The Evolution of the Idea of God: An Inquiry Into the Origins of Religions

by Grant Allen

On the other hand, it is quite possible, or even probable, that there really did live in Galilee, at some time about the beginning of our accepted era, a teacher and reformer bearing the Semitic name which is finally Hellenised and Latinised for us as Jesus. If so, it seems not unlikely that this unknown person was crucified (or rather hung on a post) by the Romans at Jerusalem under the Procurator C. Pontius Pilatus; and that after his death he was worshipped more or less as a god by his immediate followers. Such kernel of truth may very well exist in the late and derivative Gospel story; a kernel of truth, but imbedded in a mass of unhistorical myth, which implicitly identifies him with all the familiar corn-gods and wine-gods of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Furthermore, it is even possible that the Christ may have been deliberately put to death, at the instigation of the Jewish rabble, as one of those temporary divine kings whose nature and meaning we have already discussed. If this suggestion seem improbable from the lack of any similar recorded case in the scanty Jewish annals, I would answer that formal histories seldom give us any hint of the similar customs still surviving in civilised European countries; that many popular rites exist unheard of everywhere; and that the Jews were commonly believed through the Middle Ages to crucify Christian boys, like St. Hugh of Lincoln, in certain irregular and unrecognised ethnical ceremonies. Furthermore, lest I should be thought to adduce this instance through an anti-Semite tendency (which I do not in the slightest degree possess), I may add that even among Christians similar customs are believed to exist in rural parts of Italy at the present day,—there are villages where a man dies yearly as the representative of Christ; and that in my opinion the Oberammergau and other Passion Plays are survivals of like representations in which a condemned criminal, the usual substitute, did once actually enact the part of Christ. In short, I do not hesitate to say that god-slaying ceremonies, more or less attenuated, have lingered on everywhere in obscure forms among the folk-rites and folk-customs of the most civilised peoples.

Without doing more than briefly indicate this possibility, however, I pass on to say that if ever there was really a personal Christ, and if his followers began by vaguely believing in his resurrection, the legend, as we get it, is obviously made up of collected fragments from all the godslaying customs and beliefs we have been considering in detail through the last six or seven chapters. In the Gospel of his later believers, after the sect had spread widely among the Gentiles of the towns, Jesus is conceived of as a corn and wine god, a temporary king, slain on a cross as a piacular atonement, and raised again from the dead after three days, in the manner common to all corn and wine gods. It is possible, of course, that the first believers may have fastened all these ideas on to an accidental condemnation and execution, so to speak; but it is possible too that the Christ may actually have been put to death at the great spring feast of the Passover, in accordance with some obscure and unrecognised folk-rite of the rabble of Jerusalem. I do not even pretend to have an opinion on this subject; I do not assert or deny any historical nucleus of fact: I am satisfied with saying that the story on the whole exhibits the Christ to us entirely in the character of a temporary king, slain with piacular rites as a corn and wine god. In this case at least, I am no dogmatic Euhemerist.

I think it was Professor Freeman who once quaintly described Buddhism as “a blasphemous anticipatory parody of Christianity.” The learned historian’s idea apparently was that the author of all evil, being aware beforehand of the divine intentions, had invented Buddhism before the advent of Christ, so as to discount the Christian Plan of Salvation by anticipation. If so, we must regard all other religions as similar blasphemous attempts at forestalling God: for we shall see as we proceed that every one of them contains innumerable anticipations of Christianity—or, to put it conversely, that Christianity subsumes them all into itself, in a highly concentrated and etherealised solution.

In the earliest Christian documents, the Pauline and other Apostolic Epistles, we get little information about the history of the real or mythical Christ. Shadowy allusions alone to the crucifixion and the resurrection repay our scrutiny. But through the mist of words we see two or three things clearly. The Christ is described as the son of God—that is to say of the Jewish deity; and he is spoken of continually as slain on a post or tree, the sacred symbol of so many old religions. He dies to save mankind; and salvation is offered in his name to all men. A careful reading of the epistles from this point of view will give in brief an epitome of the earliest and least dogmatic yet very doctrinal Christian theology. Its cardinal points are four —incarnation, death, resurrection, atonement.

The later accounts which we get in the Gospels are far more explicit. The legend by that time had taken form: it had grown clear and consistent. All the elements of the slain and risen corn and wine god are there in perfection. For brevity’s sake, I will run all these accounts together, adding to them certain traits of still later origin.

The aspect of Christ as a survival of the corn-god is already clear in Paul’s argument in First Corinthians on the resurrection of the body. This argument would strike home at once to every Greek and every Asiatic. “That which you sow is not quickened unless it die. And when you sow, you sow not the body that is to be, but bare grain; it may be wheat or any other grain. But God gives it a shape as pleases him; to every seed its own body.” The whole of this fifteenth chapter, the earliest statement of the Christian belief, should be read through in this connexion by any one who wishes to understand the close relation of the idea of sowing to the resurrection. It might have been written by any worshipper of Adonis or Osiris who wished to recommend his special doctrine of a bodily resurrection to a doubtful cremationist, familiar with the cult of Dionysus and of Attis.

The earliest known rite of the Christian church was the sacramental eating and drinking of bread and wine together; which rite was said to commemorate the death of the Lord, and his last supper, when he eat and drank bread and wine with his disciples. The language put into his mouth on this occasion in the Gospels, especially the Fourth, is distinctly that of the corn and wine god. “I am the true vine; ye are the branches.” “I am the bread of life.” “Take, eat, this is my body.” “This is my blood of the new testament.” Numberless other touches of like kind are scattered through the speeches. In the parable of the vineyard, God the Father is described as the owner of a vineyard, who sends his only begotten son to receive the fruit of it: and the workers slay him. The first miracle at Cana of Galilee is one where water is turned into wine by the hand of Jesus: and so on through a long series of curious instances, which readers can discover for themselves by inspection.

In early Christian art, as exhibited in the catacombs at Rome, the true vine is most frequently figured; as are also baskets of loaves, with the corresponding miracle of the loaves and fishes. Multiplication of bread and wine are the natural credentials of the corn and wine god. The earliest description we possess of Christ, that of John of Damascus, states that his complexion was “of the colour of wheat”; while in the apocryphal letter of Lentulus to the Roman Senate we read in the same spirit that his hair was “wine-coloured.” The Greek description by Epiphanius Monachus says that Christ was six feet high; his hair long and golden-coloured; and in countenance he was ruddy like his father David. All these descriptions are obviously influenced by the identification of the bread and wine of the eucharist with the personal Jesus.

In the usage of the church from very early days, it has been customary to eat the body of Christ in the form of bread, and to drink his blood as wine in the sacrament. In the Catholic church, this continuous ceremony takes place at an altar, containing sacred bones, and is represented as being the offering of God, himself to himself, in the form of a mystic and piacular sacrifice. The priest drinks the wine or blood; the laity eat only the bread or body.