158 



♦ KNOW^LEDGE ♦ 



[May 2, 1887. 



BIRTH AND GROWTH OF CHRISTIANITY.* 



EADEES of Knowledge, since the first 

 monthly number appeared, will find much 

 to interest them in Mr. Janes's excellent, 

 carefully thought out, and well-written 

 treatise on the early history of Christianity. 

 He presents much of the evidence to which 

 we have only directed readers' attention, 

 not having here had space fully to consider it. He has 

 also collected much matter on which, in our treatment of 

 the subject, we have not hitherto touched. 



The guiding idea of the work before us is that conveyed 

 in the maxim of Confucius, that " The superior man does 

 not set himself either /or anything or aijainst anything ; 

 what is right he will follow"; and again in the terser text 

 of Paul, " Test all things ; hold the good." 



After a brief introduction, Mr. Janes sketches the con- 

 dition of Palestine in the Eoman peiiod, and the society 

 and religion of the Eoman Empire. In the first of these 

 chapters he presents, inter alia, interesting matter relating 

 to the Essenes. Though inclining to the belief, which we 

 must confess we do not share, that the doctrines and 

 practices of the Essenes originated in Palestine by a natural 

 evolution out of Pharisaic Judaism, he admits that obviously 

 Eastern notions, chiefly of Zoroastrian origin, had been 

 gradually creeping into the thought and faith of Israel. 

 The penetration of Buddhist ideas to the more earnest of 

 the Pharisaic separatists, after a process of filtration thi-ough 

 Zoroastrianism, seems to us a far more reasonable explana- 

 tion of Essenism than any process of evolution from 

 Pharisaic Judaism. 



In the account of Religion in Eome, perhajas the most 

 interesting matter is that relating to oriental influences. 

 The success of the worship of Mithra, when introduced by 

 the Emperor Commodus towards the close of the second 

 century, is full of significance, especially when associated 

 with the influence which the worship of Serapis had had on 

 the Romans during two preceding centuries. Eenan goes 

 so far as to say that, " Had not Christianity taken the lead, 

 Mithracism would have become the religion of the world." 

 It is not absolutely certain, however, that the Christianity 

 which actually did find favour among the Eomans, or at 

 any late the ritualistic part of such Christianity, was not 

 simply the disguised worship of Serapis- — that is to say, sun 

 worship, and therefore Mithracism in another form. Mr. 

 Janes mentions, though with little idea apparently of the 

 significance of what he notes, that 



Even after the secular ascendency of Christianity the ritualistic 

 worship of Mithra was handed down from age to age through the 

 esoteric order of the Kosicrucians and the secret societies of the 

 Middle Ages. The ceremonies observed in the worship of Mithra 

 are described by Tertullian, a Christian writer of about 200 A.D., as 

 strongly resembling the sacraments of the Church. The initiates 

 were admitted by a rite of baptism. They worshipped in little 

 chapels, similar to Christian churches. They made use of a species 

 of eucharist, eating the sacred bread, draOna, accompanied by 

 solemn religious ceremonies, while the neophyte was tested by 

 twelve consecutive penances. As in the Eleusinian Mysteries, the 

 doctrines of a life after death, the resurrection of the body, and 

 a future slate of rewards and punishments, were taught by Mithra- 

 cism. The influence of this new religion upon the thought and 

 literature of the time was absorbing and all-persuasive. 



The Gnostics doubtless borrowed largely from Mithi acism ; 

 and the popular sects of Judaism are also thought to have 

 derived many of their rites and doctrines from kindred 

 mysteries, through Babylonia. The indirect influence of 



* " Primitive Christianity." By Lewis G. Janes, Index Associa- 

 tion, Boston. 



these conceptions upon the current and subsequent develop- 

 ment of Christian doctrine was doubtless considerable. The 

 leading Mithraic festival, celebrated at the winter solstice, 

 identical in time with the Eoman Saturnalia, was ultimately 

 assimilated by Chri,stianity, and recognised as commemo- 

 rative of the birth of Jesus, which the apostolic tradition 

 had assigned to the spring-time instead of the 25th of 

 December.* 



Further on Mr. Janes makes the following pertinent 

 remarks on the pcsition of religion in the West and in the 

 East nineteen centuries ago : — 



Eome, with her State religion — a hollow ecclesiasticism to the 

 more intelligent— stood ready, at the demand of self-interest, to 

 dethrone Jupiter, and to pass over the temples of her gods, her 

 images, her festivals, the paraphernalia of her priests, and the title 

 of Pontifex Maximus, then held by Ciesar as the head of the Pagan 

 oultus, to that new religion which, through the supremacy of the 

 emj^ire among the nations of the world, was soon to make such 

 mighty strides toward universal dominion. Her sculptured heads 

 of Jupiter were to descend to posterity, lechristened by the name of 

 .St. Peier, and her little god Vatioanus, whose function it was to 

 watch over the first lisping of infants, was to bestow his name upon 

 the Vatican — the palace of the Christian popes. The great Aryan 

 monotheism of Zoroaster had met in Babylon the great Semitic 

 monotheism of the Hebrew prophets, and, together with some more 

 questionable benefactions, had blessed it with its gift of a belief in 

 a life beyond the grave, and thus prepared the way for one of the 

 leading doctrines of Christianity. The word " Father "as applied to 

 the Supreme Being had entered Judaism from that other contact 

 with the Aryan races through the Greeks, and was used by Jewish 

 Eabbis of the century preceding the birth of Jesus. The Hebrew 

 doctrine of the Messiah had taken a new and more personal form 

 under the influence of contemporary Persian notions, and the 

 stimulus of foreign oppression. Millennial expectations imported 

 from Babylon were " in the air." The writers of the Book of Daniel 

 and the apocryphal Book of Enoch had applied the term " the Son of 

 Man"— a common designation of the prophets— to designate the 

 coming Messiah. Hillel had already proclaimed the "golden rule" 

 (" Do not to others what thou wouldst not they should do unto 

 thee ") as the substance and foundation of Judaism. 



These two chapteis are only introductory to the body of 

 the work, in which the subject of the origin and progress of 

 Christianity is very fully and fairly considered. Mr. Janes, 

 while pointing out the impossibility of reconciling the 

 narratives in the three first Gospels, even with each other, 

 and the complete incongruity of the fourth Gospel, mani- 

 festly the work of a Gentile Gnostic, admits as genuine much 

 more of the specifically historic matter in the Synoptic 

 Gospels than we can for our own part accept. But he gives his 

 reasons, and shows how he has weighed them : he does not 

 mislead by dogmatic assertion. Of course he rejects as 

 manifestly developed from the .solar myth the whole account 

 of the birth and youth of Christ. 



The following passage presents the general result to which 

 Mr. Janes has been led in regard to the character, the 

 opinions, and the views of the founder of Christianity : — 



We have attempted, fairly, with no bias of preconceived opinions, 

 to set forth the leading features in the teaching of Jesus on its 

 theological side, as repotted in the Synoptical Gospels. While 

 recognising the fine humanity of his doctrine of the fatherhood of 

 God and the profound sincerity of all his beliefs, there is evidently 

 much in this teaching which the liberal and cultured thought of 

 modern times has for ever discarded, much that bears tie impress of 

 a primitive and ignorant age and of a narrow and restricted intel- 

 lectual environment. For us there is no encompassing host of 

 demons, no personal prince of evil, no bodily resurrection, no 

 eternal kingdom of immortals to be established upon the earth. If 

 we still hold to the fatherhood and personality of God, it is in quite a 



* The cross was a Mithraic symbol long before the advent of 

 Christianity. It also constituted one of the eight altar implements 

 of the Buddhists, and from very early times had been recognised as 

 the sacred sj mbol of the god Nilus in Egypt. It is also of frequent 

 recurrence in those buried cities of the Troad which Dr. Schliemann 

 has recently exhtuned. 



