Contents Updated: Thursday, March 09, 2000
Adelphiasophists need to persuade Christian believers to examine candidly the bases of their belief and the practical alternatives. The complaints of priests against the stirrers of sectarian conflict are prompted by a desire to keep their flocks in ignorance and pursue their mercenary activities unrecognized. The real issue for Christians is whether the Word of God is the Word of God. What satisfies them that it is not just the later word of the people who have adopted the profession of saving souls for practical pecuniary reasons?
How are they sure that what they believe is really the religion of Jesus. Perhaps they will answer that the bible tells us. Well, millions of Fundamentalist Christians believe an agonized mother of a stillborn baby must accept that the soul of her child will burn in bell forever because it bad not been baptized. What is the basis of their belief? Where is it in the New Testament, and was it Jesus or some parrotter that said it? Jesus, god though he might be, took a terrible risk with this rule, did he not, because he left his own baptism until he was thirty?
No one can find a statement in the gospels that absence of baptism leads to hell fire. On the other hand, if the devout Christian takes baptism to be merely a symbol of repentance and people who are unrepentant will burn, then millions of insincere Christians are burning in hell too, including many Fundamentalists, but an innocent child who has not lived long enough to sin will be living in the balmy place.
Evidence of the lateness of the teaching that is attributed to Jesus is nowhere clearer than in one of the most famous texts of the New Testament. The writer attributes a pun to the prophet of Nazareth:
Thou art Peter [Rock], and upon this rock I will build my church.
Jesus, as an Essene probably so delighted in puns that it is a wonder there are not many others. Just as, for English speakers, the pun does not make any sense unless the Greek name Peter is translated into English, it seems unlikely that Jesus could have made the pun in Aramaic, but Peter is simply the Greek translation of the Aramaic for a stone, Cephas, so the pun does work in the original language of Jesus. Paul prefers to call Peter by the nickname that Jesus gave him and not its Greek equivalent. Anyway, the Christian, especially the Catholic, Church stakes its legitimacy on that pun. Yet, the word, "church," is used again in Matthew 18:17, where a man who has a quarrel with his neighbour must submit it to "the church."
So, the Church Peter was to build already existed and Jesus was a part of it! And if Jesus was part of a church, and also expected the world to end soon, why should he be appointing Peter as the rock upon which another church would be built. The Greek word put in the mouth of Jesus is ecclesie. The word is used by the Greek translators of the Old Testament (Deut 31:30 and Ps 22:22). The only Aramaic word corresponding to this meant the general assembly or convocation of the Jewish people, or an assembly of the Essenes (qahal), so a genuine reference to "the church" by Jesus meant that he was an Essene.
Where does Jesus say he is, not the "son of God," but God? Let a Fundamentalist go carefully through the gospel of Matthew without a preacher to befog him, and they will realize a strange thing: most of their cherished beliefs are not even in the bible they consider infallible, and many of them are not the teaching of Jesus but of Paul, the Jewish scriptures or the theologians.
The contrast of the teaching of Paul with the teaching of Jesus, simply from studying the gospels and epistles, is so glaring that Christian scholars of great distinction and authority can conclude that Paul knew nothing of Jesus in life that he was willing to admit to. Fundamentalism is based on Paul.
Taking Matthew as the most complete record of the supposed teaching of Jesus, only a few incidental phrases can be called theological. Paul was the first theologian. Jesus believes in God and says that he must be worshipped in spirit only, not in temples and synagogues, not with the aid of priests or ministers. This God will punish sin with eternal torment—personal sins, Jesus never mentions an inherited sin of Adam—and reward virtue with eternal bliss. Jesus believes in devils and angels, which the Jews had taken over from the Babylonians and Persians. He believes that the end of the world is near, and that God will then judge all men for their personal sins.
No one will question that this is a summary of the religious content of ninety-nine percent of the teaching of Jesus in the gospel. That alone is significant. If the modern Christian wants to find support in the gospels for his beliefs, he has to search for short and incidental phrases, the meaning of which is always disputed, and the authenticity generally denied.
Gospel writers never make Jesus plainly claim that he is God, and Paul only does once, in a disputed passage. Other early Christian writings are just as shy of saying plainly that Jesus was God.
Christians say Jesus says he is god when he admits the title, "the Son of God," but "Son of God" meant to the Jews a man dear to God—at the commonest level, any male Jew. The English Bible throughout mistranslates the Greek which only says "son of God," with "The son of God." The Greek nearly always omits the article.
And if in other cases we have the full phrase "the Son of God" or "Son of Man," who will come one day on the clouds to judge all men (the most characteristic belief of the Persians), this is contradicted over and over again by other texts.
Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is God (Mt 19:17).
Not as I will, but as thou wilt, (Jesus prays to God—Mt 26:39)
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? (Mt 27:46).
Can Christians explain why their God should want to pretend to them that he was not God at all? The gospels are a tissue of contradictions on the divinity of Christ.
"Ah," says the Christian, "Everyone has incurred the sentence of damnation for Adam's sin, and the application to each person of Christ's redemption of the race is through baptism." Well, look again. Where does Jesus say that all men are condemned because of Adam's sin? Where does he say that God alone could atone for it? Where does he say that that is his purpose?
Neither Jesus nor anyone else in the gospels mentions original sin or the sin of Adam and Christian interpreters and theologians for centuries denied it. It was invented by the medieval priesthood to give them power over the masses, who became sinners irrespective of what they did in life and therefore dependent on the priesthood to save their souls. The formula of baptism at the end of Matthew:
Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost (Mt 28:19),
was fraudulently added to the gospel when a priesthood was created, as scholars know.
Near the end, in one of the most suspected passages, Jesus is made to say that his blood is to be shed "for many, for the remission of sins" (Mt 26:28). This is so different from the whole previous teaching of Jesus, it looks suspicious. But it does not mean "original sin." The gospel says nothing about the redemption by atonement taught by both Catholic and Protestant Churches, and the reason for the incarnation! In the manual of "Dogmatic Theology" are two vague references to sin or sins in John. John is so late that it is worthless as a historic source of genuine sayings of Jesus. Paul, not Jesus or the gospel writers, gave the Church the doctrine of the atonement.
Original sin and the atonement for original sin—the two things which are the real bases of Christianity, since they explain Christ and the incarnation—are the two things that even the gospel writers never put in the mouth of Jesus. They are the among Paul's three characteristic doctrines—original sin, divine atonement for original sin, and the need of "grace"—which are not in the gospels.
Bousset, in his "Kyrios Christos" (1913), says that Paul never heard of Jesus but got his doctrine of "the Lord" and redemption from Greek and Mithraic sources. Messianic ideas blended with Greek ideas in the many Jewish societies over the Mediterranean world to supply Paul with the elements of his gospel.
After two millennia, during one of which learned people did nothing except devote themselves to this work, the most learned theologians disagree totally about what Jesus did, what he said, and what he meant. Yet, the confidence in them of their flocks, the way in which Christians declare that something has at last been been explained, or some contradiction has been reconciled, is hilarious. Christianity is the most complete scam ever devised.
This first statement of Christian theology is fairly simple. Paul never bothered about the precise relations or natures of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There was one God, and this God had assumed flesh in a woman's womb, then shed it and gone back to heaven. His "spirit" or his "grace" now helped men to avoid personal sins. All that they had to do was to get together in little groups of churches to practice virtue, to hold the commemoration supper, and to await the coming of the kingdom. There was now no need for circumcision, sacrifices or synagogues.
In the epistles and Acts are admissions of conflict: Peter or Paul, faith or works, resurrection or no resurrection, obligation to the Jewish law or 'do as you wilt.' God had forgotten to leave instructions. His Church settled these dozen fiery controversies only to find itself locked in a terrific and protracted fight with Gnosticism.
The struggle with the Gnostics was inevitable and began early. In Acts 8 is a story of a man in Samaria who had won a great reputation by "magic," and who offered the apostles money to teach him their magic. The story is probably as correct as the description of the Pharisees: a Christian libel. Simon may well have been an early Gnostic.
Gnostics believe in spiritual knowledge—they know, or seek to know—in contrast to those who have or seek faith, like Christians. It is no less vulnerable to tricksters, and much New Age "mystery" is a variety of the Gnostic scam. Yet, Gnosis has a sounder basis than belief. Knowledge can be tested.
Gnosticism was not one philosophy or religion. The chief common feature was an intense emphasis on the contrast of matter and spirit, sin and virtue, darkness and light. The Persian religion was largely responsible for this: but Greek philosophy in Plato, late Egyptian mysticism, and Buddhism which reached Egypt and Asia, if not Greece, had the same dualism. The flesh was a contamination of the spirit which had to live in it for a time. Sin was a defilement for which the soul had to be purified and redeemed. Baptism (by water, blood, fire, or spirit), anointings, lustrations, and thrillingly esoteric rites, not to be revealed to the mob, helped. The world was full of evil spirits and good spirits (as the Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Persians taught), and you could exorcise these by mystic formulae or even calling them by name.
Paul's religion suited these mystics and ascetics. His contempt of the flesh and glorification of the spirit were common to them all. His gospel of a redeemer from sin was real "good tidings" to them. There was obviously a great deal of truth in the new religion. It might appeal to the poor and to slaves by its denunciation of wealth and its communism, but it also came to appeal to these "intellectuals." Christianity spread through this esoteric world, and it set out to answer the questions which Paul and the gospel writers had left open.
The gnostics so hated and despised matter that they did not believe that God had created it. The Old Testament, which said that he had, was abandoned. Matter was eternal, in a chaotic state, as the Babylonians had said. But why did God have anything to do with the putrid stuff?
Gnostics held that a number of finite but divine things had emanated from God. One of these Æons, as they were called, had "fallen" from grace. God sent a great Æon, the Demiurgos, to put order into the chaos of matter or "create" the world as we know it. This was the Yehouah of the Jews. Then he sent an Æon of the highest rank, Soter (Redeemer or Saviour), to save the fallen Æon and rescue the elements of light, the souls of men, from their contamination with darkness. This was Christos.
But how could an Æon of supreme rank take flesh, with all its horrors? Most of them said that he merely used a phantasmal body, not real flesh. The gospel story was an allegory, they said, from beginning to end. Christos abandoned his ethereal body before it was crucified, and most assuredly there was no resurrection of it, and there would be no resurrection of the flesh for any man.
Some men of great ability rose in the Gnostic world, and for a hundred years there was a mighty struggle. The Church won but it caught the Gnostic virus. Ascetical practices like fasting were fostered by these haters of the flesh. Ritual and sacramental features were adopted. Baptism became more important and the passage was added at the end of Matthew during the Gnostic struggle. Mystic ideas or speculations about Christ crept in, as the beginning of John, the latest gospel, shows. A definite attitude toward the Old Testament was assumed. The need of authority in the Church was practically demonstrated, and the position of the bishops or "overseers" of the communities was greatly strengthened.
It was a federation, no bishop acknowledging allegiance to any other bishop, but the bishop had more control of the "elders" (presbyters or priests) and the deacons who helped at the meetings and the highest rank for women in the mainstream church. There was also now much exorcism of devils, sprinkling or baptizing with water, anointing with oil, and so on. New classes of assistants arose to share the lot (cleros) of the bishops and priests, new "clerics" exorcists, readers, doorkeepers.
There was little growth in the first two centuries. The gospels seem to have been completed in the second quarter of the second century, but they left doctrinal questions open. Jesus was the Son of God, and there was also a vague Holy Spirit, but there was only one God. The Gnostic attempt to define the relations of these had been so heretical and disturbing that most Christians were content to leave the matter as it was. The only addition (in John) was that Jesus had existed as the Logos "with God" for all eternity. The Jew Philo had spoken of this Logos or "creative word" of God. But mystics do not require—if they do not actually dread—precise definitions, and the intellectualists were killed off.
The early Christian writers, men of moderate ability like Clement of Rome, Justin the Apologist and Irenaeus, had been absorbed in recommending the simple creed to Pagans and Jews or defending it against the Gnostics. They did not enlarge it by speculations. The Apostles' Creed fairly represents Christian belief at the end of the second century. No theologian now supposes that it goes back even to the first century, and in its actual form it is late. But an ancient Roman creed to the beginning of the second century is generally thought to be the one given by Tertullian:
I believe in God, the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ, his only son Our Lord, who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate and buried, the third day he rose from the dead. He ascended into heaven, sitteth at the right hand of the Father. Thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead. And in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Church, the remission of sins, and the resurrection of the flesh.
This is just a simple summary of the religion of the gospels. The Church would not say plainly that Christ was God, and the statement that he sits at the right hand of God in heaven is an expression of uncertainty of the subject. He is now said to be the "only" son of God. This is an outcome of the controversy with the Ebionites, the successors of the Jerusalem Church of James the Just, who denied the divinity of Christ and the virginity of Mary, and were suppressed. The Holy Church is inserted, a reflection of the new organization which came out of the conflicts. The familiar doctrines of Christianity had still to be fabricated.
After the gnostics, and the struggles with Ebionitism, came further conflicts with Patripassianism, Modalism, Adoptionism, Montanism, Novatianism, Sabellianism, Arianism and Nestorianism, then Eutychius, Helvidius and Jovinian, Donatus and Pelagius raised more flags of dissension, followed by the Monophysites, the Monothelites… and on and on.
Christians must have asked themselves what this "Father and Son" really meant, if there was only one God and as soon as anyone of intelligence devoted themself to the problem, there was a new heresy. Patripassians said that it was God the Father who suffered on the cross and the bishops pronounced it a shocking heresy. Modalists, looking to the philosophy of Aristotle, said that the Son was a "mode" of the Father, and the bishops who probably did not even know what philosophers meant by a "mode," expelled them, after half a century of quarrelling. Then Jesus must have been "adopted" as a Son, and the Adoptionists were expelled. Each time the central authority was strengthened.
Montanus denied that the inspiration of the Holy Ghost was confined to men in "orders," and there was a terrific fight for several decades. A large part of the Christian body resented the growth of the new sacerdotalism and rightly claimed that it had no basis in the gospels. They held also that the clergy had no power to absolve from mortal sins. The sinner must be expelled from the Church and left to his fate. These deadly thrusts at their authority and at their ambition to make the Christian body as large as possible stung the hierarchy, and the fierce battle ended in the suppression of Montanism and a fresh accentuation of priestly authority. Hence the work of Cyprian. Cyprian, who received the halo of the saint, was a priest and wrote to strengthen their position. Priests and bishops had "received the Holy Ghost" and could "bind" or "loose" whatsoever they chose. They, as successors of the apostles, had to conduct the commemoration supper, which was evolving from the Messianic meal into a "sacrament.
Tertullian, a somber fanatic—the wildness of his early life had led to a morbid reaction—with a mighty power of scorn, a learned priest of the African Church, had a particular scorn of the Roman Church and the pretensions of its bishop or Pope. His zeal about sin has caused him to give us some piquant pictures of the state of the Church at the end of the second and the beginning of the third century. He is important mainly as a critic, an early Protestant, but he adopted a word of the Gnostics in regard to the relation of Father and Son. He said that the Son was homo ousios, of the same substance, with the Father, and this would presently lead to a far more furious controversy than ever. Tertullian remained a Montanist or Puritan until he died.
Clement of Alexandria and Origen also of Alexandria, were the first to apply Greek philosophy to the Christian story in a form which could be generally accepted by the Church. Both, especially the learned Origen, were heretics. Origen supposed that the counsels of Jesus had to be taken literally, and he had castrated himself on New Testament authority:
For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it (Mt 19:12).
His later method was scientific—whatever seemed absurd or contradictory or opposed to experience in the new faith was to be taken figuratively. He denied the eternal torment of the wicked. Origen was deposed, excommunicated, and bitterly persecuted. Clement was more diplomatic, and remained within the Church.
At first, baptism was the only sacrament, the only form of remission of sin, and mortal sin committed after baptism could not be forgiven, the Essene belief that the penitent had to remain perfect to enter the kingdom. Smart Christians therefore deferred baptism to as near to death as possible to leave few opportunities for sin before death. Potential converts were chary and the number of converts stayed small. The clergy then discovered that God, in his great mercy, had allowed for priests to remit sin. The proof was in the gospels but unclear, so they were clarified. The Catholic doctrine of sacraments and orders was being slowly and shamelessly developed. Christianity was evolving by creative theology, a sort of creative accounting for priests.
One half of Christendom interprets the instructions of the Holy Ghost in an opposite way from the other half. The Catholic thinks that the Holy Ghost planned the creation of priests, bishops, archbishops, Popes, the eucharist, the confessional, seven sacraments, the mass, and so on while the Protestant says that the Holy Ghost forbade all these things, admitting that for over a thousand years the Holy Ghost had fallen asleep on duty.
Jesus expected the end of the world and he never dreamed about founding a "church" that would have had the briefest of lifetimes. Christians, seeing that the end of the world did not come, built temples like their religious neighbours.
The first Christians had few "sacraments." The Catholic doctrine of sacraments was invented by Augustine. Baptism was common in Judea especially in the form of purificatory lustrations, among the Essenes, and in most ethical religions of the time. The sacred meal was celebrated by the Essenes and several eastern mystery religions. All the other "sacraments" were priestly inventions. Cyprian effectively began the manufacture of "holy orders." Extreme Unction and Confirmation crept up to the rank so slowly and unobtrusively that no one can retrace the evolution. As to "matrimony," hardly any Catholic doctrine is more audacious. The Church had no control of marriage until the Middle Ages. It was a purely human matter. The "seven sacraments" gave enormous power and wealth to the clergy, as the embodiment of priestcraft—the practices of spiritual shysters who use every important occasion in anyone's life to extract money from them.
The services grew in the same manner. The mass was said in Greek, even in Rome, until the end of the third century. Cyprian had by that time discovered that the offering of the bread and wine was a "sacrifice," and only a consecrated priest could offer it. The Essenes and the Mithraists, both influenced by Persian religion, ate a sacred meal. Augustine is repeatedly in difficulties on that point. The Manichees also had a "consecrated host," and Augustine stoops so low as seriously to repeat the Christian calumny that, to make their sacrament, the priest had intercourse with a lady of the congregation and moistened the flour with the seminal fluid!
Every new development increased the power of the clergy and the subjection of the laity. Of the two titles of the head of the Roman Church, Pope and Sovereign Pontiff, the first (papa) was the common title of all bishops in the first few centuries and is still a common title in the east. The second is the title of the head of the Roman Pagan religion, which the Bishops of Rome took from the syncretistic emperors. The Pope became Pope only when there was no other strong bishop to oppose his claim.
The evidence of forgery and fraud is hardly less in regard to the Papacy than it is in the examples of saints and martyrs.
In the early Church, the episcopal sees supposed to have been directly founded by the apostles were viewed with a special regard. The occupants of the sees encouraged this. It entitled them to the first place and the most oracular utterance in assemblies. In their churches, the tradition of the apostles existed in its purest form. Rome, where the Church was said to have been founded by Peter and Paul, the two greatest apostles, was one of these outstanding sees, but in truth, if any churches were founded by apostles, they were in the east where the earliest churches were founded, Christianity first took root, and where it had most members.
In 190 AD, the Roman bishop, Pope Victor, commanded the bishops of Asia Minor to celebrate Easter on the same day as the Romans—Papal supremacy in the year 190? Many of the Church's sins are sins of omission. Here they omit to say how the eastern bishops responded. Eusebius in Ecclesiastical History (5:34) relates that the Asiatic bishops told Victor where to get off.
In 252 AD, S Cyprian, saint and martyr, backed by the African bishops, told Pope Cornelius where to get off as well. Repeatedly, he told Rome to mind its own business, to drop its arrogant claim to supremacy, and to see that "each prelate has the right to follow his own judgment." Pope Stephen tried to follow up the matter, and the African bishops, meeting in solemn council, drafted a scalding reply, still extant, which closes all question of Papal authority in the third century.
The eastern Churches never accepted the Pope's claim. The African Church, the only one important in the west, besides Italy, resisted Rome to the last. S Augustine did not say, in the Pelagian controversy:
Rome has spoken: the case is finished,
but, in his 131st sermon, he said:
The decisions of two of our councils have been sent to the Apostolic See, and a rescript has reached us. The case is finished.
His emphasis is on the protest of the two councils. The African bishops detected the Pope in the use of forgeries, and told him that they trusted to hear "no more of his pompousness." When they did hear more of it, they sent him a scornful letter about his attempt to "introduce the empty pride of the world into the Church of Christ."
When the Christian Vandals and Goths occupied and plundered Italy, Spain and Africa, the Pope became "head of the universal Church," the wasteland west of the Adriatic Sea. The civilized world, east of the Adriatic, laughed at the Popes.
In the Dark Ages, Popes could rewrite history to their hearts content—and they did! The crop of forgeries appeared, the lives of saints and martyrs multiplied and the history of the first four centuries was falsified. It will never recover because much of it is deliberately destroyed. If Christians know nothing of this, their only excuse is their perpetual one of wilful ignorance.
Pope Gregory, St Gregory the Great, persuaded the new rich of Italy that the end of the world was now really at hand, and they would do well to enter heaven naked. They gave him enormous tracts of Italy. In the eighth century, the Popes forged the most amazing documents ever forged, duped Charlemagne, and founded the Papal States.