A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

When Christianity comes into aggressive competition with Paganism, one of the common charges of its Roman enemies is found to be that the Christians were wont to eat the body of an actual child in their mysteries. There is no good reason to believe that this horror ever happened among them; though the language of the rite tells of a pre-historic practice of human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism, such as actually took place among the early Semites and the pre-Christian Mexicans, and was said to have been in use among the Druids about the beginning of the Christian era; but it is probable that in some Christist groups there was a usage of eating a baked image of a child, as had been done in the Dionysian mysteries. The manipulation of the Abraham and Isaac legend, taken with other data in the Pentateuch and elsewhere, makes it clear that child-sacrifice had been practised among the early Hebrews as among the Phœnicians, and that the sacrifice of a lamb or kid became the equivalent, as it was perhaps the prototype. When it was permitted to substitute a dough image for the actual lamb, the mystical principle could be further served by a dough image of the child that the lamb itself typified. Under the veil of secrecy, which was as much a matter of course with the early Christians as with the pagan initiates of the Eleusinian and other mysteries, such variations of the cult were possible to an indefinite extent. It was only when there grew up an ecclesiastical organization, in the spirit and on the scale of the imperial system itself, and when the compiled gospels had become a recognised code for the Church in general, that they were reduced to the norm of the pagan sacrament of bread and wine.

The only other primary Christian rite, that of baptism, is shown even in the gospels to have been pre-Christian; and the anti-Judaic John the Baptist may have been a historic figure among the Jews, though his connection with the Christos is a myth, seen in the gospels in different stages of its development.[7] The presumption is that it was framed at the stage at which the Jewish Christists, faced by the Pauline and Gentile opposition to circumcision, hitherto held binding among the Jesuists, decided to substitute baptism (which already had a Jewish vogue) and thereby maintain a Jewish primacy. But baptism too was a common Gentile usage, as was the use of holy water, later adopted by the Christian Church.

With these Christist rites, it is clear, there was originally associated a fixed belief in the speedily-approaching end of the world, that being the notion which most completely pervades every book in the New Testament. The rites then, like the similar mysteries of the Pagans, were regarded as the way of entrance into the future life, whether that were conceived as the apparition of a supernatural New Jerusalem on earth, or as a transformed existence in a material heaven in the skies. For the Pauline period, the approaching catastrophe was evidently the supreme pre-occupation; and to the fear of it the whole of the early Christian propaganda appealed. There is no reason, however, to believe that the Christians at Jerusalem ever “had all things in common,” as is asserted in the Acts of the Apostles, where other passages confute the claim. Such communities indeed had arisen in antiquity, and there was a kindred tradition that Pythagoras had centuries before, in Italy, converted by one discourse a multitude of hearers, who adopted a communal life. But the narrative in the Acts, especially as regards the fable of Ananias and Sapphira, seems to have been framed in the interest of some of the Christian communist groups which arose after the period in question, and whose promoters needed at once an apostolic precedent for their ideal and a menace against those who temporized with it. In the Pauline epistles the Gentile converts, so far from cultivating community of goods, are seen going to law with each other before heathen judges.

It is probable that the use of the sign of the cross, as a mark of membership and a symbol of salvation, belonged to the earliest stages of the cult; at least the sign in question figures as the mark of a body of religious enthusiasts in Jewry as early as the Book of Ezekiel ([ix, 4]; Heb.); and in the Apocalypse ([vii, 2, 3]) the “seal of the living God” appears to have been understood in the same sense as the sign prescribed in the prophecy. The Hebrew letter tau, there specified, is known to have represented at different periods different forms of cross; and the oldest of all is believed to have been the crux ansata of the Egyptians, which was a hieroglyph of immortal life. Thus the historic form of the crucifix was determined, not by the actual manner of normal crucifixion (for in that the arms were drawn above the head and not outspread), but by previous symbolism. In the Egyptian ritual of Osiris a spreading of the arms on the cross was in remote antiquity a form of mystic regeneration; and in some amulets the stauros or tree-cross of Osiris is found represented with human arms.

§ 6. Rise of Gentile Christism

A severance between the Jewish and the Gentile Christists was the necessary condition of any wide spread of the cult. Though it was the success of Jewish proselytism that paved the way for the propaganda of Christism, only a handful of Gentiles would willingly bow to the Jewish pretension of holding all the sources of “salvation.” That a Græcized Jew, as Paul is represented to have been, should begin to make the cult cosmopolitan, in despite of opposition from Jerusalem, is likely enough; and continued opposition would only deepen the breach. The Judaic claim involved a financial interest; and as local economic interest was a factor in the development of every Gentile group of Christists, a theological argument for Gentile independence was sure to be evolved. As the composition of the Christ-myth proceeded, accordingly, various episodes to the discredit of the mythic twelve disciples of Jesus are framed: “one of the twelve” figures as the betrayer; Peter openly denies his Master, and the others forsake him in a body in the hour of trial; while their incapacity to understand him in life is often insisted on. John the Baptist and Jesus, again, are made explicitly to teach that the “Kingdom of God” is taken away from the Jews, though Jesus also promises the twelve that they shall sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes. Finally, there is a manipulation of narratives on the question of the responsibility for Jesus’ execution, the outcome being that it lies neither with the Roman governor nor with the sub-Roman king, but with the Jewish priests and people, even as the life of the Child-God at his birth is menaced by the Jewish King. In all likelihood most of those episodes were first set forth in a Gentile Passion-play, whence they passed into the common stream of tradition; but such an item as the part played by Pilate is likely to have been first introduced from the Jewish side, Pilate having been an object of special Jewish detestation.

In such matters the literary or myth-making faculty of the Gentiles, with their many Saviour-Gods, gave them the advantage over the Judaists; but the strife of the two interests was long and bitter. It flames out in the Judaic book of Revelation, in the allusion to those who “say they are apostles and are not”; and long after the time allotted to Paul we find him caricatured in certain Judaizing writings, the so-called Clementine Recognitions and Homilies, in the person of Simon Magus, an entirely unhistorical personage, who also appears in the Acts of the Apostles. Simon Magus is, in fact, a mythical figure evolved from Semo Megas or Great Sem (=Sem-on, as Samson is Samas-on), an old Semitic Sun-God worshipped by the polytheists of Samaria, and in connection with whose cultus there was evidently a Gentile Christist movement, of a Gnostic or mythical character, its Christ being conceived as non-human. Such a movement being competitive with that of the Jewish Jesus, “Simon,” to whom was ascribed an impressive Gnostic treatise, became the type of anti-Jewish heresy; whence the late Christian story in the Acts, where Elymas again (=Great El) is a mythical duplication of Simon.

There are many signs that Samaritan elements entered early into the Christist movement. The fourth gospel even represents the founder to have been accepted in Samaria as the Messiah; and in so far as the cult became Gentilised, even if the Ebionites did not stand for an ancient local and quasi-Samaritan foundation, Samaritans would be the more ready to join it, since they were thereby helping to discomfit the more exclusive Jews. But they too had their Christ-myth; and the conception of the Holy Spirit as a dove came from them to the Christians. Seeking to found finally on the Old Testament, the scripture-makers of the latter movement had to explain away their Samaritan antecedents by myths of heresy.

The book of Acts as a whole, however, stands for an ecclesiastical tendency in the second century to make out that the first apostles had not been divided; that Peter too was a preacher of Gentile Christism, to which he had been converted by a vision; and that Paul, in turn, had made concessions to Judaism. When the Judaic Church became less and less dangerous as a possible monopolist, the organizing Gentile churches could thus proceed to construct a theoretic connection between Christianity and Judaism, the “new dispensation” and the old, thus preserving for the new creed the prestige of the Old Testament, with which, as a body of sacred books, the New could not for a long time compete, even in the eyes of its devotees. At the same time the apostles, who had long figured as church-founders, were effectively glorified as wonder-workers, being credited with miracles which rivalled those of the Christos himself; and Peter raises a “Tabitha” from the dead as Jesus had done the “Talitha” or maiden in the gospels—a myth which was itself a duplicate of a traditional pagan miracle later credited to Apollonius of Tyana.