History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom

by Andrew Dickson White

No less fruitful have been modern researches in Egypt. While, on one hand, they have revealed a very considerable number of geographical and archaeological facts proving the good faith of the narratives entering into the books attributed to Moses, and have thus made our early sacred literature all the more valuable, they have at the same time revealed the limitations of the sacred authors and compilers. They have brought to light facts utterly disproving the sacred Hebrew date of creation and the main framework of the early biblical chronology; they have shown the suggestive correspondence between the ten antediluvian patriarchs in Genesis and the ten early dynasties of the Egyptian gods, and have placed by the side of these the ten antediluvian kings of Chaldean tradition, the ten heroes of Armenia, the ten primeval kings of Persian sacred tradition, the ten "fathers" of Hindu sacred tradition, and multitudes of other tens, throwing much light on the manner in which the sacred chronicles of ancient nations were generally developed.

These scholars have also found that the legends of the plagues of Egypt are in the main but natural exaggerations of what occurs every year; as, for example, the changing of the water of the Nile into blood—evidently suggested by the phenomena exhibited every summer, when, as various eminent scholars, and, most recent of all, Maspero and Sayce, tell us, "about the middle of July, in eight or ten days the river turns from grayish blue to dark red, occasionally of so intense a colour as to look like newly shed blood." These modern researches have also shown that some of the most important features in the legends can not possibly be reconciled with the records of the monuments; for example, that the Pharaoh of the Exodus was certainly not overwhelmed in the Red Sea. As to the supernatural features of the Hebrew relations with Egypt, even the most devoted apologists have become discreetly silent.

Egyptologists have also translated for us the old Nile story of The Two Brothers, and have shown, as we have already seen, that one of the most striking parts of our sacred Joseph legend was drawn from it; they have been obliged to admit that the story of the exposure of Moses in the basket of rushes, his rescue, and his subsequent greatness, had been previously told, long before Moses's time, not only of King Sargon, but of various other great personages of the ancient world; they have published plans of Egyptian temples and copies of the sculptures upon their walls, revealing the earlier origin of some of the most striking features of the worship and ceremonial claimed to have been revealed especially to the Hebrews; they have found in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and in various inscriptions of the Nile temples and tombs, earlier sources of much in the ethics so long claimed to have been revealed only to the chosen people in the Book of the Covenant, in the ten commandments, and elsewhere; they have given to the world copies of the Egyptian texts showing that the theology of the Nile was one of various fruitful sources of later ideas, statements, and practices regarding the brazen serpent, the golden calf, trinities, miraculous conceptions, incarnations, resurrections, ascensions, and the like, and that Egyptian sacro-scientific ideas contributed to early Jewish and Christian sacred literature statements, beliefs, and even phrases regarding the Creation, astronomy, geography, magic, medicine, diabolical influences, with a multitude of other ideas, which we also find coming into early Judaism in greater or less degree from Chaldean and Persian sources.

But Egyptology, while thus aiding to sweep away the former conception of our sacred books, has aided biblical criticism in making them far more precious; for it has shown them to be a part of that living growth of sacred literature whose roots are in all the great civilizations of the past, and through whose trunk and branches are flowing the currents which are to infuse a higher religious and ethical life into the civilizations of the future.(496)

(496) For general statements of agreements and disagreements between
biblical accounts and the revelations of the Egyptian monuments, see
Sayce, The Higher Criticism and the Monuments, especially chap. iv. For
discrepancies between the Hebrew sacred accounts of Jewish relations
with Egypt and the revelations of modern Egyptian research, see Sharpe,
History of Egypt; Flinders, Patrie, History of Egypt; and especially
Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn of Civilization in Egypt and Chaldea,
London, published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,
1894. For the statement regarding the Nile, that about the middle of
July "in eight or ten days it turns from grayish blue to dark red,
occasionally of so intense a colour as to look like newly shed blood,"
see Maspero and Sayce, as above, p. 23. For the relation of the Joseph
legend to the Tale of Two Brothers, see Sharpe and others cited. For
examples of exposure of various great personages of antiquity in their
childhood, see G. Smith, Chaldean Accounts of Genesis, Sayce's edition,
p. 320. For the relation of the Book of the Dead, etc., to Hebrew
ethics, see a striking passage in Huxley's essay on The Evolution of
Theology, also others cited in this chapter. As to trinities in Egypt
and Chaldea, see Maspero and Sayce, especially pp. 104-106, 175, and
659-663. For miraculous conception and birth of sons of Ra, ibid., pp.
388, 389. For ascension of Ra into heaven, ibid., pp. 167, 168; for
resurrections, see ibid., p. 695, also representations in Lepsius,
Prisse d'Avennes, et al.; and for striking resemblance between Egyptian
and Hebrew ritual and worship, and especially the ark, cherubim, ephod,
Urim and Thummim, and wave offerings, see the same, passim. For a very
full exhibition of the whole subject, see Renan, Histoire du Peuple
Israel, vol. i, chap. xi. For Egyptian and Chaldean ideas in astronomy,
out of which Hebrew ideas of "the firmament," "pillars of heaven," etc.,
were developed, see text and engravings in Maspero and Sayce, pp. 17
and 543. For creation of man out of clay by a divine being in Egypt, see
Maspero and Sayce, p. 154; for a similar idea in Chaldea, see ibid.,
p. 545; and for the creation of the universe by a word, ibid., pp. 146,
147. For Egyptian and Chaldean ideas on magic and medicine, dread of
evil spirits, etc., anticipating those of the Hebrew Scriptures, see
Maspero and Sayce, as above, pp. 212-214, 217, 636; and for extension
of these to neighboring nations, pp. 782, 783. For visions and use of
dreams as oracles, ibid., p. 641 and elsewhere. See also, on these and
other resemblances, Lenormant, Origines de l'Histoire, vol. i, passim;
see also George Smith and Sayce, as above, chaps. xvi and xvii, for
resemblances especially striking, combining to show how simple was the
evolution of many Hebrew sacred legends and ideas out of those earlier
civilizations. For an especially interesting presentation of the reasons
why Egyptian ideas of immortality were not seized upon by the Jews, see
the Rev. Barham Zincke's work upon Egypt. For the sacrificial vessels,
temple rites, etc., see the bas-reliefs, figured by Lepsius, Prisse
d'Avennes, Mariette, Maspero, et. al. For a striking summary by a
brilliant scholar and divine of the Anglican Church, see Mahaffy,
Prolegomena to Anc. Hist., cited in Sunderland, The Bible, New York,
1893, p. 21, note.

But while archaeologists thus influenced enlightened opinion, another body of scholars rendered services of a different sort—the centre of their enterprise being the University of Oxford. By their efforts was presented to the English-speaking world a series of translations of the sacred books of the East, which showed the relations of the more Eastern sacred literature to our own, and proved that in the religions of the world the ideas which have come as the greatest blessings to mankind are not of sudden revelation or creation, but of slow evolution out of a remote past.

The facts thus shown did not at first elicit much gratitude from supporters of traditional theology, and perhaps few things brought more obloquy on Renan, for a time, than his statement that "the influence of Persia is the most powerful to which Israel was submitted." Whether this was an overstatement or not, it was soon seen to contain much truth. Not only was it made clear by study of the Zend Avesta that the Old and New Testament ideas regarding Satanic and demoniacal modes of action were largely due to Persian sources, but it was also shown that the idea of immortality was mainly developed in the Hebrew mind during the close relations of the Jews with the Persians. Nor was this all. In the Zend Avesta were found in earlier form sundry myths and legends which, judging from their frequent appearance in early religions, grow naturally about the history of the adored teachers of our race. Typical among these was the Temptation of Zoroaster.

It is a fact very significant and full of promise that the first large, frank, and explicit revelation regarding this whole subject in form available for the general thinking public was given to the English-speaking world by an eminent Christian divine and scholar, the Rev. Dr. Mills. Having already shown himself by his translations a most competent authority on the subject, he in 1894 called attention, in a review widely read, to "the now undoubted and long since suspected fact that it pleased the Divine Power to reveal some of the important articles of our Catholic creed first to the Zoroastrians, and through their literature to the Jews and ourselves." Among these beliefs Dr. Mills traced out very conclusively many Jewish doctrines regarding the attributes of God, and all, virtually, regarding the attributes of Satan.

There, too, he found accounts of the Miraculous Conception, Virgin Birth, and Temptation of Zoroaster, As to the last, Dr. Mills presented a series of striking coincidences with our own later account. As to its main features, he showed that there had been developed among the Persians, many centuries before the Christian era, the legend of a vain effort of the arch-demon, one seat of whose power was the summit of Mount Arezura, to tempt Zoroaster to worship him,—of an argument between tempter and tempted,—and of Zoroaster's refusal; and the doctor continued: "No Persian subject in the streets of Jerusalem, soon after or long after the Return, could have failed to know this striking myth." Dr. Mills then went on to show that, among the Jews, "the doctrine of immortality was scarcely mooted before the later Isaiah—that is, before the captivity—while the Zoroastrian scriptures are one mass of spiritualism, referring all results to the heavenly or to the infernal worlds." He concludes by saying that, as regards the Old and New Testaments, "the humble, and to a certain extent prior, religion of the Mazda worshippers was useful in giving point and beauty to many loose conceptions among the Jewish religious teachers, and in introducing many ideas which were entirely new, while as to the doctrines of immortality and resurrection—the most important of all—it positively determined belief."(498)

(498) For the passages in the Vendidad of special importance as regards
the Temptation myth, see Fargard, xix, 18, 20, 26, also 140, 147. Very
striking is the account of the Temptation in the Pelhavi version of the
Vendidad. The devil is represented as saying to Zaratusht (Zoroaster):
"I had the worship of thy ancestors; do thou also worship me." I am
indebted to Prof. E. P. Evans, formerly of the University of Michigan,
but now of Munich, for a translation of the original text from Spiegel's
edition. For a good account, see also Haug, Essays on the Sacred
Language, etc., of the Parsees, edited by West, London, 1884, pp. 252
et seq.; see also Mills's and Darmesteter's work in Sacred Books of the
East. For Dr. Mills's article referred to, see his Zoroaster and the
Bible, in The Nineteenth Century, January, 1894. For the citation from
Renan, see his Histoire du Peuple Israel, tome xiv, chap. iv; see also,
for Persian ideas of heaven, hell and resurrection, Haug, as above, p.
310 et seq. For an interesting resume of Zoroastrianism, see Laing, A
Modern Zoroastrian, chap. xii, London, eighth edition, 1893. For
the Buddhist version of the judgment of Solomon, etc., see Fausboll,
Buddhist Birth Stories, translated by Rhys Davids, London, 1880, vol. 1,
p. 14 and following. For very full statements regarding the influence of
Persian ideas upon the Jews during the captivity, see Kahut, Ueber
die judische Angelologie und Daemonologie in ihren Abhangigkeit vom
Parsismus, Leipzig, 1866.