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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

 

Foreshadowings of Christianity in Paganism

 

 

return to main-page of the "Jesus" article

 

 

instead of going to the Odin Temple, now you go to the Jesus Church

The so-called church fathers hoped to create a big-tent, universal ("catholic") church. To that end, they adopted ideas, customs, and rituals commonly extant in the world at-large, ones that would be familiar to new converts. They attached the labels of "Jesus" and "Christianity" to old pagan ways in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. For example:

A History Of The English Language, by Professor Michael D.C. Drout, Wheaton College; an excerpt from his lectures:

“In 597 AD Pope Gregory sends Augustine of Canterbury (his future title, then-currently residing in Greece) to convert [what would later be called England). Augustine was able to convert King Ethelbert of Kent … and set up a Roman Catholic Church in Canterbury; the entomology of ‘Canterbury’ is [“city of the dwellers in Kent”]. Over the next 70 years [England] undergoes this remarkable bloodless revolution [of religious conversion because, typically, in history, rapid change of religion is caused by the sword, invading conquerors] … and this seems to be because Pope Gregory had the great idea to tell Augustine, ‘Don’t burn down the pagan temples, just leave them there, go in, take down the pagan idol, and put up the Christian cross.’ So, if you were used to having your daughter’s wedding at the Odin Temple, now it’s the Christian Church, but it’s pretty much the same place, and some people really liked this new Christianity thing, ‘so, ok, we’ll go along with it.’”

 

 

Many will be astonished to learn that virtually all the major tenets of traditional Christianity are to be found in earlier cultures.

Allow me give you the quick bottom line before proceeding here:

There are many scholars who write about the ubiquity of savior-gods. For example, historian Joseph Campbell asserted that the various saviour myths share "the same anatomy."

In these legends, associated with many ancient peoples, we find:

  • a god is made flesh
  • he is called a "savior" and a "son of God"
  • he is born in a cave or humble cowshed on December 25 before three shepherds
  • he instructs his followers to be "born again" via a baptism ritual
  • he turns water into wine at a wedding party
  • he rides into town on a donkey while worshipping masses strew palm branches before him
  • he dies at Eastertime as a sacrifice for the sins of the world
  • he descends into hell, rises on the third day, ascends into heaven
  • he tells his followers that he will return as judge of the world
  • his death and resurrection are celebrated by a ritualistic meal of bread and wine, which symbolize his body and blood

 

Arthur Findlay, The Rock Of Truth:

[A saviour-god] was worshipped in Persia four hundred years before the birth of Jesus. Osiris, the great Egyptian saviour-god, had similar miraculous events ascribed to him, and these legends go back thousands of years. In the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, one named Petra was the doorkeeper of heaven. In China similar legends exist as are found in India, Persia, Babylonia and Egypt, and as came to surround Jesus. Many other examples could be given, such as the legends surrounding the lives of Pythagoras, Prometheus, Dionysus, Horus and many others, but it would just end in repetition, because all that is attributed to Jesus was attributed to the god-men who lived before the Christian era...

As to the origin of Christianity, Saint Augustine wrote as follows:

"For the thing itself which is now called the Christian religion was known to the ancients, and was not wanting at any time from the beginning of the human race until the time that Christ came in the flesh, from whence the true religion that had existed previously began to be called Christian, and this in our day is the Christian religion, not as having been wanting in former times. but as having in later times received the name"...
 

This opinion of Saint Augustine was also the opinion of Eusebius, the father of ecclesiastical history, born in Palestine in A.D. 265, who says:

"Those ancient Therapeutx were Christians and their writings were our gospels and epistles," and "the religion published by Jesus Christ to all nations is neither new nor strange"...

Robertson in his book Christianity and Mythology remarks as follows:

"Christianity we find to be wholly manufactured from pre-existent material within historic times." Sir James Frazer takes the same view, and states in The Golden Bough, that monumental work of eight volumes, as follows: "In respect both of doctrines and of rites the cult of Mithra appears to have presented many points of resemblance to Christianity. Taken all together the coincidences of the Christian with the heathen festivals are too close and too numerous to be accidental. They mark the compromise which the Church in its hour of triumph was compelled to make with its vanquished and yet still dangerous rivals." ...

Much of the teaching attributed to Jesus is considered by many to be peculiar to him and him only, and it is supposed that he was the first to teach love, gentleness, the love and fatherhood of God, and all the other virtues. This is quite wrong, though this false way of regarding his teaching is encouraged by the Church, which claims that he originated all these injunctions. I cannot count the number of sermons I have heard upholding this falsehood.

Long before the time of Jesus there were teachers who taught everything that is attributed to him, and there is nothing of value ascribed to him that was not said before his time.

"Return good for evil and overcome anger with love", and "he that would cherish me let him go and cherish his sick comrade", were sayings attributed to Buddha. "Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you" was said by Confucius. "Whenever thou art in doubt as to whether an action is good or bad, abstain from it" was said by Zoroaster a thousand years before Jesus.

"One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice, and it is not right to return an injury or to do any evil to any man, however much we may have suffered from him" was said by Socrates four hundred and fifty years before Jesus.

"Let us not listen to those who think that we ought to be angry with our enemies, and who believe this to be great and manly. Nothing is more praiseworthy, nothing so clearly shows a great and noble soul, as clemency and readiness to forgive" was said by Cicero seventy years before Jesus.
 

"If a man strike thee and in striking thee drop his staff, pick it up and hand it to him again" was ascribed to Krishna centuries before Jesus was born. Similar teachings could be quoted from numerous sources in great numbers, attributed to men who lived hundreds of years before Jesus was born. The immortality of the soul was taught by the Hindus, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, and many others. It is one of the earliest beliefs and is found in every religion.

What is termed "The Lord's Prayer" originated in Babylon, the tablet, on which is written a prayer resembling it, being discovered in 1882. It is one of the oldest Jewish prayers, repeated for long by them in the Chaldaic language, they having learned it in Babylon during their captivity. Likewise all the high ethical teachings attributed to Jesus can be found in many pre-Christian writings, such as the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred book of India, and in the writings of Seneca, Ovid, Aristotle, Epictetus, Plato and many others.

As Thomas Whittaker, in his able work The Origins of Christianity, truly remarks, "It is a remarkable fact that Christianity, said to have been revealed, has had to recur for every serious effort to find in the universe the manifestations of a rational and moral order, to thinkers who never pretended to have obtained what they might offer in this direction by anything but the exercise of their own reason."

In concluding this chapter I should like to quote from the contribution made by the Rev. James H. Baxter, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at St. Andrew's University, to that monumental work Christianity in the Light of Modern Knowledge. His words are as follows:

"Upon the popular interpretation and practice of Christianity, the effect of its establishment as the State religion had been profound. If Paganism had been destroyed, it was less through annihilation than through absorption. Almost all that was Pagan was carried over to survive under a Christian name. Deprived of demi-gods and heroes, men easily, and half unconsciously, invested a local martyr (Jesus) with their attributes, and labelled the local statue with his name, transferring to him the cult and mythology associated with the Pagan deity. Before this century (Fourth) was over the martyr-cult was universal, and a beginning had been made of that interposition of a deified human being between God and man which, on the one hand, had been the consequence of Arianism, and was on the other the origin of so much that is typical of medieval piety and practice. Pagan festivals were adopted and re-named, and Christmas Day, the ancient festival of the sun, was transformed into the birthday of Jesus."

That Christianity was just a new name given to old religious beliefs, rites and ceremonials there is not the least doubt. The reason people continue to believe the old dogmas and creeds is because they were taught them in childhood as true, and have never taken the trouble to investigate the subject for themselves...

 

the Vatican and the ‘Pachamama’ controversy: a microcosm of a millennia-old modus operandi to become a ‘universal’ church

Shortly after I’d written the paragraphs (in the "30 Art Masterpieces of the Ancient World" article) on the numerous savior-gods and mother goddesses, each fitted to a local culture as a power-and-control scheme, a modern day example presented itself, which, in principle, reflects an ancient Machiavellian dynamic.

In October of 2019, RCC bishops of South America attended a conference in Rome. To commemorate this synod, statues of a nude "Pachamama" ("Earth Mother"), an ancient South American fertility goddess, were displayed - "outrageously," some said - right next to the holy altar in one of the local Vatican parishes, the Church of Santa Maria in Traspontina (“Holy Mary across the Bridge”).

Not everyone took kindly to what they charged to be an invasion of paganism. But the hierarchy just loved it.

 

READ MORE

 

 

Restatement: resurrection, reincarnation, and the savior-gods

The inner-workings of the long-ago ancient world is often shrouded in mystery, and so what can we say, with some confidence, that we actually know about that primordial time?

To begin, we can assert, with more than a little assurance, that the dysfunctional ego readily oppressed, brutalized, and, if opportunity allowed, otherwise subjugated its neighbors, just as it does today. As the great psychologists have pointed out, we enjoy technological advancement today but, in terms of psychological orientation, we’re still running around as primitives in loin cloths. Just look at the news today which profusely speaks of a lack of authentic progress on the spiritual level.

Fake news is still with us. Prevarication, propaganda, and power-plays are all still with us.  Egos strutting on a world stage, posturing importance, is still very much with us, just as they loved to do it in the days of Naram-Sin of Akkad.

We know that in history, in various cultures and societies, ruthless dictator-potentates concocted “savior-god” schemes to control their unruly citizenry.

Further, we know that, in a survey of 30 of the most prominent art extravaganzas of history that, each and every one of them, was employed, not as “art for art’s sake” but, as hoodwinking effort to beguile and bedazzle the masses.

All of this might lead one to reasonably infer that the “savior gods” motif was not conjured by pious minds having prayerfully discerned the mind of God in an effort to make plain how the divine economy truly operates. These were dark and ruthless power-and-control contrivances, foisted upon superstitious and fearful minds, apprehensive of retribution and punitive action from on-high.

We also know that the Great Despotic Ecclesia, as a matter of policy, in an effort to create a “universal church,” thought nothing of opportunistically adopting-and-reformulating the local myths of the uneducated and hapless.

Editor’s note: I recently had lunch with an old college mate whom I’d not seen in 50 years, and we began to talk of these things. He pointed out that, when the early Spanish conquerors invaded the New World, these more-than brutal oppressors came with strengthened hand. Dear Mother Cult had ruled that the expendable natives of these gold-bearing new lands were not really human at all, just indigenous fauna, like the monkey or lizard, and therefore one should not hesitate to kill and butcher them, as whim or necessity might warrant. With this Machiavellian mindset leading the Church, are we to suppose it so unlikely for it to have also crafted an entire pageantry, a full "cosmogony," of “savior myths” to further its bloody intentions of world domination - just as the Naram-Sins did it in earlier times?

As we look at all the evidence, we find it reasonable to conclude that the most recent “resurrection” theme is just a warmed-over concoction of the more usual “death-and-reincarnation.”

Editor’s note: On the “Reincarnation” page see the recent history of this enslaving concept, conjured as a form of class warfare and oppression, especially of women.

 

 

more than drinking the koolaid

The long reach of cultism encompasses much more than crackpot churches. The root idea of cult offers the sense of "cut." This core concept of "cut" leads us to images of refinement and refashioning and, by extension, development, control, pattern, order, and system.

Cultism as systemization finds a ready home in religion and philosophy which seek to regulate and redistill the patterning and ordering of ideas. However, in a larger sense, the spirit of cultism extends to every facet of society. We find it scheming and sedulously at work in politics, academia, family, corporations, entertainment, science, artistry – anywhere power might be gained by capturing credulous and fear-based minds.

See the “cultism” page for a full discussion.

 

 

Editor's last word:

In the article “Weaponized Art, Part II: 30 Masterpieces of the Ancient World” we find that all of these artworks, to one degree or another, had been pressed into service by a Dear Leader of the day as a form of visual propaganda. Art was made to sell the idea that a warlord was larger than life and no mere mortal, a god or a representative of the gods, a guarantor of life, fecundity, and prosperity to his conquered peoples.

See the discussion there which offers logical evidence that the birth-death-resurrection theme became an immortality strategy of the warlord, a de facto reincarnational doctrine, an effort to further his power-and-control machinations for glory and legacy.