The Eliminator; or, Skeleton Keys to Sacerdotal Secrets

CHAPTER XIV. A FEW FRAGMENTS

“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.”—John 6:12.

GNOSTICISM.

SINCE preparing Chapter XI., on The Ideal Christ, and quoting freely from Mr. Gerald Massey regarding the Gnostics, some doubts have been suggested as to the soundness of his views. We have therefore carefully reviewed this matter, and can find no reason to abate one tittle from the conclusions presented by this painstaking and able writer.

The word gnosis, meaning knowledge, does not apply exclusively to a party or sect The Gnostics were not distinguished from Christians at first by sectarian lines. The Epistles of Paul, both genuine and spurious, recognize the gnosis, and there were Gnostic sects, as well as individual Gnostics, both before and after the Christian era. The gnosis consisted in knowing, and mainly in not accepting as historical and literal what was really only allegorical. The chief Gnostic sects held as secret their essential doctrines, and at the same time they had an exoteric statement which they gave to the common people. Even Paul, who seems to have been a first-class Gnostic, preached one gospel publicly to the Gentiles, and another which he gave “privately to them that were of reputation” (Gal. 2: 2). His teachings were highly Cabalistic, and he seems to have delighted in “mysteries.” He had no conference with any of the other apostles as to what he should teach, but went to Arabia, where he doubtless met the Essenean brotherhood, and probably learned from them instead of the Judean teachers. The Essenes were famous for the cultivation of sacred literature, and had their personified Christ, as we have reason to believe. Mr. C. Staniland Wake thinks, with good reason, that the Essenes were Mithrasts, and that they worshipped the sun, and Mithras, the Persian savior, was a personification of the sun. The Essenes, according to Josephus, treated the sun with great veneration, and offered certain prayers early in the morning, as if they made supplication for its rising. The Essenes and Mithrasts were Gnostics in that they held to a personified savior, and not a literal man of flesh and blood. The symbolism of the universe afforded models for the secrets of their religion, and their rites were introduced into every part of the Roman empire—of course including Palestine—and for nearly four centuries the Mithraic religion wellnigh overshadowed Christianity. Much that was written of Jesus indicates the characteristics of the secret initiations. It may appear strange to the superficially informed when we affirm, as heretofore, that many of those matters which Paul set forth with such seeming literalness were in fact mystic and arcane, the transcript of older doctrines, and were made up throughout of astrological symbolism.

The systems of many ancient peoples centuries before Christianity contain doctrines and dramatic stories closely analogous to the gospel story of Jesus. The Neo-Platonists held that these occult rites were merely a form of representing philosophic thought as if in scenes of daily life. While Paul refers to certain matters as apparently historical, he never overlooks their symbolic import. The interpolators of his writings misrepresented his real views, as is evinced by internal evidence in the writings themselves.

The fourth Gospel, falsely credited to John, was written for the evident purpose of opposing the Gnostic doctrine of Jesus not made flesh by presenting the Neo-Platonic dogma of “the Word made flesh.” In many places throughout the New Testament there is an implication that there were those who denied that Jesus came in the flesh: “And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God” (1 John 1: 3). In 2 John, 7th verse, it is said: “For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.” How does this comport with the assumption that the existence of the human Jesus was never doubted in the apostolic age? The ignorant and disingenuous ecclesiastics who wrote on Gnosticism in early ages always observed one rule, and that was to represent it as a mere offshoot and corruption of Christianity, invented because of disappointed ambition by apostates from the religion established by the apostles. The Rev. Mr. King, in his Gnostics, and their Remains, affirms that such representations “are entirely false.” The truth is, that Gnosticism did not purport to be a Christian system, except by a kind of syncretism to reconcile different faiths. The Neo-Platonists attempted this, and Gnostics did the same on an analogous plan. The historical existence of Jesus was little else than a concession made to the unreasoning multitude, while the esoteric doctrine was so much older as to make such an existence of no possible account except as a piece of folk-lore to hang illustrations of doctrines upon. This is the central idea of every branch of Gnosticism. The forms set forth by different expositors are secondary and incidental, liable to mislead those who attempt to place them in the front and draw deductions from them; and hence Saturninus taught that all that was considered physical in Jesus was only a phantasy, and that what was from God was spiritual only, and not at all corporeal. As for the writings of Tatian, they are “lost”—that is, destroyed—and we are under no obligations to accept what his enemies have said of them. The period was one in which calumny, slander, and forgery were the rule, as well as the main dependence for refuting an adversary. We know nothing of Cerinthus except through Epiphanius, whose reputation for truth and veracity is so bad that he would make falsehood appear like truth by his manner of telling it. Our evidence respecting Cerinthus comes chiefly from Epiphanius, who once professed to be a Gnostic (Macosian), and afterward turned Catholic, and, Judas-like, betrayed some scores of his former associates, including seventy women, to the persecuting civil authorities.

The Ophites were certainly mystics, and read everything concerning Jesus as a sacred allegory. Many think that Christos was with them Chrëstos, the good, the incarnation and associate of Sophia, “the wisdom from on high.” The “wisdom religion” was extensively symbolized. Pythagoras named his esoteric doctrine the gnosis or “knowledge,” and Plato used a similar expression to indicate the “interior knowledge.” Marcion was evidently Persian and used Mithraic symbolism. The ceremonials of Mithraism (red-cap Christians) and astral rites were adopted by the Catholic Church, besides many other rites of paganism. The Jewish Cabala and the Gnostics had much in common. The Sethites were of Jewish origin, and they held that Seth was the son of Sophia, who had filled him with the divine gnosis, and that his descendants were a spiritual race.

The Mandaites were Gnostics, as their name indicates, and they found in the system the older type of doctrine which obtained in Mesopotamia and in the old and elaborate Babylonian religion. This is seen from the fact that the names of the old pantheon were adopted.

The variety of legends regarding Jesus show that he was not an historical character. Deriving the bulk of their theosophy from beyond the Euphrates, and even much from beyond the Indus, the early ecclesiastics changed names, but retained their original ideas. Nearly all Christian festivals are the equivalents of pagan observances, as is well known. Prof. F. W. Newman denounces the assertions of Tischendorf and Canon Westcott, concerning the Gnostics as “unworthy of scholars, and only calculated to mislead readers, who most generally are ignorant of the actual facts in in the case.” “The uncritical and inaccurate character of the Fathers rendered them peculiarly liable to be misled by forgone conclusions.”

Oriental Christianity and Parseeism furnish a striking example of religious syncretism. In the Gnostic basis itself it is not difficult to recognize the general features of the religion of ancient Babylon, and thus we are brought nearer to a solution of the problem as to the real origin of Gnosticism in general.

Dr. John Tulloch, principal of St. Andrew's University and the writer of the article on the Gnostics in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (ninth edition), truly says: “The sources of Gnosticism are to be found in diverse forms of religion and speculative culture antecedent to Christianity, especially in the theology of the Alexandrian Jews as represented in the writings of Philo, and again in the influences flowing from the old Persian or Zarathustrian religion and the Buddhistic faiths of the East.” He also says it is “the fact that the spirit of Gnosticism and the language which it afterward developed were in the air of the apostolic age, and that the last thing to seek in the early Fathers is either accuracy of chronology or a clear sequence of thought.”

In Appletons’ New American Cyclopedia, under the title “Gnostics,” it is said: “The Gnostics numbered two classes—the select few who were admitted to the divine secrets, and the large class of common believers who were not able to rise above the physical condition.” The point is that the Gnostics had a secret doctrine which their adversaries did not know. The recognition of Jesus as an actual person was only apparent, and hence different people differed in that respect. The doctrine came from the far East, and teachers only sought to harmonize it with the new worship, as they also did with Mithraism. The real Gnostics were the spiritual men of the times, and mere externalists could not understand them. It would be amusing if it were not so serious to see men often affecting great learning, themselves not professing orthodoxy, yet vehement for what can only be called Roman ecclesiasticism. “The letter killeth,” and “the wise shall understand.”

Many writers on Gnosticism seem to know no more than the cock on the dunghill knows of the jewels that lie before him. The fact is, that the writings of the so-called Fathers, and of the New Testament itself, have come down to us percolated through Roman sacerdotalism, and must be taken with many grains of allowance. There were many men named Jesus at the commencement of the Christian era, but that a Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead is not supported by a particle of evidence. The anonymous author of the great English book, Supernatural Religion, has shown how utterly valueless the Gospels are as sources of evidence; and where else shall we look for an historical Jesus? We can have no faith in historical “phantoms,” “aions,” and “illusions.” Neither pagan nor Jewish contemporaneous history gives any countenance to the orthodox claim of a personal, crucified, and risen Jesus.

ORIGIN OF THE CHRIST STORY.

The Gospels were doubtless compiled nearly two hundred years after the beginning of the Christian era from the mythological and superstitious lore that was then circulating in great abundance; and Christ himself is only a mythological personage who, if such a person ever had any existence at all, existed many centuries before the Christian era, and was very different from the Christ of the Gospels, being originally Æsculapius or some other character of the like fame, and serving only as the basis of the Christian fable. It is certain that the primitive teachers of Christianity converted to their own purposes the writings of ancient poets and philosophers, mixing together the Oriental Gnosticism and Greek philosophy, and palming them on the world in a new form as things especially revealed to themselves.

It may further be remarked that at a most early period of the Christian era there appears to have been great doubts as to the real existence of Christ. The Manichees, as Augustine informs us, denied that he was a man, while others maintained that he was a man, but denied that he was a God (August. Serm. xxxvii. c. 12). There is, therefore, considerable force in the expressions of a modern writer that the being of no other individual mentioned in history ever labored under such a deficiency of evidence as to its reality, or ever was overset by a thousandth part of the weight of positive proof that it was a creation of imagination only, as that of Jesus Christ. His existence as a man has, from the earliest day on which it can be shown to have been asserted, been earnestly and strenuously denied; and that not by the enemies of the Christian faith, but by the most intelligent, most learned, and most sincere of the Christian name who have left to the world proofs of their intelligence and learning in their writings and of their sincerity in their sufferings. The existence of no individual of the human race that was real and positive was ever by a like conflict of jarring evidence rendered equivocal and uncertain. Nothing, however, is more common than for some persons to assume an air of contempt, and to cry out that those who deny that such a person as Jesus of Nazareth ever existed are utterly unworthy of being answered. It is, truly, very convenient for them thus to shelter themselves by assuming his existence as incontrovertible, instead of fairly meeting historical facts which, to say the least, render his existence very problemetical. It is to no purpose to urge that it might as well be denied that no such a person as Alexander the Great or Napoleon Bonaparte ever existed as to set at defiance the evidence of the existence of Jesus. For the existence of neither Alexander nor Napoleon was miraculous, and there never was on earth one other real personage whose existence, as a real personage, was denied and disclaimed even as soon as ever it was asserted, as was the case with respect to the assumed personality of Christ. But the only common character that runs through the whole body of the evidence of heretics is, that they, one and all, from first to last, deny the existence of Jesus Christ as a man, and, professing their faith in him as a God and Saviour, yet uniformly and consistently hold the whole story of his life and actions to be allegorical. The very earliest Christian writings that have come down to us are of a controversial character and written in attempted refutation of heresies. These heresies must therefore have been of so much earlier date and prior prevalence; they could not have been considered of sufficient consequence to have called (as they seem to have done) for the entire devotion and enthusiastic zeal of the orthodox party to extirpate or keep them under, if they had not acquired deep root and become of serious notoriety—an inference which leads directly to the conclusion that they were of anterior origination to any date that has hitherto been ascribed to the Gospel history.

In accordance with the notion that Christ was a phantom, the writer of the Commentaries which are attributed to Clement of Alexandria, apparently quoting from the Gospel of Nicodemus, tells us that an apostle attempted to touch the body of Christ, but in so doing found no hardness of flesh and met with no resistance from it, although he thrust his hand into the inner part of it. A similar idea is conveyed by Luke where he says that Christ vanished out of the sight of his disciples, but yet shortly after stood in the midst of them—a notion consistent only with that of an apparition (Luke 24: 31, 36). Similar remarks may be made on the words of Christ to Thomas and Mary; to the latter he says, “Touch me not, for I have not yet ascended to my Father that is, I am not to be felt;” and to the former he says, “Reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side” (John 20:17, 27). Both these expressions, contradictory as they are with regard to Jesus, still show that the writer knew something of the notion entertained that Christ was a phantom. Luke (24: 37, 39) also has words proving the same point, where he says that the disciples, when they saw Christ after his resurrection, thought they had seen a spirit and that he told them to handle him. Marcion of Pontus, who flourished about A. D. 127, believed Christ not to have been born of a virgin and to have grown up gradually, but that he took the form of a man and appeared as a man without being born, and at once showed himself in Galilee in full maturity. Manes also, according to the testimony of Socrates and others, “denied that Christ was ever really born or had real human flesh, but asserted that he was a mere phantom.” (See Lardner’s Credibility, vol. ii. p. 141.) For men who entertained this notion of “the person of Christ,” his sufferings, death, and resurrection were of course a delusion—were only in appearance. Thus, according to Father Apelles, who wrote about A. D. 160, Christ was not born, nor was his body like ours, but consisted of aërial and ethereal particles. Very probably, Apelles did not think it unlikely that a body composed of such subtile matter as this should rise from the grave and be capable of passing not only through the smallest aperture, but even through solid matter. Barnabas, the companion of Paul, in his Gospel had another way of disposing of the question of the resurrection—namely, by denying that Christ was crucified at all, but was taken up into the third heaven by four angels; that it was Judas Iscariot who was crucified in his stead; and that Christ will not die till the very end of the world (Toland’s Nazarenus, Letter i. chap. v. p. 17.) The Basilidians, about the commencement of the second century, disposed in a similar manner of the miracle of the resurrection by asserting that it was not Christ, but Simon of Cyrene, who was crucified instead of Jesus.

Such are some of the various opinions of the origin of the story of Christ’s resurrection. They are placed before the reader that he may have a choice of theories. After matured reflection, however, he will, most probably, come to the conclusion that this tale originated in the same manner as “The Gospel of the Birth of Mary,” “The Gospels of the Infancy of Christ,” “The Gospel of Nicodemus,” the epistolary correspondence of Christ and Abgarus, of the Virgin Mary and Ignatius, together with hundreds of other similar productions of the ages when facts were not so much appreciated as fables in the form of books. If he arrive at this conclusion, he will see no reason to believe that such a personage as the Christ of the Gospels was ever crucified, much less raised from the dead.

ANCIENT ENIGMAS.

It is amusing to observe how, in ancient times, the dark, enigmatical, and allegorical style was practised, particularly in the East, by all public teachers, both Jews and Gentiles. By this means they explained away the fabulous tales current regarding their gods, and discoursed on every branch of knowledge known to them. They deemed religion a mystery not to be publicly explained, and always delivered its dogmas clothed in dark allegories (Oie. de Nat. Deor. lib. ii. iii.; Spencer de Legibus Heb., p. 182; Clerici Hist. Eccles., p. 23). The Egyptians and Chaldeans were noted for their dark sayings (Simon Hist crû. des Comment, p. 4). Gale (Opuscula Mythologica) gives an account of several ancient books expressly written as instructions to interpret allegories. The Greek poets, Homer not excepted, are by their scholiasts regarded as treating of their gods in a mystical style. The Stoic philosophers dressed the whole heathen theology in allegorical language (Cic. de Nat. Deor., lib. ii.). The Pythagorean philosophy was taught in enigmatical expressions, the meaning of which was studiously concealed from the vulgar mind, and revealed even to the initiated only gradually as their years of maturity were thought to qualify them for its reception. Plato and his followers in the groves of Academia practised the same mode of teaching religion, especially theogony. The writings attributed to Paul the apostle, as has been shown, are replete with mystical and enigmatical expressions. This he confesses, saying that he spoke “the wisdom of God in a mystery,” “comparing spiritual things with spiritual” (1 Cor. 2: 7, 13). Accordingly, he regards the history of Isaac and Ishmael as an allegory (Gal. 4: 22-25), which he condescends to explain. The primitive Fathers of Christianity pursued the same mode of communicating instruction and of defending their religion against the pagans. Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Irenæus, Tertullian, Origen, all of them, were very expert in this occult system, in imitation of the heathen philosophers, by whom most of them had been educated. Eusebius (Hist. Eccles.y lib. vi. c. 19), citing what he is pleased to call the assertions of Porphyry, writes that Origen, having been educated in Greek literature, intermingled it with the fictions of Christianity, that he dealt in the works of Plato, Numenius, Cranius, Apollophanes, Longinus Moderatus, Nico-machus, Chæremon, and Cornutus, and that he derived from these pagan authors the allegorical mode of interpretation usual in the mysteries of the Greeks, and applied it to the Jewish Scriptures. Thus, Origen’s mode of teaching was identical with that of the pagans—a mode commended even by the learned Dodwell (Letters of Advice, etc., p. 208), who says that the pagan mystical arts of concealment are of use toward understanding the Scriptures. The Jewish rabbis also delivered their doctrines in the same obscure and mystical manner, as their Talmud, Cabala, Gemara, and other books, besides what we call the Hebrew Scriptures, amply show. The religious teachers of all the nations of antiquity thus delighting in dark sayings, it is therefore by no means wonderful that the writers of the Gospels, whoever they were, attribute similar enigmas to Jesus. This accounts, in a measure, for the obscurity of the Gospels, while, however, it traces their origin to a pagan source.

GODS OF VIRGIN BIRTH.

It is in perfect harmony with what has long ago been demonstrated by some of the most critical writers, not only in English, but also in other languages—namely, that the New Testament has been collected by Eclectic monks—particularly Egyptian monks of Jewish extraction connected with the Alexandrian college—from various legendary tales and other documents then afloat, which they modified to answer their own purposes, and which since their time have been considerably altered to suit the requirements of different religious communities.

The Christian apologists of the second and third centuries evinced no lack of knowledge on this point. Justin Martyr, as already cited, in addressing a Roman emperor, says that the Christians, by declaring Jesus to be the Son of God, born of a virgin, said no more than the Romans said of those whom they styled the 24 sons of Jupiter, such as Mercury, Bacchus, Hercules, Pollux, and Castor; and as to Jesus, he repeats, having been born of a virgin, the pagans had their Perseus, son of Jove and the virgin Danaë, to balance this feature. Creusa, daughter of Erectheus, was visited by the god Apollo, and in consequence became the mother of the god Janus. A Chinese virgin by means of the rays of the sun—regarded as a deity—became the mother of the god Fo, who acted as a mediator between his followers and another superior god. The Hindoo virgin Rohini in like miraculous manner gave birth to a god, one of the Brahman trinity. Another Hindoo virgin, Devaci, as already observed, having had an intercourse with the deity Yasudeva, became the mother of an incarnate god whose name was Chrishna; whose birth was announced by the appearance of a new star; whose life, when an infant, was sought in vain by the reigning tyrant of the country; whose principal exploits were killing a terrible serpent, holding a mountain on the tip of his finger, washing the feet of the Brahmans, saving multitudes by his miraculous power, raising many from the dead, dying to save the world from sin and darkness, rising from the dead, and then ascending to his heavenly seat in Vaicontha (Sir Wm. Jones’s Asiatic Researches, vol. i. pp. 259-273). Somonocodom, who, according to the sacred books of the Talapoins of Siam, was destined to save the world, was another personage who had a virgin mother. The followers of Plato about two hundred years after his death, but more than a century before the Christian era, reported that he had been born of a virgin.

The most ancient Alexandrian chronicles, which furnish ample proofs of the universal prevalence of our gospel religion in Egypt for ages before the Christian era, testify as follows: “To this day Egypt has consecrated the pregnancy of a virgin and the nativity of her son, whom they annually present in a cradle to the adoration of the people; and when King Ptolemy, three hundred and fifty years before our Christian era, demanded of the priests the significancy of this religious ceremony, they told him it was a mystery.” (See Christian Mythology Unveiled, p. 94.)