For nearly two thousand years now the Christian has been given an unbearable burden to carry on his way through life: he is inflicted with original sin from birth and he needs the ‘Redeemer’ to free himself from it.
We all learnt in school and church that God was the beginning and end of everything, alpha and omega, that God was almighty, infinitely good, all-righteous, omniscient, omnipresent and eternal.
So far I accept the concept of God without reservations. But because he is eternal God is also timeless: he knows no yesterday, today or tomorrow. Eternal and omnipresent God does not need to await the results of his measures. He does not need to ask how they are going to turn out, for he already knows the answer.
In my Catholic school I listened attentively to the charming story of how God in his goodness made two harmless creatures a present of a stay in Paradise, the home of joy and happiness. Adam and Eve, the chosen ones, lived a carefree-existence. They lacked nothing and they had no desires or longings. There was only one thing that was strictly forbidden them by God the Father. They must not eat of the Tree of Knowledge. It was the first case of ‘Off limits’!
We are nonplussed. Why did the Almighty make this strict prohibition? Did he enjoy this kindergarten for the first people on earth? Could God share the human happiness which Adam and Eve experienced in the Garden of Eden, since he, the sublime, stood high above mankind? Why did he want to keep ‘knowledge’ from his first-created children?
Theologians have an answer. God wanted to ‘bestow love’ on them and wished that they should both ‘partake’ of his kingdom. For heavens’ sake! According to that interpretation, God is supposed to have yearned for love … and to have felt lonely. In my opinion, those are not feelings that befit God, for he of all people is boundlessly happy in his omnipotence. An intermediate condition – ‘A little love might be nice’ or ‘It’s boring, playmates wouldn’t be a bad idea’ – does not exist for an exclusive God. So what was he trying to achieve with his humans in Paradise?
Again, theologians have the answer pat. God wanted to lead Adam and Eve into temptation, he wanted to test them. That doesn’t wash, reverend gentlemen. What kind of low opinion have they of God? ‘Temptation’ and ‘testing’ would be mere cardsharper’s tricks, since he, the omniscient, must have known the results of the temptation beforehand. Now suppose we play with the idea that they did not, having free will, eat the apple. What would have happened if they had not recognized their shameful nakedness – and with it the possibility of procreation? Would God have had to create more and more human beings – on the assembly-line system? People, who, thanks to their free will, would not have striven for ‘knowledge’, because they obediently observed God’s ban? God obviously had the ‘Fall’ in his calculations, because he was omniscient. Otherwise many countries in the world would not be bursting at the seams with overpopulation today.
Adam and Eve did not pluck the apple from the bough casually. There was a tempter, the devil or snake. But every created thing comes from God. At least, that’s what we’ve learnt. So that logically the devil (or snake) is also a product of God. Was our benevolent God so infamous as to create a devil or snake in order to deceive two innocents? And why is God so shocked after the vegetarian meal to find that from then on sin is ineradicable in his world? HE knew in advance exactly what would happen.
Theologists tug at my sleeve. It wasn’t like that! Lucifer, the devil, they say, was a renegade in God’s kingdom. A renegade in the kingdom of heaven? If the ‘kingdom of heaven’ equals bliss (as we are promised), there cannot be any opposition, rebels or renegades in it. Either – or. If God’s kingdom guarantees the state of perfect happiness, Lucifer, would certainly not have had the idea of disobeying God. However, if absolute happiness did not exist there, it was because God was not almighty enough to create such a state. Here, too, there is a weak point in the theologians’ argument. They are unable either to dismiss the struggle between God and Lucifer or to motivate it logically. Before Lucifer approached the inhabitants of Paradise to tempt them, God must have known that his devilishness would succeed. And the business of Adam and Eve’s ‘free will’ remains a kind of deus ex machina. Even with the interpolation of Lucifer, the snake, Adam and Eve acted at the will and behest of almighty God.
To a man who takes the word that was taught him at its face value, the situation presents itself as follows: God did not live in a perfect heaven, for there was an opposition in it, Lucifer set to work in Paradise and egged on Adam and Eve to commit a sin which God knew was about to happen. Then the apple was eaten. Then came the crowning episode: (omniscient) God was so offended that, beside himself with wrath, he cursed the innocent descendants of the first married couple for all eternity and branded the stain of ‘original sin’ on to the family tree as a ghastly heritage. Everyone born since then carries ‘original sin’ with him from the cradle.
How can miserable mankind be freed of this burden? Only by a redeemer. The Bible says: ‘God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son …’
Not being overcritical, people accepted this son who had cropped up so suddenly, although it is difficult to conceive of the one and only God with a family. This son is to be envied, since he has a ‘heavenly’ father, full of love, goodness and solicitude. That is what one would think, but it is not the case. He is handed over to mankind (suffering under the burden of original sin), so that he can free his brother and sisters from their burden. The son of God has to be nailed to the Cross and bled to death in agony. After the death of his ‘only begotten son’ God is appeased again! Surely this ghastly story contains ideas from barbaric pagan cults? This dogma of redemption seems to me to be a kind of throwback to primitive religions which forced their servants to propitiate their wrathful Gods with blood sacrifices.
The crucifixion, theologians assure us, is only to be understood symbolically. Why is this not made quite clear in religious teaching? My daughter Lela learns – like all previous generations – that Jesus was the only begotten son of God made flesh, that he suffered every pain (the oppressing original sins) as a man. That he died as a man, struggled as a man, with all the attendant torments and miseries. But how can God, who knowingly let his own son be tortured – because Adam and Eve committed a sin that he could easily have prevented through his fore-knowledge – be reconciled by Christ’s death with the very men who killed him? (With this macabre end to the story, original sin should really have been banished from the world. But it is still about.)
Theologians, full of ideas and skilled in dialectics, recently sought a path which would lead out of this dilemma, but it terminated in a dead end.
They now say that God the Father did not so love the world that he sacrificed his only begotten son, but that Jesus sacrificed himself of his own ‘free will’ out of love of mankind. Unfortunately this about-turn does not produce any significant conclusion.
God the Father and God the Son are unalloyed and inseparable, according to Christian dogma (the Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds). So it makes no difference what one or the other does. Either way the sacrifice remains senseless. Father and Son were (and are) ‘one’ from the beginning according to current doctrine. Hence both of them knew what was going to happen at any given moment. As this does not resolve the contradiction, the ecclesiastical teachers thought up an – absolutely final? – interpretation. Jesus wanted to show mankind how they should live in order to please God the Father.
Does that bring us back to the beginning again, to zero? If the whole of mankind is supposed to become ‘pleasing to God’, then the Almighty would simply have had to plan that our ancestors Adam and Eve should become so, according to his divine will. That would have been quite within his powers, wouldn’t it?
Surely the dogmas of original sin and redemption lack any kind of foundation when considered in the cold light of reason?
Even in the interests of the Christian churches, I consider blood sacrifices and redemption by the crucifixion to be dangerous doctrines. Made dogmas by the early councils, they became the authority for torture and murder during the trials of heretics, they became the approved rituals of the Inquisition and even today they ‘inspire’ salvation-seeking youth and members of obscure sects to ghastly exorcistic ritual murders, with those sacrifices, these criminals still pretend to ‘propitiate’ God.
Jesus was a Jew. His date of birth is unknown. His name is not to be found in any register of births, yet the Christian west bases its calendar on the ostensible (and accepted) year of Jesus’ birth. The first time that his name appears is in one of St. Paul’s epistles, about the year 50 of the new era.
In the Gospels according to St. Matthew and St. Luke it says Jesus was ‘born at Bethlehem’. St. Mark, on the other hand, names Nazareth as the place of birth. Right from the birth of the Redeemer, confusion and contradictions make the Bible adventurous reading.
Mary is universally mentioned as his mother. His father, Joseph the carpenter, is not the physical father, for Mary received the sperm by ‘immaculate conception’ with the co-operation of the Holy Ghost. That is Christian popular belief, for reason cannot grasp this process of impregnation. So especially illuminated theologians take great pains to prove what is meant by ‘immaculate conception’.
According to the official biography, the New Testament, the trail of the infant Jesus is lost after his birth until he suddenly crops up again in the Temple as a twelve-year-old runaway in heated theological conversation with scholars. Unfortunately we never know exactly what is true and what is not, what actually happened and what forgers invented (original texts!).
If it is correct, and that is what I am assuming here, that the twelve-year-old could tie the clever temple scholars up in theological discussion, the precocious lad must have been drilled in the Old Testament texts in some contemporary school.
What kind of school was available to him? We must recall the historical background to find the answer.
The territory we call the ‘Near East’ today belonged, at the time we are concerned, to the gigantic Roman Empire. Damascus was conquered in 64 B.C. by the famous general Pompeius Magnus (106-48), Jerusalem was taken in 37 and Egypt became a Roman province in 30. What happened in this century to Gaius Julius Caesar in the conquered and occupied territories is not hidden in historic mist.
Presumably occupying forces have been made of the same stuff in all ages. At all events the Romans brought their way of life with them and propagated their culture in the occupied countries. The Roman soldiers were no saints: they worshiped Apollo (taken over from the Greeks), the god of poetry, music and youth, emptied their beakers to the health of the god Bacchus (Dionysus), wooed the goddess Fortuna for luck, implored pity from Jupiter, god of lightning, thunder and justice, prayed to Neptune, god of water, for rain, knelt in devotion before Sol, the sun god. Abomination to any orthodox Jew!
For more than 400 years – Ezra compiled the text of the Torah as early as 440 B.C. – the Jewish people had lived according to the Mosaic Law, the Pentateuch and the Torah. And the patriarch Moses said in the law:
Thou shall have no other gods before me.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,
or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above,
or that is in the earth beneath,
or that is in the water under the earth.
Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them; for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God. (Exodus 20:4-5)
Moses was a monotheist. When the founder of the Jewish religion had led the Israelites back into Palestine from Egypt circa 1230 B.C. he had the legendary tablets with the commandments set up on Mount Sinai. Thus the recognition and worship of a single god was an old tradition, when the Romans practiced polytheism among the Jews.
The Jews could do nothing about it. With gnashing of teeth they lived together with the hated heavily armed occupiers, who, I should remark in passing, neither encouraged nor forced conquered peoples to worship their gods. Very sensibly, they even gave them a measure of self-government. True, the Temple was guarded by Roman soldiers, but it was administered by Jews. In the forecourts money-changers, merchants with their stalls and artisans in their booths carried on their business.
So at the time of the Roman occupation, the time of Jesus, the Torah – the basic law of the Jewish state since 443 B.C. – was still the religious doctrine of the Jews.
The Sadducees, representatives of the conservative religious party, were strict guardians, preservers and teachers of the Mosaic law. One possible school for the infant Jesus could be sought among them … The Sadducees’ opponents were the Pharisees, the progressives, who admittedly also kept the letter of the Mosaic Law, but who accepted angels and resurrection from the dead in their teaching. As scribes they gained considerable influence of Judaism at the time of Jesus with their law schools. Here was a second possible answer to the problem of Jesus’ schooling.
If we follow the gospels, Jesus did not agree with the Sadducees or the Pharisees. He often made fun of the ‘scribes’ and the New Testament also states that they did not accept the forward young man as one of their kind. But if Jesus had been a graduate of a Sadducees’ or Pharisees school, he would have been recognized or expelled as a renegade. Nothing of the kind has been handed down: the name of Jesus of Bethlehem or Nazareth does not figure in any writings by the scribes. The disputatious Jesus must have acquired his knowledge somewhere else. Where? Was there a third school? There was, but it has not been common knowledge for very long.
Until A.D. 68 the extraordinary conservative fraternity of the Essenes lived deliberately isolated from temple Jewry in a monastic-like habitat that had been rebuilt after an earthquake. It was situated at Chirbet Qumran in a fissured mountainous region on the Dead Sea. The ‘Army of Salvation’ traced their origin to a ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ from the time of the Maccabees, centuries before Christ. The Essenes concluded their New Covenant in order to prepare the Messianic kingdom. The oldest reports about this ascetic sect are found in an essay by Philo of Alexandria (25 B.C. – A.D. 50): ‘Quod omnis probus liber sit’.
Palestinian Syria, inhabited by a considerable section of the very numerous people of the Jews, is also not unfruitful in the production of virtues. Certain of them, more than 4,000 in number, are called Essenes; in my view, although it is not strictly speaking a Greek word, it is connected with the word ‘holiness’; these are in fact men who are quite specially devoted to the service of God but they do not make animal sacrifices. They find it more advisable to consecrate their thoughts. … They amass neither silver, nor gold, and they do not cultivate large tracts of land because they want to get income from them, but limit themselves to providing for the necessaries of life. Almost alone among men, they live without goods or property … nevertheless they consider themselves rich because they rate sufficiency and a good disposition as a genuine excess … They reject everything that could awake avarice in them. … They do not possess a single slave, on the contrary they are all free and help each other mutually. … Thousands of examples testify to their love of God … contempt for wealth and honors, aversion from pleasure … They have a single fund for all, and communal expenses … and the custom of communal meals … nowhere else could one find a better practical example of men sharing the same roof, the same way of life and the same table …
The intriguing nature of the Essene community also struck the Jewish historian and general Flavius Josephus (37-97), who mentioned them in his books The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews. In Chapter 7 of Book II of The Jewish War, he gives details of this religious community which I quote literally:
Among the Jews there are three schools of thought, whose adherents are called Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes respectively. The Essenes profess a severer discipline: they are Jews by birth and are particularly attached to each other … Scorning wedlock, they select other men’s children while still pliable and teachable, and fashion them after their own pattern. Contemptuous of wealth … their rule is that novices admitted to the sect must surrender their property to the order … When adherents arrive from elsewhere, all local resources are put at their disposal as if they were their own … In dress and personal appearance they are like children in the care of a stern tutor. Neither garments nor shoes are changed till they are dropping to pieces or worn out with age. … The priest says grace before meat … After breakfast he offers a second prayer … (only) two things are left entirely to them … personal aid, and charity … they champion good faith and serve the cause of peace … They are wonderfully devoted to the works of ancient writers, choosing mostly books that can help soul and body … they … conquer pain by sheer will-power: death, if it comes with honor, they value more than life without end. Their spirit was tested to the utmost by the war with the Romans, who racked and twisted, burnt and broke them, subjecting them to every torture yet invented to make them blaspheme the Lawgiver or eat some forbidden food, but could not make them do either, or ever once fawn on their tormentors or shed a tear. … It is indeed their unshakable conviction that bodies are corruptible and the material composing them impermanent, whereas souls remain immortal for ever. … Some of them claim to foretell the future … rarely if ever do their predictions prove wrong …
Flavius Josephus, who wrote these words in A.D. 77, knew all this about the Essenes, because, by his own account, he himself had lived among them for three years. It is highly probable that he also knew the written traditions and leather scrolls from about 100 B.C., which the community had packed in jars and hidden in nearby caves during a rebellion that threatened them.
This theological bomb with a time-fuse of 2,000 years exploded. In 1947 the original documents hidden by the Essenes, now known as ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls’, were found by accident in caves at Wadi Qumran. Since then they have had an unshakable place in theological historical literature. Heinrich Alexander Stoll has told the whole exciting story of the Qumran texts in the book The Caves by the Dead Sea. This incredibly valuable Manual of Discipline, already supplied with commentaries by the Essenes(!), found its way half-way round the world, was appraised in universities and monasteries until it came into the good hands of objective scholars such as Professor Andre Dupont-Sommer and Professor Millar Burrows, after all kinds of intrigues and haggling.
The translations of the Qumran Scrolls show quite unequivocally that vital parts of the Gospels originated from the Essene school: that Jesus’ style and way of life followed the customs of the Essenes and that parables, such as Jesus used, indeed whole sermons attributed to him, had been taught by the Essenes.
Textual comparisons of the Qumran Scroll and the New Testament would be recognized and confirmed as clearly tallying with one another by any normal court of law – not so by Christian theologians. As if there was something reprehensible about the remarks of Jesus of Nazareth or Bethlehem containing the spiritual teachings of the ascetic Essene community! But here Jesus’ consubstantiality with God, ordained in Nicea, stands in the way. The Essenes were simple members of an order who had their own doctrine long before Christ Jesus an epigone? Impossible. The Christian guardians of the pure teaching of Jesus find that intolerable. Albert Schweitzer obviously did not speak clearly enough when he said: ‘Modern Christianity must always as a matter of course reckon with the possibility of abandoning the authenticity of [the modern] Jesus.’
Here are some examples of clear agreements between the teaching of the Essenes and the teaching of Jesus:
The Essenes did not baptize. Neither did Jesus.
The Essenes denounced the theologians of their time, the Sadducees and Pharisees. So did Jesus.
The Essenes preached meekness and humility to please God. So did Jesus.
The Essenes warned of an imminent ‘Last Judgment’ with fire. So did Jesus.
The Essenes said a man must love his neighbor like himself. That was the leitmotiv of all Jesus’ speeches.
The Essenes spoke of the ‘Sons of Light’ who fight against the ‘powers of darkness’. Who does not know these metaphors from Jesus’ sayings?
The Essenes preached the ‘spirit of truth’ and promised ‘eternal life’. Jesus did so, too.
The Essenes spoke of ‘members of the New Covenant’ and the ‘Holy Ghost’. What did Jesus do?
The Essenes had communal meals preceded by saying grace – like Jesus at the Last Supper.
The Essenes spoke of the foundation ‘that will not be shaken’ – Jesus of the rock (Peter) against which the gates of hell shall not prevail.
‘Beatitudes’ were found in the fourth Qumran cave that begin sentence after sentence with the word ‘Blessed’ – the opening phrase that Jesus used in his Sermon on the Mount.
The Essenes required every member who had just entered their community to confess his sins – an iron law of Christianity.
With so many proofs (they are no mere indications), the question inevitably arises whether Jesus, too, did not spend a period among the Essenes, just like the historian Flavius Josephus. For nineteen Christian centuries clever men puzzled over the accounts of Flavius Josephus: no one knew anything about the Essenes. They are not mentioned in the Gospels or the Acts of the Apostles. Had Flavius Josephus penned a science-fiction story about a non-existent order? The discovery of the Qumran Scrolls posthumously confirmed him as a scrupulous historian.
Excerpt from Miracles Of The Gods
See Part I here.