Moncure Daniel Conway

“ Under a teaching that symbolized the deity as the Sun, shining alike on the thankful and thankless, individually, desiring no sacrifices, and concentrating human effort against the forces of evil in nature, in society—the evil principle—Jahveh falls like lightning from heaven. Like “the blameless man” of the “Wisdom of Solomon,” Jesus “sets himself against the Wrath,” however sanctified as the Wrath of God, and sees all sacrifices as eucharists of the Adversary. He not only repudiates the name “Jahveh,” but tells the official agents of Jahvism that their god is his devil. ”

“ Solomon, and the Second Solomon, rest in their unknown graves; their wisdom is corrupted; but their genius survives in the earth. Of old it was said God looked down from heaven on the children of men, and found that there was “none that doeth good, no not one.” But it is now man who, with eyes illumined by the brave and cultured Solomons of all lands and ages, looks upon the gods to see if there be one that doeth good. The best of them are defended only by a plea that evil is the mask of their benevolence. But it is not humanly moral to do evil that good may come. ”

“ One may indeed dream of a deity longing for a human love,—grieving at being through ages an object of fear, personified as Wrath,—rejoicing in the birth of any new interpreter who should free him from the despot glory, “I create evil,” and reconcile the human heart to him as eternal love—love ever burdened with the griefs of humanity, ever seeking to be born of woman, and to struggle against the dark and evil forces of nature. ”

“ O Jesus! noblest of patriots, greatest of heroes, most glorious of all martyrs! Thine is the spirit of universal liberty and love—of uncompromising hostility to every form of injustice and wrong. But not with weapons of death dost thou assault thy enemies, that they may be vanquished or destroyed; for thou dost not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against ‘principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places’ ”

“ For no one can carefully study the Book of Proverbs without perceiving that a large number of them never could have been popular proverbs, but are terse little essays and fables, some of them highly artistic, which indicate the presence at some remote epoch of a man of genius. And I cannot conceive any fair reason for setting aside the tradition of many centuries which steadily united the name of Solomon with much of this kind of writing, or for believing that every sentence he ever uttered or wrote is lost. ”

“ It was in my heart to build an house to the name of Jahveh my God; but the word of Jahveh came to me, saying: ‘Thou shalt not build an house unto my name, because thou hast shed much blood upon the earth in my sight; behold a son shall be born unto thee who shall be a man of rest, and I will give him rest from all his enemies round about: for his name shall be Solomon [Peaceful] , and I will give peace and quietness unto Israel in his days: he shall build an house for my name: and he shall be my son, and I will be his father ”

“ Few can really be interested in Abimelech and the shewbread; no one now believes that a rich man must go to hell because he is rich, nor a pauper to Paradise because of his pauperism; and none can intelligently believe the narrative of the resurrection of Lazarus without believing that in Jesus miraculous power was associated with the unveracity and vanity ascribed to him in that narrative. But take the legends all together, and in them is visible the supersacred heart of humanity steadily developing through manifold symbols and fables the religion of human helpfulness and happiness. ”

“ Yet it can hardly be said that the stories of Yima in the Avesta and of Solomon in the Bible are entirely independent of each other,—as in Yima’s being given by the deity a sort of choice and selecting the political career, Ahura Mazda saying: “Since thou wanted not to be the preacher and the bearer of my law, then make thou my worlds thrive, make my worlds increase: undertake thou to nourish, to rule, and to watch over my world.” ”

“ Armaîti has a daughter, “the good Ashi,” whose function is to pass between earth and heaven and bring the heavenly wisdom (Vohu-Mano, “Good Thought”) to mankind. The soul of the world thus reaches, and is reached by, heaven, and Armaîti thus becomes a personification of the combined human and superhuman Wisdom ascribed to great men, such as Solomon. At the same time the “sons of men” are all the children of Armaîti, and she finds delight among them. Even the rudest are restrained by her culture. “By the eyes of Armaîti the (demonic) ruffian was made powerless,” says Zoroaster. ”

“ The supreme head of the spiritual world is so far above the material world in majesty that he cannot come in contact with matter, though this august “holiness” has nothing to do with his moral character. Indeed deities were in all countries considered quite above the moral obligations of men. Jahveh’s “holiness” required the employment of mediators in creation—the Spirit of God brooding over the waters, Wisdom the “undefiled” master-builder, the Word—in each of whom is some image of his quasi-physiological “holiness,” his transcendent immateriality. ”

“ Shimei had once called David what Jahveh also called him, a man of blood, but afterwards asked his forgiveness. Under a pretence of forgiveness, David nursed his vengeance through many years, and Shimei was now a white-haired man. David’s last words addressed to Solomon were these:
“He (Shimei) came down to meet me at Jordan, and I sware to him by Jahveh, saying, ‘I will not put thee to death with the sword.’ Now therefore hold him not guiltless, for thou art a wise man, and wilt know what thou oughtest to do unto him; and thou shalt bring his hoar head down to the grave in blood.” ”

“ It was the birth of a new God that moved Jerusalem: a unique God in Judea—and almost unknown in modern Christendom—namely, a Good God. As the Arabian gospel significantly relates, the Eastern Wise Men came to the cradle of Jesus as that of a saviour “prophesied by Zoroaster,”—the one prophet who separated deity from the realm of evil.
It is now even unorthodox to deny that the agonies of nature are part of the providence of God: but herein orthodoxy is in direct antagonism to what it maintains as the authentic teaching of Jesus. ”

“ Such is Koheleth’s conception of life, which, except so far as it is marred by a vague notion of Fate which is fatal to philanthropy, is not very different from the idea growing in our own time. “The All is a never-ceasing whirl” (i. 8) , and Koheleth advises that each individual man try to make what little circle of happiness he can around him. “O my heart!” says Omar Khayyám, “thou wilt never penetrate the mysteries of the heavens; thou wilt never reach that culminating point of wisdom which the intrepid omniscients have attained. ”

“ The doctrine of one writer in “Wisdom” is simply predestination. Paul’s potter-and-clay similitude is anticipated, and the Parsi dualism curiously adapted to Jahvist monotheism: “Good is set against evil, life against death, the godly against the sinner and the sinner against the godly: look through all the works of the Most High and there are two and two, one against another.” But the liberal son of Sira is more optimist: “All things are double, one against another, but he hath made nothing imperfect: one thing establisheth the good of another.” ”

“ Thus does the fourth Gospel sink Jesus morally into the grave of Lazarus, leaving in his place an embodiment of the Jahveh who had lying spirits to send out into his prophets on occasion.
The resurrection of Lazarus is a transparent fabrication out of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. Abraham’s words to the rich man,—“neither will they be persuaded if one rose from the dead,”—were not adapted to a faith built on a resurrection, so that parable is suppressed in the fourth Gospel. The resurrection of a supernatural man is not quite sufficient for people not supernatural. ”

“ But as for practical life and conduct, God, or fate, is clearly indifferent to it, consequently let a man eat his bread and quaff his wine with joy, love his wife,—the best portion of his lot,—and whatever his hand findeth to do that do with vigor, remembering that “there is no work, nor thought, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the inevitable grave.” ”

“ That a man should regard the Holy Spirit as unable to make men infallible; that he should have discovered immoral utterances in the prophets; that he should regard it as a sign of enlightenment to disregard the Sabbath deliberately and intelligently—this is surely all very striking.
Who, in the second century, could have invented these anecdotes about Jesus? They are not harmonious with the Pauline Epistles; their heretical character is proved by the repudiation of the Gospel containing them, while their genuineness is implicitly confessed by the ultimate suppression of that Gospel. ”

“ One edge has slaughtered innumerable Jews, Moslems, Arians, Socinians, mingling their blood with that of the humane Jesus himself on the sacrificial altar he tried so hard to exchange for mercifulness. The other edge turned against the moral heart of Jesus himself, lowering the tone of all narratives and utterances ascribed [199] to him after his connection with Jahveh, and consequently lowering all Christendom under its dishonourable burden of accommodating human veracity and kindness to the bad heavenly manners that were acquired by the deified Christ. ”

“ It is remarkable to find such a story related without any word about sin and forgiveness.
The so-called “Sermon on the Mount” is well named: it is evidently made up of reports of sermons in amplification of sayings of Jesus in the style of the Wisdom Books, among which probably were:
“Let your light shine before men. A lamp is not lit to be put under a bushel.”
“The lamp of the body is the eye. If thine eye be sound the whole body is illumined; if the eye be diseased the whole body is in darkness. If the inner eye be darkened how great is the darkness.” ”