Shadow of the Third Century
A Revaluation of Christianity
BY
ALVIN BOYD KUHN, PH. D.
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Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn's unpublished autobiography, Great Pan Returns.
"...the tyranny exercised over the human mind in the name of
religion."--H. H. MILMAN, The History of Christianity (page 461).
"From the very beginning it was a tradition of faith. . . . In
all strictness the Gospels are not historical documents. They are
catechisms for use in common worship . . . that and no other is
the content they announce; that and no other is the quality they
claim."-- ALFRED LOISY, The Birth of the Christian Religion
(p. 12).
[1949]
TO
ALL THOSE
WHO KNOW THAT TRUTH
ALONE WILL FREE US FROM THE
TYRANNY OF INDOCTRINATED PIOUS OBSESSIONS
THIS
VOLUME IS
SINCERELY DEDICATED
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. PRIMEVAL CHRISTIANITY
II. THE SHADOW OF THE SPHINX
III. WHEN VISION FAILED
IV. THE VEILED LIGHT
V. WISDOM IN A MYSTERY
VI. MILK FOR BABES
VII. NIGHTFALL
VIII. HATRED OF PHILOSOPHY
IX. FROM RELIGION TO PHILOSOPHY
X. TO FAITH ADD KNOWLEDGE
XI. THE GREAT EBB-TIDE
XII. CRUMBS FROM THE TABLE OF THE GODS
XIII. WISDOM IS MUTE
XIV. THE MYTH-GHOSTS WALK ABROAD
XV. PAUL KNOWS NOT JESUS
XVI. GREAT PAN IS DEAD
XVII. THE REAL GHOST OF HISTORY
XVIII. "HIGHER" CRITICISM
XIX. THEN IS OUR FAITH VAIN
XX. DEMENTIA IN EXCELSIS
XXI. PRAYER AND HEALING
XXII. THE NIGHT IS LONG
INDEX
PREFACE
In the mountains of
Some years before that the author saw the cinema dealing with the Easter (rather pre-Easter) rites of the Penitentes, or Flagellantes in New Mexico, in which on Good Friday they marched up to a hilltop lashing each the one in front with knotted ropes upon bare backs, to a cross on which a victim in human form was savagely put through an ordeal simulating the crucifixion and well-nigh actually murdered. The reflections of the beholder of this eccentric monstrosity of religious pietism were centered upon the agency that could have brought to birth in normally sensible human beings such outlandish and insufferable perversions of religious motivation. Obviously it was a product of the Christian religion, for every motive and feature in it sprang from a Christian principle or practice. What should one think about a religion that could generate such appalling prodigies of fanaticism?
Back in 1837 there broke out in New England and spread west as far as Ohio a
wave of religious frenzy that threw the land into a furore of excitement and
swept people into its maelstrom of insane force like leaves in an autumn gale.
It originated in a single bit, or several bits, of calculation based on a
literal interpretation of figures in the Bible by a rather fine young
vii
at
When the night passed calmly and dawn broke the deluded fanatics were left deflated. Miller scratched his head, and also scratched pencil again on paper, with the result that he announced that he had made a miscalculation, and that the final day of earth was to fall on the succeeding October fifteenth. The pitiable farce was again gone through. Then Miller and his chief aides quarreled over who was to blame; and one more dire instance of the derationalizing power of the religion known as Christianity, taking its Holy Scriptures as literal historical record, had grievously marked its dark blot on the stained pages of world history.
Not a century since at least the tenth A.D. but has heard the lusty
preachment of the repeated claims that events then transpiring were the literal
fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy, to which the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries have added the prophecies alleged to be indicated by measured
dimensions in the halls, corridors, chambers, passages and stairways in the
great pyramid of Gizeh. This rage is upon the world with more abandon and
fanaticism in this twentieth century than ever before, and probably has
materially influenced international movements, particularly in
A schoolgirl in this
viii
parents that her teacher in the public schools had asked her to take her turn reading the prescribed ten verses from the Scriptures in the day's opening exercises, and handed her an edition of the Bible that was a non-Catholic one. The parents, Roman Catholics, were so incensed at the thought of a Protestant Bible having touched the hands of their child that they visited the teacher, poured out their indignant feelings upon her and laid complaint with the School Superintendent. This sample of narrow bigotry is also a product of the religion called Christianity.
And so, stated simply, this book has been written to tell the truth about a religion that has produced such obviously irrational behavior. The story needs telling all the more for the reason that it has never been told in its bald straight factual truth, and because heaven and earth have been called upon to prevent its being known ever since the third century. It is in the main truth that has been suppressed, buried, its evidences destroyed, its documents changed, with a story far other than the true one substituted in its place and promulgated with every device of propaganda. It aims to take its place as the true history of the origin and spread of what has been named the Christian religion.
It is eminently desirable to say at once, before its first page is read, that the work is not an attack upon Christianity. So far from being hostile to Christianity, it is in all likelihood the first book in centuries that is written in support and defense of Christianity, striking forceful blows at every influence inimical to Christianity. It stands unqualifiedly as the courageous champion and crusader for Christianity, a Christianity that is so sorely needed at the present epoch to save a still savage world.
In spite of this protestation the essay will sound to many like the most scathing denunciation and blaspheming of what they have believed to be Christianity they have ever read. Many will lay the book down with the indignant query whether the author has never been able to see a single item of good in the whole long history of the faith. It is admitted here that emphasis in the work has been placed upon the idiosyncrasies, foibles, follies, cruelties, fallacies, impostures and falsities, the horrifying list of evils that are an integral part of the record, and are not denied. The intrinsic and sincere reason for this accentuation is the consideration that while it is assuredly not the whole story, it is that part of the story which has to be known if any true evaluation of the place, function and further utility of this religion is to be appraised in the modern generation for future history. If a tool of
ix
culture is not known thoroughly it will not be used skilfully. The truth of the Christian religion is not and can not be known unless that truth is known in its organic wholeness.
It has to be asserted here that one who thinks he has the true history of the Christian religion, but does not know what is here revealed for the first time, is sadly in error. What happened to Christianity and in Christianity in those two direful centuries, the third and fourth, is not only an essential part of the whole story of Christian history; it is in fact the indispensable key to any right understanding of the entire history. It is a daring venture to assert that the full truth about Christianity's rise and spread has never yet been told, and that a given work makes that disclosure for the first time. This work risks that venture. It is the key to the last two thousand years of world history.
As to the other side of the story--the good which it is claimed to have done in the world--let it be said once and categorically in this Preface, so that it need not be reiterated at every new turn throughout the whole book, that Christianity has wrought much of what we believe we can call "good" in its history. Since it has ruled the world of the West for sixteen hundred years, and automatically numbered among its adherents practically all the greater characters in European and American history, a religion numbering in its following such a body of high-minded people could not help but contribute much "good" to general society. If any religion has in its enrollment strong spiritual characters, or masses of commonly decent people, along with rogues, it will register a good influence. Even a bad religion can not utterly corrupt upright people. And even evil itself invariably generates incidental good, unintended good, thrown off as a by-product by evil action. The very perpetrator of evil learns something, if only by his punishment or through his conscience. So it is put down here in indisputable terms: Christianity has caused, registered, produced or generated much good in the world.
What is insisted upon, however, is that a view which is blinded to see only good in this faith is an unbalanced and hence an untrue view. The work is undertaken in its main purpose to disabuse the general mind of a host of prepossessions and conventional notions about Christianity which are simply not true. And it is in the pursuit of this laudable objective, as part of the effort to fight a battle for Christianity that we are under the necessity of republishing what to many will, regrettably, seem like a virulent assault upon Christianity itself. Even at that many readers will for a time at least feel that we are
x
pursuing the paradoxical course of trying to build up Christianity by knocking it down. It must be seen, however, that what we are building up is Christianity, and what we are knocking down is something else that for the good of mankind sorely needs to be stricken down.
The work sets out to prove that what has passed under the name of Christianity is not and really has never been Christianity at all. The thing accepted for Christianity has turned out to be something else very unlike it, a frightfully deceptive false substitution. Thousands have found it in every age unacceptable, repelling, repugnant to every instinct of logic and sanity. Among those who have found it inhospitable and insufferable to their natural instincts of both reason and good were Emerson, Lincoln and Edison, in the American scene. Now, as in the days of its foundation it is, as a popular religion, maintained by the less intelligent majority and disdained by the truly learned and intelligent, who sanction it in a patronizing way as being good for the ignorant, but hardly adequate for themselves. Its popular vogue is deemed useful to the orderly status of society, as it tends to hold the masses to a tolerable measure of self-restraint from criminality and a fair level of human decency.
No apology, but a word in extenuation of the presentation of so large a quantity of quoted material is in order. The citation of a hundred passages from authors and historians was absolutely imperative in the case of a work which takes a stand on nearly every point in radical opposition to all conventionally accepted beliefs. A position that flies so directly in the face of all general opinion must call to its support the weight of a formidable array of authority. Only by marshaling the evidence in fairly impressive volume and quality can the real strength of the case be demonstrated. The material cited is at any rate a republication of data which are vital and valuable in themselves and should be more generally known. It is a part of the truth which so badly needs republication at this time.
The author wishes to repudiate the suggestion that he is inspired by a hostile animus against Christianity. He confesses to a natural "animus" against bigotry, superstition, narrow hatreds, persecution, tyranny, war, murder, slaughter, lying and sickening hypocrisy, the more so when they are perpetrated in the name and under the disguise of "holy religion." Since Christian history is in the main a record of these horrible things, he is free to express his dislike of them. But these things are no part of a true Christianity, and so it can not be charged that he is prejudiced against that which is true Christianity.
xi
It needs only to be said that if he has filled his volume with material that sounds scurrilous in ordinary Christian ears, he has not invented the data, but taken it nearly all from Christian writers! Nothing he has said is really half as virulent as the statements of the Christian apologists themselves. He has refrained from using language to characterize the evils of Christianity as brutally frank and realistic as he finds the historians of the religion themselves using. Let it be remembered that he has made only the scantiest reference to the unspeakable horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, when the love of Christ in Christian hearts drove the ecclesiastics to tear limbs from quivering bodies or burn them at the stake, for conscientious conviction of honest truth-seeking. A thousand pages could be added to the record of the profligacy of the priesthood, the forgery of documents, the immorality of the clergy and laity, the economic subjugation of the peasants under churchly feudal land ownership, the never-flagging draining of money from the poor and the abuses which drove at last the northern half of Europe out of the fold in rebellion. The work is not an effort to stigmatize Christianity as it could be stigmatized, but an attempt to rewrite the history of its upbuilding on false bases, to delineate the nature of its falsification of the truth and its utter misinterpretation of its Scriptures, and then to trace the evil psychological consequences of this warping of mind on the life of the West. In the prosecution of this intent it became necessary in an incidental way to introduce a meager portion of the truly horrendous data of Christianity's record of evil influence.
It is distinctly and directly avowed that the book itself, and more particularly its strictures on religion as an influence less beneficent than philosophy, have been launched with not the remotest reference to the world's political situation at the time of writing, when supreme world conflict is being waged between two great groups, the one bent on suppressing religion, the other standing on a religious platform entirely. Odd as it may seem, the book has not been motivated by any agreement with, allegiance to or support of the party hostile to religion. The position taken is in no sense opposed to religion per se; it only holds that religion divorced from philosophy is inadequate to man's highest needs and will prove a treacherous and eventually dangerous guide in life. The writer stands for religion sanified and stabilized, intellectually enlightened, by philosophy and science. He stands against the use of religion to hypnotize the masses. He dislikes the religion of ignorance, when honest priestly leadership could so easily make it
xii
a religion of intelligence. The international implications of the analysis must be considered by those wise enough to discern their proper relevance. This may be said of any worth-while work on philosophy or religion. It is in no sense a propaganda work, but a challenge to general intelligence.
The effort has been made to eliminate footnotes entirely, the sources of the many citations being inserted in the text itself. It is desirable to say, however, that in many places in the work the author has openly stated, or possibly hinted, that many points, problems, questions and mysteries formerly or still baffling the world of religious scholarship, have found resolution in clear light. Particularly where it was asserted that the secret esoteric science of interpreting Scriptures composed in the ancient arcane language of symbolism had been rehabilitated and a reinterpretation of the Scriptures had been made on the basis of this new insight, the statements standing without further elucidation will naturally arouse inquiry and provoke challenge. To meet this inquiry and challenge, it simply needs to be said that the material which will be found to support the hints made in this respect has already been published in the author's earlier work, The Lost Light, or perhaps in its companion study, Who Is This King of Glory? The present work often alludes to the error of interpreting the Scriptures literally and historically, and gives the reader to understand that they can be and now have been interpreted properly on the purely allegorical and mythical basis. Obviously every scholar and every intelligent reader will bristle to this epochal statement and demand that we produce this product of might and magic, or reveal where it has been done. It has been done in The Lost Light and Who Is This King of Glory? We could not keep interjecting this information throughout the course of the book. So it is given here.
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THE PATH TO THE GATE
"The vice of a soul is ignorance; the virtue of a soul is knowledge."--HERMES.
"I do not see any sin in the world, but I see a great deal of ignorance."--GEORGE SAND.
"It is also acknowledged that ignorance and delusion in regard to the gods is irreligiousness and impurity, and that the superior knowledge in respect to them is holy and helpful: the former being the darkness of ignorance in regard to the things revered and beautiful, and the latter the light of knowledge. The former condition will cause human beings to be beset with every form of evil through ignorance and recklessness, but the latter is the source of everything beneficial."--IAMBLICHUS, The Egyptian Mysteries (p. 13).
"Now had commenced what may be called, neither unreasonably nor unwarrantably, the mythic age of Christianity. As Christianity worked downward into the lower classes of society, as it received the rude and ignorant barbarians within its pale, the general effect could not but be that the age would drag down the religion to its level, rather than the religion elevate the age to its own lofty standard."--DEAN H. H. MILMAN, The History of Christianity (p. 500).
These are a few excerpts culled from a collection that could fill pages and they may prepare the mind of the reader for what is to come in the body of the essay. Dean Milman's history of Christianity is a particularly sound and sane evaluation of the influences that engendered and conditioned Christianity throughout. If what he says here is true, the position and conclusions of the work here presented must be conceded to rest on highly accredited and substantial foundations. For, in substance, the contention of our work is that Christianity evolved and took historical form as the result of a corruption of high wisdom already extant, and not as the promulgation of new light and wisdom previously unknown. There is solid ground for the thesis that the religion which can be successfully foisted upon popular acceptance is never anything but the corruption of more exalted understanding and truer wisdom. Baldly stated, the thesis here to be vindicated is that
xv
Christianity only gained the favor and held the allegiance of the masses of the populations of the West for centuries because it succeeded in accommodating its message to the prevalent levels of general unintelligence. In doing so it inevitably distorted its truths into ludicrous caricature and baneful forms of error and falsehood.
xvi
CHAPTER 1
PRIMEVAL CHRISTIANITY
Voltaire once remarked that it might be a very fine thing if
It is suggested here that the philosopher would have made a far more
pertinent observation if he had said that it might be well if
"There is no such thing as a religion called 'Christianity'--there never has been such a religion. There is and always has been the Church."--Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies, p. 246.
If these assertions embody substantial truth, the obvious inference must be that the West, while under the illusion that it possessed and
1
even implemented Christianity, in reality possessed something else that was believed to be Christianity, but was not. Its highly vaunted religion bore the name of Christianity, but strictly was at no time real Christianity. That grandiose system which it presented and promulgated under the name of Christianity was at best but a feeble, nay even a wretched caricature of the real structure that the name connoted. What is now to be expressed for the first time in all the history of religious disputation is that this assumed corpus of cultural influence was at no time truly Christian at all. It carried the name and it enacted the presumptive role which the name prefigured. But it was not Christianity. It was something else. What that other thing was it will be the burden of this work to announce clearly and unequivocally.
The prime purpose of the essay, it must be uncompromisingly asserted, is therefore to redeem Christianity from the onus of every kind and degree and weight of obloquy, disfavor, rejection, neglect, scorn, hatred, misrepresentation and denunciation to which it has been subjected by virtue of its mishandling by the parties that so falsely caricatured it in posing as its advocates, champions and sainted heads. The aim is to so restate the true character and message of Christianity that such a virulent denunciation as that leveled at it by the German philosopher Nietzsche will be totally disarmed of its force and pertinence and rendered innocuous by being shown to be utterly wide of the mark of truth. If the object in view is measurably achieved, the result will be the exoneration of Christianity from the entire mass of opprobrium loaded upon it by the irreligious, the atheists, freethinkers, secularists, the profane of every ilk. The objective, admittedly ambitious and daring, is to rehabilitate Christianity in its pristine virtue and splendor and thus to vindicate it against the violence of attack and volume of discredit which it suffered through the ignorant zealotry of those proclaiming themselves its friends, as well as from the frontal hostility of those openly declaring themselves its defamers. The high design is to restate the system that alone has just claim to the name of Christianity and to demonstrate by contrast its superiority and magnificence as over against that hetero-Christianity which by one of the most amazing demarches of all history, came to masquerade in its vestments and under its name. It is desired to establish the extraordinary fact that the system of proclaimed faith and dogma, ceremonial and government, historically known as Christianity never has been real Christianity at all. If the project is measurably successful the very desirable object will have been attained of showing that the volume of attack
2
that has been at times heavy and damaging has fallen out of bounds, since it was never leveled against true Christianity but hit hard against a pseudo-Christianity that for the most part richly merited the obloquy thus poured upon it. The blows of attack fell upon the masquerading system which, while it was never Christianity, yet stood disguised as such and therefore in line to receive the brunt of many assaults of hostile forces.
The gist of what will constitute the introductory datum is to be found expressed with wholly unexpected frankness and conclusiveness in a statement of the sainted Augustine, who has often been given the title of "Founder of Christian Theology." This citation from his writings virtually could stand as the "golden text" of our work, as it is a concise epitome and summary of the central theme. Its reproduction in this connection and at this juncture of world affairs could well become the solvent of most of the tragic misunderstandings responsible for the present world confusion. It will stand in the present work as the firing of the opening gun in a battle that will be waged from now on to unseat from its throne of power in the domain of mass consciousness that weird and fantastic delusion of literalized and historicized Scriptural myths which has steeped the minds of untold millions in doltish superstition over so many centuries under the name of Christianity. It is by no means an indulgence in extravagant fancy to assert that it is world-shaking in its implications. Here it is:
"That which is known as the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist; from the very beginning of the human race until the time when Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which already existed, began to be called Christianity."---Retractt. I, xiii.
This astonishing declaration was made in the early fourth century of our era. It can be asserted with little chance of refutation that if this affirmation of the pious Augustine had not sunk out of sight, but had been kept in open view through the period of Western history, the whole course of that history would have been vastly altered for the better. It is only too likely the case that the obvious implications of the passage were of such a nature that its open exploitation was designedly frowned upon by the ecclesiastical authorities in every age. It held the kernel of a great truth the common knowledge of which would have been a stumbling-block in the way of the perpetuation of priestly power over the general Christian mind. It would have provoked inquiry and disarmed the ecclesiastical prestige of much of its power.
3
For what is it that the Christian saint actually says? It stands as hardly less than a point-blank repudiation of all the chief asseverations on which the structure of Christian religion rests. Every child born to Christian parents in eighteen centuries has been indoctrinated with the unqualified belief that Christianity was a completely new, and the first true, religion in world history; that it was vouchsafed to the world from God himself and brought to earth by the sole divine emissary ever commissioned to convey God's truth to mankind; that it flashed out amid the lingering murks of Pagan darkness as the first ray of true light to illumine the pathway of evolution for the safe treading of human feet. All previous religion was the superstitious product of primitive childishness of mind. Christianity was the first piercing of the long night of black heathenism by that benignant gift of God.
Augustine shatters this illusion and this jealously preserved phantom of
blind credulity. From remotest antiquity, he asserts, there has always existed
in the world the true religion. It illuminated the intellects of the most
ancient Sages, Prophets, Priests and Kings. It built the foundation for every
national religion, whose tenets consisted of reformulations of its ubiquitous
ageless principles of knowledge and wisdom. It went under a variety of
designations: Hermeticism in ancient
4
ment of all true religion, the Christos--Christianity. It was as if he said: this sublime religion has existed in the world from the beginning; it has borne many names and been exploited in varied forms. But it is our merit that we at last have given it the highest name it ever bore, Christianity, the religion of the Christos, the divine principle in all men.
So thought the devout saint in the fourth century. True was his statement--in part. For alas! and again alas! the newly promulgated religion into which he had gravitated, that had indeed drawn every single item of its theology and its ritual, of its symbols and its festivals, from that antique code, had already, even as he wrote, so far lost or perverted every facet of that ancient light that it stood as a grotesque caricature, indeed even a flat inversion, of the resplendent system of archaic truth. In fact the movement which he was helping to start on its course, and which he called the "true" religion, "already" existent, was farther from being a continuation of that extolled earlier heritage than almost any other reformulation of it known to history, the direst and most tragic corruption of it in all the ages. Indeed, had he really possessed the full and profound rudiments of that earlier lore, he would have been keenly aware that the new development he was so unctuously leading, so far from being a straight perpetuation of that great tradition, was almost its total negation and obliteration. He would have known that, instead of being a new presentation and revivification of that venerable wisdom-lore, the cult of his espousal was even then the surety of its death. Before he himself passed off the scene, in the late fourth century, the religion of his fervent love had already devastated the structure and prostituted the venerated message of that antecedent cultus, leaving it a meaningless jargon of inscrutable creeds, empty formularies, uncomprehended rituals and Scriptural books, over which it was doomed to wrangle in witless futility but fierce venom of theological disputation for two full centuries and to settle finally into a truce without peace that has lingered on in silent but smoldering hatred of parties ever since.
Had the great saint who fled to God on the rebound from his youthful excesses of passions of the flesh, ever fully opened his eyes to the significance of what he was promulgating with such hot passion of his soul, he would not have failed to see that the new wave of religionism had little right to the august Hellenic name which it had laid hold on, and which it had already degraded. He might have known that his new cult, so far from republishing and reanimating that ancient tradi-
5
tion of sacred philosophy, was destined to smother and virtually extinguish
that very fire of living truth, which half in discernment and half in blindness
he so sweepingly claimed to be the content and corpus of the new faith that
For with the hatred of books, learning and philosophy already in full swing, the fell hostility of the new popular evangelism to anything savoring of culture and erudition had already swept out the arcane literature, and its frenzied course had not stopped until it had sent up in flames the most precious collection of books in the world at any time--the great Alexandrian library. Nay, even beyond that its furious besom swept on to the obliteration of all past heritage in the final act of closing out the last of the great Platonic Academies in the Hellenic world. And with this gesture of insolent triumph in the desolation of golden truth it could not itself comprehend, it extinguished the last candle-flicker of a luminous torch of wisdom-knowledge that had been kept steadily and brightly burning in brotherhoods of cultured students for the guidance of the race from most archaic times.
After Justinian's order to close up the last Platonic school in the sixth century came the Dark Ages. And this period of benightedness, be it observed, extended precisely over the area covered by the spread of this spurious faith, and continued to throw its pall of ignorance and gloom upon this part of the world during the time of its dominance. Carrying its own darkness with it as it went, it yet has had the incredible effrontery to call itself the light of the world, and to charge other cultures with generating the forces of darkness. The antecedent religions which it supplanted in northern Europe in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, the Celtic, the Druidic, the Teutonic and Norse, all in turn suffered the extinction of the ancient gleam of true philosophy which these nations and civilizations still cherished, when the devastating hand of fanatical pietism closed upon and crushed them. When the lurid persuasions of frenzied ignorance imagine themselves
6
to be the benignant light, all true light must hide itself till the black fury has swept past. For never can darkness comprehend the light. And still the shadows linger and the West still gropes in worse than half-darkness to find its pathway to blessedness.
A thousand volumes stand on library shelves bearing the titles of histories of primitive Christianity, the origins of Christianity, the formative influences in the Christian movement and the general narrative of the rise and growth to world power of this "Christian" religion. But this work will advance the thesis that flouts nearly every word in all those books in its direct asseveration that neither the history of Christianity as Augustine envisaged it nor that of the Christian movement has ever yet been written. Histories stand on the shelves, but nowhere yet has the true history appeared. It has virtually never been known; it is still buried in the wrack and debris of the past. There parades in its stead the library of tomes purporting to be that history, but they miss the mark of truth by many a league. Every volume of it is based on a mass of unfounded assumption, weirdly travestied misstatements of old truth and uncouth perversion of exalted wisdom. It is an incredible melange of misconception and misrepresentation, adding up in the end virtually to outright falsehood. Every history of Christianity has missed the real truth of its subject, and the field is thus open for this work to present as much of that truth as it is possible to crowd into the space of a single volume. All salvation from world ills of the present awaits the first writing of this true history of Christianity. It should mark a distinct epoch in world annals. It is enough of penance and karmic retribution for half the world to have had to pay the huge penalty of nearly two thousand years of injurious ignorance, with its long train of deleterious consequences, for having been denied the true knowledge of the influences that so misshaped its life over many centuries. And not until this incubus of wretched error and arrant superstition is lifted off the common mind of the great West will there be the possibility of an advance to freer life on a higher level.
Every attempt to write Christian history hitherto has been doomed to miscarriage from the start by its being based on presuppositions and acceptances not a single one of which could be certified as veridical truth, but all of which in the total amounted to a nearly complete tangle of falsehood. It has been constructed and still rests on an insecure and untenable platform of fiction, fantasy and falsity. So blunt and challenging a statement could not be made unless the all-sufficient
7
data were at hand to support it. This corroboration will be furnished in the body of the work. That it has not been discerned, evaluated at its supreme worth and assembled before is the most damaging evidence to the stultifying force of fifteen centuries of Christian influence, and the heinous attestation of the blindness of general religious research.
Every historian of Christianity has approached his task with mind firmly set to rationalize a host of traditional conceptions which he had never had the acumen to see were themselves but the fictionalized formulations of the very movement that he essayed to delineate. His objective vision was from the start beclouded and wrongly focused on its theme through being conditioned by the very aberrations of view which the movement he set out to historicize had afflicted him with and thus vitiated his effort to envisage it correctly. He lacked the insight to correct these basic maladjustments of view before using them as lenses through which to get the properly focused picture. In short he used the glass of a badly distorted perspective supplied to him by the very movement which had created such an instrument for the conscious purpose of preventing its true picture from being seen. The rules and standards by which he presumed to judge and appraise--and applaud--Christianity were those narrow presuppositions, claims, assertions and predilections, not to say prejudices and jealousies, which were generated within the sphere of motivations which produced Christianity itself, and which wholly lacked the balance and true perspective to afford the historian the proper criterion of appraisal. The norms and standards of Christian criticism, when applied to a comparative evaluation of this system with others, have ever been found narrow, insular, in short disastrously bigoted and sectarian. It has remained for three centuries of nearly futile Christian missionary effort--itself motivated by an egregious sense of superiority--and the late acceleration of world communication, bringing distant peoples in closer touch and thus breaking down old barriers of misunderstanding, to open the eyes of discerning Christians to the provincial insufficiency of their traditional belief in Christianity's unique status of excellence and to reveal the shortsightedness of their norms of judgment.
The time is therefore ripe for the rectification of all the misjudgment that has gone into the inditing of the rows of books on Christian history. How could that history be fair, true and honest when its very bases, its fundamental theses, were weakened by error and mired in misconceptions? There is actually sufficient ground to warrant the
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statement that every thesis upon which the conventional historian rested his judgments and his interpretations was false and erroneous. Hardly any argument advanced for the glory of Christianity could stand on material true as fact. Perhaps no other religion has ever come so near to being based wholly on fiction, fancy and lurid imagination. Allan Upward goes so far in one of his books as to assert that Christianity has the unique and unenviable distinction of being founded completely on a web of falsehoods. If this be demerited as a snap judgment, what is to be made of the sincere verdict of a capable and fair-minded scholar like Gerald Massey, who was forced to an equally harsh conclusion as the result of forty years of assiduous and intelligent research in the Egyptian backgrounds of Christianity, every item of his "bias" being generated by data before which his mind had to bend in the direction of truth? And many another investigator, who was able finally to wrench his mind free from the suffocating hypnosis of age-old tradition, which exalted and condoned everything Christian and deprecated everything Pagan, has been overwhelmingly persuaded that what has been put forth uninterruptedly over eighteen centuries as the truth about the faith stands at gross variance from what he reads in the actual account. He sees that there has been uniform and prolonged deception, hiding of the record and subterfuge. If he will be at pains to pursue his researches to the limit of assiduity and persistence, he will be further awakened to the painful realization that, with one story standing on the record, quite another has been foisted on the world. If the history reader's integrity of critical judgment can hold fast and his sense of true values remain uncorrupted, he will eventually be unable to escape the inquiry why in this instance the true history of a movement acclaimed to be the greatest in earthly annals has stood on the books as one thing of a certain character, but has come out to the public as something radically different. And he will finally have to yield to the disquieting conviction that this has not happened by sheer natural tendency, but that it has been a development that took its course under the imposition of a pressure whose force must be reckoned as little less than titanic. And unpleasantly the accumulation of reflections on the extraordinary circumstance will bring him face to face with the long deferred but at last unescapable conclusion that the universal popular rating and estimate of Christian history has been designedly promulgated and perpetuated through what he is constrained to characterize in the end as deliberate and conscious conspiracy.
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Only when the process of enlightenment on this exceptional phenomenon in world history has reached its culmination in established conviction is the investigator so far freed from the trammels of conventional studentship and prejudiced postures of understanding that he can orient his mind to the position of detachment necessary to undertake a dispassionate examination of the history in question. In one degree or another this reorientation of approach, conditioned to the peculiarities of the problem, is a necessary operation preliminary to this particular study. In hardly any other case is it so completely a necessity as in the investigation of the genesis and career of Christianity. For here in most extraordinary measure this preliminary conditioning of mind provides the only resource for unearthing the full truth in the story. Unless the student begins by divesting himself of the unconscious obsession of the mass of allegations, persuasions and indoctrinations in the shadow of which all Christian history has been fashioned and colored, and begins to subject to criticism that body of predilections itself, he is doomed to fail in his quest. Indeed so-called Christian history amounts in the bulk to little more than the flaunting of these same chosen asseverations, since that history has had little other aim than to vindicate these persuasions.
The reviewer of a book on religion by Profs. Frieze and Schneider of Columbia University in the New York Times some years ago frankly expressed his skepticism about the value of such compilations of tribal custom, belief and ritual until some one could come along and give us some interior light on the basic significance of all such things on a world pattern of common meaning, adding that such a compendium was now badly needed in view of the fact that still, as in his school days, the study of comparative religion in the colleges and seminaries was only utilized as the occasion and excuse for orthodox apologists to impale ever deeper on the student mind the claimed superiority of Christianity over all other cults. This was a sagacious observation, amounting in essence to a charge that Christian studentship had never subjected world faiths to a fair and adequate comparative evaluation. This again is to say that Christian protagonists posed as trying other religions before a prejudiced judge and a conditioned jury and under the terms of a code of values expressly framed to exalt its own system and deprecate every other.
The present epoch may well be marked in history as notable for its bringing to an end this farcical exhibition of the narrowness of mind to which factional religion can reduce its devotees. From roughly about
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1930 the bars of bigotry were so far let down that Christian universities began to admit the actual scrutiny of Oriental religions into their classrooms and to give courses on such religions that were not quite the travesty they had been in all previous time. Ancient and Oriental, even tribal religion, is being given something resembling an honest investigation and its values are being assessed on a more realistic basis of fairness. Occasional tribute of high spiritual merit and quality is accorded these non-Christian religions by Christian leaders and publicists. But these gestures are still accompanied, if not motivated, by a noticeable spirit of condescension, as exhibiting something in the way of a superior's gracious and magnanimous tolerance.
The claim that the true history of the genesis of Christianity has never yet been written is founded squarely on the demonstrable fact that the numberless accounts purporting to be such true histories of the movement have blinked, ignored, missed and suppressed the most significant data in the case. In all cases the essential relevance of the data was missed because all but a few of the historians were totally ignorant of the relation between Christianity and antecedent religious influences, most particularly those stemming from ancient Egypt, in the light and bearing of which alone a true account could be framed.
It is perhaps no overstatement at all to assert that no history has ever been written less objectively than that of the Christian movement. It has been not only colored, but actually constituted by subjective elements at every turn. From the very start facts were ignored and disdained, or twisted into false shape for partisan purposes. Ancient documents of great significance were misconstrued, tampered with and mutilated, and always wholly misconceived as to their real import. Other documents were piously fabricated out of pure fancy and foisted upon the gullible as true narrative of holy event. And finally every interpretation was rendered in strict and unfailing accord with a monstrous bias of fanatical religionism generated in heavy ignorance. This statement, which will be reprobated as false and rejected as the mere venting of a violent hostility to Christianity, will be found confessed and reiterated in work after work of the cult's own authorities. If it kindles resentment it will only be because current belief has been left uninformed by a tacit conspiracy, and the few students who do encounter the unpleasant data shrug their shoulders--for the good of the faith and the faithful.
Whatever there is of sinister character in this situation lies in the fact that the general mass of the people have been and still are kept
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in deep ignorance of the truth of the history of their own faith. A conspiracy of silence provides its own ground for an active suspicion of its motive. Things true, honest and honorable have no reason to fear knowledge. Christian clergymen seldom--indeed as regards certain chapters of their ecclesiastical history, never--preach or reach the truth as their own books present it. The sinister element inheres in this secrecy, which has been cast like a dread shroud over the period of Christian beginnings. Generally a noble institution takes pride in commemorating its origins, heralding its founding events and honoring its first pioneers. Christianity glorifies its martyrs, of course, and speaks eulogistically of some few of its Fathers' names sanctified by tradition of holiness. But anything resembling a truthful survey of its early centuries, taking due account of all the influences contributing to the rise of the faith, has really never been undertaken. Sermons seldom memorialize the events of that period.
Reluctance in this direction must be generated in the theological seminaries, where the difficulties of presenting the record to the average congregation must become realistically obvious to the young clerical student as he reads it. And beyond doubt this reluctance is massively increased when the candidate assumes charge of his first pastorate and gets a view of his flock in the pews. In the end, and from age to age it proves so much easier and pleasanter if ministerial conscience can be quieted--which a little sophistry can readily achieve--to let the sleeping dogs of historical knowledge lie unawakened, rather than stir them up with data that could so readily set them growling and barking. After all, the work of the Church and its ministry is to promote the glory of God, and that work can best go forward without let and hindrance if the burden of a past record which is neither edifying nor helpful is not flung about the neck of present effort. It is the tactic that sidesteps endless disturbance and obviates the necessity of strenuous sophistry in "explanation." It is the easier course to let the unsavory annals of the early centuries lie practically unknown to the laity, leaving the writhings of apologetics to the leading encyclopedias and histories where the unfortunate chronicle can lie buried in reasonable innocuousness. Thus it is that a record which, when attention is called to it, proves astonishing beyond all belief, has during the present age escaped general notice and provoked no challenge.
Yet the honest mind asks for an answer to the question why the Christian Church has held for centuries a policy of nearly total silence
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about its early history. And the more persistent student sadly comes to doubt whether the same disingenuousness that silenced the history will provide a fair answer. It will be one of the motives of this work to unfold the hidden reasons for that secrecy, showing them to be the same as those which in the distant beginning distorted the entire movement out of true character and then sought to cover its iniquitous work by book destruction and documentary fraud on a scale unknown elsewhere in all history. It will be found that the original perversion of high archaic philosophy has sealed the lips and checked the pens of all later historians, muting as well the pulpit voice. The truth of Christian history has been suppressed. A fuller revelation of that history, tremendous in its scope and its documentary attestation, will be the nub of effort in the present work. The possibility of inditing this true history inhered in the fact that the research was undertaken with a mind free from former bias of indoctrinated belief and alerted to discern the relevance of many data commonly misconstrued or ignored. A working acquaintance with the Greek, Hebrew and ancient Egyptian languages facilitated the discovery of much that proved vital to correct understanding. The reading of ancient documents which still, in spite of mutilation and corruption, carry the full story to any capable intellect, opened up the wide vista of long lost truth.
In a detective mystery story the telling clues are so often revealed by the culprit's own measures at concealment. It is not to be denied that zest was lent to the search by the discovery of obscure clues of this nature. The trail of unbelievable skulduggery is only too easily followed through almost the entire history of ecclesiastical Christianity. Investigators had missed truth before because they were not cognizant of the fact that a conspiracy had existed and operated over a span of centuries, and they were therefore caught by its maneuvers. Once its connivance became known a thousand clues for the unearthing of salient fact came to view.
It is believed that some confusion may be avoided in the work if resort is had to a slight innovation in attaching a name other than Christianity to that wave of popular and ignorant zealotry that came to be known by that designation. It seems clear enough that a distinction in name should be made between a true Christianity that was not popularized in a historical movement in the early centuries and a false "Christianity" that was so developed and popularized. It will serve the interests of explicit reference throughout the study if the two are sharply differentiated by a difference of name. To this end it
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has been deemed well to use the term "Christianity," as generally as circumstances will allow, to refer to that immemorial true religion which Augustine declared had always existed, and to apply to the movement which sprang to life in the first and second centuries A.D. the more properly suggestive name of "Christianism." But the occasional apt use of the new term will help the reader to keep the reference clear as to which of the two systems is under discussion. This may appear to some readers as an arbitrary and unwarranted shift of meaning, intimating by inference that the movement known as historical Christianity had no right to its name, that its name was a misnomer. The assumption of error in introducing a change of name for Christianity itself constitutes a strong item of evidence as to how far common understanding has been misguided from true direction. For the entire work will establish on the solid ground of verity the conclusion already announced, that the historical faith known as Christianity has no sound claim to the title, since it is in fact far from being true Christianity. Hence this essay will take the first step toward the correction of a great historical error by shifting the name from the improper object of its designation and assigning it to that declared true system of wisdom-knowledge which organic ecclesiasticism almost wholly stamped out after the third century. The use of the term "Christianism" will emphasize for the reader the spurious and truly un-Christian character of much that appertains to the system of Christianity, and this recognition is necessary if there is to be a restoration of Christianity to its place of high service in the crucial state of the world today.
The impregnable warrant for this shift of terminology and its challenging implications will be demonstrated in the body of the work.
The primary task envisaged, then, will be to trace the currents of influence that carried the previous high system of true religion, that Augustine insisted was true Christianity, down into the murky depths of a debasement and a distortion that would make the name "Christianism" appropriate to it. It is not a groundless asseveration but an unassailable fact of history, and one of the most tragic, that the religion that started under the name of Christianity in the first century did not long retain its original character and substance. Irrespective, for the moment, of whether it changed for the better or the worse, the simple fact is that it changed, and that radically. No argument can dispute
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the assertion that it was not by any means the same religion in the fourth century that it had been in the first. Beginning as a more or less sincere effort of genuine, if ignorant, religiousness, it had plunged rapidly down the grade of deterioration until in the fourth century it had completed its dire transmogrification into Christianism.
As only one item offered in evidence of this assertion, the provable fact is that it had begun as a cult springing wholly from Pagan origins and motivations in the first century, and by the fourth it had utterly turned its back on Paganism and repudiated every hint of generative connection with it, loading it with contumely from that day to this. A second evidence of the fact is that a whole list of books that stood in favor in its eyes at the start and for some time thereafter, were condemned and violently repudiated within less than two centuries. A third proof is found in the later refutation of several doctrines that had held high place in the initial period. Another evidence is the tremendously significant fact that nearly all the original groups that had participated in the upbuilding of the new movement and were in fact its pioneers and leaders, had, even before the fourth century, been pronounced heretics from the true faith and reviled as such by the parties that had swept in and grasped control of all policies. Still another, and again one of transcendent import is the fact that the mystical-allegorical mode of interpreting the sacred Scriptures in use at the inceptive state of the new impulse had by the fourth century been wholly supplanted by the literal-historical approach to the meaning. These and still other marks of sweeping change will be treated in detail in their proper place in the development.
The odd circumstance about these changes is that, while in the eyes of the revisionists they were regarded as steps forward to a higher religion, they can in every case be demonstrated to have been those very things that sadly transformed true Christianity into an ungainly Christianism.
The forces which pressed upon the early Christian movement to turn it from what it was at the outset to what it became within two hundred years will be the chief objects of investigation in the introductory part of this work. Their close scrutiny and accurate determination will in fact form the main substance of the plot of the book. Their clear envisagement and delineation are what has been wanting in Christian histories. They will supply the very essence of what has been missed by all former surveyors of the scene. They make up that portion of the history of Christianity that has never been written. They will
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therefore contribute to the narrative its most important elements. Their presentation will provide that new light that will permit vision to resolve the obscurities and uncertainties of former blindness and to integrate phenomena in their true relations.
In the first place it has to be remarked that these forces have not been observed and scrutinized adequately for the simple reason that the savants refused to see that drastic change had taken place, and they therefore saw no necessity for discovering and charting the influences that had caused it. These influences were never isolated for observation. So it has fallen out in the historical sequel that these tendential pressures whose consequences have so banefully afflicted world culture have never been searched out and analyzed. Their reproduction here will supply the "missing link" in the fruitful study of Christian history. The undertaking involves a renewed survey of the early-century field and a new marshalling of the data presented, with the production of some new data, but more particularly with the diagnosis of the available material under the light of a new and more veridical insight. The warp and woof of the threads of fact will be given pattern and significance hitherto unperceived.
True perspective upon the movement of Christianity has been impossible for all previous historical visioning because of the salient fact that a traditional misjudgment of the background and environmental influences from the bosom of which Christianity sprang has pitifully and ruinously beclouded all correct estimate of the genius of Christianity itself. The result has been almost a complete failure to measure aright the forces which produced the new faith. There has invariably been a misreading of the data, with a consequent missing of the vital import and the inevitable distortion and caricaturing of the picture of truth.
This unfortunate circumstance sets before us the task of reconstructing the picture of the formative processes in more truthful perspective than has been done before. The enterprise involves primarily a more realistic viewing of the relation of Christianity to its Pagan antecedents, environments and sources. It is here that the prospect of the most vital rectification of view is to be opened out. This portion of the terrain has been mulled over with great assiduity by numerous spokesmen for Christianity, and the present effort to throw its data into a new orientation, so as to upset entirely the conventional theses will involve the whole matter afresh in violent controversy. But it is at such a cost that old obsessions are to be dispelled and a fairer understanding
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gained. The colossal weight of the factual data and documentary testimony to be adduced in support of the amended view can be relied upon to break down at last the barriers of purblind prejudice and to let in the benignant light of truth upon a period and a section of history that has, for the West, been shadowed for centuries by the dark malignancy of triumphant error.
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CHAPTER II
THE SHADOW OF THE SPHINX
The starting point, then, is the universally proclaimed insistence of the Christian Church that the world, before the coming of Christianity, was enveloped in "heathen" darkness. It had never enjoyed the benison of the proclamation of real truth from God, the fount of cosmic Intelligence. Over the antecedent centuries it lay wrapped in spiritual benightedness, no messenger from above ever having been sent to proclaim the knowledge of the one true God, no Word of true enlightenment having flashed into the gloom. God had not hitherto bestirred himself to vouchsafe to mankind any inkling of its relation to him. The world lay in mental nescience and moral depravity, relieved by no intermediation or provision on the part of Deity, who thus suffered mankind to grope on without evidence of his providential interest, until about the year 12 B.C. he caused his only Son to be born into the world in a miraculous fashion to bring the people the first ray of true light and to provide the first means ever available for their salvation. This is the gist of what has been taught to every child of the millions born in the past sixty generations in the Western world and is still taught over that area. Suddenly, after centuries of inactivity, God awakened to the realization that his mundane children needed his attention. Onto the scene came the Savior, crowning his otherwise completely unknown life of thirty-three years with an active career of teaching and wonder-working, covering, allegedly, three years, and ending his short life with an ignominious crucifixion on a cross at Jerusalem.
Through the force of this traditional indoctrination no Christian child in twenty centuries has ever held any other belief than that the body of sacred literature declared to be the supernal message of this cosmic visitant was the first flashing out in blank darkness of sublime truth and surpassing wisdom, transcending illimitably the crude efforts of Pagan antiquity to find true knowledge. It has served the
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interests of the Christian establishment to have this belief prevail over the area of its domination throughout its long period of regnancy.
It needs no argument to demonstrate how tragically erroneous this indoctrination has been, for history itself has pronounced the verdict. It is now clearly enough seen as a baseless and deceptive canard. Still lingering addiction to the belief is now sternly rebuked by the data of scholarship and criticism, all of which establishes the sharply disillusioning fact that neither the reputed world Savior nor the religion he is asserted to have founded presented a single new or unique item of truth. In broad statement every word this divine Emissary uttered and every act he performed can be matched by material that was hoary with age in the literature of the Hebrews or of the Egyptians. And every doctrine promulgated by the Church that sprang to being ostensibly on the basis of his life and work can be identified with its prototypal forms in most of the antecedent literature all over the world. The very narrative of this Messenger's life in Judea is to all intents and purposes a fac-simile of the mythical biography of some fifteen to fifty previous figures of Sun-gods and Avatars of the ancient world. Indeed the biographical history of Apollonius of Tyana, as written by Philostratus, is a more or less faithful replica of the life of Jesus in the Gospels. And Apollonius was born in the year 2 A.D., while Jesus, as the data is now rectified by the findings of authentic historical record, could not have been born before the period of the governorship of Cyrenius (now changed to Quirinus) in Syria, as it was during his tenure of the Syrian consulship under Rome that Matthew states the world tax was levied by Augustus Caesar that brought Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem, so that prophecy might be fulfilled in the Savior's birth in that town of Davidic descent. And this doubtful Quirinus is recorded as having reigned in Syria between the years 13 and 11 B.C. Herod, who, as the Gospel states, attempted to kill the infant Christ, was dead at the date of 4 B.C. The Church no longer disputes the necessity of shifting the data of its Founder's advent on earth from four to thirteen years earlier.
But this shift alone writes the verdict of error across thousands of pages of books which have hitherto based critical conclusions as to the authenticity of the events of Jesus' life on the claim of the correctness of these dates. How nearly this emendation of date comes to overthrowing the entire edifice of the case for the very existence of the Galilean few have realistically envisioned. It shakes the whole structure
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of Gospel historicity so violently that in the opinion of many scholars it now lies completely in ruins.
The Rev. John Haynes Holmes, minister of the Community Church in New York City, about 1945 preached and printed a sermon entitled Christianity's Debt to Judaism--Why Not Acknowledge It? In it he stated that Christianity derived, first, its Founder, Jesus of Nazareth, from the Jews; secondly, it drew some five-sixths of its canonical Scriptures--the Old Testament--from the same source; and, thirdly, everything that its Founder said and did, as well as the titles, office and function he filled and the character he bore, were already extant in the Talmud, the Mishnah, the Gemara and the Haggadoth of the Hebrew writings. No voice has arisen to refute any of these epochal assertions. But so steeped is the general mind in accepted traditionalism that an announcement sufficient in its purport and involvements to signalize virtually the falsity of every basic tenet on which Christianity rests goes practically unnoticed. Apparently not ten people recognized its absolutely crucial implications, as they in effect write the death warrant of the system posing as Christianity. And now it will have to be seen how many will grasp the critical significance of the further revelation that Christianity gave to the world nothing but a terribly mutilated and disfigured copy of ancient Pagan literature. For such, the sequel will determine, is what Christianity will be shown to have done.
The age-long assumption that Christianity arose like a Sphinx out of the shadows of heathen nescience and flashed its bright beams upon a world buried in aeonial darkness has had the unfortunate result of tearing it out of its proper generative setting amid the influences that bred it. The forces that pressed upon it in its birth have not been accredited with the due measure of formative power which they exerted upon it. Even when their influence has been weighed by the historians, as in Milman's, von Mosheim's and other leading treatments, a biased view inveterately blocks all possibility of giving full consideration to their values in the rise of Christianity. Historians have apparently been stolidly set against giving to the religions surrounding Christianity at its inception the weight which they obviously exerted upon the new faith. This reluctance or stubbornness has come from the fact that these scholars had never opened their minds with sufficient dispassion to examine the data which clearly revealed derivation of Christian principles from Pagan sources. As a matter of fact the affectation of Christian scholars for many centuries has been an inveterate disinclina-
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tion to submit their Christianity to comparison with "heathen" cults at any time. In want of adequate comparison and comprehensive study, as well as of symbolic and analogical genius to carry it on with any chance of success, the connecting links between Christianity and its prior antetypes were never discerned with competent clarity to bring forth decisive conclusions. Once the presumptive superiority over its rival cults was spread universally in Christianity, it was offensive to the pride of Christian consciousness to degrade its heaven-blessed ordinances, rites and doctrines by subjecting them to comparison with the earth-born and bemired heathen observances and superstitions. It at one stroke divested of their divine halo the ceremonials that stood aureoled with celestial beauty in the minds of the faithful. It seemed like a sacrilege to break the spell of mystic holiness springing from the belief that the sainted doctrines and rites had been instituted from heaven. To relegate them to the province of merely human, and that Pagan, derivation and conception was to shatter their seductive force irremediably. Religion has ever been jealous of the human and earthly motivations.
So the ecclesiastical power has shunned comparative religion until now when the pressure of open inquiry is forcing it to face the conclusions of study and to find new apology for them. Such apology, it can be expected, will be specious and clever enough. The false Christianism withstood the devastating advance of modern physical science with bitter opposition during three centuries, as the positive light of knowledge threatened to overthrow the postulates of religious faith. Secular discoveries of new truth menaced the haunting dogmas of revelation until, the rack and the stake having failed to stop the tide of empirical research, a judicious compromise and reconciliation had to be effected with it. Now again the Church, finding itself periled from the side of profane research into comparative religion, but unable to stem the tide by murder and excommunication, will have to meet with whatever resources of subterfuge and evasion it can the disclosure of its own origins from Chaldea, Greece, Judea and old Egypt. For the voice of the Sphinx is being heard in the land and the budding leaves and the singing birds of a new springtime of revived human understanding in religion, herald the end of a winter of bigotry and delusion. It is safe to predict that orthodox religionism will not come off unscathed in this encounter as it has done in its conflict with science. For the revelations of Christian derivation from Egypt will undermine its foundations, which, all its advocates agree,
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rest upon the Gospel witness to the historical life of Jesus of Nazareth. And that life, as an event of the first century, and those Gospels, as original literary productions of the late first century, both are challenged by the identity of their data with the allegorical "life" of Horus of Egypt in the Book of the Dead. It is not too strong an assertion to say that those Gospels, as the biography of a man who lived in the first century, are tottering. Christian historians and exegetists are themselves dismantling the once solid fabric of the structure. Science forced Christianism to shift its position on many of its dogmas and minor tenets. But comparison with archaic Egyptian systematism will cut so deeply at the very roots of the tree of faith that its leaves and branches must wither.
The same Dr. Holmes later preached and printed another sermon entitled Akhnaton of Egypt: The King Who Discovered God. In it he expressed his own--and by inference all other Christians'--amazement at the fact that some seventeen centuries before Christ, back there in the Nile country, this young king, even though he died in his early thirties, had reformed the prevailing religion of his land by ousting the corrupt rule of the priesthood and reinstituting a system of worship and spirituality so high and pure that its obvious equality with the best in Christianity becomes to us today a mystery of the most inexplicable and challenging nature. How, the New York clergyman asks, can we account for this ancient king's establishment of a religion essentially on a level with highest Christianity, when the world at the time is asserted to have been enveloped in Stygian darkness? To attempt an answer to his own question the modern clergyman has to pull Akhnaton entirely away from his time, his background and his heritage. He surmises that Akhnaton had somehow worked his way by a special and exceptional genius through error and ignorance to a clear apprehension of monotheistic Deity and its fatherhood of man. It appears to be entirely beyond the reach of his understanding to recognize that already then, as ever since, the exoteric priesthood had buried an already existing true esoteric religion under a bushel of uncomprehended outer forms and fables, which no doubt were, as now, taken literally, and that the king, who, like Julian of Rome centuries later in much the same situation, had penetrated to the inner spiritual core of these Mysteries, decided to give back to his people the true mystical teaching, which thus received the emphasis it had been denied for centuries previously. It is all too easily seen what Akhnaton labored to accomplish then, for it is a replica of what clear-visioned
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esotericists have tried to do in more than one instance in history, when the corruptions of sound esoteric understanding had destroyed the beauty, the sanctity and the uplifting power of high truth. It was one of the efforts which seem to have to be repeated time and again in history, to break through the icy incrustations of dogmatism reduced to dead delusion and to clear the way for growth of the spirit in new freedom.
It is indeed a testimony to the total want of astuteness on the part of modern theologians that, in spite of Augustine's declaration that the true Christianity had been in existence from remotest antiquity, Christian scholars continue to express surprise when, as in the case of Akhnaton's campaign to bring that archaic true Christianity out from under the stultifying influence of a debased priesthood, they run across the evidences of the existence of something higher than the corrupt popular superstitions of exotericized religionism. They remain blind to the manifestations of this phenomena in the past of old Egypt because they remain singularly blind to the import of an identical situation visible under their eyes at the present day. For once more the very esotericism that Augustine lauded is struggling to emerge from another period of obscuration under the despotism of an appalling deadness of literalism that has buried it since the third century, and to assert its profounder culture in the milieu of modern shallowness. Such blindness demonstrates with great cogency the incapability of modern insight to evaluate at its true worth such an outburst of intrinsic cultural enthusiasm as that which brought the remarkable awakening known as the Italian Renaissance in the fourteenth century. The causes which led to that magnificent rebirth of refined study, and then the diabolical forces which in turn conspired to crush it out after two hundred years, should be restudied with the utmost care, for they would prove instructive to the highest degree.
It has never been seen as the ultra-significant fact it is, that the Renaissance was engendered by the discovery and dissemination of old classical Greek and Latin literature, restoring to functional power the enlightening influences of symbolism and allegory and the analogical method, and that it was indeed this very magic of symbolic intimation that went far to implement this notable and fairly dynamic revival of the "true religion" of Augustine's vision. The "lesson" of this circumstance and phenomenon is that obviously the immemorially true religion of primordial times had embodied itself pretty completely in the philosophy and mysticism of the great Greek nation at its peak
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of Platonic excellence, with the pointed implication for the world of today that the rehabilitation of that lofty mansion of ennobling conception would be the most direct measure to inaugurate another sorely needed rejuvenescence of the jejune religious life of this age. If a Christian has still to wonder why the renaissance of Greek literature performed for fourteenth century Italy what centuries of Christian influence failed to accomplish, he need only to heed the following passage from B. A. G. Fuller's splendid History of Philosophy (Introduction, p. 5.)
"It is under the influence of the splendid pagan tradition of the good life as a harmonious development of all the faculties and exercise of all the functions with which nature has endowed man, that Greek ethics made its great contribution of sanity to moral theory."
Supplementing this notation there should be instituted an analysis of the dire forces which caused the Italian Renaissance to die out after two glorious centuries. For they were the same forces which emerge to the surface and dominate human action the moment the aggressive power of a diviner glow of light and knowledge diminishes and commonplace stolidity blankets the field of everyday consciousness. This condition constitutes the deadliest menace to the life of the world. "When vision fails, the people perish." If this Biblical declaration were taken as very actual truth and not a mere glow of poetic uplift, the world might more rapidly advance to happier days.
The indebtedness of Christianism to ancient Egypt will be outlined at length at a later place in the essay, but it will lend support to Augustine's broad assertion of the existence of an ancient universal true religion to cite a passage such as the following from von Mosheim's well accredited history of the early centuries of Christianity (Vol. I, p. 383):
"Long antecedent to the coming of Christ, there were to be found, not only amongst the Egyptians, but also among the Jews, who copied after the Egyptians (as is placed out of all question by the Essenes and Therapeutae), as well as in other nations, certain persons who made it their study by means of fasting, labor, contemplation and other afflictive exercises, to deliver their rational souls, which they considered as the offspring of the Deity unhappily confined within corporeal prisons, from the bonds of the flesh and the senses, and to restore them to an uninterrupted communion with their God and parent. This discipline arose out of that ancient philosophy of the Egyptians, which considered all things as having proceeded from God, and regarded the rational souls of the human race as more noble particles of that divine nature."
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This passage has been chosen for citation at this early stage of the work because it puts the stamp of highly accredited authority upon several of the primary data on which our basic argument rests. It testifies, first, to the previous existence of high religious philosophies which are at once seen to be germinal in Christianity. Second, it certifies that religious disciplines which certainly set the pattern for those later followed by Christianity, derived from ancient Egypt. And, third, it establishes the extremely important detail, which has been so insistently ignored, evaded and flouted, that the Jews "copied after the Egyptians." The reader will not be permitted to forget this latter point as the study develops. There has been great reluctance to take this item into account, as to accede to it means practically to trace Christianity itself back to the Egyptians. It was flouted just because its implications are potentially so menacing to orthodox constructions. Even after Dr. Holmes had preached his sermon expressing most courageously Christianity's positive debt to Judaism, and it was represented to him by the author of this work that both Judaism and Christianity owed every thing they possessed to the Egyptians of old, he proved as recalcitrant to this larger datum as many readers had been to his representation of a shocking bit of unpalatable truth.
Some strength is added to the point of Christianity's indebtedness to previous systems by a brief statement from George P. Fisher's book on The Beginnings of Christianity (p. 177): "Christianity introduced no new element in the constitution of the soul." Indeed it lost all knowledge of those constitutive elements of man's divine nature which the Pagans had dealt with, by recognition of which the human being was the better enabled to guide his evolution judiciously.
If Augustine stands as the founder of Christian theology, no less surely is Eusebius the founder of the Christian ecclesiastical system, as well as being perhaps its most important early historian. It is indeed a notable circumstance that these two prime instigators of the Christian movement inscribed each statement which in essence and in effect practically negate all the basic claims of the religion they extolled and instituted. Eusebius' remarkable statement adds corroboration to Augustine's and the two must stand together as a challenge to all Christian assertion throughout the ages. Had they been kept steadily before the eyes of the world, Christianity might have been spared its catastrophic miscarriage. Eusebius' affirmation is taken from the seventy-second chapter of Nathaniel Lardner's great work on Christianity:
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"That the religion published by Jesus Christ to all nations is neither new nor strange. For though, without controversy, we are of late, and the name of Christians is indeed new; yet our manner of life and the principle of our religion have not been lately devised by us, but were instituted and observed, if I may say so, from the beginning of the world, by good men, accepted of God; from those natural notions which are implanted in men's minds. This I shall show in the following manner: It is well known that the nation of the Hebrews is not new, but distinguished by its antiquity. They have writings containing accounts of ancient men; few indeed in number, but very eminent in piety, justice and every other virtue. Of whom some lived before the flood; others since, sons and grandsons of Noah; particularly Abraham, whom the Hebrews glory in as their father and founder of their nation. If any one, ascending from Abraham to the first man should affirm that all of them who were celebrated for virtue were Christians in reality, though not in name, he would not speak much beside the truth. For what else does the name of Christian denote but a man who, by the knowledge and doctrine of Jesus Christ, was brought to the practice of sobriety, righteousness, patience, fortitude and the religious worship of the one and only God over all? About these things they were no less solicitous than we are; but they practiced not circumcision, nor observed Sabbaths any more than we; nor had they distinction of meats, nor other ordinances, which were first appointed by Moses. Whence it is apparent that they ought to be esteemed the first and most ancient form of religion which was observed by the pious about the time of Abraham, and has been of late published to all nations by the direction and authority of Jesus Christ."
Here is a flat declaration from the founder of Christian ecclesiasticism that Jesus did nothing more than republish the religion of the ancient Hebrew patriarchs. What then becomes of the claim that Christianity was a wholly new revelation brought to earth by the only Son of God about the year 30 A.D.? Eusebius fully agrees with the manifesto of Augustine. This work will assemble a vast body of other material supporting their pronouncements. It has been too dangerous for the Christian Church to pronounce its founders in the right, or to convict them of error. It has simply not faced the issue raised by their forthrightness and candor, which at least in the case of Eusebius was so generally wanting.
But if this statement of Eusebius is considered perilous to the claims of Christianity, it is as nothing in comparison with another sentence of his which falls with the force of a veritable atomic explosion upon the whole Christian system. If this statement of his is true--and it has everything to support it, little or nothing to controvert it--it stands virtually as a death sentence to Christianity. In a moment of extreme
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frankness and speaking in reference to the Essenes or Therapeutae, the esoteric cultists who had flourished for ages in Palestine, he wrote in chapter seventeen of Book II of his famous Ecclesiastical History the following amazing utterance:
"These ancient Therapeutae were Christians and their writings are our Gospels and Epistles."
Then the Epistles of Paul and the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were old, old documents taken from the Essenian libraries and foisted upon a credulous rabble as new writings of the first century. For we turn to the Encyclopędia Britannica and under the article "Essenes" we read that "they preserved in their libraries the books of the ancients and read them not without an allegorical interpretation." What becomes of the Christian faith if it is true that those Gospels and Epistles, with an unhistorical and purely typal figure of Jesus the Christ in them, were in Essene libraries from a very remote period?
From a book called Astral Worship (p. 92) we take a passage which adds further strength to the assertions of Augustine and Eusebius:
"As further evidence that modern Christianity is but a survival of Eclectic philosophy of the ancient Therapeutae, we have another important admission by the same historian (Eusebius) who, in quoting from an apology addressed to the Roman Emperor Marcus Antoninus in the year 171, by Melito, Bishop of Sardis in Lydia, a province of Asia Minor, makes that apologist say, in reference to certain grievances to which the Christians were subjected, that 'the philosophy which we profess truly flourished aforetime among the barbarous nations; but having blossomed again in the great reign of thy ancestor Augustus, it proved to be above all things ominous of good fortune to thy kingdom.'"
So Bishop Melito adds his testimony to that of Augustine and Eusebius, and scores of data from other sources, hints and admissions encountered here and there, build up a formidable case. It all points with practical decisiveness to the truth of the assertion that Christians of any intelligence during the first two centuries at least did not regard their movement as the bearer of the first light into a world of heathen darkness, but only the republication of very ancient truth.
There is another item which is by no means inconsiderable in this connection. It is a statement which is mentioned by George Hodges in his work, The Early Church (p. 158) and is well known as a fact. He states that the account of the life of the Cappadocian saint Apollonius
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of Tyana was read by the Neoplatonists "as the Christians read the Gospels." The significance of this is found in the consideration that the Neoplatonists in all likelihood read such a work as a typal or allegorical representation of the incarnational life of the divine principle, the Christ, in man, and perhaps regarded it as a more faithful dramatization of that life than the Gospels. This would tend to show that intelligent men of philosophical interests in that period, in so far as they were acquainted with the Gospels, did not take them to be the biography of a historical personage. Along with this possibility it is significant that the Emperor Septimus Severus is said to have had busts of both Apollonius and Jesus in his chapel. What can this signify but that it was common belief that the legendary accounts of the "lives" of both Apollonius and Jesus were on a par for historical value? And if not for historical value, then both equally treasured for their allegorical pertinence. The almost certain truth of the matter is that, as always, the "rabble" took these accounts to be veridical biographies of living men, some believing Apollonius to be the true divine Son of God, others crediting that high honor to Jesus; while the men of philosophical acumen understood both to be type figures in spiritual allegories dramatizing the life of the divine principle in fleshly body.
And it should not be overlooked in this debate that we have that most notable statement of Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, France, in the second century, one of the early writers for the Christian movement, in which he says that there were in existence in his day not only the four Gospels later canonized, but a multitude of Gospels! Now the very momentous reflection arises as to this, that if the multitude of Gospels out of which the Council of Nicaea finally decided to select and canonize four, were all documents dealing, as they presumably did, with the biographical career of the man Jesus, written by authors having data to contribute to the narrative of his life, surely every such document would have been presumed to be of practically inestimable value and would not have been suffered to fall into oblivion. Let us imagine what would be considered the value of the sudden discovery now of ten or twenty, or even one, of those other Gospels, which would assumedly contain some data about the life of Jesus not found in the four chosen. Can any one inform us why new or additional data about Jesus would be less sensationally valuable to the Christians at the end of the second century than new data is to the American people coming to light now about Jefferson, Washington or Lincoln, or to the English-speaking world is the new material written by Boswell that
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has just come to hand? A multitude of Gospels about Jesus floating around, four chosen and the rest consigned to oblivion, when every item about this cosmic Savior of the human race, every additional saying of his, every move and adventure, would have been of priceless interest and value! Has the Christian authority kept Irenaeus' statement in its general oblivion because to publish it and face its implications would suggest the terrifying inference that none of the Gospels then extant could have been taken as the actual biography of the living historical Jesus? Indeed the only conclusion possible in the case is that many copies of that mythical dramatization of the life of the incarnate Soul of Divinity in human flesh--the Logos made flesh and dwelling among us--were extant among the Mystery groups and the philosophical schools. And what does that imply? Nothing short of the horrendous truth that none of them, including the four chosen, was the veritable biographical account of any living person! The intelligent knew they were not, the "vulgar" presumably took them to be such actual biographies; and when numbers counted more than quality and intelligence, the Church took the fatal step of canonizing the popular beliefs.
Is it, too, without significance that even Jerome thought that the Gospel of the Hebrews was the original of the Gospel of Matthew? Among the "multitude" of documents then known were such as the Gospel according to the Twelve Apostles, the Gospel of the Egyptians and the Gospel of Peter. Can any one estimate the value of a Gospel written by Peter if this disciple had ever written an authentic one?
Augustine gave out another pronouncement which cannot but be held to have some bearing on this debate. He says in Greek: "We come down to Moses, the ocean of theology out of which all rivers and all seas flow." How are we to reconcile the apparent inconsistency exhibited here? For certainly in his books he makes no other than Jesus the fount of all theological light and truth. We know that there were groups of early Judaic Christians who eulogized Moses as the prime originator and mouthpiece of all arcane wisdom of old. No doubt it will be explained that Augustine made Jesus the fulfiller of Mosaic prophecy. And perhaps he uttered this eulogy of Moses in his younger days when he was concerned with occult philosophies and before he had lost his soul in rhapsodies of love for the crucified Galilean.
Another challenging reference comes to us from Irenaeus. According
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to him (b. i, ch. xx, i) the Marcosian and Valentinian Gnostics were in possession of many Gospels. He says, "their number is infinite," and amongst those apocryphal works was one entitled The Gospel of Truth (Evangelium Veritas). This scripture, he says, "agrees in nothing with the gospels of the apostles." (Irenaeus, b. iii, ch. xi, 9.) Gerald Massey comments by saying that this gospel is probably the one referred to by Tertullian, who says the Valentinians were in possession of "their own gospel in addition to ours." (Tertullian, De Praescrip. 49.)
And Massey has presented a point of the greatest import which, carrying danger with it, has of course been discounted by orthodox scholarship. It is dangerous because it hints forcefully at the ancient Egyptian origin of all "gospels." Here was the most learned and intelligent element in early Christianity, the Gnostics, in possession of a Gospel on which they staked their very high position, called the Gospel of Truth. If it came from Egypt, the original word for "truth" would have been Maat, the goddess of truth, often written Maatiu. Massey steadily affirms that this is the original form of "Matthew." All the slurs and slights which he has received from orthodoxy may not be able to prove him wrong.
At any rate it must be again asked what this conflict as between one party's Gospels and another's can mean in reference to the life of a man claimed to have lived from 1 to 33 A.D. Was the point of argument between the parties over the question whether certain Gospels gave a truer account of his life than others? Whether certain eyewitnesses were more authentic and credible than others? But if Gospels were not fought over on these grounds, but on some other questions of true spiritual preachment of a general nature, then