The cleansing of the temple Why did the solar God Joshua-Jesus scourge the money-changers out of the temple? Answer: Because it is told of Apollonius of Tyana, “that he expelled from the cities of the left bank of the Hellespont some sorcerers who were extorting money for a great propitiatory sacrifice to prevent earthquakes.”
The connection is beautifully obvious like the rest of our author’s rapprochements; but we must accept it, or we shall lay ourselves open to the reproach of “psychological resistance to evidence.” Nor must we ask how the memoirs of Damis, that lay in a corner till Philostratus got hold of them in the year 215, enjoyed so much vogue among the “Christists” of Jerusalem long years before they can conceivably have been written.
Why on the occasion in question did Jesus make a scourge of cords with which to drive the sheep and oxen out of the Temple? Answer: “Because in the Assyrian and Egyptian systems a scourge-bearing god is a very common figure on the monuments … it is specially associated with Osiris, the Saviour, Judge, and Avenger. A figure of Osiris, reverenced as ‘Chrestos’ the benign God, would suffice to set up among Christists as erewhile among pagans the demand for an explanation.”
Here we get a precious insight into the why and wherefore of the Gospels. They were intended by the “Christists” to explain the meaning of Osiris statues. Why could they not have asked one of the priests of Osiris, who as a rule might be found in the neighbourhood of his statues, what the emblem meant? And, after all, were statues of Osiris so plentiful in Jerusalem, where the sight even of a Roman eagle aroused a riot?
Janus-Peter the bifrons Who was Peter? Answer: An understudy of Mithras, who in the monuments bears two keys; or of Janus, who bears the keys and the rod, and as opener of the year (hence the name January) stands at the head of the twelve months.
Why did Peter deny Jesus? Answer: Because Janus was called bifrons. The epithet puzzled the “Christists” or “Jesuists” of Jerusalem, who, instead of asking the first Roman soldier they met what it meant, proceeded to render the word bifrons in the sense of “double-faced,” quite a proper epithet they thought for Peter, who thenceforth had to be held guilty of an act of double-dealing. For we must not forget that it was the epithet which suggested to the Christists the invention of the story, and not the story that of the epithet. But even Mr. Robertson is not quite sure of this; and it does not matter, where there is such a wealth of alternatives. For Peter is also an understudy of “the fickle Proteus.” Janus’s double head was anyhow common on coins, and with that highly relevant observation he essays to protect his theories of Janus-Peter from any possible criticisms. Indeed, we are forbidden to call in question the above conclusions. They are quite certain, because the “Christists” were intellectually “about the business of forming myths in explanation of old ritual and old statuary” (p. 350). Wonderful people these early “Christists,” who, although they were, as Mr. Robertson informs us (p. 348), “apostles of a Judaic cult preaching circumcision,” and therefore by instinct inimical to all plastic art, nevertheless rivalled the modern archæologist in their desire to explain old statuary. They seem to have been the prototypes of the Jews of Wardour Street. No less wonderful were they as philologists, in that, being Hebrews and presumably speaking Aramaic, they took such a healthy interest in the meaning of Latin words, and discovered in bifrons a sense which it never bore in any Latin author who ever used it!
The keys of Peter It appears to have escaped the notice of Professor Franz Cumont that Mithras carries in his monuments two keys. The two keys were an attribute of the Mithraic Kronos, in old Persian Zervan, whom relatively late the Latins confused with Janus, who also had two heads and carried keys. That late Christian images of Peter were imitated from statues of these gods no one need doubt, and Fr. Cumont (Monuments de Mithras, i, 85) does not reject such an idea. It is quite another thing to assume dogmatically that the text [ Matthew xvi, 19] was suggested by a statue of Janus or of Zervan. To explain it you need not leave Jewish ground, but merely glance at [ Isaiah xxii, 22], where the Lord is made to say of Eliakim: “And the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder; and he shall open and none shall shut; and he shall shut and none shall open.” The same imagery meets us in [ Revelation iii, 7] (copied from Isaiah), [ Luke xi, 52], and elsewhere. A. Sulzbach (in Ztschr. f.d. Neutest. Wissenschaft, 1903, p. 190) points out that every Jew, up to A.D. 70, would understand such imagery, for he saw every evening the temple keys ceremoniously taken from a hole under the temple floor, where they were kept under a slab of stone. The Levite watcher locked up the temple and replaced the keys under the slab, upon which he then laid his bed for the night. In connection with the magic power of binding and loosing the keys had, of course, a further and magical significance, not in Judæa alone, but all over the world, and the Evangelists did not need to examine statues of Janus or Zervan in order to come by this bit of everyday symbolism.
N.B.—No connection of Janus-Peter of the Gospels with Peter of the Pauline Epistles! The one was a mythical companion of the Sun-god, the other a man of flesh and blood, according to Mr. Robertson.
Joseph and his ass Who was Joseph? Answer: Forasmuch as “the Christian system is a patchwork of a hundred suggestions drawn from pagan art and ritual usage” (p. 305), and “Christism was only neo-Paganism grafted on Judaism” (p. 338), Joseph must be regarded as “a partial revival of the ancient adoration of the God Joseph as well as of that of the God Daoud” (p. 303). He was also, seeing that he took Mary and her child on an ass into Egypt, a reminiscence; or, shall we not say, an explanation of “the feeble old man leading an ass in the sacred procession of Isis, as described by Apuleius in his Metamorphoses.”
There is no mention of Joseph’s ass in the Gospels, but that does not matter. Dr. Drews is better informed, and would have us recognize in Joseph an understudy of Kinyras, the father of Adonis, who “is said to have been some kind of artisan, a smith, or carpenter. That is to say, he is supposed to have invented the hammer,” etc. Might I suggest the addition of the god Thor to the collection of gospel aliases? The gods Joseph and Daoud are purely modern fictions; no ancient Jew ever heard of either.