CHAPTER XVII

THE REAL GHOST OF HISTORY

It is deemed desirable to incorporate in the work at this point an assemblage of evidence indicating the non-historical character of the ancient Scriptures. This insertion is made at the expense of space that might be used to present more pertinent material. But it is regarded as essential for many reasons. It will be impossible to break the hold of false Christianism upon the mass mind as long as the Bibles are believed to be actual history. And minds can not be changed without the presentation of evidence. Let it be said promptly, however, that the data included here is but an infinitesimal fraction of all that could be gathered. A thousand pages would not be sufficient to spread out the material that lies in our notebooks alone, and that has come from only limited reading. That the conclusions set forth on the basis of this evidence fly straight in the face of all orthodox belief will not be wondered at. But that fact will not invalidate the evidence. The significant thing is that the evidence is unwelcome and will be fought.

The chief body of non-historical material affecting Christianity is of course in the New Testament. But as that grew out of and is founded on the Old, it is well to look first at the situation there. We have already presented from the Encyclopædia Britannica passages that state clearly the non-historical character of Hebrew Talmudic, Midrashic, Haggadic and general religious literature including the Old Testament.

Benjamin Bacon, Yale theologian, in his Jesus and Paul (p. 164) says that

"Haggadic teaching, whether Jewish or Christian, has no restrictions in the use of fiction save that it bring home the religious or moral truth intended. Its one rule is: 'Let all things be done unto edification.'"

And again (207) he says:

"Just as in modern times we are conscious that truth may be conveyed in many cases more effectively by fiction than by fact, so with the ancient world, but in much higher degree."

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The "higher degree" being that the knowing ones held keys by which to differentiate between the outer allegory and its inner core of meaning, and the uninitiated did not. The knowing ones, said Massey, kept back in secrecy the esoteric explanation of the myths, to let the crude belief in the supposed history take root among the ignorant.

A weight of cogent testimony is carried by the statement of Eusebius (Ecclesiastical History, Bk. II, Ch. 17) in which he quotes Philo's comment on the ascetics in Egypt:

"The whole period from dawn to eve is for them a religious exercise; they study the sacred Scriptures and expound their rational philosophy by allegory, for they regard the literal interpretation as symbolic of a concealed reality indicated in what is beneath the surface. They have also some writings of men of old, who were the founders of this sect, who left many memorials of the meaning allegorically expounded, which they use as models and copy their method of treatment."

Eusebius comments on the above as follows:

"This seems to have been said by a man who had listened to their expositions of the sacred scriptures, and it is perhaps probable that the writings of men of old, which he says were found among them, were the Gospels, the writings of the apostles and some expositions of prophets after the manner of the ancients, such as are in the Epistle to the Hebrews and many other of the Epistles of Paul."

This is significant testimony and the reference to the Epistle to the Hebrews would seem to be likely truth from what Jerome, according to G. R. S. Mead (Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, p. 128), says of a Gospel according to the Hebrews. This, he says, is the same as the Gospel of the Twelve Apostles and the Gospel of the Nazarenes. Then Mead states that "it should be remembered that these Nazoraeans knew nothing of the Nazareth legend which was subsequently developed by the 'in order that it might be fulfilled' school of historicizers."

A most revealing fact it is that fragments of the original Egyptian mythos, which is a system of cosmo-evolutionary laws and archai based on the eternal principles of being as they are reflected in nature, and which the Egyptians detected as no other people have done, crop up prolifically in the Haggadoth, the Kabalah, the Talmud and other Hebrew writings. It was this type of material that entered so largely into Philo's elucidations. The distillation of true inference from this is that this same matter had been known to the Jews themselves and known in the same category of understanding, that is, as non-historical.

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So that again it is proved that Biblical "history" has been mainly derived from misinterpreted theology.

An instance--out of hundreds--comes to hand at the moment in what is said in the Classical Journal (Vol. 17, p. 264, T. T. Massey) to the effect that the 600,000 warriors of the Israelite multitude that reportedly came out of Egypt in the Exodus are 600,000 inhabitants of Israel in the heavens, according to the Jewish Kabalah; and the same scenes, events and personages that appear as mundane in the Pentateuch are celestial in the Book of Enoch.

In another work we have presented the demonstrable conclusions of Gerald Massey's study, that among ancient peoples the localities, names and character titles of kings, heroes and others, were all taken from the original zodiacal or astrological charts of the heavens and transplanted to the maps and the earthly histories and personages of national renown. History and geography were alike framed over the pattern shown in the mount, the pattern of the heavens. This universal ancient custom is the key at once to all the mythic religion of the past and the conclusive seal of the non-historical character of the Scriptural narratives.

It has been the nearly universal assumption that all mythology emerges from veridical history, or that it all had some history for its background. Massey labors with data and logic to demonstrate that the reversal of the process is the truth: the myth was first and the (alleged) history arose from it, being the rash interpretation put upon it by popular thought which can not comprehend the subtleties of the mythical message. Massey brings the Book of Enoch into this category. He says that one of two things is sure: either the Book of Enoch contains the Hebrew history in allegorical form; or the celestial allegory is the Hebrew history. The parallel is perfect, he affirms. Instead of being history turned into allegory, as the common opinion of scholarship has had it for centuries, it is allegory that has been turned into "history." The Book of Enoch certainly does contain the same characters as the sacred and secret history of the Jews; and as the Enoch cosmograph surely pertains to the astronomical allegory, there is established the strongest possible presumption that the material is mythical or typical in the Pentateuch. There can be no doubt that the Book of Enoch is just what its title claims it to be: the book of the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, with no relation to earthly human history.

The staggering fact forced upon Massey by the data he unearthed in Egyptian study is that every trait and feature which enters into the

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picture of the Christ as divinity, and every event or circumstance considered as pertaining to the human personality of the Christ, was pre-extant and pre-applied to the Egyptian and the Gnostic Christ figures, who never could become flesh. Massey then specifies some twenty features of character description of the Gospel Christ, and matches every one with identical items from Horus and Iu-em-hetep, the Egyptian Christ characters. The first of these recites the fact, of which all Christian minds are so oblivious, though it stands in their own Bible, that like the double-sexed Horus and other deities, the Christ of Revelation, who is the Alpha and Omega of the creational allegory, is represented as epicene, with female breasts.

Again Massey says that the noble full-flowing river of old Egypt's wisdom ended in a quagmire of prophecies for the Jews and a barren wilderness of desert sands for the Christians, and on these shifting sands the Christians reared their temple of the eternal which is giving way at last because it was not founded on the solid rock of the wisdom expressed in mythic and allegorical figures.

Higgins in his great Anacalypsis quotes Bryant in a remarkable discerning paragraph:

"Besides it is evident that most of the deified personages never existed; but were mere titles of the Deity, the Sun, as has been in a great measure proved by Macrobius. Nor was there ever anything of such detriment to ancient history as the supposing that the gods of the Gentile world had been natives of the countries where they were worshipped."

The attempt to render these fables of the gods into ostensible history misled, he says, Bishop Cumberland, Pearson, Petavius, Scaliger and numberless other great men, and among the foremost the great Newton.

Higgins asserts that the work of every ancient author without exception has come down to us badly corrupted by the skulduggery of Christian editors. He says that he suspects that "the vulgar" were taught to expect a new divine person every six hundred years.

It is as plain as day that allegory is woven into the narrative from such a fact as that Philo speaks of a character in the sacred story, "a man whose name is East." This must be held a strange appellation if it had been intended to refer to a human. But, continues the commentator, if the name be an allusion to the Incorporeal Man, who is the rising expression of the divine in human nature, it can be seen that "East" is a most appropriate name, as he is the re-orient man of the resurrection.

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Allan Upward takes all significance off the field of history and roots it in its rightful place in the subjective consciousness of all men when he writes that in the early true Christianity of the Gnostics, "the redemption of the sinner is not so much the historic transaction consummated on the material cross of Calvary as it is the work of the Christ within." "An extraordinary licence was accorded in his age to the preacher to employ allegory, myth, symbolism, legend, parable, whatever he will, in the interest of religious edification."

One of the most challenging bits of testimony to the allegorical character of ancient Biblical writing is before us in a remarkable statement of the Christian Father Origen in his Contra Celsum (IV, 171, Spence). After making a comparison between the Gospel resurrection of Christ and the Greek resurrection of Dionysus, he remarks in a tone of apology tinged with bitterness:

"Or, forsooth, are the Greeks to be allowed to use such words with regard to the soul, and speak in allegorical fashion (tropologein) and we forbidden to do so?"

"Thus clearly declaring," adds Mead, "that the 'resurrection' was an allegory of the soul and not historical." This exceptional touch of resentment on the part of a learned Christian against the crude limitations imposed on his mind by Christian narrowness is most revealing. Now as then any mind illumined by the lofty philosophy of the Greeks had a hard time accepting the crudities of Christian faith and its literal restraints on intelligence.

On the subject of Old Testament historicity it is surely of great significance that the father of "real history," Herodotus, has made no mention of the world's wonder of architecture at the time he lived, the temple of Solomon at Jerusalem. A writer notes that not even the Masons claim the actual existence of Solomon. Kenealy shows that he is not noticed by Herodotus, nor by Plato or any writer of standing. It is most extraordinary, says Kenealy, that the Jewish nation, over which but a few years before the mighty Solomon had reigned in all his glory, with a magnificence scarcely equalled by the greatest monarchs, spending nearly eight billions of gold on a temple, was overlooked by Herodotus in writing of both Babylon and Egypt and in visiting both places having to pass quite close to the great capital of the Jewish nation. Kenealy even asserts that there are no proofs of the actual existence of the twelve tribes of Israel, and adds that Herodotus, the most accurate of historians, who was in Assyria when Ezra flour-

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ished, never mentions the Israelites at all. He was born in 484 B.C., when the Israelitish history, according to the Old Testament, was running its course. How, asks Kenealy, can Herodotus' silence (like Paul's, we add) be accounted for? Only on the ground, so indubitably established by Massey and others, that Old Testament writing, as even Josephus hints, is not history but sublime allegory.

Higgins draws attention to the notable fact that such an astonishing event as the crossing of the Israelites from Egypt on the dry lane through the parted waters of the Red Sea, and the overwhelming of the Egyptian hosts in the waters, was not mentioned by such historians as Berosus, Strabo, Diodorus or Herodotus. That these men should not have heard of such incredible events either from the Egyptians or the Syrians, Arabians or Jews is unaccountable on any assumption that the events really occurred. Likewise it is odd--if it is history--that the same series of occurrences took place when the Afghans or Rajapontans, shepherd tribes, invaded South India and conquered Ceylon, and were driven out over Adam's bridge. Their pursuers were similarly overwhelmed.

Massey affirms that the catacombs of Rome are crowded with Egypto-Gnostic types which had served to Roman, Persian, Greek and Jew as evidence for the non-historic origins of Christianity. The Jesus of the Gnostic Scriptures says that when he came into the world he brought with him the twelve powers; "I took them from the hands of the twelve saviors of the treasure of light"; that is, from the twelve who are called Aeons in the cosmic astrology. These twelve are the distinctive radiations of divine power that are to be gathered up by the Christ Aeon as it circles the twelve signs of the zodiac, appropriating one from each, and finally unifying them all in himself. They have been humanized and personalized when the allegory was forced into Procrustean "history."

There is another mighty book of historical record that maintains a silence profound and perplexing on what has been universally taken to be history in the Old Testament--the residence of the Hebrews in Egypt for four hundred years and their exodus therefrom. This scroll of history which speaks so eloquently by its very muteness is the mass of records on Egyptian tombs, temples, tablets, monuments and papyri. The astute Egyptians committed the events of their history to these indelible slates. Some claims have been put forth that one or two records seem to mention the name of Jacob-El as a divinity, one on a scarabaeus; and it is believed that Petrie found one reference to the

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name of "Ysirrael." This is too scant for historic evidence of all the chapter of Israel's connection with Egypt, which, had it been of veridical nature, would have been recorded voluminously. The going down of twelve orders (tribes) of angelic spirits into the Egypt of the flesh on earth to win evolutionary guerdon in the bondage of spirit to flesh, is the grand universal myth of the descent of souls to mundane life, and too clearly expressed in allegory to be mistaken for history by any except the most imbecile. A beautiful poetic fantasy is not made historically real by being misbelieved by a million million deluded minds.

Then there are the several "captivities" of the Hebrews in Persia, Babylon and Assyria beside the "bondage in Egypt." In Jeremiah (52:27-30) the total number of Israelites carried into captivity by Nebuchadnezzar is given as four thousand six hundred. This is hardly volume enough to be considered as the captivity of a whole people. There is evidence also that these displaced persons were allowed practically full personal liberty in their new home, as were many such groups of Hebrews that were from time to time settled by various monarchs about the Eastern lands to guard the trade caravans against the perpetual raids by desert brigands. Allan H. Godbey, in his monumental work, The Ten Tribes a Myth, has assembled incontestable evidence to all this, reducing the theological implications of the Biblical record almost to nonsense. We can not omit Massey's splendid summarization of all this pseudo-historical "captivity" and "bondage" suffered by the Israelitish Sons of God:

"It is a captivity that never was historical in a land of bondage which may be called Babylon, Egypt or Sodom; but, as Hosea shows, it was a bondage from which the prisoners were set free 'after two days'"--

that is, in the spiritual resurrection of the soul buried in flesh during the "three days" of its pilgrimage through the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, or various other symbolizations of three, such as the three winter months or the three dark days of the moon, or the three watches of the night preceding the "fourth watch" or dawn, "night," like "winter," embleming the period of incarnation.

Massey traces the Chr (Kr,Cr,Khr) stem of the word Christos back to Egyptian origin and, in spite of the skepticism with which the scholar's philological work is regarded academically, it seems as if he could not be in error on this point. It comes, he says, from the Egyptian Kher, meaning the "Word," "Voice" or the Logos. As the Christians identified the Christ with the Logos or Word, there is sound

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reason to credit this origin as correct. The Greek Ch (our X) and the Greek Rho (R, but resembling our P) together form the cross in the circle, or cross and circle combined. The circle is the infinity of spirit and matter, and the cross is spirit and matter in conjunction. The combined figure, or Chr is thus emblematic of the entire story and meaning of all life in both its expressive and its latent phases. The power that manifests in all creation is in the cosmos the Logos, or Kheru, and in the man it is the Christos. In the cosmos it is the universal voice; and in man it is the fragment, germ or seed of infinite mind that can come to conscious function in the brain-cell mechanism of a mortal body.

According to Philo the Word could not become incarnate in corporeal form and certainly not in one corporeal unit. Massey says that Philo knows no more of a Christ that could be made flesh than he knew of a Jesus in human form; and he was exactly contemporary with Jesus if the latter lived in reality. He is the one writer whose word about Jesus would have carried the weight of authentic testimony had he vouchsafed a single paragraph. But, no; there is not a word. Like Paul, only a little later, he never heard of the man.

Allegory and not history is again obvious in old legends that the cross of Christ represented the four cardinal points, and in Christian tradition was alleged to be composed of four kinds of wood, palm, cedar, olive and cypress, these no doubt being meant to signify respectively north, west, east and south; and these in turn typing the four elements in man's psychic constitution, sense, emotion, thought and spiritual intuition.

Again in the symbol of the Fish for the Christos power there is further evidence of allegory, pointing away from history. When two such stalwart adherents of the new faith as Augustine and Tertullian refer to Christ as the Great Fish, and his followers as the minnows, there is symbolic reference to non-personal Christly attribute, under purely zodiacal (Piscean) emblemism. The sign of Pisces is both the house of bread and of fish, the two foods on which the many are fed in the Gospels, symbolizing the one the food of the earth, the other the food from the sea or water, and thus typifying sense and emotion, in one aspect of its reference. A historical man would have no ground of reality in being called a fish. In allegory the fish symbol (elaborated elsewhere) yields amazingly pertinent relevance and meaning.

Likewise the legends of Christ's birth in a stable, or in a cave, are quite definitely not in relation to history. But they immediately take on

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splendid significance in the myth referring to the body as the stable in which an animal nature is housed for the winter or night of incarnation, or the cave of earth (the first man is of the earth, earthy)--again indicating the body.

Neither Basilides nor Valentinus, philosophical Gnostic Christians, acknowledged any historical personage as the founder of Christianity. Gnostics generally would stand on this same ground as to the purely spiritual essence of Christhood.

A most telling and challenging item comes to light in the name of Bethany, where Jesus raised Lazarus, with two sisters present. Both Massey and later researchers, notably Wendell Harris of England, have adduced the patent fact that Bethany is a compound of the Hebrew beth, "house," and the An, or On (Egyptian Anu, Greek Heliopolis), city where the sun, symbol of the divine Christ in man, went to its death and later resurrection. It is by now recognized that Jesus is Horus, Lazarus is his "dead" Father, Osiris (El-Asar-us), and that Mary and Martha are the Meri and Merti (alternate names for Isis and Nephthys) of the Egyptian cult. Since this story is given only in that one of the four Gospels that is admittedly least historical of all, and by some regarded as entirely non-historical, there is every presumption that the allegorical nature of the Lazarus incident is established, especially since it is clearly derived from documents of ancient Egyptian origin. And an amazing corroboration is added by the fact that Anu is described in old Egypt as "the place of multiplying bread." At Beth-any (the "u" becomes "y" in English always) Jesus multiplied bread--and fish!

And in the Egyptian Book of the Dead the two Meris, Isis and Nepthys, likewise plead with their "dead" brother El-Asar-Us to arise and come forth to comfort them.

Pagan representation of abstract truth exalted the mothers of the sun-Christs to the rank of goddesses. None are human. Christianity fell into the allegory, or fell for the allegory when it took Mary (Maia, Maya, Meri, Moira, Myrrha, Miriam, etc.) to be a human girl. It has vainly tried to correct the error by deifying her.

Higgins records the presence of the Mosaic myths all over the known world at dates of great antiquity, with a reduplication of place names, hero names and dramatic figures.

Even the symbolism connected with the age of twelve years is found elsewhere than in the New Testament. Lundy (op. cit., p. 241) says

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that St. Ignatius calls Daniel the Wise, and says that at the age of twelve he became possessed of the divine spirit.

According to Benjamin Bacon (Jesus and Paul), Marcion, Cerinthus and the Docetic Gnostics had no difficulty with a Christ-emanation assuming temporary embodiment. "What they could not tolerate was a real flesh and blood Leader, a High Priest and King of humanity." Just so. The Pagan world had this sort of Messiah in every Roman Emperor, as Japan had in its Mikado. But then Bacon flies off into inanity when he finds he must not let the statement stand without the invariable slur on Gnostic idealism. For he says that surely the mythical interpretation of the gospel record has little to contribute to the science of religion, since science of any kind must deal with objective historic fact. The larger the basis in concrete reality the better. A science of mythology is possible, he admits; but a record of life in real moral union with the Father is a better basis for the scientific study of religion.

It seems hopeless to expect that Christian theologians can ever be brought to see that the mythological interpretation of those Gospels is the one and only way by which the dynamism of the spiritual truth depicted there by allegory can be transferred from those pages and that alleged personage over to the millions who read it now in vain. To take it as history leaves the Christ-power standing back there in Judea; to take it as allegory of the soul in every man brings the power surging back into the individual reader. This is the final answer.

When Christian people can at last be educated to read the Gospel narrative as the allegory of a divine reality tremendously concrete and objective in themselves, the Christian religion will be born anew.

Another stern challenge lurks in the fact that such capable minds as Marcion, Valentinus, Cerinthus and the Docetic Gnostics refused to accept Jesus as a living man. Why should these educated men deny, or debate and doubt the existence of Jesus if the man actually had lived? Their doubt indicates that no evidence of his existence was known in their day.

Even Spinoza says that it is not necessary to know Christ after the flesh; yet it is quite necessary that we should know that eternal Son of God, the wisdom of God, which has manifested itself in all things, but chiefly in the mind of man and in certain men risen to Christhood. This is the true Christian theology.

Another arresting datum is the surprising fact that, as Massey points out, the early Christians assigned two birthdays, three months apart,

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the one at the winter solstice, the other at the vernal equinox. These can have no other foundation than the two birthdays of the "double Horus" of Egypt, Horus the Elder, dying in the autumn and at his lowest point at the winter solstice, being reborn and resurrected at the vernal equinox as Horus the Younger.

Stellar typology was beautifully woven into the allegory. When the birthplace was in the sign of Taurus, the star that was rising in the East to herald the new birth was the Orion cluster. In this group, in Orion's belt, are the "three kings," representing the three aspects of divinity; and so standing behind the Gospel legend of the journey of the three Magi from the East to welcome the divine Babe. Allegory is everywhere behind and before the history; and allegory should have become "history" in no other way than as clarified conception in human brains.

Massey brings out that the Mohammedans, tracing usage away back to ancient custom, celebrated the birth of the babe in the cave or subterranean sanctuary, from which the Priest issued, saying: "The Virgin has brought forth: the light is about to begin to grow again." Is it not significant that non-Christians can celebrate this "Christian" festival with "Christian" customs, yet not recognize the Jesus birth and history?

The Arabs celebrated the birth of deity in the cave; the Persians marked the birth of the sun, symbol of the deity, in the cave of Mithras at the winter solstice; and the Greeks commemorated the birth of the sun-god in the stable of Augias, which Hercules, performing the twelve labors of the symbolic zodiac, had to cleanse. The stable was, of course, the physical body of man, the source of pollution to the purity of the soul resident in it for a cycle.

Klausner thinks that it is far more difficult to explain how certain Jewish writers, the evangelists, invented such a wonderful character as Jesus than it is to admit that they were describing a man who really did live. But this only testifies to Klausner's unacquaintance with the whole spirit and methodology of ancient sacred writing. They did not have to invent a fictitious character or pick up and exalt a real living entity. For never was there not at hand in esoteric literature and in the Mysteries the universal type-figure of man divinely perfected and radiant in Christly virtue. This mythos personification was never absent from the literature, the ceremonial, the art, the drama, the myths and the general thought of intelligent Pagans. One does not have to invent what is there and omnipresent.

And so it is not necessary, as many Theosophists and Rosicrucians

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postulate, to have recourse even to such problematic prototypal figures as the living Apollonius of Tyana (born about the year 2 A.D.) or the certainly mythical or typal figure of Jehoshua ben Pandira, nebulous Talmudic character, asserted to have lived about 115 years B.C. Ignorant wild belief, ever prone to concretize and historicize spiritual allegory, kept looking for the Messiah-light in human form and picked on now this, now that historical personage as the embodiment. Many Fundamentalist Christians of various sects are still doing the same thing. And this stupid blindness persists in spite of the Scriptural declaration that the Kingdom of Heaven cometh not with observation, lo here, or lo there.

Well does Benjamin Bacon in his Jesus and Paul, speaking of Mark, make the astute observation that, do what he will to emphasize the miraculous powers of Jesus and the marvel of his wisdom and prophetic foresight,

"It is of course impossible for him to make it at the same time the story of a real man under real historical conditions, and also the story of the superhuman being who steps down from the 'Heavenly Places' of the post-resurrection Christology. The combination is, however, attempted even in this earliest-known record of the sayings and doings of Jesus, and it is in this attempt that the influence of Paul, however indirectly, is most clearly seen."

Comment here should accentuate what Bacon so frankly avers, that Mark found it impossible to make a celestial allegory sound realistically like a human biography; because that was in reality what he was attempting. It is what the debased Christianism has all along been trying to do, and by now it should know that its effort has finally failed. The centuries of harlequin efforts to force the typal Jesus Logos-figure down into the frame of a personal life have constituted, all unwittingly, the consummate serio-comic farce of all time.

Most noteworthy again is Bacon's forthright asseveration that Paul, "our earliest witness," gives no evidence of knowing a "Christ after the flesh." Obviously Paul needed to make no soul-searching decision, because he had never heard of the existence or work of such a man. It is unthinkable that he would not have mentioned him if he had known him to be the founder of the esoteric faith he had himself so ardently espoused. And Bacon most truly and startlingly adds:

"Had he done otherwise, Christianity would not have survived his generation."

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A string of exclamation points could not overemphasize this observation. Let the theologians ponder it.

In the Apocryphal books, such as those of which a fragment was found at Oxyrhyncus, entitled the Logoi, or Sayings of Jesus, it is obvious that a man born early in the first century could not have been the author or originator of what is there headed "the Wisdom of Jesus." Phrases common to the Ritual of old Egypt extant thousands of years earlier are found in these preserved remnants. The utterances so long assumed to be those of a speaker in the first century are definitely the lines spoken by the dramatic figures in the age-old Mystery recitals. They were long stock phrases in the speeches of the actors in the great drama.

Another item of allegory converted into assumed history turns up in the narrative of Jesus' trial before Pilate. The crowd to whom Pilate turned to throw the decision off his own conscience yelled to him to crucify Jesus and release Bar Abbas. Klausner very sagaciously and with obvious truth records a discernment of scholarship here that is very important. He scrutinizes the point that the populace demanded not Jesus, "bar Amma" (son of the Mother), but Jesus "bar Abba" (son of the Father). Klausner does not see the deeper apocryphal significance of this, but his Hebrew terminology betrays the cryptic clue to that recondite sense. In the human constitution there are the two conflicting (until they are reconciled and "marry") natures, the man of flesh, born of woman (son of the Mother, mater, matter), and the man of spirit (son of the Father, spirit). In the ritual dramas the mob, the hordes of lower passions in man, were dramatized as shouting their demand to crucify the Christ, as it is said in fourth Galatians, "he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the spirit." This relationship was appropriately dramatized in the scenario. And this is the perfect representation of what the rabble of low sense motivations cry out against the Christ man in us all the time. If anything could more plainly clinch the proof that the trials and crucifixion of the Jesus figure in the Gospels is sheer allegory and drama, and not history, it would be hard to find.

The justly famous and beautiful fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, the so-named Chapter of the Suffering Servant, has perplexed the theological mind no end. No one has been able to decide who is this character suffering for our transgressions and bearing the whole world's sins in his own body. Fidelity to set habitudes and modes of exegesis in Chris-

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tianism require that it be equated with the Nazareth Jesus. But he wasn't alive in Isaiah's time to be the world's scapegoat for sin. Never has it been seen that it is the one universal Christ-spirit or divine principle that in all men takes upon itself the sufferance of sin that such a position and evolutionary function entails, to perform its aeonial work in the divine scheme. What is definite is that it can not be the historical Jesus, even in prophecy.

The myths had been at last converted into ostensible and half-plausible "history" and republished as such, and everything else was suppressed or pressed into the mold of the fraud. Christology was founded on the Christos who is mythical in one phase and mystical in another, and forever real in human consciousness. He was Egyptian and Gnostic in both phases, but historical in neither. The Christ was a title and a type that could not become a person,--but could be personified in a drama. One has but to turn to the second book of Esdras to learn that the Jesus Christ of the Gospels was both pre-historic and pre-Christian, derived from ancient Egypt. As Massey puts it,

"The true Christ, whether mythical or mystical, astronomical or spiritual, never could become a historical personage, and never did originate in any human history."

Those who did know the inner truth, whether Jews, Samaritans, Essenes or Gnostics, entirely repudiated the historical interpretation and refused to become "Christians,"--and were the best of true Christians for it! "They could no more join the ignorant fanatical Salvation Army in the first century than we can in the nineteenth," protests Massey.

The foundations of the whole "Christ biography" were already laid in entire independence of any supposed Founder of Christianity. They were cosmographs of eternal principles of truth, representing the verities of higher consciousness, and were later transferred to earth and translated into a human story which never "happened," but all the same is the pith and marrow of all that does happen.

The famed first international legalist, Grotius of the Netherlands, had evidently seen the non-factual basis of Christian or Biblical "history" so clearly that he goes the length of saying in outright fashion that

"Ecclesiastical history consists of nothing but the wickedness of the governing clergy." (Epistolae, p. 7.)

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Amongst a lengthy list of forgeries may be mentioned that of the document known as the Acts of Paul and Thecla. Tertullian says of this piece that it was forged by a presbyter of Asia, who, when convicted, confessed that he did it out of respect for Paul.

It may be a bit off the side of pertinent discussion, but perhaps not entirely irrelevant to the main theme, to look briefly at the traditions of the wonders of divine prodigy alleged to have appeared in the sky when Constantine was fighting the battle of the Milvian Bridge, the victory in which gave him the imperial throne. The apparition of the cross with the Latin In Hoc Signo Vinces (In this sign thou shalt conquer) has been accepted by the credulous, but denied by the more critically disposed. The Catholic Encyclopedia (VIII-718) says that the labarum, or monogram of Christ had been a familiar symbol prior to Constantine's conversion. Eusebius says nothing of the cross incident, though he writes fulsomely of the providential intervention in the Emperor's favor in battles.

Militating against the historical view of the Gospel Jesus is that most strange duality of opinion which prevailed amongst the earliest Christian writers as to the personal form and appearance of the man of Galilee. Of a living person it is next to impossible that there should be two almost diametrically opposed views as to such items as form, figure and personal comeliness. Yet there are two distinct and contrary opinions on this score, the one holding that the Savior of mankind was of radiant beauty in form and feature; the other that he was ugly, deformed and repellent in aspect. An analysis of this confusion given in our work, Who Is This King of Glory? can not be repeated here. But that the divergent opinions had their natural origin in the two characterizations of the Egyptian Horus the Elder, old, wizened and disfigured, and Horus the Younger, shining with the beauteous glow of youth, is obvious. Yet the fact is a circumstance of the utmost singularity in Christian annals. There were of course no portraits of Jesus or his mother, as Augustine testifies. Each artist, he says, represented the Lord's face according to his own ideal conception.

Lundy's fine study of Monumental Christianity has found that there was no trace in art or literature of the infamous "Slaughter of the Innocents" by Herod's soldiery until about the close of the fourth century, by which time Christian imagination had begun that licentious sweep of its power to reconstruct in concreteness a history that had existed nowhere else save in overwrought minds.

There is scarcely space to elucidate capably the next point; but it

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is of far greater moment than will be appreciated by the readers of the brief reference here made to it. It has to do with the symbolic meaning of the terms "mount," "desert" and "wilderness" in the arcane Scriptures. Not alone Jesus of the Gospels but heroes of the Old Testament retire again and again into the "mount" and the "desert" or "wilderness," for purposes of retreat, refreshment, rest or renewal. In turning cosmic mythopoeia into actual earthly history these mounts and deserts, like the rivers, seas and lakes, must be localized on the map. But it has been given as yet to few to see how completely the alleged veridical history of the Scriptures is shot into inane gibberish the moment it is realized, as in the end it must be, that the "mount" is a hieroglyph in the archaic language of ideograms, which means just this earth itself; that mount in the midst of space on which all spiritual transaction for a soul in evolution takes place. "Desert" and "wilderness" are variant types of the same mundane locality. The earth is itself that "high mount" on which the temptation, the transfiguration and the crucifixion of divine soul in mortal body alike take place. It is where the ark lands after the flood of dissolution washes away all forms to begin a new cycle. And it is the secret mount on which man in his Mosaic state of development climbs aloft to commune with Deity in his tabernacle of flesh. The devastation which the rediscovered connotation of this single word works in fundamentalist conception and theology is complete and bewildering.

This is seen in all its glaring luridness when it is found used by the ancient Egyptians in connection with that other recent disclosure of buried esoteric meaning in the words "death," "the dead" and "to die." All Scriptural meaning is turned quite "downside up" by the reconstruction of theology with the aid of the clues these words furnish. It is now revealed that ancient mythicism considered and named those souls incarnated in earth life "the dead." "To die" was to incarnate; "death" was the depressed, deadened condition of conscious being while soul inhabited the "tomb" of the flesh. As the "mount" was the earth, there emerges in tremendous vividness the hidden meaning of such a phrase as is found in the Egyptian books: "The dead are those who are on the mount."

Charles B. Waite, in his History of the Christian Religion to the Year 200, asserts that Luke's Gospel had its origin in an earlier Gospel of Paul; Mark's in an earlier Gospel, or Recollections of Peter; and Matthew's in the Oracles, or Sayings of Christ, as Massey claims throughout. But, says Waite, in none of these prototypal sources is

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there found anything like the miraculous conception or the material resurrection of Christ; or accounts of the miracles; or references to any book containing such accounts or teachings of either of these doctrines. Nor do the Apostolic Fathers, Clement of Rome, Ignatius and Polycarp, make any mention of the miracles of Jesus or of the resurrection. These chief of Christianity's second-century spokesmen make no reference to either of the four Gospels nor to the Acts of the Apostles, nor are there any quotations from this literature except such as evangelical writers concede may have been taken from other sources. As Irenaeus says, there was a multitude of Gospels extant in his day.

Waite also says that it can not be denied that the evidence of the existence of the canonical Gospels was unknown to Justin Martyr, and that this lacuna in early Christian literature is well-nigh conclusive as to the non-historicity of the Gospel material. Justin's sketchy references and quotations are obviously from other sources; which again reveals that there were other sources out of which material in the four canonical writings could be taken. What those other sources were is the great unsolved problem which Christian scholarship has never faced or even recognized, and it is the one central point of issue on which the solution of the entire muddled problem of Gospel origination ultimately rests.

As so much of Christian evidence for the historicity of evangelical tradition has been made to rest on the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius, who with Constantine convened the epoch-making Council of Nicaea, it is worth noting what Waite has to say as to the reliability of this writer's work:

"No one has contributed more to Christian history, and no one is guilty of more mistakes.

"The statements of this historian are made, not only carelessly and blunderingly, but in many instances in falsification of the facts of history. Not only the most unblushing falsehoods, but literary forgeries of the vilest character darken the pages of his apologetic and historical writing."

Another writer cited by Waite asserts:

"Eusebius had a peculiar faculty for diverging from the truth. He was ready to supply by fabrication what was wanting in historical data."

Many scholars have concurred in these opinions. It is well known on what foundations of falsehood and forgery this great world religion actually rests.

A score or more of passages could be assembled out of Paul's

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Epistles, such as several in which he says that we are waiting for the appearance of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, which become ridiculously incoherent if they refer to the earthly bodily coming of one who, according to all Christian claim, had just been there! One does not look for the coming of a person who has just been there, finished his mission and departed.

But we face now a sheaf of testimony from one of the very earliest of the Christian Fathers, which, whether the argument be pro or con, constitutes a severe shock to all Christian claims as to the historicity of the Gospels and the Jesus figure in them. The eminent Church Patriarch who gives us this datum is Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, Gaul (France). This fierce champion and Papias appear to be the only second-century Christians who refer to the four canonical Gospels at all. What they have to say is therefore of great importance and decidedly argues for the non-historicity of the Christian foundation.

Beginning with chapter ten of Book III of his work, Irenaeus' text bristles with names and direct quotations from all four Gospels. Before this part of his work he had mentioned only two of the Gospels, Luke and John. It seems a fair inference from this that these other Gospels had come to his knowledge between his writing the latter part of his Book II and the beginning of his Book III. This might carry the inference that these others had either just then come into existence, or had just come to his knowledge about that time. Certainly it is plausible to suppose that the whole four Gospels could not have been in existence and in circulation very long before they would have come to the eager hand of the active and prolific Irenaeus, who had only recently come from the tutelage of his aged friend Polycarp in Smyrna, "the disciple of the Apostle John." Polycarp had sent Irenaeus to Lyons. He likewise gives no evidence of acquaintance with the Gospels.

The astonishing fact, then, is that in recording his first reaction to the new Gospels of Christianity, Irenaeus launches into an immediate and fierce attack upon their historicity, charging them with error and "heresy" in the vital points of the crucifixion and early death of Jesus! He directly refutes the "heresy" that Jesus died and was crucified so early in life as his thirty-third year.

"It is not true," he asserts, "that Jesus Christ died as early in life and after so brief a career." "How is it possible," he demands, "that the Lord preached for one year only?"

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He bases his authority on the oral testimony of John the disciple himself, along with the "true Gospel" and "all the elders." This latter source is notable, since Irenaeus asserts that what he then reports came to him from "the elders," some of whom in their early childhood had themselves heard the truth direct from the lips of the beloved disciple! Irenaeus proceeds with the story:

"For he came to save all through means of Himself, all, I say, who through him are born again to God--infants and children and boys and youths and old men. He therefore passed through every age becoming an infant for infants; a child for children; thus sanctifying them for the Lord. So likewise he was an old man for old men, that he might be a perfect Master for all, not merely as respects the setting forth of the truth, but also as regards age, sanctifying at the same time the aged also, and becoming example to them likewise. Then at last he came to death itself, that he might be 'the first-born from the dead'"

"They, however, that they may establish their false opinion regarding that which is written, 'to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,' maintain that he preached for one year only and then suffered in the twelfth month. [In speaking thus] they are forgetful to their own disadvantage, destroying His work and robbing Him of that age which is both more necessary and more honorable than any other; that more advanced age, I mean, during which also as a teacher He excelled all others."

"Now that the first stage of early life embraces thirty years and that this extends onward to the fortieth year, every one will admit; but from the fortieth and fiftieth year a man begins to decline towards old age, which our Lord possessed while He still fulfilled the office of a Teacher, even as the Gospel and all the elders testify, those who were conversant in Asia with John, the disciple of the Lord, [affirming] that John conveyed to them that information. And He remained among them up to the times of Trajan [reigned A.D. 98-117]. Some of them, moreover, saw not only John, but other Apostles also, and heard the very same account from them, and bear testimony as to the statement. Whom, then, should we rather believe?" (Iren. Adv. Haer, Bk. II, Ch. xxii, secs. 3, 4, 5; Ante-Nicene Fathers I, 391-2.)

Yea, verily, whom shall we believe? Irenaeus or the Gospels? Irenaeus speaks from the background of possibly creditable history; the Gospels speak from the uncertain ground of mutilated myth, allegory and drama. Irenaeus' word is pertinent to the historically known data available at his time; the Gospels pertain not to objective history but to spiritual edification gone awry, relative to no time, but to all time.

The citation of this passage at length is momentous for the reason that it has at times been adduced as one of the most robust of all extra-

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Gospel or secular evidences of the historicity of Jesus and the disciples. That it lends some strength to the thesis of the existence of a cult and a cult founder (who may well have been Apollonius of Tyana, for which seemingly arrant supposition there is some plausible evidence) in those days is perhaps cautiously to be admitted. But that it adds strength to the case for the historicity of Jesus and the authenticity of the Gospel narratives, is a rash and rank presumption. On the exact contrary it practically smashes that entire construction to bits! On the assumption that Irenaeus' tradition direct from the elders who had in childhood contacted John is true, there is an end to the whole fabrication of the Gospel story, roof, walls and foundation. For at one stroke the crucifixion, death, resurrection and ascension of the Lord are turned into a hoax! "If Christ be not risen, then is our faith vain." shouts the Apostle Paul. And if Irenaeus' story is true, there was no resurrection, because no death at age thirty-three; and Christianity is reduced to the emptiest of myths! The story, coming from one of the outstanding Fathers of the early Church, even more positively negates the historicity of the Gospels than does the thunderous silence of St. Paul. And if Jesus actually lived to an advanced age, as Irenaeus positively asserts, the fact makes the complete silence of all secular history on all of his life except a little span of three years (or one, as Irenaeus strangely claims!) all the more inexplicable. Even Irenaeus' claim that Jesus lived to great age carries with it no ring of history, for it reads like anything but factual reality. He says that he lived to age because then he could minister to people of every age. This is the argument used so much in religion, that a thing was so because it would so nicely fit into a preconceived hypothesis. Again if Jesus lived to the time of Trajan (his birth now being placed as far back as the years 12 B.C.), that would have made him to live to age one hundred and ten at the very least! This discloses in what a dilemma the Church now finds itself: it must, to save its tradition, discredit the veracity of Irenaeus, one of its rocks of reliance, Eusebius being already heavily discounted. Thus its historical foundations are collapsing at every turn.

In rounding out this collation of evidence indicating the non-historicity of the Christian bases, it is deemed worth the time to present in the briefest possible form a series of determinations recorded by a Christian proponent of the existence of Jesus, Joseph Warschauer, writing in a work, The Historical Life of Christ. His views are fairly representative and so it can not be charged that he is presenting a warped personal opinion. His conclusions are adduced here in sup-

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port of the assertion on our part that Christian scholars are more and more discrediting the Gospels as sheer historical fact.

The reader of his book and many much like it can not fail to note a constant run of expressions which prove that New Testament exegesis rests almost entirely on surmise, guess, conjecture and supposition. We list some of these as succinctly as possible:

"Indeed the whole romantic story of the circumstances attending the Baptist's death is open to the gravest doubts, being, among other circumstances, palpably modeled on well-known Old Testament stories of kings and queens."

Concerning the baptism in the Jordan he says:

"Now, quite apart from any question of the miraculous--the Spirit appearing in bodily form, an actual voice from heaven uttering human speech--the account given by Matthew and Luke carries its own refutation. For it is inconceivable that Jesus could ever have met with unbelief and opposition if his Messianic kingdom had been thus visibly and audibly attested at the very start of his career before a large concourse of people who would ever have borne witness to what they had seen and heard."

He thinks the voice was an inner psychic experience of Jesus, not an objective fact.

He discredits the truth of the instances of Jesus' casting out devils from demoniacs. "Some sacrifice of historical accuracy is obvious." "That in the present instance . . . we are not holding to history at all, should need no detailed demonstration." The temptation is modeled over Old Testament prototypes. (This is his conclusion in a score of items.) "Any answer that might be attempted will be open to the charge of being purely conjectural." In one place he speaks of a "remarkable feat of textual manipulation." Luke, he says, gives the birth story on the model of Old Testament births of heroes and Christly figures.

"The hymn ascribed to Zacharias is in form a Messianic psalm . . . but the remainder of the story is an example of that haggada or fanciful religious narrative in which late Judaism delighted."

He believed that it is unlikely that Jesus' parents would have proceeded three days on their homeward journey from the Passover visit to Jerusalem before they missed their young son of twelve years, who had stayed in the temple to argue with the doctors of divinity.

He comments on the great unnaturalness of the supposition that one who was a simple obscure artisan one week should the next week

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realize himself to be the personalized "expectation of all nations," the cosmic Christ-Aeon, dazzling and glorious beyond all human conception. This observation is commended to all who can think.

Jesus' calling of the twelve "bears the stamp of legend and not of history." "There is no reason to assume that, if it belongs to history, it happened at this juncture,"--in re the cleansing of the paralytic let down through a hole in the ceiling. He attributes some of the cures of Jesus to what modern psychology calls "suggestion," or powerful emotion,--not miracles at all. Unless uttered in irony, he says, Jesus' calling not the righteous but sinners to repentance "is not likely." "The credibility of this cure need not detain us." "Mark tells us with what one may judge a type of exaggeration." "If they are authentic utterances of the Lord's." "We may hazard the guess . . ." "We are here moving reverently and hesitatingly in the region of surmise." "Mark, with whom geography is not a strong point." "Mark's statement is open to serious doubt." ". . . may possibly be attributable . . ." "Mark, though he is mistaken as to the name of the locality . . ."

And regarding the raising of Lazarus, he quotes from E. F. Scott that it is inconceivable that a miracle of such magnitude, performed in the one week in our Lord's life of which we have a full record, and in the presence of crowds of people in a suburb of Jerusalem, and a miracle which was the immediate cause of the crucifixion, should have been simply passed over by the other evangelists without mention. "We are almost compelled to the conclusion that the narrative is in the main symbolical." To which we add that Egyptian study now conclusively proves that it is just that, the names Lazarus, Bethany, Mary and Martha all being Egyptian. He quotes Prof. Burkett that for all its dramatic setting it is impossible to regard the Lazarus story as a narrative of historical events.

"These verses read like a later elaboration." But Warschauer steps for a moment into the focus of true perspective when he pauses to enumerate that not in the conquest of the outer elements or the elements of the human frame, but in the conquest of human hearts, in the power to revive dead souls and to lead them up to a perception of God's glory--there we behold the true essence of all miracle, which is ageless and ever enacted afresh. When all Christendom can let go the chimerical objective "historicity" of its Gospels and fasten solely upon their subjective historicity, all will be better for mankind.

"Seem to us of doubtful authenticity." "Perhaps not a historical feature." "The true order of events can only be conjecturally established

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under the sole guidance of probability." "Matthew made a most happy conjecture of his own." ". . . evidence against his supposed birth in Bethlehem." The statement that Jesus laid his hands on a few sick folk and healed them "has the air of an interpolation." He doubts the authenticity of the "Whom do men say that I am?" utterance. "Mark, with a certain pettiness guesses, because the disciples needed a holiday after their recent exertions." An item "which Mark certainly places altogether out of its natural surroundings." "The truly desperate task of reconciling the Synoptic with the Johannine tradition." This remark has our full approbation and Warschauer our sympathy. "Clearly such an arrangement is too artificial." "The four short treatises known as Gospels are so far from being biographies that they have been not altogether unjustly described as 'records of the Passion extended backwards.'" In discharging so difficult a task as wrestling with the "life" of Jesus, the historian "will often have to content himself with something far short of certainty; weighing probability against rival probabilities, surmise against counter-surmise . . . arriving often at no more than provisional conclusions."

Space forbids giving Warschauer's sensible remarks on the unreliability of the several genealogies of Jesus. He rightly asserts that if the evangelist wished to prove Jesus' divine ancestry, they would have given us Mary's, not Joseph's, lineage! For "David's line" was broken right at the Messiah's immediate fatherhood, Joseph, David's descendant, being pushed aside so that the Holy Ghost might give the child divine fatherhood. And the genealogies--which Paul warns the believers to shun--differ widely from one another.

Easton is quoted as saying that Mark and the parables are allegorical. The location of the "mount" on which the "Sermon" was preached is put down as a senseless theme of endless and fruitless debate. Indeed Easton says that as an actual discourse the Sermon on the Mount was never delivered at all, and the "Mount" is a mere rhetorical or theological decoration. (We have earlier shown that is a symbolic term for the earth.) It is in Matthew, he claims, only a Christian counterpart of Sinai. (Our thesis again finds corroboration.) Easton (Christ in the Gospels) declares the miracles are a non liquet. He enumerates one item after another as not historical, but poetic legend. Warschauer asks what is to be made of the existence before Christian times of the document known as Jesus, Son of Sirach. Easton asserts that both Jewish and Christian literature from B.C. 250 to A.D. 250 simply teemed with pseudepigraphs of all sorts. And he asks if we are to class the

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writings of Daniel, Enoch and II Peter pointblank as dishonest fabrications.

The answer, now to be given in full confidence of its correctness, is that such tomes were compiled from the floating residue of ancient written wisdom and were not considered dishonest because they were never (until ignorant Christianity took hold) considered to be objective, but only subjective, history, or allegories of history. They can be charged with dishonesty only from the standpoint of claiming to be what they never were claimed to be. We can conclude this long and perhaps boresome, but nevertheless instructive chapter with Easton's statement that "whatever was John's purpose, it was assuredly not to write history, as we understand history."

Let it be remembered, however, that this is by no means the "case" for the non-historicity of the Scriptures and the bases of Christianity. It is but a minor fragment of that "case." That, in any reasonable measure of fulness and completeness, has never been presented. It is beyond the scope of this undertaking.

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CHAPTER XVIII

HIGHER CRITICISM

A portion of the mental devastation wrought by the acceptance of the fallacious foundations of Christianity is brought under observation when investigation is undertaken in the field of Biblical textual research. It is believed that strength will accrue to the conclusions of our study if a section is devoted to the presentation of a brief critique in this forbidden domain. To do anything comprehensive or conclusive upon this topic in one chapter is of course out of the question. The aim in touching upon it at all will be to present some items collated in our reading that will at least approach the matter from a somewhat new angle, or rather will base a new critique upon grounds of fact and data that will introduce entirely new principia of judgment into this badly muddled province. These new elements of criticism will prove vastly revolutionary in the main, since they rest upon a series of deductions from historical data that have been almost completely slighted in scholastic study hitherto. If these new principles of Bible criticism are generally valid, they will, in a word, be found powerful enough to overthrow all previous deductions and render to a very large degree obsolete all the previous work of Bible critics. For the new view proceeds from the standpoint from which the lay and scene of the whole field to be investigated is utterly transformed by the magic influence of a staggering new understanding of the origin of all Scriptural material. In short, the foundations on which the material itself under observation is to be based are in the new view removed out of the world of time and significance dimension in which they have been adjudged to exercise their function of meaning, and elevated to a wholly different realm of relevance.

It must already have occurred to the alert reader that if the Bible literature is--or was originally--wholly allegorical and dramatic symbology, a body of poetic representation of mystical realizations, the quantum of critical work done in the past on the basis of the assumed

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historicity of Old and New Testament writings must have completely missed the mark of true reference and true explication. In brief, on the premises laid down by the evidences that confirm the allegorical and non-historical character of the Bibles, all the work of criticism of the past is at one stroke reduced to the sheerest mental moonshine. It will be the purpose of this brief chapter to present in the field of textual critique some points which will contribute their meed of testimony to the validity of the allegorical bases of all study of the Bible.

The first ponderous consideration in the purview is the datum now well established that the material content of archaic books of wisdom is chiefly allegorical, with variations in the form of myth, drama, number graph and pictorial astrograph. More and more, as the previous chapter demonstrated, Christian students are segregating large portions of hitherto assumed historical occurrence in the Bible out of the category of history and placing it off on the side of poetry, legend and tradition. Well, then, if material once believed to be history is no longer taken as such, a critique based on its relevance as objective fact becomes at once so much empty froth and the hollowest mockery of determinative sense. It turns out to be entire illusion; and the vast volume of such critique becomes as futile as one's voice carried away by the wind over lonely places. It is seen to have been a mighty huffing and puffing to blow upon a house that never existed. It is part of the most asinine blunder of all time.

When the gaze that saw the Scriptures as history becomes readjusted to the discernment of the same material as sublime allegory of the essential and eternal verities, then and then only does the enormity of the misjudgment loom before the mind in all its incredible proportions. It would take a volume to reorient the meaning from the connotation into which it has been contorted as history over to what it truly signified in the non-historical approach. (This has been done already as exhaustively as could be done in six hundred pages in our work, The Lost Light.) The Scriptures must be completely turned inside out. For only the outside or surface has been looked at, all the while the true intent and the vital message have been hidden inside. The meaning of every item must be lifted out of its supposed historical milieu and reference and reallocated all afresh in the world of consciousness. The significance, in fine, must be moved up from the locale of earth to the domain of mind, from the objective to the subjective world. For all Scriptural "events" are fictitious portrayals of true events in man's inner world, of which outer events are but the shadows. The

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outer is the garment of the inner. Before this adamant truth all future Bible interpretation must bend as inexorably as life bends to evolution or a reed to the wind, or water to gravity. That it has been unrecognized for many ages bespeaks the inner crassness of all Christian mentality.

The first step in this metamorphosis of Scripture must be taken along the path of the completely honest and newly intelligent reinterpretation of the Bible in full correlation with an enlightened study of comparative religion, not to omit comparative mythology, folk-lore, poetry, philology, including all symbology, allegory and drama. Humiliating as it may well be to vaunting Christian pride, the stern necessity of the case demands that Christian scholarship now go back to the Paganism it scorned and reviled without stint to pick up the lost keys which alone will open its way to the mutilated inner sense of arcane writings of old. The effort for long centuries has been to interpret books written in a form and language utterly inconsonant with our modern literature on the same plan and method as if they were modern products. This has made indigestible hash of the Bibles. Now must be adopted those methods of exposition which will render the sense at once more piquant, more succulent and completely nourishing to the mind. The method simply involves, first and foremost, the treatment of the material as allegory, not as history; or to read it as the paralogue of man's subjective history, having ended forever the gross blunder of mistaking it for particular occurrence. Says Nils W. Lund in a work shortly to be referred to in a very important connection, Chiasmus in the New Testament, "the study of folk-lore is especially valuable, for it offers a similar line of development as that of the Gospel tradition."

From the study of comparative systems of arcane thought must and will arise the reconstruction of philosophy, which, dismembered into fragments tossed out of all relation to each other and the whole structure, must now be reintegrated into its primal "unity of apperception," Kant's noble phrase fitting the concept here with great nicety. As Albert Pike shows in his Morals and Dogma, the mystic shows and performances were not the mere reading of a lecture but the deployment of a problem. Requiring research they were calculated to arouse the dormant intellect. They implied no hostility to philosophy, because philosophy is the final solvent of symbolism. Then Pike adds the most revealing truth, that the ancient interpretation of symbolism was often ill-founded and incorrect, as it has been ever since.

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The alteration from symbol to dogma is fatal to both beauty and sense, and if incompetently made, leads to error, intolerance and assumed infallibility, says Pike. This is true, but must be taken carefully. Symbol indeed must be transposed over into dogma, if by dogma we mean precise recognitions of truth that can be explicitly set forth under faithful representation. The transferal must be made in a way that enhances, not vitiates, both the beauty and the sense. Pike's assertion that error and its sad consequences flow from the incompetent manner of the transposition from myth to truth adumbrated by it, is quite correct. This ineptitude led to the fatal misstep that opened the door to the quick and easy descent of the human mind to the dark Avernus of mental fog in which it has groped in wretched blindness for so long and out of which it is now to emerge at last.

Nothing is truer than that philosophy is the expounder of symbolism, while symbolism is at the same time the pointer to philosophy. It is that domain of mental activity in which symbolism heads up in final meaning. A symbol is the outer road sign pointing to where the soul will find entertainment and refreshment in the city of final understanding. Philosophies devised symbols as indices lying outside in the world of sense by which the traveling and bewildered mind might be helped to find its way to something analogous or homologous to it in the inner world where values finally must be found. Therefore symbols are semantic of verities and realities lying deep in the conceptual area of consciousness, that is, in philosophy. Like sacraments, they are outer visible signs of inner invisible realities, that to a cultivated inner eye are as realistically sensible as an object of physical sight.

Matthew Arnold declared that culture disintegrates for want of a consistent world view. Hocking of Harvard, we have already seen, makes a total grasp of world meaning basic for sound mentality. Stanley Romaine Hopper states that, to be stable, a mind must be thrust back upon philosophy, where it may acquire a foothold on the real and so renew creative satisfactions. For man is ennobled finally only by reflection and the love of wisdom. From waywardness and wandering man may return to his home of blessed assurances only by the path of wisdom. How infinitely essential it is, then, that for that comprehensive understanding of the Scriptures which will feed the deepest hunger of the God-mind fragment in man, the mind must truly know how these Scriptures form an integrated structure of meaning that is veritably the bread of life to starving souls. And this rests finally upon the correct, not the muddled and erratic, reinterpretation of symbolism

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and allegory into the luminous and intelligible presentments of truth.

Hopper well says that we are obliged to renew the meaning of life and absorb its import. This, we maintain, is what the arcane myths were expressly devised by consummate genius to help us do. He likewise says that the individual soul is the true analogue of destiny. In it resides our failure and our hope for new achievement in the world. It is of tremendous import, then, that the Scriptures be rescued from an irrelevant reference to old characters who never lived as people, since they are clearly typal figures, and realigned with its vital pertinence to man's own soul. The Christian error that took the meaning of Scripture away from man's immediate individual (and collective) experience and isolated it upon one or a few fabled personages in "history," is responsible for the failure and the lack of hope in the world today. Well does this author of The Crisis of Faith say again that our world today exhibits everywhere a reduction from truth to absurdity, to the preposterous, the ironic, the cynical, or to the terrible pathos of the present conflict which seeks resolution in vain. The crisis of our times is of the intellect, the intelligence. It is a crisis of perversion arrived at through the malevolent despotism of a set of pseudo-categories which have tyrannized over and badly determined our choices. Their compelling power has been unbreakable because it has been concealed in the hidden premises of our period's assumptions and standards, which we have inherited from stultified tradition and accepted without adequate criticism. It can be added to this very sound observation that those accepted assumptions are the age-old sediment of conceptions that took form when early Christianity debased beautiful allegory into absurd "history." We are now still enthralled by the insuperable power of inherited and transmitted fallacies, from which the tyrannous power of ingrained "sacredness" of tradition prevents our liberating ourselves.

In this connection it is pertinent to say that the fixed canons of Scriptural exegesis laid down by Jerome, according to Archibald Duff (History of Old Testament Criticism, p. 78), established a theological tyranny for one thousand years.

Conybeare in his The History of New Testament Criticism, very well paraphrases Origen's position on the myths and allegories: with the utmost study and pains we must strive to enable every single reader with all reverence to understand that in dealing with the contents of the sacred books he handles words which are divine and not human. Yet Conybeare is found wrestling with the same question that perplexed Johannes Weiss and many another Christian exegetist, how

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the early Christians could have heard of the Pagan gods, whom scholars claim were the ante-types (but whom Massey says were then taken for anti-types) of the Christ figure in the Gospels. Conybeare writhes in a torment of mental irritation at the charge made by so many scholars that the Christ-story in the Gospels was a rescript of many antecedent allegorical biographies of Pagan cult-gods, such as Cybele, Attis, Isis, Osiris, Horus, Helena, Dendrites, Krishna, Janus, Apollonius, Aesculapius, Heracles and Oceanus, Saoshyant, Mithra and Buddha. Referring to these mythical deities and their legendary "lives," he says:

"Prick them with a pin and out gushes their lore in a copious flood; and every item is supposed to have filled the heads of the polymath authors of the Christian Gospels. Every syllable of these Gospels, every character in them, is symbolic of one or another of these gods and heroes, Hear, O Israel: 'The Christians borrowed myths of all lands from Paganism.'"

This is sardonically ironical, but it chances to be the truth! This critic of New Testament criticism then gives vent to an outgush of exasperation over the claims of such scholars as Robertson, Smith and Drews that the Christ figure in the Gospels was just the perpetuated copy of a cult-god under one or another name, but particularly that of Joshua (the Hebrew equivalent of Jesus) that was worshipped in the regions surrounding Judea or in Judea itself.

For the sake of grappling resolutely with the serpent of Christian hostility to the obvious and crucial involvements of the study of comparative religion, it is desirable to subject this scholar's position to more detailed scrutiny. It is necessary to meet and refute this stubborn recalcitrancy of Christian scholars to the truth that confronts them in volume, but which they have dodged and parried by the most arrogant methods of intellectual subterfuge and insincerity imaginable, or honestly missed by an obtuseness which is next to incredible.

He follows the passage above cited by saying we must suppose, on the Joshua cult-god theory, that the Gospels were a covert tribute to the high standing and worthy character of Pagan mythology and religious dramas, Pagan art and statuary. Again we may pause to interject that a statement made to ridicule Pagan religion, does in fact pay it high and deserved praise. If, he continues, we adopt the mythico-symbolic method of analysis, these Gospels can have been nothing else than Pagan productions. (Again he is unwittingly right.) Then he challenges this view's sponsors to explain the alchemy of mind by

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which the ascertained rites and beliefs of early Christians were distilled from these antecedents. The effect and the cause are so utterly disparate, he asserts, so devoid of any organic connection, that one would like to see more clearly how this relation worked out. At one end of it we have a hurly-burly of Pagan myths; at the other an army of Christian apologists inveighing against everything Pagan and martyred for doing so. Then he says with sarcasm that he only hopes that the orthodox will be delighted to learn that their Scriptures are a thousand-fold more wonderful and unique than they appeared to be when they were merely inspired by the Holy Spirit. This latter, forsooth, is not half so wonderful as Pagan mythic symbolism. We have discovered a new literary genius, unexampled in the history of mankind. You rake together a thousand irrelevant thrums of mythology, picked at random from every age, race and clime; you get a "Christist" to throw them into a hopper and turn a crank, and out come the Gospels. In all the annals of the Bacon-Shakespeare debate we have seen nothing like it, he concludes.

Conybeare feels that this ironical vehemence of his disposes with finality of the entire movement to establish the mythico-symbolical character of the Gospels, as preposterous tommyrot and fol-de-rol. It must be calmly asserted in rebuttal, however, that his position is the one that has to be described as fatuous and insupportable to the last degree of stupidity. That a critical Christian scholar of eminence can refer to the mythical foundations of ancient literature as some weird and bizarre concoction of deluded children or barbarians, not to be seriously considered in relation to the genesis of later religions, exhibits most glaringly the bleak nescience and barrenness of modern academic or Christian genius. When the eye of a scholar can scan the field of ancient religious literature and then come away from the view with the opinion that the one element, that he must see is ubiquitous and voluminous in that domain of research, can be given no place of influence in the formation of a new creed that arose in the very milieu of that element, there is ample reason to suspect that such a vision is myopic if not totally blind. In this field of research one finds almost nothing resembling history of the objective sort; but instead endless myth and allegory. Yet Conybeare asserts that it is fatuous to take ancient religious literature as mythical material, but wholly sound to take it as history. It is the canon of scholarship to base determinations on evidence. Yet it is the "mythicists" who have based their opinions solidly upon massive heaps of evidence, and it is Conybeare who

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has paid so little heed to this evidence that he stands convicted of narrow bigotry. He is so little conversant with the mountainous data of comparative religion that he damns it all with a sneering phrase, "a thousand irrelevant thrums of mythology." Answer to this is that the thousands of mythic representations, obvious fictions as they are, constitute an organic body of such significant import that to them man must look still for his supreme enlightenment. Scholars like Conybeare have never mustered the mental insight to penetrate their outer disguise of fiction and reveal their inner core of meaning, and they continue therefore to classify it as primitive rubbish. Irrelevant thrums they most assuredly are not, but the sublimest formulations ever devised by near-divine wisdom. This critic thinks that a collection of them "picked at random from every age, race and clime" constitutes a rubbish heap of superstitious junk. Sir James Frazer's collection of them in The Golden Bough has been an epochal event in the history of religion. Can it mean nothing in contravention of Conybeare's argument that a thousand scraps of mythology, picked either at random or with design from every land and time, when brought together and compared in the mental atmosphere free from scornful Christian prejudice, yield an absolutely convincing evidence of their being integral parts of a stupendous system of the profoundest and most consistent organic philosophy extant in human thought? This critic has never trodden the path of long and patient search, and with a free mind, in the field of comparative mythology. No scholar with mind set to look fairly at what he finds can graze long in this interesting and fruitful pasture without at length being overwhelmed with the evidences of either the virtual identity or the organic unity, or both, of the material found in the most diverse quarters. Christian minds alone resist the force of this evidence and remain impervious to its revelations. Conybeare is sure that Robertson, Smith and Drews, not to mention Renan, Strauss, Massey, Higgins, Brandes and Mead, are fanciful enthusiasts hallucinated by some speciously alluring theory. It is quite beyond him to realize that these men, like the present writer, have come to conclusive opinions relative to the mythical nature of the Scriptures only when their minds have had to succumb to the force of the massive evidence. He does not meet and refute their position with contrary or more weighty evidence, but in exasperation simply calls them addle-pated.

But scholarship does not decide crucial points by vehement protestation; it decides on the evidence. The final word, then, is that when

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scholars will once look at the massed data through the new lens of a clearer resolution of symbolic and mythic signification that is now available, they will find Conybeare's irritation and his sarcasm baseless and his error costly. Massey alone lists some one hundred and eighty points of identity between the long antecedent and entirely mythical Horus of Egypt and the Gospel Jesus. Frazer, Newberry and others draw practically endless parallels between Attis, or Tammuz, or Bacchus (Dionysus), Mithra, Sabazius, Zagreus, Apollo, Hercules, Krishna, Witoba and other Pagan Sun-god deities and the Gospel Jesus. To Conybeare this weight and volume of evidence is so much moonshine of deluded theorists. But by now the trickle of evidence through the tiny hole in the dyke of Christian mental obduracy has widened to torrential volume and the dyke is fast crumbling to ruin. The day of sneering at the mythical character of the Gospels is at its sunset at last.

It is a point of great weight surely which William A. Heidel puts before us in his monumental study of ancient festivals. The Day of Yahweh (p. 95f.), when he says that Bible commentators have so often pointed out the existence in the text of "recurrent motives," such as the passing over of a body of water, an outward and a return journey, and others. He then says that the first impulse of thought is to regard it as a childish resort on the part of the Bible narrator, "because it has all the appearance of a trifling play on words; but so to regard it were a grave mistake." To do so would not only be to miss valuable hints, he says, but also to treat with scant respect what to the Hebrews was certainly sacred. Still more significant is the datum that in the religious rite or sacred drama these repetitions likewise occur. Scholars have tried to explain this by asserting that the rite was based on the Scriptural narration. "But this natural assumption is clearly wrong, the rite here also antedating the sacred story."

This is indeed a point of great weight and it bespeaks something other than history. When the same, or similar, or analogous incidents occur to one hero after another, as for instance the number of women, Sarah, Hannah, Elizabeth and some others all giving birth to their divine sons in old age, one can not avoid the conviction that these are not historical "coincidences." So strong and compelling is this feature, repeated in scores of items, that if people were free from religious fixations, hardly a person could read the Old Testament and maintain the belief that he is conning veridical historical event. The feeling of

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dealing with something quite unearthly, quite eerie as history would be overwhelming if natural reaction had its free play. Who can really believe that the waters of the geographical Red Sea parted to let the Israelites cross dryshod, and then rushed in to drown the Egyptians? Who can honestly believe that angels sang to shepherds, that a rod turned into a serpent, or that a star left its orbit to stand over a stable? The "Red Sea" at any rate can no longer be believed in, as it is no longer in the corrected translation. It is now the Reed Sea, meaning the human blood.

As to these recurrent themes, which as history become amazing prodigies, but as allegory are readily understood as items of cryptic truth-telling repeated again and again for emphasis or by copying, the advocates of an incontestable historical rendering must themselves swallow and ask all others to swallow, a series of endless coincidences in the stories of one figure after another; as for instance that Lot and Elkinah, the former in the nineteenth chapter of Genesis and the other in the nineteenth chapter of Judges, both undergo the identical experience of being demanded by a mob of rough fellows outside the house where they were overnight guests, and both offer their daughters to the violence of the mob as appeasement. And Jephthah pledges his daughter to work out of a difficulty likewise. Yes, endlessly recurrent theme and even a run of detail rises to offer serious challenge to the historicity of the Old and New Testament alike.

Another indication of mythical character in the Scriptures is found in the countless analogies between natural phenomena and spiritual science. The life of the soul is depicted and analyzed over the correspondences found to subsist between it and the living principle in nature. Fundamental in this area is of course the one ubiquitous phenomenon of the periodical death and resurrection of vegetation, paralleled by the winter hibernation and spring revivification of animals, reptiles and insects. So recurrent is this feature in the archaic writings that some students have ventured to believe that the death and resurrection of the Christ--pretty nearly the whole central axis of Christianity--was nothing but a human application of the so-called "corn-myth." These suggestions have naturally drawn the fire of scornful rejection from the protagonists of the historical view. One who speaks out on this theme is Johannes Weiss, leading scholar in the group of high German critics in his great two-volume work on Primitive Christianity (p. 491). He says that the Christian position is

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"once and for all opposed to the fantastic notions of those who would make the death of Christ a particular instance of the story of the vegetation gods who die and come to life every year. Were there nothing else, it would appear strange that not only the resurrection but also the death of Christ should be placed in the spring of the year. In the earliest period we find no indication whatever of a yearly celebration of the death of Christ; rather it seems that the Lord's Supper was celebrated weekly."

Correction of this--and a hundred similar observations--is to be made through the clarifying fact that first and fundamentally the ancients did not believe that any personified forces of nature such as "vegetation gods" died and came to life every year. They saw that vegetation died and rose again annually; and to them that was an analogue and parallel of something of superlative interest and concern for all human knowledge, namely the comparative yet very real "death" of the soul of Christliness that in each incarnation in flesh went down into and through its winter-time of dormancy and rose again from out that sleep of inertia in the continuing springs of each evolutionary cycle or "year." Nature furnished an analogue by which the truth and meaning of man's life on earth, as body and soul conjoined, could be more graphically portrayed and vividly comprehended. All that ancient sagacity intimated by the constant reference to the corn-myth was that this annual round of death and resurrection in outer nature perfectly typified the analogous periodic "death" and resurrection of the soul of divinity within man himself. As Emerson says, the outer reflects the inner, and from contemplation of the visible sign a deeper realization of the invisible reality can be won.

"Once for all," we say, there is nothing fantastic about this. It is the one thing that prevents religious thought from becoming fantastic, as it has done in Christian miscalculation of what the Scriptures are dealing with. If the knowledge that the sacred writings were designed to keep man in intellectual harmony with truth and reality had not so frightfully miscarried under Christian mishandling, the utterly fantastic misconception of them as history instead of natural analogy of divine-human experience and spiritual science would not have been precipitated into world consciousness.

As to the argument of Weiss that the Christians placed both the death and the resurrection of "Christ" in the spring, what this reveals is astonishingly interesting indeed. What has to be said here is that the Christians became hopelessly entangled in the varied forms and natural bases of symbolic representations employed by the Pagans, lost

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the understanding necessary to avoid mistakes in seasonal datings of festivals, and ended by placing the death of "Christ" in the wrong season of the year! They placed it in the spring, when it always belonged, by every intimation of analogy, poetically and symbolically, in the autumn, to be in keeping with the death of nature. This will be contradicted, of course. But there is no argument. Just as certainly as a symbolic festival of rebirth and resurrection belongs in the spring, one commemorating death belongs in the autumn. The great ancient festivals at which the "death" of the Sun-gods was memorialized, were celebrated always in the fall. One, but only one, among scores of witnesses to this is the Jewish festival or series of festivals held in the month Tishri, our September. The Jewish New Year is still celebrated in September. But it was a New Year in the sense of the beginning of a new cycle of soul's immersion in the life of body, which the ancient savants poetized as the soul's "death." The similar "death" of the sun, eternal soul symbol, in the autumn was the natural basis of the spiritual or evolutionary analogue. In the fall the soul had a new birth in or into matter (figured as its "death"); in the spring it had also its rebirth from matter back to spirit, involving the death of the body but the rebirth of the soul out of its entombment in mortal flesh. Both seasons, six months apart, figured a rebirth, one from the point of view of the body, the other from that of the soul. So closely intertwined are these two ideas of rebirth that the ignorant Christians got them confused, and for three and a half centuries they celebrated the birth of their Lord and Savior on March 25, only transferring it to the December 25 date of the winter solstice in 345 A.D. by decree of Pope Julian II.

But a period of forty days, indicating the length of time spirit is incubated in matter before it regerminates to rise again, was fixed in ancient days as one form of festival celebration. The period began with the death of soul and ended with its resurrection. The Pagans began the period on September 21, the date of the autumn equinox, or the Passover from spirit into body and ended it on October 31, the date of the still surviving All Souls' Day, or Hallowe'en. If one kept the meaning clear it was possible also to set the same forty-days festival in the spring, placing the "death" date forty days before the glorious day of resurrection fixed for the conjunction of sun and moon after the vernal equinox, the Passover from flesh back to spirit. The fall celebration emphasized the death, the spring one the resurrection. Both are appropriately timed for those who know it all as symbolic and in what specific ways the meaning is poetized by the seasons.

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But if this balance of understanding is lost and the ritual meaning is replaced by an alleged murder and fantastic bodily resurrection of a man instead of a divine principle in all men, then the celebration of the death as an objective occurrence on a given spring day on a cross of wood becomes both a symbolic anachronism and a travesty of human sense past all belief. And the celebration of the gruesome rites of Good Friday and Passion Week by maudlin Christians in the spring is, in the stark form of historical realism in which it is misconceived, the most awful miscarriage of sanity in human history. It is to cause millions to gloom over the idea of divine death at the very moment when life is chanting on every side its vernal hymn of victory over the bonds of wintry death.

The correctness of all this is found in the fact, among other things, that for three and a half centuries the Christians did not know whether the Christ was born, or should be commemorated, in the spring or in the dead of winter. Had a babe been born, surely some historical data could have been preserved. And the fact that all religions place these "births" and "deaths" at one or other of the four cardinal points in the year, zodiacally considered, is of itself sufficient attestation to any mind but one sold in slavery to chimerical pietism that the birth and death of the Christ were not historical events.

And it is time now to insert the next consideration, of overwhelming force, that to attempt to carry on Bible exegesis in total disregard of ancient astrological symbolism, expressly the zodiacal emblemism, is a fool's madness. The zodiac is the primal key to the Scriptures! A thousand allusions and figurations in the text can be brought out to clear sense only be reference to the marvelous and as yet only imperfectly fathomed depths of cryptic significance embodied in that sphinx-riddle circle of twelve signs and constellations. The sun in passing periodically through these twelve regions of the heavens prefigured the divine soul of man as passing through and assimilating unto itself twelve aspects of deific mind power that in the total and in the final synthesis will constitute in perfected man the perfected Christ-in-man. The first chapter of Luke can not be interpreted in its inner esoteric sense without reference to the zodiac, since the six-months period between the birth of John the Baptist and that of Jesus is only to be understood as the six months between the opposite signs of Virgo and Pisces, the first or natural man, the forerunner, being born in the sign of the Virgin, and the second or spiritual man being born in "Bethlehem," the "house of bread" and of fish, which is the sign of Pisces.

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On top of this comes the next item, equally essential for true Scriptural exposition. It is numerical symbolism. As Pythagoras said, the world is built on number and the harmony of numbers. Christian ignorance has gazed like a bumpkin with open mouth at the numbers one, two, three, four, six, seven, eight, ten, twelve, twenty-four, thirty, forty and seventy (in particular forty), found recurring endlessly in its holy book, and has never yet uttered a single syllable indicating intelligent comprehension of what they signify in Scripture. Yet the total of clear meaning is finally to be found compressed in these numbers. Revival of Pagan wisdom is at last disclosing what these cardinal numbers mean, and Christianity must resort to that long-reviled and despised "heathenism" to learn after twenty centuries what its own Bible is actually talking about. There is a greater release of understanding of Bible writing in simple arithmetic of four plus three equals seven, and four times three equals twelve, not to mention seven plus three equals ten, and four times seven equals twenty-eight (the days in a moon cycle) than in all the dead dissertations on Bible "history." For these numbers refer to the component elements in man's divine-human constitution, four in the human side of his dual being and three in the divine side. We are condensing a complete manual of soul-science here in a few sentences. The four cardinal elements in nature, earth, water, air and fire, typify the four bodies constituent of man's basic fourfold composition, symbolizing respectively his four departments of consciousness, sensation, emotion, thought and spiritual will. Any one attempting to grasp Bible sense all through without knowing these positive anthropological references is eligible for the dunce-cap and the title of nincompoop. It can not be done. They are essential keys. Omitting only earth, John the Baptist says that his baptism is of water, while that of the higher principle, the Christos, is of air (Latin: spiritus) and fire. Jesus said he came down to scatter fire, i.e., divine spirit over the earth. Yet Christians glorify Christ and sneer at Prometheus. And out of Lucifer, the firelight bringer, they have made their anthropomorphic Satan.

Back in the seventeenth century in England there flashed out momentarily in the perceptions of two eminent Biblical commentators so clear a realization of the true status of Scriptural material that it deserves to fall with great surprise and amazement for the reader into the context of this work. It appears that Anthony Collins (1676-1729), a scholar at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, and Thomas Woolston (1699-1731), who wrote a work called Discourses on the Miracles,

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of many editions (London, 1729), at about the same time but independently arrived at the conclusion that the Bible can be properly interpreted only as allegory! Among other items Collins announced that the Isaiah prophecies of a virgin bearing the Christ babe referred to a young woman in Ahaz' time and could not refer to the mother of Jesus seven hundred years later. Also he declared the Book of Daniel was a forgery of the age of Antiochus Epiphanes. Says Conybeare (op. cit., p. 53): "This brilliant conjecture which modern inquiry has substantiated, of itself suffices to place him in the foremost rank of critics." Collins asserted that the Bible was primarily allegory, that in fact the only way to save it from nonsense was to allegorize the prophecies and take them in a secondary sense different from their obvious and literal one.

"In no other way, he urged, can they be adapted to the belief in the spiritual Messiah, who is yet to appear; for the prophecies must have been fulfilled, or the Christian faith which they evidenced is false. Since they were demonstrably enough fulfilled in their literal sense, Collins argues that the pointing of the Hebrew text must be altered, the order of words and letters transposed, words cut in half, taken away or added--any procrustean methods in short employed in order to force the text into some sort of conformity with the events."

We may be pardoned for the thought that this excerpt alone justifies the production of our book, since it lays bare, in all the gross crudity of conniving ignorance and weak human duplicity the very trick and conspiracy that we will be challenged to prove in support of our claim that the Scriptures were "doctored" and altered in order to make allegory read like ostensible history. In spite of his ignorance as to the actual non-fulfillment of ancient mythicism (misinterpreted as objective prophesy), this man Collins saw clearly what had to be done to bring over the Gospels into the category of history. What more need be said? Massey had not studied Egyptology long before he saw as plainly as any fact can be seen that the "literalizers of the Gospel" and the "carnalizers of the Christ" had tampered with the text of Scripture to solidify the "evidence" for their historical theory. At least two hundred pages of data in our note-books alone could pile up evidence to support this accusation. But Conybeare himself comes right up to our elbow with a statement that puts the seal of veracity on our own assertion and what the additional mass of testimony would adduce. We need therefore only to cite his passage, which in effect and

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in essence is the proof we will be challenged to produce (op. cit., p. 46):

"With rabbinical ingenuity, thousands of passages were torn from the living context which gave them sense and meaning, and distorted, twisted, mutilated, misinterpreted, in order to fit them in as predictions of Jesus, the Messiah."

We have asserted that the ancients reflected their astrological symbologies in their national histories, and in their topical geography. This will be scouted as rank insupportable assertion. But let us listen as Heidel (op. cit., p. 222) speaks out:

"The Hebrew text represents Meribah and Massah as place-names. How ancient this attempt to convert ritual into geography may be we have no certain means of determining."

Then there was Woolston. Conybeare states the general position of this writer on the miracles related of Jesus, that they are so unworthy of a spiritual Messiah (could this be a new thought for pietists?) that they must one and all, including the resurrection, be set down as never having happened at all, and be explained allegorically as types and figures of the real, or spiritual alone. This is remarkable, surely. Here was a man seeing the thing lucidly at last. He falls back upon the early Fathers, instancing Origen as saying that whatsoever Jesus did in the flesh was but typical and symbolical of what he would do in the spirit; and that the "bodily diseases" he healed were no other than the infirmities of the soul that are to be cured by him, as an immanent spirit. (Let us pause to reflect that for the enunciation of this same sublime truth Origen was anathematized not three hundred years after his death.) As to the miracle of turning water into wine, Woolston affirms, the Fathers were so sensible of its "absurdity, abruptness, impertinence and senselessness . . . according to the letter" that they had recourse to a mystical and allegorical interpretation, as the only way to make it "consistent with the wisdom, sobriety and duty of the Holy Jesus." He cites Hilary, Augustine, Origen and Jerome as looking upon the whole story of the resurrection as emblematic of Christ's spiritual resurrection "out of the grave of the letter of the Scriptures in which he had been buried about three days and three nights according to that mystical interpretation of prophetical numbers which I have learned of them. . . . By the three days, St. Augustine says, are to be understood three ages of the world." He is resolved, he says, to give the letter of the Scriptures no rest so long as God gives him life and abili-

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ties to attack it. The acceptance of the text as history implies "absurdities and nonsense." And this man then asks a question that should hit every reader of this work with the keenest appreciation of its pertinence. He asks how this battle against the crude historical reading of Scripture is to be won. By "a grave, sedate and serious manner"? "No, I think ridicule should here take the place of sober reason; as the most proper and effectual means to cure men of their foolish faith and absurd notions." It would be good odds to lay a wager that Woolston has the right idea. He at any rate finds unexpected confirmation from a popular modern expert in the art of producing laughter. Says Mark Twain:

"Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution, these can lift at a colossal humbug, push it a little, weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast." [The first chapter of our The Lost Light has the caption: Tragedy Dies in Laughter.]

A choice excerpt from the venerable Zohar of the Hebrews falls in here with aptness:

"R. Simeon said: 'Had I been alive when the Holy One, blessed be He, gave mankind the Book of Enoch and the Book of Adam, I would have endeavored to prevent their dissemination, because not all wise men read them with proper attention, and thus extract from them perverted ideas, such as lead men astray from the Most High to the worship of strange powers.'"

That this calamity did befall and that it has been the cause of world dementia is the inescapable conclusion of studentship. Had all wise men read the arcane books "with proper attention" to their artfully concealed significance and located their meaning on the plane of consciousness instead of on that of history, there could not have been the consuming fires of rancor and persecution that have cast such a lurid glow upon the pages of history.

A consideration given expression by Conybeare that should have instructed that scholar in a better view of the personal Messiah is worth noting. Speaking of another critic named Evanson, he states that he saw clearly how insufficient is the evidence of the Gospels to bear the strain of the vast superstructure the theologians have built upon them. This is a keen discernment, to which theologians generally have been blind. What has been loaded upon the ostensible foundation of a few ancient documents wrongly believed to be books written by divine dictation in a literal sense, is veritably a whole cosmos of mean-

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ing. Surely no simple carpenter and a dozen "fishermen" could by any circumstance be made to be the prime generators of a movement launching a message that embraced earth and man in their cosmic relations, unless the fanatical hypnotizations of millions of people poured their psychological fervor into the delusion.

Conybeare next gives Joseph Priestley's contribution to Scriptural critique. His main heresy (for which he nearly lost his life at the hands of a Tory mob)

"was the entirely correct opinion that the earliest Christians neither knew anything of Trinitarian doctrine nor deified Jesus after the manner of Athanasian doctrine. He denied that the Apostles could have discerned God Almighty in the man of flesh and blood with whom they familiarly consorted. 'I am really astonished,' he wrote to Horsley, 'how you really entertain the idea of any number of persons being on this even footing, as you call it, with a being whom they gradually believe to be maker of themselves and all things, even the Eternal God himself.'"

This opens the way to our saying what has often pressed for statement, a thing which, if it could ever be given a half minute of full consideration, would shake millions of sensible but credulous Christians out of their childish dream of the historical Gospels and their Christ personage. One has but to take the Gospel story as history and then picture a hundred aspects of what it presupposes, reconstruct them on the basis of realistic actuality, to see how completely impossible it all is. One needs but to ask how countryside peasants could have acquired the specialized education assuredly needed to enable them to "spot" a cosmic Logos when they saw one in the form of a neighborhood carpenter! That ages of searching study could have faced this necessary feature of Christian theological assertion and never seen the preposterousness of its obvious implications marks the whole record of Christian pietism as a thing of doltishness beyond credence. And millions of persons at this day are possessed with the assumption that if the same Galilean came walking down the street now, any one looking at him would know that he was the Cosmic Lord and Co-creator of the universe with the Father. But no theologian has ever told how one would be able to differentiate this human being from the order of common humanity. And Conybeare himself admits that the Galilean fishermen knew nothing about a way to identify one of the three members of the cosmic Trinity.

A sidelight of considerable value is thrown upon the great controversial situation in the fourth century by a comment of Farrar on the

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arguments of Arius on the non-identity of the Son with the Father in the Trinity. Farrar says that Arius was forced by his doctrinal stand to "sever Jesus" (Greek: luei Iesoun) and reduce the whole work of redemption to an interior process. The Ebionites, says Farrar, had denied Jesus' full divinity; the Docetists had likewise denied his humanity. But it was reserved for the Arians at once to affirm and nullify them both. They evidently accomplished this logical legerdemain by affirming his divinity as a spiritual principle, while denying his humanity as a person of history. It all came from the incredible blunder of conceiving that the Logos or Word of God could be a man of flesh on earth. Arius saw clearly enough that he had to "sever Jesus" the man from the cosmic or creational Aeon, coequal with the Father, if only to save Christian doctrinism from committing itself to a preposterous imbecility of thought.

Nature symbolism and analogy, mythical forms embodying mystical intimations and universal truths, astrological pictography based on the zodiacal chart and the thirty-six constellations, numerological significance and the four elements must all be reinstated in the workshop of Bible interpretation as tools of competent elucidation. But there remains another device that has lurked undiscovered in the Scriptural construct for lo these many ages, which must now be brought out and used to throw a still clearer light upon the dark obscurity that still enshrouds this field. This completely lost open sesame to an unsuspected source and range of meaning in the Bible lies wholly on the form side of Bible structure, having nothing directly to do with the verbal content. Perhaps it might be said that it expresses meaning through form and arrangement, not through language. But it does involve number and in most startling fashion.

Nothing so glaringly emphasizes modern Christian deadness to all true significance in its Bible as the demonstration of dullness in its failure to respond with any least show of recognition of the importance of just about the most momentous discovery of a cryptic structure in its literature in two thousand years, when a few years ago a book was published which should have swept all Christendom with a wave of intense interest and led to a new envisagement of the Scriptures. The book, entitled Chiasmus in the New Testament, was produced by a Chicago theologian, Nils Wilhelm Lund. It announced and by abundant citation from both Old and New Testaments alike amply demonstrated the fact that the writing in both books was adjusted to fit into a frame of structure based amazingly on the key

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number of our universe,--seven. It is difficult to illustrate without a diagram, but "Chiasmus" is a structure made over the outline of the Greek letter Chi, which is approximately the English "X." It pervades the Bible throughout in surprising regularity. There will be found a series of four statements in a line of sequential development or relation, which might be lettered A, B, C, D, or numbered 1, 2, 3, 4,. But when the fifth is added it is found to repeat C or 3; the sixth repeats B or 2; and the seventh and last repeats A or 1. It thus runs the sequence of A, B, C, D, C, B, A, or 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1. The development of the thought or statement takes four steps forward, then seemingly turns and retraces the three steps of the initial movement and returns to where it began. There is enough material in the Bible that Lund has collected to illustrate the pattern to fill the more than three hundred pages of his book. This obviously proves the device to be a definite scheme of sacred composition.

Perhaps the book and its astonishing revelation of a new element of meaning in Holy Writ failed to create more of a stir because the author himself, while having done a magnificent piece of analytic work on the text to exemplify the principle, closes his treatise with never a gleam of comprehension of the equally astonishing purport of this strange design. Without this elucidation of its meaning his study remained merely an interesting and, as we would say, curious phenomenon, and dented theological perspicacity not an inch.

Had he or his fellow-exegetists had the slightest inkling of what this chiasmus structure indicated, it might have caused a ruction in theological quarters indeed. The period of time that Jonah should have been mythically held in the whale's belly, and that Jesus should have remained in the bonds of hell and the grave, is not three, but three and a half. This correct number is found three times in the eleventh and twelfth chapters of Revelation. It represents or diagrams the exact half of the seven stages which life units must pass through on their way to full involvement in matter's realm, which are of course followed by a return through the same three and a half planes to the starting point in the empyrean. Life takes three and a half steps downward or outward into the toils of matter and then retraces its steps to return to the Father. It "descends" through the atmic plane to the mental, then to the emotional and finally lands on the physical. The physical plane is thus the nadir of the downward movement or involution, and so becomes the turning point where the return is begun. In Old Testament allegory Sinai is the word that marks this plane of the return,

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because it is derived from the Egyptian seni, meaning "point of turning to return." This etymological revelation could itself alone effect a turning of Bible exegesis to return to sane bases and edifying, instead of stultifying conclusions. It is itself a great point in evidence that the Old Testament is not history or geography.

This entire elucidation will be received with vehement protestation of its unsoundness. But it is the key to the chiasmus form of the Bible, and there is no other key to this otherwise entirely enigmatic structure.

And how can orthodox dullness remain forever inert to the illuminating implications of what all this lights up? Staring it in the face is this "peculiar" form device, which carries the imputation of divine dictation even more strongly than words can tell it. The Scriptures were constructed with such transcendent genius that not only does the language speak its elevated meaning, but it falls into such a form that this itself dramatizes or reconstructs the very figure-graph of the life movement. This is a stupendous announcement, which stupefied fundamentalists will probably go on blandly ignoring for several hundred years more. At any rate there stands the phenomenon, and whether Christianity slumbers on in its mental torpor or awakens to newness of life depends largely on whether it will take heed to this strange discovery or not.

And not only does chiasmus present its extraordinary challenge to intelligence, but a perhaps still greater wonder comes to light in the further fact that almost every verse, all key words, many chapters as a whole, and even books, in the Hebrew and Greek, come out, through the number value of the letters of those alphabets, to total seven or a multiple of it. A man named Panin, who spent forty years counting these aggregates, reveals that there are some fifteen words and combinations of words in the first verse of Genesis that total seven or a multiple. To begin with the verse has seven Hebrew words. This numerical value runs all through the Bible. If one will reflect on these facts, the Bible will appear as remarkable for its sheer form as for its meaning. And Christians, disdaining to learn or copy from Pagans, have never seen the basic significance of the great "magic" number seven. It is Philo who says that it is doubtful if any one can adequately celebrate the marvel of the number six, which is crowned with completion of its work in the number seven. All cycles run through seven stages. God wrought at his creation six "days" and consummated it on the seventh. A Hebrew slave, says Numbers (21), was to work in bondage

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six years and go free in the seventh. It was commanded that fields should be worked six years and go unworked the seventh. This can not be history; it is allegory.

We can come now to the briefest possible survey of the Bible books, more particularly the four Gospels and Revelation of the New Testament, in the more immediate sphere of textual criticism. To enter this field with any attempt at thoroughness is out of the question, as it would involve a large work in itself. The purpose in touching it at all is to point out some obvious elements in the case which appear to have been neglected in all the massive study devoted to it. Scholars have labored over comparison of texts and manuscripts with the greatest care and with even a display of ingenuity of the highest degree. yet it would seem as if their noble effort has gone almost completely for nought, because of their stubborn recalcitrancy to the large basic factors in the case, by neglect of which they have missed sound conclusions at every turn. To the six or seven fundamental corrections already announced in this chapter must now be added another, the implications of which will vastly reorient the whole scheme of Scriptural study. The new plank in the platform structure must rest firmly on the sub-structure fact that the Gospels and Bible literature generally are based on old Egypt's now readable literature and are themselves rescripts of old, old books of the Essenes or other cults preserving the arcane books from remotest antiquity. Support for this revolutionary statement has already been adduced. It seems incontestable. If criticism can now be based on this new datum, a thousand perplexing and virtually insoluble questions resolve themselves at once into clear sense. A wholly new envisagement of the material can be gained and a complete new set of conclusions arrived at.

Taking up the four Gospels it will be clear at once that all the tomes that have been devoted to guessing when Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were written and by whom, are at one stroke rendered obsolete and reduced to rubbish by the alteration of the dates from somewhere allegedly between the years 50 and 120 A.D. to an unknown date at least some thousands of years B.C., possibly ten thousand. As long as these four documents were stubbornly held to be biographies of a man who was claimed to have lived from about 1 A.D. to 33 A.D., their composition had perforce to be dated within a measurable period following the year 33 A.D. Had the knowledge prevailed, however, that the character in them known as Jesus the Christ was not a man of flesh, but the ritual-dramatic figure personifying the Christ-in-man, a

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principle of higher consciousness, there would have been no need to fix their date of composition at any specific time. Eusebius' statement and hundreds of suggested intimations of data strengthen the conclusion that they were of immemorial antiquity. Therefore there was at no time any necessity to tie them in with the life of a man in the first century.

Our discussion of this point has brought out the new principle of criticism or of determination that the Gospels were not written in the late first or early second centuries, but, already in existence for thousands of years (with Jesus in them!), were for the first time in history brought forth out of esoteric custodianship and spread, with all the danger of misinterpretation (which at once happened) among the populace at large. We have cited in our first pages the challenging statement of Augustine that the true Christian religion had already existed from the beginning of man, that in his age it began to be called Christianity, and that at Antioch, not at Jerusalem. This gives rise to a consideration that has never even been thought of, much less accorded its natural and decisive weight in the problem. It is of stupendous consequence in the debate on textual criticism. It is that, if the one true Christian religion had been in existence for ages antecedent to the first century A.D., it must have had its assumedly full complement of supporting literature, or Scriptures, to preserve its creedology and doctrinism and to carry its gospel. It is absolutely unthinkable that the whole world was permeated with this hoary religion that Augustine speaks of and that the immense body of sacred literature found in all nations far back in time was wholly unrelated to this true Christianity, but that a true Christianity existed all by itself in total isolation from the main or universal corpus of religious literature everywhere extant. On this point logic speaks out in thunder tones that shake the unsteady edifice of post-third century "Christianity" to its foundations. For however the premises are arranged, logic asserts that the vast range of ancient Hindu, Persian, Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian and Norse religious literature was true Christian literature--if Augustus and Eusebius (and others) spoke truly. (And if they have falsified, their untrustworthiness shakes the house of Christianity violently again.)

Christianity here faces a fateful dilemma. If it upholds its founders and early historians, it tears down the very foundations on which it rests; if it repudiates these spokesmen, it likewise jars its stability. It has kept its course between Scylla and Charybdis up to now by obscuring the troublesome data. Its only chance of survival lies in the

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continued ignorance of its following. It had its inception in ignorance and only by sufferance of ignorance has it continued. It rejoiced in the ignorance of its adherents from the start and this fatal delight set the norm for its policy ever since. Hear Milman (p. 331):

"While they swept in converts indiscriminately from the palace and the public street, while the Emperor and the lowest of the populace were alike admitted on little more than the open profession of allegiance, they were satisfied if their allegiance in this respect was blind and complete."

Following upon this cataclysmic new canon of criticism is another, that which has to do with the inclusion of four Gospels covering in general the same narrative in the Christian Bible. If any other notable or influential tome in the world had reprinted the same lengthy narrative of ostensible history four times over, it would have been held to be a matter of brainless idiosyncrasy. But when fanatical pietism is the dominating force in any movement, reason and balanced judgment go into complete abeyance. Irenaeus explained that there had to be four Gospels because there were four points of the compass and four winds. The odd thing is that all four winds in the Christian Gospels blow the same way and carry the same breezy message,--except when in scores of big and little points they directly contradict each other. When they blow in opposite directions they have created tempests in the brains and books of the cloistered exegetists.

And that lands us right in the midst of the eternal debate as to the authorship of these four books selected for the canon. What it is possible to say now should end this aeonial controversy short off. One of the blind spots blocking out a critical view of the palpable realities of the case has been the incredible obtuseness of judgment which permitted all the hosts of textual critics to go on assuming for centuries that these four Gospels were actually the separate and original writings of four different writers, each writing in his own distinctive fashion and style of diction an account or record of ostensibly the same set of historical occurrences, containing a run of the same sermons and discourses uttered by one or more characters in the story, and all four, in large measure, actually repeating almost whole sections and chapters in the same identical words! It is past all plausible supposition to claim that any four persons in history would or could sit down in their own libraries and compose documents describing a given epoch in history with all detailed events, and come out at the end with four books of about equal length and more or less exactly identical word-

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ing verse by verse! This is a phenomenon that has been blindly accepted by all Christian thought in the field of documentary study. It is quite on a par with the dominant legend handed down about the authorship of the Septuagint translation: that seventy translators were shut up in seventy separate cubicles in a monastery, each with a copy of the Hebrew MS, and with no exchange or communication during their entire period of labor, all seventy at the end emerged with precisely the same Greek wording of every verse! Well has it been claimed that Christianity has been built upon miracles. That four independent narrators should have come up with four almost identically-worded books of considerable length is the "miracle" on which the whole fabric of this Christianity rests. Now this grotesque fabric is tottering to its fall, shaken and shattered by the sane reflection at last that the four documents can be nothing other than four slightly varying copies of a common tradition, long only oral, but finally written, which the Council of Nicaea decided to incorporate in the official canon to give cumulative weight to a fiction they knew already rested on the weakest foundations, and also perhaps because each one contained some minor portions not included in the others.

Conybeare puts the idea just enunciated in pretty much the same way. He says that a "common element" is evident in all three (Synoptic) Gospels to any one who reflects how impossible it would have been that three independent writers should remember a long and complicated body of incident and teaching in the same way and transfer it to paper page after page in almost identical words.

Theological critics have a few times been driven close to recognition of this clearly inescapable resolution of the problem. Several of them have indeed hinted at the possible existence of a "common document," an "original document," now lost, lurking in obscurity behind all the four, and which all four have copied! Some of these glimmerings of sanity must be commented upon. Conybeare says (History of New Testament Criticism, p. 69) that a certain Mr. Smith, of Jordan-hill, in a Dissertation on the Origin and Connection of the Gospels (Edinburgh, 1853) argued that oral tradition, the alleged personal knowledge the Gospel writers had acquired by experience or hearsay, was not adequate to explain the identities of word and event which are evident in the Synoptic Gospels. Conybeare comments that John is unaffected by the circumstance that Matthew and Luke both copied Mark, instead of all three having--as was supposed by Mr. Smith--"copied common but now vanished ulterior documents."

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It is important to note that, as Conybeare writes, a tradition preserved by Papias (A.D. 120-140) states that Matthew "composed the Logia, or oracles of the Lord in the Hebrew tongue,--i.e. in the Aramaic patois of Palestine and that various peoples subsequently rendered these Logia into the Greek as best they could." Many scholars believe today, says Conybeare, that Matthew's Hebrew Logia were a selection of prophecies of Jesus Christ culled from the Old Testament. So here once more is cogent evidence that the Gospels were material long extant before Jesus ever could have lived.

Conybeare continues: in any case our first Gospel is no translation of the document attested by Papias; for, as Dean Robinson remarks,

"Our St. Matthew is demonstrably composed in the main out of two Greek books," so that we must "conclude either that Papias made a mistake in saying that St. Matthew wrote in Hebrew, or that if he wrote in Hebrew, his work has perished without leaving a trace behind it."

Some more of this discussion is introduced here to give readers an idea of the inextricable labyrinth of floating conjectures and traditions one becomes entangled in when entering upon the study of Bible criticism. So Conybeare continues: there is furthermore a statement in Irenaeus (about 170-180) to the effect that Matthew published his gospel among the Jews in his own tongue at the time that Peter and Paul were preaching the gospel in Rome and founding the Church. This statement seems to be independent of that of Papias, as most certainly is the story related by Eusebius about Pantaenus, the catechist of Alexandria and teacher of Clement and Origen. This story runs that about the year 180 Pantaenus visited India and found the natives using a Gospel of Matthew written in Hebrew, which Bartholomew had conveyed to them. Origen and Eusebius equally believed that our Matthew was the work of the Apostle originally composed in Hebrew.

Is it pertinent to ask how the natives of India could make use of a Matthew Gospel written in Hebrew, when for centuries of the Middle Ages there was hardly a native in all southern Europe in the countries west of Greece who could be found to teach the Renaissance scholars the Greek tongue, so as to read the great Greek classics and Aristotle's works then being brought out to the light.

It is not immediately incidental to the point at issue, but still is not too far removed from bearing upon the whole theme of Bible writing that Conybeare lets another fierce cat out of the bag when he concedes

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that it is practically certain that the John of whom Irenaeus heard Polycarp say that he had known him in his boyhood, was not the Apostle John, but the Presbyter John! The exclamation point is fully justified, as with this there flies out the window another cherished bit of tradition converted into alleged reality by Christian fiction-mongering, in which its devotees were most adept. Irenaeus, as Conybeare, claims, had confused the two Johns.

Even now among the best educated Anglicans there is a tendency, says Conybeare, to give up the fourth Gospel (John). Dean Robinson says of it that it is not history in the lower sense of a contemporary exact reproduction of the very words spoken by Christ or to him. He says also that the old man (John) could not be expected to remember the events of the life of Christ in detail, especially the exact language of the discourses! The story is rather a drama that is enacted, he says, "in which every incident tells, or it would not be there. The record moves not on the lines of the ordinary succession of events so much as on the pathway of ideas." This, let it be said, is a true discernment, and adds more grist to the mill that grinds the flour of final conclusion that the Gospels are dramatic rituals of spiritual ideas and nothing else.

But so gripping is Conybeare's dissertation on the authenticity of the Gospel of John that it would be a deprivation not to notice it. He writes that for seventeen hundred years the theology that elevates Jesus of Nazareth out of and above human history, transforming him into the Word of God, which triumphed at Nicaea and inspired Athanasius, was based on this fourth Gospel more than on any other book of the New Testament. It now at last appears, from such admissions as that of Dean Robinson and others, that this entire theological fabric was woven in the mind of an Apostle meditating in extreme old age on the half-forgotten scenes and conversations of his youth. Such, says Conybeare, is the best case which can be made out for orthodox theology. We are left with the roofless ruins of a stately edifice which sheltered orthodox theologians of the past. And even these ruins are crumbling further down.

All this is astonishing enough. But to save our readers from gathering an erroneous impression it needs to be said that John's Gospel was most assuredly not the (original) fabrication of any John or other man in his old age. For if one thing in all this tangle of misguided conjectures is solid fact, it is the truth that many documents of the general

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kind called Logia, or "Sayings of the Lord," dramatized as spoken on the Mount (of earth!) by the divine Personage in man to the natural man for his wise guidance, were extant in all the Eastern lands at that and earlier times. "John" did not need to fabricate such a conception of the Logos, or such a document expressing it. For, as Irenaeus testifies, hundreds of such books were floating about in his day, the second century. And only ignorance mistook the Jesus in them for a living man.

Conybeare ventures the assertion that as regards these many other gospels, such as that according to Peter, and the Gospel of the Egyptians, the Church did well to exclude them from its canon. How does he know? How can he say this? It is sheer prejudice and assumption. The presence of the Gospel of the Egyptians in the canon might have gone far to shatter the false accretions of ignorance and wild belief about the historicity of material that was never other than allegorical, and thus saved millions of Christians from being duped by "history" concocted out of beautiful fiction. This conclusion is well founded if only on the fact that this gospel so clearly revealed the purely allegorical nature of Scripture that the orthodox party saw to it that it was completely obliterated.

Newberry in his fine work, The Rainbow Bridge, says it is probable that even such stories as the creation legends of Persia and that in Genesis originated from a "common document." And Conybeare comes up with a remarkable statement that no one now contends that Matthew's Gospel is other than the work of an unknown writer, who compiled it out of Mark's Gospel and "Q," the common document of Matthew and Luke. And what is this "Q" document? A hypothetical fabrication of the minds of scholars who hit upon the one really rational idea that has occurred to them in all this search and speculation. As in science, so here; the mind is confronted by data; it seeks a plausible hypothecation that will account for them. And the existence of a common document was hypothecated to account for links of connection and traces of similarity that could find no rational explanation otherwise.

Our assertion is that this "common document" is the correct tack of speculative criticism at last. But the hard fact for orthodox partisans to swallow in accepting it is the necessity going with it of conceding that it was not a Christian but a Pagan document! And what also will have to be taken in is the fact that this "common document" was not just one individual book standing alone in literature, sharply distin-

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guished from all other writings, and alone furnished a basis for the four Gospels canonized, but instead was "common" in the sense that it was, in one variant or another, a common possession of all the world of the East then and a long time before. This "common source" was not at all in any sense to be regarded (as Christian commentators do) as the original conception or product of a single writer's brain or pen, a literary creation produced as a modern author generates a book out of his knowledge or imagination. It was the composite sum-total of the primordial true Christian revelation (of Augustine's description), or literary deposit of wisdom expressed in formularies long or short, in formations expressing numerical foundations as in the chiasmus, given to early humanity by developed giants in intellect, and handed on for ages purely by oral tradition, but finally here and there becoming consigned to written books. The many rescripts of such basic "rudimentals," so to say, of sapient philosophy and moral and spiritual truth, cosmology and anthropology, were extant, but secretly cherished for ages. About the late second and early third centuries the ignorant Christians got hold of some of them floating about and brought them out to public accessibility. The Gospels were, as Eusebius testifies, not composed, originated, written after the first century to detail the biography of a man living fully two hundred years before they first appear. The solution of the whole immense mystery of the Gospels and the origin of Christianity founded on them is now revealed in the simple statement that the Gospels, though not written at that time, were released from secrecy to common accessibility about the second century. And as Mead has so well shown, it was this release of these documents and the mob's frightful conversion of their esoteric spiritual meaning into assumed history that produced the madness that has engulfed a third of the world ever since.

Here--at last--is the true story and the true basis of all textual criticism.

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