Kitabı oku: «The Christ Myth», sayfa 3

II
THE HELLENISTIC IDEA OF A MEDIATOR (PHILO)

With Alexander’s conquest of the Persian Empire Palestine also was drawn within the circle of Hellenistic culture. It was at first a vassal state of the Egyptian Ptolemies, and consequently at the commencement of the second century before Christ came under the overlordship of the Syrian Seleucids. The customs and intellectual life of Greece forced their way into the quiet isolation of the priest-ruled Jewish state and could not be expelled again, despite the national reaction under the Maccabees against foreign influences. Above all, however, the dispersal of the Jews contributed to bring about a settlement of opposing views. Since the Exile the Jews had spread over all the countries of the East Mediterranean. Some had remained in Babylon, others were permanently settled especially in the ports as tradesmen, bankers, and merchants. They controlled the entire money market and trade of the East through their assiduous industry, mercantile sharpness, their lack of scruples, and the tenacity with which they held together, supported therein by their worship in common in the Synagogue. In the atmosphere of Greek philosophy and morality a still further transformation and purification of Jahwe took place. All common human and material lineaments were dropped, and he developed into a spiritual being of perfect goodness, such as Plato had described the Godhead. Here the Jews found themselves face to face with the same problem that had long occupied the Greek philosophers. This was the reconciliation of the supernatural loftiness and aloofness from the world of their God with the demands of the religious consciousness that required the immediate presence of Godhead.

Among the ideas which were borrowed by Judaism from the Persian religion belonged those connected with the mediatory “Word.” As the creative power of the Godhead, the bearer of revelation and representative of God upon earth, the expression “the word” had already appeared in aphoristic literature. Under Græco-Egyptian influence the term “wisdom” (sophia) had become the naturalised expression for it. “Wisdom” served to describe the activities in regard to man of the God who held aloof from the world. In this connection it may be noted that according to Persian ideas “Wisdom” under the name of Spenta Armaiti was considered as one of the six or seven Amesha Spentas (Amshaspands), those spirits that stood as a bodyguard closest to the throne of God and corresponded to the Jewish archangels. She was considered by the Persians as the daughter or spouse of Ahuramazda. Already, in the so-called “Wisdom of Solomon,” written by an Alexandrian Jew in the last century before Christ, she was declared to be a separately existing spirit in close relation to God. Under the guise of a half-personal, half-material being – a power controlling the whole of nature – she was described as the principle of the revelation of God in the creation, maintenance, and ruling of the world, as the common principle of life from on high and as the intermediary organ of religious salvation. Just as Plato had sought to overcome the dualism of the ideal and the material world by the conception of a “world-soul,” so “Wisdom” was intended to serve as an intermediary between the opposites, the God of the Jews and his creation. These efforts were continued by the Alexandrian Jew Philo (30 B.C. to 50 A.D.), who tried to bring the Perso-Jewish conception of the “Word” or “Wisdom” into closer accord with the ideas of Greek philosophy than the author of the “Book of Wisdom” had already done. Philo, too, commenced with the opposition between an unknowable, unnameable God, absolutely raised above the world, and material created existence. He imagined this opposition bridged over by means of “powers” which, as relatively self-existing individuals, messengers, servants, and representatives of God, at one time more closely resembled Persian angels or Greek Dæmons, at another time the Platonic “Ideas,” the originals and patterns of God in creating. Essentially, however, they bore the character of the so-called “Fructifying powers,” those creative forces which infused a soul and design into formless matter and by means of which the Stoic philosophers sought to explain existence. As the first of these intermediate forces, or, indeed, as the essence of them all, Philo considered the “Logos,” efficacious reason or the creative word of God. He called him the “first-born son of God” or the “second God,” the representative, interpreter, ambassador, Archangel of God, or Prince of Angels. He considered him as the High Priest, who made intercession with God for the world, the affairs of which he represented before him as the paraclete, the advocate and consoler of the world, who was the channel to it of the divine promises; as the tool with which God had fashioned the world, the original and ideal of it to which God had given effect in its creation – that which operated in all things; in a word, as the soul or spirit of the world, which the Stoics had identified with their God, but which Philo distinguished from the other-world Divinity and looked upon as his revelation and manifestation.

In essence only an expression for the sum total of all divine forces and activities, the Logos of Philo also was sometimes an impersonal metaphysical principle, simply the efficacy of the Godhead, and sometimes an independent personality distinct from God. Just as the Stoics had personified their world-reason in Hermes, the messenger of the Gods, so the Egyptians had raised Amun Ra’s magic word of creation to a self-existing personal mediatory being in Thoth the guide of souls; the Babylonians, the word of fate of the great God Marduk in the shape of Nabu; the Persians, the word of Ahuramazda in Vohu mano as well as in the Spenta Armaiti, the good thought of the creative God. And just as according to Persian ideas it was at one time the divine “son” and mediator “Mithras,” the collectivity of all divine forces, at another the ideal man Saoshyant who appeared as Saviour and Deliverer of the world, and just as both mingled in one form, so Philo also at one time described the Word as the collectivity of all creative ideas, at another only as the unembodied idea of man, the ideal man, the direct divine image and immaterial pattern of the material exemplars of humanity, that is effective therein as the subject of all religious redemption. Indeed, he occasionally identified him with the tree of life in Paradise, since both were everlasting and “stood in the middle.”

According to Philo, man is unable of his own strength to free himself from the bonds of earthly existence. All deliverance depends upon the emancipation of the soul from the body and its sensuous desires. In conformity with his true spiritual and godlike nature, to become as perfect as God, is the highest virtue and at the same time true happiness. This is attained by an insight into the divine reality of things, by whole-hearted trust in God, by grateful recognition of the goodness and love bestowed by him, showing itself in piety towards God as well as in charity and justice towards other men. But in addition the Logos itself must be in us and cause for us the insight into our divine nature. The Logos must guide us, come to the aid of our human weakness with his supernatural strength in the struggles against the world and sin and raise us up to God. Thus the apotheosis of man is the goal aimed at in all religious activity. The Logos, however, is the only means to this end, in so far as we are raised through union with him in faith and love to our true origin and life’s source, “the vision of God,” and thereby have participation in his life.

III
JESUS AS CULT-GOD IN THE CREED OF JEWISH SECTS

All religious spirits of the time longed to secure this happy vision and communion with God, and to obtain even here on earth a foretaste of the heavenly life. The Jews sought to attain this end by a painfully exact observance of the ordinances of their law, but in so doing they became entangled in a mesh of such minute and tiresome regulations that the more they applied themselves to the service of the law the more difficult it appeared. It seemed to be no longer possible to reconcile the demands of everyday life with one’s religious duties. Some therefore withdrew from the life of the world and in retirement and quiet endeavoured to devote themselves exclusively to the “inner life.” In Egypt the Therapeutes or Physicians, a religious association composed of Jews and their proselytes, with their headquarters in the neighbourhood of Alexandria, sought in this manner, as Philo informs us in his work “On the Contemplative Life,” to give effect to the claims of religion as expressed by Philo himself.³⁰ Their religious observances resembled those of the Orphic-Pythagorean sects, as in abstinence from flesh and wine, admiration for virginity, voluntary poverty, religious feasts and community singing, and the use of white garments.

They made a deep study of the mystical writings of revelation that had been handed down, and these they used as a guide in the allegorical explanation of the Mosaic law. They united a contemplative piety with a common religious observance, and thus sought to strengthen themselves mutually in the certainty of religious salvation. Beyond the Jordan the Jewish sect of the Essenes (from the Syrian word chase, plural chasen or chasaja) had their chief settlement. These called themselves, as is expressed by their name, the “Pious” or “Godfearing.” In their esteem of temperance, celibacy, and poverty, their reprobation of slavery, private property, the taking of oaths, and blood-sacrifice, in the honour they paid the sun as a visible manifestation of the divine light, they agreed with the Therapeutes. They differed from them, however, in their monastic organisation and the regular manner in which the life of the community was divided among different classes, their strict subordination to superiors, their maintenance of a novitiate of several years, the secrecy of the traditions of the sect, and their cultivation of the healing art and magic. The Therapeutes passed their lives in leisurely contemplation and spiritual exercises; the Essenes, on the other hand, engaged in the rearing of stock, farming, and bee-culture, or they pursued a handicraft, and in the country places or towns of Judæa, where they often dwelt together in houses of the order, they lived as dwellers in a desert the life of purity and sanctity. Both sects, again, were alike in expecting an early end of the world and in seeking to prepare themselves for the reception of the promises of God by the cultivation of brotherly dispositions amongst themselves, by justice, good works, and benevolence towards their fellow-men, finding therein the special occupation of their lives.³¹

Of what nature were the secret traditions upon which these sects rested? We know from the Jewish historian Josephus that the Essenes clung to an extreme dualism of soul and body, in which, indeed, they agreed with the other religious associations of antiquity. Like all mystical sects, they regarded the body as the grave and prison-house of the immortal soul, to which it had been banished from an earlier life in light and blessedness. They also grounded their longing for deliverance from the world of sense and their strivings towards the glory of a better life of the soul beyond the grave upon pessimism in regard to human existence. They even regarded the performance of secret rites as a necessary condition of redemption. But in the opinion of the Essenes it was essential above all to know the names of the angels and dæmons who opened the passage to the different heavens, disposed one above another. This knowledge was to be revealed to men by one of the higher gods, a god-redeemer. A conception allied to that lay at the root of the Book of Wisdom, as well as of Philo’s work – the belief in the magic power of the redemptive word of God, mingled by the Essenes with many strange Egyptian, Persian, and Babylonian ingredients and removed from the sphere of philosophic thought to the region of a rankly luxuriant superstition. Thus the closely related Jewish Apocalypse had expressly supported the revelation of a secret divine wisdom.³² Indeed, we now know that this whole world of thought belonged to an exceedingly manifold syncretic religious system, composed of Babylonian, Persian, Jewish, and Greek ingredients, which ruled the whole of Western Asia in the last centuries before Christ. Its followers called themselves Adonæi, after the name of its supposed founder, Ado (? Adonis). It is, however, generally described as the Mandaic religion, according to another name for its followers, the so-called Mandæi (Gnostics).³³

Of the numberless sects into which this religion split only a few names have come down to us, of which some played a part in the history of the heresies of early Christianity; for example, the Ophites or Nassenes, the Ebionites, Perates, Sethianes, Heliognostics, Sampsæes, &c.³⁴ We are thus much better acquainted with their fundamental ideas, which were very fantastic and complicated. They all subscribed to the belief in the redemption of the soul of man from its grave of darkness by a mediatory being, originally hidden in God and then expressly awakened or appointed by him for this purpose. In original Mandaism he bore the name of Mandâ de hajjê – that is, Gnosis, or “word” of life. In the form of Hibil-ziwâ, the Babylonian Marduk or Nabu, he was to descend from heaven with the keys thereof, and by means of his magic obtain the dominion of the world. He was to conquer those dæmons that had fallen away from God, introduce the end of the world, and lead back the souls of light to the highest Godhead.

As the Apocalyptics show, this view had numerous adherents among the Jews of Palestine also. All those who found no satisfaction in the literalness of the Pharasaic beliefs and the business-like superficiality of the official Jewish religion, found edification in ideas of this sort, which excited the imagination. They dealt with them as “mysteries,” and sought, as may well be from fear of conflicts with traditional religion, to keep them secret from the public.³⁵ Hence it is that we have such an incomplete knowledge of this side of the religious life of the Jews. At any rate they clothed their expected Messiah with the attributes of the Mandaic God of Mediation, and they appear, as is clear from the Apocalypse of Daniel and that of John, to have taken particular pleasure in the description of the scene where God calls (“awakes”) the Redeemer to his mediatory office and installs him as Deliverer, Ruler of the World, and Judge of the living and the dead.

We are accustomed to look upon the Jewish religion as strictly monotheistic. In truth, it never was, even in the Mosaic times, until after the return from Exile. And this is clear, in spite of the trouble which the composers of the so-called historic books of the Old Testament have taken to work up the traditions in a monotheistic sense and to obliterate the traces of the early Jewish polytheism, by transforming the ancient gods into patriarchs, heroes, angels, and servants of Jahwe. It was not entirely Babylonian, Persian, and Greek opinions which influenced Judaism in a polytheistic direction; from the beginning, besides the theory of one God, emphasised by the priesthood and official world, there existed a belief in other Gods. This constantly received fresh nourishment from foreign influences, and it appears to have been chiefly cultivated in the secret societies. On the descent of the Israelites into Canaan each tribe brought with it its special God, under whose specific guidance it believed its deeds were accomplished. By the reforms of the Prophets these Gods were suppressed; but the higher grew the regard for Jahwe (apparently the God of the tribe of Judah), and the further he was in consequence withdrawn from the world to an unapproachable distance, the more strongly the remembrance of the ancient Gods again arose and assumed the form of the recognition of divine intermediate beings, the so-called “Sons of God.” In these the longing for the direct presence and visible representation of God sought expression. Such appears to have been the “Presence,” or “Angel of God,” with whom Jacob wrestled in the desert,³⁶ who led the Israelites out of Egypt and went before them as a pillar of flame,³⁷ who fought against their enemies, drove the Canaanites from their homes,³⁸ held intercourse with the prophets Elijah and Ezekiel,³⁹ and stood by the people of Jahwe in every difficulty.⁴⁰ He is also called the “King” (Melech), or “Son” of Jahwe,⁴¹ and thus exactly resembles the Babylonian Marduk, the Persian Mithras, the Phœnician Hercules or Moloch, “the first-born son” of God (Protogonos), who also appeared among the Orphics under the name of Phanes (i. e., Countenance), who wrestles with Zeus at Olympia as Jacob with Jahwe, and, like him, dislocates his hip in the struggle with Hippokoon. In the rabbinic theology he is compared with the mystic Metatron, a being related to the Logos, “The Prince of the Presence,” “Leader of Angels,” “Lord of Lords,” “King of Kings,” “Commencement of the Way of God.” He was also called the “Protector,” “Sentinel,” and “Advocate” of Israel, who lays petitions before God, and “in whom is the name of the Lord.”⁴² Thus he is identical with that Angel promised in the second Book of Moses, in whom also is the name of Jahwe, who was to lead Israel to victory over the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hivites, and Jebusites.⁴³ But he, again, is no other than Joshua, who was said to have overthrown these nations with Jahwe’s aid.⁴⁴ But Joshua himself is apparently an ancient Ephraimitic God of the Sun and Fruitfulness, who stood in close relation to the Feast of the Pasch and to the custom of circumcision.⁴⁵

Now, many signs speak in favour of the fact that Joshua or Jesus was the name under which the expected Messiah was honoured in certain Jewish sects. In Zech. iii. Joshua, who, according to Ezra iii. 2, led back the Jews into their old homes after the Babylonian captivity, just as the older Joshua brought back the Israelites into Canaan, the promised land of their fathers, was invested as High Priest by the “Angel of the Lord,” and promised the continuance of his priesthood so long as he walked in the ways of the Lord. In Zech. vi. 9–15 the High Priest Joshua is crowned as Messiah and brought into connection with the “branch” under which the glory of God’s kingdom will come to pass. It is true that in this passage under the title of Messiah Zerubbabel, the leader of the Jews of the race of David, was originally understood. In him the prophet thought he could discern that “branch” by which, in accordance with Isaiah xi. 1, the House of David was again to obtain the rule. Since, however, the great hopes set upon Zerubbabel as Messiah were not fulfilled, a correction was made (and this before the Bible was translated into Greek) in the text of the prophet, as follows: The name of Zerubbabel was struck out, the plural changed into the singular, so that Joshua alone was represented as having been crowned, the promises regarding the Messiah accordingly also passing over to him (Stade, “Gesch. des Volkes Israel,” 1888, ii. 126, note. Hühn, “Die messianischen Weissagungen des israel. Volkes,” 1889, 62 et sq.).

Jesus was a name given, as will be still more clearly shown, not only to the High Priest of Zechariah and to the successor of Moses, both of whom were said to have led Israel back into its ancient home, both having a decidedly Messianic character. The name in ancient times also belonged to the Healthbringer and Patron of the Physician – namely, Jasios or Jason, the pupil of Chiron skilled in healing⁴⁶– who in general shows a remarkable resemblance to the Christian Redeemer. Consider also the significant fact that three times at decisive turning-points in the history of the Israelites a Joshua appears who leads his people into their promised home, into Canaan and Jerusalem, into the Kingdom of God – the “New Jerusalem.” Now, as Epiphanius remarks in his “History of the Heretics,” Jesus bears in the Hebrew language the same meaning as curator, therapeutes – that is, physician and curer. But the Therapeutes and Essenes regarded themselves as physicians, and, above all, physicians of the soul. It is accordingly by no means improbable that they too honoured the God of their sect under this name.⁴⁷ We, moreover, read in a Parisian magic-papyrus recently found and published by Wessely (line 3119 et sq.): “I exort thee by Jesus the God of the Hebrews.” The words are found in an ostensibly “Hebrew Logos” of that papyrus, the tone of which is quite ancient, moreover shows no trace of Christian influence, and is ascribed by the transcriber to “the Pure,” under which name, according to Dieterich, the Essenes or Therapeutes are to be understood.⁴⁸ The Jessaes or Jessenes (Jessaioi) named themselves after Jesus, or after “the branch from the root of Jesse.”⁴⁹ They were closely connected on one side with the Essenes and on the other side with the Jewish sect of the Nazarenes or Nazoraes (Nazoraiori), if they were not absolutely identical. These were, as Epiphanius shows, in existence long before Christ, and had no knowledge of him.⁵⁰ They were, however, called Nazoraes (Nazarenes (Nazarenos) is only a linguistic variation of it, cf. Essaes and Essenes) because they honoured the Mediator God, the divine “son,” as a protector and guardian (Syrian, Nasaryá; Hebrew, Ha-nôsrî) (cf. “the Protector of Israel,” also the fact that Mithras was honoured as “Protector of the World”). According to Acts xxiv. 5 the first followers of Jesus were also called Nazoraes or Nazarenes. The expressions “Jesus” and “Nazorean” were therefore originally of almost like meaning, and by the addition of “the Nazorean” or “Nazarene” Jesus is not characterised as the man of Nazareth, as the Evangelists represent it, but as the Healer and Deliverer.

Whether there was a place called Nazareth in pre-Christian days must be considered as at least very doubtful. Such a place is not mentioned either in the Old Testament or in the Talmud, which, however, mentions more than sixty Galilean towns; nor, again, by the Jewish historian Josephus, nor in the Apocrypha. Cheyne believes himself justified by this in the conclusion that Nazareth in the New Testament is a pure geographical fiction.⁵¹

It is only in the later phases of the tradition that the name appears in the New Testament as a place-name. In the earlier ones the Nazorean (Nazarene) only signifies the follower of a particular sect, or is a surname of Jesus which characterises the significance attached to him in the thoughts of his followers. “The Nazorean” appears here only as an integral part of the whole name of Jesus, as Zeus Xenios, Hermes Psychopompos, Apollo Pythios, &c., &c. It is applied to Jesus only as Guardian of the world, Protector and Deliverer of Men from the power of sin and Dæmons, but without any reference to a quite obscure and entirely unknown village named Nazareth, which is mentioned in documents beyond any dispute, only from the fourth century on (see Eusebius, Jerome, and Epiphanius). Or where else is a sect named after the birthplace of its founder?⁵² Moreover, even in the Gospels it is not Nazareth but Capernaum which is described as his city; while Nazareth does not play any part at all in the life of Jesus. For the passages Matt. xiii. 53–58 and Mark vi. 1–6, according to which he had no success with his miracles in his “patris” on account of the unbelief of the people, leave the question open whether under the name of “patris” one is to understand his father-city Nazareth or somewhere else. The corresponding passage, Luke iv. 16–31, mentions Nazareth, it is true, in connection with this incident; but it is in discrepancy with the older versions of Matthew and Mark, and it appears otherwise recognisable as a later redaction of the passages in the other Gospels.⁵³

Now the expression nazar or netzer in the sense of twig (sprout) is found not only in the well-known passage Isaiah xi. 1, where the Messiah is described as the “rod from the tree of Jesse” or “the twig from its root.” In fine, was not the twig looked upon as a symbol of the Redeemer in his character of a God of vegetation and life, as was the case in the worship of Mithras, of Men, a god of Asia Minor, of Attis, Apollo,⁵⁴ &c., and did not this idea also make itself felt in the name of the Nazareans? “He shall be called a Nazarene,”⁵⁵ accordingly, does not signify that he was to be born in the small village of Nazareth, which probably did not exist in the time of Jesus, but that he is the promised netzer or Zemah, who makes all new, and restores the time when “one loads the other beneath vine and fig-tree,”⁵⁶ and wonderful increase will appear.⁵⁷ Again, the possibility is not excluded of the name of the Nazareans having been confused with that of the Nasiraes (Nazirites), those “holy” or “dedicated” ones, who were a survival in Judea from the times when the Israelite tribes were nomads. These sought to express their opposition to the higher civilisation of the conquered land by patriarchal simplicity and purity of life, abstinence from the use of oil, wine, and the shears, &c.⁵⁸

According to this, Jesus (Joshua) was originally a divinity, a mediator, and God of healing of those pre-Christian Jewish sectaries, with reference to whom we are obliged to describe the Judaism of the time – as regards certain of its tendencies, that is – as a syncretic religion.⁵⁹ “The Revelation of John” also appears to be a Christian redaction of an original Jewish work which in all likelihood belonged to a pre-Christian cult of Jesus. The God Jesus which appears in it has nothing to do with the Christian Jesus. Moreover, its whole range of ideas is so foreign even to ancient Judaism that it can be explained only by the influence of heathen religions upon the Jewish.⁶⁰ It is exactly the same with the so-called “Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles.” This too displays a Jewish foundation, and speaks of a Jesus in the context of the words of the supper, who is in no wise the same as the Christian Redeemer.⁶¹ It is comprehensible that the later Christians did all they could in order to draw the veil of forgetfulness over these things. Nevertheless Smith has succeeded in his book, “The Pre-Christian Jesus,” in showing clear evidences even in the New Testament of a cult of an old God Jesus. Among other things the phrase “τὰ περὶ τοῦ Ἰησοῦ” (“the things concerning Jesus”)⁶² which according to all appearance has no reference to the history of Jesus, but only means the doctrines concerning him, and in any case could originally only have had this meaning, involves a pre-Christian form of belief in a Jesus. But this point is above all supported by the circumstance that even at the earliest commencement of the Christian propaganda we meet with the name of Jesus used in such a manner as to point to a long history of that name. For it is employed from the beginning in the driving out of evil spirits, a fact that would be quite incomprehensible if its bearer had been merely a man. Now we know from the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles that it was not only the disciples of the Jesus of the Gospels, but also others even in his lifetime (i. e., even in the first commencement of the Christian propaganda), healed diseases, and drove out evil spirits in the name of Jesus. From this it is to be concluded that the magic of names was associated from of old with the conception of a divine healer and protector, and that Jesus, like Marduk, was a name for this God of Healing.⁶³ Judging by this the Persian, but above all the Babylonian, religion must have influenced the views of the above-named sects. For the superstition regarding names, the belief in the magic power attributed to the name of a divine being, as well as the belief in Star Gods and Astral mythology, which is a characteristic of Mandaism, all have Babylon as their home. The Essenes also appear to have exercised the magical and healing art of which they boasted in the form of wonder-working and the driving out of evil spirits by a solemn invocation of the name of their God of Healing.⁶⁴