The Christ Myth

by Arthur Drews

And your hearts are united.

Let your thoughts be in unison,

That you may be happily joined together.”[1]

While the faithful by partaking of the sacred cake and the fiery Soma cup united themselves with the God and were filled with his “spirit,” the sacrificial gifts which had been brought to him burnt upon the altars. These consisted likewise of Soma and Sacred Cake, and caused the sacred banquet to be of such a kind that it was partaken of by Agni and men together. The God was at and present in the banquet dedicated to him. He consumed the gifts, transformed them into flame, and in sweet-smelling smoke bore them with him up to heaven. Here they were partaken of by the other divine beings and finally by the Father of Heaven himself. Thus Agni became not merely an agent at the sacrifice, a mystic sacrificial priest, but, since the sacrificial gifts simply contained him in material form, a sacrificer, who offered his own body in sacrifice.[2] While man sacrificed God, God at the same time sacrificed himself. Indeed, this sacrifice was one in which God was not only the subject but also the object, both sacrificer and sacrificed. “It was a common mode of thinking among the Indians,” says Max Müller, “to look upon the fire on the altar as at the same time subject and object of the sacrifice. The fire burnt the offering and was accordingly the priest as it were. The fire bore the offering to the Gods and was accordingly a mediator between God and men. But the fire also represented something divine. It was a God, and if honour was paid to this God, the fire was at once subject and object of the sacrifice. Out of this arose the first idea, that Agni sacrificed to himself, that is, that he brought his own offering to himself, then, that he brought himself as a victim—out of which the later legends grew.”[3] The sacrifice of the God is a sacrificing of the God. The genitive in this sentence is in one case to be understood in an objective, in the other in a subjective sense. In other words, the sacrifice which man offers to the God is a sacrifice which the God brings, and this sacrifice of the God is at the same time one in which the God offers himself as victim.

In the Rigveda Agni, as God of Priests and Sacrifices, also bears the name of Viçvakarman, i.e., “Consummator of All.” Hymn x., 81 also describes him as the creator of the world, who called the world into existence, and in so doing gave his own body in sacrifice. Hence, then, the world, according to x. 82, represents nothing existing exterior to him, but the very manifestation of Viçvakarman, in which at the creation he as it were appeared. On the other hand, Purusha, the first man, is represented as he out of whose body the world was formed.[4] But Purusha is, as we have seen, the prototype of the Mandaic and apocalyptic “son of man.” Herein lies the confirmation of the fact that the “son of man” is none other than Agni, the most human of the Vedic Gods. In the Mazda religion the first mortals were called Meshia and Meshiane, the ancestors of fallen mankind, who expect their redemption at the hands of another Meshia. This meaning of the word Messiah was not strange to the Jews too, when they placed the latter as the “new Adam” in the middle of the ages. Adam, however, also means man.[5] The Messiah accordingly, as the new Adam, was for them too only a renewal of the first man in a loftier and better form. This idea, that mankind needed to be renewed by another typical representative of itself, goes back in the last resort to India, where, after the dismemberment of Purusha, a man arose in the person of Manu or Manus. He was to be the just king, the first lawgiver and establisher of civilisation, descending after his death to rule as judge in the under-world (cf. the Cretan Minos). But Manu, whose name again meant no more than man or human being (Manusha), passed as son of Agni. Indeed, he was even completely identified with him, since life, spirit, and fire to the mind of primitive man are interchangeable ideas, although it is spirit and intelligence which are expressed under the name of Manu (Man = to measure, to examine).[6] We thus also obtain a new reason for the fact that the divine Redeemer is a human being. We also understand not only why the “first-born son of God” was, according to the ideas of the whole of Nearer Asiatic syncretism, the principle of the creation of the world, but also why the redemption which he brought man could be for this reason looked upon as a divine self-sacrifice.[7]

The sacrifice of the God on the part of mankind is a sacrifice of the God himself—it is only by this means that the community between God and man was completed. The God offers sacrifice for man, while man offers sacrifice for God. Indeed, more than this, he offers himself for mankind, he gives his own body that man may reap the fruit of his sacrifice. The divine “son” offers himself as a victim. Sent down by the “father” upon the earth in the form of light and warmth, he enters men as the “quickening and life-giving spirit” under the appearance of bread and wine. He consumes himself in the fire and unites man with the father above, in that by his disposal of his own personality he removes the separation and difference between them. Thus Agni extinguishes the hostility between God and man, thus he consumes their sins in the glow of his fiery nature, spiritualising and illuminating them inwardly. Through the invigorating power of the “fire-water” he raises men above the actuality of every day to the source of their existence and by his own sacrifice obtains for them a life of blessedness in heaven. In the sacrifice, too, God and man are identified. Therein God descends to man and man is raised to God. That is the common thought which had already found expression in the Rigveda, which later formed the special “mystery” of the secret cults and religious unions of Nearer Asia, which lay at the root of the sacrament of “the Supper,” which guaranteed to man the certainty of a blessed life in the beyond, and reconciled him to the thought of bodily death.[8] Agni is accordingly nothing else than the bodily warmth in individuals, and as such the subject of their motions and thoughts, the principle of life, their soul. When the body grows cold in death the warmth of life leaves it, the eyes of the dead go up to the sun, his breath into the wind; his soul, however, ascends towards heaven where the “fathers” dwell, into the kingdom of everlasting light and life.[9] Indeed, so great is the power of Agni, the divine physician and saviour of the soul,[10] that he, as the God of all creative power, can, by merely laying on his hands, even call the dead back to life.[11]

Even in the Old Testament we meet with the idea of a sacramental meal. This is pointed to in [Genesis xiv. 18] sqq., when Melchisedek, the prince of peace (“King of Salem”), the priest of “God Most High,” prepares for Abraham a meal of bread and wine, and at it imparts to him the blessing of the Lord God. For Melchisedek, the ruler of Salem, the city of peace, “the King of Justice,” as he is called in the Epistle to the Hebrews, is even in this book plainly described as an ancient God: “without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like unto the Son of God, he abideth a priest continually.”[12] So also the Prophet Jeremiah speaks of holy feasts, consisting of cake and wine, of nightly sacrifices of burnt-offerings and liquids, which were offered to the Queen of Heaven (i.e., the Moon) and other Divinities.[13] Isaiah, too, is indignant against those who prepare a drinking-feast for God and make liquid offerings to Meni.[14] Now Meni is none other than Mēn, the Moon-God of Asia Minor, and as such is identical with Selene-Mēne, the Goddess of the Moon in the Orphic hymns. Like her he is a being of a dual sex, at once Queen and King of Heaven. Consequently a liquid sacrifice appears to have been offered by all the people of Nearer Asia in honour of the Moon. As Moon-God (Deus Lunus) and as related to Meni, in whose worship a sacramental meal also plays the chief part, Agni appears in the Vedas under the name of Manu, Manus, or Soma. He too is a being of dual sex. Of this we are again reminded when Philo, the Rabbinic speculation of the Kabbala, as well as the Gnostics ascribe to the first man (Adam Kadmon) two faces and the form of a man and woman, until God separated the two sexes from one another.[15] According to this we should probably look upon the fire-worship in Asia Minor also as the foundation of the sacramental meal.

Obviously we have to do with a meal of this kind in the bringing in of the so-called shew-bread. Every Sabbath twelve cakes were laid by the priests “upon the pure table before the Lord,” “and it shall be for Aaron and his sons, and they shall eat it in a holy place, for it is most holy unto him of the offerings of the Lord, by a perpetual statute.”[16]

It appears, then, that this meal, presided over by the High Priest as representative of Aaron, was partaken of by twelve other priests, and Robertson rightly sees herein the Jewish prototype of the Christian Supper and of the number of apostles—the Twelve—present at it. But the High Priest Aaron is a personification of the Jewish Ark of the Covenant, that is, of the visible expression of the Covenant between God and man, one of the chief prototypes of the Messiah. And if the self-offering of the Messiah, as we have seen above (p. 78), has its precedent in the self-offering of Aaron, so also the great solemnity of the Aaronic sacrificial meal would not be wanting in the story of the Christian Redeemer.

As is well known, Joshua too, the Jesus of the Old Testament, whom we have learnt to recognise as an ancient Ephraimitic God of the Sun and Fruitfulness, was accompanied in his passage of the Jordan by twelve assistants, one from each tribe. And he is said after circumcising the people to have celebrated the Paschal Feast on the other bank.[17] Hence, taking into account what has been said above concerning Joshua, we are probably justified in drawing the conclusion that his name was permanently connected with the partaking of the Easter lamb.[18] In any case the so-called “Supper” of Christianity did not only later take its place as the central point of religious activity, but from the beginning it held this central position in the cults of those sects out of which Christianity was developed. It was the point of crystallisation, the highest point, of the other ritualistic acts, in a way the germ cell out of which in association with the idea of the death and resurrection of the God Redeemer the Christian outlook upon the world has grown. Just as in the Vedic Agni Cult the sacrifice offered by men to their God was a self-sacrifice of this God as well in a subjective as in an objective sense; just as the participating in common of the sacrificial gifts served the purpose of rendering the sacrifice in an inward sense their very own, and thereby making them immediate participators in its efficacy, so, too, the Christian partakes in the bread of the body of his God and in the wine drinks his blood in order to become as it were himself God. The Evangelists make the Supper coincide with the Feast of the Pasch, because originally a man was immolated on this occasion; and he, as the first-born and most valuable of sacrificial gifts, took the place of the God who offered himself in sacrifice.[19]