The Invention of Christianity: The First 500 Years by Tom Lee

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Tom Lee...

Looking at some of the detail in the Gospel of Matthew

Lock up your daughters, manacle your sons, and keep this episode of Tom Lee's commentary well out of their sight. Today Tom explores the foundational stories concerning the incarnation and birth of Jesus. Are these stories literally true? Or were they borrowed and adapted from similar foundational stories that had been used in other religions before Christianity? Where does the real truth in these matters reside?

Which Gospels to Choose? Part 8.5
by Tom Lee

Common themes in religions…

Missionaries among the heathen may have felt that the God-man of what was hoped would be a unifying universal religion, must not be allowed to appear less divine than the gods and heroes he would be superseding. The idea of a god mating with a mortal woman was a very familiar one with Greeks, Romans and Egyptians. Dionysus, Perseus, Ra, Attis, Horus, Mithras, Buddha and Zoroaster were all supposed to have been born of a god and a virgin, and in several cases, in some mystic way, to become the god themselves.

Some speculate that Zoroaster was the first person to teach that humans have a soul as well as a body, and that the soul gives us the faculties of reason, consciousness, conscience, and free will.

The Persian sage Zoroaster according to the Zend-Avesta, the Zoroastrian scripture, prophesied that a savior was to arise born of his seed and that of a virgin, and the story of the Magi appears to have been taken bodily from a passage in the Zend-Avesta.

"You, my children, shall be the first honored by the manifestation of that divine person who is to appear in the world: a star shall go before you to conduct you to the place of his nativity; and when you shall find him, present to him your oblations and sacrifices; for he is indeed your lord and an everlasting king."

This prophecy, perpetuated in Mithraism, must early have caught the attention of the rival church. Mithras, the rock-born, had been worshipped by shepherds, and the Magi were the astrologer priests of the Zoroastrian faith in Persia.

Zoroaster was supposed to have been miraculously conceived by his mother when she was fifteen, and a Turanian Prince (the persecuting Herod of the story) attempted to destroy him when he was a baby: the spirit of God descended upon him at the age of thirty, and afterwards Angra Mainyu, the Lord of Evil, tried to tempt him into sin. Sound familiar?

Some speculate that Zoroaster was the first person to teach that humans have a soul as well as a body, and that the soul gives us the faculties of reason, consciousness, conscience, and free will. Free will enables us to choose good or evil actions and makes us responsible for our actions. As people make their own choices, God is justified in rewarding or punishing us by sending us to heaven or hell. About a thousand years later St Augustine made similar arguments and may have been directly inspired by Zoroaster, since, for nine years before he became a Christian, he was a Manichean, a sect influenced by Zoroastrian beliefs.

Missing from the ancient Jewish view were concepts of…

But the ancient Jewish world was without Heaven, Hell, the soul, and eternal salvation or redemption. These concepts were inveigled into later translations that sought to Christianize the Old Testament.

Following the Babylonian Exile, the Jews had very close contact with the Persians, and some came to believe in the resurrection of the dead, a final judgment, and reward or punishment after the judgment. It is a theological landscape far removed from our own.

Buddhism, from the time of Ashoka, who came to the throne of a united India in 270 BCE, was a proselytizing religion, sending out missionaries to all parts of the known world. But it was at this time too that the pantheon of Buddhism began to multiply with the introduction of new Buddhas. The first of these was Maitreya, the future Buddha. His coming would usher in a new age of peace and brotherhood. This Buddha, according to legend, would not be Indian or Asian, but would come from the West. Thus the Hellenistic Buddhists, descendants of Alexander's troops, in the borderlands of India were awaiting their own Messiah.

Undiscouraged by lack of evidence and the chronological tables in both Matthew and Luke that firmly, though differently, trace the ancestry of Jesus from David through Joseph, the church historians represented the Mother of Jesus as something between one of the many virgins who throughout the ages had been reputed to give birth to demi-gods after the visitation of some pagan deity. The cornerstone was a mis-translation of the key-word virgin in Isaiah 7:14. It should have been young woman, still rendered rather ambiguously as maid in the Jerusalem Bible.

The whole passage was in fact a contemporary prophecy relating to King Ahaz and had nothing to do with Messianic prophecies. In the Genesis Apocryphon found among the Dead Sea Scrolls the lost opening apparently told of the miraculous birth of Noah and the text begins with the suspicion of his father Lamech that his wife had been made pregnant by an angel and therefore had been unfaithful to him, which she repudiates. Thus the Matthew nativity writer was paraphrasing creatively.

The astrological connection…

Of Abraham it was told that when he was born a star appeared in the East and moved across the heavens. The wise men went to King Nimrod and told him this signified the birth of a child destined to be great. The king's councillors advised him to kill the son of Terah. The king sent his soldiers to slay the child but God protected him by dispatching the Angel Gabriel to conceal him by clouds and mists. Afterwards Terah, fearing for the boy's life, fled secretly from the country (Book of Jashaor and Maase Abraham). There are shades too of the story of Moses.

But there is no reason to suppose that Jesus' birth was attended by any supernatural occurrences or was in any way exceptional. He was as completely human as every baby, the eldest child of a Jewish artisan named Joseph and his wife Miriam (Mary).

Contemporary poster from the Planetarium in Hawaii exploring the Christian Christmas story with the Astrological connection..

Only in the Gospel according to Matthew is there mention of a star heralding Jesus' birth, specifically in the reign of King Herod, who died on the lunar eclipse in March of 4 BCE. The Bible and archeological records from ancient clay tablets show a continuing careful year-long observation of a triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the sign of Pisces in 7 BCE, marking the most probable time for the birth of Jesus, if the story of the star has any connection at all. Old Jewish traditions link Saturn to Israel, and Pisces itself was considered to be the constellation of the Jews. The rabbinic writer Abarbanel went so far as to predict the Messiah would appear when there was a conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in Pisces.

A famous Persian astrologer, Gjamasp, about 500 BCE, predicted that when the great conjunction fell in Pisces, a great history-changing prophet would appear among them. Jupiter and Saturn conjoin every twenty years in different signs, but they don't always make three conjunctions in the same year, which is due to a process called by astrologers "retrograde".

In addition, about every 240 years the conjunction changes to a different astrological sign. This process is called "mutation", which can also happen with any other planetary cycle. However, the particular cycle of Jupiter-Saturn denoted the birth of kings. Gjamasp predicted that the Great King of the Hebrews would be born and the Age of Pisces would begin in the next Triple Mutation in the water element in Pisces, the sign of the Jewish nation. That is precisely what occurred in 7 BCE. The three conjunctions were exact on May 24, October 1, and December 9. Gjamasp's prophecy may have been the basis of the nativity visitation story of the magi. described in Matthew, which does not prove that it actually happened.

Jesus' followers chose as their symbol a fish because the Greek word for it, i-ch-th-u-s, formed the initials of the phrase Jesous Christos theou uios soter — Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.

Mary's traditional birthplace is Sepphoris in Galilee, a town that was rebuilt in grand style by king Herod Antipas. Josephus testified to its beauty, calling it "the ornament of all Galilee". We know that the evangelists believed the family was settled in Galilee and claimed descent from the house of David from which the Messiah was expected. We know that Jesus was the first-born, and that he had four younger brothers and at least two sisters.

What sort of family did Jesus belong to?

Roman Catholics, because of the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary, hold that the brothers and sisters of Jesus were the children of Joseph by a former wife, which would make them older than Jesus. The Gospels give no warrant for this interpretation. Indeed Matthew 1:25 "And knew her not 'til she had brought forth her first-born son" implies that Joseph did have intercourse with Mary after the birth of Jesus. Why else emphasize that Jesus was her first-born son unless there were others? Perpetual virginity and marriage cannot coexist.

If Mary remained a virgin, her marriage to Joseph was unconsummated and was no marriage at all. Sexual intercourse, according to Catholic doctrine, is the defining aspect of marriage, and no marriage exists until consummated through sexual intercourse. No priest would sanction a couple entering a marriage under a vow of perpetual virginity. The Catholic Church will not even sanction a couple entering marriage if the man is not capable of sexual intercourse. Jewish law did and does consider procreation a Biblical command from which no man is free, (Genesis 1:28). Could Mary have said to the angel "I don't do sex"?

It is possible that Mary, described as a member of a priestly house, and like the rest of her people, awaiting the promised Messiah, may have dedicated her child to God before he was born. It would explain the passages in Luke where she is said to have pondered the incidents of the Nativity, and kept all the sayings of Jesus in her heart. Such words do not suggest the confident assurance of a woman who knows that she has given birth to the Messiah, but a watchful woman alert to any signs that her prayers may have been answered.

“Missionaries among the heathen may have felt that the God-man of what was hoped would be a unifying universal religion, must not be allowed to appear less divine than the gods and heroes he would be superseding.” …Tom Lee

PHOTO CREDIT: The image used in the headline has been sourced from the OnLine Sacred Gallery of the British Library: www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/sacred/downloads.html

Tom Lee is an Australian, now semi-retired in Phoenix, Arizona, who has had an illustrious international career as an actor, writer, and broadcast commentator. He does not claim to be a professional theologian, nor an historian, but he undertook this study because, like many of the people who are attracted to what we're doing here at Catholica Australia, he was simply inquisitive about the history of Christianity and trying to better understand what he had been brought up to believe. In a sense, his book is a one-man journey seeking to better understand who Jesus was and what his own faith was about.

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