By Mark Owen - © 2010
Chapter 4 - A potted history of Christianity (part 1)
....the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
- Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach
We must now take a closer look at the faith that inspires so many millions. I do not hide my purpose. Quite simply, I wish to show how the life of a nabi, a Jewish preaching-man, provided the foundation upon which an entirely new character was built, that of the Christ-god (the term I prefer), a fantasy figure. And how the structure erected upon that fantasy developed into what we know as the Christian Church. Further, I shall show how the rottenness at the heart of this deception is evident throughout the subsequent history of the Church that claims it was founded by Jesus of Nazareth.
Few plagues have had a more devastating effect upon human life than the blight of Christianity. Yet the Christian Church was a massive fraud from its very beginnings.
A considerable body of modern scholarship has now been assembled, attesting to the flimsy nature of the evidence upon which Christianity was founded. The Church's credentials are, taking the most charitable view, highly suspect. Thus it should not surprise us that divisions soon rent asunder the fabric of the nascent faith and have been doing so ever since. After all, when many basic documents lack any real substance, who can tell what is fact and what fiction? It is my purpose in this and further chapters to demonstrate something of the tenuous nature of the foundations of the faith and then to relate how the uncertainties resulted in endless divisions, disputes, conflicts, even murder - and sometimes murder on a grand scale.
Divisiveness is endemic to political parties and religious movements. The Hebrews certainly did not escape factionalism. They had their parties. Among them were the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The faith of the ancient Hebrews was guided by the revelation of the will of Yahweh (Jehovah), a name usually rendered as 'the Lord' in most Bible versions. The Jews' religion might well be handed down by Yahweh, but that didn't stop his devotees interpreting Sacred Things in ways best suited to their own temperaments. They still do. As do the followers of Jesus of Nazareth.
The Sadducees were wholly legalistic in their interpretation of the Law of Yahweh. They were opposed by the Pharisees. In broad terms (but very broad) one might say the Sadducees were the fundamentalists of their day, the Pharisees the liberals. Both parties were opposed to Jesus, at least as they are portrayed in the Gospels. Although the Pharisees believed in the possibility of resurrection (but not the resurrection of Jesus), the Sadducees did not.
Somewhere around the year 35 CE, Saul, a man from Tarsus, who was a Pharisees, set forth on a journey that was destined to change world history. For the end result of this man's odyssey was to establish nothing less than the Christian Church. Now most people believe, if they think at all about the subject, that the Christian Church was established by Jesus, a carpenter's son from Nazareth. An attractive notion but quite untrue. Rather, the Christian Church grew out of the speculations of a group of people, chief among them Saul of Tarsus, who came together to engage in spiritual exercises, people seeking, as so many still do, to find answers to life's dilemmas.
Mind you, I doubt if Saul really knew what he was about in the days before he joined the Christian cause. I doubt he set out, like so many conquerors, to leave his mark upon the world of his day. He probably simply wanted to gain a bit of kudos from Yahweh by rounding up a bunch of dropouts who thought they had discovered an amazing truth. These were followers of Jesus, a man done to death by the Romans at the behest of the religious hierarchy. Members of the Nazarene sect had, after all, assumed the right to teach religion to the people, defying the Establishment, and that was considered to be a heinous crime.
What do we know about Saul? (We gather much of his story from the New Testament book of Acts; in 1913 Eduard Norden in his work Agnostos Theos effectively demolished Acts, describing it as historical fiction, but Christians don't bother themselves with such passing difficulties.) Although Saul was a devout Jew he was also, by accident of birth, a Roman citizen (Acts 16:37). He was evidently unmarried (1 Corinthians 7:7), indeed he is known for his misogynist view of gender relationships (1 Corinthians 11:7,8 to cite but one of many passages). He is in many respects the quintessential misogynist. Many of my female readers would well recognize shades of Saul in their boss, their lover, their husband, or a clergyman of their acquaintance. And his jaundiced attitudes have permeated the Church for two thousand years. Indeed, Saul would have appreciated the monks at the Greek Orthodox monastery of Mount Athos. Nothing female is allowed within the monastery's walls, and I mean nothing. Not only are women forbidden but even hens, mares, cows, or any other female creature. The border is patrolled by armed guards to ensure that this bastion of male supremacy remains inviolate. It has been that way for over 700 years.
The shadow of Saul fell across the centuries during a 1997 debate on the ordination of women:
'There are some things women do better than men, and some things that men do better than women. One of the things men seem to do better is to teach and to rule with authority.' (The Reverend Douglas Milne, Australian Presbyterian minister).
'I don't know how to react to that. It is a cruel and authoritarian concept of ministry.' (The Reverend Joy Bartholemew, Presbyterian minister, in the same debate).
'I wasn't staying inside to listen to that.' (The Reverend Theodora Hobbs, who, with others, walked out during the debate) .
Saul also had another character fault, for he watched, presumably in a detached frame of mind, if not with excitement (for folk are apt to get their jollies from such scenes, as any student of execution history knows) a death by stoning, of one of the hated Jesus people, Stephen. He may even have been operating a makeshift cloakroom as the frenzied mob entrusted their outer garments to him for safekeeping (Acts 7:58). Well, stoning is, after all, hot work. And it seems, from subsequent events, that Saul was deeply and actively involved in the death of Stephen, for not long after watching this bloody execution Saul embarked on a rampage. Like the Gestapo of a later era he and his henchmen stormed into the houses of Jesus' followers and seized men and women, dragging them off to prison (Acts 8:2). Not content with his tally he set forth on a punitive expedition, accompanied by, one assumes, some sort of posse of police, aimed at rounding up this nest of vipers and putting them where all such independently-minded people belong - behind bars, if not in a coffin.
But on a hot, dry road as he neared Damascus at midday (Acts 22:6) Saul evidently suffered a nasty case of sunstroke (heatstroke as it is now called). This, surely, is the only explanation for the hallucinations this excitable Jew experienced thereafter. He told people he had actually seen the Nazarene preacher - alive and well. What is more, Jesus spoke to him and said: 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' Poor Saul, it was all so confusing. One wonders if the sun had really affected his brain, for it was not very long after this time that the name Paul entered into the narrative. Up to Acts 13 he was called Saul but then we read, 'Saul who is called Paul' (Acts 13:9). But perhaps this was, as some think, a veiled reference to phallic symbolism, frequently evident in the Bible, the name Paul being linked to phallus and its many variants in several languages. In many ways this narrative leaves us all as confused as evidently was Saul aka Paul himself.
Be that as it may, he was now calling himself Paul. And, after convincing himself that he had been marked out for some great work (history's prophets are, without exception, self-elected to their high office, e.g. Zarathustra in his temple, Buddha under his tree, Muhammad in his cave, Joseph Smith with his magic plates), he took up preaching. Wherever he went he told folk about his 'miraculous conversion' on the Damascus road. And this, after all, did give him status among the followers of Jesus, a matter of some moment, as we shall see. But there's a problem. Saul/Paul was still confused over what had actually happened to him that day.
Let us examine the documents. Jesus spoke to him in Hebrew; curious this, for Jesus' native tongue was, according to the rest of the New Testament, Aramaic, the lingua franca of the day. Did Paul make a mistake? But there's more. The Bible tells us: 'The men that journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but beholding no man.' (Acts 9:7). Plainly Paul thought he saw Jesus but his fellow travellers only heard a voice, they saw nothing. Yet in one of his sermons, Paul told his hearers: 'They that were with me beheld indeed the light but they heard not the voice of him that spake to me.' (Acts 22:9). Obviously Paul had not yet recovered from the after-effects of heatstroke!
Naturally good Christians reject any suggestion that heatstroke was responsible for Paul's delusions. Well, he is the Founding Father of their faith and all. But there is very strong evidence to suggest that heatstroke was indeed responsible for the feverish - and confused - mental activity that resulted in the Apostle believing he was preaching a new faith. Heatstroke is a common condition suffered by people exposed to the sun in tropical climes and is even reported as striking victims in temperate regions during very hot summers. Syria, through which Saul passed, was not merely temperate but actually subtropical. In parts of the country extremes of temperature are often recorded, certainly high enough to bring on heatstroke. The journey from Jerusalem to Damascus, a distance of some two hundred kilometres, is estimated by commentators to have taken Saul about six days and a significant portion of the route ran through dry and arid country; conditions just right for the sun to strike down a traveller.
In their book, The Life and Epistles of St Paul (Longman's, 1898), two convinced Christians, Coynebeare and Howson, wrote of this journey:
Leaving now the Sea of Galilee . . . we follow the company of travellers over the barren uplands which stretch in dreary succession along the base of Antilibanus. All around are stony hills and thirsty plains, through which the withered stems of the scanty vegetation hardly penetrate. Over this desert, under the burning sky, the impetuous Saul holds his course, full of fiery zeal . . . (p. 71).
This was the area known as the Wilderness of Damascus. And it was midday, with the sun at its zenith. It was dry and it was hot and the journey was a long one and Saul was a very determined, zealous man. Heatstroke is described in medical literature as being 'an often fatal affection of the central nervous system'. Through its attack on this system it also affects other parts of the body and in extreme cases causes complete physical breakdown of many bodily functions. Some reports in the past have given a figure of 50 percent fatalities! Predisposing factors not only include high temperature (the major one) but also dry atmosphere, stress or anxiety on the part of the victim, overwork, poor nutrition and 'prolonged marches'. And recent studies indicate that in many cases a state of mental confusion sets in, people affected not being properly aware of their surroundings.
Close to our own time, in January 1991 there was a dramatic case of heatstroke reported in Australia. A female German tourist, aged 30, was critically ill after exposure to our burning southern sun. She had been in a coma for two days, had suffered brain damage, kidney failure and muscle-melt, or liquefaction of her muscles. As I write, then, I picture the zealous, highly-strung figure of Saul breathing out his threatenings and slaughter, marching with his entourage onwards to Damascus, single-minded, intent on dragging the followers of Jesus 'bound to Jerusalem,' to exult in their sufferings and experience the release of his own pent-up hatred and contempt for them. The Church's founder was in fact someone in urgent need of psychiatric help!
All the conditions were ripe for the occurrence of a dramatic event. But that event was not Saul's confrontation by a dead rabbi, as we are led to believe, which is an absurdity anyway; it was the prostration of Saul beneath the awesome primeval power of the midday sun. Caught up in a state of mental confusion and detachment, it is easy to understand how ghostly visions could trouble him. But I haven't quite finished with this episode. Saul was struck blind. And it comes as no surprise that his blindness was said to last three days - a magical mystery period in Bible stories! One cannot help but be a trifle suspicious as to the authenticity of the story with the interposition of this conveniently neat three-day period. The blindness is very significant. The Bible gives no spiritual reason whatever for this condition. But there is, of course, a probable physical reason. It is plainly obvious that Saul must have come perilously close to losing his eyesight altogether. He described the light he saw as brighter than the sun (Acts 26:13). This phraseology aptly describes the effect of staring straight into the sun's rays because normally we do not do such a dangerous thing.
Still not convinced that Saul suffered heatstroke? Let us turn yet again to the Bible itself, which here, as in many places, gives itself away; the editors were a slapdash lot. In both his 2nd letter to the Corinthians and the letter to the Galatians (leaving aside the interesting question as to whether Saul actually wrote these letters, which many doubt) we have the Apostle referring, with some feeling, to suffering 'an infirmity in the flesh' (2 Corinthians 12:7 and Galatians 4:13). This affliction bothered him often. In fact, he says himself that he prayed for its removal. Alas, his prayers were not answered! Prayers frequently aren't, even although the Bible assures us that believing prayers are answered!
Now most Christian commentators think this infirmity - surprise, surprise! - was an eyesight problem! It seems likely that Saul was part-blind or had even lost the sight of one eye. What else could he refer to but such an affliction when he says of the Galatian Christians: 'I bear you witness that, if possible, ye would have plucked out your eyes and given them to me' (Galatians 4:15). It is pretty obvious that Saul's eyesight had been damaged by his heatstroke experience.
So Paul (as we'll now call him for convenience), convinced he had met up with Jesus, began preaching and teaching. There was at this point no Christian Church as such but some sort of embryonic 'church' had evolved among the followers of Jesus in Jerusalem. They were all Jews and still attended temple worship on the Sabbath, Saturday, but they also met together on the first day of the week, Sunday. Confusion over the observance of this holy day was to dog the Church throughout its history.
Eventually the title 'Christ' which means 'Anointed One' - a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew 'Messiah' - became attached to his birth name by the church. This was a laboured effort to lend credibility to its false claims - linking Jesus to the Messiah, the strange figure expected (and, note, still expected) by the Jews. A full explanation of the way the simple worship of the followers of Jesus evolved into the Christian Church is beyond the scope of this book. I refer my readers to a detailed scholarly study - Ancient, Medieval and Modern Christianity, by Charles Guignebert (Reissued in an English translation by University Books).
