Shadow of the Third Century: A Revaluation of Christianity PREFACE In the mountains of Virginia a few years ago the minister of a sect of religious addicts, standing in his pulpit, released a rattlesnake and provoked the reptile to strike him twice in the arm. This, it was announced, was to prove that the power of faith in God was able to overcome the power of the serpents poison. Lamentably all that was proved impeccably was the failure of arrant faith in God to overcome human folly, when goaded to feverish pitch of fanaticism by irrational religion. Some years before that the author saw the cinema dealing with the Easter (rather pre-Easter) rites of the Penitentes, or Flagellantes in New Mexico, in which on Good Friday they marched up to a hilltop lashing each the one in front with knotted ropes upon bare backs, to a cross on which a victim in human form was savagely put through an ordeal simulating the crucifixion and well-nigh actually murdered. The reflections of the beholder of this eccentric monstrosity of religious pietism were centered upon the agency that could have brought to birth in normally sensible human beings such outlandish and insufferable perversions of religious motivation. Obviously it was a product of the Christian religion, for every motive and feature in it sprang from a Christian principle or practice. What should one think about a religion that could generate such appalling prodigies of fanaticism? Back in 1837 there broke out in New England and spread west as far as Ohio a wave of religious frenzy that threw the land into a furore of excitement and swept people into its maelstrom of insane force like leaves in an autumn gale. It originated in a single bit, or several bits, of calculation based on a literal interpretation of figures in the Bible by a rather fine young Vermont schoolmaster and local lay preacher. Young Miller took some numbers given in Daniel, Ezekiel and Revelation and with a little arithmetical manipulation, by two distinct methods, deduced that the date of April seventeenth, 1843--six years ahead--was the day set by Biblical prophecy as the Day of the Lord, that dreadful day on which the crack of doom would shatter the heavens and all the world would be dissolved with fervent heat at twelve oclock midnight. The village preacher began spreading his arithmetic in Sabbath discourses about the countryside; excitement took hold; the Boston ministerium put him on for great evangelistic campaigns; and leading divines fell in with the extravaganza. As the six years sped by, the closer approach of the Day swelled the hysteria to ever expanding proportions. Hundreds disposed of all their properties; and on the fatal night all sought the nearest mountain top, hilltop, treetop or rooftop (following a Biblical admonition) to be nearer the heavens. When the night passed calmly and dawn broke the deluded fanatics were left deflated. Miller scratched his head, and also scratched pencil again on paper, with the result that he announced that he had made a miscalculation, and that the final day of earth was to fall on the succeeding October fifteenth. The pitiable farce was again gone through. Then Miller and his chief aides quarreled over who was to blame; and one more dire instance of the derationalizing power of the religion known as Christianity, taking its Holy Scriptures as literal historical record, had grievously marked its dark blot on the stained pages of world history. Not a century since at least the tenth A.D. but has heard the lusty preachment of the repeated claims that events then transpiring were the literal fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy, to which the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have added the prophecies alleged to be indicated by measured dimensions in the halls, corridors, chambers, passages and stairways in the great pyramid of Gizeh. This rage is upon the world with more abandon and fanaticism in this twentieth century than ever before, and probably has materially influenced international movements, particularly in Germany and England. Thousands blare forth their excitable predictions, presenting for proof the texts of Scripture, twisted by a heated imagination into meanings fitted to the preconceived construction and sublimely insensible of the fact that others in every preceding century have with the same far-strained plausibility interpreted the fulfilment of ancient prophecy in the events of their time. Always Bible and pyramid prophecy is being fulfilled now. If we can reincarnate and be back in the twenty-fourth century, we will doubtless witness the same asinine procedure. It will be just as easy to match prophecy with current event then as now and in the past. Thus another weird frenzy of Christian origin runs its course in each century. A schoolgirl in this New Jersey city a few years ago reported to her parents that her teacher in the public schools had asked her to take her turn reading the prescribed ten verses from the Scriptures in the days opening exercises, and handed her an edition of the Bible that was a non-Catholic one. The parents, Roman Catholics, were so incensed at the thought of a Protestant Bible having touched the hands of their child that they visited the teacher, poured out their indignant feelings upon her and laid complaint with the School Superintendent. This sample of narrow bigotry is also a product of the religion called Christianity. And so, stated simply, this book has been written to tell the truth about a religion that has produced such obviously irrational behavior. The story needs telling all the more for the reason that it has never been told in its bald straight factual truth, and because heaven and earth have been called upon to prevent its being known ever since the third century. It is in the main truth that has been suppressed, buried, its evidences destroyed, its documents changed, with a story far other than the true one substituted in its place and promulgated with every device of propaganda. It aims to take its place as the true history of the origin and spread of what has been named the Christian religion. It is eminently desirable to say at once, before its first page is read, that the work is not an attack upon Christianity. So far from being hostile to Christianity, it is in all likelihood the first book in centuries that is written in support and defense of Christianity, striking forceful blows at every influence inimical to Christianity. It stands unqualifiedly as the courageous champion and crusader for Christianity, a Christianity that is so sorely needed at the present epoch to save a still savage world. In spite of this protestation the essay will sound to many like the most scathing denunciation and blaspheming of what they have believed to be Christianity they have ever read. Many will lay the book down with the indignant query whether the author has never been able to see a single item of good in the whole long history of the faith. It is admitted here that emphasis in the work has been placed upon the idiosyncrasies, foibles, follies, cruelties, fallacies, impostures and falsities, the horrifying list of evils that are an integral part of the record, and are not denied. The intrinsic and sincere reason for this accentuation is the consideration that while it is assuredly not the whole story, it is that part of the story which has to be known if any true evaluation of the place, function and further utility of this religion is to be appraised in the modern generation for future history. If a tool of culture is not known thoroughly it will not be used skilfully. The truth of the Christian religion is not and can not be known unless that truth is known in its organic wholeness. It has to be asserted here that one who thinks he has the true history of the Christian religion, but does not know what is here revealed for the first time, is sadly in error. What happened to Christianity and in Christianity in those two direful centuries, the third and fourth, is not only an essential part of the whole story of Christian history; it is in fact the indispensable key to any right understanding of the entire history. It is a daring venture to assert that the full truth about Christianitys rise and spread has never yet been told, and that a given work makes that disclosure for the first time. This work risks that venture. It is the key to the last two thousand years of world history. As to the other side of the story--the good which it is claimed to have done in the world--let it be said once and categorically in this Preface, so that it need not be reiterated at every new turn throughout the whole book, that Christianity has wrought much of what we believe we can call good in its history. Since it has ruled the world of the West for sixteen hundred years, and automatically numbered among its adherents practically all the greater characters in European and American history, a religion numbering in its following such a body of high-minded people could not help but contribute much good to general society. If any religion has in its enrollment strong spiritual characters, or masses of commonly decent people, along with rogues, it will register a good influence. Even a bad religion can not utterly corrupt upright people. And even evil itself invariably generates incidental good, unintended good, thrown off as a by-product by evil action. The very perpetrator of evil learns something, if only by his punishment or through his conscience. So it is put down here in indisputable terms: Christianity has caused, registered, produced or generated much good in the world. What is insisted upon, however, is that a view which is blinded to see only good in this faith is an unbalanced and hence an untrue view. The work is undertaken in its main purpose to disabuse the general mind of a host of prepossessions and conventional notions about Christianity which are simply not true. And it is in the pursuit of this laudable objective, as part of the effort to fight a battle for Christianity that we are under the necessity of republishing what to many will, regrettably, seem like a virulent assault upon Christianity itself. Even at that many readers will for a time at least feel that we are pursuing the paradoxical course of trying to build up Christianity by knocking it down. It must be seen, however, that what we are building up is Christianity, and what we are knocking down is something else that for the good of mankind sorely needs to be stricken down. The work sets out to prove that what has passed under the name of Christianity is not and really has never been Christianity at all. The thing accepted for Christianity has turned out to be something else very unlike it, a frightfully deceptive false substitution. Thousands have found it in every age unacceptable, repelling, repugnant to every instinct of logic and sanity. Among those who have found it inhospitable and insufferable to their natural instincts of both reason and good were Emerson, Lincoln and Edison, in the American scene. Now, as in the days of its foundation it is, as a popular religion, maintained by the less intelligent majority and disdained by the truly learned and intelligent, who sanction it in a patronizing way as being good for the ignorant, but hardly adequate for themselves. Its popular vogue is deemed useful to the orderly status of society, as it tends to hold the masses to a tolerable measure of self-restraint from criminality and a fair level of human decency. No apology, but a word in extenuation of the presentation of so large a quantity of quoted material is in order. The citation of a hundred passages from authors and historians was absolutely imperative in the case of a work which takes a stand on nearly every point in radical opposition to all conventionally accepted beliefs. A position that flies so directly in the face of all general opinion must call to its support the weight of a formidable array of authority. Only by marshaling the evidence in fairly impressive volume and quality can the real strength of the case be demonstrated. The material cited is at any rate a republication of data which are vital and valuable in themselves and should be more generally known. It is a part of the truth which so badly needs republication at this time. The author wishes to repudiate the suggestion that he is inspired by a hostile animus against Christianity. He confesses to a natural animus against bigotry, superstition, narrow hatreds, persecution, tyranny, war, murder, slaughter, lying and sickening hypocrisy, the more so when they are perpetrated in the name and under the disguise of holy religion. Since Christian history is in the main a record of these horrible things, he is free to express his dislike of them. But these things are no part of a true Christianity, and so it can not be charged that he is prejudiced against that which is true Christianity. It needs only to be said that if he has filled his volume with material that sounds scurrilous in ordinary Christian ears, he has not invented the data, but taken it nearly all from Christian writers! Nothing he has said is really half as virulent as the statements of the Christian apologists themselves. He has refrained from using language to characterize the evils of Christianity as brutally frank and realistic as he finds the historians of the religion themselves using. Let it be remembered that he has made only the scantiest reference to the unspeakable horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, when the love of Christ in Christian hearts drove the ecclesiastics to tear limbs from quivering bodies or burn them at the stake, for conscientious conviction of honest truth-seeking. A thousand pages could be added to the record of the profligacy of the priesthood, the forgery of documents, the immorality of the clergy and laity, the economic subjugation of the peasants under churchly feudal land ownership, the never-flagging draining of money from the poor and the abuses which drove at last the northern half of Europe out of the fold in rebellion. The work is not an effort to stigmatize Christianity as it could be stigmatized, but an attempt to rewrite the history of its upbuilding on false bases, to delineate the nature of its falsification of the truth and its utter misinterpretation of its Scriptures, and then to trace the evil psychological consequences of this warping of mind on the life of the West. In the prosecution of this intent it became necessary in an incidental way to introduce a meager portion of the truly horrendous data of Christianitys record of evil influence. It is distinctly and directly avowed that the book itself, and more particularly its strictures on religion as an influence less beneficent than philosophy, have been launched with not the remotest reference to the worlds political situation at the time of writing, when supreme world conflict is being waged between two great groups, the one bent on suppressing religion, the other standing on a religious platform entirely. Odd as it may seem, the book has not been motivated by any agreement with, allegiance to or support of the party hostile to religion. The position taken is in no sense opposed to religion per se; it only holds that religion divorced from philosophy is inadequate to mans highest needs and will prove a treacherous and eventually dangerous guide in life. The writer stands for religion sanified and stabilized, intellectually enlightened, by philosophy and science. He stands against the use of religion to hypnotize the masses. He dislikes the religion of ignorance, when honest priestly leadership could so easily make it a religion of intelligence. The international implications of the analysis must be considered by those wise enough to discern their proper relevance. This may be said of any worth-while work on philosophy or religion. It is in no sense a propaganda work, but a challenge to general intelligence. The effort has been made to eliminate footnotes entirely, the sources of the many citations being inserted in the text itself. It is desirable to say, however, that in many places in the work the author has openly stated, or possibly hinted, that many points, problems, questions and mysteries formerly or still baffling the world of religious scholarship, have found resolution in clear light. Particularly where it was asserted that the secret esoteric science of interpreting Scriptures composed in the ancient arcane language of symbolism had been rehabilitated and a reinterpretation of the Scriptures had been made on the basis of this new insight, the statements standing without further elucidation will naturally arouse inquiry and provoke challenge. To meet this inquiry and challenge, it simply needs to be said that the material which will be found to support the hints made in this respect has already been published in the authors earlier work, The Lost Light, or perhaps in its companion study, Who Is This King of Glory? The present work often alludes to the error of interpreting the Scriptures literally and historically, and gives the reader to understand that they can be and now have been interpreted properly on the purely allegorical and mythical basis. Obviously every scholar and every intelligent reader will bristle to this epochal statement and demand that we produce this product of might and magic, or reveal where it has been done. It has been done in The Lost Light and Who Is This King of Glory? We could not keep interjecting this information throughout the course of the book. So it is given here. Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Ph.D. Shadow of the Third Century: A Revaluation of Christianity. Alvin Boyd Kuhn (September 22, 1880 - September 14, 1963) was an American scholar of comparative religion, mythology, Egyptology, linguistics and language. Author, lecturer and publisher. ------------------------------------------ Shadow of the Third Century begins with the assertions that a true history of Christianity has never before been written and that the roots of the Christian religion lie in earlier religions and philosophies of the ancient world. Christianity as we know it, says Kuhn, took the form it did due to a degeneration of knowledge rather than to an energization produced by a new release of light and truth into the world. In the ancient world, knowledge was commonly passed down by esoteric traditions, its inner meaning known only to the initiated. The Gospels, says Kuhn, should therefore be understood as symbolic narratives rather than as history. Sacred scriptures are always written in a language of myth and symbol, and the Christian religion threw away and lost their true meaning when it mistranslated this language into alleged history instead of reading it as spiritual allegory. This literalism necessarily led to a religion antagonistic toward philosophy. Moreover, it produced a religion that failed to recognize its continuity with, and debt to, earlier esoteric schools. As evidence of this, Kuhn finds that many of the gospel stories and sayings have parallels in earlier works, in particular those of Egypt and Greece. The transformation of Jesus followers into Pauline Christians drew on these sources. Moreover, the misunderstanding of true Christianity led to the excesses of misguided asceticism. The book as a whole is, says Kuhn, a clarion call to the modern world to return to the primitive Christianity which the founder of Christian theology, Augustine, proclaimed had been the true religion of all humanity. With its many citations from earlier works, Shadow of the Third Century also serves as a bibliographic introduction to alternative histories of Christianity. amazon/Shadow-Third-Century-Revaluation-Christianity/dp/1926777239
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 00:42:24 +0000
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