Having presented the evidences that the Jewish, or ancient
Christianity, originated at the University of Alexandria, under Greek
rule, we now propose to show that its modern form emanated from the
same source, under Roman rule; but, before entering upon this
investigation, it is important to become conversant with the sentiments
manifested towards religion by the cultured element of Roman society in
that enlightened era, which, designated as the golden age of
literature, was adorned by such distinguished orators, philosophers,
historians, poets and naturalists as Cicero, Tacitus, Pliny, Horace and
Virgil. In reference to this subject, Gibbon, in his history of The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. I., chapter 2, says: "The
various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all
considered by the people as equally true, by the philosophers as
equally false and by the magistrate as equally useful. Both the
interests of the priests and the credulity of the people were
sufficiently respected. In their writings and conversation the
philosophers of antiquity asserted the independent dignity of reason,
but they resigned their actions to the commands of law and custom.
Viewing with a smile of pity and indulgence the various errors of the
vulgar, they diligently practiced the ceremonies of their fathers,
devoutly frequented the temples of the gods, and sometimes
condescending to act a part on the theatre of superstition, they
concealed the sentiments of an atheist under the sacerdotal robe.
Reasoners of such a temper were scarcely inclined to wrangle about
their respective modes of faith or of worship. It was indifferent to
them what shape the folly of the multitude might choose to assume, and
they approached with the same inward contempt and the same external
reverence to the altars of the Lybian, the Olympian or the Capitoline
Jupiter." Upon the same subject Mosheim, in his church history, Book
I., chapter 1, says that "The wiser part of mankind, about the time of
Christ's birth, looked upon the whole system of religion as a just
object of contempt and ridicule."
In determining why such adverse sentiments were entertained towards
religion by "the wiser part of mankind," about the time referred to in
the foregoing quotations, it will be found to have been owing to the
extensive spread of the Esoteric philosophy, which taught, as
previously stated, that the gods were mythical and the scriptures
allegorical. While attainable only through initiation, it was
necessarily confined to a limited number, but, ultimately getting
beyond the control of the priests and vast numbers acquiring the
knowledge of its secrets without initiation, it became evident that it
was but a question of time when there would be no respectable element
left to sustain religion. At this juncture our attention is directed to
the University of Alexandria, which, at that time, was in a flourishing
condition. Having ceased to be an exclusively Jewish school, students
from all parts of the Roman Empire, without regard to nationality, were
attending it, and its professors were drawn from the ranks of both
Jewish and Gentile scholars. Realizing the hopelessness of reviving the
ancient faith among the enlightened clement of society, and the
impossibility of proselyting them to a new form of superstition, these
professors resolved to institute a system of worship exclusively for
the Jews and the lower and neglected classes of Gentiles, including the
slaves and criminals. To that end they rewrote the scriptures of the
Jewish or ancient Christianity, which had been preserved among the
secret archives of the University. Retaining their teachings relative
to the finale of the plan of redemption, and its monasticism; also the
land of Judea as the scene of its version of the Gospel story, and the
name of its saviour, to which they added the Latin terminal "us," thus
making it Iesus or Jesus, they perpetuated the Greek name of
Bacchus--the same that was ultimately perverted into the monogram
which, consisting of the Roman letters I. H. S., is found in all
Catholic churches, and in some Protestant ones, is falsely supposed to
stand for Jesus Hominum Salvator, or Jesus, Saviour of Men. Conforming
their version of the Gospel story to the lowly condition of its
expected votaries, they attached to the saviour the characteristics of
poverty, and made it teach that he was born in a manger, that his
disciples were but humble fishermen and that the poor would be the only
elect in the kingdom of heaven. Dropping the name of Essenes or
Therapeutae, and retaining that of Christian, they incorporated a
thread of real history corresponding to the reign of Augustus, and
arbitrarily made the Christian era begin at that time. Having thus
completed their scheme, they prudently destroyed the original from
which they compiled their scriptures, and sending out missionaries to
all parts of the Empire commissioned them to preach salvation only to
the Gentile rabblement and to the Jews.
That the sacred records of the ancient Essenes or Therapeutae
constituted the basis of the scriptures of modern Christianity we have
the authority of Eusebius, the church historian of the fourth century,
from whom we learn nearly all that is reliable of its history during
the first three centuries. In his Ecclesiastical History, Book II.
chapter 17, he makes the important admission that "Those ancient
Therapeutae were Christians, and that their writtings are our Gospels
and Epistles." As further evidence that modern Christianity is but a
survival of the Eclectic philosophy of the ancient Therapeutae, we have
another important admission by the same historian, 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." Thus we have indubitable evidence that it was the Eclectic
philosophy of the Jewish, or ancient Christianity, which "blossomed
again," in its modern form, during the reign of Augustus.
From the testimony of Philo, as referred to by Eusebius, and from the
writings of Josephus, the Jewish historian, we learn that, at the
beginning of our era, the descendants of the ancient Essenes were still
observing the practices and customs of monasticism. But as Josephus
refers to them only as descendants of the ancient Essenes, and makes no
mention of Christ or Christians--except in one paragraph which has been
conceded by the best authorities to be an interpolation it is evident
that, at that time, they had no connection with the University of
Alexandria, and nothing whatever to do with the institution of modern
Christianity. It is also apparent that the Jews of Judea had no hand in
its organization, for, if they had instituted it, they would not have
attached to the Messiah the Greek title signifying the Christ, but,
writing their version of the Gospel story in their own dialect, would
have used the Hebrew word signifying the Shiloh (see Gen. xlix. 10);
and furthermore, having conceived the idea that he would manifest
himself as a great temporal prince, who would re-establish the throne
of David, and deliver them from the oppression of foreign rulers, they
would not have attached to him the humble characteristics of the Christ
of the new Testament. Again, if they had been the authors of modern
Christianity, it would have been a most surprising inconsistency for
them to turn right about and reject its conceptions of a savior,
especially when that rejection resulted in the dire persecutions to
which their race has ever been subjected by the Christians. But the
Gentile riffraff, attracted by the gracious promises of enjoying in the
world to come the felicities denied them in this, eagerly attached
themselves to the new sect, which rapidly increased in numbers, and its
votaries, glorying in the opprobrious epithet of Ebionites, or needy
ones, made themselves so obnoxious by their aggression and turbulent
dispositions that, barely tolerated by the Government and condemned by
the cultured adherents to the established religion, many of them,
courting the crown of martyrdom, suffered death at the hands of the
civil authorities; and thus was engendered that spirit of hatred
against their fancied oppressors which only awaited the opportunity to
manifest itself in deeds of rapine and-bloodshed.
The fanacticism which prevailed among the earlier Christians was the
direct result of their dense ignorance, and to this sole cause we may
ascribe all the trouble which the Roman Government had with them, and
to become convinced of this fact we have but to study church history.
In reference to this subject Mosheim, in his Ecclesiastical History;
Vol. 4, part 2, chap. 1, says: "It is certain that the greatest part
both of the bishops and presbyters were men entirely destitute of
learning and education. Besides, that savage and illiterate party, who
looked upon all sorts of erudition, particularly that of a
philosophical kind, as pernicious, and even destructive of true piety
and religion, increased both in number and authority. The ascetics,
monks and hermits augmented the strength of this barbarous faction, and
not only the women, but also all who took solemn looks, sordid
garments, and a love of solitude, for real piety, were vehemently
prepossessed in their favor." In almost any history of England we will
find it recorded that, even in the ninth century, King Alfred lamented
that there was at that time not a priest in his dominions who
understood Latin; and even for some centuries after the bishops and
prelates of the whole Christian community were marksmen, i. e., they
supplied by the sign of the cross the inability to write their own
names. If the bishops and priests were so supremely ignorant what can
be said in reference to the literary attainments of the laity?
The Christians were alternately persecuted and tolerated by the Roman
Emperors until the first quarter of the fourth century, when certain
events occurred through which the Church of Rome became the recipient
of Imperial Patronage. Constantine I., called the Great, having made
himself sole Emperor by destroying all other claimants to the throne,
applied to Sopater, one of the priests of the established religion, for
absolution, and was informed that his crimes were of such an atrocious
character that there was no absolution for him. Believing that the
Phlegethon, or lake of fire and brimstone, awaited him in the future
life, unless he could obtain absolution, he became very much distressed
when one of his courtiers, learning the cause and referring him to the
Church of Rome, he at once applied to her Bishop, Silvester, who,
readily granting the desired absolution, he added another victim to his
butcher bill by ordering the death of the honest priest who had refused
to grant him absolution. The Christian sect having become a powerful
and dangerous faction, Constantine conceived the idea of strengthening
his usurped and precarious position by attaching it to his interest,
and to that end he professed himself a convert to its tenets, and,
taking the Church of Rome under his especial patronage, elevated her
Bishop to the rank of a prince of the Empire and gave him one of his
palaces for a residence.
The Christian hierarchy, knowing that it would be a potent means of
confirming the faith of the laity in the Gospel story as a literal
history to have a tomb of the Saviour to which pilgrimages could be
made, and appealing to Constantine to provide one, he sent his mother,
Helena, to Judea to find the place and, of course, discovering what she
went to look for, he had erected, under her supervision, over the
designated spot, that splendid edifice which, known as the church of
the Holy Sepulchre, remains to this day. Helena, good at finding lost
things, also claimed to have discovered the veritable cross upon which
the Saviour had been crucified; and her son, worthy of such a mother,
claimed, as recorded by Eusebius, that he had seen with his own eyes
the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, bearing
the inscription: "In Hoc Signo Vinces," signifying "Under this sign,
conquer." Those were times of remarkable and supernatural occurrences.
At the time Constantine became the patron of Christianity the bishops
and presbyters of the several churches, seemingly ignorant of the
teachings of the Esoteric philosophy relative to the origin of the
Trinity, were divided into two factions in discussing the relation
between the Father and the Son. One party, headed by Athanasius, a
presbyter of Alexandria, and afterwards bishop of that see, advocated
the ancient belief that the three persons in the godhead of Father, Son
and Holy Ghost is but one God, that Christ is consubstantial or
co-eternal with the Father, and that he became man to perform his
mission of redemption. Such, in brief, is what is known as the
Athanasian or Trinitarian Creed. The other party, headed, by Arius,
another presbyter of Alexandria, advocated the belief in one God alone
and that Christ, having no existence until begotten of the Father, is
not consubstantial or co-eternal with him. Such, in substance,
constitutes what is known to the Trinitarian or Orthodox Christians as
the Arian or Unitarian heresy. Could stronger evidence be adduced that
this controversy was the result of ignorantly making a distinction
where there is no difference, for whether Trinitarian or Unitarian the
mythical genius of the sun is the God to whom they all paid supreme
adoration, although the Christians of to-day would deny it most
emphatically.
The faction, advocating the Trinitarian creed having converted the
Emperor to their belief, and influencing him to enforce it as a
fundamental doctrine of the Christian theology, he, in the year 325,
summoned, at his own expense, a general council of bishops and priests
to meet at Nice, in Bithynia, a province of Asia Minor. When they had
assembled he appeared among them, clad in gorgeous attire, with a
jewel-studded diadem upon his royal brow, and, seated upon a gilded
chair, presided over their deliberations. A minority of them, holding
"most contumaciously" to the Arian heresy, and refusing to change their
views at the bidding of the Emperor, he banished them from their
respective bishoprics, while the majority adopted the Trinitarian
creed, and appealing to Constantine to suppress the writings of Arius
he issued an edict for that purpose, which we present as follows:
"Moreover we thought that if there can be found extant any work or book
compiled by Arius the same should be burned to ashes, so that not only
his damnable doctrine may thereby be wholly rooted out, but also that
no relic thereof may remain unto posterity. This we also straightway
command and charge, that if any man be found to hide or conceal any
book made by Arius, and not immediately bring forth such book, and
deliver it up to be burned, that the said offender for so doing shall
die the death. For as soon as he is taken our pleasure is that his head
shall be stricken off from his shoulders." Rather a blood-thirsty,
edict to be issued by the "puissant, the mighty and noble Emperor," and
a very inconsistent one, considering that he soon afterwards readopted
the Unitarian faith and restored the banished bishops to their
respective sees; but, regardless of his action, the Church of Rome
sustained the Trinitarian creed and enforced the dogma of the supreme
divinity of Christ.
Thus we see that the history of Christianity, in the first half of the
fourth century, cannot be written without incorporating considerable
from the life of Constantine, whose ensanguined record before his
pretended conversion marks him as the most brutal tyrant that ever
disgraced the imperial purple; but the appalling crimes he perpetrated
afterwards, among which were the scalding his inoffending wife to death
in a bath of boiling water, and the murdering, without cause, of six
members of his family, one of which was his own son, justify what a
learned writer said of him, that "The most unfortunate event that ever
befell the human race was the adoption of Christianity by the
crimson-handed cut-throat in the possession of unlimited power," and
yet Constantine was canonized by the Eastern church.
During the first three centuries, when Christianity was but a weak
sect, her bishops addressed numerous apologies to the Roman Emperors,
in which they claimed tolerance from the government on the ground that
their form of worship was virtually the same as the established
religion. But after Constantine's pretended conversion its hierarchy
began to labor for the recognition of Christianity as the state
religion, and to give to their demand some show of consistency they
insisted that their scriptures were really historical, and that there
was no resemblance whatever between the two forms of worship; while
theirs was of Divine authenticity the Pagans was purely a human
institution.
For centuries after the convocation of the council of Nice the peace
and harmony of the several churches were disturbed by the rancorous
discussion of the same old questions of Trintarianism and Unitarianism,
the Western church adhering to the former while a majority of the
Eastern congregations maintained their faith in the latter; but
ultimately the Trinitarian party, gaining the ascendency, and
persecuting the adherents of the Unitarian faith, the greater part of
them retired into northern Arabia where they founded numerous
monasteries; and from history we learn that, having impressed their
Unitarian faith upon the populace of that country, it was ultimately
incorporated into the Koran, the sacred book of Mohammedanism; and,
while becoming votaries of that form of worship, still retained the
belief that Christ was but one of the prophets.
The cultured adherents to the established form of worship, becoming
alarmed at the growing power and influence of the Christians and at the
prospect of such an ignorant and vicious rabble obtaining control of
the government, regardless of their pledge to keep the Gnosis secret,
publicly announced that the Gods were mythical and the scriptures
allegorical, and engaged in a heated controversy with the Christians
upon the subjects. The character of their discussions is well, although
supposititiously, expressed by Gerald Massey, in his work entitled,
"The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ;" page 179, American
edition, where he makes the Gnostics say to the Christians, "You poor
ignorant idiots; you have mistaken the mysteries of old for modern
history, and accepted literally all that was only meant mystically." To
which the Christians responded, "You spawn of Satan, you are making the
mystery by converting our accomplished facts into your miserable
fables; you are dissipating and dispersing into thin air our only bit
of solid foothold in the world, stained with the red drops of Calvary.
You are giving a satanic interpretation of the word of revelation and
falsifying the oracles of God. You are converting the solid facts of
our history into your newfangled allegories;" to which the Gnostics
replied, "Nay, it is you who have taken the allegories of Mythology for
historical facts."
But it was impossible to stem the rising tide; the lessons which the
priesthood had taught the ignorant masses had been too well learned.
They were sure that their scriptures were historical; that Jesus Christ
was truly the incarnate saviour who had died and rose again for the
salvation of the elect, and that being the elect it would be
pre-eminently just and proper that the old Pagan form of worship should
be abrogated and theirs recognized as the state religion. Thus the
conflict raged until the year 381, when, under the reign of the Emperor
Theodosius the Great, this demand having been formally made, and the
Senate, fearing the tumult a refusal would excite, with a show of fair
dealing ordered the presentation, before that body, of the respective
merits of the two forms of worship. In that memorable discussion, which
lasted a whole week, Symmachus, a senator, advocated the old system,
and Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, the new, which resulting, as a foregone
conclusion, in the triumph of Christianity, a decree to that effect was
promulgated.
Then the long deferred opportunity having arrived, the vengeful
bishops, hounding on a no less vengeful laity, ruthlessly murdered the
priests of the old religion, and, appropriating its emoluments to their
own use, they seized upon its temples, and demolishing some, converted
others into churches. With iconoclastic hands they destroyed some of
the statues representing the ancient divinities, or after mutilation
exposed others in public places to the derision of the populace.
Subjecting the adherents to the older form of worship, whom they
designated as infidels, to the most diabolical indignities and
persecutions, they destroyed their works of art, burned their
libraries, suppressed their schools of learning, and either killed or
exiled their professors. Among the atrocious acts perpetrated by these
fiends in human shape none was more barbarous than the one committed in
Alexandria, in the year 415, when Hypatia, the beautiful and
accomplished daughter of Theon, who had succeeded her father as
professor of mathematics and philosophy in the Alexandrian University,
while on her way to deliver a lecture, was, by order of Bishop Cyril,
dragged from her chariot and murdered in a most revolting manner.
One of the successors of Theodosius justified himself in decreeing the
spoliation of the old religion upon the grounds that "It was unbecoming
a Christian government to supply the infidels with the means of
persevering in their errors." Another one of the Emperors, more zealous
than his predecessors, decreed the death penalty against all persons
discovered practicing any of the rites and ceremonies of the old
religion. Thus the onslaught of Christian savagery obliterated the
civilization of Greece and Rome, and inaugurated that long reign of
intellectual night known as the Dark Ages, which, materially aiding in
effecting the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, made it possible to
erect upon its ruins that Italian Oligarchy, which, since then, has
ruled the greater part of Christendom.
The dogmatic element of the ancient astrolatry, as incorporated into
the Christian creed, underwent no material change until the
inauguration of the dark ages, when the bishops of the several
churches, in the delirium of metaphysical speculation, concocted the
previously unheard of doctrine of pre-existence of spirit, in
conformity to which God was declared to be purely a spiritual deity,
who, existing before matter, created the universe of nothing. Being the
sole custodians of the scriptures; and changing the six periods of a
thousand years each to the six days of creation, they altered Gen. i,
1, to read, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,"
which in the original read: "In the beginning, when the Gods (Elohim or
Alehim) had made (shaped or formed) this heaven and this earth." These
radical changes necessitating others, they made two distinct and
independent beings of the principles of Good and Evil personified in
the God Sol; the former they embodied in Jesus the Christ and the
latter in the Christian Devil, thus supplanting old Pluto; the
presiding genius of the under world.
Rejecting the ancient doctrines relative to the soul, and teaching
that, having proceeded from a purely spiritual deity, it would exist
eternally as an independent spiritual entity, they substituted for the
ancient system of limited rewards and punishments the one inculcating
their endless duration. These changes in the creed, which were
confirmed at the general council of Constantinople, in the year 553,
necessitating further alterations of the scriptures, the righteous were
promised "eternal life" in the Paradise of God beyond the stars; and,
While consigning great sinners to "everlasting punishment" in the
Tartarian fires of the under world, the less venial were to expiate
their crimes in the same old Purgatory. Thus, having invented an
endless heaven and an endless hell for purely spiritual souls, and
neglecting to expunge the doctrines of the resurrection of the body,
the setting up of the kingdom of heaven upon a reorganized earth and
other materialistic teachings of the ancient religion, they made of the
creed and scriptures such a conglomeration of "things new and old"
that, without the Astrological key, it would be impossible to determine
what they originally taught.
At the Reformation in the 16th century Luther and his coadjutors, while
projecting into the Protestant creed all the cardinal tenets of
Catholicism, excepting that of Purgatory, made no change in the
verbiage of the scriptures. Thus retaining the awful doctrine of
endless hell, the reformers constructed a creed which they intended for
the government of Protestants for all time; but, doing what had never
been done before in the history of the world, they gave the scriptures
to the laity, and, whether or not they secured the right of private
judgment or individual interpretation, it has been taken all the same;
and thus opening the door to investigation, it must ultimately result
not only in the abrogation of hell, but in the relegation to the limbo
of oblivion of the whole dogmatic element of religion.
As a fitting conclusion to this article, we again direct the attention
of our readers to the subject of the primary source of religious
dogmas. Prior to the establishment of Christianity as the state
religion of the Roman Empire, the philosophers who wrote against it
invariably made the charge that its theology was derived from the
ancient Paganism. After its establishment as the state religion of the
Empire, the hierarchy of the church, knowing that this charge was
unanswerable, instigated the Emperor Theodosius I. to promulgate an
edict decreeing the destruction of all books antagonistic to
Christianity. This edict, directed more particularly against the
writings of Celsus, was carried out so effectually that we know nothing
of what he wrote, only as quoted by Origen, the distinguished church
father of the third century, who attempted to answer in eight books
what Celsus had written in one, entitled "The True Discourse." In one
of his quotations from Celsus' work he makes that philosopher say "that
the Christian religion contains nothing but what Christians held in
common with heathens, nothing that was new or truly great." See
Bellamy's translation, chapter 4. During the earlier centuries the
Christians were divided into numerous sects, entertaining very
divergent views, and each faction, holding all others to be heretical,
charged them with having derived their doctrines from the Pagan
religion. Upon this subject we find that Epiphanius, a celebrated
church father of the 4th century, freely admits that all that differed
from his own were derived from the heathen mythology. Such was the
position of all orthodox writers during the Middle Ages, and since the
Reformation the Protestant clergy have uniformly made the same charge
against the Catholic; a few quotations from their writings we present
for the edification of our readers.
Jean Daille, a French Protestant minister of the 17th century, in his
treatise entitled La Religion Catholique Romaine Institute par Nama
Pompile, demonstrates that "the Papists took their idolatrous worship
of images, as well as all their ceremonies, from the old heathen
religion." Bishop Stillingfleet of the English church and a writer of
considerable eminence in the 17th century, said, in reference to the
complaisant spirit of the early church towards the Pagans, that "it was
attended by very bad consequences, since Christianity became at last,
by that means, nothing else but reformed Paganism, as to its divine
worship." See Stillingfleet's defense of the charge of idolatry against
the Romanists, vol. 5, page 459. M. Turrentin, of Geneva, Switzerland,
a learned Protestant writer of the 17th century, in one of his orations
describing the state of Christianity in the 4th century, says "that it
was not so much the Empire that was brought over to the faith, as the
faith that was brought over to the Empire; not the Pagans who were
converted to Christianity, but the Christians who were converted to
Paganism." Thus, having shown that the Catholics derived all their
cardinal tenets from the Pagan mythology, the Protestants must surely
have obtained theirs from the Catholics, for they teach all of them
except that of Purgatory.