The Secret Vault presents: The Christian and Pagan Creeds Collated. Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
By the Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
The Jews had a superstition of not uttering the incommunicable name of God, [ HB ] - that is, Yahou, or Jackhou; or, as it frequently occurs, in one syllable, [HB] - Jao, or Jack; [a] which, with more reverence than reason, is pronounced Jah! as the tetragrammaton, or word of four letters, which at this day adorns our Christian temples is called Jehovah.
From this divine name [HB], says Parkhurst, the ancient Greeks had their [GK] in their invocations of the gods, more particularly of the god Apollo, i.e. The Light. And hence these two letters, forming the name Jah, written after the Oriental manner, from right to left, were inscribed over the great door of the temple of Apollo at Delphi.
[a] The nearest approach to the exact pronunciation of this sacred word will be produced by suspending the action of all the organs of articulation, and making only that convulsive (heave, of the larynx, by which the bronchial vessels discharge the accumulated phlegm; it is enunciated with the most eloquent propriety in the act of vomiting, and perhaps on this account has been called the unutterable name. - Consult Rabbi Ben Herschel, and his beard! The God Jehovah, the most hideous of the whole mythology, was well known to the Gentiles; he was the Jonn of the ancient Tuscans and Latinized into the Janus of the Romans.]
[HB] is several times joined with the name [ GK], which seems to indicate that they are distinct names for the same deity, and not the one the mere abbreviation of the other. The rays of light or glory within a circle or ring of which the tetragrammaton, or four-lettered word, is exhibited in our Christian temples, are a demonstration that the same deity is intended by the Christian Jehovah as by the Pagan Jah (that is, Apollo), whose name of two letters was in like manner encircled with rays of glory.
The Pagans, indeed, seem more rigidly to have adhered to the text or injunctions of those Syrio-Phoenician odes which have been consecrated by Christian piety, under the name of the Psalms of David, and which formed a material part of their idolatrous liturgies, than their Christian plagiarists who have retained the use of them in- a never-interrupted succession from their times.
We read in the original, the hundred times repeated commands, [ .] Ellell-lu-jah! praise ye Jack! [ ]- Behold! bless ye Jack! [ . . .]
Sing ye to the gods! Chant ye his name! Exalt him who rideth in the heavens, by his name Jack, and leap for joy before his face! For the Lord hath a long nose, and his mercy endureth for ever!
It is admitted, however, on all hands, that the proper pronunciation of the tetragrammaton which we call Jehovah, and its synonym Jah, is entirely lost. Nor can it be denied, that the Hebrew points ordinarily annexed to the consonants of those words, are not the natural points belonging thereto, nor indicative of pronunciation; but are the vowel points belonging to the words Adonai and Elohim, - to warn the reader, that instead of the word Jehovah, which the Jews were forbidden to pronounce, and the pronunciation of which had been long unknown to them, they are always to read Adonai, or Adonis. [a]
[a] See the Oxford Encyclopaedia, under the head Adonists; and my own for their investigations of this curious subject, in my Syntagma of the Evidences of the Christian Religion, published during the earlier months of my still continuing unjust imprisonment, for contentious exposure of errors and ignorance on which that religion is founded. P-96]
Hence, we find, that frequently where the common printed copies read [], many of Dr Kennicott's codices have [] And hence, says Dr Parkhurst, whose orthodoxy of Christian faith admits not a suspicion - hence the idol Adonis had his name. [Parkhurst's Hebrew Lexicon, under the head [HB] 3.] [LN., Kennicott, Benjamin, 1718 to 1783, churchman and Hebrew scholar.]
The reader will, I hope, do himself the justice to observe, that throughout this Diegesis, no merely fanciful or conjectural interpretations are admitted, and no new lights struck out from ingenious etymologies: he is here presented with the calm dispassionate evidence of fact, and when those facts are most pregnant of conclusions adverse to Christianity, they are invariably adduced in the words and on the authority of Christians themselves, whose disinterestedness, at least, in yielding admissions of this character, is no more to be questioned, than their learning and piety to be surpassed.
The great source of difficulty and mistake in tracing the identity of the parent figment through the multifarious forms of the ancient idolatry, seems to arise from the change of epithets and names, while yet it is but one and the same deity and demi-god who is meant under a hundred designations. Thus, the names under which the Sun has been the real and only intended object of divine worship, have been as various and as many as the nations of the earth on which his light has shone. And as various are the allegories and fictions of his passing through the zodiacal sign of the Virgin, which, of course, would remain a virgin still; his descending into the lower parts of the earth; his rising again from the dead; his ascending into heaven, his opening the kingdom of heaven to all believers; his casting his bright beams of light through twelve months, or Apostles, one of whom (February - Judas) lost a day, and by transgression (or skipping over) "fell, that he might go to his own place," (Acts 1-25); "his preaching the acceptable year of the Lord" (Luke 4-19). By all which metaphorical personifications, were typified the natural history or circumstances observable in the Sun's progress through the twelve months which constitute the natural year.
The Jews in vain endeavour to disguise the fact, that they also were Sun worshippers. We find, from their own sacred books, that their Solomon, after having built a temple to Jehovah, "did build also a high place for [] Chemosh (that is, the Sun), the abomination of Moab, in the hill that is before Jerusalem," (1 Kings, 11-7); [ LN., NIV, has. 'Solomon built a high place for Chemosh the detestable god of Moab, and for Molech the detestable god of the Ammonites, -] and so late as to the reign of Josiah, successive kings of Judah "had dedicated horses to the Sun; and the chariots of the Sun were at the entering in of the house of the Lord." - 2 Kings, 23-11.
The prophet Malachi expressly speaks of Christ, under the same unaltered name of Chemosh, the abomination of the Moabites - [ .]- Chapter 3-4, or 4-2. Which being, by our evangelical reformers, very conveniently translated the Sun of Righteousness, [a] of course could refer to nothing else than Jesus Christ, and so conceals the idolatry, while it conveys the piety.
[[A] The Hebrew has no adjectives: Sun of Righteousness is their idiom for the Righteous Sun.]
The same deity, however, under his name Adonis, without any change but that of the various pronouns, suffices to indicate my Adon, our Adon, &c. is the undisguised idol who is addressed innumerable times throughout the book of Psalms, under that name, and to whose honour, in common with that of Jehovah, they were composed and dedicated. The 110th Psalm, of which the first verse rendered into English, is, "The Lord said unto my Lord, sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool," should have been rendered, "Yahou said unto Adonis." The two idols were worshipped in the same house of the Lord, which was at Jerusalem: Yahou, or Jack, sat on the lid of a box, ridiculously called the ilasterion, or mercy-seat; while Adonis seems to have occupied the vestibule, or entering-in of the house of the Lord.
The rest of the Psalm is a dialogue, in which Jao, or Jack, proposes terms of alliance between himself and Adonis, and engages to join him in the slaughter of their enemies. The preference of the Jews for Adonis, who was distinguished for his personal beauty, above the cloven footed and long-nosed Jehovah [b] has induced them to this day, not only to read the name Adon, wherever it occurs, but entirely to banish the recollection of Jao altogether. They substitute the name Adon in every instance where our translators have put Jehovah, or the Lord; so that in the reading of those to whom these lively oracles were committed, it is not Jehovah, but the Phoenician deity Adonis, who is the God of the Old Testament.
[b] See the plate of him in Parkhurst, and his convincing arguments in proof that the beast with four faces and four wings, standing like a cock upon a hen-roost, on one leg, " must be referred to Jehovah only," under the head [] [LN. The Sumerian god Nergal, bore the epitaph 'Cock of the Dunghill,' he was a god of plague and war, and was considered as the Greek Aries and the Roman Mars; see in SV, books and Encyclopaedic dictionary.]
Jehovah then, had more than cause enough for jealousy against the encroachments of Adonis, and in one most striking instance, the worship of this idol, under his name Tammuz, is denounced as an atrocious abomination. Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the Lord's house, which was towards the north, and behold there sat women weeping for Tammuz. - (Ezekiel 8-14.)
Here Jerome interprets [.] Tammuz, by Adonis, who he observes, is in Hebrew and Syriac, called Adonis.
"I find myself obliged, (says the pious author of the Greek and Hebrew Lexicons,) to refer Tammuz, as well as the Greek and Roman Hercules, to that class of idols, which was originally designed to represent the promised Saviour, the Desire of all nations. His other name, Adonis, is almost the very Hebrew [] or our Lord, a well-known title of Christ." [LN., Tammuz is a corruption of the Sumerian god Dumuzi-d, who has the epitaph 'Shepherd', he is Adonis to the Greeks: see SV book by Lux Nova, Inanna and Dumuzid book, or in SV, Encyclopaedic dictionary.]
Such are the words of the ingenuous, most learned, and orthodox Parkhurst, who proceeds to exhibit this resemblance of Adonis and Christ, by subjoining, with acknowledgements to his authorities Spearman and Godwyn, a passage from Julius Firmicius, which in my earlier writings I was content to quote, as he had done, at second-hand.
The retirement and leisure however which my Christian persecutors have forced upon me, and the attentions of my unbelieving friends, have enabled me to study the very rare and curious original itself. It is an oration or address of Julius Firmicius delivered to the Emperors Constans and Constantius; the object of which was to induce those pious princes to seize the property of their Pagan subjects, and apply it to Christian uses - than which, of course, nothing could have been more orthodox. After forty-five pages of abuse heaped on the ancient Pagans for their egregious forms of idolatry, in which by a most curious mystical interpretation of their ceremonies, he discovers Christ to have been represented by them all, - he adds, [b] Let us propose another symbol, that by an effort of cogitation, their wickedness may be revealed, of which we must relate the whole process in order that it may be manifest to all, that the law of the divine appointment hath been corrupted by the devil's perverse imitation. On a certain night (while the ceremony of the Adonia, or religious rites in honour of Adonis lasted) an image was laid out upon a bed and bewailed in doleful ditties. After they had satiated themselves with fictitious lamentations, light was brought in; then the mouths of all the mourners were anointed by the priest, upon which the priest, with a gentle murmur, whispered -
Trust ye, saints, your God restored,
Trust ye, in your risen Lord;
for the pains which he endured
Our salvation has procured.
[b] Aliud etiam symbolum proponamus, ut conamine cogitationis, scelera revelentur; cujus totus ordo dicendus est, ut apud omnes constet divinae dispositions legem, perversa Diaboli imitatione corruptam. Nocte quadam simulaecrum in lectica supinum ponitur, et per numeros digestis fletibus plangitur Deinde cum se ficta lamentatione satiaverint, lumen infertur. Tunc a Sacerdote omnium qui flebant, fauces unguntur, quibus perunctis, sacerdos lento murmure susurrat:
[ Greek ] Literally, "Trust ye communicants; the God having been saved, there shall be to us out of pains, salvation." Godwyn, who seems not to have discovered the metre of the original, renders it, "Trust ye in God, for out of pains, salvation is come unto us."]
"Upon which their sorrow was turned into joy, and the image was taken, as it were out of its sepulchre." These latter words, though their sense is evidently implied, have no direct authority in the original, but seem to be a scholium of Mr. Spearman. Firmicius, in his tide of eloquence, leaves his conclusion elliptical; and breaks away into indignant objurgation of the priest who officiated in those heathen mysteries, which, he admitted, resembled the Christian sacrament in honour of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, so closely, that there was really no difference between them, except [c] that no sufficient proof had been given to the world of the resurrection of Adonis, and no divine oracle had borne witness to his resurrection, nor had he shown himself alive after his death to those who were concerned to have assurance of the fact, that they might believe. The divine- oracle (be it observed,) which had borne witness to the resurrection of Christ, but which it seems had vouchsafed no such honourable testimony to the resurrection of Adonis, was none other than the answer of the God Apollo, at Delphos; which this author derives from Porphyry's books on the Philosophy of Oracles; and which Eusebius has condescended to quote, as furnishing one of the most convincing proofs that could be adduced from the admission of an adversary of the resurrection of Christ. [d]
[c] Dei tui mors nota est, vita non comparet; nec de resurrectione ejus divinum aliquando respondit oraculum, nec hominibus se post mortem ut sibi crederetur, ostendit, nulla hujus operis documenta promisit, nec se hoc facturum esse praece dentibus monstravit exemplis. - De Errore prof. Relig. p. 45.]
[d] Firmicius, quotes this Christian forgery under the title [ Greek .] - Eusebius, avails himself of it, as [Greek ] - Macknight and Doddridge strove mightily to enlist it into the service of the Church Militant; but it would not do. [Greek ] Thou art handsome, beyond the sons of Adam, love is diffused in thy lips, for the sake of which, God is enamoured of thee forever. - Psalm 45.]
"But thou at least," says Eusebius, "listen to thine own Gods, to thy oracular deities themselves, who have borne witness, and ascribed to our Saviour, not imposture, but piety and wisdom, and ascent into heaven." Quoted in the author's Syntagma, p. 116. This was vastly obliging and liberal of the God Apollo; only, it happens awkwardly enough, that the whole work, (consisting of several books) ascribed to Porphyry, in which this and other admissions equally honourable to the evidences of the Christian religion, are made, was not written by Porphyry, but is altogether the pious forgery of Christian hands; who have kindly fathered the great philosopher with admissions, which as he would certainly never have made them himself, they have very charitably made for him.
But not alone the very name Adon, or Adonai, nor the particular manner in which that God was worshipped, occurring as frequently as the name Jehovah, and by the Jews themselves constantly maintained to be the sense of that name, and proper to be used rather than, and instead of it; but the distinctive attributes of Adonis, the peculiarly characteristic epithets and designations by which that idol was identified from all others, prove beyond the possibility of doubt, that the Jews were worshippers of the self-same Adonis, adored by their Phoenician neighbours. Adonis was distinguished for his personal beauty. We find entire odes or psalms in praise of his beauty, and his characteristic epithet of The Beauty of Holiness used interchangeably, instead of his name. He appointed singers unto the Lord, and that should praise The Beauty of Holiness." - 2 Chron. 20-21.
"The Devil," says Firmicius, "has his Christs," [Habet ergo Diabolus Christos suos, p. 46.] of which he affects not to deny that this Adonis was one. But one of the strongest sensible proofs of the difference between the false Christs and the true one, which this author could adduce, was, that the ointment with which the Pagan priests anointed the lips of the mystics, or initiated in the Adonia, or sacrament of our Lord Adonis, was wholly different from the unguentum immortale, which God the Father gave to his only Son, [e] and which the Son bestows on all those who believe in the divine majesty of his name: for Christ's ointment, he would have us to know, is u of an immortal composition, and mixed up with the spiritual scents of paints, of myrrh, aloes, and cassia, out of ivory palaces;" whereas the Pagan ointment was, I dare say, little better than cart-grease. -Nobody, need know any more about Vir. Clarus Julius Firmicius Maternus. [LN., Julius Firmicus Maternus, he was Latin writer and noted Astrologer, who had a pagan education, and understood Greek, later seen as a public advocate, Astrologer and Christian apologist.]
[e] Aliud est unguentum quod Deus pater unico tradidit filio, &c. p. 46. - See in its place, under the name Christ, what serious though slippery, arguments the Fathers build on ointment or pomatum.]
The Adonia were solemn feasts in honour of Venus, and in memory of her beloved son, Adonis. Venus, as sprung from the sea, Mare, could not be more honourably distinguished than by her epithet Maria; Adonai is literally Our Lord: so that these solemn feasts, without any change or substitution of names, were unquestionably celebrated to the honour of Mary and her son, Our Lord; to whomsoever else those names may have in later ages been applied. They were observed by the Greeks, Phoenicians, Lycians, Syrians, Egyptians, and indeed by almost all the nations of the then known world. It is universally agreed, that it is to these ceremonies that the Jewish God refers in the 8th chapter of Ezekiel, where they are denounced as an abomination; we find by inference, an honourable apology for the Jewish nation, who, as a people, have through so many ages, refused to embrace a religion, which in so many particulars, and even in the continuance of the same names, has lost all possibility of being distinguished in their apprehension from "the abomination of the Sidonians." The festival of the Adonia was still observed at Alexandria, the cradle of the Christian religion, in the time of St. Cyril; and at that Antioch, where the disciples were first called Christians, (Acts xi. 26,) even as late as the time of the emperor Julian, commonly called the Apostate;
"Whose arrival there during the solemnity was taken for an ill omen." - Bell's Pantheon. This is surely a curious admission of our Christian mythologists. Let the reader ask himself, and answer as he may the questions emergent from this state of the Christian evidences -
1. What argument can be drawn from the wonderful propagation of the Gospel, when in the city where it was at first most successfully preached, and where the disciples were first called Christians, it had not, even in the fourth century, abolished the Pagan and idolatrous festival of the Adonia? -
2. And wherefore should the arrival of the emperor Julian (a known apostate from the Christian religion, and a zealous patron of Paganism), during the celebration of the Adonia, have been considered as an ill omen, but that the Adonia had come to be considered as entirely a Christian festival? -
3. And at what time, or whether ever, the festival of the Adonia was distinctly abolished, and that of the Christian Easter established upon its overthrow?
For the solution of these most important inquiries, we hold up the light of the admissions of ecclesiastical historians. It must ever be borne in mind, that the Christians of the second, third, and fourth centuries industriously laboured to give their religion the nearest possible resemblance to the ancient Paganism; and confessedly adopted the liturgies, rites, ceremonies, and terms of heathenism; making it their boast that the Pagan religion, properly explained, really was nothing else than Christianity; that the best and wisest of its professors in all ages had been Christians all along; that Christianity was but a name more recently acquired to a religion which had previously existed, and had been known to the Greek philosophers, to Plato, Socrates, and Heraclitus; and that "if the writings of Cicero had been read as they ought to have been, there would have been no occasion for the Christian Scriptures." Nor did some of them, who maintained that Jesus Christ had a real existence, hesitate to ascribe to him a work in which he himself expressly declared that he was in no way opposed to the worship of the gods and goddesses; [See the chapter of admissions in this Diegesis; and Jones on the Canon vol. 1. p. 12.] while our most orthodox Christian divines, the best learned in ecclesiastical antiquity, and most entirely persuaded of the truth of the Christian religion, unable to resist or to conflict with the constraining demonstration of the data that prove the absolute sameness and identity of Paganism and Christianity; and unable to point out so much as one single idea or notion, of which they could show that it was peculiar to Christianity, or that Christianity had it, and Paganism had it not; have invented the apology of an hypothesis; that the Pagan religion, like the Jewish dispensation, was typical; and that Hercules, Adonis, &c. were all of them types and forerunners of the true and real Hercules, Adonis, &c. our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Nothing is more easily conceivable, than that the priests and devotees of any one of the innumerable forms of absurdity which superstition might from time to time assume, should decry all others, and pretend that theirs alone was divine: nothing is so hard to be conceived, as that a God of infinite wisdom and truth should be the author of a religion so little superior, and so closely resembling the devices of juggling priests and self-interested impostors, that it should not be in the power of any man on earth, who would judge impartially, to discover in what the superiority consists; or that there was really any difference at all between them.
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Next Chapter 23. The Mystical Sacrifice of the Phoenicians.