The cutie, glancing up, sees him looking at her. Paralyzed with fright, she leaps out of her seat, climbs over the police sergeant, and flees the courtroom.
VI. FIRST THINGS
The Genesis of a Deity
From the American Mercury, Jan., 1933, pp. 121–22.
A review of THE MYTHOLOGY OF ALL RACES:
VOL. V, SEMITIC, by Stephen Herbert Langdon; Boston, 1931
IF THE standard reference works mention Yahweh at all, it is only to explain, with hollow erudition, that the original form of His name was YHWH, and that it was turned into Jehovah in the Eighth Century A.D. by giving YHWH the vowels of Adonai. But where Yahweh Himself came from they do not say. This lack is supplied by Dr. Langdon, who is Professor of Assyriology at Oxford and a man of great learning. His study of the evidence leads him to believe that the original god of the Jews and Christians was not Yahweh at all, but Ilani (later written Elohim), and that this Ilani was picked up from the Babylonians in the dark backward and abysm of time, long before the Jews settled in Palestine. In those days they were a wandering tribe of great pugnacity, and the Babylonians got rid of their raids and forays by making mercenary soldiers of them, and allowing them to engage in trade. They lived this life for five or six centuries at least, and gradually became more or less Babylonianized. For one thing, they adopted a large part of the Babylonian mythology, and through them it has come down to us—the story of the Flood, that of the Tower of Babel, that of the Fall of Man, and so on. And for another thing, they abandoned the primitive gods who had contented them in the desert, and adopted the Babylonian sun-god, who was widely popular among the peoples of Asia Minor and passed under various names. What the Jews called him at the start is unknown, but in the Fifteenth and Fourteenth Centuries B.C., when they began to move westward toward the Mediterranean, they found that the Phoenicians and Arameans called him El, and this name they presently borrowed.
But El soon had a rival, for in the course of their wanderings in search of land the Jews entered Canaan, and there they found another god, Yahweh. This Yahweh, compared to El, was a somewhat primitive deity. He was not a splendid sun-god but a simple rain-god. El’s province was the whole universe, but Yahweh confined Himself pretty strictly to Canaan. Nevertheless, there was something powerfully attractive about Him, for Canaan was a dry country, and a rain-god was of much more use in it than a sun-god. So the Jews, like the other Semitic tribes who followed them into Canaan, began to incline toward Him, and when they conquered the land and began their history as a settled people they made Him their tribal god. He remains so to this day, and Christians and Moslems in their turn have borrowed Him, but no reader of the Old Testament need be told that He never had it all His own way, even in the palmy days of Israel. On the contrary, He had to meet constant and serious competition from two sides. On the one side were the primitive Baalim or village gods to which the Jews of the remoter settlements were always returning, to the rage and despair of the prophets in practise in Jerusalem. And on the other side was the stately and elegant hierarchy of Babylonian gods, headed by the gorgeous El, for which the sophisticates of the cities, especially in the cosmopolitan North, always had a nostalgic hankering.
In the end the Jewish priests had to make a sort of compromise between Yahweh and El, and the two are amalgamated in the Old Testament into a joint god who is spoken of first under one name and then under the other. But the majority of Jews, at all events in the southern part of Palestine, always leaned toward Yahweh. He was a much more friendly and comfortable god, despite His frequent rages, than El. El was all right in the over-refined cities of the North, but down in the deserts of Judah the herdsmen and shepherds preferred a god who was more approachable and had a better understanding of the needs of simple men. In the Old Testament it is always Yahweh who appears in the most human and charming situations—wrestling with Jacob, taking the air in the Garden of Eden, suspicious and jealous of the builders of the Tower of Babel, gossiping with Moses, lunching with Abraham. There is nothing subtle about this Yahweh—nothing of the metaphysical elegance of El. He does not appear as the Word, but as a downright and even flat-footed old man—a sort of fatherly general superintendent of the Jews, very friendly when they obey His orders but cruel and vindictive when they try to fool Him.
The modern Jews, and the Christians and Moslems with them, have pretty well forgotten El. He survives only in a few refinements of ritual and in the books of learned divines. Yahweh has swallowed him—Yahweh, the honest old rain-god. He it is that the Jews have long trusted to restore them to the land of their fathers, and He that the Catholics hope will be kind enough to make their stay in Purgatory short, and He that the Methodists count upon joyously to burn all the rest of us in white-hot flames forever. He has been successful among gods largely because of His very crudity. No training in divinity is needed to understand Him. At times, as beseems a god, He may retreat into inscrutability, but in general He is quite comprehensible, and even transparent. His principles, indeed, are so simple that they are taught in the Sunday-schools to children of five or six. As in ancient Palestine, He increases in humanness as He gets away from the cities, and throws off the uncomfortable vestments of El. In the South of this great Republic He returns to the primitive estate of a rain-god, and when there is a drought His votaries turn out exactly as the desert Jews used to turn out in Southern Palestine, to demand confidently that He do something about it.
Christian Origins
From the American Mercury, Jan., 1932, pp. 125–27.
A review of THE MESSIAH JESUS AND JOHN THE BAPTIST, by Robert Eisler; London, 1931
The problem Dr. Eisler here tackles is this: What actually happened in Jerusalem and thereabout in the first years of the Christian era? What were the origins of that Jesus of Nazareth who made such an uproar during the administration of the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, and what were the circumstances which made Him the founder of a new religion, the most widespread and powerful that the world has yet seen? The answers that we find in Christian literature are incomplete and unsatisfactory. The New Testament, as we have it, is full of obviously dubious history. It was written, in the main, by men who had not witnessed the events they describe, and hence it bristles with contradictions and absurdities. Worse, it shows plain signs of later tampering, so that the most we can say of it today is that it tells us, not what really happened, but simply what certain Christian theologians of the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and even later centuries, thought may have happened. Nor is any help to be found in non-Christian chronicles, for, as the great German scholar, Adolf Harnack, once said, all that they have to say might be printed on one quarto sheet of paper.
Dr. Eisler is convinced that it is a gross error to assume, as has been commonly done, that this paucity of records proves only that Jesus attracted little attention among the Romans—that His revolt was of no importance, and hence passed unnoticed. He shows, on the contrary, that they must have taken it very seriously, at all events, in its political aspect, and that it was their custom to keep elaborate official memoranda of such events, and that these memoranda were open to their historians. Why, then, have we so little about Jesus? In particular, why is there so little in the well-known history of Josephus, a Roman court historian, and why is that little so plainly unreliable? Why is the Jew Josephus made to say flatly that Jesus was a teacher of the Truth, that He arose from the dead, and that He was “the Christ ”? Dr. Eisler’s answer is simple. Josephus never said anything of the sort. The Testimonium Josephi, like so much of the New Testament, is an interpolation in the original text. What Josephus did say has been taken out, and what the Christians of Constantine’s time wanted him to say has been put in. And what other historians said has been lost to us because, in those days, there was a vigorous and relentless censorship of anti-Christian documents, and every scrap of hostile writing was hunted down and destroyed—all save the few inconsiderable fragments mentioned by Harnack.
So far Dr. Eisler’s case has l
ittle support in documentary facts. But he quickly produces an impressive body of such facts from Russia. In the libraries and monasteries of that country are a number of early MSS. of Josephus, mainly in Northern dialects of Old Slavic. They are translations from early Greek MSS. and though there are some traces in them of that Christian tampering which is found in all the Western MSS. of Josephus, many passages remain that have disappeared entirely in the West, and in them the acts and aims of Jesus are dealt with in a detailed and realistic manner. These passages, in not a few cases, are so phrased that they are apparently direct quotations from official records of the events preceding the Crucifixion, and so they are of high historical value. They coincide, broadly speaking, with the narrative in the Gospels, but in many important details they are at variance, for they tell the story from the Roman point of view. It would be going too far to call them impartial, but they are at least free from Christian coloring, and in consequence they answer many questions that the Gospel historians and the sophisticated Western Josephus evade, apparently deliberately.
In brief, Dr. Eisler concludes that Jesus was a member of a tribe of wandering craftsmen which still survives in the deserts of Palestine, and is now called the Sleb. Its members practise all the simple crafts that are in request among the nomads—carpentry, blacksmithing, and so on—and are noted for their gentle manners. They take no part whatever in the tribal feuds, accept only food and drink for their labor, and own no property. In times of trouble they are pacifists, preaching non-resistance and retiring to the desert when actual war breaks out. In the first years of the Christian era their influence was undoubtedly thrown against that spirit of revolt which was rising in Palestine, and was destined, in the year 70, to lead to a furious conflict with the Romans, fatal to the Jewish state. Jesus, like John the Baptist before Him, opposed this revolt, and proposed that His followers retire to the desert to escape it. But the little band was drawn, nevertheless, into the conspiracies of the Zealot faction, which was for an immediate attack on the Roman garrison, and Jesus, by virtue of His birth—He was, as a son of David, eligible to the Jewish throne—became willy-nilly a figure in the anti-Roman movement. In the end, cornered, He apparently abandoned conciliation for the sword, and when an attempt was made to seize the Temple He was a party to it. Its failure cost Him His life. And, as Luke tells us, “a superscription was written over Him in letters of Greek, and Latin, and Hebrew, THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS.”
Dr. Eisler’s reconstruction of Josephus’s narrative throws a great deal of light upon some of the darkest places in the Synoptic Gospels. It explains the arming of the Disciples, otherwise so strangely at variance with the Sermon on the Mount. It makes understandable the great discrepancies between other parts of the early preaching, and the melodramatic events of the last few days. It gets rid of the Christian tradition, incredible on so many grounds, that the Romans had little if anything to do with the Crucifixion, but simply turned Jesus over to the Jews. It disposes of difficulties in a dozen other places, some of which have fevered theologians for many years. And incidentally, those parts of the Russian Josephus which deal with the person and personality of Jesus also give rational explanations of certain minor texts that have long been quite unintelligible, for example, the “Physician, heal thyself” of Luke iv, 23.
Altogether, Dr. Eisler has made an extraordinarily interesting book. If even so much as half of it be rejected, then enough remains to affect New Testament criticism very powerfully. The orthodox theologians, of course, will pass it over in silence, but more enlightened readers, whether clerical or lay, will find it well worth reading.
The Root of Religion
From DAMN! A BOOK OF CALUMNY, 1918, p. 90
The idea of liberal truth crept into religion relatively late: it is the invention of lawyers, priests and cheese-mongers. The idea of mystery long preceded it, and at the heart of that idea of mystery was an idea of beauty—that is, an idea that this or that view of the celestial and infernal process presented a satisfying picture of form, rhythm and organization. Once this view was adopted as satisfying, its professional interpreters and their dupes sought to reinforce it by declaring it true. The same flow of reasoning is familiar on lower planes. The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.
The Mask
From the same, p. 98
Ritual is to religion what the music of an opera is to the libretto: ostensibly a means of interpretation, but actually a means of concealment. The Calvinists made the mistake of keeping the doctrine of infant damnation in plain words. As enlightenment grew in the world, intelligence and prudery revolted against it, and so it had to be abandoned. Had it been set to music it would have survived—uncomprehended, unsuspected and unchallenged.
The Eternal Mob
From NOTES ON DEMOCRACY, 1926, pp. 66–68
Do I forget that democratic man, despite his general imbecility, has some shining virtues—specifically, that he is filled with humble piety, a touching fidelity to the faith? I forget nothing: I simply answer, what faith? Is it argued by any rational man that the debased Christianity cherished by the mob in all Christian countries today has any colorable likeness to the body of ideas preached by Christ? If so, then let us have a better teaching of the Bible in the public-schools. The plain fact is that this bogus Christianity has no more relation to the system of Christ than it has to the system of Aristotle. It is the invention of Paul and his attendant rabble-rousers—a body of men exactly comparable to the corps of evangelical pastors of today, which is to say, a body devoid of sense and lamentably indifferent to common honesty. The mob, having heard Christ, turned against Him, and applauded His crucifixion. His theological ideas were too logical and too plausible for it, and His ethical ideas were enormously too austere. What it yearned for was the old comfortable balderdash under a new and gaudy name, and that is precisely what Paul offered it. He borrowed from all the wandering dervishes and soul-snatchers of Asia Minor, and flavored the stew with remnants of the Greek demonology. The result was a code of doctrines so discordant and so nonsensical that no two men since, examining it at length, have ever agreed upon its precise meaning. But Paul knew his mob: he had been a travelling labor leader. He knew that nonsense was its natural provender—that the unintelligible soothed it like sweet music. He was the Stammvater of all the Christian mob-masters of today, terrorizing and enchanting the mob with their insane damnations, passing the diligent plate, busy among the women.
Once the early church emerged from the Roman catacombs and began to yield to that reorganization of society which was forced upon the ancient world by the barbarian invasions, Paul was thrown overboard as Methodists throw Wesley overboard when they acquire the means and leisure for golf, and Peter was put in his place. Peter was a blackguard, but he was at least free from any taint of Little Bethel. The Roman Church, in the aristocratic feudal age, promoted him post mortem to the Papacy, and then raised him to the mystical dignity of Rock, a rank obviously quasi-celestial. But Paul remained the prophet of the sewers. He was to emerge centuries later in many incarnations—Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and so on. He remains today the archtheologian of the mob. His turgid and witless metaphysics make Christianity bearable to men who would be repelled by Christ’s simple and magnificent reduction of the duties of man to the duties of a gentleman.
The IQ of Holy Church
From the American Mercury, Sept., 1930, pp. 33–34
There are some shrewd fellows among the Catholic clergy, and there are many more who are charming and amusing, but the church as a church, like any other ecclesiastical organization, is highly unintelligent. It is forever making thumping errors, both in psychology and in politics, and despite its occasional brilliant successes among sentimental pseudo-intellectuals, as in England, and among the Chandala, as in America, it seems likely to go downhill hereafter. Consider its position in the world today. After 1,800 years of uninterrupted propaga
nda, during 1,500 of which it was virtually unopposed in Christendom, scarcely a dozen really first-rate men subscribe to its ideas, and not a single first-rate nation:
Its poverty in this respect is well demonstrated by its almost comical excess of enthusiasm whenever a stray member of the intelligentsia succumbs. Reading the Catholic papers—I allude, of course, to the more intelligent of them, not to the dismal diocesan rags—an uninformed person might easily gather the impression that Hilaire Belloc was the greatest historian who ever lived, and G. K. Chesterton the most profound metaphysician. This gurgling over second-raters, it seems to me, is injudicious. A more moderate rejoicing would be far more convincing. And a more moderate reviling would probably do more damage to the church’s chief current enemies—the birth controllers and the physical scientists. The war upon birth control, as it is commonly carried on by virgin bishops, is not only unfair, but also ridiculous, for it is based upon theological postulates that no educated man could conceivably accept. There is, I believe, a lot to be said against the birth controllers—for example, on the score of their false pretenses: they really know no more about preventing conception than any corner druggist. But their Catholic critics, so far as I know, have never said it. Instead, they ground their case upon a dogmatism that is offensive to every intellectual decency, and try to dispose of their opponents by denouncing them as mere voluptuaries. This last is sheer nonsense. The principal birth controllers are as serious as so many witch-burners, and the theory that they are voluptuaries is easily refuted by looking at one of them, preferably a female.
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