The whole history of Christianity, in all its forms, reeks with blood and smells to heaven with carrion. In the first centuries Christians persecuted pagans or, divided among themselves, persecuted each other as heretics. Later arose the feuds of orthodox and Arian, then came a united Christendom against Islam, followed by Protestant wars. In these Catholics murdered, pillaged, and devastated Protestants and burned and tortured them as heretics by ecclesiastical tribunals; Protestants persecuted and executed Catholics and, divided among themselves, persecuted one another. In the sixteenth century Anglican Episcopalians persecuted Catholics and Nonconformists. In the seventeenth century Puritans persecuted Catholics, Episcopalians, and Quakers, and so on. The whole history of this religion is a long narration of blasphemous and degrading theories propagated by violence, hypocrisy and crime. Christian charity is a delusion which is found only among the persecuted, who, the instant the scale turns, become the ruling faction, forget its meaning, and hasten to avenge their sufferings in persecutions. No other religion has so bloody a history as Christianity. The old heathen religions went calmly on their way, indifferent to one another and showing the most perfect toleration. Rival gods of rival nations were worshiped in temples side by side, without conflict or ill feeling. Buddhists and Brahmins mildly flourish in proximity. But Christians who believe that the Christ was sacrificed for love of humanity, that their gospel is one of love, peace, and good will, vie with one another to outstrip the ferocity of wild beasts.
While many students believe that Jesus was a purely mythical being, without actual existence save in the brains of religious Christians, I see no reason to doubt that a certain Jewish rabbi may have come out of the rebellious province of Galilee about the time of Herod. Such messiahs had come before him and such have succeeded him. Some of the messiahs subsequent to Jesus were: one who appeared in Persia in 1138, another in Arabia in 1167, and one in Moravia at the close of the twelfth century. Eldavid proclaimed himself messiah in Persia in 1199, Sabathai Tzevi assumed the title of “King of Kings” in 1666 and was executed at Constantinople by the Sultan. So late as 1829 there appeared in India the eight-year-old son of a peasant who was a wonderful serpent charmer and was called Marayum Powar. It was an ancient belief that the ability to handle serpents unharmed was a proof that one had become perfectly holy—absorbed in God! Therefore, numerous people came to believe Powar a god and in ten months ten thousand followers were about him, baptizing and performing miraculous cures—and his cult seemed well on the road to establishment when, over-confident of his power, he was bitten by a serpent and died. His followers, after vainly awaiting his resurrection, dispersed.
That Jesus’ whole career is lost in encircling myth is no proof that the original figure never existed. There is plenty of historical evidence to show that the central portion of Europe was once ruled by a king named Karl, and we do not doubt this simply because a great cloud of myths has been gathered about the name of St. Charlemagne, any more than we feel bound to believe that because he once lived he must now necessarily exist, sleeping in a mountain, until it shall be necessary for him to spring forth and save the German fatherland.
One set of students assert that the Christ was merely the personification of vegetable life, claiming that his death and resurrection typify the death and revivification of vegetation. Others hold that he is the modern phase of the eternal sun-god. To sustain this hypothesis the following allegorical interpretation of his supposed career is offered as an explanation. He was born on the early dawn of the twenty-fifth day of December, the day on which commences the sun’s apparent revolution around the earth; his birth was announced by the brilliant morning star; his virgin mother was the pure and beautiful dawn; his temptation was his struggle with the adverse clouds which he dispersed; his trial, execution, and death were emblematic of the solar decline and crucifixion at the beginning of winter; his descent into hell was typical of the three days of the winter solstice; and his resurrection and ascension refer to the return of the sun after its seeming extinction.
I have now shown that among the great majority of the nations of antiquity, no matter as to how they may have differed in the details, all held one general idea of faith in a savior-mediator between man and the supreme deity. Some such medium seemed necessary to them, for they had not reached that intellectual plane on which one feels able to hold direct communication with the creator. Modern Christianity, in all its forms, still panders to this ancient superstition that man must needs have an agent between himself and his God. He must have an intercessor between his weakness and God’s power—and vengeance.
But when the human mind is freed from superstition and men learn that right living and a clean ethical code is all that is required, then they will cease to bow, either physically or mentally, to any humanly invented mediator, and their enlarged ideas of the justice of the supreme deity will prohibit any belief in impossible demi-gods. However, for the majority, that happy time of emancipation is still in the distant future, and, until its dawn lightens the general intelligence, men will continue to adore and supplicate the mediator whom inheritance and environment have taught them to revere, as Krishna, Buddha, Mithras, or the Christ, as the case may be.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Apocryphal New Testament, Being All the Gospels, Epistles and Other Pieces Now Extant, Attributed in the First Four Centuries to Jesus Christ, His Apostles, and their Companions, and not Included in the New Testament by its Compilers. London. Printed for William Hone, 1821.
Baring-Gould, S.—[Curious Myths of the Middle Ages]. London. 1877. Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets, and other Old Testament Characters. New York. 1872. The Origin and Development of Religious Beliefs. New York. 1870. 2 vols.