پژوهشی در ایده‌ها، انسان‌ها و رویدادها در ادیان عهد باستان

by Samuel George Frederick Brandon (translator سودابه فضایلی)

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Genres: Nonfiction

752 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Mohammad Ranjbari · Rating 5 out of 5]

بحث ریشه شناسی (ایتمولوژی) نه تنها به زبان اختصاص دارد که می تواند تاریخ عقاید و بررسی ریشه های بسیاری از آن ها را نیز در بر بگیرد. «براندن» در این کتاب، تحقیق بسیار ارزنده ای را در این موضوع انجام داده است. او با بررسی ادیان برجسته و غیر برجسته و حتی ادیان مرده، ریشه شناسی بسیاری از باورها، اسطوره ها و عقاید را به دست داده است. به عنوان مثال، با توجه بیشتر بر ادیان هندی – آریایی، دین مسیح و اسلام و یهودیت را بررسی کرده است. یا با بررسی متون زرتشتی و مانوی و مصری، باورهای رسوخ یافته در ادیان مسیحیت و اسلام را کندوکاو کرده است. طرحِ اولیۀ بسیاری از مؤلفه های دینی – آیینی و تطور آن ها از مباحث اصلی و جالب این کتاب است، مانند: ایدۀ باور به خیر و شر، ایدۀ تجسد و نظریۀ روح، کائنات و جهان آخرت، شیطان و فرشتگان و ... .
کار بسیار مشکلی خواهد بود خلاصه کردن این کتاب که پر است از حقایقِ در سایه قرار گرفته. اما به عنوان نمونه می توان به این مباحث زیر اشاره کرد:

پیدایش خدایبانوان در آیین های متعدد مصر باستان که به ادیان دیگر تسری یافته است.
قائل شدن به جهان خیر و شر (خدا و شیطان) برای اولین بار در دین زرتشت و آموزه های این پیامبر و در نتیجه ترسیم جهان به دو بخش روز (روشنایی) و شب (تاریکی). یا در رابطه با دین زرتشت بسیاری از آیین های مجازات و روایات حاکی در این موضوع، در دین زرتشت منشاء دارد. گذر از پل چینوت (که به دین اسلام نیز راه یافته است و سزای دروغ و خیانت و بسیاری از اعمال قبیح دیگر که در دین مسیحیت و کمدی الهی دانته دوباره مطرح گردیده است.) حکایات عبرانی در مورد آفرینش که به دلیل اشتراک بیش از حد، به درستی نمی توان آن را از آنِ یک دین دانست. به ویژه در بین سه دین اسلام و مسیحیت و یهودیت.
پیدایش نخستین بارۀ خدای زمان با نام زُروان در دین زرتشتی و ماقبل آن که تاثیر بسیاری بر کل ادیان جهان به ویژه مسیحیت گذاشته است. بررسی های معماری نشان از قبول این خدا دارد.
بررسی ادیان بین النهرین و نحوۀ مواجهۀ انسان خالی الذهن با مرگ (ناشناخته ترین و مرموزترین مولفۀ فکری انسان باستان) و تجسد مرگ در قالب خدایان مختلف به ویژه هادس و اوزیرس و ... .
بررسی چندحماسۀ مشهور از جمله گیلگمش، حکایات عبرانی و چندین خرده روایت دینی در اروپا و رم و یونان.

بخش دوم کتاب به صورت کاملا مشخص به پژوهش در باب دین مسیحیت و یهودیت می پردازد. مباحثی تخصصی در باب روایات مختلف از حکایات عبرانی و اسرائیلیات، روایت های مختلف از زندگی مسیح و اناجیل مختلف و ...
خوانش این کتاب قطور نیازمند حوصله هست و البته نمی توان منکر این شد که تمامی کتاب برای خوانندۀ ایرانی قابل استفاده نیست و هر کسی از ظن و دین خود می تواند بدان ورود داشته باشد. آن چه ضروری ست، مباحث مشترک در بین ادیان هست که با اثبات وام هایی که از یکدگر گرفته و بخشیده اند، تقدس خشک و جزمیت را تعدیل کرده و نگاهی انتقادی و در عین حال علمی را به دین تکلیف می کند. هر چند این کار با ماهیت دین تناقض داشته باشد!
براون از راه افسانه روی گردان شده و حقیقت ها را دیده است
(جنگ هفتاد و دو ملت همه را عذر بنه
چون ندیدند حقیقت ره افسانه زدند)

از متن:

در یک نوشتار متأخر فارسی موسوم به «روایات»:
واضح است که به استثناء زمان، همه چیز مخلوق است و فقط زمان مخلوق نیست و برای زمان هیچ حد و مرزی وجود ندارد و هیچ ارتفاعی نمی توان برایش قائل شد و هیچ عمقی نمی توان برایش تصور کرد. زمان همیشه بوده و همیشه خواهد بود. هیچ خردمندی نیست که بگوید: زمان از کجا آمده؟ یا این نیرو کی وجود نداشته؟
کسی نیست که بتواند خالق زمان را نام ببرد، و در این مفهوم، زمان هنوز آفرینش را عملی نکرده بود که آتش و آب را خلق کرد و چون این دو در هم آمیختند، اورمزد جلوه کرد. زمان هم خالق است و هم مالک آفرینشی که آفرید.» ص 108

نکتۀ جالب توجه این است که با پیدایش خدای زمان، مفاهیم خدا و شیطان نیز در دامن او و از او متولد می شوند!
97/09/08

[Arianne X · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Book Written for an Audience that No Longer Exists

The Mass Extinction Event No One Noticed

On the first page of the preface, the author states that this book is written for the “…large public of intelligent layfolk…” who of course “have their own specialist knowledge and skills in industry and commerce; but they are also alert to academic subjects…” I submit that no such audience currently exits. It was lost in a mass extinction event which wiped out the public intellectual and the literate public. Ironically, this book is written about religion in the ancient world as we enter a new dark age filled with ancient beliefs in the modern world.

The First Religions

The first religions were about human service to the gods, not in explaining, rationally or otherwise, the existence and origins of gods or humans, or in mandating rules of human conduct. Humans were created as servants to build temples and provide offerings to the gods. The next earliest narratives were about the creation of existence itself, and the relationships of the gods to each other, not of humans. Last to develop was the god who mandated human conduct and provided rules for human action and standards of behavior. This progression follows the movement of human beings from the first tentative steps out the ice age in search of answers into the founding of large states in need of governance.

A Brief History of Religion

With this book, we can trace the ancient origins of current religions such as Christianity through ancient history. Christianity was not a unique event bursting onto the world or an isolated phenomenon without precedent two thousand years ago. Christianity did not begin its existence already equipped with a theology. It can only be understood in the context its time and place. It was indeed a new cult or superstition, but it was thrown up from the continuation of traditions, religions and practices from the Axial age of the Ancient Near East where we find the Cainite roots of Judaism as well as the dying and rising savior mystery cults which formed around agriculture and cosmology. These beliefs, practices and mysteries followed from human existence as nomadic hunter-gatherers to settled communities based on agriculture and domestication, to established villages and cities and finally to empires and states. Most astonishing is in how the religious of beliefs of a very small number of people in the Ancient Near East has come to dominate religious belief across the globe.

The origins of Christianity are to be found in the even more ancient beliefs and practices found in Egypt and Mesopotamia predating Christianity by thousands of years. The Jewish religion from which Christianity is a derivative sect itself parallels and draws from Egyptian beliefs and Mesopotamian folk tales about creation, death and ceremonial practices. Christianity, as a sect of Judaism, inherited the dualism of Zoroastrianism, the mythology of Mithraism, the mysticism of Orphism and the mythos of Gnostic beliefs with a touch of astrology but updated with ethereal Platonic and later concrete Aristotelian Greek philosophy. For example, both the story of the temptation of Adam and Eve by the serpent and the Noah flood narrative found in the Bible Book of Genesis (c. 400BC) first appeared in ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’ (c. 1500BC - 2000BC).

The original version of Christianity was a personal faith of a small number of Palestinian Jews in the Messianic mission of Jesus of Nazareth and centered in Jerusalem. This original Christianity was wiped out during the Jewish War of AD 66 – AD 70. The surviving version of Christianity which became the basis for the orthodox faith was the Pauline version which converted Christianity into a universal salvation faith. A Jewish messiah would have meant nothing to Greeks, Romans and Syrians. Paul realized it had to be universalized to broaden its appeal. The original version of Christianity was in the best position to dominate the theology and keep the sect local and parochial, but the Jewish War allowed the new communities created by Paul to become the universal version of Christianity which comes through to us today. There is a theory, not covered in this book, that the original form of Jewish Christianity survived and morphed into Islam.

The Soul

The Christian notion of the soul originates in a Hellenized version of ideas originating in the Ancient Near East whereby every human possesses a double nature, a compound of the physical and the psychical. The Christian notion of a separate immortal soul inhabiting a physical body is different from, but is a derivative of, the earlier Hebrew idea that a person is a unified psycho-physical being. The original Jewish position was that human resurrection was not possible, very similar to the ancient Sumerian belief, but this was later repudiated and acceptance of full resurrection, body and soul, was accepted as the orthodox Jewish position but this morphed finally into resurrection of the soul alone, the orthodox Christian position. This became the Christian notion, resulting from the infusion of Platonic thought where the empirical world is an illusion, and the body is the prison of the soul. In such a case, a combined body/soul being is absurd and cannot be resurrected. This led to extreme forms of self-destructive Christian asceticism whereby the body was despised and damaged for the sake of the soul which was to be saved.

Dualism

Contemporaneous with the Buddha (India), Confucius (China) and the post-captivity Hebrew prophets (Palestine) was Zarathustra (Persia/Iran), the prophet of Ahura Mazda in the sixth century BC. From Zoroastrianism, the ancient dualisms of unceasing conflict between good and evil, the creative and the destructive, true and false, time and space, the forces of light, the forces of darkness, life and death arose in stark contrast and were made an essential part of religious belief. Zarathustra thought of duality as the original and abiding characteristic of existence from the beginning of ‘creation’ and that Ahura Mazda created the duality of existence from the beginning with the differentiation of a primordial undifferentiated nature. This dualism found its way into Judaism during the period of the Babylonian Captivity and thus into Mithraicism, Manicheanism, Gnosticism, Christianity, and Islam. Dualism within a monotheistic religion creates internal contradictions, please see the Devil below.

Judgement

One of the most pernicious doctrines inherited from Christianity is the judgment of the dead and thus the association of a deity with the maintenance of morality, but this was not invented by Christianity. Christianity inherited its promise of judgement after death from the Jewish idea of the ‘end of the world and Last Judgement’ eschatology. But when Christ did not return, the Church was compelled to transform it into an individual judgment. The Medieval Christian Church merged these two notions of judgment (universal and individual) by inventing purgatory. One could go to purgatory after death to be cleansed of personal sin well awaiting the universal final judgment – only Christianity could foist something as wicked as a double judgment onto people to manipulate them into obedience.

The notion of an individual judgment after death seems to have been a part of every known human religion, east and west. The ancient Egyptian religion was profoundly concerned with individual judgement and the afterlife where we see the transformation of the deity from the mere personification of amoral natural power indifferent to human wellbeing to the judge of human actions as early as the third millennium BC and even reaching back to the beginning of the cult of Osiris in the fourth millennium BC.

Reliance on a deity as the standard for morals and ethics destroys human responsibility and culpability for morality and ethics. Too often I have heard, “Arianne, it is the will of God.” Thus, ethical action and moral behavior is beyond the scope of human action. Human behavior becomes based on the threat of damnation or the reward of redemption. Only an atheist can behave morally or act ethically for the sake human wellbeing. Side Note: Most Christians that I know practice judgement and rejection as their highest values. I have been subjected to their judgment and victimized by their rejection based on my difference in belief from them.

The Savior God

This is a ‘new’ type of God, one deeply acquainted the with common human experience of suffering and death. The most well-known and obvious example of the dying and rising savior cult God is Jesus Christ. However, the original prototype of exactly this example was Osiris of Egypt. The death and resurrection of the savior God assures the worshipers of a new and happy lot in the afterlife. This is the case for both Osiris and Jesus. With both Osiris and Jesus, their ultimate triumph over death was in the pathos of their suffering. Both were stuck down by an act of unjust, unprovoked criminal violence after which neither the resurrected Osiris nor Jesus resumed life on earth.

The model of for the dying and rising God is most likely connected to the seasonal nature of the agriculture life cycle. The procession of the seasons reenacts the drama of life and death or dying and rising. Osiris was closely linked to vegetation and fertility, the sources of life. Osiris thus emerged as the classic porotype of the savior God with the power to judge the dead and whose death and resurrection assured his devotees of a new life after death. But the process of transformation from the Egyptian Osiris to the Jewish/Christian Jesus was a long and complex one with many stages and examples. After Osiris, but prior to Jesus were Inanna (Mesopotamian), Adonis (Greek), Zalmoxis (Thracian/Greek), Romulus (Roman). Some would also include Mithras (Persian), each of these was a savior God and son or daughter (Inanna) of God with a passion as well as a pathos of suffering, and death followed by a resurrection providing a victory over death for their followers. But each was a fictional compound of magic and myth, perhaps including Jesus? (My opinion, not the author’s). See below on the historicity of Jesus.

The Devil

In short, the Devil is an attempt to account for the existence of a destructive force in a monotheistic system emphasizing creative good. Dualism is the necessary outcome of the tension inherent in the opposing doctrines of any such monotheistic system and the Devil is in the dualism. The alternative is to ascribe evil directly to the creator God as the Hebrews initially did with Yahweh. The Adam, Eve, Serpent Pre-Babylonian Captivity story shows the tension in Hebrew thinking created by holding two simultaneously contradictory positions as both true, viz., the agent of evil as part of Yahweh’s good creation. It follows that Yahweh is the origin of evil. Satan is a post Babylonian Captivity c. 538 BC Hebrew addition to relive Yahweh of some responsibility though this does not account for how the Devil got into Yahweh’s creation initially. The Devil is thus rationalized as a rebellious being and this Devil as teaser and tempter is carried over into Christianity resulting in degrading superstitions and terrible acts of fanaticism. The invention of the Devil demonstrates the internal contradiction inherent in monotheism. A Devil is not needed in a polytheistic system. A polytheistic system can account for many types of different forces with many types of different gods.

Angels

Angels pre-date the Devil. The source of angels is that of messengers from God to people. As far back as Homer in the Greek tradition there was Iris and later there was Hermes of classical Greece. Judaism did not evolve in a cultural vacuum and given the social syncretism of the time and place, the Jews absorbed the angel mythology and passed it on to Christianity and Islam. Angels represent a fusion of ideas derived from several different religious traditions of the Ancient Near East. The ancient folklore of angels proved easier to incorporate into monotheism rather than to eradicate. In time, angles multiplied as messengers and doers in human affairs to the point where every person had a personal guardian angel – the ultimate comforting myth. Angel mythology is very much alive today in 21st Century popular Western culture. Even Death has been promoted to the status of angle. Even the Devil and his minions got in on the act and are known as fallen angels. Ironically, the iconic winged angel comes from Pagan origin, borrowed from the winged ‘Victory’ statues of Roman art.

My Minor Criticisms:

The Exodus Narrative

The author treats the story of Exodus as a real historical event and Moses as a real historical character. I believe the current scholarly consensus opinion is that there is very little actual history in the story of the Exodus and the Moses character is mythical, but this could be because the book was published in 1969.

The Maccabees Rebellion

The author refers to Judas Maccabaeus, the Jewish rebel, as the hero in the struggle with the Seleucid king Antiochus IV over the Hellenization of the Jewish community. I think of the success of Maccabaeus rebellion as one of the tragic turning points in the history of the Ancient Near East that made the disaster of Christianity (referred to as a “pernicious superstation” by Tacitus) possible. It is possible that if the Maccabaeus rebellion was defeated by the Greeks and the Jewish community Hellenized, the radical and Jewish sect leading to Christianity would have never developed.

The Historicity of Jesus

The author still treats Jesus as a real figure of history whereas I have my doubts. The historic reality of Jesus is still the consensus academic position. But as mentioned above, I think Jesus bares too many resemblances and parallels to previous fictional dying and rising savior gods not to at least arose some doubt as to his historicity. The author defends the historicity by citing Tacitus, Josephus (later Christian interpolation noted) and the Gospels as well as the argument from the criterion of embarrassment, i.e., no one would make up such a ridiculous story as having the leader and founder of their own movement ignominiously crucified as a criminal, it would be a scandal. If fact, why even record it unless it was already a well-known event that had to be acknowledged? So obviously embarrassing is the fact that it must be true.

In terms of sources, I find it exceptional by its absence that Philo of Alexandria records the administration of Pilate in Judea but makes no mention of Jesus. Did he not exist or was he just not worthy of mention at the time? The limitation of the argument from the criterion of embarrassment is that the event might not have been considered embarrassing in the context of its time and place. It is only considered an embarrassment based on our modern context and interpretation. What the author refers to as an embarrassment could have been, and was later, cast as a heroic sacrifice of martyrdom and redemption or even an act of righteous rebellion by a hero willing to pay with his life. We are just assuming this must be an embarrassing event, but this is based on our standards, not the people who experienced the event. The author also cites the fact that Mark (Gospel of) transfers responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus from the Romans (for insurrection) to the Jews (for blasphemy). This is taken to mean it was an actual event. That is, Mark was trying to coverup the political activities of Jesus with respect to the Romans.

My conclusion. It could be that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical character with the very prevalent, nearly ubiquitous and highly familiar dying and rising savior god myth of the Ancient Near East graphed onto him, most likely by Paul, with his Hellenistic background, to erase his role as a messianic Jewish zealot seditionist rebelling against Rome and transform him into the founder of a new and universal salvation religion. The scandalous crucifixion now becomes the rout to glorious salvation and righteous redemption. This is how a Jewish Messiah becomes the incarnate Son of God and the transcendental savior of all humanity.

Date of this Text

Not the fault of the author, but this book was published in 1969 and by the author’s own admission, the full context, importance and impact of the ‘recent’ discovers of the Nag Hammadi text (1945) and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1947) was yet to be fully assessed and analyzed in terms of understanding religion in the ancient world.

Alternative Title

‘The Origins of Christianity in Ancient History’ – The book is a wonderful reader in the religious practices and beliefs of the ancient world but the inevitable cumulation of the book is tracing the ancient roots of Christianity.