Loe raamatut: «The Eliminator; or, Skeleton Keys to Sacerdotal Secrets», lehekülg 14

The original books from which the Gospels were compiled have perished. There was a Gospel in the possession of the Ebionites carefully guarded as a sacred or arcane book, a copy of which Jerome procured with great difficulty, but which has since been lost and forgotten. The sect disappeared, melting away into the church or the synagogue, and we now read of them loaded with the opprobrious slanders of Irenæus and Epiphanius. They were the original disciples in Judea, and were subjected, in common with other Jews, to the hardships and persecutions which followed upon the destruction of the national polity. This Hebrew Gospel and such writings as the Catholic Epistles of James and Peter contained their peculiar doctrines. They regarded Jesus as a teacher or exemplar, but not as a superhuman being in any sense of the term. That notion came from the pagans.

Indeed, it was not their belief that such a man had literally existed. The Doketæ (or Illusionists) held that he was a symbolic being, an ideality. The Gnostics generally, whom Gibbon describes as “the most polite, the most learned, and most wealthy of the Christian name,” described him as an aion or spiritual principle; and considered the crucifixion as metaphorical and not a literal event. The real Christ, Chrëstos or divine principle, they regarded as still in heaven, intact.

The apostle Paul was the great innovator upon the Ebionite and Essenean doctrines. He was too broad and far-seeing to overlook the fact that the exclusiveness of Judaism would arrest any universal dissemination of the faith in the world. Hence he struck out boldly on his own account. He had a gospel, he declares to the Galatians, which he had received from no man; it was not “according to any man,” but a distinct, differentiated matter, the apocalypse of Jesus Christ. “Let the man, or even angel, that preaches any other gospel be anathema,” he declares. He did not hesitate to denounce the Ebionist apostles, nor they in turn to set him forth as an impostor, holding the doctrine of Balaam and teaching faith without works or rites. At Antioch he withstood Peter to the face, and declares him condemned. Writing to the Corinthians, he denounces the schisms and deprecates the influence of Apollos, a Jew from Alexandria. “I, the wise architect, have laid the foundation,” says he, “but another has built upon it. That foundation is Christ.” It is very plain, however, that the Christ that he taught was rather an ideal than a literal personage. “I have seen the Lord,” he declares, and again avows that he preached “Jesus Christ and the Crucified One.” Yet when he refers to the death and resurrection he always treats of them as figurative matters, pertaining to the spiritual and not to the corporeal nature. A Christ that he had seen could but be a spiritual entity. “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” he declares, “neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.” This is a complete setting aside of any gross, literal sense to be given to his language. Others who received the gospel were crucified as Christ was, and rose again to a new life while yet embodied in mortal flesh. He was the type, the model, the exemplar, and they who believed were walking in his footsteps. “Know ye not,” he asks the Roman believers, “that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? We then are buried with him by this baptism into his death; so that as Christ was raised up from the dead, even so we should walk in a new life. For if we have become planted together in the likeness of his death, we are also, on the other hand, in that of his resurrection: knowing this, that our old man was crucified together, that the body of sin might be made inert, that we may no longer be enslaved to sin. If we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live to him; being aware that Christ having risen from the dead is no longer dying, death no longer rules him. For wherein he died, he died to sin once for all; but wherein he lives, he lives to God. So likewise reckon ye yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

A spiritual crucifixion, death, and resurrection, in strict analogy with the equinoctial crucifixion, death, and resurrection of the mystic rites, is the foremost idea of this passage. The baptism of Jesus in the river Jordan and his forty days’ temptation in the wilderness were of the same character. There was no literal dying signified in the case. Indeed, nobody knew better than Paul that the Jewish Sanhedrim did not sit and that capital punishments were not inflicted at the period of the Passover, the day of the crucifixion, being, according to the law, “a day of holy convocation.” The crucifixion being figurative and suggested by an astrological period, we are fully warranted in the hypothesis that the victim likewise was a symbolic personage of an astral character.

This ideal Jesus, with the emphatic but ambiguous phrase of Paul—“Him crucified”—was not sufficient for the exigencies of the Christian leaders of the subsequent century. The Gnostics and other cultured men were satisfied, but the lower classes wanted a more tangible character, a physical corporeity. The great want, therefore, was some proof of the literal existence of the individual by the evidence of men that had seen him and been familiar with him. This was now furnished by the production of the three synoptic Gospels and their adoption in the place of other evangelical literature. Afterward, Irenæus or some one with his approval added the Gospel according to John. The fiction of an apostolic succession was then originated, and forgery for religious purposes was a general practice. The quarrels of Christians with Christians were for centuries more scandalous than all the atrocities of actual martyrdom.

Previous to this the Church had labored indefatigably and successfully to destroy the influence and reputation of Paul. He was now taken into favor; his Epistles were revised, interpolated, toned down, and accepted as canonical. The Acts of the Apostles was next produced. It is a work in two parts—one set apart to the story of the apostle Peter, and the other to the achievements of Paul. The purpose evidently was to indicate that the two were not at variance, but were laborers in the same field. The work of harmonizing must have been difficult. In our day it would not have been possible. Books cannot be got out of the way as in former centuries, and inconsistencies of writers are sure to be exposed.

Justin Martyr lived at Rome in the reign of the Antonines and wrote a Defence of the Christians. Yet he makes no mention of “St. Peter the first bishop.” He had never heard of him. Irenæus, however, did not hesitate to say anything to advance the gospel, and accordingly boldly asserts that Peter and Paul founded the church at Rome; overlooking their reciprocal animosity, and the fact that the Epistle of Paul to the Romans addresses the “saints,” but makes no mention of a church. Claudius had banished the Jews from Rome for their turbulent conduct under the instigations of Chrestos, and the emperors Trajan and Adrian seem to have known of Christians only from information which they had derived solely from the provinces in the East. But all this made no difficulty for Irenæus. This French prelate also declared that the ministry of Jesus lasted upward of ten years; also that he lived to be an elderly man. The anachronisms and bad geography of the Gospels are notorious, but they do not compare with the absurdities of Irenæus. He invented the name Antichrist, and hurled it with ferocious rage whenever he had been assailed and hard pushed in controversy. He was never so much in his element as when quarrelling; and his designation of Irenæus (a man of peace) is one of the most stupendous misnomers ever heard of.

We have alluded to the fact that passages had been interpolated into the Epistles of Paul. The object was to harmonize the Logos of Philo and his school with the Christ or Chrêstos of the apostle. It would have been a futile attempt if it had been made when Paul was castigating the Corinthian Christians in regard to Apollos. A dead man’s words, however, can be mutilated and perverted without his resistance. We accordingly find the sturdy Hebrew diction of the apostle interlarded with Gnostic utterances, and new epistles purporting to have been written by him which give a different complexion to his doctrines. The pleroma or fulness which is treated of in the Epistle to the Ephesians was taken bodily from the Gnostics.

The pre-existence of Christ as the Creator of the world was asserted in a spurious document purporting to be a letter from him to the Colossians, and interpolations of a corresponding nature were made in the genuine Corinthian Epistles. Thus in the famous chapter on the resurrection we find the following sentiment of Philo in an amplified form: “Man, being freed by the Logos (or Word) from all corruption, shall be entitled to immortality.”

Gibbon has shown us that the first regular church government was instituted at Alexandria. This is in keeping with the other facts. The dogmas of an incarnate God, of the Trinity, and the sacred character of the Blessed Virgin were all introduced into the creed by the influence of the Alexandrians, and it would therefore seem to be legitimately their right to institute the government. We have noticed already that the Therapeutæ of that country had offices with similar titles and functions as those now possessed by officers of the Church, and as they and the Christians were closely allied, we have good reason for the belief that they had united with the new organization in such numbers as to outvote the original members. Certain it is, that thenceforth the names of Essenes and Therapeutæ occurred no more. But the sect which gave shape to the concept had thus, to a certain degree at least, resumed control over the whole matter.

That such an individual as Jesus Christ ever lived is entirely without proof from history. We find Josephus making mention of one and another who acquired notoriety. He describes Judas of Galilee as the founder of a fourth philosophic sect, and tells of Jesus the son of Hanan who predicted the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple years before it occurred. We observe similarity enough in his utterances to those of the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew, and in his deportment when brought before the Roman governor to that described in the Gospels, to warrant some little surmise of identity with the Jesus of the Gospels. But of Jesus as the founder of the Christian religion, or more properly the Ebionite sect, we have no such delineation. Of him we have only an utterance which is a palpable forgery.

This preaching of Jesus as a veritable individual of like passions with other men, having a will not always consonant with the divine will, and yet divine in qualities and attributes, has been very justly “to the Jews a stumbling-block and to the Greeks foolishness.” Intelligent men, however reverent and impartial, have been compelled to dissent. The fanatic Tertullian in declaring his own position gave utterance to what many felt to be the substance of the whole matter: “I reverence it because it is contemptible; I adore it because it is absurd; I believe it because it is impossible.” We are outgrowing a faith and veneration so utterly childlike as to be fatuity itself.

If we search for Jesus at Nazareth in Galilee, we shall not find a footprint. If, however, we look for him in the testimonies of the Nazarim and Essenes as the personification of their school of philosophic thought, thus representing in concept the emanation of God and the evolution of man as a spiritual being, we shall see him as he is. Hence to surrender the popular notion of a literal man as an infallible teacher and exemplar is not to renounce anything that is vital in truth. We will only dispense with the paganism and raan-worship. We eliminate the sensuous imagery, but preserve intact the life, the power, and the energy. The parables and aphorisms which are in the Gospels are as true, as wholesome, and inspiring as ever. Jesus the ideal represents, and will continue to represent, all that was implied in the arcane religions in the East. Upon this ground, therefore, it is well that Christianity in its external forms as well as in its esoteric principles should supplant the other worships. It repeats what there is of value in them, and at the same time it comes more closely home to the higher consciousness. In the personification of Jesus the true ideal of our humanity is suggested. We are born of our earthly father and mother, whose image and name we accordingly inherit, and we have to pass through the pains and throes of a second birth as children of the celestial parent. This was outlined distinctly by symbols in the initiations, and the successful candidate, having overcome in the trial, was enthroned and acknowledged as the son of the Most High. Hence Jesus sets forth in the Gospel the last disclosure of the Esseneân rite: “Call no man father on the earth, for one is your Father; he is in the heavens; and you are brothers.” Paul repeats the sentiment in other words: “As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God; heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ.” This idea, often too much lost sight of, lies at the core of all real knowledge. The end of all worship, all philosophic discipline, and all religious teaching is to open the way in every mind to a higher perception and a profounder conscientiousness.

Yet the suggestion of the angel at the sepulchre is pertinent—that we forbear to seek for the living among the dead. The real enlightenment of mankind comes not from teachers, but only from the fountains of interior illumination. We have no call or occasion to go to this man or to that man as a leader. It may be the province of individuals to stand out conspicuously in order to indicate the next advance to be made. But when each has thus performed his service, his glory is outshone by the refulgent light which he has induced others to seek and obtain.

We require no display of spiritual pyrotechnics. Enough for us that there is truth, and that we have the intellect to perceive it—that there is right, and we have the will to obey it. Neither a human God nor a divine man can enlighten us further than this. There are freedom and impulse for us to attain the highest degree of illumination of which we are capable. The human aspiration soars beyond the path of the lightning. In every noble idea, every worthy desire, we have a mediator with God. The more silent the work, the more certain that the principle of all life is performing it. In this is our eternity, and there is nothing beyond.

CHAPTER XI. THE IDEAL CHRIST

“What think ye of Christ? Whose son was he?”—Matt. 22: 42.

NEARLY a quarter of a century ago (1868) a very remarkable pamphlet was published by request of the Free Religious Association, written by that remarkable man, the Rev. Samuel Johnson, a Unitarian minister and an author of no little repute. The subject was The Worship of Jesus. It had a very limited circulation, and the stereotype plates were destroyed in the great Boston fire, and it is now very difficult to find a copy.

Mr. Johnson takes the ground that “Christianity is a temporary step in the divine growth of man through the worship of the ideal; and this hope lies, not in pausing on this step as final, nor in proving the names and personalities associated with it to be as valid for ever as they have been in the past, but in that which underlies and governs the whole process—the law of religious idealization.

“This is no speculation; it is the positive law of progress, as history presents it. To worship ideals is the condition of spiritual life. To lose belief that there is somewhere a better than ourselves is to gravitate downward to what is worse than ourselves. We grow better by definite homage to a best. And this worship of ideals is a process of idealization.... Man’s power of growth, therefore, resides in the ability to shift his veneration....

“Ideals prove themselves to be idealizations, that they may point him on to higher levels. This is religious progress....

“So a time comes when every religion that centres in an individual's prerogative of divinity falls under criticism, and is, so far, referred to temporary causes. Christianity cannot escape this law. As a distinct religion it is but Christism, and passes away, like Jehovism, before a broader faith. Whether what succeeds it be called Theism or Pantheism, this terminology of systems fails to express its scope. It is free worship of the one infinite and eternal life of the spiritual, moral, and physical universe....

“How, then, did the concentration of the religious sentiment upon Jesus originate? Not, as the Church insists, in the undeniable rights of a perfect Being to the everlasting allegiance of mankind, for there is no evidence of his perfection, intellectual or spiritual, but in the fact that the religious sentiment, at a certain stage of its historical progress, demanded a single human centre, and knew how to satisfy its own demand by its own process of idealization.

“The ideal itself was sent in the soul of the age. It was bound to do what it would with its materials by its own divine gift. It was the creative force of the time. It is not the whole truth to say with Merivale, then, that( the religion of Christ seized and developed, with a divine energy, the latent yearnings of mankind for social combination, having for its essence, in a human point of view, the doctrine of the equality of man/ Rather did that religion catch a spirit of universality already abroad in the age—not latent, but mighty to transform society, to inspire both Hebrew Messiah and Gentile philosopher, to make its god in its own image, and to transform the little Jewish sect at last into a Church of civilization....

“And this, at least, is sure; always there is a man for the hour. Somehow or other, a great demand will find satisfaction. But the man is not what the hour reports him when it has crowned him with all that faith and fancy can bestow, and set up, through him, its own special demand as valid for all time. Future ages will revise, from a freer standpoint, the image it transmits for their adoration....

“The earliest types and emblems of Christ-worship betray this powerful element in its origination. Jesus is represented in the form of the old deities and in conjunction with them. Between the images of Mercury Criophorus and Apollo Nomius, and that of the ‘Good Shepherd/ the transition is so gradual that it is hard to decide whether the picture is pagan or Christian. In the Catacombs Jesus sits as Pluto on the judgment-seat, with Mary as Proserpine, while Mercury leads in souls. Still earlier emblems of Jesus, the Lamb, the Fish, the Ship, the Cross, the Dove, are all associated with older heathen mysteries or mythological beliefs, as are also the Christian festivals and rites.

“And so the idealization of Jesus went on steadily and consistently till it reached deification. The early Christian ‘apologists’ ridiculed the human gods of the old polytheism, yet they did but concentrate the same principle more perfectly in the form of their Christ. Hebrew monotheism was indeed too strong in Paul to allow of his finding in Jesus more than a man in whom the fulness of the Godhead dwelt. But this hovers very close upon the larger desire of the nations. And later, in the Gospel of John, the Gentile current has absorbed the Hebrew and the call for a God-man is boldly met. A life of Jesus is here dramatically constructed, not out of historical facts, nor even traditions, but out of that preconceived ideal of an incarnate word attaching itself, in its longing for actual and living substance, to the growing prestige of his name....

“The records of Jesus’ life have had to be idealized also; and these are not, like his person, so dim and veiled as to leave the religions imagination a certain margin of freedom, however inadequate, but a definite statement of doctrines, doings, and claims; so that science, philosophy, art, and morality have been taught to bow in his name to the limitations of half-developed times and men.

“It is not denied that by leaving out what we dislike we can find in the New-Testament Jesus as noble an ideal as we will, though it can be only of a purely interior individualism, unrelated to practical and political functions. But we cannot ignore the many sources, apart from the real life of Jesus, from which this feast of good things has been derived. The New Testament is, in fact, not so much the record of a life as the fruit of two ancient civilizations, the Oriental and Greek, of whose confluence Christianity itself was the product....

“It is urged that we destroy the basis of religious unity when we take away this historical and personal centre of faith. Men absolutely need, it is said, that concrete form, that individuality, under which the divine is represented to them in the Christ. There would be more cause for this anxiety if it could be shown that they have ever possessed such a centre. But what have they had, after all, but a common name for ever-changing ideals? The belief that all eyes were turned to a common authoritative centre was an illusion, which had its uses, indeed, but becomes a breeder of strife in proportion as men learn the rights of free inquiry. ‘Worship the Christ! follow Jesus!’ cry the ages. But who is Jesus? and what is the Christ? The Jesus of Matthew is one, the Christ of John is another, the ‘second Adam’ of Paul is a third. The moral as well as the theological contents of the name vary with the ages and the sects that appeal to it. As the Christ of Luther was not the Christ of Augustine, nor his the Christ of James, so the Christ of the Unitarian is one, of the Calvinist another. Whom the one will save, the other will destroy; what to the one is moral wrong, to the other is divine right; what love would require in the one, justice would foreclose in the other. What common centre can the liberal Bible scholars and the panic-stricken, text-ridden Revivalists find in the name of Christ? All the warring sects have been ‘standing up for Jesus;’ and which of them knows what Jesus was? The farther you get back toward the original, the less sure do you feel of your own knowledge, and the less right should you feel from what you know in part to assume that you have found the appointed centre of religious thought. It would be easy to show that unity is impossible so long as it is sought to found it on the claims of a person to that position, since the mysterious irrationality of such an office must keep the speculative faculties of mankind in ceaseless self-contradiction and strife. It would be easy to show that this claim of Jesus has been the perpetual root of dogmatic warfare—that all barbarism of the Christian Church in past ages has come of jealousy about the honor due the person of the Christ.” We offer no apology for these long extracts from Mr. Johnson’s inimitable little book of ninety pages. “He being dead yet speaketh,” and his words give no uncertain sound. He was in advance of the times, and if his brethren in the Unitarian ministry would regard Jesus, whom they almost deify, as an ideal (quite imperfect) that has come down to us from pagan peoples, and cease to court the favor of the orthodox, they would have more self-respect and more real regard from the thinking men of the age.

We might as well now come directly to the question whether the Jesus of the Gospels was an ideal rather than a historical individual—an impersonation rather than a person. And here we take the broad ground that whether there was a real man or not makes no difference whatever, because the writings themselves are largely ideal, and so make the man what he was not. No two persons worship the same God, the “personified Infinite.” The conception of God must itself be limited and incomplete, and therefore inadequate and largely ideal. No two persons believe in the same Jesus, so there must be as many ideals as there are believers. The habit of exaggerating, of deifying those whom we have been taught to regard as the greatest and best, is a well-known disposition of the human mind. Indeed, “the function of the Church is the cultivation of the ideal.” This is so palpable that the legends of all religions recognize this principle to such an extent that most of them represent their “saviors” as having been born of virgin mothers. Catholics flock to their temples and in parrot-like utterances worship an ideal Jesus and an equally ideal Virgin, and thus cultivate only the ideal side of their nature. It is very much easier to excite the imagination than to convince the understanding; and this is the real secret of the strength of Catholicism and of the weakness of Protestantism. Catholic worship is mainly spectacular, an appeal to the senses, and is therefore attractive alike to the uneducated and the educated. They believe the Gospels literally, because they have had the principal incidents recorded in them set forth before their eyes from their very birth, and they cannot be reasoned out of what they have never been reasoned into.

But we are told that Jesus must have been a real person or he never could have exerted the influence that he has for the last eighteen hundred years upon so many millions of people. Let us see: If Jesus ever dwelt upon this earth, it must have been several hundred years ago. Not one of the many millions who have worshipped him since his few years of sojourn here but have done so in view of what they have heard of him or read of him. They never saw him and never heard his voice. He wrote nothing, and never authorized any one else to write anything. After the lapse of nearly two centuries the four Gospels appeared. Very little is told of him there. If you take out what is repeated concerning him therein, you would not have, in length, what would make a modern sermon; and that would be found full of contradictions, absurdities, and impossibilities. Those who have believed on him have believed on what they called testimony concerning him; and that testimony would have produced the same effect whether true or false if they really believed it. The real existence of an alleged person is not essential to excite admiration if it is really believed that he existed. The Swiss loved and honored William Tell just as much as if he had not in these latter years been proved a myth. The world’s history teems with the heroic deeds of many noble persons (impersonations) who never had an existence, and the literature of the race would greatly suffer by striking out all that is fictitious. The reason that the ideal Christ has exerted so much greater influence than any other impersonation is because so many skilful artists have bestowed their best labor upon it, and because the figure is so ancient and contains so many features that commend themselves to the human mind and heart.

We find in Natural Genesis, by the English poet Gerald Massey, a passage which so beautifully portrays our own view of this subject that we cannot forbear copying it:

“It has often been said that if there were no historic Christ then the writers who represented such a conception of the divine man must have included amongst them one who was equal to the Christ. But the mythical Christ was not the outcome of any such conception. It was not a work of the individual mind at all, but of the human race—a crowning result of evolution versus any private conception of a hero. This was the hero of all men, who never was and was never meant to be human, but from the beginning was divine; a mythical hero without mortal model, and equally without fault or flaw. This was the star-god who dawned through the outermost darkness; this was the moon-god who brought the message of renewal and immortality; this was the sun-god who came with the morning to all men; this in the Kronian stage was the announcer of new life and endless continuity at the opening of every cycle, and in the psychotheistic phase the typical son of the Eternal as manifester and representative in time.

“As a mental model the Christ was elaborated by whole races of men, and worked at continually, like the Apollo of Greek sculpture. Various nations wrought at this ideal, which long-continued repetition evoked from the human mind at last as it did the Greek god from the marble.

“Egypt labored at the portrait for thousands of years before the Greeks added their finishing touches to the type of the ever-youthful solar god. It was Egypt that first made the statue live with her own life, and humanized her ideal of the divine. Hers was the legend of supreme pity and self-sacrifice so often told of the canonical Christ. She related how the very god did leave the courts of heaven and come down as a little child, the infant Horus born of the Virgin, through whom he took flesh or descended into matter, < crossed the earth as a substitute/ descended into Hades as the vivifier of the dead, their vicarious justifier and redeemer, the first-fruits and leader of the resurrection into eternal life. The Christian legends were first related of Horus, or Osiris, who was the embodiment of divine goodness, wisdom, truth, and purity—who personated ideal perfection in each sphere of manifestation and every phase of power. This was the greatest hero that ever lived in the mind of man—not in the flesh—to influence with transforming force; the only hero to whom the miracles were natural because he was not human. The canonical Christ only needed a translator, not a creator, a transcriber of the ‘sayings’ and a collector of the ‘doings’ already ascribed to the mythical Christ.

“The humanized history is but the mythical drama made mundane. The sayings and marvellous doings of Christ being pre-extant, the ‘spirit of Christ,’ the ‘secret of Christ,’ the ‘sweet reasonableness of Christ’ were all pre-Christian, and consequently could not be derived from any ‘personal founder’ of Christianity. They were extant before the great delusion had turned the minds of men and the figure-head of Peter's bark had been mistaken for a portrait of the builder.