The Christ Myth. Drews Arthur

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СКАЧАТЬ of God” and at the same time “King of the Jews”; and how the idea could arise that in his shameful and undeserved death God had offered himself for mankind. Now too we can understand that he who died had after a short while to rise again from the dead, and this in order to ascend into heaven in splendour and glory and to unite himself with God the Father above. These were ideas which long before the Jesus of the Gospels were spread among the Jewish people, and indeed throughout the whole of Western Asia. In certain sects they were cherished as secret doctrines, and were the principal cause that precisely in this portion of the ancient world Christianity spread so early and with such unusual rapidity.

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      THE BIRTH OF THE MESSIAH. THE BAPTISM

      It is not only the idea of the just man suffering, of the Messiah dying upon the gibbet, as “King of the Jews” and a criminal, and his rising again, which belongs to the centuries before Christ. The stories which relate to the miraculous birth of Jesus and to his early fortunes also date back to this time. Thus in the Revelation of John125 we meet with the obviously very ancient mythical idea of the birth of a divine child, who is scarcely brought into the world before he is threatened by the Dragon of Darkness, but is withdrawn in time into heaven from his pursuer; whereupon the Archangel Michael renders the monster harmless. Gunkel thinks that this conception must be traced back to a very ancient Babylonian myth.126 Others, as Dupuis127 and Dieterich, have drawn attention to its resemblance to the Greek myth of Leto,128 who, before the birth of the Light god Apollo, being pursued by the Earth dragon Pytho, was carried by the Wind god Boreas to Poseidon, and was brought safely by the latter to the Island of Ortygia, where she was able to bring forth her son unmolested by the hostile monster. Others again, like Bousset, have compared the Egyptian myth of Hathor, according to which Hathor or Isis sent her young son, the Light god Horus, fleeing out of Egypt upon an ass before the pursuit of his uncle Seth or Typhon. Pompeian frescoes represent this incident in such a manner as to recall feature for feature the Christian representations of the flight of Mary with the Child Jesus into Egypt; and coins with the picture of the fleeing Leto prove how diffused over the whole of Nearer Asia this myth must have been. The Assyrian prince Sargon also, being pursued by his uncle, is said to have been abandoned on the Euphrates in a basket made of reeds, to have been found by a water-carrier, and to have been brought up by him – a story which the Jews have interwoven into the account of the life of their fabulous Moses.129 And very similar stories are related both in East and West, in ancient and in later times, of other Gods, distinguished heroes and kings, sons of the Gods, of Zeus, Attis, Dionysus, Œdipus, Perseus, Romulus and Remus, Augustus, and others. As is well known, the Indian God-man Krishna, an incarnation of Vishnu, is supposed to have been sought for immediately after his birth by his uncle, King Kansa, who had all the male children of the same age in his country put to death, the child being only saved from a like fate by taking refuge with a poor herdsman.130 This recalls Herodotus’s story of Cyrus,131 according to which Astyages, the grandfather of Cyrus, being warned by a dream, ordered his grandson to be exposed, the latter being saved from death, however, through being found by a poor herdsmen and being brought up in his house. Now in Persian the word for son is Cyrus (Khoro,132 Greek Kyros), and Kyris or Kiris is the name of Adonis in Cyprus.133 Thus it appears that the story of the birth of Cyrus came into existence through the transfer to King Cyrus of one of the myths concerning the Sun-God, the God in this way being confused with a human individual. Now since Cyrus, as has been said, was in the eyes of the Jews a kind of Messiah and was glorified by them as such, we can understand how the danger through which the Messianic child is supposed to have passed found a place in the Gospels. Again, a similar story of a king, who, having been warned by a dream or oracle, orders the death of the children born within a specified time, is found in the “Antiquities” of Josephus134 in connection with the story of the childhood of Moses. Moses, however, passed like Cyrus for a kind of forerunner and anticipator of Christ; and Christ was regarded as a Moses reappearing.135 Again Joab, David’s general, is said to have slaughtered every male in Edom; the young prince Hadad, however, escaped the massacre by fleeing into Egypt. Here he grew up and married the sister of the king, and after the death of his enemy King David he returned to his home.136 But Hadad is, like Cyrus, (Kyrus) a name of the Syrian Adonis.

      Another name of Adonis or Tammuz is Dôd, Dodo, Daud, or David. This signifies “the Beloved” and indicates “the beloved son” of the heavenly father, who offers himself for mankind, or “the Beloved” of the Queen of heaven (Atargatis, Mylitta, Istar).137 As is well known, King David was also called “the man after the heart of God,” and there is no doubt that characteristics of the divine Redeemer and Saviour of the same name have been intermingled in the story of David in the same way as in that of Cyrus.138 According to Jeremiah xxx. 8 and Ezekiel xxxiv. 22 sqq. and xxxvii. 21, it was David himself who would appear as the Messiah and re-establish Israel in its ancient glory. Indeed, this even appears to have been the original conception of the Messiah. The Messiah David seems to have been changed into a descendant of David only with the progress of the monotheistic conception of God, under the influence of the Persian doctrine concerning Saoshyant, the man “of the seed of Zarathustra.” Now David was supposed to have been born at Bethlehem. But in Bethlehem there was, as Jerome informs us,139 an ancient grove and sanctuary of the Syrian Adonis, and as Jerome himself complains the very place where the Saviour first saw the light resounded with the lamentations over Tammuz.140 At Bethlehem, the former Ephrata (i. e., Place of Ashes), Rachel is said to have brought forth the youngest of the twelve month-sons of Jacob. She herself had christened him Benoni, son of the woeful lament. He was, however, usually called Benjamin, the Lord or Possessor of light. In the Blessing of Moses he is also called “a Darling of the Lord,” and his father Jacob loved him especially.141 He is the God of the new year born of the ashes of the past, at whose appearance lament and rejoicings are commingled one with another; and thus he is only a form of Tammuz (Hadad) bringing to mind the Christian Redeemer in that he presided over the month of the Ram.142

      Now we understand the prophecy of the prophet Micah: “Thou Bethlehem Ephrathah, which art little to be among the thousands of Judah, out of thee shall one come forth unto me that is to be a ruler in Israel, whose going forth is from of old, from everlasting.”143 Now, too, the story of the slaughter of the children at Bethlehem has its background in religious history. It is said in Matt. ii. 18, with reference to Jer. xxxi. 15, “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and she would not be comforted, because they are not.” It is the lamentation of the women over the murdered Adonis which was raised each year at Bethlehem. This was transformed by the Evangelists into the lament over the murder of the children which took place at the birth of Hadad who was honoured at Bethlehem.144

      Hadad-Adonis is a God of Vegetation, a God of the rising sap of life and of fruitfulness: but, as was the case with all Gods of a similar nature, the thought of the fate of the sun, dying in winter and being born anew in the spring, played its part in the conception of this season God of Nearer Asia. Something of this kind may well have passed before the mind of Isaiah, when he foretold the future glory of the people of God under the image of a new birth of the sun from out of the blackness of night, with these “prophetic” words: “Arise, shine, СКАЧАТЬ