King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) Read Free Page A

orderly and humane style than in any Chrestian society of to-day which has not modelled its discipline closely upon theirs.
    It will be asked : What reason have the libellists to circulate these statements if there is no truth in them? The answer is plain. Not only do the remaining Judaic Chrestians still refuse to deify Jesus, since for Jews there is only one God ; but, the Gentile Chrestians being ignorant of Hebrew, Judaists naturally stand at a great advantage in expounding both the Messianic prophecies relating to Jesus and the collected corpus of his moral discourses and pronouncements. This has bred jealousy and resentment. Truths that to a Gentile brought up in the Olympian faith seem a wholly original illumination appear to the Judaists as a logical development of Pharisaism.
    I once heard a Roman Chrestian cry out at a love-feast where I was a guest : “Listen, brothers and sisters in Christ, I bring glad tidings! Jesus rolled up the Ten Commandments given to Moses, by substituting two of his own : ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy strength.’ And ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ ”
    Great applause.
    A former Judaist sitting next to me blinked a little and then said dryly : “Yes, brother, that was well said by the Christ! And now I hear that those rascally Jewish copyists have stolen his wisdom and interpolated the first of these two overriding Commandments into the sixth chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy, and the second into the nineteenth chapter of the Book of Leviticus !”
    “May the Lord God pardon their thievish wickedness !” cried a pious matron from the other end of the table. “I am sure that the Pharisees are at the bottom of it !”
    Not wishing to cause a tumult, I refrained from reminding her that Jesus had praised the Pharisees as “the righteous who need no repentance” and as “the able-bodied who have no need of a physician”, and in hisfable of the spendthrift runaway had made them the type of the honest son who stayed at home : “Son, you have always remained dutifully with me and all my goods are yours.”
    In Chrestian Churches, as among the Orphics and other religious societies, secret doctrine is taught largely in the form of drama. This, though an ancient and admirable way of conveying religious truth, has its disadvantages when the characters are historical rather than mythical ; and when the worshippers accept as literally true what is merely dramatic invention. I have before me a copy of the Nativity Drama now used by the Egyptian Church, in which the principal speakers are the Angel Gabriel, Mary the Mother of Jesus, Mary’s cousin Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s husband Zacharias the Priest, Joseph, Mary’s husband, three shepherds, three astrologers, the midwife Salome, King Herod, Anna the prophetess and Simeon the Priest. The play is simply but skilfully written, and I have no fault at all to find with it as devotional literature. Its purpose is to demonstrate that Jesus was the expected Jewish Messiah, and more than this, that he was the same Divine Child who had been foreshadowed in all the ancient mysteries—Greek, Egyptian, Celtic, Armenian and even Indian. The third scene, for instance, opens in the Bethlehem stable on a darkened stage.
The Cock (crowing) : “Christ is born !”
The Bull (lowing) : “Where ?”
The Ass (braying) : “
In Bethlehem!
”
    These creatures, by the way, are not quaint characters borrowed from the Fables of Aesop : they are sacred animals. The cock is sacred to Hermes Conductor of Souls and to Aesculapius the Healer. It dispels the darkness of night, is the augur of the reborn Sun. You will recall that almost the last words spoken by Socrates before he drank the hemlock were a reminder to a friend that he had vowed a cock to Aesculapius : he was expressing, I suppose, his hope in resurrection. The cock likewise figures in the story of Jesus’s last sufferings and