Contents Updated: Thursday, April 29, 1999
The Christian revelation derived from paganism yet Christian prelates habitually decry paganism as the work of the devil. Christianity's leading myths—the supernatural birth of a Saviour, the slaughter of the innocents, the temptation in the wilderness, the performance of miracles, the death and resurrection of the god—were features of pre-Christian religions.
The Christian revelation is not the only one, other religions make the same claim and each revelation professes divine origin and appeals to a holy book. The particular revelation which average humans accept and therefore their notions of truth depends upon the accident of their birth and education. This might not be so bad if each revelation tolerated the others, but each counts itself orthodox and regards the rest as heretical or infidel.
Christianity cannot boast an inner unity of its own. It is divided into a bewildering array of sects, each differing from others on essential questions. Protestants and Catholics both like to eat their god in their services of worship, but whereas Protestants regard the wafers and wine as merely symbolic of eating human flesh, the Catholics believe the wafers and wine actually become the flesh of the god at the moment of ingestion. This distinction in their absurd interpretation of their ritual cannibalism is considered sufficient for a schism.
In these schisms the churches simply exemplify the contradictions presented by their scriptures. The only point they agree upon is the divinity of these very scriptures which yield so many interpretations! But though their divine king is the same one, the different churches have always been bitter rivals. In Roman Catholic countries Protestants seek to make converts, while Roman Catholic bishops map out dioceses in the midst of Protestant populations.
The Christian revelation is blindly accepted on the assumption that the Bible is inspired. Yet the discoveries of science have laid bare the fallacies upon which the Bible is founded, and the erroneous opinions that run through it. Mainly it is irreconcilable with science. The first book of the Bible, Genesis, speaks with an uncertain voice. It contains two separate stories of the creation, and they contradict one another. The Genesis cosmogony is based upon mistaken ideas of the universe, the shape and movements of the earth and sun, and their mutual relations. Of course, reasonable people can accept that these are primitive creation myths representing the efforts of unscientific people to understand the world.
Yet the whole Christian theory of Redemption depends upon these myths being true! The theory is that the Son of God had to be sacrificed because the first man, Adam, was sinful and so has all mankind been since. The crucifixion solved that. Since they are myths there is no need for the redemptive sacrifice of the Son of God to atone for the sin of Adam. If the Fall of Man is mythical, sin did not enter the world by the disobedience of Eve. And if Eve, being mythical, could not have introduced the contagion of sin, there is no Original Sin for mankind to inherit and therefore no need for a Saviour to give his life to rectify Eve's fault.
Primitive stories like those of the Creation and Fall of Man, the Deluge and the Tower of Babel, all of Babylonian origin and interesting as mythology, are the kind of literature that Christians accept as inspired by God's Holy Ghost and therefore true!
The first and second chapters of Genesis contain two Creation stories differing from each other in almost every particular of time, place, and order. The first account (the Elohistic) in Genesis extends from 1:1 to 2:3, when the second account (the Yahwistic) commences, and extends to the end of the chapter. These two accounts can neither be reconciled with each other nor be made to harmonize with science. The Elohistic version has the rudiments of scientific justification but the Yahwistic is purely fairy tale.
Consider the two accounts item by item for comparison. The first account occurs in Genesis 1 to 2:3 and the second continues in 2.4 until the end of the chapter when the account of the fall of man begins.
The first account is called the Elohistic account because it names God as Elohim which is actually a Hebrew plural and so should be translated gods not God. The second account is called the Yawistic account because the name of God is YHWH Elohim which actually means YHWH the gods but is always deliberately mistranslated as Lord God.
Genesis begins: The earth was without form and void. The Holy Ghost begins quite well in the light of modern science which is that the universe did not exist, it was void, then exploded into existence in The Big Bang. Then we begin to get absurdities: Light and darkness are created and divided from each other but light and darkness could not be divided for us on earth because they are produced by the rotation of the earth with respect to the sun. Unfortunately the sun was not created till the fourth day! Apparently the Holy Ghost was ignorant of the properties of light, and the rotation of the earth.
Then a firmament in the midst of the waters was created. The Holy Ghost seems to think that the earth was flat ocean in the centre of the universe.
Then the vegetable kingdom was created, grass, herbs, fruit trees, yielding fruit, mosses, trees, presumably insectivorous plants though insects have not yet been created, and flowing plants though there are no insects to fertilize them. All this without an atom of chlorophyll to give colour to the plants, leaves, and flowers because so far there had not been a ray of sunshine, and what use is chlorophyll without it?
At last the Holy Ghost thinks of the sun to rule the day, and the stars to rule the night. Perhaps the plants could have survived a day without chlorophyll and now they are given it!
On the fifth day we find that whales, fishes, and birds are created, the water population first, the winged population second, and the land population third. The Holy Ghost did not realize that though the water population appeared first, the land population was second, and the winged population last. Oh, and he seems to think that whales are fish not mammals.
Finally we have insects, reptiles, cattle, man created. Sorry, Holy Ghost, insects and reptiles were actually millions, of years before man. God, who popularly has no image nor likeness—no form nor parts, makes man in the image and likeness—of God! Man is of the image and likeness of God not because God made him that way but because men have made for themselves the god they wanted to worship according to their own anthropomorphic fancy.
This story present to us a pair of human beings, who have no knowledge of good and evil, and are commanded by the deity (literally, the gods) not to eat a certain fruit which would give them that knowledge. One can be forgiven for wondering why this god did not force feed the pair with the fruit then they would have known what to expect The answer that the Gnostics deduced was that the fruit would allow the pair to realize that this god was not actually a good one. Well, they ate it and still believe that God is good which must mean that either he is or the human race are terminally thick.
The pair having eaten the fruit, the Creator, in fright—because man has now become as one of us, apparently having equal power with gods, again using the plural—comes hurrying down from his throne in heaven, and curses not only Adam, Eve, and the serpent, but even the ground. The first three are condemned to certain punishments, in which their innocent posterity are to participate, for humankind to bear the burden of Original Sin. Our Creator—supposedly all-good, all-wise, benevolent, merciful and forgiving—condemns the whole human race to an eternal punishment in normal life for the offence of using the curiosity which the Creator had presumably given us along with our brains.
But these punishments were never uniformly fulfilled. Man was to eat bread by the sweat of his face, but plenty of the born rich have never had to work in their entire lives. Woman was to bring forth children in sorrow but, though it can be difficult, most women have children without sorrow, and many with joy. The Serpent was doomed to glide on his belly and consume a diet of dust, but snakes evolved without legs because an ecological niche existed for a legless reptile, and they do not eat dust. The Holy Ghost seems to be confusing snakes and earthworms. Besides the dignity of God being demolished by His behaving in a peevish and infantile manner, the guilty devil was allowed to get off scot free, and to roam about the world doing further mischief!
The deity at first pronounces all his creations good, but then wishes he'd never made man. Why then didn't he immediately return the humans he had made to the clay from which he made them and have another go. Perhaps he's only a baby god just learning how to make things and he only thought about it later, or perhaps he's only a juvenile god and he thought it might be good fun to see what happens. It is impossible to conceive a Creator of infinite wisdom and knowledge regretting his work and it is impossible to believe that such a God would concoct such a load of tripe through his Holy Ghost expecting to persuade the sinners he created to repent. Yet, unless Christians accept this tissue of contradictions, their theory of redemption falls to the ground like a house of cards.
During the excavations of the ancient cities of Assyria and Babylonia clay tablets were discovered. They are written in cuneiform (wedge-shaped) characters, in the form of epic poems. The decipherment of this cuneiform writing has removed the Jewish scriptures from the solitary position they once occupied and put before us the literature of a race allied to the Jews in blood, creed, thought, and language. The clay tablets contained the same accounts of the creation, flood, and the Tower of Babel as Genesis. The story of creation occupies seven tablets, and gives two accounts.
Tablets have also been discovered amid the ruins of the ancient city of Tel-el-Amarna, in Egypt, evidently relics of an ancient library containing the official correspondence between the King of Egypt and the officers and sovereigns of Assyria, Babylonia, and other Asiatic countries. The decipherment of these has disclosed the origin of the two contradictory accounts of Creation given in Genesis, which before was a puzzle.
The Babylonian account is identical with the Elohistic, relating how the creation of the world took place by successive stages, man being the final act. The Akkadian is identical with the Yawistic, man being created before plants and animals.
The first tablet opens with a description of chaos: At that time the heaven above had not yet announced, or the earth beneath recorded, a name. The unopened deep was their generator. Mummu-Tiamat (the chaos of the sea) was the mother of them all. Their waters were embosomed as one, and the cornfield was unharvested. The pasture was ungrown. At that time the gods had not appeared, any of them ...... no destiny had they fixed. Then the great gods were created.
The twelve Babylonian tablets in which the legend of the Deluge appears correspond with the twelve signs of the zodiac and the twelve months of the Akkadian year. They describe the exploits of the Chaldean Hercules—Gilgamesh. The story is told to Gilgamesh, in the eleventh tablet by the Chaldean Noah—Tamzi, Izduhar, or Hasisadra (Xisuthros of Berosus, and in Semitic, Shamas napisti, the Sun of Life). This flood lasted six days and nights.
The story tells how, at the end of the Flood, Tamzi looked out of his ship and saw that mankind was turned to clay; like reeds the corpses floated. Relating how he was commissioned by the gods to save himself and family, he says:
I alone was the servant of the great gods. Their father, Anu, their king; their counsellor, the warrior Bel; their throne-bearer, the god Uras; their prince, En-nugi; and Hea, the Lord of the Underworld, repeated their decree. I this destiny hearing, Hea said to me: Destroy thy house and build a ship, for I will destroy the seed of life.
From the instructions he received Tanzi built the ship and eventually it landed on Mount Nizor (Mount Rowandiz)—the Akkadian Olympus. In the Hindu legend of the flood a rainbow appeared on the surface of the subsiding water, the ark or ship resting on the Himalayas. In the ancient Greek legend Deucalion is the hero, and the ship rested on Mount Parnassus. The Chinese, Parsees, Scandinavians, Mexicans, and other ancient nations, also had similar legends.
Latterly the idea has been mooted with some backing that the flooding of the Black Sea basin around 5000 BC might have provided the original idea of the flooding of the world. Despite the vast volumes of water that must have flowed in from the Dardanelles the filling up process would have been slow enough for most people to flee ahead of it. The point of the story might have been that some built boats or rafts to help save their livestock. From the Black Sea on the Eurasian steppes the legend could have easily spread East, West and South in each case taking it to places where devastating floods were common, thereby entering local folklore and explaining its wide distribution.
Not far to the south of the Black Sea in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, floods were commonplace caused by the usual periodical rise of the two great rivers, which took place in the eleventh month of the Chaldean year. But archaeology has discovered evidence of a particularly devastating flood caused by the normal seasonal flooding combined with a typhoon in the Indian ocean, the winds o which piled up a massive head of water into the Persian Gulf. Such disasters would have kept flood legends well to the fore of local folklore in mesopotamia. The Israelites taken into captivity were told tales about the flood and wrote it into their sacred books on their return from captivity in about the fourth century BC.
Noah's ark was 150 yards long by 25 feet wide, and 15 feet high. In this ark were crammed pairs, sevens, or fourteens of every living thing. There are thousands of species of mammals, thousands of species of birds, thousands of species of reptiles and snakes, and millions of species of insects and lesser creatures. This was some floating zoo. Genesis 7:14 tells us creatures came from all parts of the earth. Eight people attended to the wants of some millions of living creatures, and Noah provided food for all of them! If the flood covered the whole earth, it must have risen higher than the height of the highest mountain, Mount Everest, almost six miles. Even schoolchildren find this incredible. The injustice of drowning all created beings because the Creator had made one species imperfect is obvious.
Human beings, having sinned at birth, have thereafter to look forward to a God sent Saviour to redeem them through his suffering and death, an idea common among the ancients. For Christians this saviour was Jesus Christ who was crucified.
Primitive people believed that the gods demanded a sacrifice to atone for sin or avert calamity. He that is hanged on a tree is accursed of God (Deuteronomy 21:22 and Galatians 3:13). Hanging on a tree was a common form of punishment and a gibbet made in the form of a cross for hanging or crucifixion was called a tree—frequently the accursed tree:
Osiris and Horus were crucified as saviours and redeemers. The sufferings, death and resurrection of Osiris formed the great mystery of the Egyptian religion. Attis, the only begotten son and saviour of the Phrygians, was depicted as a man nailed or tied to a tree, at the foot of which was a lamb. Tammuz or Adonis, the Syrian and Jewish Adonai, was another virgin born god, who suffered for mankind as a crucified saviour. Prometheus, of Greece, was with chains nailed with arms extended to the rocks on Mount Caucasus, as a saviour; and the tragedy of the crucifixion was acted in Athens 500 years before the Christian era. Bacchus, the offspring of Jupiter and Semele, was the only begotten son, the sin-bearer and the redeemer. Hercules, son of Zeus, Apollo, Serapis, Mithras of ancient Persia—The Logos, Zoroaster and Hermes were all saviours centuries before Jesus was made one.
Crucifixes displaying the god Indra are to be seen at the corners of the roads in Tibet. In Some parts of India the worship of the crucified god Bulli, an incarnation of Vishnu, occurs. The incarnate god and saviour Buddha expired at the foot of the tree. Krishna came to earth to redeem man by his sufferings. The whole history of Krishna closely resembles that of Jesus, even in them both being crucified. He is represented hanging on a cross, to which he was nailed by an arrow.
The early followers of Jesus were a conglomeration of conflicting sects, whose angry disputes are facts of history. Some of the doctrines and stories contained in the Christian scriptures are Persian, Egyptian and Buddhist. The reason is that many of the first followers of Jesus were Essenes, he being one himself. The Essenes or Therapeutae—respectively the Semitic and the Greek name for healers—had roots in Egypt and a knowledge of Egyptian religion, the eclectic philosophy of Philo of Alexandria, Buddhism from the Buddhist school in Alexandria and Persian religion from the Exile. According to T W Doane in Bible Myths the church historian Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea in the fourth century, stated explicitly, positively and unreservedly that the ancient Therapeutae were Christians, and that their ancient writings were our gospels and epistles.
A substantial body of the Essenes were ready to accept Jesus the Nazarene, or Jesus of Nazareth as the Christians falsely called him, as the expected Messiah but they were not called Christians until the middle of the first century of our era, when the name was given to the new sect at Antioch. The word Christian means a follower of a Christ, from the Greek Christos, an anointed one or saviour. But as many Saviours, Messiahs or Avatars—like Buddha and Krishna—had appeared thousands of years before Jesus, there seems little basis for calling Jesus The Christ except belief. After Antioch the Christians began organizing as missionaries.
The Essenes had a full hierarchy, similar to that of the present Catholic church—bishops, priests and deacons and, according to a letter of the Emperor Hadrian to the Consul Servanus, they worshipped Serapis, a sun god, long after they became followers of Jesus. He wrote: There are there [in Egypt] Christians who worship Serapis and devoted to Serapis are those who call themselves Bishops of the Christ. This must have helped the adaptation by the priests of the old pagan doctrines and legends to the myth of Jesus to complete the Christian mythology. What we now know as Christianity was gradually developed through many centuries out of the numerous disputes that arose among the contentious sects considering themselves Christian.