Christianity thus transformed the Christ principle into Christ the man. In so doing, it captured the imagination of those to whom the abstract concept of Christliness would have little appeal. The birth, baptism, temptation, sermonizing, miracle working, transfiguration, trial, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of a man, whose effort and agony were bent on eradicating the sins of mankind, could stir the most torpid minds. The spectacular growth of the Christian religion (which was essentially little different from a score of religious cults of its day) was due in large part to its startling proclamation that the universal dream had been fulfilled, the Messiah had come in the person of the babe of Davidic descent.
To those people whose prospects of earthly happiness were stifled under the tyranny of the Roman power, Christianity's heralding of the advent of the Messiah sounded much like the ringing of a liberty bell, promising their release from servility. They were to be redeemed by God himself, come to earth to fulfill the glorious promises of scripture. The poetry of the birth story itself was filled with mystery and magic. At the divine birth, angels had announced the glad tidings to shepherds watching their flocks by night in the fields. (Thus the humblest person felt himself the direct recipient of divine grace.) The virgin maid had been mystified as the angel Gabriel announced to her that she should conceive and bear the child of heaven, fathered by the Holy Spirit. Three Magi came from the East to greet the celestial visitant with threefold gifts; heaven and nature united their songs in jubilation over the Lord's birth.
The beauty and wonder of this story never fails to touch the heart. The tragedy is that its acceptance in literal form robs the mind of the true mystical experience that can be imparted by the universal truth contained within the nativity story. The imagery of the scriptures was designed to elevate consciousness above the mundane into the pure realm of the spirit.
It has generally been forgotten that the advent of the Messiah was inseparably connected with the concept of the apocalypse. The consummative event was to take place when the scroll of the heavens was rolled up and the earth dissolved. In the view that prevailed in the Jewish world at the time of the upsurge of Christianity, the Son of God was to come "at the end of days." The delineation of the event was heightened in the imagination of the age by the universal distress of the masses and, among the Christians, by oppression under an exaggerated consciousness of sin. The distress of nations would bring repentance as the first step and the necessary condition of the consummation. Then preliminary heralding would come in the appearance of the prophet Elijah, the legendary forerunner of the Messiah. This role is played in the Gospel story by John the Baptist, who was said to be the prophet reincarnated, and who must appear to announce the near coming of the Lord and call the nations to repentance.
It was believed that with the avatar's appearance and the assumption of his seat on the throne in Jerusalem would come the restoration of the kingdom of Israel. The Messiah would judge all the nations in addition to the twelve tribes of Israel. Transgressors would be consumed in fire. There would be anguish of nations, famine, earthquakes, and convulsions of nature. Son would turn against father, daughter against mother; cities would be destroyed, laws forgotten. False prophets would abound, deluding the people. A few of the good would be preserved and purified out of the welter of iniquity.
Instead of bringing the consummation of all things in the eschatalogical sense, much Messianic expectation contemplates only the end of the present cycle of darkness and evil and the beginning of the reign of peace and the golden age of the world. Happiness and prosperity, both material and spiritual, will universally prevail. At the sound of the heralding trumpet, there will be a gathering together of the exiles—all the Jews scattered over the four quarters of the earth. The Gentiles who survive the day of judgment will all turn to Judaism and call upon the name of the one and only God, and all will be united in one society to bow to the will of the Most High with singleness of heart. The glorious kingdom of the saints will be established in the land of Israel. The temple will be rebuilt, and though the nations will continue in their separate existence in the brotherhood of the world, they will all stream into the mountains of God and serve him along with his own chosen people. The earth will increase its fruitfulness; even the beasts will be at peace with men. All grief, pride, oppression, slavery, and inequality will pass away, as all recognize their common brotherhood as sons of the Father in heaven. Then will come the resurrection of the dead; the righteous dead will come to life, and even the ungodly will turn to virtue following their purgation in the fires of hell. The righteous will sit in the company of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses, and all will be sheltered in the shadow of the Messiah. Then will dawn the halcyon age in which the need to eat and drink will be overcome. Even the begetting of children will pass away, all being spiritual; sharp dealing, jealousy, and strife will end. But the righteous will sit with crowns on their heads in the bright light of the presence of Shekinah.
This, avers Joseph Klausner in Jesus of Nazareth, was the ideal that Jesus heard proclaimed in his day; and this, he adds, is what Jesus had in mind when he predicted that the kingdom of heaven was nigh and that those hearing his voice should not pass away before they would see this kingdom realized. Is it not a sobering thought that even his divine genius was misled and that his prediction was followed by two thousand years of strife, violence, war, and human exploitation?
Christian theologians insist that their religion demands only one thing: belief in the existence, divinity, and saving power of Jesus of Nazareth. The Christian manifesto is that, whereas in the Old Testament the Messianic advent is still the hope of the future, in the New Testament, this hope has been fulfilled, and the event has released upon earth a beneficent reality for all men. This saving power did not arise from any evolution of spiritual capacity in mankind, any growth of conscious capability to apprehend truth or any natural unfoldment of inner quality. It came simply and entirely from the events of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In effect, this doctrine asserts that spiritual truth would be powerless to redeem human nature unless first demonstrated by Jesus. In other words, truth as an abstract principle is impotent on the human level unless and until it has been hypostatized by Jesus' life and death. Hence, nearly every address to deity in the Prayer Book of the church ends with the phrase, "through our Lord Jesus Christ." That Jesus was God, and alone of all men divine, is the cornerstone of the Christian religion.
The early fathers of the church did not realize how precarious was this commitment to one set of alleged historical events, for the events themselves might be questioned or even disproved. Their authenticity was maintained down the centuries by the sheer force of dogmatic assertion. But now investigation, criticism, and definite historical data have cast considerable doubt on the facts of Jesus' life. If the entire foundation of the religion rests upon historical fact, its fate may hang precariously in the balance, depending on whether increasing knowledge will confirm or disprove certain historical events. And indeed the claims for its historicity are losing ground before the steady advance of contemporary research and discovery.
But surely Christianity has much more to offer in the teachings of its founder than in his life. It should therefore be said at once that what is lost as history will come back with immeasurable gain as spiritual allegory. As the Petrine contention for the historical Jesus of the early church weakens, the Pauline contention for the Christos that is, or is to be, resurrected in all hearts, grows in truth and power. More and more significant will become the outstanding fact that Paul cared so little for the historical Jesus that he did not think it worthwhile to mention him in connection with a single event of his career. Paul's conception of the Greek Christos was that of a principle of divine consciousness in the souls of men, and not merely that of one man from Galilee.
Modern man and ancient man held widely different views as to what deserved to be perpetuated in written accounts. Today we have unlimited resources for communication, and so we freely publish the trivial along with the meaningful. Antiquity had no such resources, and therefore it conserved what it had by recording only that which was considered most vital and precious. What people did was held to be secondary, derivative, and subordinate to what they thought and felt. The center of interest was not the eventful content of history, but the structure, the frame, and the meaning: its elan, its spirit, its logos. There are any number of indications of this attitude. The mind of antiquity continually strove to discern and reconstruct in human terms the rationale of the Overmind of the world. The nature of the ancient scriptures openly reflects this purpose, and it is more than confirmed by the fictional and symbolic method of representing truth in multiple images. History needs no such instruments to narrate its factualities.
This methodology is revealed, not only in the contents of the works, but also in the subtle and cryptic devices introduced into the structure of the composition. Study indicates that the authors intended to convey or embalm meaning as much by form as by wordsense. As nature reveals its meaning in its morphology, so it seems to have been the intent of the ancient writers of the sacred books to present truth in forms whose very organic structure would be revealing to the discerning mind. Investigation has traced some highly ingenious and subtle ciphers and cryptograms in our Bible itself. The word chiasmus, for example, will be found in the dictionary; it appears in the title of an epochal book, Chiasmus in the New Testament, by Nils Wilhelm Lund, of the faculty of a Chicago theological seminary. In it, he reveals the presence of a structure in the arrangement of verses in the Bible, based on the great key number of the universe—seven. Arcane science of the ancient day said that the creative force emanating from the heart of being, and proceeding from spiritual to dense material levels, descended through planes A, B, C, to D and went no further; but on its return it took the course back to its primal ethereality through the same planes, D, C, B, and A, in reverse order. Lund traced the presence of many chiasmic structures in the Bible, such as the fact that the last three verses in a series of seven virtually repeat, in reverse order, the first three.
Here is evidence that the authors of the Bible tried to copy in a literary structure what they conceived to be the form of procedure in cosmic creation. Pythagoras was not alone in holding that God built the universe on number: the Gnostics, Kabalists, and Hermeticists also expounded this theory. In both Greek and Hebrew, every letter of the alphabet had a numerical value, so that the words and sentences not only carried a message through their words, but also framed a pattern of meaning over mathematical design and proportion. The scriptures therefore stand not only as books enshrining the most profound ethical meanings; they also structuralize the frame of the patterns or archai of the Logos. A careful counting of the numerical value of the Bible texts reports that every verse totals a multiple of the number seven. The first verse of Genesis, in the Hebrew, is composed of seven words and shows nine combinations of the words and phrases that equal multiples of seven. Facts of this kind enforce the recognition that the purpose of scriptural composition was something far more profound and more potent than mere narrative.
Along with this, there are numbers and symbols interwoven in the texture of the composition that also indicate a purpose and modality other than historical factuality.
At the marriage feast in Cana, for example, the servants set out six pots of water to be turned into wine, signifying the six days of creation of the natural world that generate a birth of "spirit" in the crowning seventh. Jesus tarried here or there for seven days (as indeed, so did the Buddha and many another great religious character). Kings reigned forty years. Twelve stones were set up by Joshua in the dry bed of the Jordan River at his crossing; twelve baskets of fragments of bread and fish were gathered up after the multitude had been miraculously fed on five small loaves and two small fishes. Circumcision was performed on the eighth day. The very name of Hecate, Greek goddess of the moon, means six. The Israelite world was nearly split in twain over the question whether the Passover fell on the fourteenth or fifteenth of Nisan, the fourteenth being implied by lunar, the fifteenth by solar symbolism. The seventh day of the tenth month had special sanctity. More events than Jesus' resurrection—notably, Jonah's voyage in his piscatorial ark—were consummated "after three days." Atergatis and Semiramis and other goddesses were named "the Goddess Fifteen."
Many intimations point to the general fact that the documents authored and cherished in ancient times were cryptic constructions devised with incredible artistry to prefigure and dramatize both the form and the meaning of cosmic ideation, natural law, and living spiritual truth. Beyond question, this secret language was among the most important arcana of the Mysteries. To the ancients, literary composition had one preeminent purpose: to reveal the heroic struggle of the soulfire of man to overcome its material bonds, to free itself and transform mortality into immortality. The evidence for this is ubiquitous in mythology, in iconography, in epic and lyric poetry, in the universal science of heraldry, in astrological pictography devised and attached to the constellations and major stars in the heavens, in the zodiac, and in such elaborately constructed symbolic systems as the Tarot cards.
The very life of the people from remote time down through the medieval period was saturated, one might say, with an endless diffusion of arcana in the form of folklore, tradition, proverb, fairy tale, legend, castle ballad, and hero epic—even to Mother Goose jingles. Inspiration sprang from an overriding concern with the rich inner life of man, in relation to which the haphazard and often meaningless and cruel sequence of outward events was of but transient significance. We should note, in this connection, the relation between the two central words in arcane literature, Logos and Mythos. Logos is the power of the universal Mind; Mythos, related etymologically to mouth and therefore signifying utterance, is the effort of man's mind to express what it has comprehended of the supreme Mind. Myth is man's admittedly partial and incomplete statement of the truth of the Logos. Even though fragmentary, myth embodies truth at the highest level on which the human mind can envisage and pictorialize it. The scriptures of the Eastern world will not be read in their proper context until their imagery is penetrated to reveal the forms and figures of truth that have been so cunningly wrought into their texture. Many secrets of ancient men of wisdom still lie hidden, a rich resource which awaits discovery and decipherment.
Alfred Loisy has framed one of the problems that confront biblical scholarship. If the Gospels can no longer be accepted as history, what may they be other than history? It seems clear to us that they must be allegory, drama, and myth, which thus convey to man a grand panorama of spiritual truth. The discourses in the Gospels may well have been speeches to be recited by the principal actors in the Mystery plays, especially the utterances of the central figure, the Christos-Messiah. The movements, actions, and miraculous labors of Jesus could well have been the dramatist's efforts to portray histrionically the occult experiences of the soul in its evolution. Such features as the birth, the awakening of intellectual power at age twelve, the temptation or stress of conflict between the body and the soul, the development of the soul's divine potency to heal the ills and weaknesses of the flesh, the overcoming and casting out of the demonic forces of the natural man by the Christly influence, the symbolic raising of the "dead" inert spiritual power to a new birth of life, the anguish at the height of the clash between the two poles of life (the whole experience of the soul under the long domination of the animal instinct being itself the essence of crucifixion on the cross of matter), then the final victory in the soul's radiant transfiguration of the mortal man by the spirit's light, and the ultimate resurrection of the soul out of its "death" under the suffocating heaviness of the life of sense—what are all these but a dramatic rendition of the phases of the soul's life under the duress of its incarceration in mortal body? As asserted before, these elements of the narrative that constitute the ostensible life history of the man Jesus coincide at every point with critical situations in the drama of the Mysteries and other rituals in religions long antecedent to the first century. It would be extraordinary if long after earlier religions had elaborately portrayed a series of stages in man's spiritual experience, one man should have recapitulated every scene of the drama in his own life, even to the point of using the identical words put into the mouth of the Sun God of ancient Egypt.
There is an aspect of the Messianic conception that deserves special attention in this connection. Certain forms of the presentation had linked the advent to the moral condition of the people of Israel. Since the world was to be regenerated at the great day of the coming, the inference had been that the event was contingent upon the moral regeneration of God's chosen people. Israel's sins, her waywardness, disobedience, and apostasy from Jehovah were holding back the dawn of the Day of the Lord. In fact, one faction held that the Messiah had already come, but that he remained unrecognized, a beggar wandering among men who, because their spiritual sense was deadened by immorality, could not identify him as God. This legend, of course, is the precursor of many expansions of the poetic theme of human failure to discern the godly under the guise of the commonplace, as in Lowell's The Vision of Sir Launfal and the stories of the Grail cycle. It can readily enough be presupposed that the birth of any higher spiritual quality in human nature is retarded by a low level of general morality, just as continued ignorance inhibits whatever advance greater knowledge would bring. But this point is not the one expressed by the Messianists. Their thesis was simply that, in the terms of the great tradition, Israel might be expected in a few years to transfigure its mores so radically as to constitute a climactic point in human history. From one point of view, this thesis can be seen as a rational belief that the field must be tilled and ready before the seed can be planted. But from another, it signifies that heaven must wait upon man, which would be absurd.
Another belief inherent in the tradition was that the divine Child should be born on the day of the destruction of the temple. If one uses Paul's vivid figure of the body as the temple of the living God, this implies that when the weaknesses of the flesh (epitomized in the concept of original sin) have been overcome, transmuted, or "destroyed," the Christ spirit, ever present but until then submerged, will flower into full life. The spiritual man, the Christ, will be born when the natural man dies.
Then again, the legend asserted that the Messiah was to come up out of the sea. What does this mean? From the physiological point of view, it is true that every human babe is born out of sea water—the amniotic fluid. In another sense, all living matter is symbolized by water, from which and by which all life proceeds. Life on our earth began in and came out upon land from the sea. Greek myth recounts that Venus (Love) was born out of the sea foam that was stirred up around the knees of Zeus as he waded through the waters. As life started in water, then emerged into the air, so man is said to be born first of water, the psyche, and then of the spirit. Since the element water has long been held to represent the animal or psychic nature, the Christ, representing the spiritual soul, would be seen as arising out of that watery element, the sea, into the free air of the spiritual life.
Integral in the Messiah legend was the notion that the child had to be spirited away immediately after his birth to escape destruction—often by a dragon. In the Egyptian tradition, the name for the symbolic serpent typifying the lower nature of man, along with Apap and the Hydra or water dragon, was the Herut reptile. A Syrian form was likewise Herutt. Mythology is full of stories of the God-child who must be hidden from the danger of destruction by a serpent, which the Egyptian myths represented as lurking in the bight of Amenta (this physical world) to devour young souls. So, also, Hercules had to strangle two great serpents in his cradle. Can there be a connection between the danger to the divine Child from the snake "Herut" and that from the tyrant "Herod"?
Another story is connected with a figure named Taxo or Taxon in the Apocalypse of Moses. It is said that Taxo and his seven sons hid themselves in a cave in order to pray for the people, but also to be able to live in accordance with the people's strict interpretation of the law. The cave is a companion symbol to the stable as the birthplace of the Savior in the legends. If ever theology could recognize that this "strict law" is not Jewish legalistic religion, but that which is characterized by geburah, the unbending immutability of natural law, it might perceive therein a hint that the divine soul, when it comes to dwell in mortal body, would conform its life to the law governing its house of flesh, while it "prayed" for the elevation of its host.
The above forms only a small part of the existing evidence that the expectation of the immanence of the Messiah was widely prevalent in that first century.