But worse than this. We know from Mr. Robertson and Dr. Drews that the same Proto-Christian Joshua-God, who was waging war in heaven on the pagan gods and goddesses, was himself a composite myth made up of memories of Krishna, Æsculapius, Osiris, Apollo, Dionysus, Apollonius, and a hundred other fiends. Mr. Robertson attests this, p. 305, in these words: “As we have seen and shall see throughout this investigation, the Christian system is a patchwork of a hundred suggestions drawn from pagan art and ritual usage.”
Is it quite appropriate that the pre-Christian Jesus or Joshua should turn and rend his pagan congeners in the manner described by Professor W. B. Smith? His mythical antecedents, as ascertained by Mr. Robertson and Dr. Drews, are grotesquely incompatible with the rôle of monotheistic founder assigned him by Professor W. B. Smith. Are we to suppose that the learned and eloquent propagandists of his cult were aware of this incompatibility, and for that reason chose to veil their monotheistic propaganda in the decent obscurity of everyday demonological language?
Mary and her homonyms Who was Mary, the mother of Jesus?
Let Dr. Drews speak first:—
Now if Joseph, as we have already seen, was originally a god, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a goddess. Under the name of Maya, she is the mother of Agni—i.e., the principle of motherhood and creation simply, as which she is in the Rigveda at one time represented by the fire-producing wood, the soft pith, in which the fire-stick was whirled; at another as the earth, with which the sky has mated. She appears under the same name as the mother of Buddha as well as of the Greek Hermes. She is identical with Maira (Maera) as, according to Pausanias, viii, 12, 48, the pleiad Maia, wife of Hephaistos was called. She appears among the Persians as the “virgin” mother of Mithras. As Myrrha she is the mother of the Syrian Adonis; as Semiramis, mother of the Babylonian Ninus (Marduk). In the Arabic legend she appears under the name of Mirzam as mother of the mythical saviour Joshua; while the Old Testament gives this name to the virgin sister of that Joshua who was so closely related to Moses; and, according to Eusebius, Merris was the name of the Egyptian princess who found Moses in a basket and became his foster mother.
The above purpureus pannus is borrowed by Dr. Drews in the second edition of his work from Mr. Robertson’s book, p. 297. Here is the original:—
It is not possible from the existing data to connect historically such a cult with its congeners; but the mere analogy of names and epithets goes far. The mother of Adonis, the slain “Lord” of the great Syrian cult, is Myrrha; and Myrrha in one of her myths is the weeping tree from which the babe Adonis is born. Again, Hermes, the Greek Logos, has for mother Maia, whose name has further connections with Mary. In one myth Maia is the daughter of Atlas, thus doubling with Maira, who has the same father, and who, having “died a virgin,” was seen by Odysseus in Hades. Mythologically, Maira is identified with the Dog-Star, which is the star of Isis. Yet again, the name appears in the East as Maya, the virgin-mother of Buddha; and it is remarkable that, according to a Jewish legend, the name of the Egyptian princess who found the babe Moses was Merris. The plot is still further thickened by the fact that, as we learn from the monuments, one of the daughters of Ramses II was named Meri. And as Meri meant “beloved,” and the name was at times given to men, besides being used in the phrase “beloved of the gods,” the field of mythic speculation is wide.
And we feel that it is, indeed, wide, when, on p. 301, the three Marias mentioned by Mark are equated with the three Moirai or Fates!
In another passage we meet afresh with one of these equations, p. 306. It runs thus: “On the hypothesis that the mythical Joshua, son of Miriam, was an early Hebrew deity, it may be that one form of the Tammuz cult in pre-Christian times was a worship of a mother and child—Mary and Adonis; that, in short, Maria = Myrrha, and that Jesus was a name of Adonis.”