Читать книгу God and My Neighbour - Robert Blatchford - Страница 13

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We now reach the second stage in our examination, which is the claim that no religion known to man can be truly said to be original. All religions, the Christian religion included, are adaptations or variants of older religions. Religions are not revealed: they are evolved.

If a religion were revealed by God, that religion would be perfect in whole and in part, and would be as perfect at the first moment of its revelation as after ten thousand years of practice. There has never been a religion which fulfils those conditions.

According to Bible chronology, Adam was created some six thousand years ago. Science teaches that man existed during the glacial epoch, which was at least fifty thousand years before the Christian era.

Here I recommend the study of Laing's Human Origins, Parson's Our Sun God, Sayce's Ancient Empires of the East, and Frazer's Golden Bough.

In his visitation charge at Blackburn, in July, 1889, the Bishop of Manchester spoke as follows:

Now, if these dates are accepted, to what age of the world shall

we assign that Accadian civilisation and literature which so long

preceded Sargo I. and the statutes of Sirgullah? I can best

answer you in the words of the great Assyriologist, F. Hommel:

"If," he says, "the Semites were already settled in Northern

Babylonia (Accad) in the beginning of the fourth thousand B.C.

in possession of the fully developed Shumiro-Accadian culture

adopted by them—a culture, moreover, which appears to have

sprouted like a cutting from Shumir, then the latter must be far,

far older still, and have existed in its completed form in the fifth thousand B.C., an age to which I unhesitatingly ascribe the South Babylonian incantations."... Who does not see that such facts as these compel us to remodel our whole idea of the past?

A culture which was complete one thousand years before Adam must have needed many thousands of years to develop. It would be a modest guess that Accadian culture implied a growth of at least ten thousand years.

Of course, it may be said that the above biblical error is only an error of time, and has no bearing on the alleged evolution of the Bible. Well, an error of a million, or of ten thousand, years is a serious thing in a divine revelation; but, as we shall see, it has a bearing on evolution. Because it appears that in that ancient Accadian civilisation lie the seeds of many Bible laws and legends.

Here I quote from Our Sun God, by Mr. J. D. Parsons:

To commence with, it is well known to those acquainted with

the remains of the Assyrian and Babylonian civilisations that

the stories of the creation, the temptation, the fall, the deluge,

and the confusion of tongues were the common property of the

Babylonians centuries before the date of the alleged Exodus

under Moses... Even the word Sabbath is Babylonian. And the

observance of the seventh day as a Sabbath, or day of rest, by

the Accadians thousands of years before Moses, or Israel, or

even Abraham, or Adam himself could have been born or created,

is admitted by, among others, the Bishop of Manchester. For in

an address to his clergy, already mentioned, he let fall these

pregnant words:

"Who does not see that such facts as these compel us to remodel

our whole idea of the past, and that in particular to affirm that

the Sabbatical institution originated in the time of Moses, three

thousand five hundred years after it is probable that it existed

in Chaldea, is an impossibility, no matter how many Fathers of the

Church have asserted it. Facts cannot be dismissed like theories."

The Sabbath, then, is one link in the evolution of the Bible. Like the legends of the Creation, the Fall, and the Flood, it was adopted by the Jews from the Babylonians during or after the Captivity.

Of the Flood, Professor Sayce, in his Ancient Empires of the East, speaks as follows:

With the Deluge the mythical history of Babylonia takes a new

departure. From this event to the Persian conquest was a period

of 36,000 years, or an astronomical cycle called saros. Xisuthros, with his family and friends, alone survived the waters which drowned the rest of mankind on account of their sins. He had been ordered by the gods to build a ship, to pitch it within and without, and to stock it with animals of every species. Xisuthros sent out first a dove, then a swallow, and lastly a raven, to discover whether the earth was dry; the dove and the swallow returned to the ship, and it was only when the raven flew away that the rescued hero ventured to leave his ark. He found that he had been stranded on the peak of the mountain of Nizir, "the mountain of the world," whereon the Accadians believed the heavens to rest—where, too, they placed the habitations of their gods, and the cradle of their own race. Since Nizir lay amongst the mountains of Pir Mam, a little south of Rowandiz, its mountain must be identified with Rowandiz itself. On its peak Xisuthros offered sacrifices, piling up cups of wine by sevens; and the rainbow, "the glory of Anu," appeared in the heaven, in covenant that the world should never again be destroyed by flood. Immediately afterwards Xisuthros and his wife, like the Biblical Enoch, were translated to the regions of the blest beyond Datilla, the river of Death, and his people made their way westward to Sippara. Here they disinterred the books buried by their late ruler before the Deluge took place, and re-established themselves in their old country under the government first of Erekhoos, and then of his son Khoniasbolos. Meanwhile, other colonists had arrived in the plain of Sumer, and here, under the leadership of the giant Etana, called Titan by the Greek writers, they built a city of brick, and essayed to erect a tower by means of which they might scale the sky, and so win for themselves the immortality granted to Xisuthros... But the tower was overthrown in the night by the winds, and Bel frustrated their purpose by confounding their language and scattering them on the mound.

These legends of the Flood and the Tower of Babel were obviously borrowed by the Jews during their Babylonian captivity.

Professor Sayce, in his Ancient Empires of the East, speaking of the Accadian king, Sargon I., says:

Legends naturally gathered round the name of the Babylonian

Solomon. Not only was he entitled "the deviser of law,

the deviser of prosperity," but it was told of him how his

father had died while he was still unborn, how his mother had

fled to the mountains, and there left him, like a second Moses,

to the care of the river in an ark of reeds and bitumen; and how

he was saved by Accir, "the water-drawer," who brought him

up as his own son, until the time came when, under the protection

of Istar, his rank was discovered, and he took his seat on

the throne of his forefathers.

From Babylon the Jews borrowed the legends of Eden, of the Fall, the Flood, the Tower of Babel; from Babylon they borrowed the Sabbath, and very likely the Commandments; and is it not possible that the legendary Moses and the legendary Sargon may be variants of a still more ancient mythical figure?

Compare Sayce with the following "Notes on the Moses Myth," from Christianity and Mythology, by J. M. Robertson: