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AuthorTopic: part VIII  (Read 1668 times)

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part VIII
« on: February 21, 2014, 08:31:21 PM »

We find Saint Paul, the first Apostle of the Gentiles, avowing that he was
made a minister of the Gospel which had already been preached to every creature
under heaven,^ and preaching a God manifest in the flesh, who had been
believed on in the world,  therefore before the commencement of his ministry,
 and who could not have been Jesus of Nazareth, who had certainly not been
preached at that time, nor generally believed on in the world till ages after.
Saint Paul owns himself a deacon, which is the lowest ecclesiastical grade of
the Therapeutan church. " The Gospel of which Paul's Epistles speak had been
extensively preached and fully established before the time of Jesus by the
Therapeutae or Essenes, who believed in the doctrine of the AngelMessiah,
the ^on from heaven ; the doctrine of the ' Anointed Angel,' of the man from
heaven, the Creator of the world ; the doctrine of the atoning sacrificial
death of Jesus by the blood of his cross ; the doctrine of the Messianic
antetype of the Paschal lamb and of the Paschal omer, and thus of the re
surrection of Jesus Christ the third day according to the Scriptures,  these
doctrines of Paul can with more or less certainty be connected with the
Essenes. ... It becomes almost a certainty that Eusebius was right in surmising
that Essenic writings have been used by Paul and the evangelists. Not Jesus,
but Paul, is the cause of the separation of the Jews from the Christians.'"^

The very ancient and Eastern doctrine of an AngelMessiah had been applied to
Gautama-Buddha, who predicted that another Avatar would come upon earth in six
hundred years after his death. This time had nearly expired; so Jesus of
Nazareth was proclaimed as the expected Messiah by these Buddhist Jews, and the
sun-myths were interwoven with his real history. Jesus unquestionably possessed
a nature as divine as it is possible for a human being to possess, or he
would not otherwise have been received as the Angel-Messiah by a sect so pure
and holy as were the Essenes.

Justin Martyr, in his dialogue with Trypho, says that there exist not a people,
civilized or semi-civilized, who have not offered up prayers in the name of a
crucified Saviour to the Father and Creator of all things.^

Eusebius says that the names of Jesus and Christ were both known and honored by
the ancients.^

The Rev. Robert Taylor, in writing upon this subject, says : 

What short of an absolute surrender of all pretence to an existence
distinctive and separate from Paganism is that never-to-be-forgotten, never-to-
beoverlooked, and I am sure never-to-be-answered capitulation of their [the
Christians'] Melito, Bishop of Sardis, in which in an apology delivered to the
emperor, Marcus Antoninus, in the year 170, he complains of certain
annoyances and vexations which Christians were at that time subjected to, and
for which he claims redress from the justice and piety of that emperor : first,
on the score that none of his ancestors had ever persecuted the professors of
the Christian faith ; Nero and Domitian only, who had been equally hostile to
their subjects of all persuasions, having been disposed to bring the
Christian doctrine into hatred, and even their decrees had been reversed, and
their rash enterprises rebuked, by the godly ancestors of Antoninus himself. .
. . And secondly, the good bishop claims the patronage of the emperor for the
Christian religion, which he calls our philosophy, on account of its high
antiquity^ as having been imported from countries lying beyond the limits of
the Roman empire, in the reign of his ancestor Augustus, who found its
importation ominous of good fortune to his government.^

Saint Augustine says : " That in our times is the Christian Religion, which to
know and follow is the most sure and certain health, called according to that
name, but not according to the thing itself, of which it is the name ; for the
thing itself which is now called the Christian Religion really was known to the
ancients, nor was wanting at any time from the beginning of the human race
until the time when Christ came in the flesh, from whence the true religion,
which had previously existed, began to be called Christian ; and this in our
days is the Christian religion, not as having been wanting in former times,
but as having in later times received this name." ^

Eusebius, the great champion of Christianity, admits that "that which is called
the Christian religion is neither new nor strange, but  if it be lawful to
testify the truth  was known to the ancients." ^

Ammonius Saccus (a Greek philosopher, founder of the Neoplatonic school) taught
that Christianity and Paganism, when rightly understood, differ in no essential
points, but had a common origin, and are really one and the same religion.^

Celsus, the Epicurean philosopher, wrote that " the Christian religion contains
nothing but what Christians hold in common with heathen ; nothing new." *

Justin explains this in the following manner : 

It having reached the Devil's ears that the prophets had foretold that Christ
would come ... he [the Devil] set the heathen poets to bring forward a great
many who should be called sons of Jove [that is, the sons of God] ; the Devil
laying his scheme in this to get men 'to imagine that the true history of
Christ was of the same character as the prodigious fables and poetic stories.^,

Julius Firmicius says, " The Devil has his Christs."

The following remarkable passage has been preserved to us by Mosheim, the
ecclesiastical historian, in the life of Saint Gregory, surnamed Thaumatur
gus, that is, " the wonder-worker " : 

When Gregory perceived that the simple and unskilled multitude persisted in
their worship of images, on account of the pleasure and sensual gratifications
which they enjoyed at the Pagan festivals, he granted them a permission to
indulge themselves in the like pleasures in celebrating the memory of the holy
martyrs, hoping that in process of time they would return, of their own accord,
to a more virtuous and regular course of life.^

Gregory of Nazianzus, writing to Saint Jerome, says : " A little jargon is all
that is necessary to impose on the people. The less they comprehend the more
they admire. Our forefathers and doctors have often said, not what they
thought, but what circumstances and necessity dictated."^

Eusebius, who is our chief guide for the early history of the Church,
confesses that he was by no means scrupulous to record the whole truth
concerning the early Christians in the various works which he has left behind
him.^ Edward Gibbon, speaking of him, says : 

The gravest of the ecclesiastical historians, Eusebius himself, indirectly
confesses that he has related what might redound to the glory, and that he has
suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace, of religion. Such an
acknowledgment will naturally excite a suspicion that a writer who has so
openly violated one of the fundamental laws of history has not paid a very
strict regard to the observance of the other ; and the suspicion will derive
additional credit from the character of Eusebius, which was less tinctured
with credulity, and more practised in the arts of courts, than that of almost
any of his contemporaries. ^

Isaac de Casaubon, the great ecclesiastical scholar, says : 

It mightily affects me to see how many there were in the earliest times of the
Church, who considered it as a capital exploit to lend to heavenly truth the
help of their own inventions, in order that the new doctrine might be more
readily received by the wise among the Gentiles. These officious lies, they
were wont to say, were devised for a good end. ^

Caecilius, in the Octavius of Minucius Felix, says : 

All these fragments of crack-brained opiniatry and silly solaces played off in
the sweetness of song by deceitful [Pagan] poets, by you too credulous crea
tures [that is, the Christians] have been shamefully reformed and made over to
your own god.

Faustus, writing to Saint Augustine, says : 

You have substituted your agapae for the sacrifices of -the Pagans ; for
their idols your martyrs, whom you serve with the very same honors. You appease
the shades of the dead with wine and feasts ; you celebrate the solemn
festivals of the Gentiles, their calends, and their solstices ; and as to their
manners, those you have retained without any alteration. Nothing
distinguishes you from the Pagans, except that you hold your assemblies apart
from them.^

The learned Christian advocate, M. Turretin, in describing the state of
Christianity in the fourth century, says " that it was not so much the empire
that was brought over to the faith, as the faith that was brought over to the
empire ; not the Pagans who were converted to Christianity, but Christianity
that was converted to Paganism." ^

Edward Gibbon says in regard to this matter : 

It must be confessed that the ministers of the Catholic Church imitated the
profane model which they were impatient to destroy. The most respectable
bishops had persuaded themselves that the ignorant rustics would more
cheerfully renounce the superstitions of Paganism if they found some re
semblance, some compensation, in the bosom of Christianity. The religion of
Constantine achieved in less than a century the final conquest of the Roman
empire ; but the victors themselves were insensibly subdued by the arts of
their vanquished rivals.'^

Tertullian, one of the Christian Fathers (a. d. 200), originally a Pagan, and
at one time Presbyter of the Christian Church in Africa, reasons in the
following manner on the evidences of Christianity : 

I find no other means to prove myself to be impudent with success, and
happily a fool, than by my contempt of shame,  as, for instance, I maintain
that the Son of God was born. Why am I not ashamed of maintaining such a thing?
Why, but because it is itself a shameful thing. I maintain that the Son of God
died. Well, that is wholly credible, because it is monstrously absurd. I main
tain that after having been buried he rose again ; and that I take to be
manifestly true, because it was manifestly impossible.'^