                13 page printout, page 240 - 252
                           CHAPTER XIV

                   Pagan Christs Before Jesus

     The Myth of the Virgin Birth -- Christmas Before Christ
         -- Divine Sons and Sages -- Christ and Krishna

                  THE MYTH OF THE VIRGIN BIRTH

     THERE are few doctrines of the Christian faith so vulnerable,
so slight in their foundations, as this of the virgin birth of
Jesus. It is the feeblest statement about Jesus in the whole of the
Gospels. It is unknown to Paul. It grows under our eyes in the New
Testament. And from end to end of the Greco-Roman world, in which
the books of the New Testament were gradually evolved, we find the
mythical material which is suggestively wrought into the familiar
story.

     Let us first examine the story in the Gospels. The earliest
Christian writings are Paul's Epistles. Paul insists that Jesus was
"born of a woman"; but who the woman was he cares not the toss of
a coin, and he knows of no miracle in the conception.

     The next writing, chronologically, is the Gospel of Mark. As
we have it, there is no proof that it existed within forty years of
the death of Christ; yet it is ignorant of the tremendous miracle
of the virgin birth. Jesus, in Mark, enters history, becomes more
than an ordinary man, at the age of thirty. Apparently the original
Mark was just a description of a singularly gifted prophet who was
called by God, or converted by John, in his early manhood.

     Matthew, the next Gospel, also seems in its original form to
have known nothing unusual about the birth of Jesus. The first two
chapters are an afterthought. The Gospel really begins, at the
third chapter, as that of Mark does. Then someone prefaced it with
one of the two genealogies of Jesus that were in circulation (i,
1-17). Next -- the new beginning is quite clear -- somebody added
a short account of how Jesus was born (i, 18-25). Lastly some other
hand added the legends of Chapter ii.

     Luke, a later Gospel, has a much more developed version of the
conception and the birth, How, by the way, we have come to speak,
as we always do, about the "virgin birth" or "miraculous birth," I
do not know. It is the conception, not the birth, that is held to
have been miraculous. The practice has misled more than one
Rationalist into thinking that the "immaculate conception" of Mary
-- that is to say, the conception of Mary by her mother -- is the
same thing as the virgin birth of Jesus.

     However, let us look closely at this late story given in Luke.
Strange, isn't it, that Mary and Elizabeth and Zacharias had such
remarkable experiences, and kept them such a dead secret that Paul
and Mark never heard of them! One desperate and learned divine,
Professor Sanday, suggests that Mary, late in life, confided these
things (including, I suppose, the very words of the long impromptu
poem she composed) to a lady friend, and she, late in life,
confided them to the writer of Luke. But Professor Sanday forgets
to explain the long secrecy. Four times in the New Testament the
brothers of Jesus are mentioned, yet Mary is supposed to have known


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that he had none. Joseph knew it still better. For some mysterious
reason the great events of Chapters i and ii, which would have
converted half of Galilee, had to remain a family secret until the
end of the century.

     Well, let us try again. We are first told that a priest named
Zacharias had a barren wife, and "an angel of the Lord" appeared
and told him that his wife would have a son. This son is to be
"great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor
strong drink"; and then the angel went and said much the same to
Mary, except that her son was to be fatherless.

     Now, divines very delicately avoid bringing to the notice of
their readers another passage of the Bible which I will here
reproduce. It is many centuries older than Luke -- it is in Judges,
Chapter xiii -- and is really interesting:

          2. And there was a certain man of Zorah ... and his wife
     was barren and bare not.

          3. And the angel of the Lord appeared unto the woman, and
     said unto her: Behold, now thou art barren, and bearest not;
     but thou shalt conceive and bear a son.

          4. Now, therefore, beware, I pray thee, and drink not
     wine nor strong drink, and eat not any unclean thing;

          5. For, lo, thou shalt conceive and bear a son; and no
     razor shall come on his head; for the child shall be a
     Nazarite unto God from the womb.

Rather suggestive, isn't it?

     However, the angel tells Mary that she will conceive. As she
is engaged to be married , this should not be a very startling
announcement; but Mary is troubled and expostulates that she "knows
no man." We might leniently suppose that the angel had a cold, and
that Mary understood him to say that she had already conceived. But
the oldest Latin manuscript of Luke has not the words: "How can
this be: I know no man." Somebody, still later, has tampered with
Luke and put in a stupid interpolation. And the source of the
interpolation is known. An apocryphal gospel of the second century
describes Mary as vowed to virginity for life, not engaged to
Joseph; and such virgins sometimes observe their vows.

     Next we are told that "these things were noised abroad through
all the hill country of Judea," and created an enormous sensation.
But apparently everybody forgot all about them again, when Jesus
was a boy, and the secret was only let out a hundred years later.
The other inspired writer makes Mary herself and her sons think of
putting Jesus under restraint on the ground that his mind became
deranged by his idea of a mission! So Mary also had forgotten it,
temporarily.

     However, the birth-time arrived; and it was a very romantic
birth, in the manger of a stable. You see, the Old Testament had
predicted that the Messiah was to be of "the seed of David"; as the
Pharisees are made to remind Jesus in the Gospels. The poor Gospel 

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writers here were in a dilemma. Mary, being related to the priest's
wife, was presumably of the house of Aaron, not David, yet they had
to bring in David. So they made Davidic genealogies -- which seems
to have been unknown to Jesus when the Pharisees wanted his
pedigree -- for Joseph; and, after all, Joseph was the father of
Jesus in every sense except one -- his seed.

     Then, since the Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem, as the
Old Testament said, Luke explains. The Emperor Augustus decreed
that "all the world should be taxed," and each man was to go, with
his family, to the city of his fathers. This meant a journey of
eighty miles for the poor carpenter and his bearing wife; and since
every family in Judea had to do this musical-choir's performance,
and get to the city of his ancestor of a thousand years earlier,
Judea must have presented a highly interesting spectacle. The most
practical Government of ancient times, the Roman, is supposed to
have ordered this piece of lunacy, through the Governor Cyrenius.
But we learn from the historian Josephus that what Cyrenius really
did was a very much smaller matter, and that it was done in the
year 6 A.D., or ten years after the birth of Jesus. Moreover,
northern Palestine was not under Cyrenius, but under the
independent prince Herod Antipas; and the Jews had so little in the
way of tax-registers that in the year 66 A.D. they had to calculate
the population from the number of paschal lambs.

     No Gospel says that Jesus was born in winter. The snow-that-
lay-on-the-ground is an artistic addition of a much later age. But
the journey to Bethlehem and the manger have now melted away like
the snow. Jesus was presumably, as Mark intimates, born in Nazareth
in the usual prosy way. His genealogy in Matthew ends, in the
oldest Syriac version of the Gospel, with the plump statement, "And
Joseph begat Jesus."

     But Luke's fairy tales are not yet over. There were more
miracles, which the shepherds "made known abroad"; and everybody
forgot in a few years. Then the incarnate God submitted to the
delicate operation known politely as circumcision; and there were
more miracles. Yet, when this wonderful being, at the age of
twelve, showed signs of precocious wisdom, his father and mother
"were amazed" (ii, 48) and they nearly went so far as to "box his
ears."

     Matthew -- to turn to him for a moment -- tells us of other
wonders. A miraculous star brought three wise men from the east to
Judea. How the star moved along in such a way as to guide them, and
why it ceased to guide them any longer when they got to Judea (and
so caused the murder of thousands of innocent babes), we are not
told. This story makes its first appearance about the year 119
A.D., and in Rome; and, curiously enough, three wise men had in 66
A.D. been brought to Rome from the east to worship the emperor! As
to the star, had not the inspired Balaam predicted: "There shall
come forth a star out of Jacob"? (Numbers xxiv, 17).

     Next Matthew tells us the tallest story in the whole of this
tissue of legends. These wise men, led by a star which nobody sees
but themselves, and which moves in such a way as to guide them
across country -- one apologist suggests that it was a meteorite 


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(which moves at the rate of about a hundred miles a second!) --
arrive at Jerusalem and lose the scent. The divine guidance then
acts in a way which certainly perplexes the mere human mind. The
sages are moved to go and tell King Herod that a new "King of the
Jews" has been born somewhere; and Herod, in a fury, and believing
the statement with childish credulity, orders the murder of all the
children in Bethlehem and the entire region under the age of two
and a half years. The little Almighty is taken, presumably on
donkey-back, hundreds of miles across the desert, to get out of the
way, and let the innocent suffer. Miracles and apparitions crowd
the narrative; but the simple miracle of changing the king's heart
and sparing the children occurs to nobody.

     The Christian cannot expect a non-Christian to write politely
about such things as this. What we may more profitably do, however,
is to remind him that just such a massacre and hiding of a child of
great promise from the wrath of a king is one of the oldest themes
in mythology. Turn to Exodus (i, 15-22):

          And the King of Egypt spake to the Hebrew midwives. ...
     And he said, When ye do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew
     women, and see them upon the stools; if it be a son, then ye
     shall kill him. ...

And so Moses was (like Sargon of Babylon thousands of years before)
hidden in an ark of bulrushes on the river. Herodotus, the Greek
historian, tells us that King Cyrus of Persia had similarly to be
hidden away at birth from a jealous king; and every Jew knew the
story of Cyrus. Suetonius, the Roman historian, gives a similar
legend about the birth of the Emperor Augustus. But one could fill
whole pages with legends of new-born gods and mortals of great
promise thus pursued by reigning monarchs, and we will return to
the subject later. The wholesale "massacre" alone is peculiar to
the Jesus-story; and that horrible detail is enough of itself to
damn it. No Jewish writer ever heard of the horror.

     Thus the wonderful story of the birth of Jesus, which grows
before our eyes in the New Testament, does not appear until at
least a century after the event. "What," asks the learned divine
Bishop Rashdall, "would an historian make of a legend about the
birth of Napoleon which did not appear until a hundred years after
the event?"

                     CHRISTMAS BEFORE CHRIST

     As I have said, there is no clue in the Gospels to the time of
the year when Jesus is supposed to have been born: except, indeed,
that it cannot have been midwinter, for that is the rainy season
and shepherds would not be out at night. Even Jewish mothers would
cherish birthdays; but Miriam of Nazareth either forgot the date of
that very wonderful day or omitted to mention it in her
communication, late in life, of the remarkable story. Early
Christendom found itself in the peculiar position of telling the
world of the most tremendous birth there ever was on this planet
and being quite unable to say when it happened. It was centuries
before even the year could be determined; and then it was
determined wrongly. Nobody now holds that Jesus was born in the 
year 1 A.D.

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     The result was that for several hundred years the various
Churches celebrated the birthday of the Lord on different dates.
The eastern Churches generally kept it on January 6th, which is now
the Epiphany. Other Churches chose April 24th or 25th; and some
placed it in May. It was not until 354 A.D. that the Church chose
December 25th as the anniversary of the birthday of Christ. Rome
was then the leading Church; and why Rome hesitated so long, and
why in the middle of the fourth century (when it was, with imperial
aid, trying to bring in the whole Roman Empire) it had to choose
December 25th, we must now see.

     In order to realize it, to see how the rise of Christianity is
a very human part of human evolution, let us imagine ourselves as
members of the small and obscure group of Christians in Rome, say,
in the fourth century. We have two poor meeting-places -- one of
them is a room above a small wine-shop -- in the despised quarter
of Rome beyond the river (the slope of the Vatican Hill) where
criminals live and the dead are buried.

     Mid-winter approaches and Rome is lit up with joy. It is the
festival of the old vegetation-god Saturn who (as a god) died, or
was displaced by Jupiter, the sky-god. But he has a fine temple on
the Capitol, and his festival lasts seven days and is the most
joyous time of the joyous Roman year. For one day slaves are free.
They don the conical cap of the freedman -- as good Christians
continue at Christmas to don such caps of paper, and hilarious
Americans don them at festive dinners today -- and sit at table
while masters wait on them.

     Stalls laden with presents line the streets near the Forum;
and the great present of the season is a doll, of wax or terra-
cotta. Hundreds of thousands of dolls lie on the stalls or in the
arms of passers-by. Once, no doubt, human beings were sacrificed to
Saturn, and, as man grew larger than his religion, as he constantly
does, the god (or his priests) had to be content with effigies of
men or maids, or dolls. Crowds fill the streets and raise festive
cries. It was a time of peace on earth -- for by Roman law no war
could begin during the Saturnalia -- and of good-will toward all
men.

     For a whole week, from December 17th to 24th, no work is done.
The one law is good cheer, good nature. But the 25th also is a
solemn festival, for it is marked in large type in the Roman
calendar "Birthday of the Unconquered Sun."

     Neither Romans nor Christians understood these things. The
festival went back far into the mists of prehistoric times. It had
been earlier a one-day festival, the feast of Saturn: a very
important magics-religious festival for insuring the harvest of the
next year, rejoicing that the year's work was over, and, no doubt,
helping and propitiating the god of fecundity by generous
indulgence in wine and love. Dimly, also, these people knew that
the mysterious winter dying of the sun was arrested. It was on the
turn. But only an accurate astronomy could decide which was the
real day of the solstice, so they celebrated the 25th as the great
day of the sun's rebirth.



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     We can well understand the anxious debates of these early
Christians about the birthday of the Lord. Christ was the real sun
that had risen upon the world. Why not boldly take "the birthday of
the unconquered sun"? That would, incidentally, help to conciliate
"the masses." But all this ribaldry and license and fooling ...
Besides, there was another reason.

     While the Christians gathered dingily in their two little
back-rooms on the Vatican Hili, there was another and more
prosperous Asiatic religion housed on the same hill. Mithraism, as
it was called, gave the Christians a very anxious time: not merely
because it spread more rapidly, and was more respected, but because
it was so strikingly like Christianity.

     Mithra was an old Aryan sun-god. The reform of the Persian
religion by Zarathustra had put the ethical deity Abura Mazda so
high above the old nature-gods that he was practically the one god.
But Mithra stole upward, as gods do, and Persian kings of the fifth
century B.C. put him on a level with Ahura Mazda.

     Then the Persians conquered and blended with Babylon, and
Mithra rose to the supreme position and became an intensely ethical
deity. He was, like Aten, the sun of the world in the same sense as
Christ. He was honored with the sacrifice of the pleasures of life,
and was himself credited with no amours as Zeus was. Drastic
asceticism and purity were demanded of his worshipers. They were
baptized in blood. They practiced the most severe austerities and
fasts. They had a communion-supper of bread and wine. They
worshiped Mithra in underground temples, or artificial caves, which
blazed with the light of candles and reeked with incense.

     And every year they celebrated the birthday of this god who
had come, they said, to take away the sins of the world; and the
day was December 25th. As that day approached, near midnight of the
24th, Christians might see the stern devotees of Mithra going to
their temple on the Vatican, and at midnight it would shine with
joy and light. The Savior of the world was born. He had been born
in a cave, like so many other sun-gods: and some of the apocryphal
Gospels put the birth of Christ in a cave. He had had no earthly
father. He was born to free men from sin, to redeem them.

     F. Cumont, the great authority on Mithra, has laboriously
collected for us all these details about the Persian religion, and
more than one of the Christian Fathers refers nervously to the
close parallel of the two religions. The Savior Mithra was in
possession, had been in possession for ages, of December 25th as
his birthday. He was the real "unconquered sun": a sun-god
transformed into a spiritual god, with light as his emblem and
purity his supreme command. What could the Christians do? Nothing,
until they had the ear of the emperors. Then they appropriated
December 25th, and even bits of the Mithraic ritual; and they so
zealously destroyed the traces of the Mithraic religion that one
has to be a scholar to know anything about it.

     The Saturnalia and "the birthday of the unconquered sun" and
the birthday of Mithra were not all. A Roman writer of the fourth
century, Macrobius, in a work called "Saturnalia" (i, 18) discusses
the practice of representing the gods in the temples as of
different ages. He says:
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          These differences of age refer to the sun, which seems to
     be a babe at the winter solstice, as the Egyptians represent
     him in their temples on a certain day: that being the shortest
     day, he is then supposed to be small and an infant.

And this is confirmed by, and receives very interesting addition
from, a Christian writer, the author of the "Paschal Chronicle." He
says:

          Jeremiah gave a sign to the Egyptian priests, saying that
     their idols would be destroyed by a child-savior, born of a
     virgin and lying in a manger. Wherefore they still worship as
     a goddess a virgin-mother, and adore an infant in a manger.
     (Col. 385 in the Migne edition, vol. XCII.)

The explanation is, of course, ludicrous. As I explain in the
chapter on Egyptian religion, Horus, the deity in question, was a
very old sun-god of the Egyptians. In the adjustment of the rival
Egyptian gods, when the tribes were amalgamated in one kingdom,
Horus was made the son of Osiris and Isis. The latter goddess was,
as I said, the sister and the spouse (or lover) of Osiris; but
whether we should speak of her as "a virgin mother" is a matter of
words. In one Egyptian myth she was fecundated by Osiris in their
mother's womb: in another and more popular, she was miraculously
impregnated by contact with the phallus of the dead Osiris.
Virginity in goddesses is a relative matter.

     Whatever we make of the original myth, however, Isis seems to
have been originally a virgin (or, perhaps, sexless) goddess, and
in the later period of Egyptian religion she was again considered
a virgin goddess, demanding very strict abstinence from her
devotees. It is at this period, apparently, that the birthday of
Horus was annually celebrated, about December 25th, in the temples.
As both Macrobius and the Christian writer say, a figure of Horus
as a baby was laid in a manger, in a scenic reconstruction of a
stable, and a statue of Isis was placed beside it. Horus was, in a
sense, the Savior of mankind. He was their avenger against the
powers of darkness; he was the light of the world. His birth-
festival was a real Christmas before Christ.

     In passing, we may recall that just such a spectacle is
presented in every Roman Catholic church in the world on December
25th. Catholics will tell you that St. Francis of Assisi invented
this tender and touching method of bringing home to men the humble
birth of the redeemer. I know too much about Francis of Assisi to
imagine that he had ever read the obscure "Paschal Chronicle," in
which I discovered this interesting passage some years ago. But
certainly some other Christian writer had seen and reproduced it,
and it had come to the knowledge of Francis. If a Catholic prefers
to believe that Francis of Assisi did in reality conceive this
method of representing the birth of Christ, he could not give us a
better proof of the identity of the Christian and the Egyptian
belief! The Catholic "crib" is an exact reproduction of the "show"
exhibited in Egyptian temples centuries before Christ; and the
Egyptian legend itself is thousands of years older than Jeremiah.
On the analogy of the Christian practice we may infer that the 



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Egyptian legend described Isis as having given birth to her divine
son in a stable. In Alexandria there was a similar Greek
celebration on December 25th of the birth of a divine son to Kore
(the "virgin").

     And this is not the end. The Greeks had a similar celebration.
The general idea of a divine son being born in a cave was, as we
shall see presently, common; or there were actually several scenic
representations of the birth of these gods in their festivals. J.M.
Robertson gives three in his "Christianity and Mythology" (p. 330).
Hermes, the Logos (like Jesus in John), the messenger of the gods,
son of Zeus and the virgin Maia, was born in a cave, and he
performed extraordinary prodigies a few hours after birth. He was
represented as a "child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in
a manger." Dionysos (or Bacchus) was similarly represented. The
image of him as a babe was laid in a basket-cradle in the cave in
which he was born. There is good reason to think that Mithra was
figured in the same way.

     We understand why the Church so long hesitated to put the
birth of Christ at the winter solstice, and why there was no scenic
representation of the birth until the Middle Ages. From end to end
of the Roman Empire December 25th was the birthday of the
unconquered sun, of the Savior Mithra, and of the divine Horus and
they and the others I have mentioned, whose festivals were in other
seasons, were represented almost exactly as the birth of Christ was
described in the Gospels and is depicted in Catholic churches
today.

     And we must not overlook the Teutonic element. Every Roman was
familiar from childhood with the great mid-winter festival; and in
the earliest days of the Christian era the religions of Persia and
Egypt, with similar festivals, spread over the Empire. But the
nations of the north also had their greatest festival of the year
in mid-winter. To these northern barbarians, shuddering in the
snow-laden forests beyond the Danube, the return of the sun was the
most desired event of the year; and they soon learned,
approximately, the time -- the winter solstice -- when the "wheel"
turned. The sun was figured as a fiery wheel; and as late as the
nineteenth century there were parts of France where a straw wheel
was set on fire and rolled down a hill, to give an augury of the
next harvest.

     Hence "Yule" (from the same old Teutonic word hoel or wheel)
was the outstanding festival of the ancestors of the French and
Germans, the English and Scandinavians. The sun was born; and fires
("Yule-logs," such as are burned in British homes at Christmas
today) flamed in the forest-villages, the huts were decorated with
holly and evergreens, Yule trees were laden with presents, and
stores of solid food and strong drink were lavishly opened. This
lasted until Twelfth Day, now Epiphany.

     Thus almost the entire civilized world of more than two
thousand years ago "had its Christmas before Christ." "The figure
of Christ," says Kalthoff, "is drawn in all its chief features
before a line of the Gospels was written." At least the figure of
Jesus in what is deemed its most captivating form was drawn in 


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every feature long before it was presented in the Gospels. The
first symbol of the Christian religion, the manger or basket-cradle
of the divine child, the supposed unique exhortation to humility,
was one of the most familiar religious emblems of the pagan world.
Had it been exhibited to a crowd in one of the cosmopolitan cities
of the Empire, it would have been strange or new to very few. One
might pronounce it Horus, another Mithra, another Hermes, another
Dionysos; but all would have shrugged their shoulders nonchalantly
at the news that it was just another divine child in the great
family of gods. The world flowed on. The names only were changed.

                      DIVINE SONS AND SAGES

     It is difficult to keep a firm sense of proportion in studying
such a question as that which now occupies us. We swim in a stream
of myths that almost makes us dizzy. We find Christs and
Christmases, virgin mothers and divine sons, stable births and
persecuting monarchs, angelic annunciations and foster-fathers
throughout nearly the whole religious world of two thousand years
ago.

     These things are now a settled part of our knowledge. The
celebrations of the birthdays of Mithra and Horus are as certain as
the Saturnalia. It is as certain that there were scores of legends
of the miraculous birth of gods, demigods, and heroes in the
ancient world as it is that the Chaldeans knew astronomy and the
Romans knew shorthand.

     There is, therefore, a strong temptation to dissolve away the
whole story of Jesus into mythical elements: to regard it merely as
a mosaic made out of differently colored bits of marble from the
quarries of the older religions. The sun-myth theory, in
particular, is strained to explain all kinds of innocent-looking
statements of the biography of Jesus in the Gospels. I cannot
follow these writers. The criticisms which Dr. F.C. Conybeare (a
doctor of theology, yet an Agnostic, and a fine scholar) has too
harshly directed at them in his "Historical Christ" seem to me in
substance justified.

     But in that work (and his equally useful and judicious "Myth,
Magic and Morals," which also is really about the subject we are
discussing) Dr. Conybeare makes one serious mistake. He knows well
all the figures of history and mythology to which are attached
these legends of supernatural birth and world-redeeming character.
But are we to suppose, he asks, that the not very well educated
writers of the Gospels knew these things? The objection certainly
holds for some of the mythical elements which have been traced to
Rome or India, and to obscure poetry and ritual. The writers of the
Gospels were ill-educated Syrians or Greeks (I prefer to think,
Greeks) whose acquaintance with comparative religion was limited.
"Not too much zeal" is a good motto for mythologists.

     But the chief mythical constituents of the life of Jesus were
known all over the cosmopolitan Greco-Roman world: most
particularly in that overlapping fringe of the Greco-Roman and the
Persian-Egyptian worlds -- the eastern coast of the Mediterranean
-- where the Gospels were certainly composed. Whatever city we may 


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favor as the cradle of the Gospels, Alexandria or Antioch, Smyrna
or Ephesus, every myth and ritual representation we have so far
mentioned was familiar there. Mithraism spread from Persia to
Britain. Roman soldiers prayed to Mithra in the towers in which
they guarded the north of England from the marauding Scots. The
religion of Isis and Horus was even more familiar round the
Mediterranean. The legend and ritual of Dionysos were hardly less
familiar.

     And this is not yet half the story of the saturation, before
the time of Jesus, of the Greco-Roman world with Christ-like myths.
It is advisable first to lay the whole material, or as much of it
as can be compressed here, before the reader, and then we may
consider how it must affect belief in the story of Jesus.

     I am mainly concerned in this chapter with the legend of the
virgin birth, but the death and resurrection legends were just as
widely diffused. Now, in the face of the matter it may not seem
necessary to appeal to any pagan beliefs to explain this Christian
legend. The Septuagint (Greek) version of the Old Testament plainly
(by a false translation) said, "A virgin shall conceive"; and this
was referred to the Messiah. Moreover, the belief in the divinity
of Christ, which very quickly developed, would of itself inspire
the idea that the divine Jesus, who frowned on or despised conjugal
relations, had not chosen to come into the world by that agency.
But the world of the time was so steeped in myths of virgin births
that the Gospel writers, or the early Christians in whose circles
the Gospel stories developed, must have had many cases in mind.

     But we must not be tempted to wander over that world of weird
and wonderful superstitions of two thousand years ago. No idea was
more familiar than the impregnation of a woman by a deity; and, if
she had been hitherto a virgin, she was held to be a virgin mother.
Every Greek and Egyptian knew a score of such; and it was in the
Greco-Egyption world that the Christian legend evolved. Most
prominent of all were the greatest of Egyptian goddesses, Isis, and
the greatest of Greek goddesses, Cybele. When at last the Church
was forced to permit a veneration of a semi-divine mother, to
compete with the most popular feature of pagan religion, statues of
and hymns to Isis and Cybele were appropriated to Mary.

                       CHRIST AND KRISHNA

     We may now pause to consider the moral, the suggestion, of
this rich mythology of the old Jewish and pagan world. Had I the
leisure and space of Sir J.G. Frazer, I might expand and arrange
this material in a series of volumes which would show the human
imagination developing the mythical forms of its religious ideas
and passing gradually from prehistoric poetry to the dogmatic creed
of the new religion. Here I must be content to summarize the facts
and briefly indicate what seem to be the reasonable conclusions
from them.

     And the first consideration which, on a reasonable view, must
occur to any impartial person is that, if the birth of an incarnate
god had been annually celebrated for ages in the ancient world, and
was celebrated particularly in the region where Christianity 


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developed, it is not in the least likely that such a birth at last
took place as an historical event. Setting aside religious
sentiment, taking a purely human or historical view of the matter,
there is a very strong presumption that the early Christians
attributed to their savior the kind of birth that was ascribed to
the deities of rival religions.

     This presumption becomes a practical certainty when we recall
how slowly the belief grew up in the Christian body, and how late
it was. Paul knows nothing of it. Mark, which on many grounds we
know to be the oldest Gospel, knows nothing of it. Matthew in his
original form knows nothing of it. Luke, the latest, has a long
story about it. We reach something like the third decade of the
second century before the story appears; though it must
unquestionably have circulated in the Churches for some time before
Luke could write it.

     The real difficulty, which is often not appreciated by
Rationalists, is to understand the frame of mind of men and women
who, while regarding pagan religions as inventions of the devil,
could borrow any mythical material from them. Clerics would do
better to use that argument, rather than ask people to believe the
virgin birth because it is in Luke, when there is not a shred of
evidence that it was in Luke before at least the end of the first
century.

     But we must not exaggerate this difficulty. Rome, when it
forced Christianity upon Europe, deliberately adopted a very large
amount of paganism. Bits of ritual, altars, statues, hymns, local
deities, etc., were taken into the new religion. Does even the
orthodox suppose that Jesus ordered the use of candles, incense,
holy water, and vestments? Yet these things were fully adopted by
the new religion.

     The truth is that we have very little historical knowledge of
the Christians of the first century. Between the simple groups of
Jesus-worshipers of Paul's Epistles and Acts, and the developed
Christian doctrine of the second century, lies a whole world of
evolution on which we have no positive light. The reasonable view,
for this part of the life of Jesus, seems to be that the influence
of the Old Testament, the shape given by the Jews to the supposed
messianic prophecies, the natural impulse of ascetic believers to
isolate Jesus from all sexual intercourse, and the broad beliefs of
the Persians, Egyptians, and Greeks about the birth of their
saviors," cooperated in that obscure and loosely organized world to
give shape to the traditional figure of Jesus.

     At all events, Asiatic religion had its Christs as well as the
religions of nearer Asia and of Europe. The Shin Ho (Holy Mother)
of the Chinese and Japanese is commonly represented with a divine
son. Even Kong-fu-tse, who escaped the common fate of reformers --
deification -- was credited with supernatural portents at birth. It
is a natural urge of the devout mind to invest its hero with
superhuman experiences.

     It is, however, in India chiefly that we find parallels.
Buddha's teaching, as settled by modern scholars, was so decidedly
non-religious that one would not expect him ever to be adorned with

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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

a supernatural halo. He not only plainly disavowed all the gods of
India, but he bade his disciples waste no time in disputing about
God and personal immortality. He was an Agnostic, a humanitarian.
Yet, pure Buddhism almost perished from the earth. What is
generally called Buddhism in Asia has no more relation to Buddha's
teaching than Roman Catholicism has to the teaching of Jesus. It is
a system of temples and statues, priests and monks, rosaries and
censers, rites and vestments, heavens and bells.

     In that atmosphere the figure of Buddha himself was bound to
be degraded to the divine level: I say "degraded," because what
would seem admirable and superior in Buddha and Jesus if they were
men, becomes petty and trivial when one measures them by a divine
standard. Here I am concerned only with the birth-stories.
Christian apologists deny that there is any parallel with Jesus on
the narrow ground that Buddha's mother, Maya, was married. The real
parallel is that the later Buddhists would not have their deity
born of carnal intercourse, and he was therefore said to be the
outcome of a miraculous conception. Whether in such case we ought
or ought not to call his mother a virgin is a matter of words. But
Mr. Robertson shows from St. Jerome that the Buddhists themselves
did call Maya "a virgin" -- they believed in a "virgin birth" --
and he rightly rejects the statement of Professor Rhys Davids that
these Buddhists understood the birth of Buddha quite differently
from the Christians because "before his descent into his mother's
womb he was a deva." That is exactly what Christians say of Jesus.

     In the very popular Hindu deity Krishna, however, we have, in
many respects, a closer parallel to Christ. It is so close in some
details that earlier scholars were tempted to think that these were
derived from an early Christian mission to India. Modern scholars
reject the idea, and they wonder only if some parts of the Christ
and the Krishna legend did not come from a common source: a source
which some find in the legends about the Persian King Cyrus given
by the Greek historian Herodotus.

     The Hindu branch of the Hindu and Persian race, the eastern
part of the Aryan race, lost in the luxuriant plains of India the
severity of the older religion, and richly developed its phallic
and sensual elements. In that world Buddhism failed, and the cult
of Krishna gained in popularity until it appealed more than any
other of the numerous religions of India. We have clear proof that
the religion flourished in India two or three centuries before
Christ; but whether there is any historical personage at the root
of it, as in the case of Buddhism, we cannot say.

     The orthodox legend of Krishna is that he was born of a
married woman, Devaki; but like Maya, Buddha's mother, she was
considered to have had a miraculous conception. We come nearer to
the story of Jesus when we read that King Kansa was warned in a
vision that the son of Devaki would destroy him, and take his
place, and the child had at once to be taken away out of reach of
the monarch. The king had Devaki's earlier children put to death
("murder of the innocents"), and Krishna had to be saved, as King
Cyrus was saved from the King of the Medes and Moses from the King
of Egypt. Krishna, moreover, gave signs of his real divine origin
soon after his birth and in his boyhood. In the end Krishna -- who 


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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

is most unchristlike in his amorous adventures among the milkmaids,
which endear him to the unascetic Hindu -- killed King Kansa, took
his place, and wrought marvelous things for his people.

     Thus one of the familiar religious emblems of India was the
statue of the virgin mother (as the Hindus repute her) Devaki and
her divine son Krishna, an incarnation of the great god Vishnu.
Christian writers have held that this model was borrowed from
Christianity, but, as Mr. Robertson observes, the Hindus had far
earlier been in communication with Egypt and were more likely to
borrow the model of Isis and Horus. One does not see why they
should borrow any model, In nearly all religions with a divine
mother and son a very popular image was that of the divine infant
at his mother's breast or in her arms.

     Two more different conceptions of an incarnate deity than
those of Christ and Krishna it would be difficult to imagine.
Krishna is, in a sense, a patron, a model, of amorous adventure
and, in his manhood, a great warrior. Jesus is the prophet of sin,
the denouncer of love, the archetype of the pacifist. Yet
worshipers far away on the plains of India came to conceive the
appearance on earth of their deity much as the Christians of the
first century conceived theirs. Neither borrowed from the other.
Was there a common source in some of the older mythic material I
have described, or shall we see here only a parallel evolution of
the religious imagination playing about the birth of a god? Perhaps
both; but the answer does not concern me here. The Jesus-ideal is
so far from unique that it is, on the contrary, one version of a
legend which stretches over three thousand years of time and is
found equally in Egypt and Syria, Greece and Rome. The stream of
religious evolution flowed on.




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