliction upon affliction,--"all these I
have resolved to pass by."
175
Catholic Encyclopedia says (VI, p. 793) that at the time of
Gregory VII’s elevation to the papacy "the Christian world was in a
deplorable condition." Doctrinal controversy waxed bitter to the point at
times of physical combat, especially, says the Encyclopedia (I, p. 191),
in North Africa. "One act of violence followed another and begot new
conflicts. . . . Crimes of all kinds made Africa one of the most wretched
provinces in the world."
Lundy says that the Arian and
orthodox factions fought in the streets and in the churches with such fierce
animosity that on one occasion one hundred and thirty-seven dead bodies were
found in one of the basilicas (Animianus Marcellinus, lib. XXVII, iii,
p. 392). Doctrinal controversy waxed so fierce that it gave rise to the phrase
"Odium Theologicum" expressed by one writer in the sentence,
"Hell hath no fury like an offended saint." This had been previously
matched by the Emperor Julian’s characterization: "There is no wild beast
like an angry theologian."
The Encyclopedia portrays
elaborately the "general debasement" which the Church shared with the
times. It was worst in the tenth century. Simony and clerical incontinence were
the two great evils descanted upon. "Many had lost all sense of Christian
ideals." Says the Encyclopedia, with more truth than it suspected,
no doubt, "the accumulated wisdom of the past was in danger of perishing."
In controversion of the general claim of the Church that in the night of the
Dark Ages it was the monasteries and cloisters of Christianity that preserved
the ancient classics, we may cite Wheless’ sentence: "We shall see that
every scrap of Greek and Latin learning which, after twelve centuries, slowly
filtered into Christendom, came from the hated Arabs, through the more hated
Jews, after Christian contact with civilization through the Crusades." And
the Encyclopedia testifies to the fact of sinister force in admitting
that even when the development of Scholasticism brought the revival of Greek
philosophy, particularly that of Aristotle, "it also meant that philosophy
was now to serve the cause of Christian truth." The same force of obscurantism
that ten or twelve centuries earlier had blotted out the world’s accumulated
spiritual light was now upon its return ready to diffract the pure rays of that
light into colors of its own composition by passing them through the medium of
that dark glass of perpetuated dogmatism and entrenched ignorance that had
extinguished it in the first instance. The same ob-
176
fuscation of intellect that had put
out the light a thousand years before was still at hand to distort its pure
gleam when it shone again.
The Encyclopedia speaks (XII,
p. 765) of "a revival of learning as soon as the West was capable of
it"--after being under Christian tutelage for a thousand years.
At a moment when the conscience of
cultured people everywhere is horrified at the savage atrocities of a nation
diabolically committed to violence, it might be well to remind those on the
side of Christian resentment against "pagan" barbarity, that when the
Christian Crusaders entered Jerusalem from all sides on July 15, 1099, they
slew its inhabitants regardless of age or sex, while Saladin committed no act
of outrage.
J. E. Ellam, in his Buddhism and
Modern Thought (p. 140), puts in brief compass and strong terms the
degradation of Europe under Christianity:
"Yet the moral level of Europe
was lower than that of any savages of whom we have record. Its barbarities and
cruelties, its vices and brutality, would have scandalized even Dahomey and
Benin. Cyril of Alexandria has a lurid description of the vices even of his own
followers. Augustine says much the same of ‘the faithful’ in Roman Africa.
Silvianus, a priest of the fifth century, writes: ‘Besides a very few who avoid
evil, what is almost the whole body of Christians but a sink of iniquity? How
many in the Church will you find that are not drunkards, or adulterers, or
fornicators, or gamblers, or robbers, or murderers,--or all together?’"
(Silvianus: On the Providence of God, III, 9.)
Lundy (Monumental Christianity, p.
353) speaks of the licentiousness in connection with the Agapae or
"love-feasts" held in the Christian congregations--
"When in the fourth century . .
. the Church, from the necessity of the case, substituted these Agapae for some
of the pagan festivities the abuse became so great that the Council of Laodicea
forbade their celebration altogether in the churches." Its Canon XXVIII
enacts that "it is not permitted to hold love-feats, as they are called,
in the Lord’s houses, or in church assemblies, nor to eat and to spread couches
in the house of the Lord."
Lundy states, however, that they
were such a scandal to the Christian name by reason of the drunkenness and
licentiousness practiced that entire suppression was the final resort.
177
"But so popular were these
festivals among the poor and ignorant classes of the Christian community, such
a strong hold had they obtained in their hearts and lives that it was an
exceeding difficult matter to suppress them."
They could still be held in private
homes and in cemeteries "and were so held for three centuries
longer." They were not suppressed until the seventh century, when the
Trullian or Quinisext Council took them in hand.
Paulinus, the good Bishop of Nola,
laments that these festivities were carried on during the entire night.
"How I wish," he says in
the Ninth Hymn to Felix, "that their joys would assume a more sober
character; that they would not mix their cups on holy ground. Yet I think we
must not be too severe on the pleasures of their little feasts: for error
creeps into unlearned minds; and their simplicity, unconscious of the great fault
they commit, verges on piety, supposing that the saints are gratified by the
wine poured upon their tombs."
The good Bishop’s sad confession
that error creeps into unlearned minds is one of the bluntest massive truths
confronting humanity. It is also one of the most vital factors involved in the
entire history of the Christian religion. Admitted by everybody, it would seem
as if, therefore, the very first article in the constitution of a great
religion would be to spread honest learning as widely and as deeply as
possible.
Lundy sententiously summarizes the
situation in the Church, saying (p. 107) that
"Christian doctrine, Christian
morals and Christian art degenerated together, and it is called
development!" So he can say: "All this is but a repetition of the
degeneracy and the debasement of the old Patriarchal faith into Pagan idolatry:
of simple truths, as taught by symbols perverted into falsehood by images and
idols."
It is hardly necessary to inject the
correction of his last statement, that it was not the images and idols that
perverted truth, but the failure to go behind those symbols to the sublime
meaning now known to be covered by them.
Mead assembles evidence to indicate
that the lasciviousness of the Agapae can not be charged against people of such
refinement and philosophical acumen as the Gnostics, though Clement does bring
the
178
charge against them; but thinks it
probable that some cults calling themselves Christians did confuse the Agapae
and love-feasts of the times with the orgies and feasts of the ignorant
populace. "The Pagans brought these accusations against the Christians,
and the Christian sects against one another."
The volume of accusation and
supporting data could be heaped up to hundreds of pages. The modest quantity,
gathered in desultory reading, here presented is sufficient to carry home the
point that flagrant deterioration had taken hold of the Christian movement on a
vast scale, and, since things have their causes, something must have occurred
in the movement that for two and a half to three centuries manifested high
intelligence and moral purity to reduce it so suddenly to corruption and
barbarity. This cause, it is contended, as far as it was an influence detached
from exterior economic, political and social conditions, was the loss of the
esoteric wisdom, philosophical culture and the whole intellectual side of
religion, induced by and further inducing the popular submergence of minority
intelligence by majority ignorance. The direct relevance to our theme of this
fateful shift from philosophical rationalism to massive irrational pietism is
found in the reflection that such a vast transformation in outward life and
thought was the evidence of another equally drastic change in basic
understanding. The larger and more manifest changes in outward life must spring
from significant changes in inner consciousness. That inner change was in major
part just that shift from symbolic and allegorical esotericism over to
historical literalism, the chief item of which was the mistaking of the
Christos for a man of flesh.
As this work is not an attack on
Christianity, it must be emphasized that the data here presented reflecting
adversely on the name and record of that religion have been given purely for the
sake of buttressing the leading argument with the support it gains from its
setting in a true, instead of a warped, view of past history. The argument
would lose some of its legitimate force if permitted to stand in the poorer
light of a history that has been, at any rate to common intelligence, grossly
distorted by pious misinterpretation, suppression of honest facts, vandalism
and juggling of every sort. The aim has been a purely academic or dialectic
one, to show that the loss of high knowledge, the historization of myths and
dramas, the literalization of the Gospels, the conversion of the personae of
the great universal
179
ritual into living persons, the
lethal sweep of ignorance and the ensuing degradation and debasement of the
whole movement from the interior heat of theological doctrine clear out to the
periphery of moral social conduct, were all wholly necessary and consistent
elements of the one completed picture. If history can not be brought into court
to support a thesis, point a moral or furnish evidence in straightforward
truth-seeking, it is studied to little good purpose. We therefore cite the
portions of history that bear with very direct cogency upon the great question
under investigation.
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Chapter VIII
SUBLIME
MYTH MAKES GROTESQUE HISTORY
No single volume could undertake the
full task of establishing the fact of the conversion of allegory, myth and
drama into "history," but the case has been presented in outline with
enough evidence to render it a substantial claim. The stage is now ready for
the introduction of the main evidence to validate the further claim that the
events taken for the alleged historical narrative of Old and New Testament
literature are not and never were occurrences on the plane of objective
reality. The case now proceeds directly to the submission of the testimony
which proves that the whole web of Gospel history was woven by ignorant
assumption out of the traditional material of the rite and the myth.
It is quite possible that with so
much of the evidence destroyed, full and final "proof" of the actual
change of meaning can never be presented, or that material will never be found
that will pin the offense on the actual culprits or show them in the actual
work of making the change. There were no lie-detectors, wall-recorders or
hidden cameras available to catch the manipulators at work. The change came
first in the minds of the theologians and the people and only later carried out
its implications in the alteration of texts and the "correction" of
manuscripts. But in the pages ahead so much of the evidence that may be
considered as "proof" of the general change on this score will be
adduced as the scope of the volume will permit. Again a great quantity is
available, and that from rather haphazard reading. A systematic search would
uncover whole volumes more. Again much of the data is furnished by Massey and
Higgins. It may be claimed that too much reliance is being placed upon the
findings of these two delvers into the past, and that their views are
prejudiced. We demur to the objection. Both gave their lives to extensive
research in the field of ancient religion, both were honest in appraising the
value of material and both were to the highest degree sincere in their single
aim of finding what was the truth. If they were eventually disposed to a
sharply critical
181
view of Christianity, it came
directly as the result of what they discovered in the history of that religion.
Their hostility was engendered by the force of repellent facts brought to light
in their studies, and was not the operation of a merely sectarian prejudice. No
more than the present writer did they begin their investigations with a
preconceived enmity to Christianity. They probably held no positive enmity
against it at any time; they simply wished the world to know the actual truth
about it and its history. At any rate they align their judgments and
conclusions with the facts and the evidence, and their work must be judged on
the basis of its agreement with the data and its competence to meet the demands
of exegetical proof, as that of any other scholars. Their testimony is
presented here because they saw with clearest vision and described with
singular lucidity the pertinent truth in scores of situations in which a clear
view has never been had before. A subsidiary aim of this study is to vindicate
in the main their important findings in their field. This aim would include
also Thomas Taylor in the field of Greek translation and exegesis.
It seems best to begin with what
might be generally called circumstantial evidence, and then proceed to more
redoubtable testimony. Every item submitted will bear more or less directly
upon the case for the non-historicity of the Gospels and their characters.
It is not necessarily true that the
workability of a thesis proves its correctness. But if the thesis for the
historicity of Jesus piles up great difficulties and obstacles in the way of
its acceptance, and that for the non-historicity clears them away, it is a
major presumptive evidence that the successful and consistently workable thesis
is the correct one. This broad observation will serve to introduce a series of
depositions from our scholar Gerald Massey, which, at the risk of some
prolixity, it seems eminently desirable to array here. They are of themselves matter
of intrinsic value and bear down on our case with most pointed appositeness.
Almost alone of Egyptologists this student discerned the chief elements in the
great significance of Egypt’s lore of wisdom, and therefore had at his service
a key by which he could penetrate more deeply into the heart of the Egyptian,
Greek and Hebrew systems of religion. His pronouncements and judgments are
deemed of especial value because they publish vital truths missed by all the
other investigators of the literature of old.
182
Massey portrays the Egyptian origin
and background of the Christian theology and finds it non-historical (The
Natural Genesis, I, p. 479):
"Egypt labored at the portrait
[of the Christ] for thousands of years before the Greeks added their finishing touches
to the type of the ever-youthful solar god. It was Egypt that first made the
statue live with her own life and humanized her ideal of the divine. Here was
the legend of supreme pity and self-sacrifice so often told of the canonical
Christ. She related how the god did leave the courts of heaven and come down as
a little child, the infant Horus, born of the Virgin, through whom he took
flesh, or descended into matter, ‘crossed the earth as a substitute’ (Ritual,
Ch. xlviii), descended into Hades as vivifier of the dead, their vicarious
justifier and redeemer, the first fruits and leader of the resurrection into
eternal life. The Christian legends were first related of Horus or Osiris, who
was the embodiment of divine goodness, wisdom, truth and purity; who personated
ideal perfection in each sphere of manifestation and every phase of power. This
was the greatest hero that ever lived in the mind of man--not in the flesh--to
influence with transforming force; the only hero to whom the miracles were natural
because he was not human.
"The so-called miracles of
Jesus were not only impossible on human grounds; they are historically
impossible because they were pre-extant as mythical representations which were
made on grounds that were entirely non-human, in the drama of the Mysteries
that was as non-historical as the Christmas pantomime. The miracles ascribed to
Jesus on earth had been pre-Christian religion. Horus, whose other name is
Jesus, is the performer of ‘miracles’ which are repeated in the Gospels, and
which were first performed as mysteries in the divine nether world. But if
Horus or Iusa be made human on earth, as a Jew in Judea, we are suddenly hemmed
in by the miraculous at the center of a maze with nothing antecedent for a
clue; no path that leads to the heart of the mystery and no visible means of
exit therefrom. With the introduction of the human personage on mundane ground,
the mythical inevitably becomes the miraculous; you cannot have history without
it; thus the history was founded on the miracles, which were perversions of the
mythology that was provably pre-extant."
This is a clear and succinct picture
of the truth on the point--except, as has been indicated in our previous work, The
Lost Light, that Massey erred in the matter of the mislocation of the
nether world, or underworld, of mythology, the Amenta of Egyptian texts. He
thought that the Christians erred in mistaking the "earth" of Amenta
for this
183
mundane realm and in transplanting
the spiritual Christos from this celestial "earth" to the real earth,
thereby euhemerizing and falsely historicizing him. In aiming to correct their
arrant blunder, he keeps the Christos entirely away from earth, and applies the
Christly legend to the "other earth" of Amenta, located somewhere in
spiritual spheres. Thus, while Massey retains the Christos as a spiritual
entity only, or an element of consciousness, which is assuredly his true
character, he in turn errs by keeping him away from earth and the life of man
in his supposititious "other earth" of Amenta. The Christos is a real
entity and he is spiritual in nature, but he is on earth and in man,
yet neither a man on earth (the Christian mistake), nor a spirit in any
other earth than this only one we know (Massey’s error). The Lost Light has
at great length established the truth that Amenta, the underworld of mythology,
Hades, is this good earth, where the Christos, a principle and not a man, but
at the same time the god in man, performs all the miracles that, as Massey
truly represents, were typical allegories in the myth, but were made into
miracles in the Gospels when ignorance dragged symbology over into
"history." To sum up, the Christians said the Christ was a man on
earth in history. Massey says that the Christ was not a man at all, nor was he
on earth or in history. He was, instead, the Christ in man, who after death
descended into the gloomy Amenta as a shade, and there worked the miracles of
healing and implemented the judgment and the resurrection. Massey’s mistake was
in saying he was not on earth. He was on earth, operating during the
life, not after the death, of men, only not as a man, but as a principle of
righteousness, in man. The previous work has demonstrated that the ancient
theologists called this life "death" (the death of the soul, buried
in sense), called mortals "the dead," and by their name Amenta they
designated no other region than this nether world which we know as earth. The
reorientation of the meanings of these three or four names is pretty nearly the
whole clue to the proper interpretation of the scriptures of antiquity. It will
be necessary to keep this correction in mind in reading further cullings from
Massey’s works. It vitiates his main conclusions, but does not destroy the
value of his findings with regard to the conversion of myth into history.
A great enlightenment floods the
mind from the vast truth couched in the following brief passage from his great
work, Ancient Egypt, The Light of the World (p. 77):
184
"When it is conclusively proved
that the Christian miracles are nothing more than the pagan mode of symbolical
representation literalized, there is no longer any question of contravening, or
breaking, or even challenging any well-known laws of nature. The discussion as
to the probability or possibility of miracle on the old grounds of belief and
doubt it closed forever."
This indeed is a welcome closure of
debate, for few things have so sorely perplexed the reasoning mind and taxed
the religious faith of mankind as the alleged "miracles" of Jesus in
the Gospels. Whatever militates to break man’s utter faith in and reliance upon
the invariability of natural law, by so much disintegrates his position of
stability in the world, undermines his bases of constancy in conduct and
corrodes his entire ground of moral conscience. It tends to reduce his cosmos
to a chaos, if the laws of life can be abrogated at any time by a fiat of
arbitrary whimsicality, however "good." The philosopher David Hume
has written a treatise that lays forever the ghost of "miracles" with
impregnable logic: if an event occurs it does so by and through the operation
of law and not in contravention of it. There can be no such thing as a
"miracle" of the kind believed in by common uncritical religious
faith."
The mind of man will be doubly
safeguarded against invasion from the side of irrationalism if Massey’s golden
theological discovery is correct,--that the miracles are only literalized
spiritual myths, and never objectively happened. It is the natural law that
works no end of miracles, that is, things to make man wonder, such as the rain,
the snow, the dew, fire, water, green leaf, bud, flower, seed, death and life
from death ever renewed. The Christian introduction of the cult of the
"supernatural" into current untutored thought has come closer to unsettling
the normal sanity of the world mind and making gullible fools out of millions
than any other influence known to history. What the
"miracles"--before they were historicized--meant to ancient sapiency
was just the truly wonder-working power of the Christ in man to transfigure
mortal life and the very bodies of mortals on earth with divine health and
beauty. And this knowledge and this conception is worth infinitely more than
the physical "healing" by a touch from outside having nothing to do
with the beneficiary’s own deserts or his own inner divinity, and therefore
meaningless. The "healing" of five thousand men and women on any
hillside or lakeside in Palestine two thousand years ago is an event of no
significance compared with the uni-
185
versal understanding of the immanent
Christ’s power to heal all men by his divine ferment. Religion badly needs a
totally new orientation to this reputed matter of "healing." If
people can for long periods violate the laws of life, particularly those connected
with food and diet, become gravely ill and then run to a healer or a healing
philosophy and be "made whole" by alleged divine power without
reference to their demerit or their deserts under the law of life and in
contravention of evolutionary justice, chaos will be introduced into the
counsels of creation. In fact, the popular religious notions that have made
"healing" almost the prime credential of the authenticity of any
religious movement, is itself almost wholly grounded on a contempt for natural
law. This has gone so far in modern "spiritual" cultism that one
strong group has flaunted as one of its banners the outright shiboleth that
"the laws of nature are the vaporings of mortal mind." It must
basically be assumed that if "spiritual law" in some measure transcends
natural law, it does so by fulfilling and consummating it, not by negating it.
It is unquestionable that spiritual law bends natural forces to its purposes,
as man uses a machine or soul uses body; but it does not disregard the natural
energies which it uses any more than the user can disregard the laws of his
machine or his body. In this field the vogue of "miracles" has
wrought havoc with general sanity. Massey’s fine discernment that saw first and
clearly in modern times that the "miracles" of "Jesus" were
Egyptian mythical rescripts falsely turned into "history," at one
stroke robs the Gospel "wonders" of their fictitious value, while
restoring to us their real value as dramatic mysteries, and his work in this item
puts us under vast obligation to him and to the integrity of his mind and
motive. It is this obligation that urges the inclusion of so much of his
material in this work.
He writes that no Egyptologist has
ever dreamed that the Ritual--the Book of the Dead--still exists
in Christian formulations, under the disguise of both the Gnostic and the
canonical Gospels, or that it was the fountain-head of all the books of wisdom
claimed to be divine. But no initiate in the Osirian Mysteries could possibly
have rested his hope of salvation "on the Galilean line of glory,"
which made individual in one "man" what was spiritually attainable by
all. Egypt possessed the knowledge that a kingly power of consciousness had
become a voluntary immolation on the altar of sense and fleshly body, in a
passion of divinest pity became incarnate, put itself "under the law"
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of sin and "death" for the
salvation of the world; but this knowledge did not run out in futile nonsense
in the belief that God had manifested once for all as a historic personality.
The same legend of divine sons sacrificing their heavenly birthright for
humankind was repeated in many lands with a change of name for the empyreal
sufferer, but none of those initiated in the esoteric wisdom ever looked upon
Iusa, or Horus, Jesus, Tammuz, Krishna, Buddha, Witoba, Marduk, Mithra,
Sabazius, Adonis or any other of the many Saviors as historical in personality,
"for the simple reason that they had been more truly taught."
(Massey.)
The first "gospel" of the
Christians "began with a collection of Sayings of Jesus, fatuously
supposed to have been a historical teacher of that name," Massey avers. In
some "New Sayings of Jesus" found at Oxyrhynchus, utterances
of "Jesus" paralleling those found in the Ritual of remote
Egyptian times are to be read.
In a lecture entitled The Logia
of the Lord, or Prehistoric Sayings Ascribed to Jesus the Christ, Massey
sets forth many vital data. Never, he says, were mortals more perplexed,
bewildered and taken aback than were the Christians of the second, third and
fourth centuries, who had started their own new beginning, warranted to be
solely historic, and then found that an apparition of their faith was following
them one way and meeting them in another. This "double" of their faith
was obviously not founded on their alleged facts which stood as the base of
their original religion, but were ages earlier in the world. It was a shadow
that threatened to steal away the body of their substance, mocking them with
its factual unreality--a hollow ghost of the same truths they had embraced as a
solid possession. It was horrible, devilish. Nothing but the work of the devil
could explain the haunting phantom. The Gnostic Ante-Christ had to be made
their Anti-Christ. The pre-Christian Gnostics and some of the primitive
Christian sects had a Christ who was not based on the person of the living
Jesus! One and all had as their divine figure the mystical Christ of the Gnosis
and the mythical Messiah, the Ever-Coming One, the type of divine selfhood,
manifesting collectively and spiritually in the evolution of the race. Historic
Christianity can furnish no explanation why the "biography" of its
personal founder should have been held back for several centuries (and
strangely the same nearly two centuries elapsed before the books on Buddha’s
life were circulated); why the facts of
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its own origin should have been kept
(and still are kept) in obscurity; why there should have been no authorized
record made known earlier. The conversion of the myths and the Docetic
(mystical) doctrines of the Gnosis into human history will alone account for
these facts. The singular thing is, points out Massey, that the earliest
Gospels are the farthest removed from the supposed human history! That came
last and, he affirms, only when the spiritual Christ of the Gnosis had been
rendered concrete in the density of Christian miscalculation! Christianity
began as Gnosticism, and continued by means of a conversion and perversion that
were opposed in vain by Paul. The Mysteries of Gnosticism were perpetuated as
Christian, but with a difference, a complete change of character and identity,
as interpretation shifted from the mystical to the historical plane. The first
Christians based their cult system on secret doctrines whose inner sense was
only explained to Initiates during a long course of discipline and study.
(Mosheim and other historians testify abundantly to the existence of the
Greater and the Lesser Mysteries in the primitive Christian Church.) These
secret teachings were never to be divulged or promulgated, and they were not
publicized until the ignorant belief in historical Christianity had taken
permanent root. We are told how it was held by some that the Apocrypha might
only be read by those who were "perfected" in the deeper Mysteries,
and that these writings were reserved exclusively for Christian adepts. It must
be obvious that the doctrine or knowledge that was forced to be kept so
sacredly secret could have had no reference to personal human history that was
broadcast to all, or to the teachings of that literal Christianity that boasted
so simple an origin. The Greater and even the Lesser Mysteries of Christianity
must have dealt with subjects that lay far over in the realm of esoteric truth,
having little connection with the outer story in the Gospels. There is bluntly
nothing to be esoteric or mysterious about in the direct narrative of Gospel
Christianity. If the early Church had its higher Mysteries it is certain that
they were of the same general nature as those of pagan Greece and Egypt.
Nobody, says Justin Martyr, is permitted to partake of the Eucharist
"unless he has accepted as true that which is taught by us," and
unless he received the bread and wine as the very flesh and blood of that Jesus
who was made flesh. In this we can see the "sarkolatrae" or
worshippers of a Christ of the flesh fighting against the spiritual Christ of
the Gnostics. There were many sects of so-called
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Christians and various versions of
the nature of the Christ, Kronian or astronomical, mythical and mystical. But
the Church of Rome could not escape the evidences that its foundations and
ceremonies were drawn from Egypt; the Virgin Mother, the Son, the gods of Egypt
were sealed up in the very corner-stone of the Church; the haunting ghost was
in the Church itself.
And according to the unquestioned
tradition of the Christian Fathers, which has always been accepted by the
Church, the primary nucleus of the canonical Gospels was not a life of Jesus at
all, but a collection of Logia or Sayings, the Logia Kuriaka, which
were written down in Hebrew or Aramaic by one Matthew, as the scribe of the
Lord. We have already glanced at the suggested derivation of Matthew from the
Egyptian Mattiu, meaning "the word of truth," or "true
sayings." Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Irenaeus agree that Matthew’s
was the primary Gospel, disputing Eusebius’ story of Mark’s primacy. This
tradition rests upon the testimony of Papias, Bishop of Hieropolis and friend
of Polycarp. Papias is named with Pantaenus, Clement and Ammonius as one of the
ancient interpreters who agreed to accept the Logia as referring to a
historical Christ. He was a literalizer of mythology. He believed the Sayings
to have been actually spoken by a historical Jesus, written down in Hebrew
by a follower named Matthew. He wrote a work entitled Logion Kuriakon, a
commentary on the Sayings. Thus the basis of the first Gospel was in no
way a biography, record or history of Jesus. It was only the "Sayings
of the Lord."
Now there is plenty of evidence to
show that these Sayings, the admitted foundations of the canonical
Gospels, were not first uttered by a personal founder of Christianity, nor
invented afterwards by any of his followers. Many of them were pre-existent,
pre-historic and pre-Christian! And if it can be proved that these oracles of
God and Logia of the Lord are not original after the year thirty
A.D., and that they can be identified as a collection of Egyptian, Hebrew and
Gnostic sayings, they would be deprived of any competence to stand as evidence
that the Jesus of the Gospels ever lived as a man or teacher. To begin with,
says Massey, two of the Sayings assigned by Matthew to Jesus are these:
"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth," and "If ye
forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you."
These Sayings had already been uttered by the feminine Logos
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called Wisdom (Sophia) in the
Apocrypha. Wisdom was the Sayer personified long anterior to Christianity. (Let
it be noted that the oracular voice in the Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes, or
the Preacher, is translated more recently as "the Speaker." This
precisely matches the character that is the utterer of truth in the Egyptian
Ritual (Book of the Dead), called "the Speaker.") It might indeed
with full truth be said, as Massey has just done, that the preacher of the
divine words of truth in the world’s arcane scripts of old is simply, in Greek
terms, Athena, the goddess of wisdom, that is, wisdom personified as feminine.
It is sheer imbecility of mind that would attempt to convert the
personification into a living man.
More Gospel passages are shown to
have been already in the Egyptian Ritual, in Enoch, in 2
Esdras, in the Haggada of the Jews and other pre-Christian documents.
The nature of the Sayings is
acknowledged by Irenaeus when he says:
"According to no one Saying of
the heretics is the word of God made flesh."
The Christ, the utterer of the
Sermons and Sayings, assuredly is not a person preaching on earth.
The "Sayings" were oral
teachings in all the Mysteries ages before they were written down. Several of
them are so ancient as to be the common property of widely separated nations.
Prescott gives a few Mexican Sayings; one of these, also found in the Talmud
and the New Testament, is called the "old proverb." "As the old
proverb says--‘whoso regards a woman with curiosity commits adultery with his
eyes.’" And the third commandment according to Buddha is: "Commit no
adultery; the law is broken by even looking at the wife of another man with
lust in the mind." Among the sayings assigned to the Buddha is found the
one dealing with the wheat and the tares. Another is the parable of the sower.
Buddha likewise told of the hidden treasure which may be laid up securely where
a thief can not break in and steal. Similarly the story of the rich young man
who was commanded to sell all he had and give to the poor is told by Buddha. It
is reported that he also said: "You may remove from their base the snowy
mountains, you may exhaust the waters of the ocean, the firmament may fall to
earth, but my words in the end will be
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accomplished." These are
samples of scores and hundreds of similarities and identities between Christian
Biblical material and passages from many pre-Christian books. No one can make
the search and discover these numberless resemblances without forming the
conviction that the Bible writings are rescripts, garbled and corrupted, of
antecedent wisdom literature. To the student who delves into the study and
makes the discoveries for himself, the evidence is startling enough to settle
the matter beyond all possibility of mistake. For him the argument is closed.
The Buddha, in making his departure,
promises to send the Paraclete, even the spirit of truth which shall lead his
followers into all truth. The Gnostic Horus says the same thing in the same
character. The sayings of Krishna are frequently identical with those of Buddha
and of the Gospel Christ. "I am the letter A," cries the one. "I
am the Alpha and the Omega," exclaims the other. "I am the beginning
and the end," says Krishna. "I am the Light, I am the Life, I am the
Sacrifice." Speaking to his disciples, he affirms that they will dwell in
him as he dwells in them.
Buddha has his transfiguration when
he ascended the mountain in Ceylon called Pandava or Yellow-white. There the
heavens opened and a great light came in full flood around him and the glory of
his person shone forth with "double power." He "shone as the
brightness of the Sun and Moon," identical with that of Christ; and both
these are the same as that of Osiris in his ascent of the Mount of the Moon.
The same scene was previously portrayed in the Persian account of the devil
tempting Zarathustra and inviting him to curse the Good Belief.
But these several forms of the one
character did not originate and do not meet in any human history that was lived
in Egypt, India, Persia or Judea. They meet only in one place--the mythos, says
Massey, with indisputable truth. The mythos arose from Egypt and there alone
can we delve down to the root of the origines. The myths of Christianity
and Buddhism had a common origin and branched from the same root, whether in
Egypt, as Massey claims it did, or elsewhere, as others may insist.
Pronounced in Greek, the Logia or
Sayings are the mythoi of Egypt. They are utterances assigned to the
personified Sayers in the mythology, which preceded and accounted for our
theology and Christology. They existed before writing and were not allowed to
be written. They
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still bear witness, however mangled
and mutilated, against historical Christianity. "Myth" and
"mouth" are identical at the root.
In the main, the drama of the Lord’s
death and the scenes of the Christian last judgment are represented in the
Egyptian great Hall of Justice, where a person is separated from his sins, and
those who have sided with Sut against Horus are transformed into goats. (This
doubtless means that they are sent back into incarnation for further
experience, and life in the body is typed by the sign of the winter solstice,
Capricorn, the Goat, occupying the place of the nadir of descent into matter on
the symbolic zodiacal chart. To separate the sheep from the goats is naturally
to set off those still needing incarnation in Capricorn position from those
who, as sheep in Aries (the Ram, the Lamb) at the spring equinox, are by
position and significance out of the area of incarnate life, having made the
passover of the line separating physical from spiritual existence when they
entered Aries.) Massey points it out as notable that of the four Gospels Matthew
alone represents this drama of the Egyptian Ritual. In the Ritual
every hair is weighed; in the Gospel every hair is numbered. Many chapter
titles of the Ritual are "sayings" of the deceased. Horus is
the divine Sayer and the souls repeat his sayings. The original Sayings were
declared to have been written by Hermes, or Taht, the scribe of the gods, and
they constituted the primordial Hermaean or inspired Scriptures, which the Book
of the Dead declares were written in Hieroglyphics by the finger of Hermes
himself.
The data of Matthew were put
in largely with the motive of fulfilling Old Testament "prophecy."
But the compiler was doubtless too uninstructed to know that the
"prophecies" belonged to astronomical allegory and that they never
could or did refer to human history and were not supposed to be fulfilled on
the plane of objective event, except in the minds of the ignorant, who could
believe that the zodiacal Virgin Mother would bring forth her aeonial child on
earth in a Judean stable or cave. Massey writes an impressive sentence when he
pens these momentous words: "Those who did know better, whether Jews,
Samaritans, Essenes, or Gnostics, entirely repudiated the historical
interpretation and did not become Christians." They were in much the same
relative case as those more intelligent persons today who repudiate the bald
literal interpretations made by such sects as Jehovah’s
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Witnesses, and just as correct in
doing so. "They could no more join the ignorant fanatical Salvation Army
in the first century than we can in the nineteenth." The so-called
"prophecies" not only supply a raison d’être for the
"history" in the Gospels; the events and attendant circumstances
themselves are manufactured one after the other from the "prophecies"
and sayings, i.e., from the mythos, which was already then of great antiquity.
All this was done in the course of the process of literalization of the drama
into a human life and its localization in Judea, under the pretext or in the
blind belief that the impossible had come to pass. The events of the Gospels
were not only thrust forth out of the mythos onto the stage of alleged history,
but were mysteriously romanticized with the halo of prophetic fulfillment of
Old Testament prediction. Of course the coming Messiah should be foretold to be
born in Bethlehem (the house of bread), for the zodiacal allegory had his
celestial birthplace long prepared in the sign of Pisces, the house of bread
and fishes. He who was to feed the earthly multitude with the miraculously multiplied
divinity symboled by bread and fish, would have to be born in the house of the
fishes and of the bread which cometh down out of heaven. The Christian
scriptures carried forward the salient features of the astronomical allegory,
but their ignorant idolaters thought they were purveying sacred history.
Again, the child’s being taken to
Nazareth was only in order that the sayings might be fulfilled that he should
be called a Nazarene. And yet, says Massey, his connection with Nazareth
(which, incidentally, has never received any geographical authenticity at any
time and perhaps never existed at all) would no more make him a Nazarene than
his being born in a stable would make him a horse. Also Jesus came to dwell in
Capernaum--"his own city"--on the borders of Zebulon and Naphtali,
that a saying of Isaiah might be fulfilled. He cast out devils and healed the
sick, for fulfillment of the same prophet’s forecast. He taught the multitude
in parables, for the same reason. In spite of his miracles and many wonderful
works among the populace the people believed not in him, because Isaiah had
hinted that the Lord would not be believed. Massey asks why they could be
expected to believe when it was prophesied they would not. Jesus sent only two
disciples to steal the ass and colt because Zechariah had spoken it so. Judas
was on the spot to betray his Lord because the Psalmist had said
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that the Messiah’s trusted and
familiar friend "hath lifted up his heel against me." The Speaker in
another Psalm had cried, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
and the crucified Messiah came in flesh would have to repeat the cry from the
cross. "They parted my garments among them and cast lots for my
vesture"; "They gave me also gall for meat; and in my thirst they
gave me vinegar to drink," had also to be re-enacted to match pre-extant
similar passages.
Massey earns our deep gratitude once
more for dissipating another of those most fatuous delusions resulting from
ignorant misconstruction of ancient mythical material. It is with reference to
the so-called "prophecies." It has already been shown that the words
"prophet" and "prophecy" by etymology have nothing to do,
directly, with forecasting future events in the objective sphere. The prophet
meant simply a preacher, or utterer of truth, and his prophecies were simply
preachments. The Biblical prophets were not clairvoyant prognosticators, but
sages and expounders of lofty wisdom. The prophet was just another variant of
the title of "Speaker" given, as just set forth, to the character in
the ritual dramas whose part it was, personating divine Wisdom, to utter or
preach the sayings of divine knowledge to mankind. The ascription to the word
of the meaning attached to it later in common understanding was most
unfortunate. It has been responsible for the precipitation into western history
of a whole enormous chapter of delusion and lunacy. The amount of insane
drivel, excited emotionalism, fear and folly, that the belief in Bible (and
more recently "pyramid") "prophecy" has generated in
uncritical minds comes to tragic proportions. If the ancient sages, as we now
more clearly see, had little concern for factual history of their past or their
own present, they must have had even less concern for the equally trivial
happenings of the future. What people did at any time was of little value in
their eyes, or formed no part of the books of spiritual wisdom. The one thing
of prime interest to them was the structure, pattern, form and meaning of all
action. Their approach to history was more the Hegelian than the mere
chronicler’s. And it has to be confessed after mature reflection that in the
end that is the only thing about history that matters vitally. No mind can
notice or remember a billionth part of the occurrences that constitute history
in the factual sense. Therefore its pursuit can have only the final value of
instructing the mind
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on the principles that have
determined events, or of admonishing the moral sense or of teaching wisdom. The
only worth-while deposit from events acted or studied as history is their
"moral lesson." "What does history teach us?" is the only
pertinent question to be asked regarding the value of the record of sheer deed.
And this consummate recognition will help to dispel at last the perpetual hue
and cry of the babbling religionists about Old Testament "prophecy."
For it reveals that if events themselves were held of little value, the
foreknowledge of them would be even less esteemed. It would assuredly be
difficult to locate a single item of practical advantage or service that has
ever accrued to the Christians of Europe through many centuries from their
having in their possession the sheaf of Old Testament "prophecies."
The net effect of their supposed reference was to throw millions of people into
wonder, bewilderment and apprehension in every century. Who is ever known to
have acted on the warnings and predictions to his clear and obvious profit? And
yet the sad story comes to us that the people of Europe in every century since
the tenth, at least, have loudly proclaimed that the burden of the
"prophecies" fell directly upon their times. The same phenomenon is
being repeated in the twentieth as it was previously in the nineteenth, and
every one before it. At the best it has always taken a monstrous amount of
imagination and stretching to make the prophetic words match the present run of
events. But the Procrustean skill of the prophecy-mongers is never less than
prodigious, and the gigantic frame of the present history can always be fitted
into the small compass of "Bible prophecy." Perhaps this is the place
to express the hope that a baleful misconception which has already reduced
itself ad nauseam, may now be further reduced ad absurdum ad
infinitum.
Massey again adjures us that we have
only to turn to the 2 Esdras (written long B.C.) to learn that Jesus the
Christ of our canonical books was both pre-historic and pre-Christian. This is
one of the books that have been rejected and set apart as Apocrypha, considered
to be spurious because they are supposed to contain the secret Gnosis or keys
to the true meanings. In this book it is said
"My son Jesus shall be revealed
to those that are with him . . . and they that remain shall rejoice within four
hundred years; and after these years shall my son Christ die and all men shall
have life."
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Massey's vigorous comment can be
given once more
"The true Christ, whether
mythical or mystical, astronomical or spiritual, never could become a
historical personage and never did originate in any human history. The types
themselves suffice to prove that the Christ was, and could only be, typical and
never could have taken form in human personality. For one thing, the mystical
Christ of the Gnosis and of the pre-Christian types was a being of both sexes,
as was the Egyptian Horus and other of the Messiahs, because the mystical
Christ typified the spirit or soul, which belongs to the female as well as to
the male, and represents that which could only be a human reality in the
spiritual domain or the Pleroma of the Gnostics. This is the Christ who appears
as both male and female in the Book of Revelation [a reference to the
fact that Jesus in Revelation is described as wearing a golden girdle
about the paps]. And the same biune type was continued in the Christian
portraits of the Christ. In Didron’s Iconography, you will see that
Jesus Christ is portrayed as a female with the beard of a male, and is called
Jesus Christ as St. Sophia--i.e., the wisdom or spirit of both sexes. The early
Christians were ignorant of this typology; but the types still remain, to be
interpreted by the Gnostics and bear witness against the history. Both the type
and doctrine combine to show there could be no one personal Christ in this
world or in any other. However the written word may lie, the truth is visibly
engraved upon the stones, and still survives in the Icons, symbols and
doctrines of the Gnostics, which remain to prove that they preserved the truer
tradition of the origines. And so this particular pre-Christian type was
continued as a portrait of the historic Christ. It can be proved that the
earliest Christians known were Gnostics—the men who knew, and who never did or
could accept Historic Christianity. The Essenes were Christians in the Gnostic
sense, and according to Pliny the Elder they were a Hermetic Society that had
existed for ages on ages of time. Their name is best explained as Egyptian.
They were known as Eshai, the healers or Therapeutae, the physicians, in Egypt;
and Esha or Usha means to doctor, or heal, in Egyptian. The
Sutites, the Mandaites, the Nazarites, as well as the Docetae and Elkesites,
were all Gnostic Christians; they all preceded and were all opposed to the cult
of the carnalized Christ. The followers of Simon the Samaritan were Gnostic
Christians; and they were of the church at Antioch, where it is said the name
of Christian was primarily applied. Cerinthus was a Gnostic Christian, who
according to Epiphanius, denied that Christ had come in the flesh. The same
writer informs us that at the end of the fourth century there were Ebionite
Christians, whose Christ was the mythical fulfiller of the time-cycles, not a
historic Jesus. Even Clement of Alex-
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andria confesses that his Christ was
of a nature that did not require the nourishment of corporeal food."
Mead fortifies Massey’s statement
regarding the Essenes, saying they "refused to believe in the resurrection
of the physical body," either of Christ or of men. The Gnostics, Mead
agrees, were the first Christian theologists, and if it is a cause for
reprehension that the real historical side of the new movement was obscured in
order to suit the necessities of a religion that aspired to universality, then
the Gnostics are the chief culprits, he says. To lend some authority to the
claim that the Gnostics were not at all rabid "heretics" or fanatical
religionists, a Dr. Carl Schmidt may be cited as saying that "we are
amazed . . . dazzled by the richness of thought, touched by the depth of
soul" of the Gnostic authors, and he speaks of "the period when
Gnostic genius like a mighty eagle left the world below it and soared in wide
and ever wider circles towards the pure light, the pure knowledge, in which it
lost itself in ecstasy."
The alleged heresy of the Gnostics,
writes Massey (The Natural Genesis, II, p. 484), which is supposed and
assumed to have originated in the second century, the first being carefully
avoided, only proves that the A-gnostics, who had literally adopted the
pre-Christian types and believed they had been historically fulfilled, were
then for the first time becoming conscious of the cult that preceded theirs,
and coming face to face with those who held them to be heretics.
Gnosticism was not a birth of the second century; it was not a perverter or
corrupter of Christian doctrines divinely revealed, but the voice of an older
cult growing more audible in its protest against a superstition as degrading
now as when it was denounced by men like Tacitus, Pliny, Julian, Marcus
Aurelius and Porphyry. For what, asks Massey, could be more shocking to any
real religious sense than the belief that the very God himself had descended on
earth as an embryo in a virgin’s womb, to undergo the precarious ordeal of the
pre-natal period, of birth, infancy, the risks of physical embodiment and the
suffering of cruelty and persecution, climaxed by an ignominious death on a
cross of torture, to save his own created world, or a few in it who might
"believe" on him, from eternal perdition? The opponents of the latest
superstition were too intelligent to accept so shallow and repulsive a story
and a dying deity. Porphyry terms the Christian religion "a blasphemy
barbarously
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bold" (barbaron tolmema).
"A monstrous superstition," exclaims Pliny. "A pestilence,"
cries Suetonius. "Exitiabilis superstitio" (ruinous
superstition), says Tacitus. "Certain most impious errors are committed by
them," says Celsus, "due to their extreme ignorance, in which they
have wandered from the meaning of the divine enigmas." (Origen: Contra
Celsum, VI, Ch. XIII.) All of which is as true as it is temperate, avers
Massey. The "primitive Christians were men whose ardor was fierce in
proportion to their ignorance," as is ever the case. Massey states that
when Peter, Philip and John, as preachers of the new creed, were summoned
before the Jewish hierarchs to be examined, the Council decided that they were
only ignorant men, unlearned in the oral law, unskilled in the tradition of
interpretation, believers who did not know the true meaning of that which they
taught. They were not punished, but dismissed with warnings, as rude anthropoi
agrammatoi kai idiotai (men uneducated and narrow-minded). Idiotai is
of course the root of our word "idiots." In the Greek, however, it
carries the meaning of being bound up in one’s own ideas so closely as not to
be able to see beyond one’s own small horizon.
Near the end of his greatest work, Ancient
Egypt, The Light of the World (p. 905), Massey sums up the data that
impelled him toward his momentous conclusions. He says that from the
comparative process we learn that the literalizers of the legend and the
carnalizers of the Egypto-Gnostic Christ have but gathered up the empty husks
of Pagan tradition, minus the kernel of the Gnosis; so that when we have taken
away from their collection all that pertains to Horus, the Egypto-Gnostic
Jesus, all that remains to base a Judean history upon is nothing more than the
accretion of blindly ignorant belief. And therefore of all the Gospels and
collections of Sayings derived from the Ritual of the resurrection in
the names of Mattiu, or Matthew, Aan or John, Thomas or Tammuz or Tum, Hermes,
Iu-em-hetep, Iusa or Jesus, those that were canonized at last as Christian are
the most exoteric, and therefore the furthest away from the underlying, hidden
and buried, but imperishable truth. With these fateful words he ends his great
work.
We have both Philo’s and Irenaeus’
expressed belief that the Word (Logos) could not become incarnate, Massey
testifies. Philo no more knows a Christ that could be made flesh than he knew
of a Jesus in human form--and he lived at almost the identical time of the
alleged
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historical Jesus! So it was with the
Gnostics. They declared it was not possible that he should suffer who was both
incomprehensible and invisible (Irenaeus, b. I, ch. VII, p. 2). According to
the Gnostics, says Irenaeus, "neither the Word, nor the Christ, nor the
Savior, was made flesh. They maintain that the Word was neither born nor did he
become incarnate" (b. 3, XI, p.3). It was impossible that the Gnostics
could accept the doctrine of a masculine Logos being made flesh or incarnated
in human form. Their Logos was the spiritual antithesis and eternal opposite of
matter, not a redeemer of the flesh by wearing it. The advent of the Gnostic
Christ could only be in the mind or the spirit. It could only be manifested by
an illumination of the mind, a purification of the life, a change of heart in
the religious sense. (It is worth pausing to comment that the "true"
orthodox Christianity of Irenaeus’ day rejected illumination of the mind,
purification of the life and change of heart as heresy!) To them the advent was
one that could dawn only about a Christ that came from within. The type-form of
divine Logos could no more apply to an external history or a personal Savior
than the spirit of giving could become Santa Klaus in person. Yet, Massey
points out, the Christ of this conception was identical with the Christ of
Philo and of Paul. Philo, he says, has defined the incarnation as Archangelos
Polyonomos, "the many-named archangel." The power or spirit that
incarnated had many names and many forms of manifestation. But this incarnation
was not of a nature to be embodied in one man or as one man, either past,
present or future. The earliest of the Christian Fathers, Justin Martyr in
particular, had given voice to expressions of the multiformity of the Christly
manifestation.
The central force of Massey’s
courageous assault on the ramparts of orthodox Christianity is in his
categorical averment that the bulk of the material entering into the
formulation of Christian doctrine and practice was long in existence before the
Christian era. Let us hear his forthright declaration to this effect in his
lecture on The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ (p. 22):
"Whether you believe it or not
does not matter, the fatal fact remains that every trait and feature which goes
to make up the Christ as Divinity,
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and every event or circumstance
taken to establish the human personality, were pre-extant and pre-applied to the
Egyptian and Gnostic Christ, who never could become flesh. The Jesus Christ
with female paps, who is the Alpha and Omega of Revelation, was the IU
of Egypt and the IAO of the Chaldeans. Jesus as the Lamb of God and Ichthys the
Fish was Egyptian. Jesus as the Coming One; Jesus born of a Virgin Mother who
was overshadowed by the Holy Ghost; Jesus born of two mothers, both of whose
names were Mary; Jesus born in the manger at Christmas and again at Easter;
Jesus saluted by the three kings or Magi; Jesus of the Transfiguration on the
Mount; Jesus whose symbol in the catacombs is the eight-rayed star--the star of
the East; Jesus as the eternal child; Jesus as God the Father, reborn as his
own Son; Jesus as the child of twelve years; Jesus as the anointed one of
thirty years; Jesus in his baptism; Jesus walking on the water or working his
miracles; Jesus as the caster-out of demons; Jesus as a Substitute, who
suffered in a vicarious atonement for sinful men; Jesus whose followers are the
two brethren, the four fishers, the seven fishers, the twelve apostles, the
seventy (or seventy-two, as in some texts) whose names were written in heaven;
Jesus who was administered to by seven women; Jesus in his bloody sweat; Jesus
betrayed by Judas; Jesus as conqueror of the grave; Jesus the resurrection and
the life; Jesus before Herod; in the Hades and in his reappearance to the women
and the seven fishers; Jesus who was crucified both on the fourteenth and the
fifteenth of the month Nisan; Jesus who was also crucified in Egypt, as it is
written in Revelation (11:8); Jesus as judge of the dead, with the sheep
on the right hand and the goats on the left, is Egyptian from first to last, in
every phase, from the beginning to the end."
If the revelation of these
identities comes with surprising or shocking force to many readers, the wonder
should mount to still greater height when it is stated, as it can be, that
Massey has traced out and enumerated some one hundred and eighty of these items
of similarity or identity between Horus of Egypt and the Gospel Jesus! And
Horus was centuries antecedent to Jesus, and was never pictured as a living
person! To the scholarly mind this astonishing fact becomes conclusive of the
whole argument. The forced acceptance of the fact that when the only-begotten
Son of the Eternal came to earth in all his regal splendor to redeem the fallen
race of mortal men, the best he could manage to get in the books that were to
establish his mission and perpetuate his influence was a garbled melange of
data and symbols already associated with a score or more of previous
non-existent typical char-
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acters, will bring at last a
realistic recognition of the weakness of the case for the historicity. Even
were the bald claim for the existence of the man Jesus to be conceded, the
victory for orthodoxy and fundamentalism would be almost if not quite as
damaging to that side as the refutation. It would indeed be a Pyrrhic triumph,
leaving the cause of Christian theology so badly weakened and wounded by
obvious inexplicability of many points, as to have forfeited the further
support of thinking people everywhere. How could it be explained with rational
consistency or with the salvation of respect and prestige, that the historical
biography of the one and only Son of God fell into the lines of the merely
dramatized "careers" of Horus of Egypt, Krishna of India, Tammuz or
Marduk of Assyria, Mithra of Persia, Bacchus of Greece, Zagreus or Sabazius of
Phrygia, and a list of others in various lands? The Rosetta Stone has at last brought
to an end the centuries-long pretense and hypocrisy of the orthodox Christian
party in the study of comparative religion.
One can understand the mental
vehemence back of Massey’s fling at his critics:
"It is not I that deny the
divinity of Jesus the Christ; I assert it! He was and never could be any other
than a divinity; that is, a character non-human and entirely mythical, who had
been the divinity of various pagan myths that had been pagan during thousands
of years before our Era."
He continues with the asseveration
that the Christian scheme is founded on a fable misinterpreted, and that the
Coming One as the Christ was but a metaphorical figure, a type of immanent
spiritual growth consummated in time, who could not take form in human
personality any more than Time in person could come out of the clock-case when
the hour strikes, like the cuckoo! The "history" in our Gospels is
from beginning to end the identifiable story of the Sun-God and the Gnostic
Christ who was not "after the flesh." The false belief, he concludes,
becomes impossible when we know the true one. But the false one has ever stood
in the way of our knowing the true one.
The mythical Messiah was Horus in
the Osirian mythos; Har-Khuti in the Sut-Typhonian; Khunsu in that of Amen-Ra;
and the Christ of the Gospels is an amalgam of all these characters, and, one
may add, of others. Jesus is he that should come; and Iu, the root of the name
in Egyptian, means "to come." Iu-em-hetep, the Messianic name
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in Egypt for thousands of years,
signifies "he who comes with peace." And this is the very character
in which Jesus is announced by the angels at midnight of December
twenty-fourth, a date set by the Egyptian astronomical symbology. A sententious
summation of the whole matter is given in Massey’s words: "From beginning
to end the canonical Gospels contain the Drama of the Mysteries of the
Luni-solar God, narrated as human history." The mythos is the magic key that
alone will fit the lock of the Bible material and open the door to the
explanation of its otherwise unfathomable obscurities. "All that is
non-natural and impossible as human history, is possible, natural and
explicable as mythos." This is indeed the eventful truth, and the
application of it is the only measure that will ever put an end to the farcical
irrationality of Christian theology and redeem the body of doctrine from
ostensible nonsense to comprehensible sublimity, after centuries of
befuddlement.
The catacombs of Rome, says Massey
again, "are crowded with the Egypto-Gnostic types which had served the
Roman, Persian, Greek and Jew as evidence for the non-historic origins
of Christianity." The child-Horus of Egypt reappears in Christian
iconography as the mummy-babe in the catacombs, wearing even the tell-tale sign
of origin from Egypt, the solar disk! Also the resurrection of Osiris comes
into Christian scriptures as the raising of Lazarus, the identification of whom
with Osiris makes one of the most thrilling chapters of comparative religion
revelation ever to be brought to light. Among the numerous types of Horus
repeated in Roman symbols of the alleged historic Jesus are "Horus on his
papyrus" as Messianic shoot or natzer (from which root in Hebrew
Massey traces the word "Nazarene"); Horus the branch resprouting each
cycle for endless ages from the parent vine; Horus as Ichthys the Fish; Horus
as bennu or phoenix; Horus as the dove; Horus as the eight-rayed star of the
Pleroma; Horus as scarabaeus; Horus as child-mummy with the head of Ra; Horus
as the little black child or Bambino; Horus of the reversed triangle.
Massey shows with sufficient
clearness the origin of the cross in the Tat-cross of Egypt, or the Ankh-cross,
the symbol of Life as resulting from the crossing or union of the two poles of
being, spirit and matter. The Tat or cross of stability, symbol of the power
that sustains the worlds and all things, was the figure of the pole, thought of
as the backbone of the world, the axis of all durability. It united in
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one the "five supports" or
the five-fold tree of the Egypto-Gnostic mystery, the four corner supports and
the central axis. This power was personified in Ptah as well as figured in the
Tat. The light that the clearer representation of Egypt throws on this symbol
is great, for it shows that the cross figure is the insignium of the same power
that is personified in the Christ himself and that true depiction should not so
much portray the Christ on the cross as that the Christ is the cross. The god
in matter and the cross are really one. This personified power in the Egyptian Ritual
says, "I am Tat, the Son of Tat" (Rit., Ch. I), or son of
the Eternal, who establishes the soul for eternity in the mystery of Tattu (Rit.,
Ch. 17). Hence we find the figure of the god, as the cross, extended
crosswise as sustainer of the universe in Egyptian vignettes. This construction
is undoubtedly back of the Gospel legend of Jesus as bearer of his own cross on
which he was to "die." In the Christian corruption of the grand
conception into impossible "history," the doctrine of the
crucifixion, with its human victim raised aloft as a sin-offering for all the
world, "is but a ghastly simulacrum of the primitive meaning, or shadowy
phantom of the original substance." In what respect are the Flagellantes
or Penitentes of New Mexico, lashed on by the fanatic frenzy of Christian
doctrine literalized, better than barbarian tribes of the forest or of the
South Seas, who are pointed at by the Christians for their inhuman degeneracy
in offering living humans in some of the former rites? For they even today come
close to actual immolation of a man on the cross on the Good Friday of Passion
Week, which Christian miscomprehension and muddled mentality has indeed made
into the Black Friday of the year.
The ox and the ass, ever present
with Jesus in his stable nativity in the Gospels, were with the Egyptian Coming
One, Iusa, ages antecedently. These two animals, which Christians ignorantly
assume are pictured in the birth-scenario because they "were there,"
are evidently typically connected with the birth of divinity because of the
exceptional and peculiar type of their breeding. They owe their existence to
cross-breeding, and so stood as the type of perfected Christhood, which is raised
above sex, or represents sex polarity crossed and unified in one, as before the
breaking of cosmic unity apart into biunity. The ox and the ass are present
when the Christ comes to indicate to the initiated that the development of the
Christ power returns the soul from its state of dual life on the cross to its
pristine unity. It is the symbol of
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the divine androgyneity, or of
spirit detached from matter, released from the cross, one again and not two.
A further light is thrown on this by
Massey (Book of the Beginnings, I, p. 516), when he speaks of the
bifurcation of the child, that is then still without sex (in manifestation), at
puberty into the distinctly male or female individual. The calf represented
both sexes in the non-pubescent stage, or the mother and the child only, in the
phase of nature that did not yet include the father, or the developed creative
mind. The bull was the type of the Father or generative force of creative
thought. But even the bull, says Massey, was made to conform to the type of
spirit-matter in union and neutralizing each other, in the ox. According to
Varro, Massey says, there was a vulgar Latin name for ox, viz., Trio. The ox
being of a third sex, neither male nor female productively, return was thus
made to the primitive Nu-ter or Neuter of the beginning. And as all things are
ultimately the A and the O, and begin and end in the same sexless state (in
heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage), the ox--and similarly
the ass--was the type of fully Christified humanity. Therefore would the Christ
be fitly represented as riding into the gates of the Holy City or heavenly
Jerusalem on the back of the lowly ass. But why the two beasts, the ass and her
foal? The ass was the symbol of the Egyptian God Atum, and ancient typism
always depicted the god as creating and procreating, in the two characters of
Father and Son. Life was made continuous by the creation in cycles, and the Son
typified the new generation as the progeny of the old, ever repeating and
recurring. It was the eternal repetition of the projection of new life from old
in the time cycles, the previous old cycle being father to the succeeding one,
which carried the soul onward in its long journey from the hinterland of matter
up to the gates of the Aarru-Hetep of Egypt, which is the Aarru-Salem, or
Jerusalem, of the Hebrew version. Iusa is pictured with the ears of an ass, and
Iu is both ass and god under one name, Massey states.
A pretty solid support is seen for
Massey’s general claims as to the association of pagan usages with early
Christian worship in that letter of the Emperor Hadrian to Servianus, in which
he writes that "those who worship Serapis are likewise Christians; even
those who style themselves the Bishops of Christ are devoted to Serapis."
The most prominent early Egyptian Christians were at the same time members
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of the Mysteries of Serapis, as many
leading Greek Christians were, like Origen, Clement, Pantaenus and Ammonius,
students of the Neo-platonic philosophy.
The Gnostic Jesus in the Pistis
Sophia says that he found Mary, who is called his mother after the material
body, that he implanted in her the first power which he had received from the
hands of his Father, called Barbelo and also the good Sabaoth. Here is the
prototype of the great legend in ancient mythical systems of the son
impregnating his own mother, as Horus fecundated his mother Isis in Egypt.
Christians can spare their spurious indignation at "heathen"
sexualism in religious worship, since the meaning carried by the representation
is simply that the soul, or son, in man implants in the physical body that
gives him his birth the power of spirit that transfigures her also into the
likeness of divinity. The soul, as primordial intelligence, is the Father ever;
in each new generation it is its own son; and the physical body is the mother.
The son, therefore, eternally in each generation impregnates his own mother.
Evil minds may see evil in this typing; beautiful minds will see both truth and
beauty in it.
Carrying on the train of
similarities between Gospel and Egyptian depictions Massey points to the dove
symbol. The hawk is a male emblem, the dove the female, he shows. Horus rises
again in the form of a hawk in the Egyptian resurrection. As matter is ever
feminine, the soul or son descending into physical body would be entering what
the ancients called its "feminine phase," its incarnation. Hence at
its baptism, or entering the sea of matter, again always typed as water, it
would swing to the dove as symbol. The dove made its appearance to attest
Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan, the Eridanus of the planisphere, the Iaru-tana of
the Egyptian myth, and the "river of life" in any system. Horus rises
also in the form of a dove, as well as that of a hawk. He is the dove in his
first phase, and the hawk in his second or perfected stage. Elsewhere, swinging
the metaphor a grade higher, he says that he came as a hawk and transformed
into the phoenix. "I am the Dove; I am the Dove," he exclaims as he
rises up from Amenta where the egg of his future being was hatched in the
divine incubator, in the An-ar-ef, the hidden land, "the abode of
occultation," the house of the blind,--our earth.
Hence in the iconography of early
Christianity the child-Jesus is depicted in the Virgin’s arms or in her womb,
surrounded by seven doves
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as symbols of the Holy Spirit
(Didron: Iconography, fig. 124). For the Holy Spirit, or divine working
efficacy of spirit in matter, must fall into the sevenfold segmentation which
force ever undergoes when it energizes matter. This had been brought out not
only in ancient cosmology and esotericism, but has been in large measure
demonstrated by modern physical science, and is corroborated by nature herself
in the sevenfold division of light, the octave (septave) of sound, the periodic
table of weights in chemistry and the seven-day table of periodicities in the
gestation process in all animal life.
A fact that must loom large in the
debate as an item of great significance is that mentioned by a number of
writers, that neither in the case of Horus nor in those of other
"world-saviors," is there any date or history falling in the gap
between the ages of twelve and thirty, matching the similar lacuna in the
"life" of Jesus! This datum alone points with great cogency to the
non-historicity of the Sun-Gods, Christs, Messiahs. Any student of ancient
literature knows the esoteric significance of numbers in arcane systematism.
The numbers one, two, three, four, seven, ten, twelve, twenty-four, thirty,
forty, seventy, three hundred and others are so profusely injected throughout
the Bible that it could long ago have been assumed that they carried the
deepest recondite meaning. Three, four, seven, twelve and forty are indeed
among the most sharply revelatory keys to the entire system of scriptural
interpretation. It is ridiculous that Christian exegesis of its own book has
for sixteen centuries labored at the interpretation with practically no regard
for the meaning of these numbers. It will later be seen as a clear evidence of
esoteric incompetence. It has remained for students outside the pale of
Christian apologetics to interpret the Bible most capably and profoundly.
The age of twelve in Egyptian myth
was one of the indices of transformation from the natural or unregenerate state
of humanity into the spiritual kingdom, on the symbolic basis of puberty,
change of voice and development of mind. And thirty was the index of completed
perfection, type of the spiritual heyday in evolution. The fact that at twelve
Jesus left his mother (type of matter and body) to attend to the things of his
Father (type of spirit) has never once been discerned as the allegory of the
natural man’s conversion into the spiritual man, the attainment of his
spiritual "thirty years." And a hundred such fail-
206
ures to read their own scriptures
aright attest the blindness of exoteric vision on the part of orthodox
expounders of scripture.
It is out of the question to
transcribe any considerable portion of Massey’s (and other) comparative
religion data, but some salient items must be introduced. There is a perfect
match between the flight of the parents of Jesus into Egypt for the safety of
the divine child from the Herod menace and a similar protection for Horus. The
god Taht says to Isis, the mother: "Come, thou goddess Isis, hide thyself
with the child," and the place of concealment indicated was in the marshes
of Lower Egypt--bringing the Moses analogy to mind at once! This is pure
evolutionary symbology and not personal history. That there is any vital significance
in the fact that Jesus fled to Egypt to escape the Herod menace, while Horus
had to be saved from the Herut menace in Lower Egypt will probably be shouted
down by hostile critics. The Herut reptile was another name for the Apap
serpent, the water monster that was the Egyptian type of the lower nature in
man waiting to devour the child of higher divinity when he incarnated. But the
substitution of the tetrarch’s name for the reptile’s designation is in the
highest probability one of the tricks resorted to in the conversion of myth
into history. Massey openly charges it.
Then there is the matter of the
twelve disciples and their historicity. Massey affirms categorically and
likely with full truth, that they "are no more human than was their
teacher." But when the Word was made flesh in physical literalism his
dramatic supporting cast had to be converted along with him.
What were the twelve disciples, if
not men? In the esoteric understanding they were the same in twelve aspects as
the three Kings or Wise Men were in a threefold division. Or they were the same
three powers of spirit further subdivided into twelve aspects. They were just
the spiritual power and intelligence which is the Christ itself, manifesting
its wholeness in a twelve-part segmentation. In the same way in which the
atomic force of the universe manifests in a seven-part differentiation, so the
spiritual nucleus of life manifests in a twelve-part unfoldment. Nature sounds
a seven-key octave and Divine Mind sounds a twelve-key diapason. Each in its
unfoldment sounds but one key at a time, until the succession covers the gamut.
As soul advances through the scale of evolution she passes through twelve
grades of being one at a time, adding unto her equipment the quality gained
207
from experience at each level, till
her absorption of the essence of all nature is complete finally in a twelvefold
unity. These twelve qualities of perfected spiritual cognition are what are
represented by the twelve signs of the zodiac, the sun’s passing successively
through each sign and acquiring the special powers of each, typing the soul’s
round of the elements and the acquisition of the twelve intelligences. In the Ritual
of Egypt the soul had to pass successively through twelve dungeons, each
guarded by a god, in each of which it was captive until the door was opened by
the god, who held the key and would not use it until the mortal could pronounce
his Name. Obviously man is a prisoner to a faculty until he opens up his
ability to utilize and command its powers. Ignorance is ever the gaoler and
knowledge is the only release. Inasmuch as light produced by suns is the
highest aspect of creative energy, the dark dungeon was the appropriate symbol
of the benighted condition of the soul when imprisoned in matter. The creative
command--Let there be light!--was the divine fiat that ordered the suns to
shine and the galaxies to glisten. And light in the physical area was the
perfect analogue and symbol of the light of intelligence that was to glow in
the domain of ignorance as solar light was to irradiate the universe of space.
Twelve lights would therefore be the most apt symbol of the twelve basic powers
of divine intelligence, and this brings us back to the primal true designation
of the twelve rays of genius in man--the Twelve Saviors of the Treasure of
Light! In various other symbolic typings they were also the Twelve Reapers
of the Golden Grain, the Twelve Harvesters in the Field of Amenta, the Twelve
Builders, Twelve Carpenters, Twelve Masons, Twelve Potters, Twelve Weavers of
the Pattern, Twelve Fishermen, Twelve Rowers of the Boat with Horus, Twelve
Sailors in the Ship of Ra, the Sun. They are the twelve powers of Sun-God
intelligence. And as ancient philosophy brings out the astounding facts that
sunlight is the eventual product of divine mentation--"the light of the
sun is the pure energy of intellect," says Proclus in one of the most
illuminating sentences ever uttered--the twelve "rays" of the solar
Logos become at last in men and gods the twelve faculties of spiritual
intelligence the evolution of which makes each man in his aeonial career a
Christ, instructing and training his "twelve disciples" within the
confines of his own individuality. They were the fourfold differentiation,
under the symbolism of fire, air, water and earth, of each
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of the three Kings, or kingly powers
of divine intellect into which primordial unity of Mind breaks up in its
necessary fragmentation as it descends into matter. As water falling from a
height breaks up into fragments owing to the resistance of the air, and the
blood-stream divides from the heart, and a tree trunk from its lower stem, so
unitary intellect descending from on high breaks up into first a threefold
partition and finally into a twelvefold division. In reduction to simplest
form, all this means that as in physical matter and its manifestation on earth
there are four basic differentiations of expressions as fire, air, water and
earth, so in mind there are the four analogous subdifferentiations, again in
soul the same four and again in spirit the same four. So the twelve great
qualities that are to divinize us are the spirit’s fire, air, water and earth,
the soul’s fire, air, water and earth, and the mind’s fire, air, water and
earth, all combined in one grand synthesis, the Christ consciousness. All this
is represented by the structure of the pyramid, which has the four bases as
groundwork, and four three-sided upper faces as the superstructure, with the
golden triangle crowning all, and glinting ever with Egyptian sunlight. In the
great ancient divine-human drama the twelve facets of solar deity were of
course personified in and by twelve characters, and the dark-minded Christian
spoliators of sage wisdom had to make twelve uneducated fishermen out of them.
There was no escape from their becoming fishermen in the Christian rendition
because the Jesus who was the astronomical Avatar coming roughly around 255
B.C., came under the precessional sign of Pisces and so came as Ichthys, the
Fish-Avatar. He came as Joshua (Jesus) son of Nun, and Nun is the fish in
Hebrew! Can Massey be gainsaid or laughed down, then, when he says the twelve
disciples were no more human than their teacher? It is Massey’s turn to laugh
at the stupidity of his critics.
Jesus himself says in Gnostic
literature: "When I first came into the world I brought with me twelve
powers. I took them from the hands of the twelve saviors of the treasure of
light," that is, from the twelve who are called the aeons in the Gnostic
astronomy. And he adds that he took these twelve powers and "cast them
into the sphere of the rulers," and "bound them into the bodies of
your mothers." By this he means that he has in evolution incorporated them
in organic creational systems and finally into the bodies of men, the fleshly
body being the mother of the individual soul. Jesus is to reign as king over
these
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twelve powers, the "nine
guardians and the three amens," "the five supporters and the seven
amens," and all the other characters which were "light
emanations," and which would have had no meaning if Jesus had not likewise
been an astronomical figure. He unifies them all in himself as he gathers them
to himself in passing through the twelve phases of creative manifestation.
Beside the twelve "disciples of Jesus" there are found in the Bible
the twelve sons of Jacob, the twelve of Judah, the twelve tribes of Israel, the
twelve stones Joshua was ordered to set up in the dry bed of the Jordan River,
the twelve pieces of the concubine’s body cut up (in the nineteenth chapter of Judges),
the twelve tables of stone, the twelve commandments, the twelve Urim and
Thummim on the breastplate of the High Priest, and others.
Moreover we find striking identity
in the Christ’s proclamations, the one in the Gospels, the other in the Gnostic
texts, of an esoteric doctrine which he will propound openly to his disciples,
though he must speak in parable to the multitude. In the Gnostic Gospel Jesus
says:
"Rejoice and be glad for this
hour. From this day will I speak with you freely, from the beginning of the
truth unto the completion thereof; and I will speak to you face to face,
without parable. From this hour will I hide nothing from you of the things
which pertain to the height."
Matching this with the statement of
the Gospel Jesus to his disciples that to them that are without it is given to
be taught in parables, but to them in the inner circle it is given to be
instructed in the mysteries, there is presented an interesting parallel indeed.
More light is thrown on this mystery of esotericism when in the Gnostic
scriptures Jesus says, "I will tell unto you the mystery of the one and
only ineffable, and all its types, all its configurations, all its regulations
. . . for this mystery is the support of them all." Again he says: "I
tore myself asunder and brought unto them the mysteries of light to purify them
. . . otherwise no soul in the whole of humankind should have been saved."
And another excerpt from his Gnostic sayings is of great value, as it clears up
a point of meaning which has been sadly misconceived heretofore. When Jesus in
the Gospels says that the believer must leave father, mother and kin to follow
after him, it has been a "hard saying," too hard to be accepted in
literal sense. It therefore
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should come with great relief to the
perplexed faithful to learn at last what the passage actually means in the
light of the same unmutilated and unhistoricized text of the Gnostic Gospel:
"For this cause have I said
unto you aforetime, ‘He who shall not leave father and mother to follow after
me is not worthy of me.’ What I said then was, ye shall leave your parents the
rulers, that ye may all be children of the first, everlasting mystery."
(Bk. 2, 341.)
Earlier the parents or
"rulers" that were to be left for the Christ ministry were described
as the seven elementary or natural powers, the mother powers of nature, giving
birth to the first Adam, or natural man, who must be left in the seeking after
the higher spiritual genius of divinity! Again it is seen how the literalizing
process has reduced high cosmic splendor of meaning to the tawdriness of a
family desertion and a flouting of the dearest bonds of mortal kinship.
Jesus gave his disciples power to
raise the "dead." In the Pyramid Texts of Teta it is said:
"Horus hath given his children power to raise thee up" from the
funeral couch.
Massey calls attention to a
discrepancy in the version of the miraculous draught of fishes in two Gospels, John
and Luke. In John, when Jesus reappears to the seven fishers
on board the boat to cause the miraculous haul, it is after his
resurrection from the dead. Consequently the transaction, Massey thinks, took
place in a region beyond the tomb and not in the life on earth. Whereas in Luke’s
version his reappearance was in the earth-life and not a reappearance after
death. Orthodox idea of course holds that Jesus was resurrected on earth and
that Massey’s conclusion therefore is not sound. What is true, of course, is
that there was no physical or bodily resurrection at all, but only the
re-arising out of the grave or tomb of the earthly body of that living nucleus
of soul that had descended into the body for incarnation. When the soul from
elevated spheres descends and links its refined energies with the coarse life
of body, the ancient seers pictured its durance in flesh as its death and
burial. Just as naturally, then, its release from body at the end of a life
cycle was its resurrection from "the dead." There was no place at all
for the historical episode of one man’s bursting the bars of a hillside rocky
tomb at any time. The resurrection, Paul tells us, was in a spiritual body,
dissociating its tenuous substance from the meshes of the fleshly vehicle.
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Again that which was a spiritual
mystery in Egypt became a "miracle" in Christianity. In the Ritual
of Egypt (Ch. 113) Sebek catches the fish in his marvelous net, and it is
proclaimed by Ra to be a mystery.
Jesus multiplied the loaves and
fishes in the Gospels, and this incident binds wonderfully in with one of the
greatest bits of comparative religion data ever to be formulated. When one has
grasped from Greek rational theology the significance of the great doctrine of
God’s deific multiplication of his own life by dividing primeval unity into
endless multiplicity, sharing his oneness with the infinity of his creatures,
and then applies to it the elucidation of the Christ’s multiplying that same
divinity under the two zodiacal types of bread and fish (Virgo and Pisces), and
then will turn to the Egyptian symbolic writing, he will come upon the amazing discovery
that the city of Annu (Anu), (Any in English)--which with the Beth, "house,"
of the Hebrew gives us Beth-any of the Gospels--was described in the Ritual
as "the place of multiplying bread!" From John we learn
that "this is that bread which came down from heaven," the divine
immortal soul which came here to multiply itself, as an oak multiplies its life
in its acorns, in the house of bread, which is the human body. When will the
religious mind break through the obfuscations of deadening literalism to see at
last that the human body, the soul’s tenement on earth, is that Bethlehem, that
house of bread, wherein the divine bread comes to be multiplied? Here at
last is incontrovertible and irrefutable proof that the Christian has to go
back to ancient Egypt’s wisdom to discover the keys to the interpretation of
his own Bible. If ever the Christian doctrines are to shed any real light on
human understanding of the problems of life and immortality, it will be only
with the help of Egypt’s restored mysteries. As Massey so clearly demonstrated,
Christian truth has been sealed up in a fatal obscurantism and Egypt holds the
keys to release it.
In the Gospels it is the women who
announce the resurrection. "The goddesses and the women proclaim me when
they see me," shouts Horus as he rises from the tomb on "the horizon
of the resurrection."
Horus was not only the "bread
of life" derived from heaven; he also gave his flesh for food and his
blood for drink, as did Jesus. He says he has bread in heaven with Ra, and bread
on earth with Seb, the earth-god.
Dealing further with the cross as
symbol, the arresting fact is
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brought to light that this emblem in
the Egyptian was never the symbol of death--in the sense of the demise of the
body--but of life! It was the symbol of "death" only in the
transferred sense of the word "death" as the circumscribed life of
the soul in the tomb of the body on earth. The cross is the "tree,"
and the "tree" is the "tree of life which is in the garden"
of this world. This chain of identity has not been seen or worked upon. In one
form of the symbolism Jesus is nailed on the tree in its form of the cross of
wood; but to suit another form of metaphorical approach he IS the tree of life.
He is the branch, the shoot (Hebrew natzer, whence probably
"Nazarene"), of his Father, the eternal Tree whose branches ramify
into all the universe. But for us in turn Christ is the tree, the vine, and we
are the branches. A number of allusions in this relation from ancient
non-Biblical sources would have kept in better understanding the connection
between the tree of Genesis and the cross, or tree, of Calvary. Ancient
mythic tradition had it that various typal Christ characters, Noah, Seth,
Enoch, Moses, Joshua, plucked a shoot from the tree of life in the garden and
planted it on the mount of Golgotha, where it burgeoned anew to become the tree
of the crucifixion. And if, in its deepest sense, the cross of crucifixion is
only the metaphor for this incarnation in body, which gives ever more abundant
life to the soul by multiplying its potentialities through the ordeal of
suffering, then the tree of life and knowledge in Genesis remains still
the tree or cross of life and salvation, and not the gruesome cross of death.
But clearly in the first instance it is the tree of the Father in his original
generation of life; in the second it is the tree of the Son, in regeneration,
or eternal renewal of life. The legends--some even carried on into Christian
exploitation--that the wood of the cross of Jesus became alive and put forth
green shoots, solidly substantiate this figurism. It is matched also by the
burgeoning of Aaron’s rod when cast to earth! Divine life flowers anew
from the old stem each time it is planted afresh in the soil of earthly body!
The Christmas legend spoke of the rose blooming from the Glastonbury thorn in
the winter solstice, and we prate in profound stupidity of the Christ as being
a fresh shoot from the rod of Jesse. The mighty truth is in our midst, but goes
all unrecognized.
The purely allegorical implications
of the cross symbol should have been seen from the Platonic and Gnostic
representations of the form of the cross called the Stauros. It was the
four-armed structure of the
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Christ-aeon or emanation extended
out over the field of creation, and represented spirit as being "crucified
in space," and, Einstein would add, in time. The fourfold division of
primary life energy out into space in the creation of universes is, as clearly
as could be done, set forth in Genesis, where the river of life split
off into four streams, named there Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel and Euphrates. All
this is to tell us that life invariably in manifestation "quadrates"
itself, or comes to expression in four differentiated aspects, which, be it
proclaimed with ultimate clarity at last, are typified in all ancient
literature by the four elements of earth, water, air and fire. This partition
of primordial life force into the four forms of its manifestation is all that
can possibly be meant by the symbol of the four-armed cross in the cosmic
range. For the individual its meaning is the quadration of the one energy of
consciousness in his life in the four aspects of sense, emotion, thought and
soul.
If the Christ was in most real truth
crucified in space, the physical timber on Golgotha’s ghastly height, hewn and
sawed and nailed, might be accepted with enlightenment as pure symbol of cosmic
process. But as it stands in common thought among Christian people it is the
gruesome sign of the most abject stultification of the godlike principle of
intelligence known to history.
Lundy says that Plato must have
learned his theology in Egypt and the East, and doubtless knew, from the
stories of Krishna, Buddha and Mithra, that other religions had their mythical
crucified victims long antecedent to Christianity. Witoba, one of the
incarnations of Vishnu, is pictured with holes in his feet.
The nails of the cross have received
considerable emphasis in the Gospel story. The nail, Massey shows, was a type
of male virility or of the deeper power of nature that binds male (spirit) and
female (matter) together for all effective progenation. The nailing of the body
of the Christ on the cross would be the dramatization of the incarnational
union of the two ends of the life polarity. Spirit must be nailed to matter to
give it its quadration, for free from matter it remains in uncreative unity.
Drawing his data largely from
Didron’s Iconography, Massey brings forth from those recesses of buried
ancient secrets which he explored so capably, the fact that must startle all
Christian readers with its pertinence to the general theme here elaborated,
viz., that with the
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whole foundation of Christianity
resting upon the physical cross and the man nailed on it, the religion that
claims to have had its very origin from that cross and man has given no
evidence of awareness or commemoration of that pivotal event in all its varied
and elaborate iconography for about six hundred years after its founding!
Massey records that during the first six or seven centuries no figure of a
man appears upon the cross in Christian monumental hierography. There are
all forms of the cross except that, the alleged starting point of the
new religion! The Christ, and him crucified, says Massey, was not the initial
but the final form of the crucifix. Over the first six centuries the
representation of the foundation of the Christian faith in a crucified Redeemer
is entirely absent from Christian art! Massey writes (Book of the
Beginnings, I, 433):
"The earliest known form of the
human figure on the cross is the crucifix presented by Pope Gregory the Great
to Queen Theodolinde of Lombardy, now in the Church of St. John at Monza,
whilst no image of the Crucified is found in the catacombs at Rome earlier than
that of San Giulio belonging to the seventh or eighth century. So in the
earliest representations of the Trinity made by the ‘Christian’ artists, the
Father and the Holy Ghost (who was feminine as the Dove), are portrayed beside
the Cross. There is no Christ and no Crucified; the Cross is the Christ, even
as the Stauros was a type and name of Horus, the Gnostic Christ. The Cross, not
the Crucified, is the primary symbol of the Christian Church. . . . And that
Cross is pre-Christian, is pagan and heathen, in half a dozen different shapes.
During centuries the Cross stood for the Christ and was addressed as if it were
a living being. It was divinized at first and humanized at last."
The Gospel incident which dramatizes
Jesus as running away from his mother at the age of twelve and saying he must
henceforth be about the business of his Father, briefly noticed, must be
scanned for some further elucidation of hidden purport. (The very first
consideration is the thought that if orthodox interpretation insists upon
taking "his mother" as his human female parent in the story, by what
warrant does it not take "his Father" also as his human male parent?
He says in effect that he must leave his mother and go to his father, and if
the one parent is taken as human, why not the other?) The esoteric significance
of this "incident" has never been divined in theology. It is a grand
cosmic dramatization, based on the puberty trans-
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formation of the boy into the man.
The parallelism is startling and suggestive. With the "mother" typing
nature and the "Father" spirit, the transition of the boy over from
the care of his mother, in which he had been nurtured up till then, to the
interests of his father, along with the first development of sexual creative
power and the budding of intellect at the same time, as well as the deepening
of the voice, which is a most amazing natural symbol of the power henceforth of
the voice to utter the true word instead of the fancies of the child, the
physiological climacteric was the most striking possible form of depiction
ready at hand of the great central truth of all scriptures--the evolutionary
transformation of man the natural, or the first Adam, over into man spiritual,
or the second Adam. In Egypt there were two Horuses, or two aspects of Horus,
Horus the babe and Horus the man, or Horus the younger and Horus the elder. The
younger Horus was the child of the mother--nature-and abode under her tutelage,
that is, was ruled by natural instinct and not by reason or mind, until he had
risen to the development of the twelve facets of his germinal divinity of
higher consciousness, whereupon he graduated from the care of mother nature and
entered the kingdom of his Father, intellect and spirit. He was then the elder
Horus, the grown son of his Father, done with nature and ready to wield the
powers of intellect and soul, the business of the Father. With his changed
voice allied to developed wisdom he could then utter the "true word"
or the echo of the Logos, impossible with his feminine falsetto before! Could
anything in nature more completely and admirably typify the profoundest of
theological conceptions?
The purpose here, however, is again
to indicate that the Gospel mention of the incident, brief as it is, has once
more faithfully copied Egyptian prototypes. Every feature of the narrative is
found prefigured in the Kamite portrayals. Horus the infant is the child of the
Virgin, i.e., matter, or body, produced under natural conditions before the
principle of mind (the male element) has unfolded and united with matter to
generate the spiritual man. Horus the elder is the child become the man,
graduated from the care of mother nature, and having germinated the seed of
intellect and spirit into growth and function. Massey is the first to have made
this determination clearly, but his work has been left in desuetude. The god
Kephr, the world-builder, was symboled by the male beetle or scarabaeus which,
the
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Egyptians alleged, procreated
without the aid of the female. This is the type, not of virgin pure matter, but
of virgin pure spirit, before union with the female or mother matter in
incarnate life.
Astronomically the first Horus or
natural man was the child of the Virgin in the sign Virgo; and six months
later--which in zodiacal symbology would be at the entire completion of the
incarnational cycle--in the sign of Pisces the second Horus, second Adam or the
Christ, is reborn of the Fish-mother, or in the house of the Fishes. And in the
Gospels Jesus the Christ is born with all the varied forms of the fish-type, as
Ichthys the Fish, son of Nun (the Fish in Hebrew), and with twelve
"fishermen" as disciples. And Luke’s Gospel places the birth of Jesus
just six months after that of John the Baptist; who as the forerunner and
herald of the Christos is the dramatic character of the first or natural man,
preceding him to prepare the way for him and make his paths straight! Will
orthodox exegetists tell us how the six months’ interval between the births of
the natural man and his divine successor, the Spiritual Christ, given by Luke,
are to be accounted for on any other basis than that of the zodiacal chart,
where in pure typology the two births occur just six months apart on opposite
sides of the zodiac? This single datum of comparative religion is enough to put
the whole structure of Christian historicity on the defensive. If the
unthinkable assumption or claim of historical factuality for the occurrence of
Jesus’ birth just six months after that of John could be predicated as true,
how could the human mind ever contain its wonder at the coincidence of the
actual history precisely matching the chart of pagan symbology? This is but one
of hundreds of instances in which Christian "history" has had to
dance to the tune played by pagan allegorism and typism.
The word "mount" or
"mountain" is another link between the Gospels and pre-Christian
derivations. The mount is very frequent in Egyptian typology, and the thing it
did not mean in esoteric rendering was an earthly hill or elevation. It
meant specifically the earth itself. The earth was the mount, raised up in
space, where matter and soul, the god and the (animal) man, the one descending
"from above," the other ascending from the slime to animal, met for
that interrelation that meant evolution. Therefore every great transaction in
the evolutionary process "took place" "on the mount." Earth
is the only place where spirit and matter ever meet on equal terms or in the
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balance (symboled of course by the
equinoxes), and so it is that God always called man (typed by
"Moses") up into Mount Sinai to commune with him. Jesus, the Christ,
is drawn up onto the mount to be tempted, he delivers his Sermon or Sayings of
wisdom to humanity on the mount (though Luke says it was on a level plain), he
was crucified on the hill and was transfigured in the height. Even the ark
landed on the "mount of earth," as "Ararat" is a variant of
the Hebrew arets (old form areth), "the earth." It is
as futile to try to locate "the hill of the Lord," "thy holy
hill," "the hills whence cometh my strength," on the map or
earth’s surface as it is to locate the milk and honey of Jerusalem the Golden
in Palestine. Horus was symbolically placed, for all his ordeals and transformations,
on the Mount of the Horizon, and this Mount--existing nowhere as a locality on
earth, but being the mundane sphere itself--is the Egyptian prototype of all
the holy mounts, Gerizim, Horeb, Sinai, Zion, Carmel, Calvary, in the
scriptures.
The mount was the "place of emergence"
in mythology. This is notable because it aids in the definite localization of
its meaning. Life emerges from unmanifestation in the invisible worlds of pure
Form (in the Greek sense) to visible manifestation in the physical cosmos, and
it can do this only where spirit can achieve its embodiment in matter. A
physical planet is the necessary ground for such processing. Spirit emerges
from subjective to objective existence on the Mount of Earth. A prominent
modern school of philosophy, Bergson’s, has dealt so fully with this phase of
cosmic procedure that it has taken the name of the "Emergent
Philosophy." As life emerged out of darkness into light it gave birth to
the suns, the lamps of creation. Hence the mount again was the place of birth
for the sun. The solar orb, symbolizing always the divine power of spiritual
light, went to its "death" in matter on the Mount of the Horizon on
the West, the Western Mount, Mount Manu, and arose in its rebirth on the Mount
of the East, or of Dawn, Mount Bakhu. These two names are instructive. Ma-nu
is the elementary primordial abyss of the waters, empty space, or inchoate
matter, as nu is the hieroglyph for water. Under the symbolism of the
sun setting in the western ocean, life goes down from the heights of pure ethereality
into the sea of matter. Passing through the round of the material kingdoms it
emerges again on the east with a focus of consciousness developed to divine
power in a physical
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organism, and comes forth as a soul
or spirit individually conscious. Human-divine consciousness comes from the
union in man’s body of the two elements of psychic soul and divine spirit, and,
oddly enough these two "persons" in man were named by the Egyptians
respectively the ba and the khu. The Eastern Mount would then bring
divinity to birth as the ba-khu, and so the Mount of Dawn for the divine
soul in man was called Mount Bakhu. These two mounts are in Revelation and
elsewhere in the Bible.
There is no end of repetition in the
Bible of the Egyptian "three days in the tomb." Hosea speaks
of the Israelites being held in bondage and being released and raised up
"after two days" or "on the third day." The place of
captivity for the soul in matter has variable naming, such as Babylon, Egypt,
Assyria, Sodom, Arabia, none of which has geographical but only allegorical
reference. If final and clinching proof is needed to show that the captivities
and bondages in the Old Testament are only mythical representations, we have it
in the prophet’s assignment to them of a three-days length. The descent of the
soul into body to manifest her powers and make her appearance or epiphany (or
emergence) is the only substance and reality in any of the
"captivities" of scripture. When the soul accomplishes its growth in
the dungeons of Amenta, Sheol, Hades, and rises in triumph over the flesh and
the grave, she is beautifully said to "lead captivity captive." That
the allegories of their Old Testament were known to the Jews as non-historical
is shown by the fact that fragments of the original mythos crop up in the
Haggadoth, Talmud, Mishna, Kabalah and other Hebrew sacred scripts, Massey
points out. This material was known to the Jews, and obviously not as history.
Further, most of it had for ages been known to the Egyptians and again not as
history. It is fatal to the historical sense of holy writ that we can turn to
such old works as the Kabalah and Enoch and the Zohar and
find their scenes, names, numbers and personages identical with those supposed
to be historical in the Old Testament. An article in the Classical Journal (Vol.
17, p. 264), by T. T. Massey says that "the 600,000 men who came up out of
Egypt as Hebrew warriors in the Book of Exodus are 600,000 inhabitants
of Israel in the heavens, according to the Jewish Kabalah, and the same
scenes, events and personages that appear as mundane in the Pentateuch are
celestial in the Book of Enoch." Indeed the first
"mapping" and "localizing" of
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events in the life and evolution of
the race were unquestionably first celestial and not mundane. It was never
anything but empyreal--until gross ignorance supervened upon intelligence and
made the tragic conversion.
Even Swedenborg, a pretty credible
testifier albeit he saw only with the eye of inner vision, states that
"their historical books were written in the prophetic style and for the
most part were made-histories, like those contained in Genesis I to
XI." (Arcana Coelesta, 2897.)
In his Jesus and Paul (161)
Bacon, who is not specifically aiming at giving the scriptures a mythical
rendering, writes that the story of Jesus’ walking on the sea in Mark 6:45-52
has a supplement in Matthew 14:28-33, which further draws out the
parallel with purely spiritual meaning; saying that in Jewish symbolism power
to tread upon the sea or triumph over it signifies victory over the power of
Sheol. And in reference to the inner significance of the
"captivities" he speaks of victory over the imprisoning powers of
darkness. Also he very rightly says (p. 205) that the history of the conception
of the Messiah as a great light entering the lower world of darkness and death
to effect both judgment and deliverance would carry us far back into
pre-Christian interpretative application of the Isaian passage: "The
people that sat in darkness have seen a great light; unto them that dwell in
the shadow of death hath the light shined." This is just the kind of thing
that Massey claims throughout, and supports his claim with mountainous
evidence.
But Bacon has a passage which comes
dangerously close to repudiating the very fundamental of Christianity in his
effort to discredit the Gnosis and early Christian esotericism, or some aspects
of them. He says (p. 201) that talk about mystical experiences, gnosis, insight
into mysteries, fellowship with God and participation in his eternal life, new
birth into eternity and the rest of the current mystical jargon of the day, is
all froth and self-deception unless it issues in practical deeds of unselfish
service. This pungent asseveration is greeted with the heartiest second from
this quarter. Indeed in many respects nothing in religious circles needs to be
said so forcefully as just this protest against the extravagances and follies
of mystical religion in our day and all days. At the same time it must be
recognized that the attainment of these things in a sane and balanced way is
certainly the aim and goal of the highest Christian aspiration. If it
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is not so the whole immense body of
saintly mystical rhapsodism in the history of the Church is all froth and
self-deception. The point of difference, then, is the degree of sanity and
balance with which such experiences are undergone and reacted to. So that once
more it is seen that the item in all religion that receives the final and
crucial emphasis is philosophical intelligence, as a lever of control over the
whimsicalities of mysticism. This point, though touched upon here incidentally,
is of absolutely transcendent importance in all estimate of true religiosity.
It is a standing challenge to the
proponents of this historical thesis of scripture to explain away the eighth
verse of the eleventh chapter of Revelation. If every word, verse,
chapter and letter of Holy Writ is--as has been solemnly declared by four or
five Church Councils--God’s unalterable truth, we then have the Bible itself in
the plainest of words declaring the crucifixion of Jesus to be non-literal and
non-historical. Speaking of the "two witnesses" (which it explains
are the "two olive trees"--therefore certainly not persons or
characters) the preceding verse says that "the Dragon shall rise up and
slay them." Then follows the eighth verse with its categorical denial of a
historical crucifixion in Jerusalem:
"And their dead bodies shall
lie in the street of the city which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt,
where also our Lord was crucified."
Jesus crucified not in Jerusalem,
but in Sodom and Egypt--two places, geographically, making it
necessary to assume two crucifixions or a half crucifixion in each place--and
these two "places" expressly described, not as physical localities,
but as "spiritually" considered. Here is the Bible’s own express
declaration that the crucifixion was nothing but a spiritual transaction.
Christian exegesis is pretty silent about this verse; it is a question if it
has ever been chosen as text for a sabbath sermon. It flies straight in the
face of all that ecclesiastical policy stood for from the third century forward
to the present. It is the verbatim contradiction of all official Christian
theology over sixteen centuries. It is a flat denial of the physical
crucifixion and inferentially of the "life" of Jesus, as the Christ.
It promises still the final triumph of esotericism. Jerusalem was the
"holy city" of the evolved spiritual consciousness, city of
"heavenly peace," as its name implies, and never anything else. As a
matter of fact, even in its
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empyreal connotation, Jerusalem was
not the locality of consciousness in which the Christ in us is crucified.
Jerusalem, on the contrary, is the city of blessedness in which, after the
crucifixion, he enters into the peace of his glorious triumph, carried up to
the gates of it on the back of the lowly animal, his body. The place of his
crucifixion is not in heaven, where peace abides, but down in the depth
(Egyptian Tepht, whence Tophet) of matter, the Sodom and Egypt of the
fleshly incarnation. There is enough of the primal truth of Christian
beginnings left in this one verse to redeem an errant religion from its lost
ways and sorry plight.
One of the Sibyl’s prophecies was to
the effect that the Messiah would come when Rome shall be the ruler of Egypt.
"When Rome shall rule Egypt, then shall dawn upon men the supremely great
kingdom of the immortal king and a pure sovereign will come to conquer the
scepters of the whole earth into all ages." The earliest Church endorsed
these Sibylline utterances and cited them to prove the foundation claims of
its own religion. Here surely, then, there is a prophecy whose literal
fulfillment gave it the lie. Rome did conquer Egypt, and after two thousand
years of painful history the world still needs the King of Kings more sorely
than ever. Here is an example of fulfilled "prophecy," the folly of
which should--but probably will not--carry disillusionment to the rabid mongers
of "Bible Prophecy."
But there doubtless was esoteric
meaning of intelligent sort back of the Sibyl’s utterance. Rome, as the
power-center of the world empire, was poetized as the city of epic divine
fulfillment, and Egypt, as always in the Bible, was the land of bondage for the
soul crucified in body, the "flesh-pots of Egypt." Of course the
kingdom of the Lord of spiritual light would come when "Rome," the
city of attainment, should conquer and rule over "Egypt," the place
of earthly carnal sense. Esotericism redeems another saying of Holy Writ from
absurd nonsense and historical contradiction. And it is the only thing that
will redeem the whole historical structure of religious meaning from asininity.
Allan Upward writes that in the
religion of the inner life "the redemption of the sinner is not so much
the historical transaction consummated on the material cross of Calvary as it
is the work of the
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Christ within. . . . Without this
feature the history of Christianity can not be understood."
No less a philosopher than Spinoza
has this to say relative to the nature of the Christ (Op. I, 510, Epis.
To Oldenburg): "that a knowledge of the Christ after the flesh is not
necessary to the spiritual life, but the thing that is necessary is a knowledge
of that eternal Son of God, the wisdom of God, which has manifested itself in
all things and chiefly in the human mind, and most of all in man perfected as
Christos."
Paul’s verse in I Cor. 15:17
becomes illogical if the historical thesis is held to: "If Christ be not
raised, ye are yet in your sins." Every inference of this statement points
to a non-historical and purely intimate personal resurrection. If the
resurrection was historical and the verse means what it says, then the logic of
the situation makes the resurrection dependent upon the state of sinfulness of
the people then, or at any time. He did or did not rise, according as the
people’s general sin is eradicated or is still in force. If people are yet
sinful, then Christ can not have risen. The sins or righteousness of people would
keep the Christ bobbing up and down between earth and heaven, like a barometer
registering the world’s batting average in the overcoming of sin. In the
esoteric sense the Christ’s resurrection is indeed dependent upon the progress
of humanity upward to righteousness. We do still bury him deeper with every
sin, or raise him up with every sincere act. He does rise or fall with our
advance or backsliding. But if this true theory is applied to the physical
resurrection, an ass’s bray is not ribald enough to express its ridiculousness.
And again despised esotericism alone saves revered scripture from harlequin
comics.
Oddly enough the Encyclopedia
Britannica (Article: Jews) takes the view that the varied traditions
in Jewish religion up to a later stage can not be regarded as objective
history. It is naturally impossible, it says, to treat them from any modern
standpoint as fiction; "they are honest even when they are most
untrustworthy." This peculiar characterization defeats its own intent by
obvious self-contradiction. What value honest untrustworthiness has is a bit
hard to see. The whole muddle is cleared up if the traditions are regarded as
honest and trustworthy allegories. For as honest but untrustworthy
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history they make no sense whatever,
and are valueless if untrustworthy.
Any number of texts throughout the
Bible at once lose all comprehensible meaning if taken in the historical sense.
For instance, there is the statement in I Cor., 6:1: "Do you not
know that the Christians are to be the judges of the world? . . . Do you not
know that we are to be the judges of angels, to say nothing of ordinary
matters? . . . Do you not know that your bodies are parts of Christ’s
body?" Taking "Christians" in its historical sense, the picture
gives us the ludicrous scenario of good Church folk in the judgment pronouncing
sentence upon Mohammedans, Buddhists, Zoroastrians! And taking Christ’s body as
that of Jesus, the man, we would on Paul’s averment be his physical limbs,
joints and viscera. Or is it permissible for literalists to take what they like
as allegorical and also take what they want as literal? This is their only
resort in the end. It makes inconsistency the necessary base of their
structure.
Also there is I Cor., 8:6,
saying, "yet for us there is . . . just one through whom we live." If
the Lord Jesus Christ is Jesus, he is here declared to have made all things,
most of which were here and made before he came. As the cosmic Logos, to be
sure, he conceivably made the worlds; but as the man Jesus, his hands would
have plenty to do with a few mountains and rivers. In the Oxyrhyncus papyri we
have the Logos saying, "I am all that was and is and shall be! And my veil
it hath never been lifted by mortals"--appropriate for the divine Word,
but fatally inapplicable to the man of flesh. Even this lifting of the veil is
drawn from the inscription on the base of the statue of Isis at Sais in Egypt.
Also John’s passage that "he
was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him
not," can have no reference to a personal living Jesus. If this is so it
is important to note that even the last clause--that the world knew him
not--must have some larger cosmic relevance and can not refer to popular
rejection of him and his preachment, according to the accepted interpretation.
A work of great statistical research
and vital data is Godbey’s The Lost Tribes a Myth. In it he asserts that
modern excavations have shown Egyptian dominance in Palestine through the
greater part of 3000 years. There were Israelite kings who were political
"sons" of
224
Egypt, and Pharaohs warred to
establish their authority. (References to the Book of I Kings are given
to support this.) "But," says Godbey, "there is no extant effort
to append the history of Israel to the antiquity of Egypt." Of course
there was not, for the reason that neither Egyptian nor ancient Hebrew
literature was dealing with history or antiquity in the historical sense. But
if Godbey means that there has been no effort to append Jewish "alleged"
history to the religious antiquities of Egypt, Massey’s work alone would
sufficiently belie his assertion.
A number of utterances of Jesus in
his dramatic character of the cosmic Aeon or Logos makes his human personal
stature seem futile and puerile beyond measure. His proclamation that he was
before Abraham in the loins of the cosmic creation, helping to shape the
universe from the foundation of the worlds, sounds senseless when the majestic
words are supposed to come from the lips of a mere man on earth. It is the same
with his final consummative plea which he makes to his Father in John to
restore unto him that glory which he had with him aforetime in cosmic heavens
before the worlds were, after he had come into the world whither he had been
sent and had done the divine preaching, "healing,"
"miracle-working," ending with his humiliating crucifixion on a
wooden cross, is to reduce cosmic events to the proportion of newspaper
chronicles. A great many texts would show the preposterous inapplicability of
cosmic characterizations attaching to Jesus as the Logos when referred to Jesus
as the man.
The evidence in this chapter is of
the kind generally called "textual evidence." It is by no means
lacking in either weight or cogency. What is here assembled is a mere tid-bit
or filip to what would be a full meal of this significant material. The
quantity could be increased to voluminous proportions. Strong as the temptation
is to linger in this field, the practical considerations of the task call for a
grappling with a series of far more substantial arguments and evidences in the
case, which rise in a scale of pertinence and convincing force from chapter to
chapter.
225
Chapter IX
FAITH’S
ODD WONDERLAND
An item of sensational testimony
bearing upon the pre-Christian origin and character of insignia claimed to be
exclusively Christian is the statement of Lundy (Monumental Christianity, p.
125) that the well-known monogram of Christ regarded as an origination of Christianity
and a cryptic shorthand signature for the name of their personal Founder, was
antecedent to the time of Jesus. Says this author: "Even the XP, which I
had thought to be exclusively Christian, are to be found in combination thus:
[@insert glyph] on coins of the Ptolemies and on those of Herod the Great,
struck forty years before our era, together with this other form so often seen
on the early Christian monuments, viz., @insert glyph. And in regard to it,
King well remarks, ‘although these symbols, as far as regards their material
form, were not invented by the Christians, they nevertheless received at this
time a new signification and which became their proper one; and everybody
agrees in giving them this peculiar signification.’" (King: Early Christian
Numismatics, p. 12 ff.). As to this the important thing is that the emblem
was not "invented" by the Christians and must have been therefore
pre-extant. As to the "new" signification given it, that is another
of those rash statements that are based on sheer assumption and the pious
necessity of putting a face on the matter reflecting favorably on Christianity
and detrimentally upon paganism, as much as to say that the pagans had the
emblem, but of course did not know its real and true import and assigned some
base meaning to it, and only the Christians elevated it to pure connotations.
There has been enough of this brash apologetic for Christian superiority to
sicken the conscientious mind. The truth in this instance happens to be
precisely the opposite of what is claimed: it was the philosophical pagans who
had the insignium and knew what it meant in its profoundest sense; it was the
Christians who adopted it in ignorance and reduced it to the empty status of a
supposed abbreviation of the name of a man. Lundy himself lets out a hint that
confirms this explanation. He says:
226
"The Greek monogram, therefore,
was the prevailing symbol of Christ as the First and the Last during the first
three centuries of the Christian era, as more expressive of the faith in His
divine character and mission . . . ; while the cross afterwards became the
symbol of his human sufferings and death, until it culminated in the ghastly
crucifix. Or rather, the primitive Church dwelt more on the divine side of
Christ’s person and office than upon the human."
This last clause is a hint that
entirely falls in consonance with the view that the personal Christ embodied in
Jesus was a formulation of later incompetence after nearly two centuries, and
not a simple fact stemming from direct original knowledge of such a man’s
existence. It is perhaps well to add Lundy’s supplemental remark, that the
sacred monogram, as well as the cross, was used in every act of worship,
stamped upon the bread of the Eucharist, marked on the foreheads of the
baptized and worn on seal rings, long before the term Pope was ever exclusively
applied to the Bishop of Rome, or ever Romanism was dreamed of.
Full value must be given to such a
fact as that the early Christian Fathers were insistent on comparing many
features of antecedent religion with those of Christianity. For one instance
Origen elaborately traces out the agreement of the resurrection of Dionysus in
the Greek cult with that of Christ, and does it in such a way as to hint that
the resurrection was an allegory of the "Pilgrim Soul" and not
historical. Paul carries out this hint in Timothy.
The historicity of the Gospel of
Mark is directly challenged by Bacon in his Jesus and Paul (p. 147).
He declares that when we look at this Roman Gospel which became so completely
standard for this whole class of literature that no other considerable record
of Jesus’ activity survives, and when we see how the material has been selected
and what motive controls the elaboration, it will be perfectly clear that we have
in Mark not a biography, not a history, but a collection of anecdotes;
and even this collection is made for purposes of edification and not of
historical record.
Abraham Geiger, German researcher,
agrees with Graetz, one of the most voluminous of German textual critics, in
thinking that in Jesus’ teaching "there is nothing new, or that what is
new is put before us in a somewhat enervated form, just as it originated during
an enervated period." (Geiger: Das Judentum und Seine Geschichte, p.
119.)
227
This allusion to enervation falls in
harmoniously with the thesis of deterioration of wisdom in Christian acumen
after the second or third century.
No students have surpassed the
German investigators in thoroughness of research. Another of this group, G. Friedländer,
in his The Jewish Sources of the Sermon on the Mount shows with much
learning that not only the Sermon on the Mount, but the entire Christian system
(excluding its asceticism) is borrowed from the Old Testament, the Book of
Ben Sira, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Philo of Alexandria and
the earlier portions of the Talmud and Midrash.
Another of the German School,
Chwolson, makes a specially noteworthy point that, rightly to understand
Pauline and Post-Pauline Christianity, a knowledge of the Sibylline Oracles,
Philo and Greek literature generally is most important.
One of the finest Jewish treatises
on the subject of Jesus of Nazareth is Joseph Klausner’s work under that
title. He says definitely that the fourth Gospel is not a "religio-historical,
but a religio-philosophical book." It was not composed, he says, until
about the middle of the second century, at a time when Christians were already
distinct from Jews. The object of John’s Gospel is to interpret Jesus as the
Logos in the extreme Philonic or cosmic sense, and it therefore passes over
such details in the "life" of Jesus as would appear too human!
"It may well include a few historical fragments handed down to the author
(who was certainly not John the disciple) by tradition; but speaking
generally, its value is theological rather than historical or
biographical."
Among capable students in the field
of this study who entirely disbelieved in Jesus’ existence are B. Smith and
Arthur Drews. Smith denies the existence of the town of Nazareth, in which
determination some others have sided with him. Origen in the latter part of the
second century states that he could find no trace of "Bethany beyond
Jordan." Smith advances the claim that Jesus was an object of worship to a
sect of Nazarites who existed at the time when Christianity came into being,
and whom the Christian Father Epiphanius mentions at great length.
It may be noticed in passing that
Nietzsche, the philosopher of super-humanity in Germany a half century ago,
pronounces the combining of the New Testament artificially with the Old in the
Christian system as "perhaps the greatest piece of effrontery and worst
kind of
228
‘sin against the Holy Ghost’ with
which literary Europe has ever burdened its conscience." (Beyond Good
and Evil, III, p. 52.)
Nietzsche’s view is endorsed by
Grethenbach, who feels that
"the solemn endorsement of the
Jewish Scriptures now embodied in the ‘Old Testament’ by the Christian Church
must stand out forever as one of the most remarkable facts in the history of
religion. By this act Christianity made itself liable for and guarantor of a
series of writings not a line of which has a known author, and but few
incidents of which are corroborated by other testimony; writings which record
prodigies and miracles more daring and more frequent than are asserted in the
literature of any serious sort promulgated by any other people." (A
Secular View of the Bible.)
This virtually amounts, he thinks,
to Christianity’s chaining itself to a "corpse." However this conclusion
must be modified by the knowledge that while the Old Testament literature may
be considered a "corpse" if regarded as history--rather a ghost or
wraith of history--it must be accepted as a very living thing when taken, as it
rightly should be, as vital allegory and drama of verity. Solomon, Grethenbach
adds, wise and wealthy as he was, left no inscriptions or other stone witnesses
to his name, as did the neighboring monarchs of the Nile and Euphrates.
Meister Eckhardt described the
Christ as the collective soul of humanity.
The celebrated Orientalist Rhys
Davids in Hibbert Lectures, 1881, (p. 33) declares that historical
criticism was quite unknown in the early centuries of Buddhism, "when men
were concerned with matters they held to be vastly more important than exact
statements of literal history."
And Vittorio D. Macchioro in his
fine work, From Orpheus to Paul supplements this with a statement that
is of the utmost cogency in its bearing on the general thesis of this work. He
says: "In both cases an historical event, which in the opinion of the
believers really happened, becomes a spiritual event for every man at all
times." This concedes essentially the whole case for our argument. This is
the true and graphic description of the position of Christianity at this time
and for centuries past. It is doing its best to make inspiring sustenance out
of events that it feels must have happened because the belief in
229
them yields spiritual nourishment.
The Gospel story must be true history, it asseverates, for witness to which see
the good effect it has had on believers. The events of Jesus’ life could not
have worked so beneficial an effect upon millions and not have happened in
reality. There must have been a personal Christ to have made Christianity the religion
it has been.
Without the change of a single word
this last form of statement may be conceded to be the truth. But if ever truth
was a two-edged sword cutting in both directions, it is so in this case, and
with damaging consequences for Christianity. True enough (the conception of) a
personal Christ was necessary to produce Christianity and make it the religion
it has been. The simple contention of this work is that it would have been a
far different and far better religion had it been based on the conception of
the spiritual Christ instead of the historical Jesus. Would Christian adherents
accept their statement in the form which might justly be substituted for the
one above?--There must have been a personal Jesus to have made Christianity the
witch-baiting, heresy-hunting, doctrine-wrangling, war-waging, bigoted and
persecuting religion it has been!
Macchioro testifies to the truth of
all that has been claimed here when he goes on to particularize that "in
other words, an historical fact, or, if you prefer, a story which Christians
regard as an historical fact, I mean the death and resurrection of the Christ,
became a mystical fact, the spiritual rebirth of man." The crux of
significance in his statements is the point that the spiritual efficacy of the
doctrine is in its being believed, not in its factuality. And it can
unquestionably be better believed as allegory than as history. Any faith,
factually founded or fancifully conceived, can become an effective agent of
human psychologization, if only it is believed hard enough. Even what appear to
be the splendid fruits of any religion may only be proving the operations of
human psychology and not at all the alleged facts on which the religion is
based.
"The Baptism and
Eucharist," concludes Macchioro, "are in the light of history nothing
but acts of initiation."
Bacon admits that Haggadic teaching,
whether Jewish or Christian, has no restrictions in the use of fiction save to
bring home the religious or moral truth intended. Its one rule is: "Let
all things be done unto edification."
230
Another German critic, Bruno Bauer,
thought the Gospels were "abstract conceptions turned into history, probably
by one man--the evangelist Mark."
W. B. Smith, Tulane University, in Der
Vorchristliche Jesus, derives the "Christ myth" from certain
alleged "Jesus cults," dating
from pre-Christian times. Jesus, he
thinks, is the name of an ancient Western Semitic cult-god, and he finds a
reference to the doctrines held by the devotees of this deity in Acts
18:25, where a Jew, Apollo, coming from Alexandria to Ephesus, already learned
in the Way of the Lord, preaches Jesus. He connects the name Jesus with the
Nazaraioi, the Nazarenes, a pre-Christian religious society.
Not less summary in his conclusions
is Drews, a profound analyst of the Jewish material. He says: "The Gospels
do not contain the history of an actual man, but only the myth of the god-man,
Jesus, clothed in an historical dress."
Then there is J. M. Robertson, whose
labors unearthed much of the buried truth about the Jesus myth. He calls
attention to the notable circumstance that the Miriam of Exodus is no
more historical than Moses; like him and Joshua she is to be reckoned an
ancient deity euhemerized; and the Arab tradition that she was the mother of
Joshua (Jesus) raises an irremovable surmise that a Mary, the mother of Jesus,
may have been worshipped in Syria long before our era.
According to Preller (Griech.
Myth., I, p. 667) the founder of the Samo-Thracian Mysteries is one Jasion,
a name cognate with Jesus. No less so is Jason, the recapturer of the
"Golden Fleece,"--divinity coming under the zodiacal sign of Aries,
the Ram.
Robertson is emphatic and decisive
in his assertion that "the Christian system is a patchwork of a hundred
suggestions drawn from pagan art and ritual usage." No mind open to the
relevance of facts and data can study ancient lore extensively without being
driven to the same conclusion. Those who deny it simply have not looked at
enough of the material.
Even T. J. Thorburn in his work, The
Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels (p. 91), says that the cave of
Bethlehem had been from time immemorial a place of worship in the cult of
Tammuz, as it actually was in the time of Jerome; and, as the
"quasi-historic David" bore the name of the sun-god Daoud, or Dodo
(Sayce: Hibbert Lectures, pp. 56-7), who was identical with Tammuz, it
was not improb-
231
able on that account that Bethlehem
was traditionally the city of David, and therefore no doubt, was deemed by the
New Testament mythmakers the most suitable place for the birth of Jesus, the
mythical descendant of that quasi-historical embodiment of the god Tammuz or
Adonis.
Among the Gnostics Basilides and
Valentinus never did acknowledge any historical founder of Christianity.
(Massey: Ancient Egypt, p. 904.) And Clement of Alexandria is authority
for the statement that it was after his resurrection that Jesus revealed
the true Gnosis to Peter, James and John. (Eusebius: H. E., 2:1.)
Epiphanius, in speaking of the
"Sabelian Heretics," says:
"The whole of their errors and
the main strength of their heterodoxy they derive from some Apocryphal books,
but principally from that which is called The Gospel of the Egyptians . . . for
in that many things are proposed in a hidden, mysterious manner as by our
Savior." (Ad. Haeres., 26:2.)
Priceless in value would be that
same Gospel of the Egyptians if Christian fury had not destroyed it.
Ancient preoccupation with figurism
and neglect of history even extended to a denial of the existence of Orpheus,
legendary divine instructor of the Hellenic world. Says Lundy (Monumental
Christianity, p. 190):
"Both Bryant and Von Doellinger
express the opinion that Orpheus was only a name applied to a school of priests
who brought the new cult of Dionysus into Greece. Vossius doubts, with good
reason, whether any such person as Orpheus ever existed, citing Aristotle and
Suidas to this effect. . . . Orpheus was a title under which Deity was
worshipped, and he was the same as Horus of Egypt and Apollo of Greece."
In the preface to his work, Prehistoric
Religion (p. 18), the author, Philo L. Mills, writes that the written Bible
is late in its appearance, but absolutely pure and primitive in its message,
while the extrabiblical traditions held a priority of composition, but not of
content; "they are valuable only so far as they lend confirmation to the
biblical record, which is itself founded on prehistorical records, which have
since been lost."
Mosheim (I, p. 482) says of Tatian,
one of the later Church Fathers, that he "disclaimed the notion of
Christ’s having assumed a real body."
232
And he also says that "Marcion
indisputably denied that Christ in reality either suffered or died; but at the
same time he affirmed that this imaginary or feigned death was attended with
salutary consequences to the human race." By what psychological processes
he fancied the Church’s perpetuation of a lie could generate salutary
consequences for the human race is another of those doctrinal riddles coming
down to us from early Christian days which we are supposed to accept without
using our reason.
Mosheim adds that the Marcionites
were the most fearless in courting martyrdom among the Christian sects, being
surpassed by non "either in the number or the courage of their martyrs."
If this is so, it only unhappily testifies to the fanatical possibilities even
among people of considerable intelligence.
Origen, says Mosheim (II, 160),
"thought it utterly impossible
that God, a being entirely separate from matter, should ever assume a body, or
be willing to associate himself with matter. . . . That is, the divine nature,
being generally a different substance from matter, the two substances cannot
possibly be commingled."
There is apparent here a singular
lack of esoteric systemology on Origen’s (or perhaps Mosheim’s) part. For that
soul everywhere does commingle with matter to effect the work of creation is
taught in Platonic-Orphic, Hermetic, and all ancient religious systems. But
Origen was astute in recommending to the preachers of Christianity to carry
into their practice a set of instructions he prescribed, following the maxim
that it is vastly important to the honor and advantage of Christianity that all
its doctrines be traced back to the sources of all truth, or to be shown to
flow from the principles of philosophy; and consequently that a Christian
theologian should exert his ingenuity and industry primarily to demonstrate the
harmony between religion and reason, or to show that there is nothing taught in
the Scriptures but what is founded in reason. If only sixteen centuries of
Christian theologians had followed Origen’s prescription!
Mosheim has been quoted as saying
that a serious fault of Origen’s was that "he lauded immoderately the
recondite and mystical sense of scripture and unreasonably deprecated the
grammatical and historical sense." If this was or is a fault, how can the
existence of a single theological seminary in Christian ecclesiasticism ever be
justified? If there
233
is no recondite or mystical meaning
underneath the scriptures, why does it need a life training of their
expositors, and why are the laity kept in ignorance of their deeper import? The
gross absurdity of such whinings against the esoteric side of religion and its
sacred books can now be better seen in its bald childishness.
Mosheim has to go to the length of
saying the damaging thing that it is not good sense to be enthusiastic over the
sublimer interpretations of scripture! And this is precisely the absurd dilemma
in which Christian theology has always entangled itself in its efforts to talk
down the esoteric element in its own history. It has to repudiate itself at its
own best. There is no quibbling over the point: either there is a deeper sense
to the scriptures, to all religious exposition, to the profounder experience of
religion itself, than the simple-minded can apprehend, or all the labored
academic studies in the field have been an extravagance and an impertinence.
When they are sincere, all Christian mystics and Christianity’s greatest preachers
have endlessly emphasized the deeper intuitions of "the life hid with
Christ" in the deeper chambers of human consciousness. The ecclesiastical
quarrel with and hostility toward esotericism is on the face of it both
dialectically irrational, directly treasonable and patently self-contradictory.
It is a grave question whether there is not full warrant for characterizing it
as a base sell-out of its own true genius for the reward of currying the
support of the illiterate masses. It is a betrayal and re-crucifixion of the
Christ in man, that has continued from the third century down to this present.
We have also seen, in his strictures
upon Origen’s addiction to "allegory" how Mosheim reflects the
constant theological fear of allegory, which is based on the ever-present
possibility that if you give free-thinkers and Gnostics an inch of allegory in
the scriptures, they may quickly stretch it to a mile and embrace the whole of
scripture in your tropes. As between absurd and impossible history and sublime
allegorical truth, the truth must be sacrificed for the history.
A light on the date of "Luke’s
Gospel" is found in the item that Theophilus, the friend to whom Luke
addresses himself in the opening chapter, was Bishop of Antioch from about 169
to 177 A.D. (Cath. Ency., XIV, 625). If Luke was written 120 to
130 years after Jesus’ death, the chances of its being a legitimate,
well-historicized and positive account of events so far past, and entirely
quiescent in the interval since their occurrence, are very slim indeed.
234
To prove Old Testament
"history" unauthentic does not directly discredit whatever may be
genuine New Testament history. Still it would strengthen the case against the
reliability of the latter if the Old can be disproved. So Higgins (Anac., p.
633) remarks how extraordinary a thing it is that the destruction of the hosts
of Pharaoh should not have been known to Berosus, Strabo, Diodorus or
Herodotus, that they should not have heard of these stupendous events either
from the Egyptians or from the Syrians, Arabians or Jews. Yet, he subjoins, the
same "events" happened in India. The Afghans or Rajapoutans, shepherd
tribes as at this day, invaded south India and conquered Ceylon, then were
driven out over Adam’s bridge; and the same kind of catastrophe is said to have
overtaken their pursuers as that which overwhelmed the Egyptians pursuing the
Israelites in the "Red" Sea.
For its circumstantial significance
it is well to bring to daylight another feature of historical fact that has
received no attention for centuries. This is the matter of the monumental
record of Jesus’ burial. Says Lundy (Monu. Christ., p. 256):
"The earliest example of our
Lord’s burial which exists among the monuments of primitive Christianity is,
perhaps, that of an ivory in the Vatican, of the sixth century, which
represents a square structure surmounted by a dome . . . with a sleeping
soldier on one side of it, and two of the holy women who came early in the
morning to anoint the dead body of their Lord. No such representations are
found in the catacombs or ‘early’ churches either of the East or West. . . . So
careful was early Christian art in abstaining from all painful representation
of the Lord. It is a hint to modern idealists in art that they go and do
likewise."
Perhaps it is also a hint that the
basis of historical factuality behind the story of the Christ’s death was too
completely wanting.
At the same level of significance is
the sister fact that Lundy brings out (Monu. Christ., p. 268). This time
it is the resurrection.
"It is a most singular fact
that no actual representation of our Lord’s resurrection has yet been
discovered among the monuments of early Christianity. The earliest that I can
find is that published by Mr. Eastlake in Mrs. Jameson’s History of Our
Lord, representing a temple-like tomb, with a tree growing behind it on
which two birds are feeding; the drowsy guards are leaning on the tomb, one
asleep, the other awake, and two others are utterly amazed and confounded; an
angel sits at the door of the sepulcher speaking to the three holy women; and
our Lord is ascending a hill with
235
a roll in one hand, while the other
is grasped by the hand of the Eternal Father, as it is seen reaching down out
of heaven. It is an ivory carving and said to belong to the fifth or sixth
century. It is at Munich."
Lundy adds that as the crucifixion
is only indicated by symbol, so doubtless is the resurrection.
Grethenbach reminds us that we must
make liberal allowance in our reading of New Testament Scripture for the desire
on the part of Jesus’ biographers to make the "incidents" of his life
conform to the texts of ancient sacred works. Hence, he says, each reader must
judge for himself whether he is being treated to fact or to the results of this
process of conformity. What a basis for the substantiation of events that have
determined the religion of one third of mankind!
In his History of the Christian
Religion to the Year 200 Waite affirms there is no evidence that any of
those Gospels which were basic documents back of Matthew, Mark, and Luke
taught the miraculous conception or the material resurrection of Christ, or
contained any account of his miracles, or any references to any book containing
such accounts or teachings. Waite says it can not be denied that evidence that
the canonical Gospels were unknown to Justin Martyr is very strong, and indeed
conclusive, and that his references and quotations were not from them but from
other known Gospels, of which Irenaeus says there were many.
A weighty consideration is back of
Waite’s strong sentence that
"no work of art of any kind has
been discovered, no painting or engraving, no sculpture or other relic of
antiquity, which may be looked upon as furnishing additional evidence of the
existence of those Gospels, and which was executed earlier than the latter part
of the second century. Even the exploration of the catacombs failed to bring to
light any evidence of that character."
It would certainly appear that the
event of Jesus’ life had no relation to the time of its recording. It has never
occurred to partisan zealots that almost indubitably this would be an
indication that the "recording" had no relation to the event. An
event that begins to be recorded only two hundred years after its occurrence
hardly has a legitimate claim to the title of history. It must inevitably be a
construction of legend and romanticism, which is exactly what the
"life" of Jesus proves to be when examined.
236
Miss Holbrook says that the four
Gospels were written in Greek (by Hebrew fishermen and simple unlearned
citizens) and that there was no translation of them into other languages
earlier than the third century. No autograph manuscript of any of them has ever
been known, nor has any credible witness ever claimed to have seen such a
manuscript. Origen says that the four were selected from a very large number,
and Irenaeus says that the four were chosen out of many because there were four
universal winds and four quarters to the globe. Such a reason for the number
selected puts entirely out of court the reason commonly and naïvely believed to
have been the guiding one--the selection of four because there were but four in
existence. Of the ordinary natural motives that led to the writing and preserving
of actual history, not a single one is evident in the production of the
Gospels. Neither the time of their composition, nor the character of their
material, nor the knowledge of their existence, nor the definiteness of any
data concerning them bears evidence of their being veridical history.
Hippolytus claims that the
Basilidian Gnostics accepted the Gospel entirely, but Mead asserts that there
is evidence to prove they did not. On the contrary they explained such material
as the historicized legends of initiation, the process of which is
magnificently worked out in the Pistis Sophia treatise. Mead says of the
learned Gnostic societies that in their eyes a Gospel was always taken in the
sense of an exposition of the things beyond the phenomenal world. As they were
the most intelligent of the early Christians, it is warrantable to regard their
views as far the most likely version of the truth. The Basilidian view of Jesus
was that he was the perfect "man" within the psychic and animal soul
of man, or the innermost divine ray of consciousness within the mortal body.
A point of fair cogency is made by
Harry Elmer Barnes (The Twilight of Christianity, p. 415) that if Jesus
had been the Son of God, neither he nor his Father would have allowed his
doctrines to be perverted and later almost wholly supplanted by a jumbled
compound of Judaism and paganism.
It counts for much in the argument
that Mead (Did Jesus Live 100 Years B.C.?, p. 324) makes it clear that
the name "Christian" was not a title given by the early followers of
Jesus to themselves. Indeed it is found still unused by a series of Christian
writers of the first half of the second century at the time when it was
employed by Pliny the
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Younger in 112 A.D., by Tacitus in
116-117 A.D., and by Suetonius in 120 A.D. These Christian writers were content
to designate the early communities of these co-believers by such expressions as
"brethren," "saints," "elect," "the
called," "they that believed," "faithful,"
"disciples," "they that are in Christ," "they that are
in the Lord," and "those of the way."
A touch of early Christian
association of doctrine with Egyptian origins that did not suffer erasure by
the vandal hands, is seen in an identification, by Augustine and Ambrose
amongst the Christian Fathers, of Jesus with and as the "good
scarabaeus," the Egyptian name for the divine Avatar coming under the
zodiacal sign of Cancer, the Crab or Beetle. In accordance with the
continuation for some time of the Kamite symbolism in Christianity, it was also
maintained by some sectaries that Jesus was a potter and not a carpenter. The
Egyptian God Ptah was the divine Potter, or shaper of the clay of man’s nature
into divine form.
Not one person in thousands in the
Church today has the faintest idea when the chronology or dating of the
Christian era was fixed. Mead states that Dionysius of the sixth century,
following Victorious of Aquitaine of the preceding century, fixed the date of
the nativity of Jesus. Turner of Oxford, in his article on the Chronology of
the New Testament in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible, gives the
nativity in B.C. 7-6. In the Ency. Biblica von Soden of Berlin, under "Chronology"
gives the Birth "circa 4 B.C." Some encyclopedias give two to
three years of the ministry, others but one year.
Likewise Mead cites the judgment of
many scholars that the speeches of the persons in the Acts of the Apostles are
the most artificial element in a book already vastly discredited as history. Schmiedel
pointed out that the author constructed the utterances in each case according
to his own conception. Even Headlam, the writer of the conservative article in
Hastings’ Dictionary, admits that the speeches are "clearly in a
sense the author’s own compositions."
It is impossible to ignore the force
of the rather startling fact baldly stated by Mead (Did Jesus Live 100 Years
B.C.?, p. 48) when he writes:
"It has always been an
unfailing source of astonishment to the historical investigator of Christian
beginnings that there is not one single word from the pen of any pagan writer
of the first century of our era which can in
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any fashion be referred to the
marvelous story recounted by the Gospel writers. The very existence of Jesus
seems unknown."
Mead goes deeply and carefully into
the early use of the term Nazarioi (Nazarenes, Nazarites, Nazarians, etc.) and
cites especially Epiphanius’ references to it, showing how this careless or
over-imaginative "historian" of the "heresies" entangles
himself in many flagrant contradictions in his statements. Says Mead:
"The historical fact underlying
all this contradiction seems to be simply that ‘Nazoraei’ was a general name
for many schools possessing many views differing from the view which
subsequently became orthodox. Their descendants are the Mandaites of southern
Babylonia, who have the Codex Nazaraeus."
Epiphanius claims strenuously that
the Nazoraeans were the first Christians and that they used both Old and New
Testament,--though how they could have used the New Testament when it was not
yet in existence, he does not explain! Incidentally the present thesis that
there were extant many documents like the Logia or Sayings and
various Mystery ritual texts or "Gospels" in all the ancient period,
both before, during and after Jesus’ "life," is the only one that
permits us to solve the difficulty of Epiphanius’ claims without charging him
with overt lying. The "Gospels" were in existence, yes, but not as
the canonical Gospels officially apotheosized at Nicea in 325. But so were they
in existence centuries before Christ.
Further with reference to the term Nazar,
Mead (Did Jesus Live 100 Years B.C.?, p. 346) has to say that the
Old Testament Nazirs were those "consecrated" to Jahweh by a vow, and
their origin goes back to very early times in Jewish tradition.
"Now it is to be
remembered," he says, "that in Numbers VI the word nezer
is applied to the taking of the Nazirite vow of separation and consecration,
and the name netzer (branch) is given to one of the disciples of Jesus
in the Talmud, and in one of the Toldoth recensions to Jeschu himself, and that
the commentators are agreed that this is a play on notzri, the Hebrew
for ‘Nazarene,’" or Galilean.
In discussing the Ebionites, one of
the earliest Christian sects, Mead says that the main charge against them, as
related by Hippolytus (Philos., VIII, p. 34) is that they, like all the
earliest "heretics" decried
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the later doctrine of the miraculous
physical virgin birth of Jesus. Strange to note again that the closer one gets
to the period of Jesus’ alleged time, the greater and more general is the
denial or ignorance of his existence. The further one draws away from it, the
greater and more insistent the "proofs" of it! This again entirely
reverses the universal phenomenon of a historical recording. Most living
characters are homely and familiar entities during and immediately after their
lives, and only wax romantic and haloed after centuries have elapsed. But Jesus
was airy and ethereal in the first century, and crystallized into quite
concrete personality after several centuries. Every writer about him from the
twelfth century on can describe his appearance, his moods, his motives to
meticulous particularity far better than anyone writing in the first century.
A curious early Christian document
is Justin’s Dialogue Cum Trypho, or debate with Trypho, in which (xlix)
he puts the following argument into the mouth of his Jewish opponent:
"Those who affirm him to have
been a man, and to have been anointed by election, and then to have become a
Christ (Anointed), appear to me to speak more plausibly than you," that
is, than Justin, who maintained the physical birth of Jesus.
Justin represents his opponent as
arguing that Jesus was born naturally like other humans, and not by a miracle
of virgin parturition. But this whole debate is wide of the mark, since the
question is not whether his birth was natural or supernatural, but whether it
was a physical event at all,--not how it occurred, but whether it occurred. The
question is not one of quality or manner, but purely one of fact.
A work of Celsus, the pagan debater
with Origen, called The True Logos, which certainly would have yielded
us much light on all early Gnostic or esoteric interpretation of sacred
writings, has been destroyed by the Christians.
It may with many carry weight in the
discussion that both Kant and Hegel negate the historical Jesus.
Of the Church Fathers Irenaeus seems
never to have subscribed to the legend of Jesus’ death on the cross, or his
death at all at the early age of thirty-three years. It is a curious thing and
hard to explain in the face of the claim that Jesus’ life was accepted
historically by the universal early Church, that Irenaeus repeats the famous
legend which
240
refutes the Gospel "history"
flatly. Irenaeus was born in the early part of the second century between 120
and 140 A.D. He was Bishop of Lyons, France; and he repeats a tradition
testified to by the elders, which he alleges was derived directly by them from
John, the "Disciple of the Lord," to the effect that Jesus was not
crucified at the age of thirty-three, but that he had passed through every age
and lived on to be an "oldish man." And we are permitted to wonder
how such a tradition, attributed to so accredited a source as John, could have
lived on for so many years, if the general field was occupied by the factual
acceptance of the Gospel narrative, or how it could have been purveyed by a
Bishop of such eminence in the Church as Irenaeus.
There are other semi-authenticated tales
and legends which keep Jesus alive beyond his early thirties, and afloat in our
modern day are works and canards purporting to expose a lost record of the
Savior’s escape from death in Judea and his travels and teachings in Eastern
monasteries, inevitably in Tibet and the Himalayas, that Shamballah of
spiritual mystery, where any such fanciful history can safely be localized. The
significant thing to note about all this is that the late inventions in the
field of etherealized imagination are very likely no more daring and bizarre
than those of the earlier centuries.
Candor and honest reflection have
both had to be cast aside and a curtain of reticence drawn over the glaring
data which operate so directly to contradict the historicity of Jesus, in the material
of the famous fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. By theologians it is known as the
chapter of the "Suffering Servant." In it are depicted in the most
vivid and memorable phraseology the sufferings of the divine agent of human
redemption, who sacrifices his heavenly heritage and reduces himself to the
form of a lowly servant to bear the sins of wayward men. It is too well known
to need quotation. Its impressive recital of the Logos bearing our sins in his
body and suffering agony for our transgressions is unforgettable literature.
But the point to note is that it is a descriptive summary of exactly what the
"historical" Jesus experienced in his earthly career, and it was
written centuries before Jesus "lived." Again it appears that Jesus’
biography was in considerable part written before he came.
Massey has called attention to the
fact, disconcerting to the supporters of the historical thesis, that the Jesus
of Revelation is described with female breasts. The conception of
supernal deity as androgyne
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motivated the representation of
types of deity as combined male and female. But this was all in the allegorical
portrayal and it removes the data from history. In this light Lord Raglan’s
statement can be well credited, that we can not go far toward the true
realization of the meaning of ancient literary formulations without recognizing
that the archaic tomes rest on no historical foundations, but that they are
documents illustrating the development of religious ideas and systems that are
of the highest importance. And when research has fortified itself with this
initial instrument of correct comprehension, Raglan avers that all the
difficulties will disappear. For that which is difficult and impossible as
history, becomes not only possible but sublimely illuminating as mythicism.
This chapter must include an item of
the most curious sort, that will doubtless fall with great surprise and some
dismay into the minds of many readers. This has to do with the several varying
reports or accounts of Jesus’ personal appearance and beauty--or ugliness--of
physical features. We have here one of the most certain instances of the
confusion of allegory with history, for on no other grounds can so eccentric a
misconstruction be accounted for. Very understandably all the prevalent notions
of the Christ’s personality picture him as of the highest order of comeliness.
It would not match popular conceptions of his character to think of him
otherwise. Surely the Son of God could be nothing less than radiant with charm
and beauty. If he had not been comely, he would have had to be made so to give
devotees the only picture of him that would have been acceptable to their
fancies. Hence every painting and sculpture from the early centuries portrayed
him as a man of typical saintliness and beauty. The imaginative genius of
artists has extended itself to the utmost to create a form and appearance, mien
and expression, that would most fully embody the highest Christian conception
of divine character. Jesus was painted to depict what the Christian imagination
conceived the perfect man and Son of God in human form to be like. This
portrayal represented in the finale a compromise between or composition of the
worldly ideal of natural masculine beauty and celestial spirituality, softened
by the elements limned in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, the man of sorrows
who bore our pains in his person. It disturbs many who like to emphasize his
humanity, in which he is presented as in all respects like unto us, to read
that he never laughed. This tradition precluded his
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ever being pictured laughing.
Laughter, though one of the commonest and most natural of human expressions,
does not quite comport with the heavier dignity and gravity of the theological
conception of his nature and mission. It is a little too light to harmonize
with the more austere solemnity of his earthly errand. Human laughter is not
commonly thought of as divine, and if the gods laugh, we are not too certain it
befits their empyreal dignity. They might be laughing at us. Laughter is
commonly too close to carousal and buffoonery to be seemingly associated with
high divinity. Our notion of divinity is inevitably colored with Sabbath
sanctity of decorum. Our puritanical bent had pretty effectively debarred
laughter from the Sabbath, hence from religion, and hence from the Christ’s
personality.
The portraiture of Jesus inevitably
took the form and character which these considerations dictated, and we have
the conventional form, face, bearing and clothing so well known. But it will come
with a heavy shock to all who with uncritical minds have accepted this
portrayal as at least tentatively a possibility of likeness to the living
person of Jesus, to learn for the first time that a number of the earliest
Fathers positively stated that Jesus was ugly, ungainly, uncomely and deformed!
We can do no better than cite Lundy’s findings on this matter (Monu.
Christ., p. 232):
"Now it is worthy of special
consideration that none of the sculptured or painted representations of Christ
in early Christian art exactly agree with the reputed descriptions given of his
personal appearance by Agbarus, Lentulus and others. It is not an easy matter
to determine when the mere symbols of Christ were developed into pictorial
and sculptured representations of his person; but one thing is certain,
viz., that the uniform testimony of the earliest writers of the
Christian era is to the effect that our Lord’s person was insignificant and
void of beauty, but that the spirit which shone through his humanity was
all beauty and glory."
Again Lundy wrestles (p. 231) with
the point:
"The New Testament writings
give no account of our Lord’s personal appearance. ‘Fairer than the children of
men’ in mind, body and soul was the Hebrew ideal of the Messiah, as the
Psalmist expresses it. (XLV:2): and ‘He hath no form nor comeliness,’ no
attractive beauty, is another Hebrew aspect of him, as Isaiah reports it; and
with such opposite prophetic anticipations, is it any wonder that the subject
of them has actually given rise to two schools of ancient Christian art, or
rather two different modes
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of treating our Lord’s personal
appearance? One made him the young and blooming and beautiful Divinity, like
Krishna, Mithra and Apollo; the other gave him a sad and ugly face, covered by
a beard, and made him really and literally ‘a man of sorrows, and acquainted
with grief.’"
Lundy should have added Isaiah’s
more specific details of portraiture in the verse which runs: "How was his
visage marred, more than any man; and his form, more than the sons of men;
disfigured till he seemed a man no more, deformed out of the semblance of a
man." The Son of God, deformed more than even humankind! This puts the
entire historicity in jeopardy. The structure of Christian theology rests very
definitely upon the claim that the babe of Bethlehem was the literal and
historical fulfillment of Old Testament "prophecy." It is now caught
in the dilemma of having to admit--if Jesus was divinely comely--that the
prophecy failed of fulfillment in this important and specific item. To have
fulfilled the "prophecy" Jesus must be put down as ugly and deformed!
And if Jesus is admitted to have been ill-featured, then millions upon millions
of pages of Christian pious effusion about the Galilean’s austere beauty must
be reduced to what they are at any rate--unctuous froth.
We find Justin Martyr, early second
century Father, quoted as follows: "He appeared without comeliness, as the
scriptures declared," when he came to the Jordan. Clement of Alexandria
deposed to this effect: "the Lord himself was uncomely in aspect . . . his
form was mean, inferior to men." Celsus, in his debate with Origen, argues
that since the Divine inhabited the body of Jesus, that body must certainly
have been different and more beautiful and radiant than common, in grandeur,
beauty, strength, voice, impressiveness and influence, "whereas his person
did not differ in any respect from another, but was, as they report, little and
ill-conditioned and ignoble, i.e., low and mean." Origen in rebuttal
protests Celsus’ using the prophet’s description in literal application to the
man Jesus, and argues that any way all human meanness was changed and glorified
in his transfiguration, resurrection and ascension. Tertullian decides that no
matter how poor and despised that body may be, Jesus is still his Christ, be he
inglorious, ignoble and dishonored. David’s words that "he is fairer than
the children of men" are applicable in that figurative sense of spiritual
grace, when he has put on his shining armor of beauty and glory. Tertullian (Flesh
of Christ, Ch. 9) says "his body did not reach even
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to human beauty, to say nothing of
heavenly glory." Augustine sidesteps the bald issue by asseverating his
beauty in all his functions, offices, acts, miracles, words, character and
mission. He summarizes his position in his statement (De Trinitate, VIII,
Ch. 4, tom. 8, p. 951, Migne’s Ed.): "Whatever the bodily appearance or
face of our Lord was, it was but one, yet it was represented and diversified by
a variety of numberless ideals." Lundy observes that this passage clearly
proves that in Augustine’s day the representations of Jesus’ features were
according to each Christian or Gnostic artist’s own conception, and that the
theologian-saint would have mentioned any portrait of Jesus if there had been
one extant, either of him or of his mother, the virgin Mary. For he adds:
"We know not the face or personal appearance of the Virgin Mary." (De
Trinitate, VIII, Ch. 5.)
Abarbanel says that the fifty-third
chapter of Isaiah can not apply to the personal Messiah, because of the
prevailing tradition of the Jewish people that he was a beautiful and blooming
youth. This tradition surely had its roots in the imaginative characterizations
of the Messiah as the sun-god, which gave to Krishna, Agni, Mithra,
Zarathustra, Horus and Apollo the ruddiest bloom of youth and beauty.
It has already been demonstrated
that the letter of Lentulus in which Jesus is described ostensibly from
first-hand knowledge is a forgery. It goes on to state that Jesus’ hair is the
color of wine and golden from the root, and from the top of the head to the
ears straight and without luster, but descending from the ears in glossy curls
to the shoulders, flowing down the back and parted in two portions down the middle
after the manner of the Nazarenes; his forehead is smooth, his face without
blemish and slightly mantled with a ruddy bloom; his expression is noble and
gracious. His nose and mouth are faultless. His beard is full and abundant and
of the wine and gold color of his hair, and forked. His eyes are blue and very
brilliant. In rebuke and reproof he is awe-inspiring, in exhortation and
instruction he is gentle and persuasive. None has seen him laugh, but many have
seen him weep. His person is tall and slender; his hands long and straight, his
arms graceful. In speech he is grave and deliberate, his language and manner
quiet and simple. In beauty he surpasses the most of men.
John Damaschius of the eighth
century cites an early tradition saying he was like his mother, assuming her
features. Lundy, quotes Didron as testifying to the descriptions of him as
given by those mys-
245
tics to whom he appeared in psychic
vision. These say that he was tall, clad like a Jew, beautiful of face, the
splendor of divinity darting from his eyes, his voice full of sweetness. Lundy
notes that these traditions do not agree with the Patristic writings on the
subject nor with the portraits copied by Boscio from the frescoes of the
catacombs. Lundy concludes by citing the fact that there is nearly a score of
examples like the two copied by Boscio, where the ugly and bearded Christ and
the beautiful and beardless one occur together on the same monuments!
This whole debate in the early
Church forum is a striking instance of the ignorance and confusion concerning
their own theological material in which the Christians became entangled by
reason of their smothering Egypt’s time-honored wisdom. Egypt stood all the
while holding in her hands the answer to the riddle of the two contradictory
versions of Jesus’ personal appearance. Its Messianic Horus was figuratively
two characters in one, "the double Horus," "Horus of the two
horizons" (west and east). "Horus the Elder and Horus the
Younger." As the elder he typified the adult divinity of one cycle; as the
younger, he was the new-born son of that aged father. Horus the Elder
represented the aged past, Horus the Younger the new-born present and the
coming future. As Massey so convincingly shows, the two characterizations
passed over into Christianity through Gnostic or other channels, and after some
time the inner connections having been lost, both stood facing the ignorant
Christians with all explanation gone. Hence the debate in the dark. Again we
have a grim demonstration of what a miscarriage of rational sense is produced
the moment allegory is converted into history.
There has been grouped in this
chapter a long series of data, all of a certain evidential character bearing
with accentuated force upon the chief point to be established by the work. It
is not the first time that one or more of these points have been raised. But it
is the first time that they have been assembled into an organic whole and
focused directly upon a single object on the basis of a thesis adequate to give
them all a unified coherence and consistency. All acquire a substantial force
and pertinence through the application of the keys of the esoteric method and
the esoteric wisdom. And while perhaps no one of them may be claimed to exert
decisive influence in the final conclu-
246
sion, the articulated phalanx of
them all in linked array does indeed present a massive body of evidence for the
case that can not be pushed aside by any critic. If this was the whole evidence
the case would still be strong. Limited space has curtailed the expansion of
some of the points, as others of far great cogency are awaiting presentation.
Many of these are so strong in their testimony that single ones among them
might be deemed of sufficient weight and decisiveness to support the main
contention. Collectively they must be accounted as constituting final and
conclusive proof. The first group of these deals with the incidents and
circumstances connected with the Nativity of Jesus. When these incredible
circumstances of alleged history are carefully scrutinized and seen at last in
their relation to Egyptian elucidative constructions, the weakness of the
historical rendition of the Gospels will be apparent with a vividness never
before realized. The Gospel narrative has been so romanticized with far-away
ideality that the mere act of facing the data in the full realistic sense as
history that actually occurred is itself a shocking experience to hypnotized
votaries. It is a straight fact that, stripped of their imaginative halo, most
of the Gospel events stand forth eerie and grotesque to naked vision. The
readiest way to discredit three fourths of the Biblical "history" is
to take the narrative strictly at its word--and then reproduce it with literal
realism. The general result is slap-stick comedy ready for Hollywood’s jaded
producers, buffoonery raised to the square or cube.
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Chapter X
COSMIC
MAJESTY WITH LOCAL ITEMS
The first item to be examined in
connection with the Nativity is that which has come to be known as the
Slaughter of the Innocents. If any sane and intelligent person will let his
reason function for a single minute upon the subject he will be assured that
such an episode as the wholesale slaughter of the male babes under two years in
Judea by edict of the ruler of the province and for the reason alleged could
have held its place in Christian minds as factual history for centuries only
through a total paralysis of mentality so great as to surpass all credibility.
It would surely seem as if the acceptance of such an incident as part of the
history of the Savior of the world could have occurred only among people rated
as semi-intelligent or semi-barbaric. The phenomenon of its having gained and
long held credible status among people whom history rates as the leaders in
world civilization challenges the student with the riddle of such an anomaly.
It would almost seem a labor of supererogation to demonstrate its patent
non-historicity; but with millions of minds still hallucinated by the spell of
the miraculous and the supernatural as being the legitimate essence of
"religion," and with the Bible standing in the character of a fetish
which must be approached only when the reason has been put in abeyance, the
task of disproving what could not by any possibility have occurred must be
undertaken.
To begin with, the consideration at
once occurs to reflection--when one transfers the episode from romantic
subjectivism to concrete realism on the plane of everyday factuality, in the
process of which nearly every incident in the Bible at once appears impossible
and ridiculous--that to carry out such an edict Herod must have struck at all
the infant children of his own political supporters, his friends, his
courtiers, the members of the ring that are with him in power. It is incredible
that a man in his position, short of being demented, would have risked the
infliction of slaughter and grief upon the families of those in his own
political "gang." Nor is it conceivable that this powerful coterie
248
of his closest supporters, his
cabinet, and the noblemen would have permitted an order that would have
involved their own children.
Then the incident is recorded only
in the Gospels; and by now it must be clear that the Gospels are spiritual
dramas and not histories. There is therefore no historical record of the event.
Veridical history knows absolutely nothing about it. It is a total blank as
regards this incident in the "life" of Jesus. It is an allegorical
formulation and nothing else. It, too, traces its mythological origin to Egypt,
where the Innocents--the virgin units of divine mind, our souls-to-be--were
attacked, like the infant Hercules in his cradle, by the two reptiles
(representing the lower natural forces of the body, in warfare with the newborn
Christos taking his initial plunge into carnality), the Apap serpent and the
Herut water monster. The soul-units were characterized as "innocent"
because they were children of God, newly generated offshoots of his mind, that
had not ever previously been wedded to matter in full incarnation. The meaning,
as always, is evolutionary, cosmic or spiritual, never objectively historical.
On their downward plunge into the world and body they had to withstand the
onslaught of the carnal nature with its menace of engulfing, devouring their
incipient spiritual nature. This was dramatized as the attack of the serpent
upon them in their infancy or childhood. The youthful David overcame the
monster Goliath as one version of it, and the fairy legends of the young St.
George or petit Jack battling the giant are other forms of it. It is all to
typify the danger involving the hosts of young souls from the side of the
carnal body on their first venture into incarnation.
Higgins says categorically that the
story of Herod and the Innocents is quite unknown to all the Jewish, Roman and
Greek historians. Mead states that the Talmud Rabbis know nothing of Herod’s
wholesale murder of the children as recounted in the introduction of our first
canonical Gospel. Josephus knows nothing of it, although he had no reason for
whitewashing the character of Herod had such a dastardly outrage been an actual
fact. And the Talmud Rabbis so thoroughly hated the memory of Herod that they
could not have failed to record such a horror had he been really guilty. Mead
adds that we must remember that the Rabbis had no belief whatever in the Gospel
tradition as history.
249
On the subject Lundy has this to
say:
"Although persecution began
with the very birth and infancy of Christ, when King Herod sent his
‘blood-hunting slaughtermen’ to Bethlehem to ‘spit the naked infants upon pikes
and make their mad mothers’ howls break the clouds,’ yet of this horrible
massacre there is no trace at all in the Roman catacombs and none in any
Christian art until about the close of the fourth or beginning of the fifth
century, when we have an example on a sarcophagus from the crypt of St.
Maximin, France. . . . Modern Romish art must needs represent the actual
slaughter in all its horrible and sickening details to make it impressive to
the vulgar, as Fra Angelico, Raphael and especially Rubens have done. Early
Christian art had a more refined delicacy of taste and far better conceptions
of the true and only object of art, which is to teach, cheer, comfort and
elevate the soul of man, and not fill him with horrors and ideas of cruelty and
licentiousness."
(Lundy adduces the valuable
testimony also that there is no picturing of the flight into Egypt and return
of the holy family to Nazareth in early art, and none of Christ among the
doctors in the temple until about the fifth century.)
To accentuate the point that
considerations of factual history had little to do with the fixing of a date
for Jesus’ birth, it is worth inserting a quotation given by Epiphanius (Haer.,
LI, p. 22) from the Codex Marcianus:
"The Savior was born in the
forty-second year of Augustus, king of the Romans, in the consulship of the
same Octavi(an)us Augustus, (for the thirteenth time), and of Sil(v)anus
according to the consular calendar among the Romans. For it is recorded in it
as follows: When these were consuls . . . Christ was born on the sixth day of
January, after thirteen days of the winter solstice and of the increase of the
light and day. This day (of the solstice) the Greeks, I mean the Idolaters,
celebrate on the twenty-fifth day of December a feast called Saturnalia among
the Romans, Kronia among the Egyptians, and Kikellia among the Alexandrians.
For on the twenty-fifth day of December the division takes place which is the
solstice, and the day begins to lengthen its light, receiving an increase, and
there are thirteen days of it up to the sixth day of January, until the day of
the birth of Christ (a thirtieth of an hour being added each day), as the wise
Ephraim among the Syrians bore witness by this inspired passage (logos) in his commentaries,
where he says: ‘The advent of our Lord Jesus Christ was thus appointed: (First)
his birth according to the flesh, then his perfect incarnation among men which
is called Epiphany, at a
250
distance of thirteen days from the
increase of the light; for it needs must have been that this should be a figure
of our Lord Jesus Christ himself and of his twelve disciples, who made up the
number of the thirteen days of the increase of the light."
The sixth of January is still
traditionally celebrated as the day of the birth of Christ in England and
elsewhere. Christian heads are for the most part guiltless of any suspicion of
the reason for the date. The quoted passage hints at it, but, without ancient
Egyptian backgrounds of data, leaves the matter still obscure. We have already
seen that the most primary significance of the number twelve, as pertaining to
the disciples, tribes of Israel, months of the year, and other usages, was the
Egyptian designation, the Twelve Saviors of the Treasure of Light. The
Christ would be fully "born" in humanity when his gradual
infiltration into human consciousness had unfolded to perfection the twelve
rays of divine mind which man is to express. The inchoate divine light in
mankind was to increase by twelve stages of growth to the full shining of
Christhood in all hearts. What more natural symbolism then could be adopted
than the counting of the first twelve days of increasing light from the
solstice of darkness, figured as the twenty-fifth of December? And after twelve
days came the thirteenth, on which the whole twelve powers were synthesized in
the unified being of the Christos. So that now with the resort again to
Egyptian constructions of imagery there can be announced for the first time to
the Christian population the correct significance of their celebrating the
birth of Jesus both on the twenty-fifth of December and the sixth of January.
As the Egyptians would have said, the December solstitial date commemorated the
birth of Horus the Younger, the infant Horus, type of the first or natural man
Adam; while the January date thirteen days later marked the day of the birth of
Horus the Elder, Horus the adult, the homme faît or man made perfect,
second Adam. In simpler terms, the December date marked the physical beginning
of the birth of the Christ spirit in mankind and the January date marked the
concluding stage of its aeonial increase. All of which again throws the meaning
of the word "birth," in reference to the Christos, into its true and
proper significance, as a gradual increase of a spiritual quality over a long
period, the whole cycle or aeon. Man, who is to be divinized, had first to be
physically "born" on a given planet. So the Christ-man as ritualistic
type of a divinized humanity, had also to be given
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his "birth-day"--at the
winter solstice, as a babe in the flesh. It will be noticed that the tradition
outlined in the Codex Marcianus lays significant stress upon the
apparently extraneous fact that the Savior’s birth on the sixth of January came
in the thirteenth consulship of Octavius Augustus, obviously an obscure hint
that Deity fell in with the symbolism to the extent of adding another
historical thirteen to the combination. Christians celebrate many a festival
day in the year’s calendar without the slightest inkling as to the long-lost
purport of the ritual commemorations.
Reverting to the Herodian hecatomb
of infant death, if the inherent impossibilities of the case do not suffice to
determine the matter against the historicity, there is another fact that settles
it with finality. This is the date of Herod’s death. Christian historians have
been relentlessly forced to assent to the year 4 B.C. as the date of the
Tetrarch’s demise. When verified historical fact is the piper, theological
fiction must dance in tune. So back goes the official "date" of
Jesus’ birth to the year 4 B.C., since Herod must be kept in the story. This
throws the whole dating of the Christian era four years out of line with the
first guess.
But what will be done now when
another authentic date is found and another shift will have to be made on the
strength of it? Another ruler is mentioned as on the throne when Jesus was
born, and his date is still farther away from the year one. Matthew says that
Caesar Augustus levied the great world tax that required Joseph to register at
Bethlehem, "now when Cyrenius was Governor in Syria." There has
hardly been a period in eastern Mediterranean history when the records of the
provincial governments under the Roman Empire were so well kept as just the time
referred to. The official annals of the Syrian government are well preserved;
and they show no Governor at all by the name of Cyrenius! The closest
approximation to the name is Quirinus, and Moffatt’s translation of the New
Testament inserts Quirinus for Cyrenius in the Nativity narrative. But the
authentic date of the governorship of this Quirinus is the two-years period
between 13 and 11 B.C.! To accommodate its dating to this item of the
"historical" chronicle of Jesus’ "life," official
ecclesiasticism must now endorse a date eight or nine years farther back than 4
B.C. Two such corrections leave the whole historical structure of Christianity
badly shaken, near in fact to the point of tottering. Without a change in the
date of the
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first Christmas the participation of
Herod in the infant slaughter becomes impossible. The personal Herod was four
years in his grave when the Bethlehem babe arrived.
Comment has already been made on the
close similarity of the name of the Egyptian serpent Herut to the Tetrarch’s
name, and the likelihood of a substitution of the latter for the former when
the Egyptian myth was converted into "history." Presumably clinching
proof of this jugglery may never be available. It must be left then to rest
upon the strong presumptive probabilities inherent in the situation. It must be
held deeply suggestive, however, that the name Herod occupies exactly the same
place, role and significance in the Gospel "incident" that the Herut
reptile fills in the Egyptian allegory! It is the Herut menace to our young
divine souls in the one instance, and the Herod menace to the young divinity in
the other. This alone is enough to remove it from the realm of coincidence and
conjecture and to throw it over into that of identity of character. If it was
one isolated single occurrence of such definite correspondence, the case might
be classed as accidental. But when it is known to be but one of a long series
of such agreements and matchings, sound judgment inclines to call it another historization
of Egyptian myth. Such it almost indubitably must be considered.
The fact of Herod’s death in the
year 4 B.C. alone jars the whole fabric of Christian systematism to its
foundations. Christian apologists have belittled in the past, and presumably
will again in the future depreciate the importance of the precise date of the
birth of their Savior, and will in spite of all facts cling to the historicity
of the episode. But we shall see that the structure of the historical claim,
severely weakened by the non-authenticity of its very first chapter of events,
will be still further assaulted and finally dismantled by a long series of
blows from the side of fact, until if it stands at all, it must rest on sheer
stolid faith alone. It will be found to be utterly discredited by reason, by
data, and by the sheer physical impossibility of the occurrence of Biblical
events when they are treated realistically and not romantically. The latter
particular will be noted in glaring vividness when the legend of the star of
Bethlehem is examined.
From Herod at the birth, it is a
short jump to Pilate at the death, of the historical Jesus.
Authoritative data are wanting to
present any outright negative evidence as to the participation of the
pro-consul in the Gospel events.
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But there is a textual detail that
looms larger and larger the longer it is considered. It is a phrase in the
Apostles’ Creed of the Christian Church.
The creed--worthy itself of a whole
volume’s study--is by no means a mere abbreviated rune or formulary of
Christian theological belief. It is that, but it is infinitely more than that.
It is a brief of ancient cosmology and creative process, incarnation of spirit
in matter, descent of soul into body and return to greater deific state by
virtue of the victory won in the lower worlds. An item of the journey of
celestial divine spirit through the planes of matter that could not be left out
was the "suffering" entailed for it by the necessity of its going
"under" the limitations imposed on it by matter’s lower range of
vibrational sensitivity. Now matter, as has been set forth fully elsewhere, was
typified universally and ubiquitously in ancient symbolism by water, so that
even the name most generally applied to the mothers of the Christs was in
whatever language the word for water, sea, ocean. Mary is incontestably of this
origin, being Mare, Maria in Latin, and Thallath, "the
sea" (name of a Hellenic "Mother of God"), in Greek. Primeval
space, the mother of all things, being matter in inchoate form, was the Great
Deep, the waters of the abyss, the firmament of the waters. Now the quality of
matter that caused it to be the generator of suffering for the energies of
spirit that were "cribbed, cabined and confined" under its sluggish
inertness, was its density. It is therefore not a shrewd guess, not a mere
chance discernment of a concatenation of phrase and idea that enables us to
make a totally new translation of one of the clauses in the Apostles’ Creed, by
which change the historical Pilate is swept entirely out of the narrative. It
is not a sheer stretching of points to make designed ends meet, but must be the
result of the rational necessities involved in the only correct and consistent
envisagement of the matters discussed in the Creed, when it is asserted that
the creedal phrase detailing with the utmost brevity the duress of spirit under
the thraldom of matter, must inexpugnably have been in the true original
formulation of the ritual statement, "he suffered under the dense sea, was
crucified, dead and buried." "Dense sea" would have been merely
a euphemism, familiar to all in Mystery Ritual cultism, for "he suffered
under the limitation of dense matter,"--a shorthand expression in Mystery
language. What, then, in the light of this irrefutable statement of the true
basic meaning that fits with
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absolute nicety and exactness into
that very place in the Creed, must be our amazement when we turn to the Greek
and find a similarity of name even closer to identity than the Herod-Herut
one-- "dense sea" in the Greek manuscripts is given as @insert Greek
equiv. (pontos pilètos)! "He suffered under pontos pilètos: he
suffered under the dense sea" (of matter).
It is far from being a merely
specious argument, indeed it is a fully warranted contention, that the sudden
introduction in this majestic cosmograph in the impressive ritual of the name
of a mere man is a misfit and impertinence bordering close on to the sublimest
ineptitude. It is exactly like the sudden injection of Bill Brown of 128 North
Sixth Street into a line in Paradise Lost. It is too sudden a jerk from
the sweep of cosmic drama to page 195 of a school history. A personal reference
to our own childhood reaction to this phrase in the Creed may be pardoned. Even
from the age of ten or twelve there seemed something wholly incongruous and
vaguely disturbing when the Creed jumped without warning from celestial
operations on a majestic scale to the judge of a court trial down in Judea. The
sudden insertion of one human person’s name in the text amid otherwise lofty
epic dramatization was jarring and disconcerting. It was an ideological
anomaly. It did not ring harmoniously with the context. It stands to reason
that the introduction of a local ruler’s name into what is provably an august
formula of creative cosmology and evolutionary method is obviously an
interpolation, and a glaring instance of the wreckage caused by that enormous
transposition of allegory and formulae over into supposed history. It will be
denied because we can produce no cinema of the scribes caught in the act of
changing Herut to Herod and pontos pilètos to Pontius Pilate; but the
results of the change glare at us nevertheless.
It must strike anyone who thinks
clearly for a moment that the writer of a formulary, as the Creed was intended
to be, aiming to express most succinctly the suffering of soul under matter’s
heavy burden, would have been most unlikely to summarize the long list of
dramatic ordeals in mortal career with the phrase "suffered under Pontius
Pilate," the proconsul. Even in the "history" of Jesus according
to the Gospels, the man Pilate was not at all a central factor in Jesus’
sufferings. His part was in fact incidental. Pilate’s decree was merely an
incident in a chain of events that already had gained such moral
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momentum that any other decision
than condemnation would have been an anticlimax and an artistic faux pas. It
would have wrecked the scenario. Pilate’s pardon of Jesus would have left
Christianity limp and unheroic, much as if in a murder mystery the first-chapter
murder victim should recover and defeat the story. Jesus had to be
condemned--"it must needs be that Christ should suffer and enter into his
glory"--and Pilate’s dramatic role was merely mechanical. He has never
been taken, even by literalists, for more than a puppet or marionette in the
play. And all this inharmony of the elements in the situation is nicely
adjusted and resolved if the original reading of "dense sea" is put
back in place of the forged proconsul’s name.
As to the Apocryphal Gospel of Pilate
and the documents entitled Letters of Pilate to Seneca and the
philosopher’s rejoinders, they are obviously forged Gospels, of which there
were scores in existence at the time. A perusal of them suggests forgery in
every phase and verse, as is also the case with the so-called Gospels of the
Infancy, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Nicodemus, the
strange Gospel of Paul and Thecla and others.
Having foisted upon the proconsul’s
name the ignominy of condemning the Son of God to death, Christian imagination
has pursued his shade even beyond the grave, and in various literary
concoctions has pictured the anguish of soul which he is undergoing in some
darksome Sheol, as post mortem realization of the ghastly crime he had
committed upon earth overwhelmed him. Unless sanity returns even these
lucubrations may become the canonical Gospels of some later ecclesiasticism.
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Chapter XI
STAGGERING
TRUTH ON EGYPT’S WALLS
Theologians have written and the
clergy have preached in such positive fashion as to the existence of the
personal Jesus that the body of the laity has been thrown under the impression
that outside the Gospels the historicity of the Master is well attested by the
evidence of secular sources. With this prepossession holding the field it
becomes necessary to marshal the material bearing on this issue. The average
Christian minister who has not read outside the pale of accredited Church
authorities will impart to any parishioner making the inquiry the information
that no event in history is better attested by witness than the occurrences in
the Gospel narrative of Christ’s life. He will go over the usual citation of
the historians who mention Jesus and the letters claiming to have been written
about him. When the credulous questioner, putting trust in the intelligence and
good faith of his pastor, gets this answer, he goes away assured on the point
of the veracity of the Gospel story. The pastor does not qualify his data with
the information that the practice of forgery, fictionizing and fable was rampant
in the early Church. In the simple interest of truth, then, it is important to
examine the body of alleged testimony from secular history and see what
credibility and authority it possesses.
First, as to the historians whose
works record the existence of Jesus, the list comprises but four. They are
Pliny, Tacitus, Suetonius and Josephus. There are short paragraphs in the works
of each of these, two in Josephus. The total quantity of this material is given
by Harry Elmer Barnes in The Twilight of Christianity as some
twenty-four lines. It may total a little more, perhaps twice that amount. This
meager testimony constitutes the body or mass of the evidence of "one of
the best attested events in history." Even if it could be accepted as
indisputably authentic and reliable, it would be faltering support for an event
that has dominated the thought of half the world for eighteen centuries.
But what is the standing of this
witness? Not even Catholic scholars
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of importance have seriously
dissented from a general agreement of academic investigators that these
passages, one and all, must be put down as forgeries and interpolations by
partisan Christian scribes who wished zealously to array the authority of these
historians behind the historicity of the Gospel life of Jesus. A sum total of
forty or fifty lines from secular history supporting the existence of Jesus of
Nazareth, and they completely discredited!
Some of the evidence of spuriousness
consists of the differing styles of Greek or Latin in the language used in the
interpolations, the place in the context where the passages have been inserted
or other indications open to the eye of critical scholars. It is so rare a
thing to find unanimous consensus of opinion on such matters among scholars
that their practically complete agreement in this case enables the layman to
accept the academic verdict with assurance. It will be informative to note some
of the commentaries on these passages made by the investigators.
In his work, The Great Galilean (p.
3) Robert Keable writes:
"No man knows sufficient of the
early life of Jesus to write a biography of him. For that matter no one knows
enough for the normal Times obituary notice of a great man. If regard
were had to what we should call in correct speech definitely historical facts,
scarcely three lines could be filled."
Had newspapers existed then, no
material could have been found for the obituary notice, not even the man’s
name, asserts Keable. Yet few periods of the ancient world were so well
documented as the period of Augustus and Tiberius. But no contemporary writer
knew of his existence.
Following his statement as to the
complete dearth of reference to Jesus’ life by any first and early second
century chroniclers and that the very existence of Jesus seems to have been
unheard of by them, Mead examines Pliny, Tacitus and Suetonius passages. Pliny
was born 61 A.D., Tacitus about the same time and Suetonius some ten years
later. All were in position to have gleaned all that was reported of an
extraordinary character like Jesus, whose activities and marvels had aroused
thousands in the Judean country, if Gospel be history. There are two short
statements in Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars, and they deal
chiefly with some disturbances aroused in Rome "impulsore
Chresto," "at the instigation of Chrestus." Just what the
ref-
258
erence could be to disturbances at
Rome, leading to the expulsion of Christians by Claudius, with
"Chrestus" as the instigator--when Jesus was never at Rome--is not
clear. Doubtless some insurrectionist activities of his followers at the
capital, it is presumed. But the Suetonius passage invalidates its reference to
Jesus as a man, it would seem. For Mead says that Suetonius’ reference to "Christiani"
in the second passage might easily apply to Zealots or Messianists of any
type. Mead adds that it is a well digested conclusion among schoolmasters and
their pupils that, as to Tacitus, we have in him a historical romanticist who
has too long fascinated readers by the beauty of his style, and that he is not
a sober historian. Tacitus’ main statement is that Jesus was put to death under
Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius. The famous sentence runs as follows:
"Auctor nominis ejus
Christus Tiberio imperitante per procuratorem Pontium supplicio affectus
erat."
Mead says this has all the earmarks
of being a Christian formula. Tacitus seems to know nothing of the name of
Jesus. "Tiberio imperitante" cannot be paralleled anywhere in
his vocabulary, and moreover is contrary to regular use, which would be "Principe
Tiberio." Hochart (Annales de la Faculté des Lettres de Bordeaux, 1884,
No. 2) says:
"This chapter contains almost
as many inexplicable difficulties as it does words."
Hochart thinks that a rescript of
the Annals and Histories by Poggio Bracciolini and Niccoli is itself a
pseudo-Tacitus and that "therefore we are face to face with an elaborate
pseudepigraph."
Josephus (Joseph ben Mattatiah) was
born 37-38 A.D., and lived to 100 A.D. His spurious passage is in the Antiquities
(XVIII, iii, p. 3). Mead says there are a dozen most potent arguments
against its authenticity and that it is rejected by all. (He names one scholar,
F. Bole, as claiming its genuineness.) We have the explicit statement of Origen
in the third century, says Mead, that Josephus had no belief whatever in Jesus
being the Christ, whereas the spurious passage states categorically that he was
the Christ. The Antiquities (XX, ix, p. 1) has a reference to a
certain Jacobus, "the brother of Jesus called Christ." Says Mead:
"It follows that Josephus knew nothing of ‘the Christ’ though he
knows much of various ‘Christs.’" Josephus, he cites, had been trained
259
in an Essene-like community and
seems to have gone to Rome in "Essene" interests. He was at Rome just
when the Christiani were singled out for special persecution and cruel
martyrdom by imperial tyranny; and yet he knows nothing of all this. He does
not know of the gruesome tragedy at Rome or even of the Christ of the
Christians. Joseph Klausner in his Jesus of Nazareth (p. 55) reiterates
Mead’s general observations with reference to the inharmony of the Josephus
passages with Origen’s statement that Josephus did not admit Jesus as the
Messiah. He emphasizes that Jesus’ life, if lived, could not have seemed of
small and inconsequential moment to Josephus, who wrote in 93, when the
Christians were strong and flourishing. Klausner points out the notable fact
that Eusebius, of the fourth century, knew the whole of the spurious Josephus
passage, whereas Origen of the third century did not. This again points to
interpolation between Origen’s day and the time of Eusebius. Klausner, on good
authority, speaks of "manifest additions by Christian copyists."
But it might be well to note and
answer Klausner’s concession to general modern opinion in his remark that
"it is far more difficult to explain how certain Jewish writers (the
Evangelists) invented such a wonderful character than it is to admit that they were
describing someone who did really exist." This greater difficulty in the
way of seeing the truth of the situation is the tremendous fact of the loss of
esotericism in general, the suppression of the knowledge of the Mystery Ritual
Drama and its significance and the decay of the original Egyptian crypticism.
In the absence of all this guiding intelligence, of course explanation is
difficult. Certainly it is difficult to see why the Evangelists should
"invent" the Jesus character and personalize him, if one does not
know that the Jesus character was already "invented" and had trod the
stage boards in the Mystery dramas for centuries B.C. The mere statement of
Klausner that the Evangelists "invented" a character that had been
the central figure of all ancient Messianic or Sun-God systems for centuries
previously, betrays this capable historian’s erroneous foundations and
approaches to the analysis of the Jesus situation. The Evangelists neither
invented nor perhaps even euhemerized the Jesus person. He was already in the
documents they rescripted or transcribed. But later ignorance changed him from
a typal to a personal entification. The misleading supposition with which these
analysts approach the problem is that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
260
were first century citizens who took
pen in hand and wrote the Gospels out of their heads. The final staggering
truth about the Bible books is that no "authors" ever sat down and
wrote them at all, in the sense in which Sir Walter Scott wrote the Waverley
novels. They were never "written" at all in the sense of original
creations by given authors. They were in existence long before ink ever met
paper to record and preserve them. They were the spoken lines of the great
drama, they were the oral tradition, extant thousands of years before they were
ever committed to writing. But at some epoch, here, there or elsewhere, the
sages or their pupils did at last commit them to writing, lest in some
degenerate age they be lost. This is obviously the whole truth as to their
origin, and there will be no sanity in the discussion of them until this is
known. So let Klausner’s remark be thrown into proper form of statement,--that
it is not difficult to understand how the Evangelists simply brought out to
more popular knowledge the recondite Gospels, with a Jesus long their central
figure, which had been theretofore kept more closely concealed within the
depths of Mystery cult secrecy. Christianity will not be understood until it is
seen as a popularization and consequent fatal vitiation of exclusive secret
religious philosophy and ritualism, instead of being considered a new creation
and a new advance on previous ignorance.
In his challenging work, The
Twilight of Christianity (p. 390), Harry Elmer Barnes reviews the status of
the meager amount of extra-Gospel material mentioning Jesus. He ventures the
observation that it may greatly surprise some readers to learn that anyone has
ever seriously questioned the actual existence of Jesus. As a matter of fact,
he asserts, the evidence for the view that Jesus was really a historical
character is so slight that a considerable number of the most distinguished
students of New Testament times have declared Jesus to be a mythical personage,
the product of the myth-making tendencies common to religious peoples of all
ages and particularly prevalent at the period of the early Roman Empire. Among
the more eminent scholars and critics who have contended that Jesus was not
historical, mention might be made of Bruno Bauer, Kalthoff, Drews, Stendel,
Felden, Deije, Jensen, Lublinski, Bolland, Van der Berg, Virolleaud, Couchoud,
Massey, Bossi, Memojewski, Brandes, Robertson, Mead, Whittaker, Carpenter and
W. B. Smith. Of non-Christian evidence, he says, next to nothing exists. Of the
twenty-four lines, the total of this sort, not
261
a single line is of admitted
authenticity. Barnes quotes the Tacitus passage (from the Annals, XV, p.
44) as follows:
"In order to suppress the
rumor, Nero falsely accused and punished with the most acute tortures persons
who, already hated for their shameful deeds, were commonly called Christians.
The founder of that name, Christus, had been put to death by the procurator,
Pontius Pilate, in the reign of Tiberius; but the deadly superstition, though
repressed for a time, broke out again, not only through Judea, where this evil
had its origin, but also through the city (Rome) whither all things horrible
and vile flow from all quarters and are encouraged. Accordingly, first those
were arrested who confessed; then on their information a great multitude were
convicted, not so much of the crime of incendiarism as of hatred of the human
race."
Tacitus wrote the Annals about
117 A.D., by which time the nascent popular notion of the historical Jesus
might have gained sufficient vogue to have let the historian assume he was
writing definite authentic history. He cites no sources or witness or
authorities for his facts.
Barnes points out that the name
Chrestus (instead of Christus) used in the Suetonius passage of two or three
lines, was a common Greek name, and may not necessarily have referred to the
particular man Jesus.
The Josephus excerpt (Antiquities,
XVIII, p. 3) is given as follows:
"About this time lived Jesus, a
wise man, if indeed he should be called man. He wrought miracles and was a teacher
of those who gladly accept the truth, and had a large following among the Jews
and pagans. He was the Christ. Although Pilate, at the complaint of the leaders
of our people, condemned him to die on the cross, his earlier followers were
faithful to him. For he appeared to them alive again on the third day, as
God-sent prophets had foretold this and a thousand other wonderful things of
him. The people of the Christians, which is called after him, survives until
the present day."
Written somewhere between 75 and 100
A.D., Barnes says the passage is admitted even by conservative and pious
scholars to be quite obviously spurious. No Jew who rejected Christianity could
possibly have written in this vein. It is obviously a late Christian
interpolation. It may have replaced an unfavorable reference to Jesus in the
original. Philo, Barnes reminds us, the most learned and brilliant Jewish
scholar of his day, has nothing whatever to say in regard to Jesus and the
262
Christians. There is therefore in
extant Jewish literature of the first century A.D. not a single authentic line
making reference to the founder of Christianity.
It is fitting at this place to make
answer to the statement of the Freethought proponent Joseph McCabe in his The
Story of Religious Controversy (p. 228). He there makes the declaration
that is worth our reproducing because it represents the common thought of the
average Christian who has not critically looked into the matter. He concludes
that it is more reasonable to believe in the historicity of Jesus because there
is no parallel in history to the sudden growth of a myth and its conversion
into a human personage in one generation. Moreover, he affirms, to those early
Christians Jesus was not merely or primarily a teacher. A collection of wise teachings
might in time get a mythical name attached to it, and the myth might in time
become a real person. But from the earliest moment that we catch sight of
Christians in history the essence of their belief is that Jesus was a personal
incarnation in Judea of the great God of the universe. The supreme emphasis,
asserts McCabe, is on the fact that he assumed a human form and shed human
blood on a cross. So it seems far more reasonable, scientific and consonant
with the facts of religious history which are known, to conclude that Jesus was
a man who was gradually turned into a God.
McCabe’s assertion that there is no
parallel in history to the sudden growth of a myth and its conversion into
history in one generation is a misstatement of the premises, to begin with. It
is both a sly subterfuge and an easy way to win a victory in an argument, to
twist the premises into shape to support the conclusion. It is simply not true
to say that the myth of Jesus was a sudden growth. We have shown that it was a
perennial cornerstone of ancient Mystery cultism. Only, it was held in secret
and was esoterically apprehended. The only suddenness connected with it came in
the way of its rather sudden popularization and exoterization. This indeed was
a lone phenomenon without parallel in history--which is the very point our
argument advances against the historicity. No doubt there had been previous
cases of the exoteric development, but never had this trend swept to such
wide-spread and overwhelming volume and power as to smother esotericism
completely and to enthrone in its stead the rule of ignorant literalism. The
Christian conversion of myth into history, sudden as it appears, was the
culminating denouement of a process or trend that was long in ferment-
263
ing and slow in working to a head.
The bloom of a flower is sudden, but it is just the apical point at the summit
of a long slow process of growth through many preceding stages. Of course there
is no parallel to this phenomenon, for it occurred only after long ages of slow
preparation and has kept its direful hold on the religious world ever since.
Not perhaps in five thousand years could it occur again on the same colossal
scale. It is likely the one titanic calamity in world history. Not the growth
of myth, but the historization of myth, is the thing that is, catastrophically
enough, without parallel in the world, on the scale and proportions as
perpetrated by Christianity in the early centuries.
Then there is the senselessness of
McCabe’s saying that a collection of myths might get a name attached to it,
when there was never a time over centuries previously that the name--Jesus or
another of similar purport, always designated the Sun-God in man--had not been
attached to such collections. All this shows unconscionable lack of
acquaintance with the facts of ancient history that should have been the
premises of argument. How can any scholar say it is hard to see why the
particular name, Jesus, was attached to the myths when Joshua, Jeshu, Jesse,
Joses, Josiah, Joash, Jehoash, Jehoahaz, Jehoshaphat, Joram, Jonah, Jason,
Iusa, Hosea and many more variant forms of the very name of Jesus were in
archaic literature for hundreds of years B.C.?
Again McCabe both twists facts and
draws from them unwarranted conclusions when he says that from the first moment
when we catch sight of Christians in history their belief was centered in the
personal human Jesus. This assertion has already been controverted by much
material gathered in this work, from Clement, Origen, Philo and others of the Christians
themselves. Among the unlearned early Christians it may have to some extent
been true; but among the intelligent and philosophical ones, the Gnostics,
Nazarenes, Essenes, and others, it most certainly was not true. Were these
sects not spurned as heretics for the very reason that they repudiated the
personal Jesus? The date of a general acceptance of the human Jesus by the
parties that had excluded the rest as heretics and established the orthodoxies
was not early in Christian history, but on in the third century.
The refutation of these statements
in McCabe’s short passage goes far to indicate how sorely intelligence and
honesty are needed to meet and straighten out many such tangled webs of
Christian presumption and falsification of data. Thousands of pages could be
given to the
264
labor of correcting misstatements of
fact, unwarranted deductions, sly insinuations and other forms of perversion of
truth found in hundreds of books dedicated to the defense of the Christian
faith.
In a note on page 24 of Josephus’ Antiquities
there is a statement that Photius says he has seen the chronology of Justus
of Tiberias, entitled The Chronology of the Kings of Judah Which Succeeded
One Another, and Photius says: "and being under the Jewish prejudices,
and indeed he was himself also a Jew by birth, he makes not the least mention
of the appearance of Christ or what things happened to him or of the wonderful
works that he did." The inference here is obviously that Justus of
Tiberius withholds mention of Jesus not because of Jewish prejudices, but in
spite of them, the intimation being that had Jesus lived and been known through
his wonderful works and Christly status, any Jew would have been prejudiced in
the direction of giving the matter all the mention possible. His silence
bespeaks his lack of knowledge of the data. He would have been glad to mention
such laudable things had he known of them.
Through the creditable scholarship
of Klausner, Mead and others we are enabled to approach the next issue that
closely and vitally affects the investigation. This is the group of references
in the Jewish Talmud to a character whom many have sought to identify with the
Gospel Jesus, namely Jehoshua (Jesus) Ben Pandira (Pandera, Pantera, Pantêre).
Klausner’s treatment of the personage or figure is very full and discerning;
Mead has a whole work devoted to him: Did Jesus Live 100 Years B.C.?;
and Massey analyzes the situation capably. It is deemed desirable to go into
the question of his relation to the Gospel Jesus, not so much because it may
contribute any effective data to the main problem under review, as because it
may carry to readers the important knowledge that other sacred writings before
the Gospels featured a Jesus figure, with much the same narrative material of
his "life," as that believed generally to exist only in the Christian
canonical writings. The brief outline of the story of this Talmudic Jesus is
indeed like a short summary of the Galilean’s career: he was born with an
accompaniment of certain supernatural manifestations, went to Egypt, became
learned in the wisdom of the Egyptians, returned to Palestine, wrought many
miracles among the populace through his Egyptian arts or sorcery and magic,
incurred the hostility of the orthodox priesthood, was tried and condemned, was
given forty days
265
for partisans to come and clear him,
and finally stoned to death and his body hanged on a tree. The date of his
birth has been placed by the best calculations of scholars at about 115 B.C. It
will be seen at once that if this Talmud figure was the Jesus to whom the
Gospels could be claimed to refer, or even the prototype of the Gospel Jesus,
the dating would throw off base the entire structure of the Nazareth
historicity, and would invalidate a thousand "proofs" of the latter
based on dates, sequences of events and arguments grounded on and affected by
such considerations. The dating of the Christian calendar would be over 100
years off the true.
We may start with the statement made
by Massey (The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ, p. 2) that in
the Book of Acts Jesus is stoned to death and his body hanged on a tree.
This establishes a fairly strong point of identity between the two Jesus
characters.
Massey declares that this Jewish
Pandira was the only Jesus known to Celsus, the author of The True Logos, which
was destroyed by the Christians. Celsus says of him that he was not a pure
Word, not a true Logos, but a man who had learned the arts of sorcery in Egypt.
Massey sums the case when he says that
"here is the conclusive fact:
the Jews knew nothing of Jesus, the Christ of the Gospels, as a historical
character, and when the Christians of the fourth century trace his pedigree by
the hand of Epiphanius, they are forced to draw their Jesus from Pandira!
Epiphanius gives the genealogy of the canonical Jesus in this wise:--Jacob,
called Pandira, Mary--Joseph--Cleopas, Jesus."
The name Pandira is related to the
French panthère, "panther," which was credited with being the
"nickname" of Jacob, the alleged grandfather of the Talmud Jesus, and
this Jacob was said to have been a Greek sailor. "Jehoshua ben
Pandira" then means "Jesus, [grand]son of the Panther." That
this Talmudic genealogy is found in Epiphanius instead of the long Jesse-David
lists appended to the several Gospels is significant of much.
Massey states that Pandira was
stoned to death in the city of Lud, or Lydda, and that it must have been around
the date of 70 B.C., after the reign of Jannaeus, 106-79 B.C. He says that
Queen Alexandra (Salomé) showed favor to him, witnessed his wonderful works and
powers of healing and tried to save him from his sacerdotal enemies
266
because he was related to her. The
Jews denied the identity of Jehoshua ben Pandira with the Gospel Jesus. Rabbi
Jechiels said: "This which has been related of J. ben Perachia and his
pupil (J. ben Pandira) contains no reference whatever to him whom the
Christians honor as God." Another Rabbi, Salman Zevi, produced ten reasons
for concluding that the Jehoshua of the Talmud was not he who was afterwards
called Jesus of Nazareth. The matter was unknown to Justus, the Jew of Celsus,
and to Josephus, "the supposed reference to him by the latter being an
undoubted forgery." Massey asseverates that "the blasphemous writings
of the Jews about Jesus," as Justin Martyr calls them, refer always to
Jehoshua ben Pandira, and not to the Gospel Jesus.
But Massey is firm and decisive in
his conclusion that the Talmud Jehoshua can not be converted into the canonical
Jesus as a historical character. The dates can never be reconciled to match
contemporary history. Massey repudiates the connection as beyond the remotest
possibility. "Make whatever you can of Jehoshua ben Pandira. He is not the
Gospel Jesus," he says. From Klausner we learn, however, that the Jehoshua
Jewish tradition was entangled at least in Origen’s mind with the parentage of
the Gospel Jesus. Origen is quoted (Contra Celsum, I, IX, p. 1) as
repeating a story that his opponent Celsus related with reference to the
current tradition dealing with the family and parentage of Jesus. And this
version of the Jehoshua ben Pandira legend is worthy of notice for several
reasons. Apart from the question whether it is the truth or a distortion, it is
to be considered significant, first because of the sheer fact that such a story
was current at the time--the late second century; and secondly because it
either carries fact or reflects a perversion of allegorism, and would be
notably significant in either case. The character called "the Jew" in
Celsus’ book (I, p. 28) goes on to say that the dogma of the "virgin
birth" was an invention of the Christians; the true facts in the case
being:
"that Jesus had come from a
village in Judea, and was the son of a poor Jewess who gained her living by the
work of her own hands; that his mother had been turned out of doors by her
husband, who was a carpenter by trade, on being convicted of adultery; that,
wandering about in disgrace, she gave birth to Jesus a bastard; that Jesus, on
account of his poverty (had to work for his living and) was hired out to go to
Egypt; that while there he acquired certain (magical) powers which Egyptians
pride themselves on
267
possessing; that he returned home
highly elated at possessing these powers, and on the strength of them gave
himself out to be a god."
True or false, it is significant
that such a story was in vogue in the second century. If one was to employ the
usual method of orthodox explanation of such data, which is to assume that the
story, however unlikely as truth, took its rise out of some factual
foundation, the conclusion would be that it was a garbled version of some more
acceptable basis of simple fact. By far the most likely elucidation would seem
to be that it was another of hundreds of exotericized myths, being the
literalization of a mythical account of the soul’s descent into matter in the
"Egypt" of the physical body, "the flesh-pots of Egypt." It
is worthy of citation just as a sample of how the literalizing tendency could
work a spiritual or cosmic myth over into a human story of gross realism! It is
more than startling, then, that Mead is found endorsing this explanation of the
story (Did Jesus Live 100 Years B.C.?, p. 126). He asks:
"Can this possibly be based on
some vulgar version of a well-known Gnostic myth of those days?
Jesus went down as a servant or slave into Egypt; that is to say, the Christ or
divine soul descends as a servant into the Egypt of the body. It is a common
element in the early mystic traditions that the Christ took on the form of a
servant in his descent through the spheres, and in many traditions Egypt is the
symbol of the body, which is separated by the ‘Red Sea’ and the ‘Desert’ from
the ‘Promised Land.’"
Mead advances this solution of the
gossiped illegitimacy of the Christ character because he had studied ancient
Oriental religionism closely enough to have found the constant operation of the
tendency of the "vulgar mind" to make hash out of sublime allegory.
His conclusion is therefore well justified.
But what must be the explanation of
another fact which he brings to light in connection with this story, a fact
which indeed seems to stand in very sinister shadow? He says that:
"Origen again refers to the
quotation from ‘the Jew’ of Celsus given above, and adds the important detail
from Celsus that the paramour of the mother of Jesus was a soldier called
Panthera, a name which he also repeats later on (i, 69) in a sentence, by the
by, which has in both places been erased from the oldest Vatican MS., and bodily
omitted from three codices in this country and from others."
268
A note by Mead says: "See Notes
on both passages by Lommatzsch in his Origenis Contra Celsum (Berlin,
1845).
According to Epiphanius’ original
statement (Haereses, p. 78), Origen himself says that James, the father
of Jesus’ father Joseph, was called by the name "Panther." Origen
apparently wished to explain in this way why Jesus, the son of Joseph, was
called "Ben Pandera," or "ben Pantere," by the Jews. According
to Origen Jesus was so called after the name of his grandfather.
Klausner alludes to the Baraita, a
tradition issuing from the Tanaim, quoted in the later Talmud, which says that
Jeshu of Nazareth practiced sorcery and beguiled and led astray Israel. And the
Talmud speaks of hanging instead of crucifixion, since this horrible form of
death was only known to Jewish scholars from Roman trials and not from the
Jewish legal system. Klausner cites the Pandira legend "in spite of Mr.
Friedländer’s various attempts to persuade us that every Talmudist worthy of
the name knows that the few Talmudic passages which speak of Jesus are a late
addition" and "the Talmudic sources of the first century and the
first quarter of the second afford us not the least evidence of the existence
of Jesus or Christianity." (Jesus of Nazareth, p. 38.)
The Toldoth Jeshu, says Mead
(Did Jesus Live 100 Years B.C.?, p. 303), notes that the Ben Pandera
legend had spread so far and wide that we find two Church Fathers compelled to
insert the name in the genealogies of Jesus and Mary. The stories say that the
trial of Jesus took place before Queen Helene (Helena) and that the sovereignty
of all Jewry was in her hands. Her name never appears in the Talmud Jesus
stories, nor for a matter of fact, do the names of Herod, or Pilate, or John
the Baptist, or any others that confirm the Christian canonical date. The only
date indications in the Talmud are, on the one hand, the mention of Joshua ben
Perachiah and Jannai in connection with Jesus, and on the other, the Akiba Mary
story. Mead says it is true that Helena was the subject of a prolific legend
activity in the Middle Ages. Mead (p. 261) does quote the Talmud as saying,
"Now the rule of all Israel was in the hands of a woman, who was called
Helene"; also he cites the Talmud passage: "And there shall come
forth a rod out of the stem of Isai (Jesse), and I am he." And the
Toldoth, like the Talmud, he states, also know of a stoning or a stoning and
hanging, or of a hanging alone, but never of a crucifixion.
269
Mead develops a point of some weight
when he says that our studies of the works of the philosophers of early times
can show us only that all of them regard the wonder-works of Jesus as being due
to his magical powers, or rather to the fact of his being a Magus, like many
others in antiquity. Such miracles, in the eyes of the philosophers, did not
prove the contention of the Christians that Jesus was God, for similar wonders,
equally well authenticated, and in a more recent case better authenticated,
according to Hierocles, had been done by others. This Hierocles had been
successively Governor of Palmyra, Bithynia and Alexandria, and was also a
philosopher. In 305 A.D. he wrote a criticism of the claims of the Christians
in two books called A Truthful Address to the Christians, or more
briefly Truth Lovers. Even Arnobius, in his Against the Nations, sets
forth the commonest argument against the Christians concerning Jesus, which was
that he was a Magus; he did all these things (sc. Miracles) by secret
arts; from the shrines of Egypt he stole the names of the angels of might and
hidden disciplines.
Even Jerome was conversant with the
legends that floated about as vulgar caricatures of the immaculate conception
of the Virgin, and in his letter to Heliodorus, which was written in 374 A.D.,
the Church Father seems to have in memory the passage of Tertullian (De
Spect.) which Mead had already quoted; for he writes: "He is called
the son of a workman and of a harlot; He it is . . . who fled into Egypt. He
the clothed with a scarlet robe; He the crowned with thorns; He a Magus,
demon-possessed and a Samaritan!" Further in his letter to Titus (iii, p.
9) Jerome writes: "I heard formerly concerning the Hebrews . . . at Rome .
. . that they bring into question the genealogies of Christ."
Gregontius, Bishop of Tephar in
Africa, in the second half of the fifth century says that Jesus had been put to
death because he was a sorcerer or magician, so the Jews asserted. John of
Damascus in the early eighth century, in the genealogy of Mary tells us that
Joachim was the father of Mary, Bar Panther the father of Joachim, and Levi the
father of Bar Panther, and therefore presumably Bar Panther himself.
Agobard in the eighth century
repeats the Pandera stories.
The Toldoth speak of making a virgin
pregnant without contact with a man. In the Talmud Balaam is one of the
synonyms of Jesus.
270
With reference again to the Helene
character that figured basically in many of the sacred legends connected with
the Christ, there is the detail that the harlot who accompanied Simon Magus was
a certain Helen (Greek Helene, Latin Helena). He said his Helen was the Sophia
or Wisdom. But the conjecture is that Helene is simply the pseudograph for
Selene, the Moon, whereas Simon the magician wielding spiritual powers was a
pseudonym of the Sun, the type of all spiritual miracle-working power. (Hebrew
for "sun" is Shemesh, whence Shimeon, Shimshon, Samson, Simon.) One
of the ancient Biblical typal designations of the women who were lunar goddesses
accompanying the sun, as mothers of life, the consorts or concubines of the
solar deities, was the "great harlot." This appellation is simply in
virtue of Mother Nature’s (water’s, matter’s) prolific fecundity in the
production of myriad life, and when held as pure typism has no sensual
imputations whatever--as incidentally have none of the phallic representations
when apprehended as pure typology.
If the above material seems to be
running far afield from base and out into irrelevancy, it is quite worth
citation if only to impress the reader, unfamiliar with the quantity of such
data encountered in the study of comparative religion, with the feeling that
the whole mass of it does indeed run away from solid history and evaporate in
sheer myth and allegory. If one will but peruse as little of the Talmud and
Toldoth material as is reprinted by Klausner and Mead in their two works from
which excerpts have been taken here, one will be convinced that it is not
history one is reading, but something less objective, less substantial. It
sounds hollow and appears shadowy. And suddenly one finds the supposedly human
characters turn to ethereal beings or personifications of the sun and its
harlot the moon, in one’s hand. To the modern who is unacquainted with ancient
method and ancient profundity, this indeed seems to run out into the little end
of nothing. To the ancient sage it was the cornucopia of divine wisdom.
Thorburn, in his attempt to refute
the mythical interpretation of the Gospels, quotes J. M. Robertson to the
effect that
"one of the most important
details of the confused legend in the Talmud concerning the pre-Christian Jesus
Ben Pandira, who is conjoined with Ben Stada, is that the mother is in one
place named Miriam Magdala,
271
Mary, the nurse or the
hair-dresser." (Jastrow, Dictionary of the Targum and the Midrash, part
2, p. 213, 1888.)
"Isis, too, plays the part of a
hair-dresser." (Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, p. 15) Magdala
yields in one ray of its meaning, nursing, rearing, hair-dressing.
Drews adds that Joseph was
originally a God. His statement has been already given.
It may be quite fitting to conclude
this chapter with a few fragments of positive evidence that true early
Christianity, so far from being the outcome of a definite historical event, was
instinct with the spirit of ancient pagan symbolic and mythical religion from
its very start. These and many more items of similar character intimate indeed
that Christianity was close in kinship to the great Sun-God cults of archaic
days. The Christs and Messiahs of pre-Christian systems were Sun-Gods, and the
great temples of religion were Temples of the Sun, and many hymns were Hymns to
the Sun. Rightly apprehended this is not the evidence of heathen
"superstition," but the very heart’s core of sublimest significance
and appropriateness. It may shock orthodox modernism to hear the blunt
statement that Christianity will not reach its highest purity and nobility, and
hence its highest serviceability until, with realistic grasp of its meaning, it
restores the sun-symbol to the central place in its doctrinism. For the divine
in man is of the identical essence of the light of the sun.
In Die Christusmythe Drews
speaks of the identification of Jesus with an ancient Hebrew cult deity,
Joshua, and an old Greek divine healer-hero, Jason, equating Jason with Joshua
and Joshua with Jesus, "as all representing the sun." Lundy speaks of
the Sun-God of the Persians and Greeks as the true type of Christ, who was
himself the sun of righteousness risen with healing in his wings,--the sun with
wings being an ancient Egyptian and Chaldean emblem! Lundy says that the
Oriental pagan symbols did not indicate a low level of conception, but bespeak
the loftiest ideologies, being types of a supreme power and intelligence above
matter. Apollo, the Sun-God, he says, must mean far more than merely material
light. In the highest philosophical and mystical sense, the pagan types and
anticipations of Christ, as Agni, Krishna, Mithra, Horus, Apollo and
Orpheus--all Sun-Gods--must be accepted as betokening that the true Sun of
Divinity must have been
272
somehow present to give form and
character to the ancient shining conceptions of the divine light in man.
"Our Lord the Sun" was
used in prayer by Christians up to the fifth and even the sixth century of our
era, and embodied in the Liturgy until altered into "Our Lord the
God." And the early Christians painted on the walls of the subterranean
necropolis the Christ figure as a shepherd under the various emblemisms of the
Greek Sun-God Apollo. The very halo that surrounds the head of the Christ and
his mother is the suggestion of the solar disk and its radiant light. And of
great evidential value is the item adduced by Massey, that as late as the fifth
century Leo the Great was compelled to rebuke the "pestiferous
persuasion" of those Christians who were found to be celebrating Christmas
day, not for the birth of Jesus Christ, but for the resurrection of the spring
sun! The power of symbol and of social tradition has proved stronger than indoctrinated
dogmatism, as the Nordic Christmas pine tree proves to this day.
Of great suggestive value to
Christians would be the item of Philo’s having advanced, thirty years before
Paul’s writing and the Christian presentation of the deific transfiguration,
the doctrine of a transfiguration of Moses through his intercourse with God.
Describing his ascension to heaven at the summons of the Father, Philo declares
that by vision of God Moses’ soul and body had been blended into a single new
substance, an immortal mind-essence having the appearance of the sun. This
is from pagan sources, yet Christian analysts will presume to deny all
connection between those wells of early wisdom and the Gospel events on the
Mount of Transfiguration, where Jesus’ garments became white as the light and
his face did shine as the sun; or that other New Testament promise that in the
Christian’s apotheosis, the righteous shall shine like the sun in the kingdom
of their Father.
It would be most interesting to
speculate upon the possible psychological reactions of the Christian population
if on a given Sunday it was read out from all pulpits in every denomination
that in the year 345 A.D., the Pope of Christendom, Julian II, issued a decree
fixing December 25 as the day on which all Christians should celebrate the
birth of the Christ, instead of March 25, as had been the custom among the
Christian people up to that time, in order that their celebration might
coincide with that of the followers of Mithra and of Bacchus! And full candor
suggests the inquiry why ecclesiastical subterfuge has kept the
273
laity in Christendom in perpetual
ignorance of a fact so significant and notable as that Christians for three and
a half centuries regarded the annual springtime re-birth of the Sun as the most
fitting type of the birth of divinity in the world and celebrated the birth of
the Son of God at the vernal equinox instead of the winter solstice. And the
Pope’s exhortation to his followers that it would be fitting that the Christian
celebration matched the time of the Mithraic and Bacchic solstitial festival
should not be lost on intelligence. And millions still think that they
celebrate the birth of a babe on the calendar day of December 25!
For thousands of years Egypt was
dominated by a religion whose gods were typified by the sun symbol. One of the
pivotal centers of religious ritualism was Anu (Annu), said to be the On of the
Bible, and at any rate the Heliopolis of the Greeks, or "city of the
sun." The great pyramid was in reality, as part of its function, a temple
of the Sun. Thousands of theological Thorburns have asserted that the birth of
the Christian Jesus, the skyey proclamation of the angelic heralds to
shepherds, the Gabriel annunciation to the prospective virgin mother, and the
adoration of three Oriental Magi before the infant King, were solid events on
the plane of occurrence, that their incidence helped to launch the new religion
to save humanity from heathen darkness, and that they could have no connection
with preceding degenerate pagan idolatry of the physical sun. It is time that
this unpardonable obduracy of ignorance be summarily rebuked by the testimony
inscribed on the walls of Egypt’s mighty structures in stone. Says Massey (Ancient
Egypt, p. 757):
"The story of the annunciation,
the miraculous conception (or incarnation), the birth and the adoration of the
Messianic infant had already been engraved in stone and represented in four
consecutive scenes upon the innermost walls of the holy of holies (Meskhen) in
the temple of Luxor, which was built by Amen-hetep III, about 1700 B.C., or
some seventeen centuries before the events depicted are commonly supposed to
have taken place."
Here is witness which outshouts the
falsehoods of thousands of pious books, millions of droning sermons and the
insincere lucubrations of generations of theologians, with thunder tones of
truth that silence forever the claims of Christianity to the historicity of its
alleged Founder’s
274
Nativity. And how could these four
pivotal themes of the incarnation have been thus sculptured upon enduring walls
if there had been no Gospels extant at that remote period from which to draw
these scenes? If there were no formal Gospels extant so far back, certainly the
contents and gist of Gospel material were in some form existent. Evidence of
this sort deals sledge-hammer blows at the entire structure of Gospel
historicity. The edifice indeed topples under the force of this one telling
stroke. Christianity, by subterfuge, vandalism and distortion had buttressed
itself against attack on every other side. But it could not fend off the attack
of truth from the ancient rear. The Rosetta Stone and the pictured walls of
Egypt’s tombs and temples have outflanked it and laid its pretensions in the
dust. Do what it will, it can not shake off the fact that the annunciation, the
incarnation, the nativity and the adoration were already on record, along with
the Virgin Mother and her Child, in the Zodiac, in the papyri and on
indestructible walls thousands of years before its beginning, and that as
religious facts they were old when the Galilean babe was allegedly born in
Bethlehem. The Christian organization and system of pious pretension can do
nothing in the face of facts such as these. Its arrant claims are silenced once
and finally by the deathless voice of ancient Egypt.
275
Chapter XII
THE
SHOUT OF PAUL’S SILENCE
The development of the theme has now
brought the discussion face to face with another particular in the volume of
testimony that has only been denied its validity as a final crushing blow to
the historical view of Jesus by resort to the most specious casuistry and the
most dogged denial of reason. It is an item that is so tell-tale in its silent
eloquence, so dangerous in its implications, that ecclesiastical policy simply
dare not permit its witness to be heard openly in the court. This menacing
particular is St. Paul’s silence about the personal Jesus. Himself almost
contemporary with Jesus, and at any rate on the scene of Christ’s life within a
few decades after its notable events, and still more, an enthusiastic convert
to the new faith following a short period of persecution of its devotees, and
fired with an unquenchable zeal for its propagation, he surely must have hounded
down all the authentic data regarding the life and acts of the great Divine
Founder of his adopted religion with indefatigable eagerness. The likelihood in
this direction must have been increased a hundred-fold by the little-mentioned
fact that he says in one of his Epistles that he spent two weeks (a fortnight)
with Peter (Cephas)! If these things happened on the plane of objective
actuality, the most elementary imagination can picture the realistic
connotations of it all. Two weeks with Peter! Is it thinkable that the zealous
young convert would pass the two weeks of this extraordinary opportunity
without plying the impetuous Peter with an endless string of questions as to
every detail of all that he had personally witnessed in connection with the
series of Gospel events? What did Jesus do here and say there? How did he look,
feel, act on this occasion and on that? What were the grand high points in the
Savior’s career, in the disciple’s opinion? What about this, that and the
other? The fancy thrills at the electric tension of interest that would have
been generated in a meeting between these two! If it also was historical . . .
But then,--the scholarly imagination thrills also with just as tense an
amazement over the incomprehensible fact that, with all
276
the data of his personal Master’s
life stored away and glowing in his mind, the dynamic Paul, when he came to sit
down and write fifteen Epistles to the young "churches" and
congregations of the faith, should never once venture to mention to his
brethren the man Jesus! Here is the incontestable, the unanswerable fact. This
is the datum that stares the proponents of historicity into silence. Before it
sophistry fails and argument goes dumb. There is no answer to this testimony of
silence on the side of the orthodox position. If Jesus lived as claimed, and
Paul lived and wrote as claimed, it is beyond all cavil unthinkable that the
apostle would have left a total blank in his Epistles on the subject of
the personal Jesus. Ingenuity can bring up--and has done so--a variety of
specious "reasons" to "explain" Paul’s silence about his
Master. But when they have exhausted their plausibility, they have not laid the
ghost of the insistent question nor reduced the pressure of its threat to the
orthodox position one whit. It stalks the claim of Jesus’ existence like a
mocking specter and no legerdemain can exorcise it. The fact stands in all its
glaring significance: St. Paul never once mentions the man Jesus! And Paul is
the earliest witness among Bible writers, the one nearest to Jesus, says Bacon.
The average man mildly versed in the
Bible is amazed when told that Paul does not mention Jesus, for everywhere the
assumption prevails that he did. If the matter is broached to a Bible student
he will make rebuttal with Paul’s own words: "This Jesus whom we have
seen," and other passages in the Epistles that sound like testimony
to the Galilean’s existence,--this Jesus in whom Paul glories and whose witness
he bore through pain and travail. How can anyone say that Paul does not mention
Jesus?
To be sure, Paul speaks of Jesus.
But even the theologians agree that this Jesus of Paul’s Epistles is not
a man of flesh. The Jesus Paul dilates upon is the spiritual entity in the core
of man’s inner being. He is the Christ principle, and not the man.
While this is generally enough
conceded by exegetists, the reader may need some assurance on the point. Our
first witness is the Yale Divinity School publicist, Benjamin W. Bacon, who in
his Jesus and Paul (p. 57) is positive in his position: Paul is the
first Bible writer in the first century and he definitely knows no Christ
except one not after the flesh. If he had posited a personal Christ,
Christianity would not have survived his day.
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Evidently Bacon does not adhere to
the general Christian belief that Jesus became a historical person in
Christianity because early Christianity had knowledge of his existence. It is
important to notice that he thinks Paul’s preachment of a personal Jesus would
even have killed Christianity. Here is Bacon declaring that the very element of
the new faith which others affirm is the innermost genius of its essence and
its very raison d’être is the thing that would have killed it at the
start. Others claim it was the tradition of the living Jesus that made it live
to become the world power of later years, and that Paul’s Hellenism and his
spiritual-Christos conception would have killed it. What a confusion we see
here in the counsels of Christian theology! One school asserts that the early
promulgation of the thesis of a historical man-Christ would have destroyed
Christianity in its very birthing, and that Paul’s Hellenization of its
doctrines saved it. Opposed to this is the general claim that Christianity
sprang to life because of its preachment of the personal Christ in the flesh
and the asseveration of countless divines that it lived by escaping the
esotericism of Hellenic philosophical systems. Compounding these two aspects of
Christian thought, we have the net conclusion that the Hellenism that would
have destroyed Christianity actually saved it; and the historical thesis that
gave it its very being would have killed it. Such illogical entanglements are
inevitable so long as the effort is not sincerely to get at the truth, but to
make a case for a traditional position on little or no solid foundation of true
data.
Bacon adds that it was not the
teachings and miracles which we find related in the Gospels that are the
bastions and supports of Paul’s doctrine, since, he declares, Paul neither
possesses these, nor even seems to care for their story. Again the cat escapes
the bag, for here is admission of high authority that Paul knew nothing or
cared nothing for the Gospel story of Jesus’ living career that had allegedly founded
the faith he had enthusiastically embraced! It is commonly assumed in Christian
circles that of course Paul knew all that the Gospels relate and that this body
of history was the basis of his espousal of the faith. But it is clear that the
Epistles are in no way related to, or an outgrowth or denouement of,
Gospel "history." They would probably be in literature if no personal
Jesus had ever lived. They trace to quite another source, which Bacon is frank
to tell us of: since Paul is addressing men to whom the conception of the
Mystery religions is the commonplace of
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religious expression, it should
occasion no surprise if he uses their phraseology. He employs the familiar
esoteric symbols to portray his own exalted experience and thinks his own
immortality achieved in terms of Mystery arcana. Paul’s language is the
vernacular of the Mystery cults. No one familiar with the philosophy of
personal redemption through absorption into the nature of dying and risen
Christhood can fail to recognize this. The fact can hardly be controverted.
Therefore it will be seen from what
a background and in what a philosophical milieu Paul presents his preachment of
the attainment of Christhood. It is as detached and remote from Gospel
"history" and all its implications as could well be imagined for a
body of fifteen Epistles that were to take their place in the same
canonical Bible as the complement and companions of those same Gospels! If the
general Christian presumption is that Paul’s contribution to the scriptures
reinforces the Gospel story of Jesus’ life, that presupposition has a strong
ostensible warrant in the sheer fact that the Epistles are put in on the
heels of the Gospels, and certainly not for the purpose of nullifying, but
assumedly to reinforce the witness and message of the Gospels. What must be the
surprise, then, of the general Christian body to be told that Paul’s
Christianity is Hellenic theosophy and philosophy, Orphic-Platonic Mystery
cultism, almost indeed Hindu Yoga mysticism, with no immediate relation or
reference to the Gospel life of Jesus! And this ever bitterly condemned pagan
cultism is what saved Christianity beyond Paul’s time for later burgeoning into
Occidental favor, we are gravely told!
The Yale theologian goes on to
identify large and grand aspects of Paul’s doctrinism as Hellenic philosophy
and Mystery teaching, and even goes so far as to say that Paul’s Christianity
includes elements that Jesus did not teach! Jesus taught no such doctrine as
that of transfiguration by conformation to the likeness of the glorified Lord.
According to Paul the adoption of the Christ mind effects a moral new creation
here upon the earth, causing the devotee to live no longer unto himself but
unto him who died and rose again for man’s redemption. It effects also a
reclothing with a spiritual body, so that mortality is swallowed up in life.
This, says Bacon, is not part of what Jesus taught in Galilee, but it is
emphatically Paul’s own vision of the risen Christ. Paul is speaking of what he
knows because he has seen it, and
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to express it he is forced to resort
to the rich phraseology of the Mystery cults!
This is well conceived by Bacon; but
that inevitable narrow contempt for all things pagan and pre-Christian that
Christianity has engendered in its adherents asserts itself a little further on
in Bacon’s work and inspires him to make one of those unfounded assertions
which in numberless instances, in sermons and books, indicate nothing more than
an inveterate determination on the part of Christian theologians not to admit
that any other religion had truth and wisdom equal to that found in their own
faith. Bacon admits that Paul borrowed the language that gave majestic
expression to the realities of his own (or any man’s) divinization from Greek
religion. But suddenly realizing that this is impliedly verging on the most
egregious praise and glorification of the Mystery religion and imperiling the
cherished superiority of Christianity over other systems, the expositor must
quickly hedge and retrench. He hastens to assert that Paul’s teaching from
Hellenistic religion and that the moral ideal presented to the votary of the
Mysteries is poor and empty when compared with that of the Sermon on the Mount.
Imagine, cries Bacon, the difference between being infused with the mind, or
ethical spirit of Jesus, and the mind of an Attis, a Dionysus, or an Asclepios!
"Partaking in the nature of" the divinity, "the life in the
spirit," "living in Christ," "living the life that is hid
with Christ in God," the terms that clothed in words the rapturous
experiences of Mystery devotees,--what, Bacon asks, would they all amount to
beyond mere magic and superstition, if the convert did not also know the spirit
of Jesus? The aspirant must realize a sense of his death to sin and of this
union with the Father that can come only through the absolute self-dedication
of Jesus. He must be redeemed by adopting the mind of Christ and not that of a
pagan god.
It is not often that dignified
discussion or scholastic critique calls for or excuses the flat denial of the
truth of an argument. But there is little left to do with such a line of
sophisticated apologetic save to say it is bluntly not true. More than one item
in the statement of Bacon is off the line of truth. To begin with it is disingenuous
and logically vapid to speak of the superiority of Paul’s teaching to the
figures of speech borrowed from Greek theology in which he expresses it. There
is no
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point in contrasting Paul’s thought
with the forms of speech that utter it. It is well enough known that mind is
greater than the capacity of language to express it. Paul chose the best
available forms at his command, and those were drawn from his intimate
association with the Mystery ritual.
Then follows the inevitable
allegation of the poverty of pagan teaching beside the shining splendor of the
Sermon on the Mount. This has become decidedly hackneyed in the past fifteen
years, or since western universities have instituted courses of real study in
Oriental religions and have seen something of the profundity and grandeur of
religions which it was until then the old Christian custom to despise. But it
is worse than hackneyed; it is not true. Christian prejudice has hitherto
prevented that frank, sincere and open-minded examination of pagan systems
which would have brought to light the true magnificence of other religions. The
proper answer to the smallness and error of the slight that Bacon casts on
Greek Mystery morality and spirituality is simply to say that a thousand
fair-minded scholars and students have more recently looked at both Christian
and ancient pagan systems and have been unable to detect any superiority at all
of Christian over pagan faiths. Indeed the consensus of much high opinion is
that the palm and laurel would have to be accorded to the pagan.
So when Bacon asks us to imagine the
abyss of difference between being filled with the mind of Christ and the mind
of Dionysus, the frank reply must be that we see no difference at all. It is
only because modern theological professors do not seem to know that in
Dionysus, Atys, Bacchus, Adonis, Zagreus, Sabazius and others the Greeks had
already expressed everything that a Christian can possibly think of as embodied
in his Jesus, that they blunder into instituting comparisons and discovering
huge gaps of difference that exist only in their own imaginations. If all the
acumen of sixteen centuries of Christian scholasticism has not sufficed to
instruct Occidental theologians in the simple fact that the pagan sun-god
figures were not historical persons, but were typal characters prefiguring
Christly nobility of perfected humanity, and were in fact the very prototypes,
pre-extant in literature, of the Jesus personage himself, it would seem as if
the credentials of Christian publicists to sit in judgment on pagan
representations could be stoutly challenged. So much abject failure and
incompetence must go far to disqualify further right to pronounce judgment in
this field.
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Augustine said that Socrates,
antedating Christianity by five hundred years and feeding his mind on the
contemplation of the (to Bacon) mean attributes, the poor and empty moral and
spiritual natures, of pagan gods, was as grand a Christian as any Churchly
saint or martyr. And he said that the pagan brand of Christianity was as lofty
and pure a type of it as the kind he knew. He himself received the Christian
doctrine of the Trinity from Plotinus, who had fed his mind on the attributes
of the pagan divinities and was steeped in Hellenistic rational religion and
esotericism. It is because Bacon thinks that Attis and Asclepios were mere
tribe-made conceptions of semi-crude humanism that he feels safe in rating them
as less authentic and less pure models of divine character than Jesus. It is
time that Christian critics who indulge in these gratuitous slurs upon
non-Christian systems be told that if they would learn to penetrate through the
outward veil of myth and allegory that shrouds these gods from vulgar scrutiny
they would find to their astonishment and humiliation that the moral and
spiritual grandeur of these typal figures takes no second place in comparison
with the nobility of Jesus. How can the mind of one of them be superior to that
of the others when they are all, in deepmost essentiality, one and the same?
All the solar deities were the embodiments of the same divine majesty. To
assert that one of them is superior to another is just to put on display one’s
ignorance of comparative religion.
But lastly the desperate nature of
Bacon’s argument is shown by the perilous resort to which he is driven to make
a point for his thesis. To prove Greek inferiority he has had to reduce a
number of the phrases which express Christian ideality at its loftiest to a low
rating because Paul draws them from the discredited poor and empty Hellenistic
mystical cult systems. In our turn we ask you to imagine, if you can, the
glaring inferiority and baseness of the phrase "partaking of the nature
of" the divinity, "the life in the spirit," "the life hid
with Christ in God," and such others used by Paul. If these are inferior
then Christianity at its highest is inferior, for these Greek pietistic
expressions are and have been for centuries current coin to describe the most
exalted reaches of the mind of man toward supernal heights in the Church of
Christ. But in the twisted logic of a Christian apologist they are classed as
base products of a despised Hellenistic pagan culture of the spirit. If
Christian mental clarity and moral purity were of so
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uniquely superior a quality above
all paganism, why for some twelve subsequent centuries did the schools of
Christian theologians have to go back to two pagan thinkers, Plato and
Aristotle, to discover the principles of truth and organic rational structure
upon which they could base any dialectical systematization of Christian
theology itself? The mind that was in Christ Jesus was apparently not
substantial enough or not capably enough known to save Christianity the need of
partaking of the mind that was in Plato and Aristotle! Many a claim of cloistered
theologians is belied by the record of history.
Bacon quotes Dr. Morgan, who claims
that the risen Christ of Paul represents a generalized picture of the
historical Jesus. It seems apparent that this word "generalized" is
here doing duty as an apology for failure to use the overt words
"non-personal" or "non-historical." Dr. Morgan is saying
that those features of Jesus which make him so real, and so human--he might
have gone on to "so winsome"--pass out of sight in Paul’s treatment
of the character. Paul’s Christ has not the inexhaustible richness or human
lovableness of the reputed historical personage. Naturally it would be obvious
that if Paul was philosophically, in the spirit of Greek rationalism,
delineating the power, functions, grandeur and majesty of the Christly
principle in the soul of man, changing man’s nature and winning his life to
intelligent godliness, he would not be likely to touch the chords of such
sympathies and emotions as are awakened by recital of personal human contacts,
trials, pains and joys. This is to compare a keen dialectical analysis of a
doctor of philosophy with the cooing smile of a babe in the cradle. You
obviously can not have the one and the other in the same individual at the same
time. Touching human emotion is out of place in a logical or intellectual
tournament. And logic has little to do with the baby’s fetching charm. One
wonders when it will dawn upon the orthodox mind that, to be sure, Paul’s Jesus
lacks human quality for the very substantial reason that in Paul’s
understanding he was not a human person at all. Only by elaborate metaphor
would Paul’s description of a principle of mystic exaltation be clothed in
terms of touching human appeal. This is the one substratum fact which explains
and resolves all the puzzles and conundrums of the argumentative problem, yet
it is the last one the apologists will look at.
And speaking of touching human
qualities, it is a grave question whether the unthinkable amount of human
sympathy, some of it pleas-
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antly amiable and consolatory, but
masses of it gruesome, maudlin and morbid, which the millions of votaries in
Christianity expend every year over the babe in the stable at Christmas, and
over the horrible scenes when the man of sorrows finally agonizes in physical
torture on the Golgotha cross on Good Friday, is psychologically noble and
edifying in any way, or whether it is not a futile, moronish and altogether
misplaced and degrading wastage of precious psychic force. If Jesus was not
personally in history, it is all sheer fatuity and nonsense, a colossal
expenditure of costly human emotion over events that never happened. The amount
of sentimental gush over the sweetly human side of Jesus, the picture of him
saying "Suffer little children to come unto me" while holding one in
his arms and two on his knees,--the total amount of hypothetical coddling of
Jesus the man as a likeable person of sanctified presence, is enough to deserve
the designation "mawkish." The efficacious leaven of the Christ
spirit in any man will make him likeably human, of course. And the Jesus
character, in this facet, is the type of this humaneness. But to affect
surprise because Paul does not introduce a picture of winsome personableness in
his dialectical exposition of the nature of Christlikeness is to miss utterly
what Paul is dilating upon.
Then Dr. Morgan says that it was to
this winsome, touching, appealing human figure of Jesus the man that the
churches turned after the death of the Apostle and that the preservation of the
Synoptic Gospels meant nothing less than the saving of Christianity. Long
search would not have brought to light for the purposes of this work a
statement from an argumentative opponent that so fully vindicates and
corroborates the general context of this study. But Dr. Morgan sees in a
different light and puts a different interpretation upon the great fact he
announces. He presents the turn from the mystical Christ to the personal Jesus
as a salutary manifestation, wholly beneficial to Christianity, and indeed its
savior. The view of this work places an altogether different, a quite
unfavorable, construction upon it. Paul had striven to limn and color in the
most graphic language available--which evidently he judged to be the
phraseology of the Mystery religions!--the Christ he knew, the power and grace
of the Christ of the inner chamber of human consciousness. To do so he pictured
the Christ of the Greek Mystery dramatization. While Pauline Christology,
Gnostic esotericism and Mystery initiation doctrine held the Christian movement
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for two and a half centuries up to a
high intellectual and philosophical level, it was Paul’s type of Christos that
inspired this lofty achievement. Intelligence restrained the uprush of the
ignorant masses’ literalized and carnalized conception of the Christ that was
so soon to swamp all cultured spiritual ideology in the movement. But with the
Apostle gone and the uncultured masses streaming into the Church, with the
Gnostics ousted as heretics and the voices of intelligence repressed into
silence, the sad and fatal turn of Christianity from the loftiness of spiritual
realizations to the basest degradation perhaps known in all religious history
marched on to consummation of its tragedy. How fatally right Dr. Morgan is,
neither he nor his Church has ever known. To its own catastrophic desolation
the Christian movement did surely enough turn from the higher and fuller
conception of the Christ as the ever-coming world Messiah of a divine spirit
transfiguring humanity, to the winsome-gruesome personal Jesus. This happened
when its personnel had fallen to so low an intellectual ebb--amply testified to
by leading writers of the time--that compromise had to be made with its
incapacity to rise to a more spiritual conception of an Avatar, and the
calamitous substitution of the euhemerized Christ that would have shocked
Clement, Origen, Philo, Ammonias and Paul had to be pronounced blessed, if the
thousands who could reach no higher were to be held in the fold. Only too true
is it that when Paul was gone the Church took that fatal plunge into a vitiated
and utterly false exotericism that perpetrated the unbelievable debacle
resulting from the personalizing of a purely dramatic figure. This step was
indeed the "salvation"--rather the initial establishment--of
historical Christianity; that Christianity that reduced purely spiritual
doctrines to as low a level of mental skullduggery as not even the naked sons
of the forest and the sea isles had ever been guilty of doing; that
Christianity which closed the academies of the most illumined wisdom the race
has known, burned libraries with fiendish fury, pronounced its own most
philosophical students heretics, perpetrated centuries of the most barbarous
cruelty in religious persecution ever known in the world, and founded a
civilization that at last has consummated its perversion of guiding wisdom by
plunging all the world into the climactic holocaust of slaughter in human
history. The turning of the Christian masses from the spiritual Christ to the
man Jesus indeed "saved" Christianity, which is no more than to say
that it perpetuated that
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kind of Christianity, certainly one
that was both derationalized and despiritualized. It utterly wrecked the true
Christianity of the ancient Sages, who have given to the world the priceless
legacy of lofty truth and tested wisdom. Christian proponents will continue to
read victory and blessedness into this saddest of all debacles in the cultural
life of the world, for the legend of Christian superiority must be maintained
at all costs.
The implications of this confusion
in the thinking of Bacon and Dr. Morgan should not escape observation. Bacon
has been quoted as saying it was Paul’s Greek Mystery systematism that saved
Christianity; Dr. Morgan avers that salvation came through the preservation of
the Synoptic Gospels with their personalized Master. As the Synoptics rest on a
thesis that is in the main diametrically opposite to that of the Johannine and
Pauline writings, we have here two eminent Christian exegetists arguing that
Christianity was saved by two forces as nearly opposed to each other as could
well be. These two views are seen to clash today; how bitterly they clashed in
the earliest days of Christian history, and with what lamentable consequences
the one prevailed over the other must be later included in our study.
Notice has already been taken of
Bacon’s declaration that we have in Mark not a biography, not a history,
but a selection of anecdotes, and those not for the purposes of history, but
for spiritual edification. If Paul’s Jesus is not a man, and Mark not
Jesus’s biographer, pretty nearly one third to one half of New Testament
support of the historical Jesus is gone already! More of Bacon’s fine material
must be scrutinized in this chapter, as it expresses with great aptness just
those points in the case that badly need review. For the moment other data
bearing on Paul’s silence must be presented.
There is Klausner, who remarks the
significance of Paul’s giving testimony to the existence of Jesus (he evidently
assumes that Paul is referring to Jesus as a person) and scans Jesus’ influence
on Paul, but admits that Paul shows no interest in the events of the Savior’s
career. He quotes a writer (name not given) who says:
"To Paul’s mind the center of
interest was not the teacher, the worker of miracles, the companion of
publicans and sinners, the opponent of the Pharisees; it was the crucified Son
of God raised from the dead, and none other."
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A phrase picked from many similar
ones in Massey’s work reads: "the Jesus of Paul, who was not the
carnalized Christ."
Drews briefly in one place refers to
Paul, "who," he says, "knew no historical Jesus."
"Instead of preaching the Jesus
of the historicalized Gospels, Paul preaches the doctrine of the mystic Christ,"
writes Mead.
Grethenbach (Secular View of the
Gospels, p. 243) remarks on the tell-tale fact that in its very earliest
stage of propagation the legend of the miracles performed by Jesus is absent
from the writings which came from or are accredited to those who were closest
to him, and are found only in later accounts by Gospel authors whose names are
wholly suppositious.
"As for Paul it might appear
from his own ardent avowal that had he ever heard of these prodigies done for
Jesus and by him, he (Paul) would not have hesitated to use them for the great
glory of God (Romans 3:7-8); and his silence about them comes with
the force of absolute denial."
In Paul’s own account of his
conversion he writes in this remarkable fashion:
"Immediately I conferred not
with flesh and blood; neither went I up to Jerusalem to them who were apostles
before me; but I went away into Arabia."
"Flesh and blood" is a
strange expression by which Paul indicates that he did not confer with the
Christian folks at Jerusalem or elsewhere. It indeed sounds very much like a
garbled mistranslation of a Mystery or ritual phrase referring to the soul’s no
longer having consort with the flesh of incarnation after its conversion from
carnal appetencies. And if Jerusalem is taken in its Mystery signification of
the city of heavenly peace, the whole passage can not illegitimately be
regarded as an epitome of the soul’s transformation, its choice of a middle
path, going neither to flesh and blood, nor retreating to heavenly Nirvana, but
going away into the intermediate region between Egypt, signifying the flesh,
and Jerusalem, the spirit, or into Arabia. It should be remembered, if
scholastics begin to snicker at such a suggested rendition, that Mount Sinai,
the middle point of meeting between man and God, is placed by Paul himself in
Arabia, as seen in the fourth chapter of Galatians. If this
reconstruction of the lost
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original esoteric meaning is
correct--and it is more likely than many will think, for ancient method handled
allegorism in just such fashion--it is good case and example of how the
historicizers of the spiritual myth turned allegory into history. By turning it
back again one can begin to see what the original formulation may have been.
Again Paul almost categorically
denies that he is preaching a Gospel of a living Jesus when he says:
"I made known to you, brethren,
as touching the Gospel which was preached by me, that it is not after man. For
neither did I receive it from man (or from a man), nor was I taught it, save
through revelation of the Christ revealed within."
Massey comments that in short,
Paul’s "Christ was not at all that Jesus of Nazareth whom he never
mentions, and whom the others preached, and who may have been, and in all
likelihood was, Jehoshua ben Pandira, the Nazarene."
As to the Christ in the Epistle
to the Hebrews, a document claimed to have been written by Paul, Massey
says:
"Now in this Epistle the Christ
is non-historical, he is the Kronian Christ, the Aeonian manifestor, of
mythical, that is, astronomical prophecy; he is after the order of Melchizedek,
who was ‘without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither
beginning of days nor end of life.’"
It would seem that we have in this
characterization of Melchizedek, after whose "order" the Christ was,
enough to convince any but mystically derationalized "believers" that
there could be nothing humanly personal and individual about Melchizedek, and
inferentially about the Christ, as of his kind and nature. There are those who
think and assert that Melchizedek was a man. He could no more be a man than
righteousness could be a man, or liberty or virtue be a lady. By name he is the
"King of Righteousness," as in Hebrew melchi is
"king" and zedek is "righteousness." "He"
is that "spirit of truth" which, when it has fully swept into all
hearts and minds, will lead us all into truth and establish the kingdom of
righteousness upon earth. The description of him as without father and mother
and genealogy, certainly does not refer to human father and mother and
ancestry. It means that "he" is "born" or generated from
that highest form and level of
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spiritual being which is yet
undifferentiated into spirit (father) and matter (mother), and is called in the
arcane nomenclature "parentless." In the highest worlds there is
neither marriage nor sex to induce it. Out of this pure essence comes the unit
of soul and consciousness that is to descend into matter, marry it and through
union with it generate the cosmos. This is why it can be further described as
being "before the worlds," "before the foundation of the
earth," "before Abraham," "in the bosom of the
Father," "in the womb of creation." "A" (Greek alpha
privative) means "not." Brahm is the Eternal and Absolute.
A-Brahm (Abraham) is therefore "not the Absolute," but of course the
first emanation from the Absolute, the first form of manifestation that is not
the Absolute and Infinite, but the manifestation of the relative--and to us the
real. Melchizedek, the power of the spirit of rightness and the great aeonial
Messiah, ever-coming from the beginning of man, that could by no possibility
"come" at any one moment, since it must come to all men as they
slowly grow in grace, or in any one personality, since it must dwell in all
alike, is that genius to which all Christified men will give body and
instrumentality as humanity is redeemed and glorified.
It is in the sense and reference
just elucidated that Paul therefore admonishes Titus and Timothy to give no
heed to "fables and endless genealogies," and to "shun foolish
questionings and genealogies." Of course Paul would warn them away from
"genealogies," since it was not likely that one in a thousand of the
laity would grasp the impersonal significance of the word, and since Paul knew
that the popularization of what would be misconceived as lineal ancestry
instead of spiritual descent would certainly lead to the disastrous outcome of
the personalizing of the Christos. Paul’s warning was against an aspect of
esotericism that he saw clearly enough would act as a trap. He was merely
guarding the esoteric purity of the loftier conception, and advising Titus and
Timothy to do the same. As Paul was (Bacon and others admitting it) fully
steeped in Mystery cultism, he was simply acting as any Mason would do today,
cautioning his confreres against using the secret vocabulary indiscreetly. It
is notable that genealogies are absent from John, the one Gospel that
preached the Christos as the ray of the cosmic Logos, and not the man. This is
quite consonant with what would be expected. Presenting Christ as non-human and
impersonal, it would omit the externally hazardous
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"genealogies." Marcus the
Gnostic eliminated the genealogies from Luke! The Docetae, a sect
preaching the purely spiritual Christ, "cut away the genealogies in the
Gospel after Matthew." (Epiphanius.) Tatian also struck them out. He had
first accepted them, but when he learned better, rejected the gospel of the
Christ made flesh. "Barnabas, who denied the human nature of Christ, assures
us that it was according to the error of the wicked that Christ was called the
Son of David"--in the literal exoteric sense, doubtless. Paul also tells
us that no "man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy
Spirit" (I Cor. 12:3). Marcion does not connect Jesus with
Nazareth. Paul’s Christ is nowhere called Jesus of Nazareth, nor is he born at
Bethlehem,--the town, but in Bethlehem, the "house of bread," the
sign of Pisces, in the astrological symbolism.
There is a ludicrous mixture--as was
to be expected and inevitable--of the historical Jesus and the spiritual Christ
in the first Epistle of Paul to Timothy, where Jesus Christ is spoken of
as he "who, before Pontius Pilate, witnessed the good confession";
and half a dozen lines later, Paul’s Jesus is the "Lord of Lords dwelling
in the light unapproachable, whom no man hath seen nor can see." Massey
comments that this is the Christ of the Gnosis who could not be made flesh to
stand in the presence of Pontius Pilate. Let the reader note, from the analysis
of the name "Pontius Pilate" made earlier in the work, how difficulty
such as this vanishes the moment the esoteric non-historical rendition is
adopted in place of the historical. Slight and inconsequential as this matter
may seem in an instance of the kind, it is the key to the redemption of the
Christian religion from its theological irrationality. It may be indeed the key
to the salvation of all religion, now threatened as never before with total
obscuration.
It is time to meet and answer a
typical orthodox retort to the implications of Paul’s silence about Jesus. We
find such a rebuttal in Shirley Jackson Case’s The Historicity of Jesus. This
is a representative work, written by an outstanding modern theologian, of the
University of Chicago Divinity School. Case speaks first of Paul’s having
acquaintance with relatives and friends of this Jesus. A little later he
discusses the claims of scholars and Paul’s own (apparent) statement that he
had "seen Jesus our Lord" (I Cor. 9:1). He cites Paul’s
incidental remark to the Corinthians that "we have known Jesus after the
flesh" as proof that he had actually seen the earthly Jesus. Then he
affirms
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that Paul had come into intimate
contact with individuals of note, and a host of others unknown to us by name,
who had contacted Jesus. There is of course no evidence anywhere for the claim
that Paul had met many persons who had seen or heard Jesus. It is just the
assumption--and no more--that if Jesus lived and did what the Gospels report,
Paul, living immediately after the events, must naturally have heard, known or
contacted the historical aftermath of occurrences that had made such a stir in
Palestine at the time. This gratuitous presupposition Case uses as the warrant
for his further presumptive statement that this knowledge and first-hand
acquaintance would have made it impossible for Paul to mistake a primitive
doctrine about an anthropomorphized god for belief in the actual existence of a
historical individual. We have to admit, is Case’s argument, that Paul stood too
close to the age which professed to know Jesus to be successfully hoodwinked on
the historical question. If Jesus never lived, it is not at all probable that
even the most enterprising propagandists could have succeeded in persuading
Paul of the reality of this mythical person in the generation to which Paul
himself belonged. Paul everywhere takes for granted the existence of Jesus,
whose memory was fresh in men’s minds; and also a good part of his attention is
given to resisting opponents who claim superiority over him because they have
been, or have received their commission from men who have been, personal
companions of Jesus--a fact, says Case, which Paul never denies, though he
disputes the legitimacy of the inference regarding superiority which they
deduce from the fact.
It is certainly permissible to state
that Case’s conclusions from the premises in this facet of the argument are not
dialectically supportable. We have ourselves mentioned Paul’s statement that he
spent a fortnight with Peter. Even without that it would be reasonable to think
that he may have known and associated with others who had been close to
Jesus--assuming that he lived. For argument’s sake, we may concede the major
premise of Case’s reasoning: that Paul could have known many who had met Jesus.
But the deductions Case draws from the premises seem wholly unwarrantable. Paul
need not mention Jesus because everybody already knew of his existence, is the
tacit claim. Such knowledge was a commonplace and there was no occasion to refer
to it. Because Jesus was a definite historical character, his life and personal
doings need never be spoken of. Paul could dilate at great
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length upon the fundamentals of the
religion Jesus assumedly founded and had no need to speak of the founder! Jesus
was the inspiration of the greatest religion on earth, a man whose life was so
epochal that history was redated from his birth, a man whose preachment of the
first divine wisdom vouchsafed to men was to free the human race from the
bondage of sin and evil, a man whose mission was so mighty that stars beckoned
and angels choired, and heavenly halleluiahs mingled with earthly songs to
celebrate the descent of deity to the planet,--and when Paul descants with holy
enthusiasm upon the marvels of this world-changing message, he found no
occasion to speak of the man who was the genius of it all! For Paul to write
fifteen Epistles, basic treatises on the religion that this man founded, and
find no reason to refer even once to anything he said or did, would be on the
order of one’s writing a thorough treatise on the American Revolution and never
once mentioning George Washington,--forsooth because everybody knows that
Washington had something to do with it! This is the sort of reasoning that Case
is treating us to. Of course everybody knows that Jesus, like Washington, was
there; so there was no need to mention him. The fact that Paul wrote profound
discourses on the religion established by Jesus and does not mention him,
proves that Jesus lived! This is a new way for a historian to put a man in
history--to remain silent about him. Herodotus or Gibbon or Macaulay does not
mention Proxon; therefore Proxon must have lived. The best way to promulgate
the religion Jesus founded is not to mention the founder! But, says Bacon,
Paul’s writings do not even dissertate on the teachings of Jesus primarily.
Therefore, on Case’s line of reasoning, it must have been in Paul’s mind that
the best way to advance the new Jesus-inspired faith was to write letters on it
that leave out both the founder and his teachings! Scholars admit that it was
Mystery cult teaching that Paul expatiates upon, and not specifically
"Christian" cultism at all, in the ecclesiastical sense. All this,
Case would argue, proves the existence of Jesus. All this is logical ribaldry,
but it becomes tragic when it is realized that the whole of post-third-century
Christianity rests upon the silly foundation of that sort of "logic."
From the standpoint of human
sentiment alone, it surely would seem as if such high motivations as gratitude,
reverence, honor, and the like, by which it can be assumed with perfect logic
that Paul would have been actuated toward the man who was the author and
finisher
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of his ecstatic faith, would have
prompted him to express at least an occasional outburst of praise and
thanksgiving toward the man himself, instead of confining all his tribute of
high feeling toward the purely abstract principle of Christhood. But again the
apologists may allege that Paul’s reverence for the man was so supreme that it
awed him into silence. It is in congruity with every high human presumption in
the case to assume that had Paul known of a surety about Jesus’ existence, no
amount of pressure of any kind could have deterred this impetuous apostle from
pouring out his lavish meed of adoration upon the life that had transfigured
his own being. He would have been ashamed not to do so. If Paul knew Jesus had
been there, how do we account for this unchristian churlishness and repression
of such a man’s natural gratitude?
Every implication of the situation
would argue that if Jesus lived and Paul had known Peter and others closely
allied to Jesus, nothing could have prevented him from extolling the wise words
and miraculous achievements of his idol to the highest point his pen could
exalt them. That is the only reasonable presumption permissible in the case; to
keep silent would be the extraordinary, the bizarre and illogical thing. There
is no dodging the fatally damaging involvements of Paul’s silence about Jesus.
Even if Case’s contention were true, that Paul keeps silent because he and the
people he was writing to took Jesus’ life for granted, that still would not
explain Paul’s characterization of the Jesus he does speak about as a spiritual
principle, and not a personality. If Paul knew of Jesus’ existence so well that
he need not prove it by any reference to it at all, there would be all the more
and not less reason for his describing him as a man. Why would Paul descant
only upon the impersonal Christos, if he knew all the while that the personal
Christ had just been present in his own land! Why write of him only as a
psychological entity, when Paul knew him as a man?
Thus it is glaringly preposterous
for Case (and others) to construe Paul’s silence as evidence for the
historicity, or to excuse Paul’s failure to mention the Galilean on unwarranted
deductions from premises that are themselves only daring conjectures. But there
is one other premise that Case posits that proves to be quite untrue. He
asserts that Paul stood close to the age that professed to know Jesus. It is
true that Paul stood close to the age in question, but it is not true that this
age "professed to know Jesus." Data already adduced have established
the
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strange fact that the age of Paul was
as silent as was Paul himself about Jesus the man. It was a later age that
proclaimed the historical Jesus, later by at least three or four generations.
Over a century had to elapse before the legend of the human babe and
miracle-worker found voice. Paul and his and Jesus’ own age were alike silent.
Philo and Josephus were close at hand in the same age, and writing volubly of
just such things as were vitally concerned with what Jesus represented, and
they are silent, save for the tiny squeak of some daring interpolator in
Josephus’ book.
As to the argument that no one could
have persuaded Paul about the reality of this mythical person Jesus, it again
is the weirdest pass at logic, for no intelligent person ever needs to be
"persuaded" about the reality of a mythical figure. No person
conversant with the Mystery teachings, as was Paul, could fail to know the
difference between a mythical hero and a living mortal. Millions of the
intelligentsia of many ages of ancient times were acquainted with the mythical personages
without once falling into the stupid error of taking them for living persons,
as the Christians did, or charged the pagans with doing. The Christians of
Paul’s type most certainly did not. Case’s point is just another instance of
the groundless fatuity that features the debate on that side, based on abject
failure to apprehend the genius of ancient allegorism.
It is worth the time to examine
several bits of Paul’s writing that point with great decisiveness to the
apostle’s spiritual Christ conception. In I Cor. 7:29 he speaks of
"waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ." What is the
point of their waiting any longer for a revelation that every Christian
preacher and writer shouts to the world had come with the historical appearance
of Jesus of Nazareth? What an anomalous situation--the long-expected Avatar of
the ages had at last come in the person of this Jesus! He was here, he had
wrought his marvels, proclaimed his message, the odor of his sacred presence
was still in the air, when Paul wrote! Yet Paul says they are still waiting for
the revelation, the Epiphany, the showing forth in Israel! He had come, and
apparently his own had not recognized him. What a miscarriage, what blindness,
for Paul and his age to miss him, and to keep pathetically looking ahead in
expectation when he had been just now behind them, at their very elbow!
Again in I Cor. 7:4-5 ff.
Paul writes of "judging nothing before the
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time, until the Lord come." A
row of exclamation points would hardly mark the significance of this verse.
Case himself cites Paul’s writing to the Philippians his confidence that God,
who had begun a good work in them "will perfect it until the day of Jesus
Christ." Further he counts on them to remain "void of offence unto
the day of Christ," and encourages them to stand fast. How could the
apostle write such things pointing to the future for fulfillment if he knew
that the Messiah had just been among them?
Massey points out that according to James
(5:7, 8) the coming or presence of the Lord was still being awaited. He
pleads: "Be ye patient" until "the coming of the Lord," for
"the coming of the Lord is at hand"--when it had just taken place!
From Peter (3:10) Massey quotes:
"The day of the Lord will come
like a thief, when the heavens will vanish with crackling roar, the stars will
be set ablaze and melt, the earth and its works will disappear."
The Lord had come, and in spite of
an earthquake and a darkened sun and other convulsions of nature, the good old
earth had kept on in its course. It is important to note in passing that
secular history records none of these supremely extraordinary natural
phenomena, which we must assume would have been the case had they occurred. It
is quite worth noting what Gibbon has to say on this score in his great history
of the Roman Empire:
"But how shall we excuse the
supine inattention of the Pagan philosophical world to these evidences which
were presented by the hand of Omnipotence, not to their reason, but to their
senses? During the age of Christ and his apostles and of their disciples, the
doctrine which they preached was confirmed by innumerable prodigies. The lame
walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, demons were
expelled, and the laws of Nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of
the Church. But the sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful
spectacle, and pursuing their ordinary occupations of life and study, appeared
unconscious of any alterations in the moral or physical government of the
world. Under the reign of Tiberius the whole earth, or at least a celebrated
province of the Empire, was involved in a preternatural darkness of three
hours. Even this miraculous event, which ought to have excited the wonder, the
curiosity and the devotion of mankind, passed without notice in an age of
science and history. It happened during the
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lifetime of Seneca and the elder
Pliny, who must have experienced the immediate effects or received the earliest
intelligence of the prodigy. Each of these philosophers in a laborious work has
recorded all the great phenomena of Nature, earthquakes, meteors, comets and
eclipses which his indefatigable curiosity could collect. Both the one and the
other have omitted to mention the greatest phenomenon to which the mortal eye
has been witness since the creation of the globe." Etc. (D. and F., p.
443.)
Again Paul’s characterization of
Jesus as "the first-born," "the first-born of all
creation," "the first-born from the dead," "the first-born
among many brethren," would not fit a personal Galilean. "Now hath
Christ risen from the dead and become the first fruits of them that
slept." But, Massey asks, in what sense? It is impossible, he avers, to apply
such descriptions to any historical person. No historical Jesus could be the
first-born from the dead. In the gross exoteric sense this would mean that no
man in all preceding centuries had risen out of his physical grave in a body of
any kind, physical or spiritual. In a somewhat more exalted esoteric sense it
would mean that Jesus was the first in all the history of humanity ever to rise
as a spiritually glorified being from his body of clay in his final
transfiguration into immortality. It would mean that no one before Jesus had
ever accomplished the resurrection of his spiritual body out of the earthly
body of this death, which is the true meaning of the resurrection. But in any
of the possible eventualities that fulfilled resurrection doctrine, taken
historically, it is unthinkable and presupposes vast injustice on the part of
God to the millions antedating 33 A.D., that no mortal had ever achieved
spiritual victory up to that time. One has to go over to the deeper esoteric
sense to catch the rational significance of the statement that Jesus was the
first fruits of them that slept. For obviously the Christ-type of consciousness
is the first power of divine rank that is awakened to full and immortal
function out of the deep sleep of age-long incubation in matter into which the living
energies of spirit are plunged at the beginning of each cycle. The Christ-mind
is the first perfected fruitage on the tree of life and nature. This is
precisely what is embodied in many cryptic constructions in sacred lore,
representing the tree in Adam’s garden as bearing the Christ as its topmost and
richest fruit. The golden bough on the tree or the bright star on the highest
tip of the Christmas pine carries the meaning still. After long ages of
gestation in her womb, Mother Nature in her old age
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(Sarah, Hannah, Elizabeth!) brings
forth the Christ consciousness, as the first divine fruitage of the natural
order. With this knowledge and conception sane comprehension can at last
replace prevalent logical dementia.
Paul also speaks of "building up
the body of Christ, until we all attain unto the unity of Faith and to the
knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man; unto the measure of the
stature of the fulness of Christ." How could each of us build up the body
of Christ, if he be a physical man? If we take such a saying of Paul as that he
"knew a man in Christ," we at once run into ludicrous impertinence if
we think of Christ as a man. What it would be to be "in" a Christ who
is physical, would be difficult to say. Does the orthodox protagonist pronounce
this a silly and preposterous argument? But he could call it silly only on the
presupposition that of course the phrase means to be "in" Christ in
the purely spiritual sense of being in the vibration of the same mind and soul
that Christ manifested. But that is to admit nearly all that this work stands
for: that the Christ is a spiritual nature in us, and not a man in history.
Orthodox strategy falls back on the definition of Christ as spiritual principle
whenever the argument would take a disadvantageous turn on the personal
rendering, but jumps back to the latter when it seems safe to do so. But the
Christ is either one or the other. The one excludes the other and the
vacillation back and forth between the two prevents the fixing of one clear and
determinate meaning to the term. It is beyond question that the word
"Christ" means the flower of divine consciousness in man and nothing
else whatever. All ancient sacred books presented a type of this beauteous
development in man’s organism at the summit of his growth, and--ignorance later
mistook the figure for a man. This is the whole--tragic--story.
That the life, crucifixion, death
and resurrection of the Son of God were distinctly not behind Paul, but still
to come as a consummation for all humanity is indubitably indicated by Paul
himself in II Timothy (2:16-18) where he says:
"But shun profane and vain
babblings; for they will increase unto more ungodliness. And their word will
eat as doth a canker; of whom is Hymenaeus and Philetus; who concerning the
truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already; and overthrow
the faith of some.""
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What testimony from the scriptures
themselves could be more cogent than this? Paul is warning his Christian
brethren to quit the silly talk about the resurrection being accomplished once
and for all for humanity, through the exoterically misapprehended physical
resurrection of the man-Christ. It was as if Paul cautioned them to be on their
guard against countenancing and enhancing the disastrous vogue of the exoteric
exploitation and garbling of deeply esoteric material. There is every reason to
think that this is the true picture of the import behind Paul’s words here, a
picture which we owe chiefly to Massey’s clear vision.
Then we come to the matter of Paul’s
vision on the road to Damascus, which is the chief reliance of the
flesh-worshipping party in the debate. This incident is supposed to clinch the
verdict for the historicity. What doubt can there be when Paul saw Jesus in his
vision, and the appearance of the Master to him was so overwhelmingly genuine
that it led to Paul’s conversion? How can Jesus’ existence be doubted when he
actually appeared to Paul (and others)?
But the matter is not so simple. It
involves much that needs understanding. Was the apparition to Paul the wraith
of the dead Jesus or the spirit-body of Jesus still living? Massey cites data
of much cogency to intimate that the vision came to Paul while Jesus was still
living, if facts of Gospel "history" be considered. He shows by data
from the Acts that Paul’s conversion, supposed to have occurred after
the year 30 A.D. at the earliest, must have occurred as early as 27 A.D. He
reasons as follows: Paul stated that after his conversion he did not go up to
Jerusalem for three years. Then after fourteen years more he went again up to
Jerusalem with Barnabas. This second visit can be dated by means of the famine,
which is historic, and known to have occurred in the year 44, at which time
relief was conveyed to the brethren in Judea by Barnabas and Paul. If we take
seventeen years from the 44, the different statements go to show that Paul had
been converted as early as 27 A.D. The conversion then could not have been by a
spiritual manifestation of the supposed personal Jesus, who was not then dead,
and further had not at that time been regarded as, or converted into, a living
person of the later canonical Gospels.
But that point can be let go, as a
bit indecisive. Modern Spiritualists and Theosophists can supply plentiful data
as well as a full-fledged rationale of spiritual science to make it possible
for Jesus, living in 27,
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or dead in 33, to "appear"
to Paul in vision. Whether spirit or wraith, little is the difference. But a
far more vital point is one which, of course, the pro-flesh debaters have never
commented upon. Quite--and refreshingly--unlike medieval and modern visionaries
who see the radiant figure of "Jesus" in their inner world, Paul
distinctly does not make the unconscionable mistake of the latter by
asserting the identity of the figure or personage of his vision with an
allegedly former living character whom he had never seen. We have covered this
point in the first chapters. He simply designates the figure appearing to him
as the Lord Jesus Christ, which can be seen to stand here for a generic name of
such a type of radiant manifestation, apart from any necessary connection with
any former or present living personality. Ancient Egyptian necrological science
predicated that the gods and the elect of perfected humanity could appear to
men in whatsoever garments of solid or etheric matter they chose. They could
appear in many different forms, clothed in flesh or clothed in light. Paul,
with his Mystery cult associations, must have been familiar with these
possibilities in a commonplace way. It was enough for him to know that he had
experienced a spiritual vision, that an apparition of a celestial-appearing
figure, an angel of light, had flashed across his inner eye. He did not presume
to tie the vision back to any earthly personage, particularly to an individual
he had never seen. He only says that the radiant light of the Christos enfolded
and blinded him.
Strange as this may sound to
theological ears, there is much solid reason to suspect that the whole episode
of Paul’s great vision was the rescript almost verbatim of a portion of Mystery
dramatism. For Paul says that the stunning, blinding radiance of Christly glory
threw him with his face to the ground, after which a voice out of the light
spoke to him and said, "Stand on your feet, Paul." This hardly seems
like personal history; for in the Mystery philosophy the descent of the divine
soul into incarnation in the early human beginning stage sent it into the
bodies of animals who yet walked on all fours, with face to the ground. And as
the Christ consciousness gradually asserted its rulership, the humanized animal
forms slowly rose to their feet, upright! For the god-soul to incarnate at the
beginning of the cycle was for it to fall to earth with its face to the ground,
and then the divine voice within spoke and bade it stand up on its feet as the
upright human-divine! It is not hard to presume that an age saturated with the
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effort to dramatize mythical
typology would have introduced into the Mystery ceremonial just such a typical
representation of the soul’s descent into lowly animal body and its
resurrection to the upright human status.
Furthermore the transformation was
accompanied by a change of name--Saul to Paul, as Abram to Abraham, Jacob to
Israel. "A new name shall be given unto" the Christified human,
carved on a white stone, says Revelation. The whole recital may not
unwarrantably be construed as a bit of the initiatory ritualism of the Mystery
societies, which was itself just a dramatic typing of the transformation of
man, starting with his face to earth in brute body, and rising from his animal
nature to spiritual stature, when he received his new baptism. In all
probability it stood at first as pure typism in Paul’s writings, and may have
been made over into an alleged personal experience of his by the hands and
fancies of those redactors who transmogrified sublime mythicism into startling
history.
In Myth, Magic and Morals (pp.
6-9 ff.) F. W. Conybeare says that Paul’s Christ is an a priori construction
of his own, owing little or nothing to the historical man of Nazareth, and to
those who knew that man and cherished his memory. The most that Paul owed to
him was the name Jesus. Paul’s Jesus is an ideal superhuman Savior, destined
from the beginning of the world to play an ecumenic role. Paul, he says, shows
no acquaintance with the Sermon on the Mount or with the parables.
Paul could not remember in another
instance of mystic vision of his (I Cor. 12:1 ff.) whether certain
experiences occurred to him "in the body or out of it, I know not; God
knoweth,"--twice repeated. This can serve as the legitimate foundation for
the suggestion that Paul’s ecstatic vision may have been one of those
super-conscious experiences which many people have had, so detached from objective
reality that they can by no possibility be related to actual events in the
world at all.
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Chapter XIII
ROBBING
PAUL TO PAY PETER
The study now touches upon a phase
of Paul’s relation to Christianity that involves a portion of early Christian
history which is generally unknown to the laity or the people at large. It is
the Peter-Paul controversy, so-called. It was a factional dispute in the early
Church between two sides representing respectively the spiritual and the
literal construction of Scripture. There appears to be evidence that there was
a Petrine party upholding the historical interpretation of the Messiahship and
the Gospel narrative, opposed to a Pauline faction that stood for the esoteric
mystical meaning of all Scripture.
Massey is speaking of the great gulf
that separated these two views and their factional advocates in early
Christianity when he makes this drastic declaration:
"The bodies of two million
martyrs of free thought, put to death as heretics in Europe alone, and all the
blood that has ever been shed in Christian wars, have failed to fill that gulf
which waits as ever wide-jawed for its prey."
There is first the matter found in
the Clementine Homilies, which is ostensibly inspired by the Petrine
faction. The author, assumed to be Clement of Rome, designates Paul as
"the Hostile Man." Peter is made to say to Paul, "Thou hast
opposed thyself as an Adversary against me, the firm rock, the foundation of
the Church." Paul’s conversion by means of abnormal visions is attributed
to the false Christ, the Gnostic and Spiritualist Christ opposed to a historic
Christ. Peter is hitting obviously at Paul in Homily 17, when he says,
"Can anyone be instituted to the office of a teacher through
visions?" Paul is treated as the arch-enemy of the Christ crucified--he is
declared the very Anti-Christ! He is predicted to be the author of some great
heresy expected to break out in the future. Peter is said to have declared that
Christ instructed the disciples not to publish the one true and genuine Gospel
for the present, because false teachers must arise, who would publicly
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proclaim the false Gospel of the
Anti-Christ, that was the Christ of the Gnostics. "As the true Prophet has
told us, the false Gospel must come from a certain misleader." The true
Gospel was confessedly "held in reserve, to be secretly transmitted for
rectification of future heresies." The Petrine party knew well enough what
had to come out if Paul’s preaching, proclaimed in his original Epistles, got
vent in wide broadcast. Hence those who were the followers of Peter and James
anathematized him as the great apostate and rejected his Epistles. Justin
Martyr never once mentions this founder of Christianity, never once refers to
the writings of Paul. Strangest thing of all is that the Book of Acts, which
is mainly the history of Paul, should contain no account of his martyrdom or
death at Rome. Paul’s writings seem to have been withheld for a full century
after his death.
According to Massey, "The Praedicatio
Petri declared that Peter and Paul remained unreconciled until death."
Klausner (85) refers to the dispute between Peter and Paul over the observance
of the ceremonial laws, circumcision and forbidden foods.
Clement of Alexandria states that
Paul, before going to Rome, said that he would bring to the brethren the
Gnosis, or tradition of the hidden mysteries, as the fulfillment of the
blessings of Christ, who, Clement says, reveals the secret knowledge and trains
the Gnostic by Mysteries, i.e., revelations made in the state of trance. Thus
Paul was going as a Gnostic and therefore as the natural opponent of historic
Christianity, the promulgation of which was the aim of the Petrine party.
Massey declares it was the work of Peter to make the Mysteries exoteric in a human
history. It was the work of Paul to prevent this by explaining the Gnosis. Paul
warns against the preaching of that "other Gospel" and that
"other Jesus."
The data on the subject are none too
full or explicit. Controversy could easily rage over it. The gist of the matter
is, however, apparent. Christianity started as Gnosticism, became vitiated by
the introduction of exoteric elements and proceeded along the track of that
course of literalization and historization which made it acceptable to all the
ignorant and repellent to all the intelligent. Endless controversy arose
between the leaders of the two trends and it appears that Paul was arrayed
against Peter. If it was not Paul, the subjective esotericist, against Peter,
the objective exotericist, it was at least Pauline spirituality against Petrine
literalism. As has so often been admitted by scholars, Paul
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preached the gospel of the immanent
Christ; Peter stood for the fact and the message of a personal Jesus. The
resolution of the controversy in favor of the Petrine party was fateful for the
whole future of Christianity and the Occident. It committed the Catholic Church
to an effort to organize the whole world under its aegis in an earthly body, in
which effort it has achieved so large a success, but also in which, by the very
fact of its adapting its message to a form of attraction for the less
intelligent masses, it has lost its own interior meaning, its profoundest
spiritual genius. No one can predict history unless he is blessed with some power
of vaticination, but it is reasonable to assume that had the Pauline wing of
the early movement prevailed, the service of Christianity to the Western
peoples over sixteen centuries would have brought more of benison than it has
done.
But the matter of this controversy
is not ready to be dismissed with the treatment given. The obligation to deal
fully with its historical implications rests heavily on anyone treating the
development of early Christianity. The early Petrine victory has fixed the
character and set the course of all following Christian influence, and as this
course and character have been defended, ecclesiastical polity has ever since
stood stoutly behind the historical interpretation of scripture. Scholars and
theologians in every camp have inveterately lauded the Church’s third-century
choice of Petrine as against Pauline theology and they have without limit
hailed that choice as Christianity’s escape and salvation from the evils of
Gnostic doctrinism and Pauline mystical spirituality. It is the purpose of this
study to challenge the dominance and the tenability of this posture and to
refute its basic contentions. It is the thesis that the Church, Christianity
and religion itself lost immeasurably by following after Peter instead of Paul.
Our contentions on this score will fly directly into the face of all orthodox
scholastic opinion and will doubtless invite bitter scorn and condemnation. But
truth is important and worth the cost one often has to pay for it.
Bacon has so well stated the conventional
and established view on the matter that it will serve the purpose handidly to
let him present it. In his Jesus and Paul (p. 138) he is speaking of
Mark’s Gospel and says that, try as he would, Mark finds it impossible to make
his recital the story of a real man under actual historical conditions, and at
the same time the story of the superhuman being who steps down into incarnation
from "heaven" and who is treated in the Christology of the Gnos-
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tics as a "principle" and
not as a man. The combination is attempted, however, says Bacon, and Paul’s
influence is seen pressing on the side of the subjective Christhood. John carried
the subjectivization of the Christ even further, but, says Bacon, it is
fortunate indeed for us that the move in the direction taken by Paul and John
could not be carried through to triumph. John came close to making the
"life" of Jesus one long ode of spiritual transfiguration, ignoring
the mundane Jesus on his personal side. John was more a history of
abstract Christhood than of the Christ himself. Then, asserts Bacon, we all
know how fatal would have been the result for real religious values if the
later Gospel--John--had completely superseded all its predecessors. Mark
superseded all earlier Gospels (this is a bit strange, since many scholars
have made Mark the earliest Gospel). Then John had carried the
apotheosis still beyond Mark. Had the transference of human to purely
spiritual character in the Christos been carried through to final victory, the
real and historical Jesus would have been completely eclipsed behind the
raptures of spiritual exaltation and mystic rapports. The solid ground of
plain, hard fact underneath the Christian structure would have disappeared. Our
science of religion would have been reduced, alleges Bacon, to the tiny
dimensions of a figure scarcely more substantial than the mythical heroes of
the Mysteries. We can be thankful that the whole Gospel was not written in the
mystic style, as displayed in the stories of the baptism and the
transfiguration, that there was so much rugged fact, defying all imaginative
effort to romanticize it into sheer ideality, so much narrative established in
the mouths of many witnesses, that those who aimed to idealize the man clear
over into pure spirit could not have their victory. Well is it that the Church
did not follow the lead of that ultra-Pauline element which for so long in the
movement sought to exalt the impersonal Christos and to ignore the Galilean
mechanic whom Paul had not known in the flesh. Sober moral common sense led the
body of the movement to fall back rather on the Petrine reminiscences of the
sayings and doings of Jesus the man.
One has to wonder whether the
eminent and learned writers of this and similar material--to be found in
endless profusion in Christian apologetic literature--have ever paused long
enough in their laudable zeal to vindicate the Christian record to reflect upon
the implications and commitments of their position thus stated. As a matter of
simple
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fact these grandiose assertions to
the effect that Christianity was fortunate to escape the Pauline influence come
close to being a blank confession that Christianity has never been a wholly
spiritual religion, and from the third century was not capable of absorbing and
assimilating the completely spiritual message and import of the true Gospel!
The realization has never seemed to dawn upon orthodox defenders of the faith
once delivered to the saints that to proclaim its good fortune in escaping
Paul’s thoroughgoing preachment of the indwelling spirit of God is practically
the equivalent of proclaiming Christianity to be a system that refuses to go
the whole way in the direction of inner spiritual illumination. The inference
of good fortune in escaping a certain element implies the presence of evil in
that element. If the Church is proclaimed fortunate in having escaped Paul’s
spiritual systematism, the plain deduction from the syllogism is that Paul’s
high spirituality was and is a dangerous and evil thing. Yet a million sermons
have taken Paul’s beautiful runes and rhapsodies of the spiritual life and gone
on to magnify and extol their sanctifying power in the Christian experience. If
this is the benign thing that Christianity escaped (and it is our assertion
that this beauteous influence is just the thing it did lose), how in the
name of all that is reasonable can a religion be declared fortunate in escaping
the highest blessedness of spiritual exaltation? If Paul’s ethereal afflatus,
his lofty flights on the wings of beatific realization of the presence of God
in the soul, are things of danger to be sedulously escaped, it is imperative,
then, that the Christian system turn to repudiate Augustine, Thomas à Kempis,
Bonaventura, St. Francis and its thousands of idolized saints and enchanted
mystics, whom it has persisted in holding up as heroes of the sacred life. In
striking, however glancingly, at Paul and his contribution to their movement,
the exegetists are shouting aloud the ultimate spiritual deficiency of their
own cult. Their attitude represents mental insincerity, if not open duplicity,
inasmuch as the condemnation of Paul’s exalted communion with inner deity
clashes diametrically with a stupendous volume of experience on the part of
Christian devotees from Augustine to Rufus Jones as to the supreme excellence
of the Gnostic pathway to the vision of divine light. In the face of this
enormous volume of most highly acclaimed and venerated mysticism of Christian
votaries, which, if anything, outdoes even Paul in pure rapture--since Paul
never relaxes his hold on rational elements, and the Christian mystics
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often do--it is surely disingenuous
for theologians to decry the Pauline influence or hold it up as a potential
peril happily escaped.
And if the Church was fortunate to
escape the fate of being ridden with the highest and sanest type of rational
mysticism perhaps ever to be introduced into religion, its good fortune did not
continue longer than the fourth century. For Augustine straightway fell into
exalted ecstasies more unrestrained than any Paul expressed. And a whole
catalogue of saints and ascetics since then have followed the same path to what
they reported to be the acme of inner blessedness. Not even the Hindu Yogi has
surpassed the line of Christian revelers in transcendental enchantments. When
the holy saints and nuns of medieval and modern Christianity have fallen into
such white-hot rapture of identity with the suffering Jesus of Passion Week
that the replicas of his wounds opened and bled on their very bodies, and all
this (and much else) has been held in awesome regard by the Christian body in
general, it comes close to downright insincerity for scholars to denounce
Paul’s lofty rational spirituality as not genuine Christianity.
It is time that someone called
attention to the glaring inconsistency of this position. That which has been
exalted as the noblest and highest strain in Christianity over the centuries is
precisely the attainment of inner rapport between the individual soul and the
God consciousness, and this is the Pauline influence that we have seen
denounced as a peril. If Paul’s emphasis on this experience was a
life-and-death danger to Christianity, then it was not fortunate to escape it,
for it never did escape it! Not only did it adopt it--on one side of its life
at least--but it became the religion’s brightest crown! If that influence
spelled catastrophe, then the religion has suffered vast catastrophe, for that
influence is exactly what it exalted to the highest. It is surely strange that
the very element which these critics pronounce the gravest danger that
Christianity escaped has never been seen as calamity, but is on all sides held
to be Christianity’s truest expression. And again can be seen how decisively
historic fact gives the lie to an ingrained facet of stereotyped ecclesiastical
pietism.
Bacon confesses that it would have
been fatal if Christianity had gone the whole way with Paul into the inner
realization of divine presence and communion. This is to say by inference that
it was all right to go a little way into realization of inner divine values,
but not to go into it with whole-hearted intensity. It must be granted that
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moderation in all things is
commendable, indeed is the sum of most virtue. And no one goes beyond us in
decrying the dangerous tendencies and extravagances that so often engulf the
unwise or unbalanced dabbler in the mystic ocean. There is here full and even
hearty accord with those who press that side of the case. But still it is the
height of anomaly to assume that any true goal of human aspiration is to be
striven for only half way. No goal of real worth will be reached without
consummate care and balance at every stage of approach. That is understood in
any effort at perfection.
Bacon holds that it would have been
a calamity if the real historical Jesus had been eclipsed behind the glories of
apocalyptic vision. Then Christianity is headed for calamity, for its confessed
and approved aim is eventually to eclipse any outward value or nucleus of value
behind supreme inner realizations. If this is not so, a thousand Christian
books and ten million Christian sermons have been a resounding lie. The
pro-Jesus argument is a bubble that bursts and vanishes under the touch of the
final consideration in all religious experience, that no Savior external to
man’s own mind and heart can avail to help any mortal win his immortal crown
unless and until that mortal has incorporated into his own nature the mind and
self of the Christ spirit. No Christ outside can transfigure a mortal until the
mortal feeds on that body of divine essence, transubstantiates his own being
with it, becomes transfigured by the ineffable infusion of a higher
consciousness and ends by being changed in a moment into the likeness of a
divine soul. Be there a thousand holy Messiahs in body on earth, they would not
alter the conditions of the individual’s apotheosis one whit. The eclipse of an
alleged personal Jesus behind individual spiritual attainment and a true estimate
of the relatively minor importance of a personal Avatar, could not be fatal to
Christianity or any religion, because in the end, with evolution the judge and
jury, any historical "Jesus" must be eclipsed behind a real divine
achievement in consciousness. If this is not true, all religious or ethical
exhortation for the spiritual purification of the life is waste and
impertinence. On the other hand, the eclipse of the Pauline emphasis on the
life of spiritual realization, irrespective or regardless of the solid fact of
Jesus’ personal career, could and did become a terrible handicap to the
promulgation of the only true Christianity worthy of the
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name--that Christianity which builds
the Christ mind and heart into the ranks of humanity.
By what species of clairvoyance
Bacon and his fellow apologists profess to see more terrible consequences flow
from centuries of Christian effort to incorporate divine graciousness into the
European and American consciousness than have accrued to history from that same
amount of effort to commemorate a solidly real Jesus, we do not pretend to
know. A myriad of the grossest forms of man’s inhumanity to man, fifty millions
of people, historians estimate, murdered by Christian bigotry and hatred,
religious wars of frightful proportions, persecutions, intercreedal
antagonisms, hopeless division and hostility, the total suppression of free
thought and free inquiry, of scientific investigation and search for truth for
ten to twelve centuries--all this is but a suggestion of the record of that
same Christianity which drew its motivations from the (alleged) solid fact of
Jesus’ existence. Surely the challenge can be flung down to the theologians to
tell us on what sound knowledge they dare to assert that the record of their
religion would have been still far more terrible if the millions of devoted
followers had been actuated by the esoteric motive of trying to incorporate as
much of the Christ mind within the area of their own lives as Paul would have
taught them to do. If the Church’s dodge from Paul’s rational mysticism back to
the exoteric factuality of Petrine doctrine saved it, it saved it for a
record of brutal and conscienceless inhumanity that would utterly discredit any
other organization on earth. Every rational assumption in the situation gives
us the right to assert that had it held to Paul instead of turning to Peter, it
might have been saved from the horrible record it has made in being
saved from the still more horrible record it would have made--as claimed--if it
had not been saved to make the horrible record it did make! Crazy as this
sounds, it is exactly where the logic of this conventional line of theological
reasoning leads us. It robbed Paul to pay Peter; far better had it been to rob
Peter to pay Paul. And the Peter’s pence it has paid have not bought it
remission of any of its sins against the glimmering of the esoteric light of
spiritual truth in many corners here and there in Europe in the intervening
centuries, light which it has with fell fury rushed to black out as soon and
often as it appeared. For from the days its ignorant masses elevated the
Petrine doctrine in triumph over the Pauline esotericism to this pres-
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ent, it has been crucifying not only
the spirit of Paul but the heart and soul of the true Christ in humanity. And
this is the institution and the creed that Bacon defends. The real historical
verdict after sixteen centuries is that it was a calamity that the solid ground
of plain hard fact of Jesus’ personal existence did not disappear behind the
living reality of inner grace.
Had the personal Jesus disappeared,
as Bacon laments the possibility of its having done, we would have had left
nothing more substantial than the mythical heroes of the Mysteries and a vague
general idea of a god somehow dwelling within us, is the claim. But our early
chapters have dealt with this point. Since the work of saving grace must be
consummated eventually by each individual for himself, and a model or paragon
was provided by ancient sage wisdom in the form of the Messianic Sun-God
figures in the Mystery dramatic rituals, man’s only inspiration toward the task
of his salvation is the knowledge that the excellence of the model can be
achieved by him in time. A living exemplar can do no more. And since he can
not, all the claims that a historical Jesus is the only solid basis for the one
true dynamic religion fall out as untrue.
All the writers in the strain that
Bacon labors to express lay great stress on the fact that the hard plain data
of Jesus’ actual career are the only solid or substantial elements to which a
religious faith can attach itself and feel under its feet the firm ground of
certitude from which dynamic fortitude can be drawn. But we have particularized
the item that if this is the one rock to which we can safely moor our bark, it
is by the very fact of its "onliness" most unsafe and insecure after
all. If Jesus alone attained, our victory is far off. As a matter of truth,
there is no safe ground for humanity to stand upon in religion save the rock of
divine instinct in the inner self. If, as said, this is insecure, no historical
man is of avail to save the individual. The sad effect of teaching the masses
to look outward for their salvation to a historical person is seen in the
helpless bewilderment and resourcelessness of people today when they are
suddenly told for the first time that their only God is the Christ within their
own souls. They are filled with dismay, they are overwhelmed with desolation,
and they turn and cry: "They have taken away my Savior--on whom shall I
lean now?" They have so little cultivated the acquaintance of their inner
divine guest that they have certitude neither of his presence nor of his com-
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petence to save them. Through dearth
or desuetude of the doctrine and practice of the immanence of God, millions
today stand trembling in helpless terror when this challenge leads to the
sudden revelation of their own inner poverty. When they are told they have
nothing more substantial to count upon than their feebly-glowing spark of
divinity--all drowned in the welter of human loves and hates, greeds and
cruelties--their situation appears to them hopeless indeed. No wonder they find
consolation and safety when the sanctified priest assures them that the
personal Jesus will look benignly upon them and be their vicarious benefactor.
Paul, Bacon agrees, had not known
the Galilean mechanic in the flesh. He had apparently never heard of him and
writes nothing of him. Yet this bereavement and deprivation did not prevent him
from being the actual founder of the true Christianity and possibly its
foremost expounder and teacher. The spiritual model of the Mystery drama was
quite as dynamic an inspiration as ever was needed to lift a man to near-divine
intelligence and holiness. Paul’s own life and writing put out of court the
arguments of his unworthy successors in the great religion he promulgated. Paul
himself disproves that the existence of a living Jesus is a necessary element
in the psychology of Christly attainment. He attained without knowledge of a
personal Savior, as did, shall we say, Plato and Socrates long before him.
There is nothing in the whole of the
illogical position upheld by Bacon in this passage that would not be readily
corrected by a proper study of comparative religion, with especial reference to
the Egyptian sources of all Bible material. But the idiosyncrasies of the
argument can not be seen until such study has been made in considerable volume
and with proper insights, as well as freedom from established biases. The
entire body of supposititious data on which criticism and judgments have so far
been based must be drastically altered, and a new foundation for both criticism
and interpretation formulated, on the basis of the inclusion of later and
sounder Egyptian studies in comparative religion. The perennial weakness of the
Christian essay to evaluate its own scriptures has been the delimitation of the
scope of its survey to the too narrow bounds of the Christian movement alone.
Contempt of "pagan" influences has kept Christian perspective focused
on the narrow study of a body of literature that has been believed capable of
standing alone and revealing its meaning without reference
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to its relation to antecedent and
environing connections. The truth is that the total of its form, nature and
meaning is so closely intertwined with these antecedent elements that without
them the study can proceed only in dense darkness. The sun of truth that is
needed to throw light into the dark recesses of the mystery, confusion and
unintelligibility of the Christian exegetical problem is that luminary of
wisdom that shone of old in Egypt, but that was eclipsed by the uprush of
popularized Christianity and buried until the Rosetta Stone opened the
long-sealed door to let the light shine forth once again. Only with that torch
in hand will the scholars have the light to see both their former erroneous
methods and the true nature of the problem.
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Chapter XIV
A
QUEEN DETHRONED
Nor immediately apropos to the theme
of Paul’s silence, but closely cognate to the broad implications of Bacon’s
position as above set forth, and of great general interest in relation to the
vital changes in early Christianity which affect the study, is a statement from
the Yale theologian on page 230 of Jesus and Paul, to the effect that it
has been credibly estimated that Christianity lost one half of its following to
Marcion and other Gnostic "heretics" bent on divorcing it from its
Jewish affiliations and making it over in the true likeness of a Hellenic Mystery
cult of personal redemption. Mead asserts, too, that the great Marcionite
movement had cut Christianity entirely apart from Judaism. Valentinus tried
with some modest success to harmonize the two elements. This datum as to the
Marcionite invasion into the ranks of Christianity must be considered a fairly
true estimate. Mosheim also says that Origen "had introduced the
Academy"--Orphic-Platonic esotericism--entire into the fabric of
Christian theology. Augustine a little later came from sitting at the feet
of Plotinus, and, previously tinged with Manichaeism, introduced the
Plotinic-Platonic doctrine of the "three fundamental hypostases" into
Christianity from early Jewish popular exoteric tendencies over to an alignment
of doctrine with the most enlightened philosophic wisdom of ancient days. It
represented an effort on the part of the more illumined elements, the real
intellectual leaders, who had affiliated with the movement perhaps from the
motive of saving the strong popular surge of religious ferment from swinging
completely out of hand and degenerating into exoteric rubbish. The danger of
the deteriorization of high spiritual religion into vulgar misrepresentation of
truth, which only the most clear-sighted sagacity can envision and guard
against, is always great. But it was never so acutely crucial as in the very
epoch under review. It seems likely that there was a lessened tone of spiritual
character and perhaps
312
some moral laxity in the personnel
of the Mysteries, provoking some wide-spread disgust. Likely also was it that
resentment and impatience prevailed among the masses over the exclusiveness of
the Mystery cults, and there probably was a growing desire on the part of the
people to break down the barriers of secrecy and spread the teachings abroad to
the world. Discerning that it was both impossible and undesirable to resist
this sweep, which represented grave danger to the inner teachings, but also
perhaps feeling some sympathy with it, the philosophical element allied itself
with the movement, seeking to direct its currents into safe channels. Almost
every great popular movement--like the French Revolution--engages at its
inception the interest and support of idealists. Later on, when more grossly
human interests surge to the surface and find expression, the idealists are
disappointed and disillusioned and drop out. A typical example of this in an
individual case is the poet Wordsworth in connection with the French
Revolution. The philosophic thinkers who joined the early Christian movement
later either dropped out or were forced out by the overwhelming surge of crude
exotericism that made hash of the doctrines after two and a half or three
centuries. Origen was in particular posthumously excommunicated and
anathematized three hundred years after his death for having introduced into
the theology the great Oriental doctrine of rebirth or reincarnation.
The high-minded endeavor of the
philosophic Christian leaders to hold Christianity up to the superior levels of
sage wisdom and interior insight, could it have held its own, is the thing that
would in truth have saved the religion of Christos. Yet this most salutary and
enlightened trend in leadership and following, Pauline and not Petrine, is the
influence that the theologians say Christianity was lucky to escape. In the
ironical long and short of the matter, the claim is that Christianity was saved
from a worse fate than its now known despicable record of centuries, by
following a trend that left every one of its doctrines void of true or intelligible
meaning and introduced chaos into every interpretation. We are asked to believe
that another trend that would have retained the true inner essence of vital
significance, to the eternal enlightenment of mankind, would have represented a
great and catastrophic danger to the faith. If this does not reveal the poverty
of exegetical and interpretative insight on the part of Christian theologians,
we would not know how otherwise to read it.
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Brief notice must be taken and
rebuttal made of an excerpt from Dr. Morgan quoted by Bacon. He says that the
Hellenistic conception of fellowship with God is intellectual and mystical
rather than moral, a participation in divine omniscience and immortality by
enlightenment or ritual. The Church, on the moral side, insists on conduct.
This is one of those fine-spun differentiations that, to have the force
intended, must slur the highest tenets and accredited principles of
Christianity itself. To hit at Hellenistic philosophy, elements of its doctrine
or practice must be belittled. But the odd thing is that these same elements
condemned in Hellenism turn out to be influences that have been lauded and
glorified in Christianity itself. What Christian Church would not feel itself
highly blessed to know that its ministry brought to its people the most
intimate mystical fellowship with God? The sad thing to note is that if it does
not attain that much of victory, it also does not attain the straight moral
purity advertised as more distinctly a normal Christian performance. Forsooth
the attainment of communion with God in the inner sanctum of conscience and
character must be decried as second rate performance because it is Greek and
not distinctively Christian. It is a weird logic that has to defend the probity
of moral conduct by slandering the sanctity or sincerity of mystical and
intellectual fellowship with God. Their efforts to translate history into the
meaning they wish to give it force them into the necessity of condemning
fellowship with God as evil. All this bespeaks the reduction of Christian
dialectic to a one-sided belittlement of everything non-Christian. Even the
highest elevations of the human soul in aspiration for union with God must be
written down as dangerous, because Greek rational religion inculcated them first.
One other venting of Christian
antipathy to the lofty systems of pagan religion is worth closer scanning, as
it is found expressed in another passage from Bacon (247). After saying that he
had made special effort in his survey of the fourth Gospel to show its
completely Pauline character, he declares that Gentile Christianity faced its
critical hour forty years after Paul’s death when the churches of Asia lay
between the Scylla of reaction toward Jewish legalism and the Charybdis of
Gnostic theosophy. That the stream of Christian development was able to take a
clear and open course by preaching to the world the spiritual Christ of St.
Paul and interfusing also into the teaching of Jesus the Pauline doctrine of
grace, is owing to the Ephesian evan-
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gelist. If this so great boon came
to Christianity through Paul’s influence, again it must be asked: why the
universal orthodox judgment that the adherence to Paul’s type of religion would
have wrecked Christianity? Again it is difficult for the laymen to understand
how Paul’s contribution both saved Christianity and threatened it with
obliteration.
The later years of development in
the early Church, says Bacon, were marked by the incoming of grievous wolves
not sparing the flock, by a teaching of Anti-Christ, threatening to sweep away
the whole Church from its relation to the historical Jesus. The Asiatic wing of
the Church was in danger of forsaking the way of approach to God by moral
self-dedication in the spirit of love and taking its course along the dangerous
path of Gnosis. By what license or chicanery of logic a Christian theologian
can stigmatize the inner realizations of divine grace and divine presence
aspired to (and often, apparently, attained) in the practice of Gnostic
Christianity as Anti-Christ, is not clear either on the surface or in the
depths of the situation. The realization of inner sanctification is apparently
to be belittled or stigmatized because it was not attained with the help of the
doctrine of a personal Jesus. And how it can be contended that a Gnostic’s
achievement of divine grace is Anti-Christ and spurious, while the same
realization by a Christian saint is the legitimate divine unction, can not
readily be apprehended. What can all this narrow logic-chopping mean but that
Christian jealousy of its own asserted virtues has reduced its apologists to
the childish maneuver of declaring the Christ it proclaims as the only true
one, and the Christ non-Christians cultivate as a false one? The presence of
such a motive is at hand in the egregiously overweening presumptions on which
the whole Christian missionary movement was based. "We have the only true
religion, because we alone have the true Christ," was the cry that
accompanied the attempt to force Christianity willy-nilly upon all the rest of
mankind. It took a hundred years of pretty nearly flat failure to open the
zeal-blinded eyes of vaunting Christians to the fact that other religions had
found ways to reach the true Christ within the heart.
If it is true that Christianity
would have been ruined by following "the delusive path of Gnosis," it
should be expected that those who for centuries did follow that path would show
in their lives and fate the awful consequences of having lived this baneful
doctrine. The
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Gnostics themselves, it is to be
presumed, must have presented in their history the evil results of the system.
What did the acceptance of Anti-Christ do to them, as a horrible example of
false teaching? Surely those who devoted their lives to following such a
pestiferous perversion of true doctrine must have given evidence of the
disastrous effects of such a plague in their own lives. If it would have ruined
Christians, surely it must be clear that it ruined its own devotees. Bacon and
his fellow slanderers of Gnosticism have surely put themselves "out on a
limb," which can be sawed off in quick order. For what do we find when we
turn back to look at the Gnostics and their careers? Let the great and
competent Gibbon answer for us (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol.
I, p. 393): "The Gnostics were distinguished as the most polite, the most
learned and the most wealthy of the Christian name." Mead and other
scholars testify to the high character of the Gnostics.
And the modern Harnack is fair
enough to say, in comment on Irenaeus’ strictures against the Gnostics, that
these fine Christians have been severely misjudged. He writes:
"Owing to omissions and because
no effort was made to understand his opponents, the sense of the by-no-means
absurd speculations of the Gnostics has been ruined by the Church Father."
The great German exegetist adds
this:
"According to Hippolytus (Philos.,
VI, 42), the followers of the Gnostic Marcus complained of the
misrepresentations of their teaching by Irenaeus; the followers of our newly
discovered book [the Akhmim Codex] could also have complained of the
incomprehensible fashion in which Irenaeus had represented their
teachings."
The time is ripe at last, after
eighteen hundred years, to scotch this unfounded and unjust canard that
Christian bigotry has kept alive against these highly intelligent and
philosophic early Christians whom ignorance designated as heretics. There is
nothing but an arrant Christian prejudice to support the Christian claim that
the embracing of Gnostic religion by the early Church would have been
calamitous. On the other side we have the clear verdict of that court of last
appeal--history--that Gnosticism, if it did not itself produce the most
excellent type of Christians, was produced and held by them. Its unimpeachable
316
testimony gives the lie direct to
this habitual slander of the splendid protagonists of one of the world’s
noblest religious enterprises. Christians themselves would have their eyes
opened upon a new perspective of historical values in the appraisal of their
own faith if they would scan the verifiable item of history that has
perpetually been held from their knowledge, the fact that in the early
proscription of "heretics" by the orthodox party in the Church, it
was a case of the worst elements pronouncing judgment against the best,
exoteric blindness striking as esoteric insight, a fury of zealotry tramping
down calm balance of philosophy. It was Christianity at its worst smothering
Christianity at its best. To say this today is open lèse majesté against
official attitude, but it happens to be on the line of truth. We are asked to
believe that Christianity found a salvation, still apostrophized in spite of a
record of historic failure, by rejecting the well-grounded religious
systematism of the most cultured, intelligent and philosophical class of the
third century, who at least had inward discernment adequate to the
comprehension of a purely spiritual Christos, and adopting in place of it the
crass literalized theological melange of a rabble of the lowest grades of
intelligence who were so completely incapable of grasping the spiritual
conception of immanent divinity in man that the Church was compelled to feed
them on the fiction of the Christ as a living man. Celsus and others have
testified that the orthodoxy of the time made its appeal only to the most
abject in mind and social station in the Roman Empire. Indeed Celsus tells us
that it would tolerate no persons of learning and intelligence in its fold. He
says it reached out after only the most wretched and "god-forsaken."
It spurned the counsels of philosophy and erudition. Libraries and learning
were anathema in its eyes, that in rejecting the Gnosis as heresy, the ignorant
leadership of the early institution condemned Christianity to ages of error,
blindness and fateful miscarriage of true religion, with a record of inhumanity
that crushes the human spirit merely to read it. If this was the salvation from
the dreadful menace of Gnosticism, Christianity had better not been saved.
And how is all this impeachment of
Gnostic Christianity to be held
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consistent with a summary statement
made by Bacon--one with which there can be ready accord--that Jesus and Paul
were the champions of the only gospel that has real promise for our struggling
world? How can it be both safe and salutary for the world to pin its faith to a
Pauline preachment now, if the cause of the true religion saved itself by
turning its back to Paul and its face to Peter long ago? This makes Paul both a
menace and the bearer of salvation at the same time. The purpose in laying
stress on such a point as this is to show up the precarious and unsound nature
of whole volumes of the sort of critical Christian apologetic, Bible analysis
and academic investigation in this field that has been under discussion here.
One must ask what becomes of the tedious hair-weighing lucubrations of eminent
theologians speculating on the Pauline authorship of certain New Testament
books, when other schools of thought just as plausibly demonstrate that Paul did
not even write the Epistles attributed to him. It all points to one thing
clearly,--the uncertain authorship of all the material of the scriptures and
the shaky status of all determinations arrived at concerning it. Inasmuch as
the whole case for the historicity of Jesus rests upon just such insecure
bases, occasion is taken here to introduce some of the available testimony of
scholars on the question of the Pauline authorship of the books assigned to him
in the canon.
In his Did Jesus Live 100 Years
B.C.? (p. 38) Mead cites the authority of a distinguished Dutch scholar,
Van Manen, to whom had been assigned the writing of the article on Paul in Hastings’
Dictionary. What so eminent a specialist has to say on the subject of
Paul’s literary work must weigh with considerable force on opinion. Says Mead:
"Van Manen emphatically
repudiates the genuineness not only of the Pastoral, but of the whole of the
rest of the Letters traditionally ascribed to Paul."
And Mead says this is of great
moment, since it is not the opinion of an isolated scholar, but the outcome of
the studies of a school. Van Manen himself is definite in his statements:
"With respect to the canonical
Pauline Epistles, the later criticism here under consideration has
learned to recognize that they are none of them by Paul; neither fourteen, nor
thirteen, nor nine or ten, nor seven or eight, nor yet even the four so long
‘universally’ regarded as unassailable."
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Mead follows with this comment:
"Van Manen is unable any longer
in all simplicity to hold by the canonical Acts and Epistles, or
even to the Epistles solely, or yet to a selection of them. The
conclusion it has to reckon with is this: (a) that we possess no Epistles of
Paul; that the writings which bear his name are pseudepigrapha containing
seemingly historical data from the life and labors of the Apostle, which
nevertheless must not be accepted as correct without clear examination and are
probably, at least for the most part, borrowed from the ‘Acts of Paul,’ which
also underlie our canonical book of Acts. (b) Still less does the Acts
of the Apostles give us, however incompletely, an absolutely historical
narrative of Paul’s career; what it gives is a variety of narratives concerning
him differing in their dates and also in respect to the influences under which
they were written."
Important is Van Manen’s statement
that the Paulinism of the lost Acts of Paul and of the canonical Epistles
of Paul, is not the "theology" or the "system" of the
historical Paul, although it ultimately came to be, and in most quarters still
is, identified with it. "It is the later development of a school, or, if
the expression is preferred, of a circle, of progressive believers who named
themselves after Paul and placed themselves as it were under his aegis." This
would not be an inordinate supposition, by any means. Much of
"Aristotle" is believed to have been written down by the students in
the Academy. But it is of greater importance for us to be told that this group
that "edited" the Pauline Epistles was, according to Van
Manen, "among the Gnostic-heretics." If this be true--and its
probability is very great--the tangle, confusion and logical rout of Bacon’s
thesis are overwhelming. The whole structure of his argument falls down in a
debacle of ruin. For having said that it was Paul (now declared by such an
eminent scholar as Van Manen to be a group of Gnostics) who saved Christianity
from popular superstition and Jewish legalism to flower out beyond his
generation, and having denounced the Gnostics at the same time, he is by his
own opinions thrust into the logically senseless and untenable position of
denouncing the school and the influence that he has said saved the faith.
Mead quotes McClymont of Aberdeen,
the conservative writer of the article The New Testament in Hastings’
Dictionary, who frankly states that the so-called Pastoral Lectures (I and
II Timothy and Titus) "are distinguished from all others by
their want of historical agreement
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with any period in St. Paul’s life
as recorded in the book of Acts, and also by their strongly marked
individuality alike in style and substance."
That there must be great strength in
Van Manen’s view is attested by the data which show that the oldest witnesses
to the existence of the Epistles are Basilides, Valentinus and
Heracleon. Marcion is the first in time. And these men were all Gnostics. As we
learn from Tertullian, traces are to be found of an authoritative group of Epistles
of Paul. It is notable that Tertullian still calls Paul "the Apostle
of heretics," and, addressing Marcion, speaks of Paul as "Your Apostle"!
What do these little items intimate but that "Paul," whether as man
or group, school or circle, was of the Gnostic persuasion if not indeed of the
Gnostic party?
Van Manen dates his "Paul
circle" about 120 A.D. and assigns 130-150 to the Acts. Justin
Martyr, in the second century, knows nothing of the Acts, even when
referring to Simon Magus, a reference which he could not have omitted had he
known of Simon’s mention in that treatise, and one which all subsequent
heresiologists triumphantly set in the foreground of their
"refutations" of that famous "heretic" and impostor. Also
there is no clear quotation from the Acts known till 177 A.D.
A matter that is full of meaning
from every point of view and is especially corroborative of our position, is
the postulation by Van Manen and indeed many others of the existence of a
"common document" under or behind the Gospels. This represents the
sanest approach or tentative in all textual Biblical investigation to what must
be the genuine nub of explanation of sources, origins, context and authorship.
The close similarity of three Gospels, or four, has never been interpreted in
its clear implications. The explanatory theory was that one of the Evangelists
wrote his document first and three others copied it--with variations. Weight of
opinion settled upon Mark as the first-written text. Much more likely
would it seem to be that all four were variant renderings of a hoary oral
tradition, the first setting down of which on paper became the "common
document" behind the four and all others--as there were many. Irenaeus
told us a valuable thing--though it is known from other evidence--when he said
that there was "a multitude of Gospels extant" in his day. Were facts
exactly known, it is quite likely that some of the "other Gospels"
considerably antedate
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the canonical four. There is no
datum which proves that these four were the earliest. The air of the day was
filled with Gospels, and common sense closes the door on every other thesis
than the only one naturally assumable,--that they were all essays on the part
of many writers to render the truest version of the great oral tradition. On
every hand there were members of the several Mystery Brotherhoods, and one
after another writer would be inspired to try his hand at transcribing portions
of the memorized Mystery ritual, adding his own glosses and elucidations,
omitting some sections of the great mystic drama, or some of the allegories and
sayings, inserting others. Many scholars predicate the existence of the
collections of the Sayings of the Lord, the origin of which it seems
easy to attribute to the program of the Mystery ceremonial, where in each
performance a large part of the typical drama of the descent and career of the
Soul in incarnation, its "death," "burial,"
"crucifixion" and "resurrection" in and from the
"tomb" of the fleshly body, consisted of an elaborate set of
discourses which constituted the message, given orally, by the Messianic
spiritual principle to mortals on earth. Since, as seen, the earth itself was
the "Mount" both of crucifixion and of transfiguration, the discourse
of the Christ character in the ritual came to be known as the Sermon on the
Mount. Burton Scott Easton, in his book Christ in the Gospels, a quite
erudite treatise, says it is silly to speculate on the geographical location of
the "Mount" on which Jesus preached his discourse, as it is likely
not to be taken in its physical or material sense at all. This is a welcome ray
of light penetrating the gloom of theological obtuseness. The
"Sayings" were the body of the verbal or declamatory interludes in
the acted drama. The parables were other spoken specialties. From century to
century at least a few innovations or novel features might be introduced in
this or that country. Though all depicted the same mystery of the Incarnation,
or the oblation of the Son (Sons) of God on the altar of fleshly humanity, the
various national Mysteries such as those of Samothrace, of Phrygia, of Eleusis,
of Bacchus, of Atys, of Osiris, Serapis, Isis, Aten and others were
modifications in one of another pronounced direction. The Mysteries solve the
great mystery of the Gospels. In whole or in part, the Gospels were just the
written transcript of the great religious ritual-drama that had been almost the
ancient world’s sole theme of sacred literature. The assumption on the part of
Christian leaders at the start, and of Christian
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apologists ever since, that the
great body of "Gospel" literature afloat in the middle East in the
early centuries of our era--and quite obviously also before it--bore no
relation to the total organic religious effort of the world before the time
specifically marked "Christian," is on the face of it manifestly a
stultification of both scholastic judgment and common sense. To attempt to
place a specific date of the first origin, which date must at all costs be kept
after the year 35 or 40 or 50 A.D.--of a body of literature that in either oral
or written form must have had an immemorial antiquity behind it even then, must
be seen at last as the prize folly of the ages. Unquestionably there was a
"common document" behind the Gospels; and some of the hoary books of
wisdom that survived the besom sweep of Christian destruction, give us inklings
of its contents.
The endless aspersions cast on the
Gnostics and their philosophy come with bad grace from the Christian side in
view of the manifest advantage in standing, repute and character which accrued
to the early Church from the adherence to it of various philosophical groups,
however much some of them might still be adjudged "heretical" from
the dogmatic point of view. It might profit the Gnostic traducers to turn back
and read again what Mosheim has to say on the close intimacy between early Christianity
and Greek philosophy. It must be noted in glancing at this material that the
word "philosophy" had come to connote in the minds of third-century
Christians a thing of reproach. It was to them the genius and embodiment of
heresy. A faint idea of what inspired this antipathy to philosophy may be
gained by putting it side by side with the recent American popular animus
against the incursion of the "brain-trust" into the political arena,
and the vulgar distrust of the cap and gown or the university degree. There is
inevitable, no doubt, a submerged subtle resentment against the cult of
intellectualism or pretensions thereto from the masses who lack it. When
Christianity gathered in the lowest elements of the Roman population and
propagated itself by catering to their level of hysterical religionism, the
resentment against learning, genuine or superficial, was widespread and
deep-seated. There are ever two vastly divergent planes on which the thing
known as religion can deploy its psychologizations in human life, that of the
intellect and that of the emotions. Like other religions, Christianity has
swung its emphasis back and forth at different epochs between these two modes
of the force. In the third cen-
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tury it was in the throes of a
movement sweeping it from the intellectual aspect to the emotional. It brought,
as we have seen, a hatred of books, learning, philosophy. But before the
debacle became overwhelming and catastrophic philosophy had rendered the Church
great service, which it is quite worth our while to recall and cogitate.
Mosheim (Vol. I, p. 341) analyzes
the contribution and influence of Clement of Alexandria. Clement tells us, he
writes, that he would not hand down Christian truth--that is, the truth about
the Christos in its purely spiritual form--bare and unmixed, but associated
with or rather veiled by and shrouded under the precepts of philosophy. For,
according to Clement, the seeds of celestial wisdom communicated by Christos to
the world lay hid in the philosophy of the Greeks, after the same manner
as the succulent part of a nut lies concealed within the shell. For he appears
to have been firmly persuaded that the essence of Greek philosophy was sound,
wholesome and salutary, in fact that it was consonant with the spirit of Christian
wisdom, but that it was reconditely veiled by a cloud of superficial images and
fictions (which we know were the mythical and allegorical dramatizations) just
as the kernel is hidden by the shell.
It should be the business of
Christians then to endeavor industriously to penetrate this exoteric covering
in order to discover the true relation between human and divine wisdom. The
origin of Greek philosophy he attributes to Deity himself--would that such
liberality had prevailed in the Christian hierarchy ever since!--but its
transmission to humanity had to be through inferior agents. Philosophy was the
way to eternal life before Christ himself came, and therefore he allows that
the Grecian sages were saved. He reiterates that philosophy was divinely communicated
to the Greeks. (Deity must have chosen Chaldea and Egypt as his agents of this
communication, since Greek philosophy emanated from those lands.) It was given
to Greece as a special testament or covenant, and it in fact constitutes the
basis of that doctrine which the world has since received from Christos. Mere
inner persuasion of the spirit must always be strengthened by that more
accurate knowledge of religion which was to be acquired through the aid of
philosophy.
This sagacious counsel of Clement the
Church would have been wise to follow. But Mosheim goes on. With a view to
accomplishing this desirable end, the Christians not only adopted the study of
phi-
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losophy themselves, but became loud
in their recommendation of it to others, declaring that the difference between
Christianity and philosophy was but trifling. And it is most certain that this
kind of conduct was so far productive of the desired effect as to cause not a
few of the philosophers to enroll themselves under the Christian banner! Those
who have perused the various works written by such of the ancient philosophers
as had been induced to embrace Christianity, can not have failed to remark that
the Christian discipline was regarded by all of them in no other light than as
a certain mode of philosophizing. (Sad the day when this liberal spirit was
replaced by that of dogmatic bigotry!)
Much light peeps out through
obscuring veils in the next observation of Mosheim: the opinion was held by
many that philosophy had been surreptitiously brought down from heaven and
communicated to mankind by those angels whom, according to the ancients, a love
of pleasure had induced to rebel against God and who descended to earth to
unite their divine intellection with material bodies for the sake of the opportunity
thus afforded pure spirits to enjoy the sense of life. (The real motive of
"rebellion" was not hostility to God, but revolt against the inane
passivity of the purely ideal world--vide Plato.) Clement himself seems
to have adopted this opinion; and he is at pains to refute those who maintained
that philosophy was a device of the evil one to deceive the human race. (This
tell-tale hint gives positive evidence of the virulence of the proletarian
revulsion against the rational wing of Christianity, which this work claims has
never been given its due place in historical analysis.) Mosheim adds that from
this position of Clement we may assume that the alleged origin of philosophy in
diabolism had taken deep root among the multitude. Clement explains that Paul,
in warning Christians to beware being spoiled by philosophy, obviously was
speaking to the more perfect Christians, those "who had attained to the
very heights of Gnostic intelligence," cautioning them that the
philosophies were but an elementary discipline and should not be permitted to
obscure the fuller realities of the Christian experience. It will readily be
apparent how widely the views of modern commentators like Bacon, who indulge in
the conventional derogation of the Gnostic Christians, diverge from the
attitude of Clement, who had first-hand acquaintance with Gnostic philosophy.
It is Clement, not Mosheim, who here equates "more per-
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fect Christians" with "the
very heights of Gnostic intelligence." Not only Gibbon, but Clement, makes
the Gnostics the elite of the Christian personnel.
Mosheim adds that through Origen and
Heraclas, pupils of Clement, and through pupils of Ammonias Saccas, who mostly
entered the ministry, the love of philosophy became pretty generally diffused
throughout a considerable portion of the Church. Porphyry says that Ammonias, a
father of Neo-Platonism, had taken up Christianity and later renounced it.
Eusebius says that he held to it to the end.
We can see in Clement’s--and no less
in Origen’s--high regard for Greek philosophy, as being indeed the innermost
kernel of rational Christianity, the sufficient answer to the indignant howl
let out nearly two hundred years before Augustine’s day by that loud and
blatant protagonist for doctrinal Christianity, Tertullian. That fierce zealot
had written:
"What indeed has Athens to do
with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? . . .
Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic and
dialectic composition!"
True enough, by the time
Christianity had been adulterated and transformed to the thing of literal
gibberish and pious emotionalism to which it had degenerated in Tertullian’s
day, little enough of its pristine kinship with the lofty Platonism and the
splendid eclecticism out of which it originally flowed was discernible. Also,
hidden under esoteric veils as its highest teachings and revelations had been,
of course the crassness of blunt exoteric vision could detect no connection with
the primal system of arcane philosophy in which the deeper Christianity of
Gnosticism had had its roots. But the sad mistake of the Church had been
manifest in its propensity and its final historic choice to follow its blind
and fanatic Tertullians instead of its clear-seeing philosophical Clements and
Origens--and Dean Inges.
The supreme lesson that the whole
historical episode should teach is that, in the words of Mosheim (I, 346) upon
Clement’s attitude on the relation of basic philosophy to religion,
". . . our conviction of mind
must necessarily be strengthened and confirmed by our acquiring that more
accurate knowledge which was to be obtained through the assistance of
philosophy."
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Whenever the principles of this
maxim are transgressed religion swings into channels of irrational behavior. In
short religion is never safe until it is well grounded upon and stabilized in
the rudiments of truth discovered by a profound study of philosophy.
Christianity despised, then threw out its early sage philosophy, and a hideous
historical sequel trailed its long shadow over the ensuing centuries.
It is too much to expect that attack
and denunciation will not fall heavily upon the thesis here advanced that
Christianity was a movement of ignorance against mental culture and rational
philosophy. It is found, however, that Mosheim directly confirms this position.
He goes on to describe the growth of a party in the Church which violently
resented the encroachments of philosophical interests on the religion of "simple
piety," and which feared that the spread of earthly philosophy (they must
have forgotten that Clement said it came down from heaven) would injure the
cause of celestial truth. The two parties, then, of the philosophical
enthusiasts and the dour pietists, "opposed each other with the utmost
warmth," the one contending for the utility and excellence of
philosophical discussion and urging the teachers of the Church to demonstrate
the harmony between religion and reason; the other regarding every species of
human learning, and more particularly philosophy, with detestation and
contempt, and urging the brethren to maintain the faith in all its genuine
simplicity. And the theologians of the modern Church still exhort us to regard
as our true Christianity the bewildering irrational literalisms of the
Christian party--which is what Christian doctrine became in its
"simplicity"--that held instruction, learning, reason and philosophy
in utter detestation and contempt!
In the finale of his discussion of
this point Bacon ends by asking the very pertinent question whether we may hold
that there is still need of the Gospel as theology. He notes that in our time
few pay homage any more to the fallen "queen of the sciences," as it
was denominated in ancient days. The cry today is for religion without
theology.
There is not room here to debate
this question. It is of the utmost importance, however, that the sheer fact of
theology’s having fallen into desuetude in Christianity should be fully
analyzed and comprehended in its true significance. That the one religion
vaunting itself to be the truest, highest, purest in world history should have
shifted so far from its pristine constitutional character as to find itself in
these
326
latter times of world stress
entirely out of unison with its original intellectual foundation, is
attestation enough that great and vital divergence from basic principles must
have occurred at some epoch. A long chapter would not suffice to detail the
nature and immense import of the divergence that did assuredly occur. But
however searchingly we may probe, it will come back in the end to the one fact
that the far distant root-cause of Christianity’s defection from its own
theology was generated back in that fatal third century, when the Gnostic and philosophic
wing of the movement was amputated by the rising power of the tide of ignorant
exotericism that flooded in upon the new religion at that time. It would be
easy enough to trace the effects right up to the present aggravated scorn and
neglect of theology. When the shift from allegory, myth and drama to history
was made, the cryptic esoteric keys to the lofty and sublime inner meaning of
theological formulations were lost. The doctrines of the faith were thus left
standing as little more than empty shells, devoid of intelligibility and hence
bereft of dynamic power and so, finally, powerless to engage interest. They
became relegated to the cloister, the library shelves and the theological
seminaries. They sank into the background and were covered by the dust of
oblivion from the sheer fact that the cord of relevance and meaning by which
they would have been tied to living human interests and problems had been cut,
and they became a thing apart and out of meaningful relation to life itself.
The Bible also, of which theology is the intellectual exposition of its
meaning, shared largely the same neglect and ostracism out of living
experience. No voice raised today would be a more desolate bleat in the
wilderness of uncomprehending stolidity than one which proclaimed anew the need
of theology as the solvent of the world’s gripping problems of this age. It
would go utterly unheard, shouted down by the raucous chorus chanting the total
inadequacy of theological doctrine to meet even the mental needs of our time.
Yet the early Church proclaimed those doctrines as the saving truth of God for
the guidance of men through this life. And the profound wisdom of the purest
philosophy in history, the Greek, blessed these teachings with its sanction.
Perhaps nothing, then, will surpass
the surprise of the Church itself when it hears the plaintive bleat for
theology rise from this end of the field. For there is ample ground to support
the forthright declaration that every single dogma, creed article and
ceremonial item in
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the original Christianity was, and
still is, the very truth, and likewise is knowledge critical for the practical
needs of the world today! It is an unbelievable anomaly that while Christian
theology is the saving truth of life, the religion that promulgated it
has so weirdly perverted it into unintelligible gibberish that it no longer
bears the stamp of either truth or utility, and the Church is itself forced to
disown its own primal genius as unrelated to the problem of practical good. So
recreant has the institution been to the teaching of truth it itself proclaimed
in creed and scripture and theology that it must now turn and disavow its own
organic constitution. The enormity of this dereliction must be seen as
proportionate to the vastness of the change and degradation necessary to have
brought it to pass. The prodigious extent of the transformation from sublime
meaning to unconscionable jargon in Christian theology can be seen in all its
appalling significance only by those who will make the comparison and see the
shocking contrast between the present corruption of the doctrines and their
transcendent majesty of import in the minds of the ancient sages who clothed
the body of truth in the romantic garb of allegory.
In rounding out this long chapter it
is supremely desirable that the full import of Paul’s silence that so damages
the case for the historical Christ be summarized and crystallized. On the basis
of the premises established it is simply inconceivable that the ardent
Apostle--the actual founder of Christianity!--could have left in his writings a
total blank about the man Jesus. No amount of sophistry or mental chicanery can
set aside the verdict of common sense. Any argument advanced to
"explain" it rings from the start with the hollowness of sounding
brass and the feebleness of a tinkling cymbal. Paul was in essential leanings a
Gnostic, one of the Hellenic philosophers so despised by the anti-philosophical
wing of fanatical Christianity in the third and fourth centuries. The
ineluctable reason why Paul does not mention a historical Jesus is that he had
obviously never heard of one, and further could not have conceived of one. No
more could he have believed in a personal Logos than could Philo, who was about
contemporary with him. Paul and John, says Bacon, saved Christianity from
vitiation for the generations beyond their own. Yet Paul and John had no
theology of a personal Jesus, obviously and admittedly. So logic concludes that
it was a theology that had no room for the personal Christ that saved
Christianity.
328
The final word here should be a
dissertation on the true inward meaning of the phrase--the Word made flesh. The
easy step from the esoteric collective sense over to the exoteric personal
caricature of the idea spelled a swift and facile "descent to
Avernus" for Christian theology. With the total loss of the formulae and
keys of the antique arcana, the fateful transmogrification of true meanings
into nonsense fell speedily upon ecclesiastical doctrinism through many avenues.
But one of the chief and most immediately damaging misconstructions was that
which inhered in the misreading of single names of type characters in a
singular instead of a multiple or distributive sense. Just as it would be a
misconstruction to read Santa Claus as one character giving gifts to all
children, instead of the spirit of giving distributed among all parents, so it
was a mistake to predicate the flesh which the Logos was to assume as the
mortal flesh of one man. Naïve thinking, if the more discerning truth is
withheld, jumps to the conclusion that if the Word is to become flesh, it must
be encased in the body of one man. But the thinking and the knowledge behind
Biblical esotericism is by no means naïve. It is inexpressibly recondite,
unbelievably cryptic. It takes at least as much acumen to decipher the occult
sense thus embalmed in allegory as it required constructive genius and
inventive deftness to embody it there. What the vital phrase then signifies in
its original cryptic intimation is that the Logos, the ideal archetypal
structure-form of God’s thought, which was to be borne out to utterance by the
resonant thunder of his Voice or spoken Word--precisely as our voices carry out
in their tones the ideas of our minds and stamp them upon the living world--was
to go vibrating down to the lowest levels of the reach of the creative
emanation and finally stamp its image and form upon the highest creature of
flesh. The pulsing electronic energy of divine Mind was in the end to become
the presiding genius in bodies of flesh. Not in the flesh of a man, but in the
flesh of humanity was the light of the Word to be born, glimmer and shine. It
was to enter and become flesh collectively, with its rays distributed among all
men, and not confined in one single body alone. The Egyptians have the term
from which indeed, in utmost likelihood, the very name "Christ" has
come, to designate the "soul made flesh." It is their Karast,
the name of the deceased in the mummy-coffin, and it means "fleshed."
Modern theology will never recover the genuinely correct sense of much of the
ancient sacred writ until it restores to a central place in
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its structure of exegesis the
forgotten doctrine of "Dismemberment," the idea of the fragmentation
or cutting of deity to pieces, or as the Greeks put it, "the distribution
of whole natures" of the gods into infinite partition, so that a seed
fragment of divine Mind may be planted in the life of every creature. This
principle is indeed clearly embodied in Christian theology and ritual in the Christ’s
breaking of the loaf--after declaring that it typified or "was" his
own body--and distributing a portion of it to each participant in the divine
transubstantiation. Each fragment of his deific nature thus transplanted in the
body, heart and mind of the communicants became "fleshed" or Karast;
and this became the Christ on the cross of flesh. The Christ in each of us is
the Word made flesh, which after the analogy of the broken pieces of the loaf,
came and dwelt among us, telling us that indeed unless we take and
"eat" of this divine essence, our aeonial salvation will not be
accomplished. The mind can see at this juncture that the moment one leaps from
the meaning of the incarnation of the Christos "in all men" to the
other sense of "in one man, Jesus," the groundwork for a rational and
intelligible comprehension of the fleshing of the Logos, and with it the whole
basic sense of ancient religion, flies away, and confusion stalks the effort to
grasp the purport of all theology. The entire edifice of theology is built upon
and around the central fact of the descent of the Logos into flesh and matter.
It is the nub of the entire system. It is the key to the scriptures. The
planting of the seed fragment of divine nature distributively in humanity was
and is the advent of Christos, the great aeonial divine coming. That the Son of
God was collectively the Sons of God, or the principle of Sonship distributed
like bread to the "multitude," has never been decisively grasped as
the prime key to the theological systemology. "The gods distribute
divinity" is one of the most sententious and revealing items in the
profound Platonic philosophy belittled by Christian dogmatists. "Each
superior deity," explains Proclus, "receiving from on high the
excellent nature of those gods who are above it, imparts it in divided measure
to those natures immediately secondary to themselves." The gods in the
rank above us offer us their very bodies, i.e., the essence of their divine
natures, the substance of intellect and will, for us to feed upon by
appropriation, or "eating." If the bread is the body of the Christ’s
nature, how can it be implanted germinally in the flesh of billions unless it
be broken into as many fragments as there are to be communicants?
330
This is the meaning--all lost in the
historicizing process--of the multiplication of the loaves (and fishes) to feed
the multitude.
The Logos was made flesh, but not in
one man only. Paul thrilled to this knowledge, and the Bible hardly anywhere
rises to such majesty and loftiness as in those passages in his Epistles wherein
he dissertates on the forming of the Christ in us through the growth of charity
in our hearts. There is no confusion there. That comes in only when the
man-Christ is thrust into the picture.
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Chapter XV
A
STAR—AND LUNA
The resources of the dictionary are
hardly adequate to pictorialize what has to be styled the doltish fatuity of
popular conception in Christian countries of such an accouterment or
embellishment of the Oriental dramatization of spiritual history as the
heralding of the birth of Christos by the appearance of a star and its guidance
of three Magi of Persia to the stable in Bethlehem. When this incredible
instance and example of the devastation of sane reason by the psychological
seductions of miracle and divine fiat has been looked into closely, some
realization must begin to take form in the minds of many that Clement’s
injunction to balance faith with critical thought is a quite indispensable
counsel of wisdom. The power of blind faith to stultify the reason is brought
out in glaring flagrancy in the instances to be cited. The point is accentuated
here in all its ribald ridiculousness for the twofold purpose of awakening the
narcotized intellects of thousands to a realization of the amount of inherent
absurdity that must be swallowed if the narrative of Jesus’ historical
"life" is to be accredited, and of adding another stone of solid
strength to the building of the case for the non-historical interpretation of
scripture. The climactic reflection from the critique should be that if the
acceptance of the Jesus story as history rests upon a series of such mental
infatuations as this, it can be received only by minds that have undergone
nearly complete paralysis, and that the whole basic structure of Christianity
thus stands upon perilously weak foundations indeed.
In a lifetime of reading there have
been encountered only two slight or glancing allusions to the illogicality and inherent
impossibility of the story of the guiding star of Bethlehem. There may be
others that have not been seen. It is to illustrate or exemplify the
shallowness of general orthodox thinking on matters of scripture and theology
that an attempt is made to present this matter in realistic baldness. When the
ordinary person at Christmas time purchases one of the greeting cards picturing
the five-pointed star in a dark blue heaven of night; with a
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streak of rays streaming down as
distinct as the beams of searchlights upon a humble structure on the edge of
Bethlehem, directing the three camel-mounted Magi to the spot of the Savior’s
nativity, the aura of interest and devotion in the scene is probably not dimmed
or diminished by any roguish consideration that there may be a single
irrational item in the representation. If the current query of American
cleverness--"What is wrong with this picture?"--were put to the card
purchaser, he or she would doubtless be shocked and taken aback to be apprised that
there was anything amiss with it. It must be true as pictured, for it is so
described in the Bible. And of course to those who have been educated to think
of the Bible as a book wherein is inscribed the record of how God turned nature
and its laws upside-down to impress his creature man with his almighty power,
the physical impossibilities in the picture present no mental difficulties. God
simply caused it to happen that way.
But it is a different story when
looked at from the standpoint of reason and natural law. As intimated before,
all that needs to be done to prove that the Bible is not a historical record of
actualities, is to take it at its word and see what you have. It involves the
process of de-romanticizing the narrative and transposing its detail over into
the realm of factual realism. The result is sometimes just inane, but more
frequently is deliciously ludicrous. A rare treat of the latter variety awaits
a realistic probing of the Bethlehem starry portent.
The non-reflective Biblical idealist
might be persuaded under pressure to admit, in the first place, that stars have
been universally known to shine only at night, not very brightly if it is in
moonlight season, and not at all (visibly) if it is cloudy. This detail would
have necessitated traveling only by night for the three Magi. This would put
the star under the awkward necessity of hiding somewhere in the intervening
daylight periods, and holding up its speed of motion or resting, or somehow
"killing the time" until dusk came on, when it would appear again and
announce that it was ready to continue the journey. Otherwise it would get too
far ahead of the camel train to serve as reliable guide. To cover the
eight-hundred miles across the Arabian desert from Persia to Judea it would
have to repeat this daily routine for a month or more, neglecting its ordinary
celestial functions until the miracle of founding Christianity was attended to.
Having landed
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the three men at the feet of the
aureoled babe, it would bid them a grateful adieu and dash off into stellar
normalcy again.
It may be a somewhat more difficult
operation, however, to convince the hypnotized devotee of the miraculous and
the supernatural, that no star--assuming now that it is a real star and not
some hypothecated ignis fatuus of Christian fancy--could by any
possibility become or act as a local guide to a given spot on earth. If there
is any lingering remnant of protest that perhaps it could be done, let anyone
go out under the open sky at night and try to determine at what moment he is
exactly under a particular star, or exactly what spot that star is pointing to.
With this corrective of his idle fancy, let him recall that the earth is
constantly turning under the stars at the rate of over a thousand miles an
hour, or about eighteen miles, roughly, a minute. Any locality thus would be
rushing under the star at about four times the speed of the swiftest airplanes,
and to keep over the desired spot the star itself would have to sweep around on
its orbit at an unthinkable rate of speed. Even if it could shoot downward one
distinct ray to point to the stable in Bethlehem, the latter would in a few
hours turn around from under its finger and disappear on the underside of the
planet. A star can give compass direction and nothing more. It can not be a
local guide.
There has been no end of the
weirdest and most fantastic speculation, much of it given out seriously by
astronomers who should be ashamed, and by religious heads who think such things
are permissible and indeed laudable because piously motivated, as to the
possible actual astronomical nature of the Bethlehem phenomenon. One theory is
that at about that period, or within a hundred years of the date, there was a
conjunction of four, five or six of the planets, making such a bright cluster
that the childish ancient world straightway fell into hysteria and paroxysms of
superstitious fear, standing in awe of some great portent, the Bethlehem babe
being somehow or other announced by the planets in one voice. Another typical
version is that there flared up a mighty comet which aimed straight toward, or
trailed its wispy tail right over, the Judean stable. It is distasteful to be
called upon to emphasize the degree of mental folly necessary to hypostatize
such stupidities, yet the consequences have been so fatal that a final
satirical treatment seems called for. The astronomers and divines who are
heedless enough to permit their names to go under these wild conjectures to
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keep the credulous in line with
"the sacred story," seem to imagine that if they succeed in putting
some unusual luminary in the sky about the year one, they have adequately
explained the legend of the star, and thus substantiated Biblical prestige. It
is not enough merely to have accounted for a star in the heavens; it must be
brought down to earth and made to hover motionless over the cave in Bethlehem!
For Matthew says that "it came and stood over where the young child
was." Imagine a cluster of five or six of our planets, including Jupiter,
which is many times the size of our earth, hanging on the outskirts of
Bethlehem villages and pointing to the stable! No astronomer that ever lived
knows anything about a star that came within a hundred feet of the earth and
stood still there. No star ever known has "stood" anywhere, since all
are rushing at invariable speed along an orbit. Again, the diameter of a star
that could point to a single building of tiny dimensions in a village could not
be twenty to thirty feet at most. The tiniest of the asteroids has a diameter
of some five miles. The only sizable star left that might fulfill the
conditions is a meteor, but no meteor ever led travelers patiently across a
desert and then stood still over a village. As an actual phenomenon, the
"star of Bethlehem" is the most childish absurdity ever perpetrated
by unscrupulous priestcraft upon religiously derationalized humans.
But the story is not only inherently
preposterous; it holds a self-contradiction as well. An amazing and, to the
orthodox view, most disconcerting fact comes to light in an observation that
reveals absolute contradiction between the conventional legend and the Gospel
text. The legend universally has it that Balthasar, Gaspar and Melchior, the
"three Kings of Orient," were Magian astrologers from Persia or
Chaldea, who by stellar or other forecast divined the date of the Messianic
birth. Under the spur of news of such aeonial magnitude, they made the camel
journey across the Arabian desert to greet the divine Messenger in Judea.
According to the best geographies it is safe to say that this is going west on
the map. So the Magi traveled west. But the Gospel story does not agree. It
says they traveled east! For when they came to Herod and informed him of the
purpose of their visit, and frightened him with their oracular prophecy that
the new-born king would unseat him from his throne, they said: "We have
seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him." The star
that appeared and led them till it stood over the birthplace was seen "in
the east." The
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"dodge" out of this
predicament will probably be the reminder that all stars rise in the east and
then "travel" west. The text says nothing to this effect. The plain
implications of the language of the Gospel is that the wise men saw the star in
the east and therefore went there, i.e., to the east, where it indicated the
locality of the Savior’s birth. But popular legend takes them westward.
Something is indeed wrong with this picture.
Mention of these tangled absurdities
was made a few years ago to the leading Episcopalian clergyman in Boston. With
Christmas approaching he introduced matter from the discussion into his next
two Sunday sermons, saying it was obvious that Christians would have to give up
the assumed historicity of this aspect of the Nativity story, and regard it all
as a beautiful allegory. The moral of the incident--and it is a weightier moral
than appears on the surface--lies in the fact that this splendid and liberal
divine had never before sensed the realistic impossibilities of the star’s role
in the Gospel "history." The moral grew still heavier when it
appeared likely that neither had any other minister thought it through. That so
superficially glaring a knot of inconsistencies and physical absurdities should
never have been noticed and commonly taken into account speaks loudly as to the
mental narcotization of the votaries of a religion of blind faith. And the
matter takes on still a graver import when it is considered that a hundred
other constructions in both Old and New Testaments can similarly be reduced to
nonsensical rubbish by the simple process of imaginatively actualizing what is
described as taking place. The story of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt
makes particularly diverting "comic strip" when the details as
narrated in holy writ are realistically reconstructed. Joseph Wheless has
obligingly done this for us in his Is It God’s Word?
The purpose here is not primarily
interpretative, but the challenge will come to us to produce a rational meaning
for the star allegory if it was not a factual verity. It will carry some
credence for the denial if it can be shown that it has another meaning on the
esoteric side that is both clear and acceptable to reason. The explanation is
not difficult. It is simple enough to anyone who has become familiar with
ancient Egyptian symbology. One of the most patent emblems by which the
Egyptians typified the soul as a nucleus of intellectual "fire" was
the star, and the evolutionary descent of the soul into matter, typified
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as earth and water, was allegorized
as the sinking of a star into the earth or ocean with the rotation of the
globe. Soul and star unite in meaning in the Egyptian word Seb, says
Massey. And souls, like the stars, sank periodically into the domain of matter.
A star falling or sinking below the horizon was the typograph of a soul going
down into incarnation in the earth, or into the earthy and watery elements of
the body. The "west" was therefore the typical "region"
where souls went to their "death," or semi-dead condition of
existence under the limitations of matter, in which state they gained a new
life, were reborn at Christmas and finally resurrected at Easter. The soul
that, as a star, had sunk into flesh "on the western horizon of the
sky," rose in its new birth or liberation "on the eastern side of
heaven." Or, putting it a bit differently, the soul that as the aged one
of a previous incarnational cycle, descended anew into matter and body to be
regenerated after "death" and to be reborn as its own son, would show
the light of its star rising in the east. The birth of the Christos then was
the emergence above the eastern horizon of the new Adam resurrected out of the
dying embers of the old. The advent of the Christ principle in man was
therefore mythically embellished by the legend of the star of soul rising in
the east. It was an integral part of the Egyptian and other dramatizations of
the divine Nativity.
The three Wise Men, rather the three
Kings of Wisdom, who attend the appearance of the star are none other than the
three differentiations of the "star" or soul itself, the three
aspects or rays into which it breaks its primal unity when it comes to organic
manifestation in and through a body or instrument. Naturally they would appear
when the "star" of soul has its birth in the east, as they are its
own three aspects raying forth, and they must come with the star. This
illumination of the mind with the true sense of a beautiful allegory is worth
more than a hundred volumes of silly speculation in the effort to make the
"history" of the Jesus life stand up in the face of obvious
irrationality. It is a wholesome relief to know that it is allegory, and to
know also that one’s faith and religion do not have to be supported any longer
on the unstable foundation of the star’s claimed factuality. The star must be
believed if the personal Jesus is to be accepted. Rejected as preposterous on
factual ground, the star can still become a virile aid to spiritual realization
if the Jesus story also is taken as the dramatization of wondrous truth. The
drama, more potently than the "history," was to
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impress this indefeasible veritude
upon the early life of humanity. It represents the genius of the whole ancient
literature, which has been woefully misread because this fundamentum was
ignored.
Less allegorical but equally
fictitious must have been that other item of Nativity accompaniment which is
introduced in order to account for the parents’ visit to the village of
Bethlehem, through which new scriptures were to be made to fulfill
"prophecies" in old ones. This was the alleged decree of Caesar
Augustus "that all the world should be taxed." The first thought that
occurs--to a politician, at least--is that the Romans must have been slow to
rise to their lush opportunities for income if the idea of a tax had not
occurred to them before this! The student of Roman history is pretty well
assured that the Imperial government had not been unduly neglected of the
taxing prerogative of a conquering nation at any time in the Republic’s or the
Empire’s period. But the sum and substance of the story of the Augustus tax is
that there is no official Roman government record of this world-wide levy
anywhere extant or ever known. And the records were well kept at this epoch.
The declaration has been thundered forth from a million pulpits that the Gospel
story of the Christ stands accredited by facts of authentic history. Here is
one of the most salient of such facts, and it is found to be no fact of history
at all. It is more fictitious than any myth. It is untrue, whereas a myth is
brimming with (hidden) truth.
It would not be difficult to amass a
great amount of authors’ data to support the claim as to the fictional nature
of this tax and the Cyrenian (Quirinian) census preparatory to it. But an
authority lies at hand that will be used extensively in this section of the
study, and it is desirable to summon the witness of a defender of the
historical point of view to our side of the discussion. This particular
authority can well be used as representative and typical of hundreds of others,
which can not all be brought forward in evidence. It has been selected out of
scores of "Lives of Jesus" because its handling of many items in the
"life" of the subject is fairer than usual to the realistic or concrete
view, and less haloed with mystic romanticism. The work is The Historical
Life of Christ, by Joseph Warschauer, an eminent European scholar. In the
Preface the author aims to embody in his work the method and theories of
another leading European student, Albert Schweitzer, who in turn has stated
that the ideal "Life" of Christ
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would be one that H. J. Holtzmann
did not write, but should have written. The Warschauer book, therefore, may be
taken as the mouthpiece of a "school" of orthodox thought in
Christianity, confessedly modernistic and liberal, and certainly highly
influential in shaping and formulating present Christian attitudes. It must be
kept in mind throughout that his book is building the case for the
historicity of Jesus.
This writer, then, is quite frank in
admitting that the total silence of history concerning the tax and census in
the reign of Augustus makes such an event highly improbable. He admits the 4
B.C. date of Herod’s death and rightly says that the census would not likely
have been taken in his reign by any Roman authority, since Herod was an
independent ruler and an ally of Rome. A "first census" was
apparently taken about A.D. 6, after the deposition of Herod’s successor
Archelaus, when Judea became part of the Roman province of Syria, under Cyrenius
(Quirinus). This "governor in Syria" mentioned in the Gospel as in
office when the Bethlehem birth occurred, is placed as early as 13-11 B.C. This
dating would change and disarrange whole blocks and chains of evidence
laboriously assembled. Warschauer concedes that if the date of Quirinus was
earlier (than 4 B.C.), the census could not have been conducted under his
supervision. For the census over which Quirinus did preside was carried out in
A.D. 7 and caused the popular revolt alluded to in Acts 5:37, for the
reason that it was the first time that the Jews had been thus levied
upon. And, Warschauer adds, Joseph was a subject of the tetrarch Antipas and
not liable to Roman taxation! Not only that, but the issuance of such an order
would have entailed almost a miniature migration of inhabitants, an unlikely
act of the Roman power. And finally, he adds, even if Joseph’s journey to his
ancestral city can be explained over these difficulties, no unprejudiced mind
would believe that he would have taken with him his wife in her then physical
condition. There is no real or plausible reason for the trip, he asserts,
beyond the literary or legendary necessity of having the Messiah born in
Bethlehem. He even most truly concludes that Luke’s attempt to link the birth of
Jesus with Bethlehem must be regarded as unsuccessful. Yet what must be
considered most remarkable in this connection is that Warschauer’s own correct
vision of the non-historicity of this (and scores of other) events in the
detail of Jesus’ "life" builds no grave doubt in his mind as to the
his-
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toricity of the whole structure.
Childhood indoctrination and traditional prepossession will not yield even to
the forthright evidence of massed opposing data. Jesus must be kept alive in
spite of mountainous evidence.
He is entirely convinced, however,
of the preposterousness of the star’s going ahead of a group of travelers and
resting over a house in a village, saying it belongs to poetry and not to
history. Yet again he gathers no hint from all this that the entire story of
the Gospels might with as sound reason be consigned to the domain of
(spiritual) poetry, and dropped as history. The ingenious explanation of the
presence of an enormous percentage of poetry masquerading as history in the
Gospel narrative is the time-worn claim that in lack of more than the most
meager substratum of real data about the real Jesus, the poetry crept in and
was incorporated through the, as he avers, particular proclivity of the first
and second centuries toward indulging "popular legend." Just as the
Norse elements of the pine tree, mistletoe, Yule log, holly, and other
symbolisms crept into later Christianity, so elements of Greek and other
mythologies became interwoven into the actual background of Jesus-fact. One wonders
how long it will be ere the minds that go so far toward the truth, will not go
the few additional steps to the goal of the full truth--that, far more than
were the first and second centuries, the entire ancient period was transfused
with the spirit of poetic and mythic representation of wisdom, and that the
entire Gospel content was a formulation of this nature, and of immemorial
antiquity. And it must be asked, since the apologists cling to the legend of
much poetry clustering around some solid data, what and where and how
many are those data, that stand as the rock of fact to which the barnacles of
popular fancy have clung. Let Warschauer himself supply this interesting answer
on almost his first page: he says that of this historical personage, to whom oceans
of pious devotion have been poured out and to whom men of every age have turned
as the revelation of God, we must say that we know next to nothing! A work to
prove the historical life of Jesus begins with this admission. But, this is no
deterrent to zeal; in fact, it serves the immediate purpose of enabling him to
say in the same breath that since we know next to nothing about this
extraordinary personage, we therefore know everything! This well matches its
companion gem of Christian logic, the averment of Tertullian that the bases of
Christianity were credible
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because they were impossible. This
proves something else not so creditable to Christianity--that when once the
mind is committed to fanatical obsession, an element contrary to reason becomes
the gauge and standard of proof.
And what is the logic that builds up
the astonishing conclusion that we know everything about Jesus because we know
nothing? The piously sophistical answer is that Jesus’ mind and character have
stamped themselves ineffaceably upon the consciousness of the race. We know him
to have been the kind of man he was because of the kind of impression he has
made upon us. We know him, as it were, by his psychological fruits in our
lives. Again, this is an argument for the psychological efficacy of some
exalted paragon, some hypostatized ideal, and as Warschauer admits, the ideal
was presented to Christian adoration on little or no basis of actual knowledge
whatever. This whole situation is covered by the statement that an ideal
stereotype, the alleged historical Jesus, was held before the Christian
imagination for centuries and naturally produced a psychological reaction
consonant with the character of the figure presented. The psychological effect
says nothing whatever either as to the historicity of the ideal personage or as
to our definite knowledge about him. Once the paragon was dangled before the
devotees, the psychological effect would be registered whether he lived to our
definite knowledge or not. Beyond all refutation Mithra, Bacchus, Sabazius,
Hercules, Izdubar, Marduk and Horus, as types and ideals of divine qualities,
had also stamped the mind and character of ancient civilizations with their
excellence. Yet they were not living persons; no one has even a little
knowledge of their life histories. Portia, Hamlet, Othello, Tiny Tim and
Cinderella have stamped much noble imagery into the life, mind and character of
millions, and are not historical. Writers like Warschauer pooh-pooh the claims
of a mythical foundation for Gospel writing. Yet, when their own admissions of
the elements of impossibility, improbability, poetry and legend that were
interpolated into the meager quantity of material that alone stands as the
history of divinity on earth are added up, there is so little left of credible
solid fact that it is indeed they who are basing a Gospel upon purely mythical
grounds! What is the "historical life of Christ" but a myth if its
historian is compelled to start out with the concession that almost nothing is
known about his subject? It is far better to work with a myth that is true in
the mythical manner, than to deal
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with a myth that pretends to be
history, but is not. The first will at least not deceive you; the second will
both deceive and delude. Advocates of the historicity found their structure of
religion squarely on myth, and the deadly, not the sustaining, kind. The
edifice of historical Christianity is founded on a reputed base of fact which can
be made to stand up only by the endless resort to guess, conjecture, surmise,
supposition, strained probability, the unbelievable proportion of which in the
works of the apologists can only be hinted at here, and the total weakness of
which can be realized only by the reading of scores of volumes that labor at
the task of upholding the historical thesis. Indeed the surest way to enhance a
doubt as to the existence of the living Jesus is to read enough books that
essay to prove it. The instability of the groundwork on which it rests will be
more sharply accentuated with each new reading.
Other features of the Nativity story
engage attention. Warschauer almost puts the case irrevocably in our hands when
he says that there is indeed hardly a single statement among those in which Luke
tells us of the Bethlehem birth that can survive dispassionate scrutiny. He
deals frankly with the Matthew-Luke flat contradictions as to the
Bethlehem-Nazareth birth and residence problem. Matthew represents
Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus, and Nazareth as the adopted home of Mary
and Joseph. But Luke has them residing in Nazareth before the birth of
Jesus. Matthew brings the holy family from Bethlehem to Nazareth, while Luke
moves the parents from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Matthew says nothing
of the journey and enrollment. Luke is silent about the Herod plot and
the flight into Egypt, and has nothing concerning the three Magi, or their
star, or the massacre of the babes. Warschauer resolves the contradictions and
discrepancies on the theory that we are dealing with two traditions which can
not be harmonized. He does not know that the solution of the numerous Gospel
contradictions must be sought further back than two opposing traditions. Nor
does he explain how two irreconcilable traditions arose out of one original
tradition. He does not know that there were more than two divergent versions of
most legendary material and that the mythical representations of many aspects
of the human-divine allegory branched off from one original formulation into
many variations and recensions, in the same way as, supposedly, did language
from one primal stock. Some of the variants can be attributed to copyists’
errors;
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others no doubt to scribal
corrections, emendations, interpolations and forgery.
He notices the Slaughter of the
Innocents and very justly equates it with a great diversity of Greek, Persian
and Syrian "popular legend," in which kings were divinely warned of
danger from their own infant sons. Yet it is to be assumed that Warschauer
would protest the conclusion which a student of comparative religion would feel
legitimately qualified to establish from these premises, that the Herod
slaughter was itself derived from this common stock of pervading myth. It is
time to remark here that the great--the inestimably great--service which Lord
Raglan’s work, The Hero, has performed in clearing up the status of all
this type of speculation is in the fact that it establishes, for the
edification of these Bible analyzers and for all understanding, the truth that
what they term "popular" legend and thus by a mere name brush aside
as of no intrinsic import, was not the upgrowth of popular fancy and therefore
mere superstition of the folk sort, but is all traceable to the one primal religious
ritual-drama, to which must be assigned an authorship of truly Olympian
sapiency. If it can ever be driven home to the seat of theological intelligence
that the whole Christian Bible is just a somewhat specialized collection of the
same stories, myths and allegories as constituted the mythical aggregations of
Greece and other countries, it will mark the day-break of the new and true
light on Biblical exegesis.
The role of the shepherds in the
fields by night, the blinding flood of light, the celestial heralding of the
advent, the proclamation of the glad tidings of great joy, are all likewise
found by Warschauer to parallel similar features of the Mithra, the Dionysus,
even the Augustus cycles of legends. The flight into Egypt is seen to be
matched by a similar episode in several mythological quarters. The
"stable" is admitted to be a "cave" in second century
stories. The great Christian doctrine of the virgin birth is treated with
sanity, as being akin to a series of divine progenations of both Greek and Old
Testament heroes. In the Hebrew scriptures we have stories of the
"wondrous births" in connection with Isaac, Samson and Samuel. The
Talmudic Moses has a virgin mother; Samuel’s mother became pregnant after
receiving divine seed; Zipporah was found by Moses pregnant, but by no mortal
man. Tamar became pregnant by an infusion of divine seed and Isaac was not the
result of generation, but of the shaping of the unbegotten. On the
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Greek side not only were the heroes
of legend, Herakles, Theseus, Perseus, Jason and others believed to be the sons
of divine fathers and human mothers, but the same legend reached down even to
historical figures like Pythagoras and Plato, both of whom were "Sons of
Apollo," the first by Parthenis--which Warschauer remarks sounds most
intriguingly suggestive of parthenogenesis, or "virgin birth,"--the
second by Periktione. It ought to be observed that the clue here noticed by
Warschauer is fundamentally of far more significance in pointing the way to the
truth than volumes of the blind speculation indulged in by students who flout
the claims for the mythical origin of Bible material.
One encounters the frequent
assertion that the Christians adopted many pagan myths and brought them from
meaningless superstition to relevant intelligibility by weaving into them a new
and worthy meaning. With an appearance of plausibility in a few cases, this
ruse has been employed in many books as one of the numberless big and little
sophistries that have served to maintain the legend of Christian superiority
and pagan depravity. Needless to say, this is not true. Indeed the true lies
the other way around. It was the exoteric folly of Christians that took the
many high typifications of spiritual and cosmic knowledge and warped them out
of all semblance of any truth, either esoteric or exoteric. Warschauer indulges
in this unworthy subterfuge in several instances.
Short shrift is made of the genealogies by this author. First the difference between the two lists as given by Matthew and Luke is noted. They are hopelessly irreconcilable, he agrees. Then the inevitable necessity of the Messiah’s being proclaimed as of King David’s line, in order that "prophecy" might again be fulfilled, is set forth. He must be of Davidic descent and of Bethlehem birth. But the notable feature of the genealogies, in Warschauer’s estimation, is the fact that both lists trace the Davidic descent through the mother’s husband, who was not Jesus’ father, but was only his foster-father. (Massey shows the identity of Jo