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.
[LN., this is one of a number of insights into the Essenes that occur on the SV, but see LN., Essenes, which was written many years before seeing any of these welcomed supports, and in the future, I will have even more insights to reveal.]
A knowledge of the character and tenets of that most remarkable set of men that ever existed, who were known by the name of Essenes or Therapeuts, is absolutely necessary to a fair investigation of the claims of the New Testament, in the origination and references of which, they bear so prominent a part.
The celebrated German critic, Michaelis, [LN., Michaelis, David, Johann, 1717 to 1791, Prussian biblical scholar.] whose great work, the Introduction to the New Testament, has been translated by Dr Herbert Marsh, the present Lord Bishop of Peterborough, defines them as a Jewish sect, which began to spread itself at Ephesus, and to threaten great mischief to Christianity, in the time (or, indeed, previous to the time) of St. Paul; on which account, in his epistles to the Ephesians, to the Colossians, and to Timothy; he declares himself openly against them." [LN., this would seem odd indeed for it is reported to us by the Jewish historian Josephus that there were around 4000 Essenes in Jerusalem alone when the great persecution started. And the rediscovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Qumran site nearby brought the near forgotten Essenes back into the limelight. Outwardly you would think that the Essenes would make the perfect disciples of Jesus. Basically, they shared everything, they strived towards all virtues, truth, honesty, justice and more, they were so trusted they held many high positions both within business and the church, because of these Ways they would become the victims of the first Holocaust. See SV, Essenes.] [Michaelis, vol. 4, p. 79.]
But surely this admission of the sect, beginning to spread itself at Ephesus, and its existence at Colosse, and in the diocese of Timothy, to a sufficient extent to call for the serious opposition of one who, in any calculations of chronology, must have been the contemporary of Jesus Christ; is no disparagement of the fact of its previous establishment in Egypt; while the admitted fact, [It is admitted by Dr Lardner.] that these three Epistles of St. Paul, in which he so earnestly opposes himself to this sect, [LN., Later Barnabas brought Saul-Paul, to Antioch and they taught many, it was at Antioch that the Essenes were first called Christians. Saul the Pharisee, became Paul the, Essene, who the people of Antioch nicknamed Christians.] (and) were written before any one of our four Gospels, involves the a fortiori demonstration; that their tenets and discipline, whatever they were, were not corruptions or perversions of those gospels, however those gospels may turn out to be improvements or plagiarisms upon the previously established tenets and discipline of that sect.
The ancient writers who have given any account of this sect, are Philo, Josephus, Pliny, and Solimis. Infinite perplexity, however, is occasioned by modern historians attempting to describe differences and distinctions where there are really none. The Therapeutai and the Essenes are one and the same sect: Therapeutics, which is Greek, being nothing more than Essenes, which is of the same sense in Egyptian, and is in fact a translation of it: - as, perhaps, Surgeons, Healers, Curates, or the most vulgar sense of Doctors, is the nearest possible plain English of Therapeuti: The similarity of the sentiments of the Essenes, or Therapeutse, to those of the church of Rome, induced the learned Jesuit, Nicolaus Serarius, to seek for them an honourable origin. He contended, therefore, that they were Asideans, and derived them from the Rechabites, described so circumstantially in the 35th chapter of Jeremiah; at the same time, he asserted that the first Christian monks were Essenes. Both of these positions were denied by his opponents, Drusius and Scaliger; but in respect to the latter, says Michaelis, certainly Serarius was in the right. [LN., the Rechabites were a biblical clan belonging to the Kenites, descendants of Rechab through Jehonadab, and accompanied the Israelites into the promised land, the priest of Midian, Jethro, who Moses stayed with after he left Egypt was a Kenite, while the bulk of the tribe lived in cities those descended from Rechab lived as nomads, forbidden to drink wine, and much resembled the Nazarites, in Astrological terms the Kenites were associated with the sign of Taurus, as the county of Kent in England is.]
"The Essenes," he adds, "were indeed a Jewish, and not a Christian sect." Why, to be sure, it would be awkward enough for a Christian divine to admit them to the honours of that name before "that religion which St. Augustine tells us was 'before in the world,' began to be called Christian." (See Admission 12.) The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch (Acts). But sure, it was something more than the name that made them such; they were none the less what the name signified, ere yet it was conferred on them: and the Essenes had everything but the name."
"It is evident," continues Michaelis, "from the above- mentioned epistles of St. Paul, that to the great mortification of the apostle, they insinuated themselves very early into the Christian church."
But is it not, in reason, as likely that the Christians, who were certainly the last comers, should have insinuated themselves into Therapeutan community?
Eusebius has fully shown that the monastic life was derived from the Essenes; and, because many Christians adopted the manners, of the Essenes, Epiphanius took the Essenes in general for Christians, and confounded them with the Nazarene: - a confusion to which the similarity of this name, to that of the Nazarites of the Old Testament, might in some measure contribute. But we find this confusion still worse confounded, in the remarkable oversight of the passage, Matthew ii. 23, which betrays that Jesus himself was believed to be one of this fraternity of monks.
[Matthew ii. 23. "That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene;" that is (as we see from Epiphanius), a Therapeut. It is certain that none of the Jewish prophets had so said. Some other equally sacred writings are referred to. Though their accomplishment by the mere resemblance of the name of the city in which Jesus is said to have resided, to that of the order of monks to which he was believed to have belonged, is a most miserable pun. The Jews, however, who think it reasonable to admit that such a person as Jesus really existed, place his birth near a century sooner than the generally assumed epoch. - Basnage Histoire des Juifs, 1. 5, c. 14, 15.] [LN., Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis around 310-20 to 403AD.]
Montfaucon and Helyot have attempted to prove them Christians but have been confuted by Bouhier. Lange has contended that they were nothing more than circumcised Egyptians but has been confuted by Henmann. - Marsh's Michaelis, vol. 4, p. 79, 80, 81. [LN., this translation will be dealt with under the Name of Michaelis, SV.]
"It was in Egypt," says the great ecclesiastical historian, Mosheim, "that the morose discipline of Asceticism [A] (i.e. the Essenian or Therapeutan discipline) took its rise; and it is observable, that that country has in all times, as it were by an immutable law or disposition of nature, abounded with persons of a melancholy complexion, and produced, in proportion to its extent, more gloomy spirits than any other parts of the world. It was here that the Essenes dwelt principally, long before the coming of Christ." - Mosheim, vol. I, p. 196.
[A] From the Greek [GK] exercise, discipline, study, meditation, signifying also self-mortification.] [LN., this self-mortification has been practised by Buddhist monks since the earliest times, and involved gradually starvation of one's self, to death. How much more pointless can faith be?]
It is not the first glance, nor a cursory, observance, that will sufficiently admonish the reader of the immense historical wealth put into his hand, by this stupendous admission, this surrender of the key-stone of the mighty arch, - this giving-up of everything that can be pretended for the evidences of the Christian religion.
More admissions
This admission of the great ecclesiastical historian (than whom there is no greater), will serve us as the Pythagorean theorem - the great geometrical element of all subsequent science, of continual- recurrence, of infinite application - ever to be borne in mind, always to be brought in proof - presenting the means of solving every difficulty, and the clue for guiding us to every truth. "Bind it about thy neck, write it upon the tablet of thy heart" - Everything of Christianity is of Egyptian origin.
The first and greatest library that ever was in the world, was at Alexandria in Egypt. The first of that most mischievous of all institutions - universities, was the University of Alexandria in Egypt; where lazy monks and wily fanatics first found the benefit of clubbing together, to keep the privileges and advantages of learning to themselves, and concocting holy mysteries and inspired legends, to be dealt out as the craft should need, for the perpetuation of ignorance and superstition, and consequently of the ascendency of jugglers and Jesuits, holy hypocrites, and reverend rogues, among men.
All the most valued manuscripts of the Christian scriptures are Codices Alexandrini. The very first bishops of whom we have any account, were bishops of Alexandria. Scarcely one of the more eminent fathers of the Christian church is there, who had not been educated and trained in the arts of priestly fraud, in the University of Alexandria, - that great sewer of the congregated feculencies of fanaticism.
In those early times, the professions of Medicine and Divinity were inseparable. We read of the divinity students studying medicine in the School, or University of Alexandria, to which all persons resorted, who were afterwards to practice in either way, on the weak in body or the weak in mind, among their fellow creatures. The Therapeuts, or Essenes, as their name signifies, were expressly professors of the art of healing - an art in those days necessarily conferring the most mystical sanctity of character on all who were endued with it, and the most convenient of all others for the purposes of imposture and wonderment. It was invariably considered to be attainable only by the especial gift of heaven, [A] and no cure of any sort, or in any way effected, was ever ascribed to natural causes merely. Those who, after due training in the ascetic discipline, were sent out from the university of Alexandria to practice their divinely acquired art in the towns and villages, were recognized as regular or canonical apostles: while those who had not obtained their credentials from the college, who set up for themselves, or who, after having left the college, ceased to recognise its appointment, were called false apostles, quacks, heretics, and empirics. And in several of the early apocryphal scriptures, we find the titles Apostolici and Apotactici (apostolical, and apotactical, i.e. of the monkish order of Apotactites, or Solitaires,) perfectly synonymous. Eusebius emphatically calls the apotactical Therapeuts apostolical. [a] "To another the gifts of healing, by the same Spirit. Have all the gifts of healing?" 1 Cor. xii. -Query. How did he spend three years in Arabia, but in a course of study for the ministry?]
"Philo (he says) wrote also a treatise on the contemplative life, or the Worshippers; from whence, we have borrowed those things, which we allege concerning the manner of life of those apostolical men." [b] Indeed, Christ himself, is represented as describing his apostles as members of this solitary order of monks and being one himself: - "They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world." - John 17-16. What then but monks? The secedes or dissenters (and of this class was St. Paul), [c] upon finding the advantage of setting up in the trade upon their own independent foundation, pleaded their success in miracles of healing, as evidence of their divine commission; and abundantly returned the reviling's of Therapeutan college. [b]Eccl. Hist. lib. 2, c. 17, A.] [c] Galat. i. 17.]
Unaided by the lights of anatomy, and unfounded on any principles of rational science; recovery from disease could only be ascribed to supernatural powers. A fever was supposed to be a demon that had taken up his abode in the body of the unfortunate patient, and was to be expelled, not by any virtue of material causes; but by incantations, spells, and leucomancy, or white magic; as opposed to necromancy, or black magic, by which diseases and evils of all sorts were believed to be incurred. The white magic consisted of prayers, fasting's, [d] baptisms, sacraments, &c. which were believed to have the same power over good demons, and even over God himself, as the black magic had over evil demons and their supreme head, the Devil. The trembling patient was only entitled to expect his cure in proportion to his faith, to believe without understanding, and to surrender his fortune and life itself to the purposes of his physician, and to the business of imposing upon others, the deceits that had been practised upon himself.
[d] "Howbeit this kind goes not out but by prayer and fasting." Matt 18-21.]
Even to this day, the name retained by our sacred writings, is derived from the belief of their magical influence, as a spell or charm of God, to drive away diseases.
Ignorance is not only bliss, but a necessity of maintaining the Christian church
The Irish peasantry still continue to the passages of St. John's Spell, or St. John's God's-spell, to the horns of cows to make them give more milk; nor would any powers of rational argument shake their conviction of the efficacy of a bit of the ivy, tied round a colt's heels, to prevent them from swelling. It will become physicians of higher claims to science and rationality, to triumph over the veterinary piety of the Bog of Allen, when their own forms of prescription shall no longer betray the wish to conceal from the patient the nature of the ingredients to which he is to trust his life, nor bear, as the first mark of the pen upon the paper, the mystical hieroglyphic of Jupiter, the talismanic R, under whose influence the prescribed herbs were to be gathered, and from whose miraculous agency their operation was to be expected.
Egyptians, gypsies, Jews, and thieves?
The Therapeutse of Egypt, from whom are descended the vagrant hordes of Jews and Gypsies, had well found by what arts mankind were to be cajoled; and as they boasted their acquaintance with the sanative qualities of herbs of all country; so in their extensive peregrinations through all the then known regions of the earth, they had not failed to bring home, and remodel to their own purposes, those sacred spells or religious romances, which they found had been successfully palmed on the credulity of remote nations. Hence the Indian Krishna might have become Therapeutan head of the order of spiritual physicians.
No principle was held more sacred than that of the necessity of keeping the sacred writings from the knowledge of the people. Nothing could be safer from the danger of discovery than the substitution, with scarce a change of names, "of the incarnate Deity of the Sanskrit Romance," for the imaginary founder of Therapeuta college. What had been said to have been done in India, could be as well said to have been done in Palestine the change of names and places, and the mixing up of various sketches of the Egyptian, Phoenician, Greek, and Roman mythology, would constitute a sufficient disguise to evade the languid curiosity of infant scepticism. A knowledge within the acquisition only of a few, and which the strongest possible interest bound that few to hold inviolate, would soon pass entirely from the records of human memory. A long, continued habit of imposing upon others would in time subdue the minds of the impostors themselves and cause them to become at length the dupes of their own deception, to forget the temerity in which their first assertions had originated, to catch the infection of the prevailing credulity, and to believe their own lie.
In such, the known and never-changing laws of nature, and the invariable operation of natural causes, we find the solution of every difficulty and perplexity that remoteness of time might throw in the way of our judgment of past events.
But when, to such an apparatus of rational probability, we are enabled to bring in the absolute ratification of unquestionable testimony, - to show that what was in supposition more probable than anything else that could be supposed, was in fact that which absolutely took place, - we have the highest degree of evidence of which history is capable; we can give no other definition of historical truth itself.
Time revels all things
The probability, then, that that sect of vagrant quack- doctors, Therapeutse, who were established in Egypt and its neighbourhood many ages before the period assigned by later theologians as that of the birth of Christ, were the original fabricators of the writings contained in the New Testament; becomes certainty on the basis of evidence, than which history has nothing more certain - by the unguarded, but explicit - unwary, but most unqualified and positive, statement of the historian Eusebius, that "those ancient Therapeutm were Christians, and that their ancient writings were our Gospels and Epistles." [a] The wonder with which Lardner quotes this astonishing confession of the great pillar of the pretended evidences of the Christian religion, [Credibility, vol. 2, 4to. p. 361] only shows how aware he was of the fatal inferences with which it teems.
[a] The above most important passage of all ecclesiastical records, is in the 2d book, the 17th chapter, and 53d and following pages of his History. The title of a whole chapter (the fourth of the first book) of this work is, that THE RELIGION PUBLISHED BY JESUS CHRIST TO ALL NATIONS IS NEITHER NEW NOR STRANGE.]
It is most essentially observable, that the Essenes or Therapeuts, in addition to their monopoly of the art of healing, professed themselves to be Eclectics; they held Plato in the highest esteem, though they made no scruple to join with his doctrines, whatever they thought conformable to reason in the tenets and opinions of the other philosophers.
"These sages were of opinion that true philosophy, [c] the greatest and most salutary gift of God to mortals, was scattered, in various portions, through all the different sects; and that it was, consequently, the duty of every wise man to gather it from the several corners where it lay dispersed, and to employ it, thus re-united, in destroying the dominion of impiety and vice." [d] The principal seat of this philosophy was at Alexandria; and "it manifestly appears," says Mosheim, [e] "from the testimony of Philo the Jew, who was himself one of this sect, that this (Eclectic) philosophy (of this Essenian or Therapeutan sect) was in a flourishing state at Alexandria when our Saviour was upon earth." - Eccl. Hist. Cent. 1, p. 1.
c] Observe well, the phrases, - "the philosophy - our philosophy," and the "true philosophy," occur throughout the Fathers, in a hundred passages for one, where " Christianity" should have been the word.]
[d]Mosheim, vol. i. p. 169.]
[e]Ibid. p. 37.]
1. We have only to collate the admission of the orthodox Lactantius, that Christianity itself was the Eclectic Philosophy, inasmuch as that "if there had been any one to have collected the truth that was scattered and diffused among the various sects of philosophers and divines into one, and to have reduced it into a system, there would indeed be no difference between him and a Christian:" [Admission No. 10 in the chapter of Admissions.]
General conclusions
2. To compare the various tenets and speculations of the different philosophers and religionists of antiquity with the strong and particular match of the Platonic philosophy, which we actually see pervading the New Testament: and to add the weight in all reason and fairness due to the positive testimony of that unquestionably learned and intelligent Manichsean Christian and bishop, Faustus, - that "it is an undoubted fact, that the New Testament was not written by Christ himself, nor by his apostles, but a long while after their time, by some unknown persons, who, lest they should not be credited when they wrote of affairs they were little acquainted with, affixed to their works the names of apostles, or of such as were supposed to have been their companions, and then said that they were written according to them." [a] - Faust lib. 2.
[a] "Multa enim a majoribus vestris, eloquiis Domini nostri inserta verba sunt; quae nomine signata ipsius, cum ejus fide non congruant, praesertim, quia, ut jam saepe probatum a nobis est, nec ab ipso haec sunt, nee ab ejus apostolis scripta, sed multo post eorum assumptionem, a nescio quibus, et ipsis inter se non concoidantibus semi-judaeis, per famas opinionesque comperta sunt; qui tamen omnia eadem in apostolorum Domini conferentes nomina, vel eorum qui secuti apostolos viderentur, errores ac mendacia sua secundum eos se scripsisse mentiti sunt." -Faust, lib. 33, c. 3.]
To this important passage, of which I reserve the original text for my next occasion of quoting it, [In chapter 15] I here subjoin what the same high authority objects, if possibly with still increasing emphasis, against the arguments of St. Augustine: - "For many things have been inserted by your ancestors in the speeches of our Lord, which, though put forth under his name, agree not with his faith; especially since, - as already it has been often proved by us, - that these things were not written by Christ, nor his apostles, but a long while after their assumption, by I know not what sort of half-Jews, not even agreeing with themselves, who made up their tale out of reports and opinions merely; and yet, fathering the whole upon the names of the apostles of the Lord, or on those who were supposed to have followed the apostles; they mendaciously pretended that they had written their lies and conceits, according to them." The conclusion is irresistible
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Next, Chapter 8. The Christian Scriptures, Doctrines, Discipline, and Ecclesiastical Polity, long Anterior to the Period Assigned as that of the Birth of Christ.