Part 8

But not only occurrences which call to mind the Christian Son of God, but even his very name appears in Grecian antiquity; and indeed the name antedates the occurrences. Homer (Odyssey, V. 125), and Hesiod (Theogony 969) mention Jasion or Jasios (names closely resembling the Hebrew Joshua and Jesus), a son of Zeus, who had a sister Harmonia, and who with the goddess Demeter (the earth, or fertility) produced out of a thrice-plowed field Plutus (wealth): meaning that the discoverer of husbandry became discoverer of thrift. But in punishment of his sacrilegious love of a goddess Zeus struck him dead with a thunderbolt, yet at the same time assigned him a place among the gods. As beloved of the Eleusinian goddess, Jasios, after initiation into the mysteries by Zeus himself, became the indefatigable herald of the mystic doctrines. Says Diodorus (V. 49): “Wealth is a gift imparted through the intermediation of Jasios.... It is known of all that these gods (Demeter, Jasios, and Plutos), when invoked amid dangers by the initiated straightway offered them help; and whoso hath part in the mysteries, the same will be more devout, more upright, and in every respect better.” Thus does Jasion figure as son of the highest god, as himself raised to divine honors, as a wandering apostle of religion, and as the source of all good fortune. His name is equivalent to “savior,” “healer,” being from the same root as iatros (healer), and the verb iaomai (to heal, cure). Compare Iao, the Greek form of the Hebrew divine name Yahve or Jehova; also Iacchos, and Jason (i. e., Iason).

Thus in mystic Hellenism we find the basic ideas of the later system of divine incarnation and human deification, of redemption, etc.; and there can be no doubt that we must seek in the Grecian mysteries for one of the sources of Christianism.

_PART FOURTH_. _Son of Man. Son of God._

1. HELLENISM AND JUDAISM.

If one attends solely to the fact that the founder of the Christian religion was a Jew, and that not only he executed his mission in Judea, but took Judaism for the basis of his teaching, the assertion made in the preceding section, viz.: that the sources of Christianism are to be sought in the Grecian mysteries, may appear singular. But the apparent contradiction disappears at once when we reflect that long before Christ’s day Judaism was thoroughly yeasted with Grecian elements; and that after his death the work of propagating his system was done far more largely by Greeks and men of Grecian education than by Jews. We will not only prove that this was so, but also will show that the Christianism of Christians is at root and in substance a totally different thing from the Christianism of Jesus.

Sharper contrast can hardly be than that between the Grecian and the Jewish character. On one side closest union between God and world: on the other, widest divulsion; on one side most untiring research and the finest sense of art-form: on the other only theology and religious poetry; on the one side a priesthood that makes no pretension, and has little or no influence: on the other a nation ruled by priests; the Greeks maintaining an active commerce with all the world, their ships traversing the seas, from the Strait of Gibraltar to the remotest angle of the Euxine: Judea sealed against all access from without, against every ship that touched at Joppa, against every caravan from the desert; in Greece eager seizing of everything new and readiness to reject what is antiquated: in Judea holding fast to what is old and mistrust of all change.

These fundamentally different elements were fated to come in mutual contact. Ever since their liberation from Babylonian captivity by the decree of Cyrus, the Jews, both those who remained in the region of Euphrates and Tigris and the small number of them who returned to the native land, had lived under the Persian sceptre, and therefore after the conquest of Persia by Alexander, were exposed to the powerful influence of Grecian culture. The Jews were scattered still more in consequence of the wars between Alexander’s successors: soon they were to be found in every port and every isle of the Mediterranean as far as Spain; on the edge of the Asian and African deserts; and after this dispersion (in Greek, diaspora), they became a shopkeeping or mercantile race. But nowhere outside Palestine were they so numerous as in Egypt and its splendid new capital, Alexandria, seat of Grecian art, literature and learning. They enjoyed large privileges in Egypt; and they erected at Leontopolis a temple, after the model of the temple at Jerusalem. But though the Jews of the Diaspora, thanks to their laws regarding foods and the Sabbath, their possession of the Scriptures, their undiminished reverence for the Temple of Jerusalem, and the obligation laid on every Jew to pilgrim thither once at least, remained most firmly attached to the religion of their fathers, nevertheless in many places they adopted the language (usually Greek) of the locality in which they lived, so that a special “Hellenist” synagogue had to be erected at Jerusalem for the sake of visiting Jews who understood only Greek. But nowhere did Jews adopt the Grecian customs and language so unreservedly as at Alexandria, and it was there that between the years B. C. 280 and 220 the Pentateuch was translated into Greek. This translation still is styled the Septuagint (Latin, Septuaginta, Greek, Heptekonta, both meaning seventy), in accordance with the old fable that in the work were employed seventy-two translators, being six from each of the twelve Israelitish tribes; and that while each of the seventy-two translated the whole of the five “books of Moses,” the several versions agreed verbatim, literatim, punctatim. In later times the remainder of the Hebrew Bible was translated (about 125 B. C.).

In Alexandria scholars who were not Jews found in the Septuagint an introduction to Jewish theology; the Hellenist Jews, from their acquaintance with the literature of Greece, became conversant with Grecian philosophy. Greeks began to admire the wisdom of Moses, Jews to study Plato and Aristotle; and the enlightened polytheism of the one concurred with the monotheism of the others, in developing a new mysticism. In this mysticism of the Alexandrines it was that the idea of Divine Revelation had its origin—an idea before unknown, but now suddenly taken up by these enthusiasts, and applied, on the one side to the Old Testament, and on the other side to the Greek philosophers. The Jew Aristobulus, founder of this school of thought, by means of an allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament, traced to that source all the wisdom of the Greeks; and Philo, greatest of the Jewish philosophers, contemporary with Jesus, though he knew nothing of his life or doctrine, so spiritualized the tradition of his race as to see in the four rivers of Eden the four cardinal virtues, in the trees of Paradise the other virtues, in the patriarchs and heroes of Israel only personifications of various moral conceptions: all in the Grecian manner. According to Philo, before he created the world, God made a world of ideas, which found its centre of unity in his Word (logos); the corporeal world was made after the model of this ideal world. The logos was God’s first work, the world his second: this passed afterward into the gospel called of John: “In the beginning was the word,” etc. He understood the history of man’s creation to mean that the first human creature was immortal, ideal, perfect, but that by the creation of woman he was made sinful, imperfect. Philo took the idea of immortality from the Grecian philosophy rather than from the ancient Jewish doctrines; and with Pythagoras he regards the soul’s union with the body as a punishment. He therefore taught that man should free himself as much as possible from this burdensome association, that is, should despise sense and live entirely in the thought of God, that so he might obtain release. One should think such views are inconsistent with the laws of man’s nature, and so in truth they are; but nevertheless in Philo’s day there existed a society that aimed to fashion their life in accordance with these opinions.

2. THE ESSENES.

Such a society was the order or sect of the Essenes, who traced their origin back to high antiquity, but whose doctrines really were first put forth about the year 100 B. C. The Grecizing Jew Josephus makes them a “third party,” standing between the Pharisees and the Sadducees. But the Essenes, as such, had nothing to do with the political questions at issue between the two principal parties. The Essenes constituted a secret society.

The name, Essenes, Essenii, is of unknown derivation. But as they practiced the healing art they got the name of Therapeutae (healers, physicians). Josephus says that they lived in special settlements in the country parts; Philo, that they lived in the hamlets, avoiding the cities; Pliny the elder plants them on the western shore of the Dead Sea, in settlements apart. Their number is stated at 4,000. Their occupations were husbandry and handicraft, but they sternly refused to have anything to do with whatever served the uses of warfare, as the manufacture of arms; they also declined all trades engaged in for individual profit, as traffic, seafaring, innkeeping. They had no private property, but community of goods; among themselves they neither bought nor sold, but each to each gave according to the need. They repudiated not alone servitude, but mastery in general, and whatever in anywise annuls the natural equality of mankind. Their food was such as necessity required, and was prepared strictly according to the rules of the order. On this point we know with certainty only that they held oil in abomination, whether for anointing or for use with victuals. But from the circumstance that they condemned bloody offerings and always practiced great abstemiousness in food, we must infer that they abstained totally from fleshmeat and intoxicating liquors. Sexual love also they condemned, and a party among them (the leading party), abstained from marriage and maintained its numerical strength by adopting outside children; another faction, however, deeming this strictness to be fatal to the sect, retained the institution of marriage, though under severe restrictions. The members observed the most scrupulous cleanliness, taking the bath daily in cold water, and wearing white garments. Their daily tasks were minutely prescribed. Before rise of sun they spoke no word, only the prayers, in which they paid honor to the sun as symbol of God. Then they went about their work, coming thence back to the common meal, first washing themselves and putting on clean garments. No one tasted anything till the priest had made prayer. The meal concluded, they offered prayer in unison, laid off their clean garments, and went back to work. At the last meal of the day the same customs were observed: at meat only one person spoke at a time. They did nothing without orders from the superiors, practiced moderation in all things, studied to control the passions, to be faithful to all obligations, to be at peace among themselves and with all the world, and to be helpful to the poor. There was a twelve-month term of probation prior to admission into the order. During that time the postulant conformed to the Essenian rule of life: he received a small hatchet (borne by all Essenes, as an emblem of labor), a loincloth for the bath, and a white gown. If the result of probation was satisfactory, a second term of probation (two years) followed; if found worthy, the postulant was admitted to membership. The rite of admission consisted of a meal in common, preceded by the pronouncing of the vow by the new brother. The tenor of the vow was that he obligated himself to be ever faithful to the rules of the order and to lead a virtuous life; to observe secrecy regarding the doings of the order and the names of members: this with reference to the world without; but with regard to the society itself, to keep nothing secret from the brethren. After admission, the Essenes were classed in four degrees. Unworthy members were expelled—a terrible punishment, indeed, for the outcasts were not released from their vow, and yet could not in the world comply with it; and so were doomed to perish.

Their religious views have been already stated in part. With Judaism their only bond of union was in their practice of sending to the temple at Jerusalem offerings; but by reason of their condemnation of bloody sacrifices they were self-excluded from the temple. Nor was their belief in immortality of Jewish origin, for they held that soul, formed of most tenuous aether, is attracted and appropriated by a body, within which it lives as a prisoner; but that after liberation through death it soars to heaven, where it lives for evermore in a blest land, without rain, or snow, or heat, while the wicked are tortured in a remote region of cold and darkness. This recalls the views of the Pythagoreans. Less honorable to the Essenes are the frauds practiced by many of them in pretending to read the future, to interpret dreams, to conjure disease away, etc. Of later Christian notions we are reminded by the Essenian nomenclature of the angels, and the obligation imposed on new members to keep the names secret. The Essenian order survived till the early days of Christianism: it then died out, the Christian asceticism having made it superfluous.

3. CHRISTIANISM.

Essenism is one of those phenomena which make but a small figure in general history, but which have mighty results, and which reconcile contrarieties in human nature. For in Essenism we have the middle term between the Grecian mysteries and Christianism, as also between the Grecian philosophy and Judaism. As appears from what has gone before, the Essenian society was a Judaic imitation of the Pythagorean league, and that league, again, represented in philosophy what the Grecian mysteries represented in religion, namely, humiliation of man by showing him that there exist higher powers that far transcend humanity; and then the elevation of man by inculcation of the thought of immortality and of future union with the Creator. With this mysticism was associated, in Greece, the lofty morality of a Socrates, a Plato, an Aristotle; and in Judea the belief in One God. The combination of all these elements could have but one result, to wit, to call forth that great power which transformed the world—Christianism.

This new power was bound to arise, to reconcile contraries that confronted each other in that time, after the Roman Empire had brought under its universal sway the lands that had cradled all the diverse religions and philosophies. Those religious and philosophical systems were no longer, as before, separated: brisk inter-communication favored by the commerce and the wars of the vast empire, brought them daily into contact. The result was twofold: first, a certain indifference for religious opinions, the diversity of which gave men occasion to judge that in supersensual things no direct knowledge is possible; and the mischief of it all was that nothing was done for the education or enlightenment of the people, and, in fact, science existed only for the higher orders, and the people found no substitute for their ancient belief. But secondly, the result also was that people began to be conscious of the feeling, implanted by the Grecian philosophers, and particularly by the Stoics, that in spite of national and religious differences, all men are brothers, and that mankind is one great whole. However beautiful and noble this idea, it had to lie dormant so long as no bond of spiritual kinship save that of political unity held together the peoples who within the empire jointly obeyed one law and one will. This missing bond of spiritual union could not be other than a religious one; for so long as the sciences were so undeveloped no other spiritual guidance but that Godward could lead all hearts, however educated, of whatever nation, to the one end toward which men were being forced by the consciousness that, above all, they were men. And if it be asked what sort of a religion that must be which shall satisfy all nations at once, first of all it is very clear that it could be no polytheistic religion. That form of religion had outlived its usefulness. The various national religions—Egyptian, Chaldaean, Syrian, Grecian, Roman—had completely exhausted themselves in the production of deities: polytheism could give forth no more new shoots, as was shown by the fact that the Romans, all the forces of nature having been worked up, had gone and made goddesses of the virtues, e. g., Pudicitia, Concordia, Pax, Victoria, and the rest, had no recourse but to admit to their Pantheon all the gods of the conquered nations, and paid now to Isis, Cybele, Mithras, and Baal the same worship as before they had paid to Jupiter and Juno. Into such disrepute had polytheism fallen in the estimation of all educated men, who if they were persons of serious character despised such gods; but if they were frivolous, ridiculed worship and sacrifice and oracles and priests. The priests themselves smiled when they met, and by their irregular lives and their superstitious practices forfeited all respect. At last every honest man must have been transported with indignation when the emperors in the paroxysms of their despotic frenzy had themselves worshiped as gods and a race of hounds in human form burned the incense of adulation before them.

Hence, the new religion for which mankind sought, to give true expression to the sentiment of a common humanity, could not be any of the heathen systems. Rather, by insisting on the oneness of Godhead, it had to make an end of polytheism, of godmaking, and of Olympian wantoning, and at the same time, of scorn and derision of the gods.

Thus, then, what was wanted was a god who should have vanquished all other gods, and he a god of definite outline and fixed character—no nebulous, lackadaisical, inert deity such as the Grecian philosophers preached: no abstract “world-soul,” signifying nothing to the uneducated people; but a god like unto man himself, and whom man should have “made after his own likeness”; one with human feelings, sentiments, and passions, with human wrath and human lovingness. And this god must stand for a doctrine of personal immortality to the end the precious Ego of every man might have infallible and trustworthy assurance that his title to a Mansion in the Skies will stand unchallengeable for ever and for ever. And again, this god must be no abstract entity, alleged to have existed somewhere, somewhen, but a personality associated with definite localities, and possessing very definite traits. And so the problem was to find this one god, this doctrine of immortality, to find a personality that would be the middle term between the two.

Nowhere was a monotheism to be found save in Judaism, and there it was plain and open to view. We have already seen how the Jews were scattered all over the world. Their synagogues were everywhere, and (noteworthy fact) they had proselytes in every large city, especially in Rome. In this we see the first steps in the dissemination of monotheism: but it could not be propagated on the large scale by Jews. Few were the persons who took a liking to the strictness of the Mosaic religion, and the God of the Jews was too spiritual a being to be grasped; besides, very many turned away from Judaism because of the indefiniteness of the Jewish notions of immortality, or the strange rites and the peculiar usages of the Jewish people.

From Judaism, then, the idea of monotheism was the only feature that could be borrowed: what was demanded else was the mystic element; that is to say, men wanted a system of religious conceptions that would reflect back upon them their own sentiments as the infallible truth. But the material best fitted for that end was to be found in the mysteries and in the Pythagorean and Essenian doctrines. The diverse ideas of the several secret leagues with regard to the separation of the divine from the human and their reconciliation, must find their unity in the Jewish God—a thing not difficult to accomplish in the times immediately preceding the advent of Christ, because of the intermingling of Grecian and Jewish ideas: and this unity had to be established by some personage of imposing figure on the stage of history, who should impress his seal upon it and surround it with the prestige of deity.

Now, at that time there was both among the heathen and the Jews an expectation of some such divine intervention as this. Thus, in the early years of the Roman Empire the belief was widespread that a new kingdom was to be founded in the East, and that a new Golden Age was about to begin. More definite was the expectation entertained by the Jews of a Messiah to come, who would restore the kingdom of Israel, and the worship of Jehova. This longing of the Jews coincided with the desire of heathendom for a new religion to take the place of a dying and degenerate polytheism.

4. JESUS.

At this juncture appeared Jesus. He lived and died in obscurity. Of his career not one word of mention is found in contemporary Greek and Roman writers, eagerly as they investigated everything. But this obscurity wrought no detriment, for it left those who were longing for a new religion free to make of him whatever they thought best for their cause; that is to say, they made of him a personality very different from what he really was. Out of a circumcised son of a Jewish carpenter, who rose, indeed, above the bigotry of his people, and who suffered death for his revolt against the rule of priests and scribes, was developed the longed for Messiah. He was no longer merely human, but the Son of God, born of a virgin; a thaumaturge; his death was formally and intentionally a sacrifice for the “redemption” of mankind; after death he rose again, and then ascended into heaven: in a word, Jesus the man had become a god. And thus on the Jewish branch were grafted quite unjewish, Graeco-mystical shoots till the branch was no longer recognizable.

We thus have in the life of the founder of the Christian Church, as handed down to us, two elements, truth and fiction. The element of truth is whatever is consistent with historical research and psychological fact and nature’s laws; and the element of fiction comprises whatever is in conflict with these. Jesus himself never pretended to be more than a man. Virtue was the burden of his teaching, and he never propounded a creed. To the many names of God he added that of “Father”—father of all mankind. He was no dogmatist, but a moral reformer, and as such occupied common ground with the Essenes and with John the Baptist, though he differed from them, and particularly from the Essenes, with regard to methods and measures: the Essenes would save men’s souls by withdrawing them from human society; Jesus sought to save men living in the world—to save human society itself.