Part 16 (1/2)
These parallels might be given to an indefinite extent, as they appear in _Asiatic Researches_, by Sir William Jones; Upham's _History and Doctrine of Buddhism_; Hardy's _Manual of Buddhism_; numerous other ancient and modern writings on this subject; and the parallel facts presented by these authorities are admitted by the most distinguished Christian writers not a few.
In regard to miracles it is thought best to say only a pa.s.sing word.
It is admitted by the ablest theologians of the orthodox schools that miracles are indispensable to establish the claim of a special supernatural revelation, and great reliance is made upon the miracles accredited to the Christian Christ; and yet we find other saviors and heroes credited not only with the same miracles substantially, but with a larger number of even more wonderful miracles. It would be easy to fill a large volume with the alleged miracles of Buddha and Chrishna, and Prof. Max Muller affirms that the Buddhistic miracles ”surpa.s.s in wonderfulness the miracles of all other religions.” Zoroaster, Buddha, Osiris, Isis, and Horus all wrought miracles, even the raising of the dead; Serapis, Marduk, Bacchus, Esculapius, and Apollonius did the same; and the early Christian Fathers admitted the reality of heathen miracles, but very conveniently attributed them to the devil. In short, it may safely be affirmed that more wonderful and better-authenticated accounts of miracles are given of numerous other persons, both before and after the advent of the Christian Christ, than are given of his miracles in the Gospels.
The Greeks were accustomed to say, ”Miracles for fools,” and the Romans shrewdly said, ”The common people like to be deceived-deceived let them be;” and even the Christian Father St. Chrysostom declared that ”miracles are proper only to excite sluggish and vulgar minds; men of sense have no occasion for them.” The modern theological idea of proving the record by the miracle, and the miracle by the record, has become too transparent for even the most credulous.
There is also great confusion about the time of the birth of Jesus, though the Church in a sort of perfunctory manner settled this by saying he was born December 25, A. D. One. But the Church adopted this date for reasons of an astronomical character. More than one hundred different dates, some extending back nearly a century, have been fixed as to his birth, showing that no one knew anything about it. A blundering notice of his birth a.s.signs its date to the period when Cyrenius was governor of Syria, and makes the enrolment ordered by that official the occasion of Joseph's temporary sojourn at Bethlehem when that event took place.
This enrolment, however, was not made till after the displacement of Archelaus from the kingdom of Judea and some ten years or more after the death of Herod, and the story is accordingly in direct contradiction with the account of the flight of Joseph into Egypt, while Herod was still alive, to preserve the life of his son from that monarch's jealousy. But what is very significant is the fact that when Cyrenius commanded the enrolment Judas of Galilee arose and denounced it. He established a distinct sect which continued till the overthrow of the Jewish people.
Josephus says: ”When Cyrenius had now disposed of Archelaus's money, and when the taxings were come to a conclusion, which were made in the thirty-seventh year of Caesar's victory over Antony at Actium,” Antiq.
xviii. 2. The battle of Actium, in which Octavia.n.u.s gained his final victory over Antony, occurred in b. c. 31. Counting thirty-seven years, would bring the date of the taxings down to A. d. 6. Archelaus after reigning ten years was deposed for misconduct, and banished into Gaul.
Cyrenius, a Roman senator, had been sent by the government to settle up his finances and take an account of the substance of the Jews, or, in other words, to a.s.sess their property in order to apportion their taxes.
These things were done in the thirty-seventh year after the battle of Actium, or in 6 A. d. Counting ten years back, we would be at the year 4 b. c., or the year Archelaus began to reign. As Herod of course was dead before Archelaus ascended the throne, he consequently died before Christ was born, and hence the entire story of the slaying of the infants, the journey of the wise men, and the flight into Egypt falls helplessly to the ground.
”But when he heard that Archelaus did reign in Judea, in the room of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither: notwithstanding, being warned of G.o.d in a dream, he turned aside into the parts of Galilee.” Matt.
2:22.
Here we have a strange state of affairs. Joseph and the young child turned from Judea to Galilee when Archelaus was as powerful in the one country as in the other, for his ethnarchy included both!
In reading the first chapter of Matthew's Gospel we find an inexplicable mystery. The very first verse reads: ”The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Then in the sixteenth verse it is said, ”And Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus who is called Christ.” In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth verses the Holy Ghost is represented as the real Father of Jesus by a virgin; and his miraculous divine descent is elsewhere specifically taught in the Gospels, and the divine Sons.h.i.+p of Jesus has been accepted as a fact by the general Church-Roman Catholic, Greek, and Protestant.
On the other hand, there is proof positive, if the record is accepted, that Jesus claimed for himself simple humanity, and consequent inferiority and subjection to G.o.d; and Roman Catholics and orthodox Protestants very conveniently settle these contradictions by affirming that he was both G.o.d and man; while Unitarians reject the divinity of Jesus, and by way of apology for so doing magnify his manhood so as to make him quite divine, a human G.o.d.
It would be easy to fill volumes with accounts, with very slight variations, of the miraculous conception and birth of divine personages born of virgin mothers, who, after laboring and suffering for the good of men, came to a tragic death, which was generally followed by a triumphant resurrection and subsequent deification. The cases are so numerous that one hardly knows where to begin to enumerate them. It would be easy to furnish a roll containing the names of scores of incarnate deities, and it would be tedious to describe the many things in which they substantially agree.
According to some modern writers, supported by abundant sculptures in temples, caves, and rocks, Vishnu, the second person of the Hindoo trinity, has been incarnated eight or nine times, Buddha being the first, Chrishna the eighth, and Gautama, also called Sakya-Muni, the ninth. The fact that these alleged incarnations took place at uniform intervals show their astronomical origin.
Equally suggestive is the fact that there are so many peculiarities connected with the birth of these G.o.ds, and also so many incidents in their lives and deaths absolutely identical.
The name of the mother of Buddha was _Maia_ and the same name was given to the mother of the Greek Mercury and even to later divinities; which, like the name Mary, typifies the sea and sometimes the month of May.
Buddha had no earthly father, but was an immaculate conception of a ray of celestial light through a virgin mother. Chrishna, the eighth Indian incarnation, was born of the left intercostal rib of a virgin. His birth was concealed through fear of the tyrant Kansa. He raised the dead and wrought marvellous miracles, and washed the feet of the Brahmans. It would be tedious to give details, as almost every incident recorded in the Gospels of the life of the alleged Christian incarnation is recorded in circ.u.mstantial detail of some ancient pagan deity.
The fact is, that all the great nations of antiquity, and many of the smaller tribes, have had very similar views as to divine manifestations in human flesh; and you need only turn to the pages of any good dictionary of mythology to verify the truth of this allegation.
We might extend these a.n.a.logies to an indefinite extent. The author of _Bible Myths_ has specified about fifty particulars in which Jesus is said to have resembled Buddha, and as many more particulars in the case of Chrishna. n.o.body having any knowledge of the world's history will doubt that these Indian divinities preceded the Judean Christ by several centuries, as many distinguished writers, like Prof. Max Muller, have admitted.
We challenge the theologians to present one single prominent feature or characteristic said to have been shown in the career of Jesus which did not appear in several other alleged incarnations hundreds of years before. The fact is, that the Christ of modern times is a perfect copy of other Christs who preceded him. Not only are all ancient Oriental scriptures full of incarnated divine saviors, but the same symbols and ceremonies abound in their wors.h.i.+p. Take the cross, for an example. In ancient India the cross was as common as in modern Rome, and heathen temples were built in the form of a cross centuries before papists and Puseyites and their liberal imitators ever thought of such a thing. It was a common symbol in the ancient wors.h.i.+p of Egypt. It was a Druidic emblem in Britain five hundred years before the introduction of Christianity. Plato, the Grecian philosopher, four hundred or five hundred years before Christ proclaimed the cross to be the best symbol of the divinity next to the supreme. The wors.h.i.+ppers of Serapis used it, and Hadrian, the Roman emperor, as late as A. d. 130 mistook them for Christians. The standard portrait of Jesus, so honored by modern Christians, is a copy of the head of Serapis, the well-known sun-G.o.d, according to the testimony of Mr. King in his able work, _Gnostics and their Remains_ (p. 68).
The same is true of baptism and the Eucharist, as ceremonies identical with these, in their main aspects, existed among the ancient pagans. The ”Lord's Supper” virtually was in use more than two hundred and fifty years before Christ. Wherever Christian missionaries have gone they have found substantially the same dogmas and religious observances, and Tertullian, a Christian Father of the second century, conveniently explained this fact by saying that the devil had taught the heathen these same things to forestall the preaching of the missionaries.
And yet Justin Martyr in the second century (a. d. 140), in defending the Christian religion against the a.s.saults of pagans, said: ”For declaring that the Logos, the first-begotten Son of G.o.d, our Master Jesus Christ, to be born of a virgin without any human mixture, and to be crucified and dead and to have arisen again into heaven, we say no more in this than what you say of those whom you style the sons of Jove.” Here is a distinct admission in the second century, from one in high authority, that the doctrine of the death and resurrection of miraculously-incarnated deities born of virgin mothers was well known among pagans before the Christian era.
But we are not done with Justin Martyr yet. In his Apology to the emperor Hadrian he makes this most astonis.h.i.+ng admission: ”In saying that all things were made in this beautiful order by G.o.d, what do we seem to say more than Plato? When we teach a general conflagration, what do we teach more than the Stoics? By opposing the wors.h.i.+p of the works of men's hands we concur with Menander the comedian.... For you need not be told what a parcel of sons the writers most in vogue among you a.s.sign to Jove; there's Mercury, Jove's interpreter, in imitation of the Logos, in wors.h.i.+p among you. There's aesculapius, the physician, smitten by a thunderbolt, and after that ascending into heaven. There's Bacchus, torn to pieces; and Hercules, burnt to get rid of his pains. There's Pollux and Castor, the sons of Jove by Leda, and Perseus by Danae; and, not to mention others, I would fain know why you always deify the departed emperors, and have a fellow at hand to make affidavit that he saw Caesar mount to heaven from the funeral pile?
”As to the Son of G.o.d, called Jesus, should we allow him to be nothing more than man, yet the t.i.tle of the Son of G.o.d is very justifiable, upon the account of his wisdom, considering that you have your Mercury in wors.h.i.+p under the t.i.tle of the Word and Messenger of G.o.d.
”_As to the objection of our Jesus being crucified,_ I say that suffering was common to all the forementioned sons of Jove, but only they suffered another kind of death. As to his being born of a virgin, you have your Perseus to balance that. As to his curing the lame and the paralytic and such as were cripples from birth, this is little more than what you say of your aesculapius.”