My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them.

Abraham Lincoln

Paul and the Mysteries in Apologetics 2

Exclusive Faith?
Judaism and Paganism
Paul and Judaism
Paul and Paganism

Abstract

Apologists say Christianity could not have been influenced by Paganism because it was an exclusive faith that demanded the sole attention, not only of the devotee, but everyone else as well! Christianity was not tolerant! Paganism on the other hand was tolerant of other tolerant religions. The gentile convert had to give up their Pagan beliefs, even if they had been sincerely held for a lifetime. Christians think converts just wiped their minds clean of all previous Pagan contamination and were born again pristine and unencumbered as Christians. The plain impossibility of this in reality is sure proof that before long Pagan practices were being introduced into Christianity, no doubt with a new interpretive gloss.

Exclusive Faith?

The prime reason that apologists give why Christianity could not have been influenced by Paganism was that it was an exclusive faith that demanded the sole attention, not only of the devotee, but everyone else as well! The Characteristic of Paganism on the other hand was that it was tolerant of other tolerant religions. Christianity was not tolerant! The gentile convert, and ultimately everyone in the known world, had to give up their Pagan beliefs, even if they had been sincerely held for a lifetime. Christians think that converts just wiped their minds clean of all previous Pagan contamination and was born again pristine and unencumbered as Christians. The plain impossibility of this in reality as opposed to the disinformation pedalled by Christian evamgelists is sure proof that before long Pagan practices were being introduced into Christianity, no doubt with a new interpretive gloss.

What are we to think of Pliny only 50 years after Paul went to Rome finding Christians singing hymns to the sun? Either these people had introduced a practice into Christianity they were familiar with, as Mithraists perhaps, or Christ was seen from the inception of Christianity as an aspect or allegory of the sun just like Mithras. Moreover, however intolerant Christianity was at the level of the shepherds, the sheep were tolerant former Pagans and doubtless saw no harm in continuing practices that they had thought harmless for most of their lives. Remember that there was little formal organization in these early years among the gentiles, and worship was usually conducted in someone’s home where Pagan forms of pious expression could not easily be suppressed by authority.

Since history shows that every significant religious practice of the Pagans was taken over by the Catholic Church, it is sheer effrontery and blatant mendacity to pretend that it did not happen, as these Protestant evangelicals want to do. These professors of philosophy and religion forget that their own churches seceded from the Catholics in the Reformation largely because Catholicism was considered to be Pagan. Philosophy and religion must now mean sophistry and dissemblance.

Metzger contrasts the Christian divine being who was a real man on earth and the “deities of the Mysteries who were nebulous figures of an imaginary past”. Whether the Christian divine being was once real or not is immaterial to anyone who knows only that they are told he was once real. In other words, to call this god real and that god mythical is purely arbitrary when the only standard is itself arbitrary—what people are told. The figure of Christ is supposed to be historic but he is no less nebulous than king Arthur, Hereward the Wake, William Tell or Robin Hood. Egyptians thought Osiris was a historic king of Egypt. Thracians thought Orpheus was a historic prince of Thrace. Romans thought that their god, Quirinus, had appeared on earth as Romulus, the founder of their city. It is a lie not to tell the whole truth, and here the Christian doctors are not telling the whole truth. Christianity does not differ from any of these and many more religions whose devotees believed, as Christians do, that their god had once been a man on earth. Again Metzger knows this.

The point about the heroes mentioned above is that their stories are like those of Christ. Mostly, they lived real lives, but nobody is sure about what it was because myths have accumulated around them. Many books of their mythology and the exegesis of it have been written, and it seems likely that had Christianity not been so oppressive that any one of them might have become a god.

Judaism and Paganism

Metzger can write:

The early Palestinian Church was composed of Christians from a Jewish background, whose generally strict monotheism and traditional intolerance of syncretism must have militated against wholesale borrowing from Pagan cults.

Needless to say, he is happily shoving beams into the eyes of the already blind. The early Palestinian church was surely comprised of Christians, if it was a Christian church, but the Christians in it were Jews! Jews certainly commonly come from a Jewish background, but Metzger seems unable to say that they were in fact Jews. We know it because the Christian New Testament tells us. Does that strengthen Metzger’s brief argument? That is what is hard to say, although Metzger shows no doubt.

Though Jews today are a fairly uniform bunch of people in that they are not divided into anything like the 30,000 varieties of Christianity, in the mid-first century it was different. Judaism was spallated by sectarianism. It is argable to what extent the many sects were strictly monotheistic. Metzger writes what he wants to be true following the directions of his Lord that it will indeed be true—enough for Christians to believe! If Metzger bases his deduction on anything at all, it is that modern Rabbinic Jews call themselves monotheistic, and that the Christians in the Roman empire were monotheistic enough to prefer to be eaten by lions than to nod in acknowledgement of an emperor god, or so the myths tell us. Pagans were polytheistic so, the conclusion to be drawn is that the only source of Christianity was its parent Judaism.

The sheep might be happy with such reasoning, but monotheists do not believe in only one god! Jews and Christians certainly do not. They believe in so many gods no one can even count them. It is likely that most so-called polytheistic Pagans were probably more monotheistic than Jews or Christians, at least in their belief that only one or at most a few gods were significant. Most Pagans were monotheistic to the extent that they favoured a particular god. Unlike Christians, however, they recognized that others might prefer another god, and they were happy to let them have their own choice, even if they thought the other god was ineffective or non-existent. It was a personal choice for them, but Christians want to tell everyone what they should believe. By the time of Christ, Pagans generally believed the separate gods they worshipped were “daimones”, agents of a supreme God. Pagans were happy to visit the shrines of other gods when they had a speciality such as Aesculapius and Poseidon, but this is no different to Christians who are happy to pray to saints who also have a speciality.

As for Jews and their offspring, the Christians, they believed in a high god called Yehouah and another wicked god who opposed the high god, called Satan, in practice the equal of the good god. That’s two gods then, in these monotheistic religions. In the Jewish scriptures, we find that Yehouah is not even the high god, and has a large number of equals in the court of his father El, but somewhere along the line Yehouah seemed to have taken over from his father. That then is a whole host more gods, but although they are there, they are ignored in the Judaeo-Christian scheme.

What is not ignored and are important is a whole raft of lesser gods called angels, that Jews and Christians pretend are not gods at all, even though they are immortal and have supernatural powers of their own. Satan is supposed to have been one of these, and plainly he is a powerful god, so we can assume that the other angels are too. Some of these angels however, are specially powerful and work for the high god. These are called archangels and are given names—but the Jews and Christians still deny that they are gods, to preserve the title “God” for the high god alone, and pretend that their religions are therefore monotheistic.

Some of the angels besides Satan were wicked too and joined their chief in spreading wickedness in the world. The high god could not stop them, even though he sent his son, another god, into the world to save human beings by deliberately getting crucified. Another god was the Holy Ghost who spent his time going around spreading fire about people’s heads called the apostolic succession, and otherwise inspiring people to do good, write gospels and generally become Christians, although he often seems to make mistakes.

How all this prevented Jews and the newly instituted Christians from accepting Pagan gods—their daimones—as angels of God is hard to understand, since mostly they only ever wanted to do good themselves. Aesculapius wanted to save people from sickness and Poseidon to save people from storms at sea, but the perverse Christians decided that all of these were the wicked angels who were the servants of Satan. The “daimones”, the Pagans considered good, the Christians called wicked, and to this day wicked angels and Pagan gods are still called “demons”. It was not that the Christians did not believe in the daimones. They did. They believed they were singlarly wicked, and came to believe that anyone who persisted in worshipping a god, such as Aesculapius, was a Satanist worshipping a demon that could be conjured and spread awful terror in the world. Lots of Christians still believe it, so they are no more monotheistic today than they were then.

Jews invented an aspect of the monotheistic Yehouah and called it Sophia. That’s yet another God. They had the Angel of the Lord, another god. Perhaps the Shekinah was another. These were not monotheistic religions in any proper sense of the word monotheistic. It meant they had a high god, but so did the Greeks and the Romans and they identified them all as the same high god. Jews were exercising in gymnasia and arguing in the porticoes of Herod’s temple modelled on the Stoa of Athens. What stopped Jews and Christians identifying the Suffering Servant of Isaiah with, say, Attis? Perhaps they did and called him Jesus.

Does Metzger really know that in all this there were not Hellenizing Jews who were not seeing Michael as Mithras—for that is who he was!—who were happy to see Yehouah as Jupiter and Zeus? This is precisely what the Maccabees were supposedly fighting against 200 years before and it is impossible to believe that the degree of Hellenization had been stopped then. The evangelic voice of the Holy Ghost whispering in Metzger’s head refuses to let him countenance any of this. The evidence is absent!

Ronald H Nash warns us:

The earlier mysteries (including those during the first Christian century) reveal a conflicting pantheon of deities and superhuman mythical beings.

The good professor means to contrast this with Christianity, which will doubtless leave any reader writhing on the floor with laughter. He wants to impress us with the idea that Christianity is a monotheistic religion, but to add “with a conflicting pantheon of deities and superhuman mythical beings” to introduce a little truth and balance quite spoils his intention, which he will be certain is that of the Holy Ghost.

In the Christian pantheon, Yehouah conflicts with Satan, angels conflict with demons, superhuman beings like the Blessed Virgin and a multitude of saints appear all over the place, Jesus is on the side of Yehouah and so is the comically inept Holy Ghost, the Jews are on the side of Satan, though Jesus is himself one, and poor Judas does everything that is required of him to make God’s plan succeed and is then branded a traitor. This is God’s revelation to the world which must be believed if we are to be saved from eternal torture, and is quite different from the merely “heterogeneous, confused cult legends” of Isis, Cybele and Mithras.

The uncomfortable fact for Christian befuddlers and befoggers is that Christianity was the very syncretistic Jewish-Pagan religion that they deny! Perhaps the Jerusalem Church was unable to take the full syncretistic step away from Judaism, but Hellenized Jews elsewhere took the step, and Paul was their spokesman.

Paul and Judaism

Metzger goes on with his sins:

It is quite inconceivable that Judaizers who attacked Paul with unanswered ferocity for what they considered his liberalism concerning the relation of Gentile converts to the Mosaic law, should nevertheless have acquiesced in what some have described as Paul’s thoroughgoing contamination of the central doctrines and sacraments of the Christian religion.

Metzger is being opaque here while contriving to convey an impression to the sheep that Christian critics are dunces unable to distinguish a “Hebrew” from a “Greek”, as they are described in Acts. It sounds suspiciously as though Metzger cannot distinguiish them, because he does not, but he must have been able to. It is just that he does not want the sheep to know, perhaps! Doubtless there are dunces among critics of Christianity but the Christians fall into one of two castes, the larger one of which consists of dunces and the smaller one of cheats. Metzger and his ilk are not dunces.

Why does he call the Jews who attacked Paul Judaizers? The so-called Judaizers were Jewish Christians who wanted to remain Jews and remained loyal to the Mosaic law. It is a Christian term used to abuse the original Jewish Christians of the Jerusalem Church who actually followed the teachings of their master, Jesus. They are the “Hebrews” of Acts. They had no idea—like Jesus himself—of changing any jot of the law! With hindsight, Christians label them reactionaries trying to undo the work of Jesus, when they were really the honest preservers of the work of Jesus. It was Paul who was trying to make Christianity non-Jewish, a sin that Jesus could never have considered.

The Jews attacking Paul were Jews who, unlike Paul, were zealous for the law and resented Paul’s determination to undermine it. Non-Jews who sought to be proselytes had to obey the law—every jot and tittle of it, Jesus said—including circumcision. Why then should Jews or even Jewish Christians have acquiesced in what Paul did? And, if some Jewish Christians did acquiesce, who says it was the same set of Jews as those who attacked Paul? The Jews who saw the strict observation of the law as a hindrance in the Greek world were the Hellenizers, the “Greeks” of Acts, and these were the ones that Paul joined, and who acquiesced in his innovations.

Believers accept uncritically the assessment of the New Testament, largely written by Paul himself, that God’s man was a strict Jew. It is questionable, even on the basis of his story as told by Christians, and unusually there are other sources here. Ancient traditions were that Paul was a proselyte or at least his parents were, though they might have been gentile godfearers. Christians are trained to be too uncritical to consider that their holy books are anything other than true. From that comes a multitude of additional untruths.

Paul seemed to have no great trouble in abandoning the religion he held so dearly and strictly. He was such a devoted Jew that he easily became an apostate from Judaism that Jews were happy to stone, and instead he founded a rival religion to Judaism. Despite this, apologists hang on to the idea that this man was a “strict” Jew, a conservative, traditional Jew, not a liberal or Hellenized Jew. The evidence offered is that he was proud of his Jewishness, as if a liberal Jew should have been ashamed of it. J G Machen’s last century book, The Origin of Paul’s Religion, a sort of evangelical bible, it seems, says:

It is very difficult to conceive of such a man [as Paul] with his excessive zeal for the Mosaic law, with his intense hatred of Paganism, with his intense conciousness of the all-sufficiency of Jewish privileges—as being susceptible to the Pagan influences that surrounded his orthodox home.

Machen, in typical apologetic fashion, is so carried off by his own evangelical zeal that he has forgotten that Paul abrogated the Mosaic law, most notably the insistence on circumcision, to make it easier to recruit gentile males, who otherwise were chary of, for them, a dangerous and unnecessary operation. Paul evidently agreed it was unnecessary and dangerous, but no devout Jew could have done. It was not a question of personal choice. For a devout Jew, the law of Moses was God’s law! If Paul knew anything of what Jesus said, which is questionable too, he would have known that Jesus refused to concede a jot or tittle of the law, so he was defying, not only God, but the son of God. Paul openly preached his own gospel describing it as “my” gospel. Perhaps this is the mystery that Christians have not spotted.

If Paul was demonstrably not committed to the Jewish law then why should anyone believe the evangelical flannel that he was uncompromisingly against Paganism? Paul was evidently devoted to gentiles and is the self-appointed apostle to the gentiles. He devotes the rest of his career to the gentiles. For gentiles read Pagans. “Gentiles” meant non-Jews and the non-Jewish religions were Pagan ones. Paul was the apostle to the Pagans. Paul knew that the law of Moses was a no-no to most Pagan men and with no sign of compunction he ditched it to make converts. That is the level of zeal for the law that Paul had.

It is therefore impossible to accept the apologetic pleas that Paul was antagonistic to Paganism because of his devotion to Judaism. He proved he had no lasting devotion to Judaism, so why should anyone believe any antagonism he had to Paganism was any more strongly held? Ditching the Mosaic law is testimony to his opportunism. The use of the popular religions of the day to propel his own syntheric religion must have been a natural step. Even if Paul was not consciously opportunistic—a hard thing to accept—he had been influenced to the core of his being by the Pagan ambience of his world. Christians want to deify Paul as well as Jesus, making him supernaturally able to resist the effects on his psyche of the world he lived in from birth, without finishing up insane. Sometimes they weakly admit that “subconscious” influences might have come into play but only when Paul consciously overcame his presumed antagonism to Pagan practices.

Yet, if Paul showed a conscious antagonism to the worship of Pagan gods, then psychologically it could signal an unconscious attraction to them, causing guilt, suppression and a counter reaction. Latent homosexuality in our still homophobic society has a similar effect manifesting itself in an angry homophobia. Curiously some scholars have suggested that Paul was a suppressed or guilty homosexual.

Paul and Paganism

Otherwise excellent Christian scholars, rare creatures, can also be deceitful. Even Albert Schweitzer would not allow Paul to be influenced in his milieu except in vocabulary. So far as his conceptions were concerned, he lived on another planet. A D Nock clumsily moves the goalposts, another popular Christian trick, to save his hero from contamination with mystery terminology in a world suffused with it:

It is not clear that S Paul’s linguistic practice points to first hand knowledge of the mysteries, still less to the reading of theoretical literature about them.

Here Nock places the goal posts so close together it is impossible to score! In other words, Nock sets up a straw doll that does not even need knocking over! No one except a Christian is suggesting that Paul was a theologian of the mystery religions, or even practised any of them. What Nock puts forward is meant as an absurd distraction, and is actually irrelevant, as anyone except the sheep can see.

Paul lives in a Pagan world in which Pagan allusions were as commonplace as biblical ones are to us today. Completely irreligious hacks will use biblical references in their scribblings in our newspapers to influence their readers without a thought about it, and atheistic scientists think it is good for their pockets if not for science to refer incessantly to the “mind of God”, the “God particle” and other misleading religious “metaphors”.

Paul admits to being an opportunist and the Acts of the Apostles say he was brought up in a great metropolis which featured major mystery cults. Tarsus was the center of several eastern religions such as Cybele and Mithras, and the sensible view is that anyone brought up in such a culture and did not have a bucket permanently over his head, or was not locked, like Kasper Hauser, in a celler throughout their formative years, must have been influenced by the prevalent religious ideas of the city. To pretend he was blind and immunized against all this is not only deceit but self-deceit on the part of Christians. Yet that is what Christians claim.

Their argument is that Paul was a strict Jew of the dispersion who would have studiously avoided any Pagan influence. To imagine that people can avoid the subtle effects of the society they live in is imbicilic. Paul should then have grown up refusing to use Greek, but it is clear enough from his letters that he did use it. Furthermore, the Jews, whether of the diaspora or of Palestine, were already Hellenized long before the time of Paul. The Greek culture which Christians designate as Pagan had dominated the whole of the known world for 400 years by the time Paul was writing letters. Despite the mythology that constitutes most of the Jewish scriptures, they are themselves largely a product of Hellenistic times. In short, Judaism itself would not have been as it was but for Hellenization.

To say that Paul absorbed no more of Hellenistic Paganism than a modern priest knows of biblical criticism or an evangelical knows about theosophy, as Schweitzer foolishly did, is to compare apples and pears. Neither biblical criticism or theosophy have impacted upon popular culture. They are not heard being discussed in market places, cafes or bars. Fads, films and record releases are, because they are the popular culture of today. Then, it was magic, miracle and mysteries, all of which Christianity utilized to make itself popular. In those days culture mainly was religion, and it was the fact that mystery religions excluded rif-raff in favour of people of high moral standing, that Christianity was able to make converts among the low-life.

Paul did not therefore have to choose to study Mithraism or the cult of Attis—they were discussed around him.

Other apologists, although still trying to distance the first Christian missionary from his environment, feel they have to accept the central point made by Christian critics. Gunter Wagner, in Pauline Baptism, writes:

Paul knows only words that have been common property for a long time, and he uses them in a sense that does not correspond with the specific meanings accorded them in the mysteries.

Wagner knows all about the specific meanings of technical terms used in the mysteries although professor Nash told us we know little or nothing about the mysteries. They were mysteries. Again, we find that Christians have God’s own omniscience when it suits them, and the reason is that God has told them it is impossible for a Christian to lie. That is their belief, but to honest folk they are just liars, whether they are lying for God and with His consent or not.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.