By Mark Owen - © 2010
Chapter 5 - A potted History of Christianity (part 2).
'What reason weaves, by passion is undone.' - Alexander Pope.
Just why anyone followed the Nazarene is not entirely clear.
The 'facts,' if we may use that term, surrounding his life are far from certain. After all not one single shred of original documentation exists for any of the New Testament books! The earliest writings were not committed to papyrus or parchment (so far as anyone can tell) until a generation or so after the death of Jesus, and these were very far from being finished works, merely collections of sayings and instructions. And all such documents have long since vanished. The actual manuscripts from which scholars work today date from much later times. When the believer reads her latest 'up-to-date' translation she is still reading material largely drawn from 4th century manuscripts! Only a few fragments remain from earlier times, the very earliest being but five verses (John 18:31-33 and 37-38) dated around 125 CE. Let me repeat that date: 125 CE! And just FIVE verses! This is the very best the Church has to offer; not much substance upon which to base so great a weight of claims.
But let's take the documents as they stand. It seems Jesus was born in Nazareth in Galilee. Or was he? He might well have been born in Bethlehem. Mark has it that he was born in Nazareth (Mark 1:9, read in conjunction with Mark 6:1), his 'native place'. Matthew and Luke also refer to Nazareth as being his native place but assert he was born in Bethlehem (in Judaea)! The weight of evidence, both from these texts and from other references, suggests Jesus was indeed born in Nazareth and for this very reason he became known as Jesus the Nazarene. Confirmation of this comes from an encounter recorded in John 7:40-42, when some Jews, listening to Jesus preaching, exclaimed: 'Doth the Christ [i.e. Messiah] come out of Galilee? Hath not the scripture said that the Christ cometh of the seed of David, and from Bethlehem, the village where David was?' It is hard to deny the thrust of these words. And John not only recorded them but failed to add any comment. It would have been easy for him to affirm that Jesus did indeed come from Bethlehem, but he did not do so. We must therefore conclude that John also believed Jesus was a Nazarene.
It was left to Matthew and Luke to 'cook the books' as they (or rather, their editors) were fond of doing. Micah, the Jewish prophet, had prophesied Bethlehem as Messiah's birthplace so, regardless of where Jesus really did come from, the compilers of Matthew and Luke made certain they got Bethlehem into the story - somewhere, anywhere. These writers had no more dedication to historical truth than the people who wove fancy tales around commonplace events in Old Testament pseudo-history.
When was Jesus born? Another complex question, to which a great deal of attention has been directed by scholars. Professor Guignebert, one of the best, says: 'We do not know, within about fifteen years, or perhaps more, the time when Jesus came into the world'. It was, in fact, a matter of some indifference to the early Church. Only in the 6th century did a Scythian monk, Dionysius the Less, set the date at what is now the year we think of as zero. The actual birth-date, Christmas Day, was debated at some length among the learned clerics. Some of them proposed dates in March, others April or May, the Eastern Church thought January 6. Finally Rome settled on December 25. A significant date this, being the festival date celebrating Mithra, the solar deity! The day came at the end of the period of the Solstice festivities. Entirely appropriate, I would say, as Jesus Christ was often compared by writers in the early Church to the sun, and both the Old and New Testaments reflect time and again the influences of primitive sun and moon worship.
According to these same New Testament documents Jesus had said to the fisherman Cephas (who, like Saul/Paul, also had a suspicious name change, becoming Peter), or so we are told: 'Upon this rock I will build my church' (Matthew 16:18). As we shall see later, this statement was undoubtedly a spurious addition to the 'original'. Spurious or no, the Popes of Rome have ever extracted great mileage out of these words. In reality the promise was not only false; it turned out to be wholly wrong! Peter, in fact, represented but one of the warring parties vying for supremacy among the followers of Jesus. And Paul among them was soon to prove the most formidable.
So, as we have seen, a small 'church' had blossomed in Jerusalem, centred around the original 'Twelve' - Peter, James and John, with nine others less well-known, one of whom, the defector, Judas, had been replaced by Matthias. These men were all Jews and, if we are able to disentangle any facts from the doubtful narrative in the book of Acts, they maintained the observance of Jewish practices. A vital point of interest, as we shall see. The group may be fairly described as Judaizers. There are distinct echoes of their particular outlook found today in the legalistic doctrines of the Seventh Day Adventists and the followers of cultists such as Herbert W. Armstrong and his son Garner Ted.
The Jerusalem Jesus people adopted a communistic lifestyle, marked especially by the act of selling up all possessions and paying the proceeds into the common treasury. The demands made by Peter and the leadership of the early Church upon new disciples were every bit as insatiable as those made by the modern gurus of religion upon their followers. Converts were compelled to give up everything! The great mass of Christians today seem totally ignorant of this part of the story of the early Church; Christians are highly selective when choosing which scriptures to follow, which to ignore.
And this was no trivial matter. Anyone who mistakenly thought the new faith was one of sweetness and light would be gravely mistaken. To frighten potential followers into disgorging their cash a moralistic warning story was told of a husband and wife, Annas and Sapphira. They sold 'a possession' but when Annas went before Peter he kept back some of the money. For such a heinous crime the poor man was struck down dead, presumably by the Ghost, as it was said he had lied to the Ghost. Peter forthwith embarked on a nasty little exercise in entrapment. Sapphira appeared before him, not knowing what had transpired, whereupon the Apostle neatly caught her out and she, too, poor woman, dropped dead. No light matter opposing holy Church, a fact to which much of later history testifies. Peter's successors ran the torture machines of the Holy Inquisition and burnt witches at the stake.
The second distinguishing mark of these disciples was the preaching of the Resurrection. Now the idea that the dead could rise again might seem outlandish to rational people (although an equally outlandish idea, that of Reincarnation, is readily accepted today by many otherwise more-or-less sane citizens) but it was not altogether strange to the people of that time. The Pharisees, as I have noted, believed in such a possibility, although it was never a prominent doctrine among the Jews. At least the Jerusalem believers had something in common with the upstart preacher Paul; he, too, believed in resurrection. But there was not much else they could agree over, for the Church was already beginning to splinter.
Dissension is recorded at a quite early stage - in Acts 6:1 and subsequent verses. There was 'a murmuring of the Grecian Jews against the Hebrews.' Already there is a strong hint here that the Gospel had been preached to the Gentiles (that is the non-Jews), an idea that would not have entered the heads of those first disciples gathering about Solomon's Porch. For as yet there was no Christian Church. Indeed, there was no New Testament or Bible such as we now have. No less an authority than the great Augustine himself was to say: 'I should not believe the Gospels if I had not the authority of the Church for so doing.' There was simply a group of devoted Jews, men and women, who maintained their Jewish heritage while they sought to follow the now-dead Jesus.
But there's more. St Paul, who told us about his marvellous revelations direct from Jesus, and who subsequently wrote a number of letters to the churches, knew little or nothing of the Gospels' account of Jesus' death and resurrection! For example, in 1 Corinthians 15:3,4 he states briefly that he 'delivered unto you first of all that which I received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and was buried; and that he hath been raised on the third day, according to the scriptures . . .' This statement occurs in the very same chapter that Paul proclaims that without the Resurrection the Christian's faith is vain.
Yet Paul, on his own admission, is preaching secondhand knowledge; received from others. And it is plainly inaccurate knowledge, for he refers to Jesus appearing to 'Cephas [Peter]; then the twelve.' But at this stage there were only eleven, the replacement for Judas coming later. And he completely overlooked the women, those same women who figure with far greater prominence than the men in all the Gospel accounts of events subsequent to Jesus's death! And that is not all. He introduces a mysterious crowd of 'above five hundred brethren' who see the risen Jesus. Which five hundred are these? No such group appears in any Gospel. How reliable is this apostolic writer? Well we might ask! His testimony is sadly wanting in credibility.
Further, in the account of these events in the book of Acts (13:29) the Gospels are contradicted by the statement that it was the Jews who crucified Jesus and then took his body and buried it. Plainly this is not the Gospels' view, yet how much suffering was heaped upon the Jewish race by the Church through such an erroneous belief. The Jews lacked any power to inflict the death penalty; this was a prerogative of the Romans, and the Jews generally would not have bothered to bury him. Only the secret disciple, Joseph, did this.
That this whole episode of pseudo-history is shrouded in uncertainty and mystery (as befits an emerging god) is demonstrated by the fact that as far as is known the whole of Christian antiquity was ignorant of Jesus' tomb until it was (surprise, surprise!) 'rediscovered' under Constantine in 326 CE, as a result, the records inform us, of a 'divine revelation' (Eusebius: Life of Constantine, 3,26). For almost three centuries nobody had paid any attention to this shrine. Obviously its rediscovery had become somewhat important as yet another way of bolstering the claims of the emerging Church.
The divine drama played out in the stories of Dying and Rising Gods is of hoary ancestry and is a natural outgrowth of the worship of solar deities. Clement of Alexandria, a Christian bishop, admitted: 'Their function was the fictitious death and resurrection of the sun, the soul of the world, the principle of life and motion.' There are many such gods (someone once collected together biographies of sixteen of them, no less) and their stories are somewhat irrelevant to our main thesis. I would mention, however, Osiris, as being of particular interest as he is a well-known solar deity. Having been murdered by Set, his dismembered body was put together again and his life restored by his son Horus. Other well-known cases were Baal of the Semites, Dionysus in Greece and Attis in Asia Minor. Attis played an important role in the writings of John in the Apocalypse (The Book of Revelation). And we have already seen the influence of Mithraism on the Christian celebration of the birth of the Christ-god.
Now Mithraism closely paralleled Christianity in many respects, in that it had a baptism in water to remove sins, and like the Zoroastrians, had a form of communion feast, of bread (baked with a cross emblem) and (probably) wine, and its initiates were sealed on the forehead as Christian initiates were. When the Christians gained the upper hand in Rome they set to work to exterminate Mithraism; it was altogether too close to their own faith. Having the secular power on its side, the Church prevailed. Thus Christianity was as much a political movement as a religious one. In some respects it still is!
Whatever the tenuous basis for its beliefs, the Church came in time to celebrate these fictions in the period known as Easter. Easter is forever linked to the Jewish Passover, a festival with clear hints of lunar worship - evident also in other parts of the Christian Bible. Don't believe me? Check out how Easter is determined: Easter Day (in the West at least) is on 'the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox'.
Easter is a curious celebration; even the word comes from the name of the Anglo-Saxon goddess of Spring (Eostre) but in religion 'any god will do'. According to Bishop Charles Leadbeater of the Liberal Catholic Church, in his book The Hidden Side of Christian Festivals (1920), the name Eostre is in turn just another form of Ishtar, Astaroth, or Astarte, the Queen of Heaven. And this all-important Christian festival is celebrated on a date that varies from year to year, sometimes in March and sometimes in April. Which results in the curious and inexplicable fact that Christians celebrate the death of their leader on a varying date!
