Mede invented two laws for interpreting biblical prophecy. The first was the law of synchronistical necessity. To understand what this law is all about, we have to leave Joseph Mede for a moment and look at the Book of Daniel, which Mede, and then Newton, regarded as Revelation’s twin and an indispensable guide to deciphering the Book of Revelation.
And suddenly in the midst of the darkness a vast hall appears, illuminated by golden candelabra. Candles so lofty that they are half lost in the darkness, stretch away beyond the lines of banquet tables, which seem to extend to the horizon. . . . On the pavement below crawl the captive kings whose hands and feet have been cut off; from time to time he flings them bones to gnaw. Further off sit his brothers with bandages across their eyes, being all blind.44
Thus does the French novelist Gustave Flaubert describe in bloody, surreal, and exaggerated detail the splendor and misery of the banquet hall of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia, who ruled from 605 to 562 BC.
One of the “brothers with bandages across their eyes” might well have been Zedekiah, vassal king of Jerusalem from 597 to 587 BC. In 587 BC, Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple of Solomon, took Zedekiah captive, forced him to watch as his children were slaughtered, and had his eyes put out. Blind, stumbling, and shattered, the defeated vassal was led off to Babylon in chains.
Nebuchadnezzar had conquered Jerusalem once before. On March 16, 597 BC, he had subdued the capital of Judah, pillaged the city and the Temple of Solomon, and forced the Jewish king Jeconiah (or Jehoiakim) to endure the same long march to Babylon that Zedekiah would endure ten years later. With the king came “all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valor, ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and all the smiths . . . except [for] the poorest people of the land” (2 Kings 24:14). Among the captives was a handsome young prince named Daniel. He and other Jewish royals were accepted into Babylonian society and treated almost as equals. Daniel acquired a reputation as a soothsayer and dream interpreter.
The Book of Daniel tells us that, in about 575 BC, King Nebuchadnezzar had a dream so disturbing that he summoned all the soothsayers in Babylonia to interpret it. Nebuchadnezzar administered to them a test; if they could not themselves redream the king’s dream, they were not capable of interpreting. Daniel redreamed the dream, thus passing the test, and told the king the following: He had seen a gigantic metal statue rise up, its head made of gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of iron, and its legs of brass. Its feet were a mixture of bronze and clay. A boulder rolled down a hill and pulverized the statue. The boulder then became a huge mountain.
Daniel told Nebuchadnezzar that the dream foretold the rise and fall of four world empires: Nebuchadnezzar’s, the Median, the Persian, and the Macedonian. The boulder symbolized a messianic kingdom that would put an end to all worldly powers. (Later readers of Daniel found that it made more sense to interpret the sequence of empires as Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman.45)
Much later, during the reign of the king’s son Belshazzar, Daniel had several visions of his own that reinforced his reading of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. Newton describes it in the Observations; in the first vision “the prophecy of the four empires is repeated, with several new additions.” Daniel sees in rapid succession a lion with eagle’s wings, a bear with three ribs in its mouth, a leopard with four heads and four wings, and a fourth “beast” with “huge iron teeth.” Each beast makes clearer which kingdom is intended: the lion with wings suggests the winged bulls of ancient Babylonian statuary; the three ribs in the bear’s mouth are the three kingdoms conquered by the Medes and Persians (Babylon, Lydia, and Egypt); the leopard with four wings conveys the tremendous speed with which Alexander the Great conquered almost all the known world, thereby laying the foundations for the Hellenistic Greek empire; and the beast with the iron teeth is Rome.46
Daniel’s second vision built on his first. He saw a ram with two horns and a he-goat with a horn between its eyes square off against each other. The he-goat subdued the ram with its horn. That horn was broken but became four horns, from one of which a smaller horn appeared and then grew very big. Daniel 8:18 goes on: “As for the ram which you saw with the two horns, these are the kings of Media and Persia. And the he-goat is the king of Greece; and the great horn between his eyes is the first king.” Newton believed this dream foretold the coming of the Roman Empire, the world-historical event whose history will be fore-told in the Book of Revelation. (Daniel had yet another vision, which later scholars believed foretold the birth of Christ and the coming of Christianity. We will discuss this vision in chapter 9, “The Conversion of the Jews.”)
Because the four empires were actual historical entities that took the path described for them by Daniel, in ages to come most scholars, one of them Isaac Newton, believed the Book of Daniel sucessfully fore-told the future and proved the existence of God. Today, scholars no longer believe the Book of Daniel was written in the sixth century BC, or even that there was a Daniel. Instead, they believe Daniel was written between 167 and 163 BC by an anonymous scribe to “predict an evil end for Antiochus IV Epiphanes, a Hellenistic king of Syria who set up an altar—and possibly a statue—to Zeus in the Temple in Jerusalem. To the Jews, this was an unthinkable abomination,” writes Richard Smoley.47 And Northrop Frye writes that “the Book of Daniel turns into Aramaic halfway through, and could no more be written by a contemporary of Nebuchadnezzar than a book that turned from Latin into Italian could be Julius Caesar’s.”48
The author of Daniel knew exactly how to draw in his audience. He placed his drama in a setting that was charged with meaning and emotion for the Jews: the court of Nebuchadnezzar at the time of the Babylonian Captivity. And he wove Jewish myth and legend into a heady narrative that could not fail to delight a Judaean audience: God himself predicting the collapse of mighty empires that had oppressed the Jews.
Finally, explains Goff, “in declaring that the Book of Daniel was written during the Captivity, he made it appear as if the prophecies had come true, and that the Book of Daniel was therefore truly the word of God and they, the Jews, should rest assured that He existed and that He was compassionate.”49
To this day, many fundamentalist and evangelical churches, such as the Church of Seventh Day Adventists, still believe the Book of Daniel was written in the sixth century BC. They regard Daniel as a fount of universal wisdom and believe his book contains solutions to any problems that might beset mankind. In 2013, when the Tea Party threatened to shut down the federal government over Obamacare, Seventh Day Adventist churches across the United States offered sermons on “Daniel: God’s Health Care Plan Revealed.” Thus did Daniel join hands with the Republican Party to help maintain the profitability of Big Pharma and U.S. medical insurance companies.
Now we can return to Mede’s law of synchronistical necessity. Mede, and then Newton, believed the Books of Daniel and Revelation were a single prophecy. Daniel tells the future history of the world down to the early Roman Empire and the birth of Christ, and Revelation picks up from there (both books surge ahead to Apocalyptic times, though Daniel only briefly). The author of Daniel backs up this single-prophecy hypothesis by quoting God’s words: “But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased” (12:4). Mede asserted that Daniel’s sealed book was the scroll Christ unseals in Revelation. Newton sums up: Daniel’s words were “shut up & seal[ed] till the time of the end.”50
Therefore references in Revelation can be interpreted in terms of references in Daniel; this is the law of synchronistical necessity. Daniel tells us that “horns” refer to kingdoms, and Mede and Newton apply this information to the various birthings of horns in Revelation. Important prophetic time spans in Daniel are also repeated in Revelation. Most important is “time, [two] times, time-and-a-half.” Mede maintained that this equaled 1,260 years, because a “time” meant a day and a day meant a year (1
+ 2 + ½ = 3½ days = 3½ years = 1,260 days = 1,260 years); he applied this same interpretation in Revelation.
Mede also invented the law of homogeneal necessity, which states that when prophesied events take the same amount of time to transpire, they are the same event; before Mede, such events were thought to succeed one another. Mede argued, for example, that the four events of the Woman driven into the Wilderness (and who lived there for 1,260 days); the Seven-Headed Beast Restored (restored and empowered for 42 months); the Outer Court Trodden Down by the Gentiles (for 42 months); and the Witnesses on Earth prophesying in Sackcloth (for 1,260 days) were the same event, since 42 months = 1,260 days. Each event has the same temporal length, said Mede, and therefore they are the same event, or aspects of the same event.
The contents of a biblical prophecy couldn’t be known until the events it prophesied had gone past. So Newton (and Mede) studied the actual history of the Middle East and Europe from the time of John of Patmos to the seventeenth century. It was a question of matching these events up with prophecies so that they could show that these events were the very same events that John had predicted in Revelation. Then they had proved the existence of God; they had accomplished what they had set out to accomplish.
Richard Westfall explains that
to vindicate the dominion of God, he [Newton] must demonstrate as well that the facts of history have corresponded to the words of prophecy. . . . He ransacked the ancient historians and chroniclers, pagan and Christian alike, plus orations, letters, the Theodosian Code, anything that could help him establish the order of events. . . . In one short passage of ten pages, in which Newton was concerned to establish that peace broke out [between Romans and barbarians] for a short period beginning in 380, he cited Zosimus, Theodoret, Cedrenus, Baronio, Marcellinus, Ammanianus Marcellinus, Socrates (the historian), Sozomen, Prudentius.51
Westfall cites eighteen additional sources that Newton drew on to write these ten pages. He evaluates Newton as a historian.
No one, I think, would call Newton a great historian. He approached history with an a priori pattern of interpretation, and he produced indigestible catenae of quotations instead of readable narratives. His goal was rigor rather than belles lettres, however, and I suspect that no one would sneer at him on that score. He brought the standards of scientific demonstration to historical research. He pursued evidence relentlessly. I seriously doubt that any historian has ever attained a firmer grasp of the facts relating to the barbarian invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries.52
CHAPTER THREE
NEWTON’S GOD
Tis the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion ever to be fond of mysteries, and for that reason to like best what they understand least.
ISAAC NEWTON, “AN HISTORICAL ACCOUNT OF TWO NOTABLE CORRUPTIONS OF SCRIPTURE, IN A LETTER TO A FRIEND,” NOVEMBER 1690
On November 14, 1690, Isaac Newton sent John Locke (1632–1704), England’s leading philosopher, a 25,000-word letter whose contents were so heretical that if word had gotten out about them, Newton would surely have lost his professorship at Cambridge. It wouldn’t have mattered that the Principia Mathematica had been out for three years and Newton was being hailed as the greatest natural philosopher of his time and perhaps of all time.
There were some in England who, if they’d gotten wind of the contents of this letter, would have done their utmost to have Newton thrown in jail. A thousand miles away at the Vatican, there were cardinals who, if they’d had the slightest hint of what it said, would have whispered in the pope’s ear that it was time for the blasphemous genius from England to be burned at the stake.
When the judicious and dispassionate philosopher John Locke, who lived on the luxuriant estate of Lord and Lady Masham near Oxford, read the letter in its entirety, he must have paced the famous gardens of that illustrious manor house with a look of more than usual thoughtfulness on his face. He’d be in great trouble himself if people found out he’d received this letter.
Locke had little knowledge of mathematics, but men of genius had explained the Principia Mathematica to him while he was in exile in Holland. The philosopher recognized the greatness of Newton’s achievement, and when he returned to England he and Newton became friends. Not close friends, for Newton was almost incapable of that; but the two worlds these men had created with exemplary genius, modern psychology on the part of Locke, and physics and mathematics on the part of Newton, did not really intersect, so there could be no ideological clashes when the two men met, but only mutual, appreciative admiration.*8
They shared the same religious views (Locke wrote extensively about “simplifying” Christianity); Newton trusted the preternaturally fair-minded Locke; and so it is not surprising that Newton sent Locke this 25,000-word letter—actually a treatise—in which Newton sought not so much the great philosopher’s approbation so much as confirmatory, supplemental knowledge.
Locke was in agreement with everything Newton wrote in the letter, including the inflammatory parts. But as he read what was so clearly heretical he must have felt on his cheeks the heat of the fires that had so many times in the past burned up the lives of good men who had accepted these beliefs. But the immensely intelligent Locke was brave and loyal. Before the week was out, he posted a lengthy reply to Newton. At some point on the journey to Cambridge the reply crossed paths with a second letter Newton had sent Locke at the end of November. This second letter was only 7,000 words long, but its contents were as blasphemous as those of the first letter. Locke was again in agreement. He again posted a lengthy reply.
What were the contents of the two letters Newton sent Locke?
Newton titled the first, which was actually two letters, “An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture, in a Letter to a Friend.” The second letter, which Newton left untitled, gave accounts of twenty-five additional “notable corruptions of Scripture.”
It took extraordinary courage for Newton to write these letters, and even a little uncustomary recklessness. The twenty-seven passages in the New Testament that he demonstrates in these letters to be “corruptions,” intentional or not, of the original text were passages the Roman Catholic Church considered to be proof of the doctrine of the Trinity—that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are one and the same.
Tens of thousands of people had been executed by the Roman Catholic Church over the centuries for refusing to swear that God and Jesus Christ were one. A mere seventy years or so divided Newton from the last, cruel, fires of the Spanish Inquisition—the same number of years that divides us from the Second World War. Even in the lifetime of Newton’s father, people had been burned alive at the stake for making statements about Jesus Christ that the Roman Catholic Church considered to be heretical.
Today you can say anything you want about Jesus Christ.
In The Last Temptation of Christ (1953), Nobel Prize–winning Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis portrays the son of God as a lusty womanizer.
In The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ and Other Essays (1967), American psychotherapist Jay Haley describes him as, variously, a man building a mass movement to topple an entrenched power structure, a schizophrenic, and a sociopath.
A few years ago, a flurry of books appeared asserting that there had never been a Jesus Christ. This supposed son of God was pure myth, a god cobbled together, perhaps mostly unconsciously, from bits and pieces of earlier pagan gods like the Titan Prometheus, who was chained to a mountain crag (or as a philosopher of myth might say, crucified) for stealing fire from the Olympic gods and giving it to mankind.
The latest take on Jesus is that he existed but was somebody else, a minor Middle Eastern king named Monobazus who ruled Edessa/ Palmyra from AD 57 to 71 and was a military leader in the Jewish revolt against the Romans in AD 66 to 70.1
Things could hardly have been more different in Isaac Newton’s time. Thirty years before Newton was born, in 1612, two English clergymen, Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wigh
tman, were burned alive at the stake for refusing to swear that Jesus was the equal of God. In 1646, when Newton was four, an Englishman named Paul Best was sentenced to death by hanging for refusing to affirm the doctrine of the Trinity. He spent time in jail but was granted a reprieve at the last moment.
There were fates almost worse than death for some said to have blasphemed the divinity of Christ. In October 1656, a Quaker minister named James Nayler rode into Bristol on the back of a donkey. He was reenacting Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on an ass, an event that is commemorated on Palm Sunday every year. Nayler was arrested, locked in the stocks, and given three hundred lashes for committing this “horrid blasphemy.” His tongue was pierced with a red-hot iron and his forehead was branded with a B. Then he was thrown into prison, where he spent three years in solitary confinement.
A law was passed during Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth, and reframed and renamed at the end of the century as the Blasphemy Act of 1697, that barred from office, sentencing to “three years’ imprisonment on a second conviction all those, educated as Christians, who denied the doctrine of the Trinity, the truth of Christianity, or the divine authority of the Bible.”2 This law did not exclude executing a person for denying the Trinity: In 1697, seven years after Newton sent his dangerously heretical letters to Locke, Thomas Aikenhead, a twenty-year-old Edinburgh University student, was hanged for publicly ridiculing the scriptures and the Trinity.3 He was summarily tried the day after he made these statements and executed the day after that.
Newton’s lifelong “anti-Trinitarianism” was molded at an early age. He rejected the doctrine of the Trinity—that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are one—while a nineteen-year-old student at Trinity College in Cambridge. He told no one; if he had done so, this extraordinarily promising student would surely have been expelled. As Newton scholar Stephen Snobelen writes, “Newton lived in an age when heresy was not only a religious crime, but also a civil offense and a social outrage. When he converted to anti-Trinitarianism at Cambridge, he opposed a triad of legal structures: civil, ecclesiastical and academic.”4
The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton Page 5
