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-PLATO, PHILO, AND PAUL;
OR,
THE PAGAN CONCEPTION OF A “DIVINE LOGOS” SHEWN
TO HAVE BEEN THE BASIS OF THE CHRISTIAN
- DOGMA OF THE DEITY OF CHRIST.
BY
BEV. J. W. LAKE.
“ Christianity conquered Paganism, hut Paganism infected Christianity. The rites of the
Pantheon passed into her worship, and the subtleties of the Academy into her creed.”—
Macaulay.
“ Godly men are called God-like, for God lives, forms, ordains and works in them all His
works;, and doth, so to speak, use Himself in them.”—Tauter.
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.
>4
'J.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
NO. 11, THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD,
UPPER NORWOOD, LONDON, S.E.
i
p,
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•
Price One Shilling.
�“ To shew you openly my opinion, I say, that it is not absolutely
necessary for salvation to know Christ after the flesh ; but it is
altogether otherwise if we speak of the ‘ Son of God,’ that is, of
the 'Eternal Wisdom of God,’ which is manifested in all things,
and chiefly in the human soul, and most of all in Jesus Christ.
Without this wisdom, no one can come to the state of happiness,
for it is this alone which teaches what is true and what is false,
what is good and what is evil. As to what certain churches add,
that God took human nature, I expressly declare that I do not
know what they say, and to speak frankly, I confess that they
seem to me to speak a language as absurd as if one were to say
that a circle had taken the nature of a triangle.”-—Spinoza, Letter
to a Friend.
“ Behold ! behold the God whom every spirit adores,
Whom Abraham served, of whom Pythagoras dreamed,
Whom Socrates announced, with whom Plato conversed,
That God whom the universe reveals to reason,
Whom justice waits for, whom the unfortunate hopes for,
And whom at length Christ came to shew to the world ;
This is not that Deity fabricated by man,
That God ill explained by imposture,
That God disfigured by the hands of false priests,
Whom our credulous ancestors trembling worshipped,
He alone is, He is One, He is just, He is good,
The earth sees His work, and the heaven knows His name.”
[From a French poem addressed by Lamartine to the Abbe
De Le Mennais, quoted in Hunt’s Essay on Pantheism.]
�DEDICATION.
To the Bishops and Clergy of the Church of England,
to those Dissenting Ministers who hold and teach the
so-called orthodox faith, but especially to the intelligent
and thoughtful among the English Laity, this pamphlet
is dedicated.
It is a condensed, comprehensive, and connected
survey of religious history, and in discerning the simple
facts which that history records, it sees and shows that
the present fundamental dogmas of the national
religion, viz., the “ Deity of Jesus ” and the “ Atone
ment for Sin, said to be effected through the merits of
his death,” are plain and palpable delusions.
History must itself be rewritten, and all its pro
minent facts reversed, ere this position can be refuted.
The overwhelming and conclusive evidence on which it
rests, is now brought, for the first time, in simple,
clear, and connected form, before the masses of the
English people, and possibly the facts adduced, will be
new to many of the clergy also.
Refutation is fearlessly challenged, for we have but
given a mere outline of the evidence we possess, and
could easily supply volume after volume of added
proofs.
This pamphlet will he widely circulated, and the
people possessed of the knowledge it imparts, will
�4
Dedication.
increasingly come to despise and contemn, as ignorant
or untruthful men, a clergy who, in the face of the
information which is here given, shall continue to pro
pagate known and proven fallacies as the eternal Truths
of God.
The hour for a new Religious Reformation has struck,
and it rests with the clergy of the National Church to
determine whether they will rank among its honoured
leaders, or he swept away as an effete priesthood by its
waves.
�PLATO, PHILO, AND PAUL.
HE belief that Christ was God, may be said to be
the foundation doctrine of the Christian Church.
Christianity, both sacerdotal and evangelical,—both
Romish and Calvinistic, makes this belief to be a
fundamental doctrine. There are few Christians, how
ever, who would not feel it something akin to gross
irreverence, were they asked to express this belief in
other language, and to assert that Jesus of Nazareth,
the peasant teacher of Judea, whom the Jewish priests
accused of blasphemy, and got crucified by the Romans
for sedition, was the Almighty maker and framer of the
myriads of worlds that stud the vast infinity of space !!
To express the doctrine in this form, is instinctively
felt to be akin to ridicule, and we are immediately told
that we do wrong thus to confuse the two natures of
Jesus, who was both God and Man,—who, in the
former capacity, was the creator of the world, but who,
as man, was like other men, subservient to the laws of
nature, and subject to the adverse fortunes and ordinary
discipline of human life.
Again, the Church of England defines God as being
“ a Spirit,” and consequently, destitute of “body, parts,
and passions; ” how then, we ask, can Jesus, who was
a man like ourselves, and who had “ body, parts, and
passions,” be God ? The question is unanswerable, in
any way consistent with an intelligent belief in the
dogma of the Godhead of Christ; and this dogma, as
held and taught by the churches of Christendom, is a
T
�6
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
gross and idolatrous superstition. Jesus was man, and
only man, was doubtless a good, earnest, devout, and
pure-minded man, was possibly pre-eminent, in an
intense degree, in all the virtues and excellences that
ennoble our humanity ; but still he was only man. We
know but little of his actual life, many years of which
are veiled in an impenetrable darkness, which no light
of history illumines, and the account we have of the
(two or three) brief years of his public ministry, is so
loosely and dubiously recorded, that we have no means
of estimating his true and actual character ; all we really
know concerning him is, that he was a philanthropist
and religious reformer, and that living in an age, the
thought-currents of which were busy in lifting religion
from a sensual to a spiritual character, Jesus endorsed
the highest, and purest, and noblest thought of the
time, and wove it into a new religion, which constituted
the gospel he proclaimed.
The true duty of men with regard to him, is to
profit by his teachings, and to catch the pure and earnest
spirit of his life, not to believe in any special dogmas
as to the office he held, or the mystical nature he bore.
This dogma of the Deity of Christ has been the
main instrument in corrupting and debasing
Christianity. For Christianity, through the corrup
tions that have distorted it, has been often more of a
curse than a blessing to the world. It has caused
rivers of blood to flow, has again and again crushed
liberty under its foot, and, for centuries together, has
kept Europe in the mists and darkness of ignorance.
To-day, those countries are lowest in the scale of
European civilisation, where a Christian priesthood
rule in greatest power. Even in our own so-called free
and enlightened country, the Christian Church has
been the stumbling-block in the way of a true and
sound national education. We regard this dogma, then,
of the “ Deity of Christ,” as a pernicious and debasing
idolatry, and we proceed to lay bare its origin and
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
7
history, to show it as being the corruption and travesty of
one of the grandest and noblest ideas that have lit and
elevated the human mind,—and so to make it abso
lutely impossible for men of honest and intelligent mind
to cherish this idea in its corrupt and idolatrous form.
In the early portions of the Bible, God is often
spoken of as having the form and passions of a man.
In Christ’s day, the more thoughtful and intelligent
minds had outgrown this gross and crude idea, and
Christ taught that God was a Spirit, and that he was
to be worshipped “ in spirit and in truth.” Christians,
however, have reproduced the gross ideas of an early
and ignorant age, by worshipping the teacher as God,
and by inventing a series of mystical dogmas through
which they have identified him with the Great Creator
of the universe.
Now, it is evident that the first lesson in religion
should be that which gives us a correct and worthy, if
not a complete and full conception of God. As Minucius Felix told a heathen of his day, so we also “should
know our Gods before we worshipped them.” For on
this knowledge and assurance the stability of our re
ligion depends. Unfortunately, the Bible gives us but
little help here. It asserts, but it does not explain,
much less reveal, the existence and nature of God.
Its assumed earliest words, “ In the beginning, God
made the heavens and the earth,” imply that the idea
of God is familiar to the reader’s mind. The early
chapters of the Book of Genesis belong, however, to
the later rather than to the earlier era of Jewish
history, are an adaptation of Chaldean legends, know
ledge of which was gained by the Jews, during their
captivity in Babylon, one thousand years after the death
of Moses. Almost down to the era of the captivity,
the Jews were idolaters, worshipped God under the
similitude of graven images, and practised many of the
rites of the Pagan peoples around them. As this
�8
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
assertion, however, runs so counter to the current
religious teaching, it is perhaps desirable to fortify it
by the following testimony of some of the most
learned biblical scholars of our age :—
“ For a long time after the building of Solomon’s Temple
(which event was itself five hundred years after the time of
Moses), sacrifices were offered on high places as well as at
the temple, and even by kings who were noted for their
piety and adherence to Jehovah’s laws, and for being
desirous, with all zeal, to promote the worship of Jehovah,
as Asa (1 Kings xv. 14), Jehosaphat (xxii. 44), Joash, the
pupil of the priests (2 Kings xii. 4), Amaziah (chap. xiv. 4),
Uzziah (chap. xv. 4), and Jotham (chap. xv. 35.) In the
Books of Kings and Chronicles, it is always pointed out as
blameable, that even these pious kings should have allowed
the worship in the high places to remain. But this is
merely the verdict of the author of these books which, in no
case, could have been composed before the Babylonian exile.
As the kings above named are depicted in everything else
as such zealous servants of Jehovah, we can scarcely think
that they would not have aimed at putting a stop to the
worship at high places, where sacrifices were offered to
Jehovah (?to Baal) at other altars besides that in the
Temple, if the Deuteronomic law, so expressly showing the
service to be contrary to the will of Jehovah, had been
acknowledged by them as Mosaic.”—Bleeps Introduction to
the Old Testament, Vol. I., p. 328.
Dr Samuel Davidson, the most eminent of English
biblical scholars, speaks with even greater plainness on
this matter, and shows clearly the crude ideas which
the Jews entertained concerning God, even down to
the period of the Babylonish captivity, one thousand
years after the time of Moses, from whom it is manifest
they could not have received the laws and teaching,
which the Pentateuch declares him to have given with
the authority of a special and supernatural revelation.
Dr Davidson says—
“It is remarkable that the fundamental doctrine of
Mosaism, viz., that there is but one God—the creator and
preserver of all, invisible, eternal, omnipotent, holy, and
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
9
just,—was all along inadequately apprehended till the
captivity. A few choice spirits grasped it with sufficient
distinctness, and adhered to it, while to the mass of the
people, Jehovah was no more than a superior God beside
other deities. Polytheism had deeply penetrated the vulgar
mind, and though the nation frequently sought Jehovah
with convictions of sin and repentance, such conversions,
called forth by external circumstances, were transient in their
effects. A manifold idolatry, partly of Zabian and partly
of Egyptian orgin, had its altars in all the cities of the land,
in the streets of Jerusalem, and in the very Temple of
Jehovah, immediately before the exile, as we learn from
Jeremiah (chaps, vii., xliv.). There is no evidence to show
that the ceremonial law was observed by the Jews with any
thing like regularity or strictness. The great feasts them
selves, such as the Passover, the Feast of Tabernacles, &c.,
were allowed to fall into desuetude, as the historical books
attest. If the externals of religion were negligently attended
to, religion itself must have been sickly.”-—Introduction to
the Old Testament, Vol. I, p. 340.
Dr Kalisch, in his learned commentary on Leviticus,
shows, very convincingly, the late date of this book as
a whole.
“ It contains,” he says, “ ordinances respecting several
institutions, the existence or full development of which
cannot be proved until long after the captivity—such as the
Sin-offerings and the High priesthood, the Day of Atone
ment, and the Year of Jubilee. Now, it has been shown that
the Day of Atonement was unknown in the time of
Nehemiah, and as the Year of Jubilee was associated with the
Day of Atonement, the compilation of the Book of Leviticus
must fall later than that date, and we shall probably be
near the truth if we place the final revision of Leviticus and
the Pentateuch at about b.c. 400.” (That is 1100 years after
the time of Moses, its reputed author !)
Again, Dr Kalisch states that
“The notion of a holy God, governing a holy people, in
a holy land, was the latest product of religious thought, that
it pre-supposes an age very far in advance of that in which
the people danced round the golden image of the calf Apis,
exclaiming, ‘ These are thy gods, O Israel, who brought
thee up out of the Land of Egypt/ or of that in which
�io
Plato., Philo, and Paul.
Jepthah believed that he was presenting an acceptable
offering to God, by slaughtering his daughter as a
holocaust.”—Historical and Critical Commentary on the Old
Testament. Leviticus. Part II., pp. 637, 639.
These views, which are the established results of all
free and learned inquiry into the Hebrew scriptures,
revolutionize the popular conception with regard to
them, and show us very clearly that the grander,
though still imperfect conceptions of God, which these
scriptures contain, were only held during the later
period of Jewish history, the centuries immediately
preceding the Christian era. They prove that the idea
of God was not a matter of divine revelation, specially
given through Moses, but was a much later develop
ment of Jewish thought, and they leave it an open
question as to whether it was not an importation from
other and even higher faiths. We shall see that
while the people, whom we are mistakenly taught to
regard as being specially chosen and called of God, were
falling continually into the practice of the Syrian
idolatries, and were even participating in the gross
rites of Baal and Astarte, there were countries where a
far purer and truer worship prevailed, and there were,
in heathen lands, systems of philosophy extant, in
which infinitely higher and more worthy ideas of God
were held.
Five hundred years before Christ, the Jews were
mixing idolatrous rites with the worship of Jehovah,
were conceiving of Jehovah as a local god, superior in
power and majesty to the gods surrounding nations
worshipped. He was, to their thought, not a pervad
ing spirit, but a localised person,—a magnified man,
dwelling just above the clouds, ruling as a king, and
watching over the fortunes of the Jewish nation, giving
them the victory over their enemies. After the cap
tivity in Babylon, into which the Jews went as a nation
of idolaters, but from which they emerged as a band of
puritans, their thought of God took a much higher
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
11
tone, and from this time, a system of Jewish philosophy
took its rise.
Of this philosophy, few traces are
discernible, till within a century or two of the
Christian era.
During this captivity they came in contact first with
the Chaldean religion, and subsequently with the
purer doctrines of the Persian faith. In the former,
they would have seen a gross idolatry from which they
probably shrank, but they would have also been
familiarised with a higher form of speculative thought
than they themselves had hitherto known. From the
Persian conquerors, however, they would have learned
a much higher faith, and have found a religion
strikingly like the best aspects of their own worship, but
with a speculative philosophy from which they had
much to learn. We find them consequently speaking
of the Persian monarch, Cyrus, as the anointed servant
of Jehovah ; and there is but little doubt that his
leniency to the Jews, in remitting their captivity, was
due largely to the similarity of their religion to his
own, to his respect for the monotheistic idea that
marked it.
From the Babylonians the Jews learned the stories,
or myths, of the creation of the world, the fall of man
and the flood. The recent finding among the ruins of
Babylon, by Mr Smith of the British Museum, of the
tablets on which the latter legend was recorded, ranks as
one of the great biblical discoveries of our day, and shews
us the source whence those legends were derived, which
Englishmen are still taught to regard as being special
revelations from God!
From the Persians, whose
religion was that taught by Zoroaster, the Jews
learned to hold far more sublime conceptions of God
than any they had hitherto known. Eusebius, quoting
in the fourth century from an old Persian record, gives
the following as the teaching of Zoroaster concerning
God:—
“ God is the first Being, incorruptible and eternal, un
�12
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
made and indivisible, altogether unlike to all his works,
the principle and author of all good, gifts cannot move bim;
He is the best of the good, and the wisest of the wise.
From Him proceed law and justice.”
This, however, was the philosophic idea of God, an
idea in close alliance, if not identical, with the Panthe
ism of the Hindoos, which makes God to he the
pervading force of nature. It is obvious that such a
God could not be worshipped by the Jews as a magni
fied man,—could not be an object of popular worship
at all,—could not be grasped by the popular mind. His
name was “ Zeruane Akerne,” signifying “ time with
out bounds,” or “ beginningless time,” or “the Eternal.”
But the Persians themselves could not worship such an
abstract being, so for practical purposes they had a
second and personal God, Ormuzd, God of light and
goodness, who has a powerful enemy, Ahriman, the
lord of evil and darkness; betwixt these there is con
tinual strife, in which the latter, like the Christian
“ devil,” of which he is the prototype, is destined to be
eventually overcome. Then there is the mediating and
reconciling God Mithras, who is sometimes worshipped
as the creating God also,—a being who is sometimes
distinct from, and sometimes identified with, Ormuzd,
who is worshipped as the reconciler between light and
darkness, and beyond Mithras, there is Honover,
the “Word” or Him who is eternal wisdom, and
whose speech is an eternal creation. “ Ormuzd is the
creation of the impersonal God, the living personal
deity, the first begotten of all things, the resplendent
image of infinitude, the being in whose existence is
imaged the fulness of eternal time and infinite space.
The sun is His symbol, yet the sun is but a spark of
the unspeakable splendour in which he dwells. What
ever the original One is, that is Ormuzd,—infinite in
light, in purity, in wisdom. But, as the first begotten
of the Eternal, his duration is limited to 12,000 years ;
as a personal deity He is finite ; He is a king, and
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
13
has a kingdom which is not universal, for it is opposed
by the kingdom of Ahriman.” *
In the common thought the Persian religion, while
nominally monotheistic, seemed practically to recognise
the existence of two gods, a good god and an evil god ;
a god who ruled the light, and a god who ruled the
darkness ;—a beneficent god who^sent prosperity, and a
malignant god who strove to fill the world with
adversity. Such views would be likely to have special
attraction for the Jewish captives, as they would solve
for them the perplexing problem of their own present
adversity. The God on whom they had relied for the
permanence of their national prosperity, had allowed
his and their enemies to triumph, to destroy his sacred
temple, to profane the holy vessels, and to make his
chosen people captive.
This theology, therefore,
which taught that there was a bad and evil God, who
sometimes foiled the plans and marred the purposes of
the good God, offered a fair explanation of their diffi
culty. We find accordingly that the'belief in a dual
god, or rather in two opposing and distinct gods, won
considerable acceptance with them, and threatened to
undermine the monotheism that to the higher minds of
the Jewish people marked the national faith. This
is evident from the 45th chapter of Isaiah, which
seems to have been expressly written to combat this
perversion of their faith, and which, from the mention
it makes of Cyrus the Persian King, was evidently
written at the period of the return, by his permission
and direction, of a portion of the Jews from Babylon.
“ I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no
God beside me. 1 form the light, I create darkness :
I make peace and create evil: I the Lord do all these
things."—Isaiah xlv. 5-7,
This dualism, however,
was never wholly eradicated, and from this date the
idea of an evil god entered the current of Jewish
* From an Essay on Pantheism, by Eev. J. Hunt.
�14
Plato.) Philo, and Paul.
thought, and the Persian Ahriman in due time developed
into the Devil of Christian theology.
But the higher aspects also of the religious thought
of the followers of Zoroaster, the great Persian lawgiver
or prophet, tinged from this time the subsequent
thought of Judaism.
It is singular that the Bible, as Protestants use it,
furnishes no record of the Jewish people during the
best and brightest portion of their religious history,
viz., the four or five centuries immediately preceding
the Christian era, and constituting the period of their
national life, that intervened between their return from
captivity and the ministry of Jesus. The apocryphal
books of Ecclesiasticus-—the Wisdom of Solomon—the
books of Esdras and of Maccabees, together with the
book of Enoch, not only supply the history of the
Jewish people during this period, but, what is of far
greater importance to our present enquiry, they show
us the progress and development of their religious
thought.
This progress was largely due to the
admixture of the higher and more recondite ideas
concerning deity, which marked the Persian theology,
with the cruder views of their own faith. Here they
first learned that God was not a magnified man, but
a pure and pervading spirit,—and as a step towards
His better apprehension, they imbibed the idea that the
creative and upholding providence of the world were
emanations from His essence, personifications, as it were,
of His power and wisdom. The pure, passionless spirit
could not, it was thought, come into contact with a
gross material world which was inherently depraved
and vicious, so the actual God that formed and ruled
the world, by whom men were upheld, and whom they
were bound to worship, was regarded as a Divine
personage, who acted as God’s vicegerent;—his wis
dom, his angel, or messenger, or word (Memra). The
Jews, however, learned also a more practical lesson, they
learned the ultimate triumph of righteousness as the
�Plato, Philo.) and Paul.
i5
purposed discipline of God, and they gathered from the
functions of the mediating God, Mithras, the ideas
which fashioned the expectation of their own Messiah.
Good and evil blended promiscuously in the world, so
the Persians held, because Ormuzd and Ahriman, the
good and evil Gods, were in perpetual strife, and some
times the good, and at other times the evil God was in
the ascendancy. A period, however, was looked for
at which Ahriman and his followers were to be finally
exterminated (the devil and his angels will be cast into
the bottomless pit as the Book of Revelation repro
duces the thought), when the earth, divested of all the
mountains that roughen its surface, would become the
habitation of happy men, the members of one great
community, speaking the same language, and animated
by the same vital and universal principle. Between
those powers who are perpetually at variance, Zoroaster
placed a mediatory being, Mithras, whose business it was
to overcome the powers of darkness, and to bring all
things under the control of Ormuzd, the beneficent
deity. Mithras had his symbol in the sun, which
luminary was to the Persians the symbol of the good
and beneficent God.
So Mithras is spiritual light
contending with spiritual darkness, and through his
labours the kingdom of darkness shall be lit with
heaven’s own light,—the Eternal will receive all things
back into his favour, the world will be redeemed to
God.
The impure are to be purified and the evil
made good, through the mediation of Mithras, the
reconciler of Ormuzd and Ahriman. Mithras is the
Good, his name is Love. In relation to the Eternal he
is the source of grace, in relation to man he is the life
giver and mediator.
He brings the “Word,” as
Brahma brings the Vedas, from the mouth of the
Eternal. (See Plutarch “ De Isid et Osirid,” also Dr
Hyde’s “DeReligione Vet. Pers.,” ch. 22, see also 11 Essay
on Pantheism,” by Rev. J. Hunt). It was just prior
to the return of the Jews from living among the people
�16
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
who were dominated by these ideas, that the splendid
chapter of Isaiah (xl.), or indeed the series of chapters
which form the closing portion of the book, were
written, “ Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith
your God. Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make
straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every
valley shall he exalted, and. every mountain and hill
shall he made low, and the crooked shall he made
straight, and the rough places plain.” And then
follows a magnificent description of the greatness and
supremacy of God, and this is followed by chapters
which tell of a Messiah, or conquering prince, who will
redeem the nation from its enemies, and restore them
to the light of the divine favour, and which predict a
millennium, a golden age of purified and glorified human
ity. It is thus manifest that the inspiration of these
writings came to the Jewish people from their contact
with the religious thought of the Persians, and not from
any supernatural source. From this time the Jews began
to hold worthier ideas concerning God, and to cherish
expectations of a golden age, a kingdom of heaven,
which the Messiah, who was to be the sent messenger of
God, should inaugurate. And this kingdom was to be
a kingdom of righteousness,—a day of marvellous light, a
rule under which all evil and darkness were to perish.
We trace the influence of these thoughts on the
Jewish literature of that day, and those portions of the
Old Testament which are classed as Messianic prophecies,
were doubtless written under its inspiration. While,
however, the Jews were captive in Babylon,—living
in an exile into which they went, a nation of turbulent
and lawless idolaters, Pythagoras was teaching in
Greece a philosophy based on the indivisible unity of
God, whom he named, or rather spoke of as, “ The
One.” On this conception he based a society, which
was the prototype of the subsequent schools of Grecian
philosophy. One deity he taught was the soul of all,
whence the spirits of men issued ; hence he framed his
theory of metempsychosis or transmigration of souls, in
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
l7
order to provide a discipline by which souls, con
taminated by their contact with' the evil and im
pure bodies of men, might receive a purification fitting
them to return eventually to the pure source from
whence they sprung. Before him Thales and Anaxi
mander had lived, and while the Jews were offering
idolatrous worship within the Temple at Jerusalem,
these men were seeking, by the aid of deep and earnest
speculative thought, to find some worthy and fitting
conception of the only true God. And at the time
when the Jews, liberated from captivity, were about
settling down once more in their Fatherland, Socrates
and Plato were teaching not only moral, but religious
philosophy, to their countrymen at Athens. They were
discussing such questions as the origin of the world, the
immortality of the soul, the nature and existence of God,
the discipline of human life, the character of virtue and
the rewards that should attach to it, as well as the
penalties that the wicked would incur.
Plato, B.c. 400, was familiar with the Pantheistic
philosophy, as well as with the polytheistic worship of
India, Egypt, and his own country, Greece. His mind,
however, shared in the general revolt which all
thoughtful minds feel, alike from the vagueness of the
former as from the superstition of the latter.
“ It is difficult,” says this philosopher, “ to find out
God, and when we have found him, it is impossible to
make him to be comprehended by the multitude.” *
Plato discerned that there was one supreme God,
eternal, immaterial, immutable, omnipotent, omniscient,
the first and the last, the beginning, middle, and end
of all things. But with this admission of The One,
TO EH, Plato conjoined many subordinate natures and
intelligencies, %ow ra IIoTAa. In the supreme mind,
Osos, Nous or Hartip, Plato discerned the Thinker; in
the manifold he discerned His thoughts. The universe
was thus the expression of the thought or idea of God,
* Timaeus.
B
�18
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
was fashioned not by the su preme and impassible thinker,
bnt by his AOroS (Logos'), or active thought.
*
“ All objects of sense have relation to the ideal as
well as to the material world. Thus a house or
machine, or table, &c., are but the material expressions
of ideas that existed in the mind of those who fashioned
them. The manifold (material nature), has thus a
double existence, one in its ideals, the other in its
phenomena. The latter is the world of sense, what
men call the material, and what the vulgar suppose to
he reality. But its existence is only borrowed. It is
a shadow,—a copy, of that which is real, the realities
are the ideas,—the architypes.”—“Essay on Panthe
ism” by Rev. J. Hunt.
With Plato, however, ideas are sometimes identical
with God, the TO EN, the one self-existent Being, and
at other times he speaks as though they were distinct
from God. Thus in his system, God, the designer, is
the supreme mind, and God the Creator, Aryaioupyog,
is spoken of as a secondary or inferior being,—a con
fusion of thought that prevails also in the Christian
systems of to-day, which in fact have been largely
based on the Platonic thought, and in which Jesus is
sometimes spoken of as the “ Son of God,” “ the
maker of the worlds,” “ begotten" of the Father, but
subordinate to the Path er,” and sometimes is reverenced
and worshipped as being the actual and supreme God.
Plato spoke of the active mind or operating thought of
God, the eternal and supreme one, under the title of the
Demiurge (creator), or Logos (the word). “ This Logos,”
he says, “ divine above all other beings, fashioned the
heavenly bodies. This Being a happy man will princi
pally reverence, while he may be stimulated by the
desire of learning whatever is within the compass of
human understanding, being convinced that he will
* The Logos, which here implies the mind of God (divine inspira
tion), was personified as a distinct being by the later schools of the
Platonic philosophy.
�Platte Philo, and Paul.
i9
thus enjoy the greatest felicity in this life; and that
after death he will be translated into regions that are
•congenial to virtue.” (Plat. Epinomis). Another of
Plato’s divinities of second or inferior rank is the
tou Ko<ry,ou, or “ soul of the world,” a personification of
the living forces of nature, a conception akin to the per
vading spirit of God—the Holy Ghost of modern creeds.
The Gospel of John commences with a plain and palp
able reproduction of the Platonic thought.
“ In the beginning was the Logos or Word, and the Logos
or Word was with God, and the Logos or Word was («) God.
All things were made by him, and without him was not
any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the
life was the light or guidance of men.”
The speculative thought, and the religious teaching
of Plato, are diffused throughout his voluminous
writings, but the following is a popular summary of
them, by Madame Dacier, contained in her introduction
to what have been classed as the “ Divine Dialogues.”
“ That there is but one God, and that we ought to love
*
and serve Him, and to endeavour to resemble Him in holiness
and righteousness; that this God rewards humility and
punishes pride.
“ That the true happiness of man consists in being united
to God, and his only misery in being separated from him.
“ That the soul is mere darkness, unless it be illuminated
by God: that men are incapable even of praying well,
unless God teaches them that prayer which alone can be
useful to them.
“ That there is nothing solid and substantial but piety ;
that this is the source of all virtues, and that it is the gift
of God.
“ That it is better to die than to sin.
“ That it is better to suffer wrong than to do it.
“That the ‘Word’ (A6yos) formed the world, and
rendered it visible ; that the knowledge of the Word makes
* Plato, while acknowledging one supreme divinity, often ac
commodates his language to the prevailing polytheistic thought.
In a letter to Dionysius of Syracuse, he says, that in his serious
moods he uses the term 0EOS (God), and in his lighter moods he
uses the phrase 0EOI (Gods).
�20
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
us live very happily here below, and that thereby we obtain
felicity after death.
“ That the soul is immortal, that the dead shall rise again,
that there shall be a final judgment—both of the righteousand of the wicked, when men shall appear only with their
virtues or vices, which -shall be the occasion of their
eternal happiness or misery.”
Such were the ideas of God and of religion, that
were held and taught by Plato in Greece, about the
time that the Jews were returning from captivity,
bringing with them ideas of God and of religion, higher
than any they had before known. These they had
gathered through contact with the followers of the
Zoroastrian faith. But clearer and truer conceptions of
God and of duty were already dawning on the Grecian
mind, and these were destined eventually to mingle
with Hebrew thought, and to fashion the central dogma
of the Christian faith, the Deity or Godhead of
Jesus.
The Jews were, from this time, an enterprising
people, and colonies of their countrymen established
themselves in the leading cities of neighbouring
nations. About three centuries b.c., a large and
important colony resided in Alexandria, the chief city
of Egypt, during the rule of the Ptolemies, and the
metropolitan city of the western world. Here Grecian
learning established its chosen seat, and here thevarious schools of philosophy were represented. Here,
too, was a splendid library, the virtual commencement
of that grand collection which became the finest library
of the ancient world, and whose reputed destruction in
the seventh century, by order of the Caliph Omar, was
an irreparable loss to all subsequent time.
*
* The fact of this destruction was regarded by Gibbon with
some doubt. Alexandria had several public libraries. The first
great library was founded by the Ptolemies, and placed in the
museum ; this library was burned by the soldiers of Julius Caesar.
The second was formed around the library from Pergamus, pre
sented to Cleopatra by Mark Anthony, and was placed in the
Temple of Serapis (the Serapeum). In the reign of Julian, this
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
'
2f
The following succinct account of Israel in Alex
andria, is given in the valuable pamphlet, “ Our First
Century,” published in Mr Scott’s Series.
“ So far back, in the history of the Jews, as B.C. 588,
they had formed a settlement in Egypt. This we know
from Jeremiah (xliii. 7), who was hostile to its formation.
The impossibility of these Jews having access to the temple
at Jerusalem, and owing to its destruction, their losing the
benefit of the daily sacrifice which used to be offered there,
were facts through which the literal observance of the
Mosaic ritual came to a violent end. The Jews in Egypt,
therefore, were compelled either to relinquish the Mosaic
law altogether, or to understand it in a new sense. They
adopted the latter course. But that law had not any second
meaning. So when a second meaning was sought for, it
could not be found. In the meantime, these Jews, at a
later period, learned the Greek language, read the books of
the Grecian philosophers, entertained certain Grecian ideas,
and so became Hellenists.
“ This Hellenising tendency found its most active develop
ment at Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great, B.C.
832. When Ptolemy, son of Lagus, captured Jerusalem,
B.c. 320, he carried away a large number of Jewish and
Samaritan captives to Alexandria, where he gave them the
full privileges of citizenship. Many others migrated thither
of their own accord. According to Josephus, Alexander
himself assigned to the Jews a place in his new city. But,
be that as it may, it is certain that, at an extremely early
period in the history of Alexandria, the Jews became so
numerous in that city, that the north-east angle was known
as 1 the Jews’ quarter.’ The religion and philosophy in
that city produced an effect upon the Jews there, more
library amounted to seven hundred thousand volumes. _ This
library was dispersed or destroyed when the Pagan worship was
put down by Theodosius the First, and the Temple of Serapis was
sacked by the Christians. Orosius, who visited Egypt in the reign
of Theodosius Second, saw the empty book shelves. {Sharpe’s
History of Egypt.) The museum, however, was rebuilt, and with
the restoration of the city, there would, doubtless, have been a
restoration of the public library. The author of “ Time and
Faith ” supposes that when the Saracens conquered the City, a.d.
642, the public library, composed in large part of the remnants of
the earlier libraries, had become, for the most part, so decayed
and worm-eaten, that Omar caused them to be destroyed as worth
less rubbish.
�22
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
powerful than the influence of politics or commerce..
Alexander had founded a Temple of Isis side by side with a
temple of the Grecian gods. Creeds from the east and from
the west, co-existed there; and in aftertimes, the mixed
worship of Serapis was characteristic of the Greek kingdom
in Egypt. For that god, originally a native of Pontus, and
adored by the inhabitants of Sinope, was introduced into
Egypt by the first Ptolemy. At first, the priests opposed
the introduction of Serapis. But the liberality of the
Ptolemies overcame the resistance of the priests ; they sub
mitted to worship Serapis, to whom they gave the throne
and the wife of Osiris. This catholicity of worship was
further combined with the spread of learning. The same
monarch who favoured the worship of Serapis, founded and
embellished the museum and the library; and part of the
library was deposited in the Serapeum. The new faith and
the new literature led to a coalition of opinions; and the
Egyptian Jews imbibed a portion of the spirit that prevailed
around them. Its first development appeared in the Greek
version of the Old Testament, known as the Septuagint.
The day on which the Greek text of the law was introduced
into the synagogue at Alexandria, was thus marked in the
Palestine calendar: ‘ The law in Greek! Darkness! Three
days’ fast I ’ So different already had the Alexandrine Jews
become from the Jews in Palestine.”
This Alexandrian colony of Jews soon became, by
their close contact with Grecian philosophy, to a large
extent, Hellenised. By degrees, they lost the memory
of their national language, and much of their rever
ence for their national faith. Their distance from
Jerusalem prevented even their attendance at the
annual festivals, and lessened their interest in, as well
as their knowledge of, their own religion.
At length, they lost the power of reading their own
Scriptures. The generations who were born and bred
among a Greek-speaking people, would naturally cease
to have any large or general acquaintance with what
would have virtually become a foreign language. Thus,
under the rule of Ptolemy Philadelphus, b.o. 260, and
some say, by his direction, the Hebrew scriptures were
translated into the Greek tongue, and were read for the
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
23
future in this language only, by the Alexandrian Jews.
Moreover, the greater part of the subsequent writings
of the Jews, those written after the closing of the
Hebrew or Old Testament canon, were written in the
Greek tongue, and emanated from the Alexandrian
Jews, and of those which had a Hebrew original, only
Greek translations now remain; showing the supremacy
which this language attained in connection with the
later Jewish literature, and showing also the Hellenised
character of the literature itself. In the Book of
Proverbs, compiled by the Hebrew-speaking Jews of
Palestine, at a period subsequent to the captivity, and
portions of which were, in all probability, written at a
much later date, we have the wisdom of God personi
fied, and represented as a being distinct from the
Eternal. Especially is this seen in the following
passages from the 8th chapter.
“I, wisdom, dwell with prudence, and find out know
ledge of witty inventions.
“ Counsel is mine, and sound wisdom. I am understand
ing, I have strength.
“ By me, kings reign and princes decree justice.
“ I love them that love me, and those that seek me early
shall find me.
“Jehovah possessed me in the beginning of his way,
before his works of old.
“ I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or
ever the earth was.
“ When he prepared the heavens, I was there; when he
set a compass upon the face of the depths, there was I by
him, as one brought up with him; and I was daily his
delight, rejoicing always before him.
“ Whoso findeth me findeth life, and shall obtain the
favour of Jehovah.”
Of the actual writer of these words we have no
knowledge at all, neither do we know at what period
they were written. The presumption is that they are
among the latest additions to the Book of Proverbs,
and that they were penned, at a time when the Hebrew
�24
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
thought was tinged with the Alexandrian theosophy,
by a Palestinian Jew familiar with the subtleties of
Grecian philosophic thought, and desirous of harmonis
ing it with Hebrew ideas.
The ideas of the divine unity expressed in the Book
of Deuteronomy, though doubtless not written till the
time of King Josiah, b.c. 632, “ Hear, 0 Israel! the
Lord our God is one God,” betray a tone of thought
wholly at variance with the personification of divine
wisdom as a separate divine personage.
*
This concep
tion of the divine unity, however, was felt, in the
presence of the speculative thought with which the
Jews of Alexandria were in such close contact, to be
confessedly imperfect. God was made by it to be
simply a magnified man, and this view in the growing
enlightenment of the world was felt to be no longer
tenable. The Eternal could not come into material
relation with his creatures, as the early Jewish scrip
tures had narrated. It was a conception too gross to
entertain, to think of the Creator as wearing a human
form, while to imagine him as a spirit or pervading
power, was to lose him altogether as a God. So the
Jews, to accommodate their views to the growing
thought of a more enlightened age, began to personify
his attributes
spoke of the divine wisdom as a
personage, as a divinely commissioned being, as the
power by which the world was created, and mankind
were purified and made godlike. This was a marked
departure from the monotheism of an earlier day, but
it was also a way of escape from the anthropomorphism
in which this had resulted.
The Jewish mind had now taken a large step towards
the recognition of a second and inferior god, and this
* It is scarcely probable that the Jewish people could have been
familiar with the declaration of the divine unity which the book of
Deuteronomy contains, or with the prohibition of idolatry and of
the worship of images found in the book of Exodus, during the
reigns of the kings when they were continually falling back into
idolatrous worship.
�Plato^ Philo, and Paul.
25
thought was largely helped by the current expecta
tion of a divinely commissioned Messiah—a Son of
man, who should make his advent in the clouds of
heaven attended by legions of angels,—who should be
•God himself coming to judge the nations.
God communed, the Jews held, with man by his
“ Memra, ” or “ Word,” by his angel or messenger, by
his Sophia, or wisdom. By wisdom he made the
worlds. By wisdom he calls to men.
The Alexandrian Jews, however, carried their views
still nearer to the form of the Platonic thought. Living
in close contact with the Stoic philosophers, who were
the later representatives of the Platonic school, the writ
ings of the Alexandrian Jews of a period dating about
two centuries before Christ show unmistakably the
influence of Grecian forms of thought. We have two
remarkable books emanating from Hebrew writers
somewhere about this date—viz., the book of “ Wis
dom,” written in Greek by an Alexandrian Jew, and
•embodying the Neo-Platonic thought, and the book of
“ Ecclesiasticus,” written in Hebrew by a Palestinian
Jew who was intimately acquainted with the Alex
andrian literature.
In this latter book we have wisdom set forth as an
inseparable attribute of God, identified so closely with
God as to preserve intact the Hebrew conception of the
divine unity, and to controvert the Neo-Platonic concep
tion which made the divine wisdom or word to be a dis
tinct divinity. It commences, “All wisdom cometh from
the Lord, and is with Him for ever. . . . The word of
God most high is the fountain of wisdom, and her ways
are everlasting commandments.” And then the writer
asks, “ To whom hath the root of wisdom been
revealed ? or who hath understood her wise counsels ?
There is one wise and greatly to be feared, the Lord
sitting upon his throne. He created her, and saw her,
and numbered her, and poured her out upon all his
works. She is with all flesh according to his gift, and
�26
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
he hath given her to them that love him. To fear the
Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”—Ecclesiasticus,
chap. i.
Here is at once a recognition and a repudiation of
the Platonic idea of a secondary god, or rather we may
speak of it as an adaptation by which it is made to
harmonise with the stern monotheism of Hebrew
thought. Wisdom is declared to be a power of God,
but not a personality distinct from God.
Very different is the tone of the Alexandrian writer
of the book of Wisdom. He was a Hellenised Jew,
one who mingled Grecian speculation with Hebrew
traditions, and thought as much of the one as of the
other. Here is his description of wisdom.
“ Eor wisdom, which is the worker of all things,
taught me ; for in her is an understanding spirit, holy,
one only, manifold, subtile, lively, clear, undefiled,
plain, not subject to hurt.
“ Loving the thing which is good, quick.
“ Kind to man, stedfast, sure, free from care, having
all power, overseeing all things, and going through all
understanding, pure and most subtile spirit.
“ For she is the breath of the power of God, and a
pure influence flowing from the glory of the Almighty.
“ She is the brightness of the everlasting light, the
unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image
of his goodness.
££ And being but one, she can do all things ; and
remaining in herself she maketh all things new j and
in all ages entering into holy souls, she maketh them
friends of God, and prophets, for God loveth none but
him that dwelleth in wisdom.”—ch. vii., v. 22 to 28.
Here we have a definition of wisdom as a divine
power or personage, closely allied to God, yet capable
of being conceived of as distinct from God, much as we
find Christians of our own day believing God the Holy
Ghost to be a distinct deity from God the Lather, yet
in some mystical sense to be one and the same with
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
*
27
him. The writer continues his praise of wisdom, and
asks—
“ If riches be a possession to be desired in this life,
what is richer than wisdom that worketh all things ?
And if prudence work, who of all that are, is a more
cunning workman than she ? And if a man love
righteousness, her labours are virtues : for she teacheth
temperance and prudence, justice and fortitude ; which
are such things as men can have nothing more profit
able in their life. . . .
“ Moreover, by the means of her I shall obtain
immortality, and leave behind me an everlasting
memorial to them that come after me.”
Of the Platonic character and origin of these
thoughts we shall find abundant evidence by compar
ing them with some extracts from Plato’s writings.
Take the following passage from the Pbtedon:
“ Wisdom is the only true and unalloyed coin, for which
all others must be given in exchange. With that piece of
money we purchase fortitude, temperance, justice. In a
word, that virtue is always true that accompanies wisdom,
whereas all other virtues, stripped of wisdom, are only
shadows of virtue. Temperance, justice, fortitude, and
prudence, or wisdom itself, are not exchanged for passions,
but cleanse us of them. And it is pretty evident that those
who instituted the purifications, called by us Teletes, i.e.,
perfect expiations, meant by such riddles (rites) to give us
to know, that whoever enters the other world without being
initiated and purified shall be hurl’d headlong into the vast
abyss; and that whoever arrives there after due purgation
and expiation, shall be lodged in the apartment of the gods.
For as the dispensers of those expiations say, ‘ There are
many who bear the Thyrsus, but few that are possessed by
*
the spirit of the God.’ Now, those who are thus possessed, asI take it, are the true philosophers.” ...
“ Those who have distinguished themselves by a holy life,.
* The Thyrsus was a spear wrapped, in vines or ivy, carried by
the worshippers of Bacchus on their initiation into the mysteries.
Of these, Socrates here virtually says that “ many are called but
few are chosen.”
�28
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
and those who are sufficiently purged by philosophy, are
received after death into admirable and delicious mansions.
Therefore we should labour all our lives to acquire virtue
and wisdom, since we have so great a reward proposed to
us, and so bright a prospect before us.”
The writer of the Book of Wisdom distinctly per
sonifies divine wisdom. This is what Plato does not
do. Plato speaks of wisdom as an attribute common
to God and man. It is the Logos or word that he speaks
of as a secondary or inferior deity, as a divine personage,
.able to be conceived of as separate from God though still
in mystical union with him. It is in the interest of
Hebrew tradition that the writer of this book per
sonifies wisdom as opposed to Plato’s Logos or world
making God, yet in close imitation of Plato’s idea,
escaping only the heresy of imagining a second God—
of making the Godhead composite, he says :
“ And wisdom was with thee ; which knoweth thy
works, and was present when thou madest the world,
and knew what was acceptable in thy sight, and right
in thy commandments. O send her out of thy holy
heavens, and from the throne of thy glory, that being
present she may labour with me that I may know what
is pleasing to thee. Por she knoweth and understandeth all things.”—Wisdom, ch. ix. 9-11.
So it was that the leaders of Jewish thought sought
to reconcile their conceptions of God with the views of
the prevailing Gentile philosophy. The Jews were as
a nation destitute of philosophy, but were pre
eminently devout. All the laws of nature, and all the
actions of men were, as they thought, under the imme
diate direction of God. “ The eyes of the Lord,” they
said, “ were in every place beholding the evil and the
good.” God was seated on a throne in heaven, king of
kings and lord of lords. This was the faith of an
ignorant people who possessed healthy religious in
stincts. It would not, however, bear the questionings
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
29
of an enlightened intellect. God was, in this view,
only a great king, a magnified man.
After the residence of the Jews in Babylon and their
contact with the Persian faith, a monotheistic religion
like their own—a religion in which God was conceived
of as a pure spirit, and in which the fancies of a
speculative theology, hy setting up inferior intelli
gences, brought the power and wisdom of this pure
spirit into close contact with the human and material
world, we find a marked change and elevation of
the Jewish thought. Thus one of the Psalmists asks :
—“ Whither shall I go from thy spirit, or whither
sb all I flee from thy presence ? ” and pours out a grand
hymn expressive of the omnipresence of the Deity.
There was, however, danger here. Truth itself was too
dazzling, and God was all but lost in the glory that
surrounded the conceptions which the minds of men
were framing of his being. The nearer men ascended
towards the truth that God was a pervading power, the
more they found themselves nearing the boundaries of
a cold and desolate Pantheism; and a God who was
thus universal, ceased to be the god of the individual,
ceased to be a national god, ceased to be a being whom
they could regard as the upholding providence of their
lives, and of whom they could say in the words of one
of their favourite and familiar hymns, that “God, even
our own God, shall bless us.”
The speculative philosophy by which the surround
ing nations of Persia, Egypt, and Greece, escaped alike
the vagueness of a Pantheism in which God was
virtually lost, and the anthropomorphism which made
him but a huge man, became in course of time a matter
of absolute necessity for the Jews to adopt. So we
find that they exalted this attribute of wisdom as being,
not a distinct personage, but as being a manifested
power, by "which the thought of man could enter into
communion and harmony with the divine mind, and so
the Eternal could sustain a real and palpable relation to
�30
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
his creatures. The problem that needed solution was
to tone down the exalted conception of God which an
enlightened intellect prompted, so as to bring him
within the reach of the pious and prayerful thought,
and this without degrading or falsifying a true and
proper estimation of himself.
In our common thought to-day we regard nature as
an intermediate link between man and God. Man
lives in immediate contact with nature, and we say
that through nature he can rise to nature’s God.
Again, the laws of nature we discern as operative
powers that came from God, but that are now the
intermediate rather than the immediate agents of his
will. Thus we regard the laws of nature as being in
one sense separate and distinct from the divine mind,
acting, as it were, independently of it, through powers
that were originally derived from it, and in another
sense we regard them as being one and the same with
it. So in a spiritual sense we say that God is light,
Love, Truth, Goodness, &c., and yet we can conceive
of these things as being separate and distinct from God,
as virtues adorning a human soul. Thus we say that
these are agencies that draw men close to God, and
that make them even to be one with God.
The popular idea of Christ is that he was the expres
sion of the divine mind, the teacher of divine wisdom ;
that through this spirit of divine wisdom, which in the
current belief rested upon him without measure, he was
one with God, and by his relation to humanity he
conferred the same privilege upon it. And a natural
consequence of this belief upon the vulgar mind and
common thought has been to suggest the idea that Christ
was God incarnate—the Almighty in human form.
The late learned Dean Milman, in his History of
Christianity has very ably summarised this develop
ment of ancient speculative thought; he says—
“Even the notion of the one Supreme Deity had undergone
some modification consonant to certain prevailing opinions
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
31
of the time (Christian era.) Wherever any approxima
tion had been made to the sublime truth of the one great
First Cause, either awful religious reverence or philosophic
abstraction had removed the primal Deity entirely beyond
the sphere of human sense, and supposed that the inter
course of the Divinity with man, the moral government, and
even the original creation had been carried on by the inter
mediate agency, either in Oriental language of an Emana
tion, or in Platonic of the wisdom, reason, or intelligence of
the one Supreme. This Being was more or less distinctly
impersonated, according to the more popular or more
philosophic, the more material or the more abstract notions
of the age or people. This was the doctrine from the
*
Ganges, or even the shores of the Yellow Sea to the Ilissus ;
it was the fundamental principle of the Indian religion and
the Indian philosophy; it was the basis of Zoroastrianism ;
it was pure Platonism; it was the Platonic Judaism of the
Alexandrian school. Many fine passages might be quoted
from Philo, on the impossibility that the first self-existing
Being should become cognisable to the sense of man ; and
even in Palestine, no doubt, John the Baptist and our Lord
himself, spoke no new doctrine, but rather the common
sentiment of the more enlightened, when they declared that
‘ no man had seen God at any time? In conformity with
this principle, the Jews, in the interpretation of the older
scriptures, instead of direct and sensible communication
from the one great Deity, had interposed either one or more
intermediate beings as the channels of communication.
According to one accredited tradition alluded to by St
Stephen, the law was delivered by the ‘ disposition of
angels; ’ according to another, this office was delegated to a
single angel, sometimes called the angel of the Law (see Gal.
iii. 19) ; at others, the Metatron. But the more ordinary
representative, as it were, of God, to the sense and mind of
man, was the Memra, or the Divine Word ; and it is remark
able that the same appellation is found in the Indian, the
* It is curious to trace the development of this idea in the older
and in the apocryphal books of the Old Testament. In the Book
of Proverbs, the wisdom is little more than the great attribute of
the deity ; in Ecclesiasticus, it is a separate being, and “ stands up
beautiful ” before the throne of God. (xxv. 1.)
[The learned Dean is in error here. “ Wisdom ” is still an attri
bute of God, a quality of character, as a perusal of the entire verse
will shew. It is the Book of Wisdom that makes it a distinct
personage.—Author’s Note.}
�^2
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
Persian, the Platonic, and the Alexandrian systems. By
the TargumistSjthe earliest Jewish commentators on the scrip
tures, this term had been already applied to the Messiah;
nor is it necessary to observe the manner in which it has
been sanctified by its introduction into the Christian scheme.
This uniformity of conception and coincidence of language,
indicates the general acquiescence of the human mind in the
necessity of some mediation between the pure spiritual
nature of the deity, and the moral and intellectual nature
of man, of which the sublimest and the simplest was the revela
tion of God in Christ.”
In this last assertion, however, Dean Mil man
ceases to be the learned and accomplished historian,
and becomes a special pleader for the dogmas of the
popular religion. The admissions of the former portion
of this passage, establish, beyond the possibility of
reasonable cavil, the fact that the idea of God in
Christ,—God as personified in Jesus, is but a version
of a speculative belief held in all the great religious
systems that were anterior to the Christian era, and is
nc)t a divine revelation that was then, for the first time,
specially and supernaturally given. The asserted deity
of Jesus is, indeed, a corruption, and perversion, and
degradation of a conception that, as held in these
ancient faiths, was but the feeble expression of a
sublime truth. In the modern dogma, however, the
sublimity is lost, and a crude superstition takes its place.
The Jews, however, as a nation, were not greatly
given to philosophic speculation, and it was not till the
year b.c. 160, that we have any indications of its
appearance in the Alexandrian colony. About this
time, Aristobulus, a philosophic Jew, endeavoured to
harmonise Jewish with Grecian literature. He wrote
an allegorical exposition of the Pentateuch, in which
he endeavoured to show that it was the source of the
Aristotelian philosophy. He did this by allegorising
its matter of fact narratives, and putting a secondary
meaning into them ; only fragments of this work, pre
served by Eusebius, now remain. The great master,
�Plato., Philo, and Pam.
however, of this art of allegorising the Old Testament,
was Philo, the contemporary, though, at the same time,
the senior of Jesus.
Philo, commonly known as Philo Judaeus, was an
eminent, and learned, and distinguished Alexandrian
Jew, while, at the same time, he was a devoted student
and follower of the Neo-Platonic philosophy. He was
brother to Alexander the Alabarch, or president, of the
Jewish colony. He was also, through his brother, an
intimate acquaintance of King Agrippa, who then
ruled in Judea, and notwithstanding that a temple had
been erected in Alexandria, the gold and silver plating
of nine of the doors of the temple at Jerusalem, were
due to the munificence of Philo’s brother. Besides
being a man of high learning and cultured thought,
Philo bore a stainless reputation, and stood so high in
the esteem of his fellow religionists, that he was
chosen, with two others, in the year a.d. 40, seven
years after the crucifixion of Christ, to go on an
embassy to the Emperor Caligula at Pome, to counter
act the calumnies of Apion against the Jews, and to
complain to Caligula of a persecution that had been
incited against them by Flaccus, the Roman President,
on account of their refusing to burn incense before
the statues of the emperor, to admit them into their
temples, or to worship them as the representative of a
God. In the voluminous works which remain to us
from Philo’s pen, we have a lengthened account of this
embassy, and of the rude and contemptuous treatment
it received from Caligula, whose extraordinary conduct,
Tunning through the various rooms of his palace, giving
directions to his workmen, and expecting the embassy
to follow him as best they could, clearly betokened his
incipient or perhaps developed insanity.
Of the date of Philo’s birth, we have no record ; he,
however, describes himself as being “ a grey-headed old
man ” at the time of this embassy, a.d. 40. This would
make him to be sixty-five or seventy years of age at
c
�34
Piato, Philo, and Paul.
that period, and consequently would place his birth
twenty-five or thirty years before the birth of Jesus.
Philo would consequently have been forty-five or fifty
years old when Jesus commenced his ministry.. This
is an important consideration, because in Philo’s writ
ings, we have an anticipation, not only of the larger part
of the moral and religious teaching of Jesus, but of those
forms of speculative thought which mark the Fourth
Gospel, the Epistles of Paul, and that to the Hebrews.
So striking is the resemblance between Philo’s writ
ings and the writings of the New Testament, that
efforts have not been wanting to claim Philo as a
disciple of Jesus, and as an apologist of Christianity.
The learned Jacob Bryant wrote a treatise in which, by
collating passages concerning “ the Logos,” from Philo’s
writings, with passages of the New Testament concern
ing the nature and offices of Christ, he thought to
establish the fact that Philo must have been a
Christian ; and in the early part of the present century,
a volume was published under the title of “ Ecclesiasti
cal Besearches,” by Dr J. Jones, the object of which
was to prove that both Philo and Josephus were
Christians.
Philo, the translation of whose literary remains fill
four volumes of Bohn’s Ecclesiastical Library, never
makes the smallest allusion to Jesus, but writes as
though he were in perfect ignorance as to his existence.
The great bulk of his writings are rambling and
allegorical commentaries on the laws of Moses, and on
the Hebrew scriptures. These he interprets in the
light of the Platonic philosophy. The intense rever
ence which Philo displays in these writings for the
lightest word of Moses, and for the priesthood, and laws,
and ritual that had his sanction, is a convincing proof
that he had never heard or heeded the reformed
Judaism which Jesus taught, much less the Christian
repudiation of the Mosaic faith which marks the
Epistles of Paul, the earliest of which was, in all pro
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
35
bability, not penned till years after Philo’s death. One
of Philo’s treatises is a life of Moses, whom he regards
as “ king, lawgiver, high priest, and prophet.”
“ The Theology of Philo is in great measure founded on
his peculiar combination of the Jewish, the Platonic, and
the Neo-Platonic conception of God. The God of the Old
Testament, the exalted God, as he is called by the modern
Hegelian philosophy, stood in close relations to the Greek
Philosophers’ conception of God, which believed that the
Supreme Being could be accurately defined by the negative
of all that was finite. In accordance with this, Philo also
described God as the simple Entity ; he disclaimed for Him
every name, every quality, even that of the Good, the
Beautiful, the Blessed, the One. Since He is still better than
the good, higher than the U nity, He can never be known
as, but only that He is : his perfect name is only the four
mysterious letters (Jhvh), that is, pure Being.”
‘ ‘ By such means, indeed, neither a fuller theology, nor
God’s influence on the world was to be obtained. And yet
it was the problem of philosophy, as well as of religion, to
shed the light of God upon the world, and to lead it again to
God. But how could this Being which was veiled from the
world be brought to bear upon it ? By Philo, as well as by
all the philosophy of the time, the problem could only be
solved illogically. Yet, by modifying His exalted nature it
might be done. If not by His being yet by His work, He
influences the world. His powers, his angels, all in it that
is best and mightiest, the instrument, the interpreter, the
mediator and messenger of God. His pattern and His first
born, the Son of God, the Second God, even himself God,
the divine Word or Logos communicate with the world.”—Keim’s “ Jesus of Nazara," Introduction, article Philo.
This modification of the conception of deity was the
keynote of Philo’s copious commentaries. By so doing
he toned down the exalted conception of God, which
the Gentile philosophies taught, and explained away
the crude narratives of his own country’s scriptures,
in which the idea of God was degraded by representing
him in form, and thought, and action, as a man. In
the Platonic Logos Philo found the mediator between
God and man, which enabled him to reconcile the
�36
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
Jewish Scriptures with the teachings of the Gentile
Philosophy.
Allegory, however, is not science, and the scientific
or speculative views of Philo form no separate and
condensed treatise, but are disseminated throughout
his voluminous writings. Subjoined are two passages
from his treatise, “De Confusione Linguarum,” an
exposition or commentary on the confusion of languages
at the Tower of Babel.
°
“ The statement,” lie says, “ The Lord went down to see
that city and that tower,’ must be listened to altogether as
if spoken in a figurative sense, for to think that the divinity
can. go towards, or go from, or go down, or go to meet, is
an impiety. . . . Since who is there who does not know
that it is indispensable for a person who goes down, to
leave one place and to occupy another. But all places are
filled at once by God, to whom alone it is possible to be
every where and also nowhere. Nowhere, because he him
self created place and space. . . . The divine being, both
invisible and incomprehensible, is indeed everywhere, but
still, in truth, he is nowhere visible or comprehensible.”—
(Bohn's Edition, Vol. 2, p. 29).
In reference to the phrase, “ sons of men ” who are
described as having built cities, Philo says, that they
who have real knowledge of God, are properly called
“ sons of God,” and that elsewhere (Deut. xiv. 1),
Moses so entitles them, and then adds :—
“ Accordingly it is natural for those who have this dis
position of soul to look upon nothing as beautiful, except
what is good. . . . And even if there be not as yet any one
who is worthy to be called a son of God, nevertheless let
him labour earnestly to be adorned according to his first
born Word (Logos), the eldest of his angels, as the great
archangel of many names; for he is called ‘ the authority ’
and ‘ the name ’ of God, and the Word (Logos) and ‘ man
according to God’s image,’ and ‘ He who sees Israel.’ For
even if we are not yet suitable to be called the Sons of
God, still we may deserve to be called the children of
his eternal image, of his most sacred Word (Logos); for the
image of God is his most sacred Word.”—(Philo “ De
Confusione.” Bohn’s Edition, Vol. 2, p. 31).
»
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
37
It would be easy, did space permit, to multiply
such extracts as these to a very large extent, and so to
shew that before Jesus commenced his ministry,
possibly even before Jesus was born, Philo was
familiarising the minds of his countrymen with ideas
concerning 11 a second or delegated God,” “ the first
born son of the Eternal Father,” “ the express image
of his person,” “ the word of God by whom the w’orld
was made,” &c. We have this thought largely repro
duced in the Fourth Gospel, that ascribed to John,
though not written till the early part or middle of the
second century, nearly one hundred years later than
the writings of Philo. There is, however, an important
difference between the conception of the “Word,” or
Logos, as Philo held it, and as the unknown writer of
the Fourth Gospel regarded it. Philo held the Logos
or Word to be a celestial being, “an angel or messenger
of the Supreme God, to be even as God, but never to
be man. He regarded it, however, as having sometimes
the likeness of man, and as being one with the Jewish
High Priest, as consecrating his office, when on the day
of atonement he entered into the Holy of Holies. But
Philo, while he regarded the Logos as the perfect or
ideal man, never identifies this Logos with any par
ticular man. The writer of the Fourth Gospel does,
however, do this, he identifies the Divine word with
Jesus of Nazareth, says that in him “the word was
made flesh ” (%«/ 6 Xo'yo? tiapZ, t'ytvtro, became flesh), and
dwelt among us ? This denotes a considerably later
stage or development of the Logos doctrine. A change
due in great measure to the florid language which Paul
applies to Jesus, and which is word for word, the same
with that which Philo had previously used with
regard to the Logos. Paul, we must bear in mind,
had never seen Jesus, knew him at best by the results
of his teaching.
He learned nothing from Jesus
directly, and distinctly asserts that his followers, the
apostles, were unable to give him any instruction.
�38
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
So Paul’s estimate of Jesus was largely ideal, was
drawn in great part from the thought currents of
Jewish and Gentile philosophy, and without doubt in
no small degree from the writings of Philo.
It will be worth while before shewing the similarity,
or rather the identity, of speculative thought which
existed between the writings of Philo and the Epistles
of Paul, to trace the connecting lines which mark the
channel through which the ideas passed from one to
the other.
When Philo was writing, the elder Hillel, one of
*
the most celebrated of the Jewish Kabbis, whom Renan
declares to have been the virtual teacher of Jesus, and
who certainly, as a religious reformer, anticipated no
small portion of Christian teaching, was chief of the
Jerusalem school, and must have become immediately
conversant with the writings of his eminent country
man, the Alexandrian Philo. Hillel was celebrated as
the successor of Ezra, who brought the law anew out
of Babylon. His wisdom was esteemed manifold as
Solomon’s, while his piety and gentleness became
proverbial. He founded what may be called a Broad
Church School of Judaism, and put a permanent
impress upon Jewish thought. He put moral duty
far before ceremonial piety, and taught as the very
kernel of the law “The duty we owe to our neighbour.”
Such a wise and large-hearted teacher must have
given a warm welcome to the writings of so able and
distinguished a man as Philo. And it is fair to infer
that these became, to a large extent, the authorised and
familiar text-book of the Jerusalem School.
* Hillel was originally a day labourer, and he devoted one-half
of the small pittance that he earned to the support of his family,
and with the other he paid his fees to study the law, under the
celebrated teacher Schemajah. Once, on the eve of the Sabbath,
when for want of work he was unable to pay the school fee, he
climbed to the window of the house on a dark winter’s evening in
order to be able to see and hear, and in the morning he was found
by the teacher stiffened with cold and snow, who in releasing him
said, “It is truly worth while to break the Sabbath on his
account.”
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
39
When St Paul was, as a young man, studying at
Jerusalem, the post of chief teacher, which had been
filled so ably by Hillel, was now held by his equally
celebrated grandson, Gamaliel, “ the glory of the law,”
of whom it is recorded that out of his thousand
disciples he instructed five hundred in the Jewish
law, and five hundred in the wisdom of the Greeks;
and Paul himself tells us that it was at the feet of this
Gamaliel he sat to receive his education. Here, then,
he would have made acquaintance with the Philonic
literature.
For these writings moulded the whole
future of Jewish thought; and Dr Keim, in his
“Jesus of Hazara,” tells us
“ that the teachings of both Hillel and Gamaliel were tinged
with Philonism ; and that, from this time forward, every
material image of God in the Old Testament—such as the
mention of His countenance, His mouth, His eye, His hand,
&c.—were carefully converted into conceptions of the divine
glory, of the indwelling presence of the Logos or Word of
God.”
And, he adds,
‘‘ The Apostle Paul, a disciple of Gamaliel in Jerusalem, was
essentially imbued with Alexandrine ideas, which he has
evidently transferred to the heart of Christianity in his
teaching concerning Christ.” (Vol. I. pp. 292, 293, English
translation.)
While, however, Philo and the Alexandrian school
were incorporating the Grecian conception of “ the
Logos,” or Divine Word, with the Hebrew thought,
the Hebrew teaching proper contented itself with a
personification of Divine Wisdom. There was, how
ever, another current of thought, viz., the expectation
of a Messiah. This was held in various forms. At
first it simply expressed the national hope of restored
fortunes through the conquering arm of some great
leader, destined by God to restore the throne and the
supremacy of the Davidic era. This was still the
popular expectation in the time of Jesus. But the
�40
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
more spiritually minded Jews, the Essenes and other
devout communities, had hopes, not of a restoration of
David’s throne, hut of the time spoken of by Malachi
when “the Lord himself should come to declare judg
ment, to inhabit his temple, to establish his covenant
and his kingdom;” while the scholastic and speculative
thought of the Philonic school identified the Messianic
expectation with the Logos idea. The two former
conceptions mark the three earlier Gospels ; the latter
conception finds plain and emphatic expression in the
introduction to the fourth Gospel, and is the pervading
idea throughout.
The fourth Gospel and the Epistles of Paul represent
the speculative thought of their age ; and the following
quotations will show how closely they at the same time
reproduce the Philonic thought. The passages here
selected from Philo’s writings are taken from the
treatise by Jacob Bryant before alluded to, the Greek
original being omitted, and simply the English transla
tion given.
Identity of the Christ of the New Testament with the
Logos of Philo.
The New Testament, speak
Philo, describing the
ing of Jesus, says
Logos, says:—
“ This is the Son of
“ The Logos is the Son
of God the Bather.”—De God.”—John i. 34.
Profugis.
“And when he again
“The first begotten of
bringeth his first-born into
God.”—De Somniis.
the world.”—Heb. i. 6.
“That he is the first
“And the most ancient
of all beings.”—De Conf. born of every creature.”—
Col. i. 15.
Ling.
“ Christ, the image of
“The Logos is the image
and likeness of God.”—De the invisible God.”-—Col.
i. 15.
Monarch.
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
“ The Logos is superior
to the angels.”—De Profugis.
“ The Logos is superior
to all beings in the world.”
—De Leg. Allegor.
“ The Logos is the in
strument by whom the
world was made.”—-De
Leg. Allegor.
“The divine word by
whom all things were
ordered and disposed.”—
De Mundi Opificio.
“The Logos is the light
of the world, and the in
tellectual sun.”—De Somniis.
“ The Logos only can
see God.”—De Confus.
Ling.
“ He is the most ancient
4i
“ The brightness of his
(God’s) glory, and-the ex
press image of his person.”
—Heb. i. 3.
“ Being made so much
better than the angels.
Let all the angels of God
worship him.”—Heb. i. 4,
6.
“ Thou hast put all
things in subjection under
his feet.”—Heb. ii. 8.
“ All things were made
by him (the Word or
Logos), and without him
w’as not anything made
that was made.”—Johni. 3.
“Jesus Christ, by whom
are all things.”—1 Cor.
viii. 6.
“By whom also he made
the worlds.”—Heb. i. 2.
“The Word (Logos) was
the true light.”—John i. 9.
“ The life and the light
of men.”-—John i. 4.
“ I am the light of the
world.”—John viii. 12.
“ He that is of God, he
hath seen the Pather.”—
John vi. 46.
“No man hath seen God
at any time. The only be
gotten Son which is in the
bosom of the Pather, he
hath declared him.”—John
i. 18.
“Now, O Pather, glorify
�42
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
of God’s works.”—De Confus. Ling.
“ And was before all
.things.”—De Leg. Allegor.
“ The Logos is esteemed
the same as God.”—De
Somniis.
“The Logos was eternal.”
—De Plant Noe.
“ The Logos supports
the world, is the connect
ing power by which all
things are united.”—De
Profugis.
“ The Logos is nearest
to God, without any separ
ation ; being, as it were,
fixed upon the only true
existing Deity, nothing
coming between to dis
turb that unity.” — De
Profugis.
“ The Logos is free from
all taint of sin, either
voluntary or involuntary.”
—De Profugis.
thou me with thine own
self with the glory which I
had with thee before the
world was.”—John xvii. 5.
“ He was in the begin
ning with God.”—Johni. 2.
“Before all worlds.”—
2 Tim. i. 9.
“ Christ, who is over all,
God blessed for evermore.”
—Rom. ix. 5.
“ Who, being in the
form of God, thought it
no robbery to be equal
with God.”—Phil. ii. 6.
“ Christ abideth for ever. ”
—John xii. 34.
“ But to the Son he
saith, Thy throne, 0 God,
is for ever and ever.”—
Heb. i. 8.
“ Upholding all things
by the word of his power.”
—Heb. i. 3.
“ By him all things con
sist.”—Col. i. 17.
“ I and my Father are
one.”—John x. 30.
“ That they may be one
as we are.”—John xvii. 11.
“The only begotten Son,
who is in the bosom of
the Father.”—John i. 18.
“ The blood of Christ,
who offered himseif with
out spot to God.”—Heb.
ix. 14.
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
43
“ Who did no sin, neither
was guile found in his
mouth.”—1 Pet. ii. 22.
“ Whosoever shall drink
“ The Logos the fountain
of the water that I shall
of life.
“It is of the greatest give him, shall never thirst,
consequence to every per but the water that I shall
son to strive without re give him shall be in him a
mission to approach to the well of water springing up
divine Logos, the Word of into everlasting life.”—
God above, who is the John iv. 14.
fountain of all wisdom;
that by drinking largely
of that sacred spring, in
stead of death, he may be
rewarded with everlasting
life.”—De Profugis.
“ The great shepherd of
“ The Logos is the shep
the flock . . . our Lord
herd of God’s flock.
“ The Deity, like a shep Jesus.”—‘Heb. xiii. 20.
“ I am the good shep
herd, and at the same time
like a monarch, acts with herd, and know my sheep,
the most consummate order and am known of mine.”
and rectitude, and has ap —John x. 14.
“ Christ . . . the shep
pointed his First-born, the
upright Logos, like the herd and guardian of your
substitute of a mighty souls.”—1 Pet. ii. 25.
prince, to take care of his
sacred flock.”—De Agri
cult.
“For Christ must reign
The Logos, Philo says,
is “The great governor of till he hath put all his
the world; he is the crea enemies under his feet.”
tive and princely power, —1 Cor. xv. 25.
“ Christ, above all prin
and through these the
heavens and the whole cipality and might and
world were produced.”— dominion, and every name
that is named, not only in
De Profugis.
�44
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
this world, but in the
world to come . . . and
God hath put all things
under his feet.”—Eph. i.
21, 22.
“ The Logos is the phys
“ The spirit of the Lord
ician that heals all evil.”— is upon me, because he
De Leg. Allegor.
hath anointed me to heal
the broken - hearted.” —■
Luke iv. 18.
The Logos the Seal of God.
“The Logos, hy whom
the world was framed, is
the seal, after the impres
sion of which everything
is made, and is. rendered
the similitude and image
of the perfect Word of
God.”—De Profugis.
“The soul of man is an
impression of a seal, of
which the prototype and
original characteristic is the
everlasting Logos.”—De
Plantatione Noe.
Christ the Seal of God.
“ In whom also, after
that ye believed, ye were
sealed with that holy seal
of promise.”-—Eph. i. 13.
“Jesus, the son of man
. . . him hath God the
Father sealed.”—John vi.
27.
“ Christ, the brightness
of his (God’s) glory, and
the express image of his
person.”—Heb. i. 3.
The Logos the source of
immortal life.
Christ the source of
eternal life.
Philo says, “ that when
“The dead (in Christ)
the soul strives after its shall be raised incorrup
best and noblest life, then tible.”—! Cor. xv. 52.
the Logos frees it from all
“ Because the creature
corruption, and confers up itself also shall be de
on it the gift of immortal livered from the bondage
ity.”—De C. Q. Erud. of corruption into the glori
Gratia.
ous liberty of the children
of God.”—Rom. viii. 21.
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
Philo speaks of the
Logos, not only as the
Son of God and his first
begotten, but also styles
him “ his beloved Son.”—
De Leg. Allegor.
Philo says “that good
men are admitted to the
assembly of the saints
above.”
“Those who relinquish
human doctrines, and be
come the well-disposed dis
ciples of God, will be one
day translated to an incor
ruptible and perfect order
of beings.”—De Sacrificiis.
Philo says “that the just
man, when he dies, is
translated to another state
by the Logos, by whom
the world was created.
For God by his said Word
(Logos), by which he made
all things, will raise the
perfect man from the dregs
of this world, and exalt
him near himself. He will
place him near his own
person.”—De Sacrificiis.
Philo says that the Logos
45
The New Testament calls
Christ the Beloved Son :—
“ This is my beloved Son,
in whom I am well pleased.”
—Matt. iii. 17; Luke ix.
35 ; 2 Pet. i. 17.
“ The Son of his love.”
—Col. i. 13.
“ But ye are come unto
mount Zion, and to the
city of the living God, and
to an innumerable company
of angels, and to the spirits
of just men made perfect.”
—Heb. xii. 22, 23.
“ Giving thanks unto
the Father which hath
made us meet to be the
partakers of the inheritance
of the saints in light.”—
Col. i. 12.
The New Testament
makes Jesus to say—
“No man can come to
me, except the Father
which hath sent me draw
him ; and I will raise him
up at the last day.”—John
vi. 44.
“No man cometh to the
Father but by me.”—John
xiv. 6.
“ Where I am, there
also shall my servant be
. . . him will my Father
honour.”—John xii. 26.
The New Testament
�46
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
is the true High Priest,
who is without sin and
anointed by God—“It is the world, in
which the Logos, God’s
Pirst-born, that great High
Priest, resides.
And I
assert that this High Priest
is no man, but the Holy
Word of God; who is not
capable of either voluntary
or involuntary sin, and
hence his head is anointed
with oil.”—De Profugis.
Philo mentions the Logos
as the great High Priest
and Mediator for the sins
of the world. Speaking
of the rebellion of Norah,
he introduces the Logos as
saying—
“ It was I who stood in
the middle between the
Lord and you.”
“ The
sacred Logos
pressed with zeal and
without remission that he
might stand between the
dead and the living.”—
Quis Eerum Div Hseres.
The Logos, the Saviour
God, who brings salvation
as the reward of repentance
and righteousness—“ If then men have from
their very souls a just con
trition, and are changed,
and have humbled them-
speaks of Jesus as the
High Priest—
“Seeing then that we
have a great High Priest
that is passed into the
heavens, Jesus, the Son of
God, let us hold fast our
profession.”—Heb. iv. 14.
“For such an High
Priest became us, who is
holy, harmless, undefiled,
separate from sinners.”—
Heb. vii. 26.
The New Testament says
of Christ—
“We have such an High
Priest, who is set on the
right hand of the throne
of the majesty in the
heavens, a mediator of a
better covenant.” — Heb.
viii. 1-6.
“ But Christ being come
an High Priest . . . en
tered at once into the holy
place, having obtained
eternal redemption for us.”
—Heb. ix. 11, 12.
The New Testament
says of John, the forerun
ner of Jesus, that he
preached “ the baptism of
repentance for the remis
sion of sins.”—Mark i. 4.
Jesus says—
“Ye will not come to
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
47
selves for their past er me, that ye might have
rors, acknowledging and life.”—John v. 40.
confessing their sins, such
“Beloved, we be now
persons shall find pardon the sons of God; and it
from the Saviour and mer doth not yet appear what
ciful God, and receive a we shall be ; but we know
most choice and great ad that when he doth appear
vantage of being made like we shall be like him.”—the Logos of God, who was 1 John iii. 2.
originally the great arche
“As we have borne the
type after which the soul image of the earthy, we
of man was formed.”—De shall also bear the image
Execrationibus.
of the heavenly.”-—1 Cor.
xv. 49.
“For if we have been
planted together in the
likeness, of his death, we
shall be also in the likeness
of his resurrection.”—Rom.
vi. 5.
These extracts, which might be very largely multiplied,
show how much of the estimate and office of Jesus as
“ the Christ,” which the New Testament contains, does
but reproduce- the thought and teaching of Philo with
regard to the “Logos.” This “Logos” Philo brings
into very close association with the Jewish High Priest.
As a good man may be said to be filled with the Spirit
of God—as our clergy profess to have the Holy Ghost
imparted to them at their ordination—so this Logos,
or Word of God, Philo says, is associated with the high
priest while he is performing his official duties.
In his treatise “ On Monarchy,” speaking of the law
which requires that the priest’s body should be without
blemish, he says,—
“ For if it was necessary to examine the mortal body of
the priest, that it might not be imperfect through any mis
fortune, much more was it necessary to look into his immor-
�48
Plato, PhilO) and Paul.
tai soul, which they say is fashioned in the form of the
living God. Now the form or image of God is ‘the Word’
(Logos), by which all the world was made.”
Again, in another part of the same treatise, speaking
of the Levitical law which forbids the High Priest
either to rend his clothes, or take from his head the
ensign of the priesthood, or to show any sign of
mourning, even on the death of his very nearest rela
tion, Philo says,—
“ The law designs that he should be the partaker of a
nature superior to that of man ; inasmuch as he approaches
more nearly to that of the deity ; being, if one must say
the plain truth, on the borders between the two, in order
that men may propitiate God by some mediator, and that
God may have some subordinate by whom he may offer and
give his mercies and kindnesses to man.”
It has been a common argument with the Christian
clergy, that at the period of the Christian era the
world was sunk in the thick darkness of spiritual igno
rance. Adam’s sin had, they say, so alienated the
human race from God, that a great gulf of separation
intervened between God and man, and no possible way
of approach was open whereby sinful man might reach
the throne of offended justice to plead for mercy and
forgiveness ; that then God conceived a way of escape,
which human thought could never have devised. He
became incarnate, laid by His proper glory, and clothed
Himself with a human form ; consented to he horn as
a man—was thus a God-man ; a being for the time
inferior to deity, yet far superior to humanity. In a
word, just such a being as Philo above describes, as
being on the borders between the two natures. Yet
Philo wrote long before Christ commenced his ministry,
and not the slightest evidence exists to warrant the sup
position that Philo ever knew of the existence of Jesus.
Moreover, Philo only reproduces the thought that Gre
cian philosophy had known and cherished for centuries !
In addition to this, we have the most positive and con
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
49
vincing evidence that, for at least two centuries before
the birth of Jesus, the world in general, and the Jew
ish nation in particular, had possessed the essentials of
a high spiritual faith. It is difficult now to show that
Christianity contains either a moral or spiritual teach
ing that may not be found in the Dialogues of Plato,
or in the Apocryphal scriptures of the Jews. There
had been a bright blaze of spiritual light glowing in
the world for centuries before Christ was born in Beth
lehem.
Philo, writing in all probability about the time that
Jesus was a youth, describes the existence of religious
communities, who were living a monastic or secluded
life in Egypt, under the name of “ Therapeutee,” or
healers, and in Palestine under the title of Essenes, or
holy ones ; a society probably allied to the society of
Assideans, mentioned in the 1st book of Maccabees ii.
42, or those who had voluntarily devoted themselves
to the study and observance of the law. The Essenes,
who in Palestine numbered above 4000, are thus de
scribed by Philo:—
“ Their name ‘ Essene,’ corresponds to the Greek (otrtoi),
‘ righteous, pious.’ For they have attained the highest
righteousness in the worship of God, and that not by sacri
ficing animals, but by cultivating purity of heart. They
live principally in villages, and avoid the towns. Some
cultivate the ground, and others pursue the arts of peace,
and such employments as are beneficial to themselves with
out injury to their neighbours. They seek neither to hoard
silver or gold, nor to inherit ample estates, in order to
gratify prodigality and avarice, but are content with the
mere necessaries of life. . . . They deem riches to consist
not in amplitude of possessions, but in frugality and con
tentment. Among them can be found no one who manu
factures any weapon of war, nor even such instruments as
are easily perverted to evil purposes in times of peace ; they
decline trade, have no slaves, but all in turn minister to
others. They discard all learning, save that which relates
to the existence of God and the creation of the universe,
but they devoutly study the moral law. In their public
D
�5°
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
assemblies on the Sabbath they interpret the Scriptures,
and mutually instruct each other in piety, holiness, right
eousness, domestic and political economy, the knowledge
of things good, bad, and indifferent, and what objects
should be pursued and what avoided. ... Of their love to
God they give innumerable proofs, by leading a life of con
tinued purity, unstained by oaths and falsehoods ; by re
garding Him as the author of every good and as the cause
of no evil. Their love to man is evinced by their benignity,
their equity, and their liberality, of which I proceed to
give a short account, though no language can adequately de
scribe it.
“ In the first place, there exists among them no house,
however private, which is not open to the reception of all
the rest, and not only the members of the same society
assemble under the same domestic roof, but even strangers
of the same persuasion have free permission to join them.
There is but one treasure, whence all derive substance. . . .
The daily labourer keeps not for his own use the produce of
his toil, but imparts it to the common stock, and thus fur
nishes each member with a right to use for himself the pro
fits earned by others. The sick are not despised or neglected
because they are no longer capable of useful labour, but
they live in ease and affluence, receiving from the treasury
whatever their disorder or their exigencies require. The
aged, too, among them are loved, reverenced, and attended
as parents by affectionate children, and a thousand hands
and hearts prop their tottering years with comforts of
every kind.”—{From the Treatise showing that the Virtuous
are also Free.} See Bohn’s translation of Philo, vol. iii.
p. 525.
Josephus gives a very similar account of this com
munity, and among other things he says,—
“The Essenes refer all things to God; they teach the
immortality of the soul, and hold forth the reward of virtue
to be most glorious. They send gifts to the temple, but
they differ from the other Jews in their ideas of purificacation. From this reason they are excluded from the holy
place, and do not offer sacrifice ; themselves being the only
acceptable sacrifice which they offer to God.”—Antiquities,
xviii. 1, 5.
We have here distinct evidence of the'gradual spiri
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
51
tual growth, of the Jewish people ; of the development
of a devotional piety, and of a practical conception of
religious duty.
After reading Philo’s account of the Essenes, the
conviction flashes upon us that John the Baptist must
have belonged to one of these communities, and that
Jesus himself must have been largely imbued with
their spirit. The Sermon on the Mount is, in fact, a
simple reiteration of their teaching. There is, however,
one distinctive difference, the Essenes separated them
selves from the world, and maintained a degree of
secrecy with regard to their views, admitting members
only after a lengthened probation. Jesus endorsing
nearly all their specific teaching, preached it as “ the
kingdom of God ” to the mixed multitude of the people,
disclaimed all seclusion and secrecy with regard to it,
and made membership open to all who were disposed
to enter. But for this public ministry Jesus would
have been simply one of the Jewish Essenes, i.e., a
spiritually minded religious recluse ; living in associa
tion with a sort of monastic fraternity. His desire,
however, to outstep the limitations of this society, and
to make the fraternity one of world-wide comprehen
siveness, to establish, as it were, a system of univer
sal brotherhood, gave to his life the special character
that marked it, and enabled him to put an impress on
all succeeding time.
It is time now for us to review the religious
thought currents that were flowing through the Jewish
mind at the time when Jesus was preaching through
the towns and villages of Judea.
First., There was the Mosaic law with its ordinances
and ritual, forming the traditional substratum of the
national religion. This was also the established or
orthodox worship.
Secondly, There was the Messianic expectation
assuming two very diverse forms. In the one which
prevailed among the multitude the expectation was
�52
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
that a mighty man, a great conqueror, should be raised
up from their midst, who, coming of the lineage of
David, should restore the brilliancy and prosperity of
David’s reign ; should overthrow the Roman rule, and
make Judea chief among the nations. In the other,
Messiah was looked for not as a great warrior who
should lead the people through revolt to victory and
freedom and supremacy, but as a great prophet who
should lead the people through righteousness back to
the loving favour of God ; God, it was thought, would
then descend in person upon the earth, and call the
nations to judgment. Those who held this latter view
cultivated personal piety, and, regarding religion as a
spiritual influence, outgrew their reverence for the
ceremonial law and the Temple service. The Essenes
were among those who held this spiritual estimate of
religion, and they looked for the coming of a new age,
a millenium—a kingdom of God on earth—and in
harmony with this expectation they so lived as to be
in readiness to enter when this kingdom should appear.
Thirdly, There were the lines of speculative thought
which the more educated and cultured of the Jews
had imbibed from the religious systems and philosophies
of the Gentile world. Every class of the Jewish people
was outgrowing its adhesion to the crude letter of the
law, and to the literal interpretation of the scripture.
To adapt these scriptures to the advancing thought of
the age, it became necessary to make them speak in
harmony with the philosophic systems that were domi
nating the world at large. This was accomplished by
commentaries which declared the cruder narratives of
Scripture to be allegories typical of higher truths.
Philo was the great master of this art, and the copious
commentaries and philosophical essays which he wrote
must have revolutionised the Jewish thought of his
age. Philo was born about the year B.c. 25, he must
therefore have been above fifty when Jesus commenced
his ministry. The speculative thought of Philo, how
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
53
ever, does not seem to have reached or influenced the
mind of Jesus. It makes its first appearance in the
New Testament in the epistles of Paul. Paul had
learned in the Jewish schools the subtleties of the
Philonic thought; how by the Logos, or divine wisdom,
or Spirit, or Word, God came near to the world of
man; how this divine Logos rested upon the High
Priest and made him to be more than human, to be a
divine being while he was engaged in performing the
sacred rites of his office. Paul, however, was born at
Tarsus, a city of Asia Minor, the rival of Athens as a
seat of Grecian philosophy and learning. In early life
Paul must have therefore been largely influenced by
the forms of Gentile thought -which were prevalent in
his native city, and till his residence in Jerusalem for
instruction in the Jewish law, was doubtless a very
indifferent Jew. Here, while studying at the feet of
the learned and liberal chief Eabbi Gamaliel, he would
have made a close and intimate acquaintance with the
theories and commentaries of Philo, who sought to
reconcile Judaism with the philosophy of the Grecian
schools, and to assert for it the place of honour as
being the primal light. Plato was thus represented as
a plagiarist of Moses. This Jewish education seems to
have suddenly fired the youthful zeal of Paul, or Saul,
as he was then named, and to have made him a Jewish
zealot. But this was only the effervescence of a fiery
and impulsive nature, and Paul soon outgrew his
sudden attachment to the Jewish law and became a
convert to the Christian reform
*
Paul did not, however, part with his philosophy on
his conversion, and that system of an intermediate
divinity, which was common now to the Grecian and
* This reform as a Christian movement was then in its infancy.
It was, however, in large harmony with the teachings of the
Essenian communities, and these were well established as Jewish
sects, as a sort of Jewish Puritanism. The Essenian communities
in all probability merged into the early Christian church.
�54
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
the Jewish thought, Paul applied to his new faith, the
great founder and teacher of which he never knew or
saw in the flesh.
Jesus was, consequently an ideal conception to the
mind of Paul. Paul knew him simply as the teacher
of a sublime spiritual faith, as one who had taken up a
prophet’s work in a prophet’s spirit, who had done
works of W’onder, and who had perished by a martyr’s
death. Nay, more, the general rumour amongst his
followers was, that God had raised him from the dead,
and that he had been seen ascending into heaven.
*
This was enough for Paul. Not the Jewish High
Priest, as Philo had taught, who was after all but a very
ordinary man, but this great and pure-minded and highsouled prophet was in his estimation the true Logos, the
accredited messenger of God, was “ the brightness of
the Father’s glory and the express image of his person.”
Paul never saw Jesus, and never learned his doc
trine, either from his disciples or his apostles ; these, he
says, could teach him nothing that he did not before
hand know.f The great principles of spiritual religion
he felt as inspirations of his own quickened heart, but
he recognised Jesus as the great prophet who had
spoken these with a prophet’s power, who had given
his life as their witness, and who had suffered a
martyr’s death in their behalf. So he preached Christ;
for he recognised Jesus as the Messiah, not in the
popular but in the spiritual sense, i.e., as the power
and the wisdom of God. But the power and the
wisdom of God were the attributes of the Gentile
Logos; the “Divine Word,” by whom the worlds were
made, the second God, the mediator between God and
man. So Jesus, considered as the Christ, Paul felt
must be each and all of these, and thus in his epistle
to the Colossians, Paul calls upon them to thank God,
* For the value of the Gospel testimony to this event, see
“ English Life of Jesus,” by Thomas Scott.
+ Gal. ch. i. 2.
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
55
“ Who hath delivered us from the powers of darkness,
and hath translated us into the kingdom of the Son of his
love .... who is the image of the invisible God, the first
born of every creature. For by him were all things created,
that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and
invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions, or princi
palities or powers, all things were created by him and for
him, and he is before all things, and by him all things con
sist.”*—CW. i. 13-17.
This is but a specimen of the numerous passages to
be found in the writings of Paul, exalting the nature
of Jesus, and attributing to him those attributes of
divinity which Philo had attempted to affix to the
Jewish High Priest, and which both Philo and Plato
had ascribed to the Logos or Divine Word, which, in
short, had for centuries been the basis of the philo
sophic thought of the then known world.
The unknown writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews,
writing from a Jewish stand-point, claims, in like
* It has lately been a question in dispute among biblical scholars,
as to whether Paul really wrote this Epistle to the Colossians, and
some others, which bear his name. The only epistles of which his
authorship is undisputed, being those to the Romans, Galatians,
and Corinthians. Certainly, in the Epistles to the Colossians and
Ephesians, Paul, if he wrote them, speaks of Jesus in far more
exalted terms than those he uses in the above-named letters.
This, however, may be due to the fact that both at Ephesus and
Colosse, Gnosticism was the prevalent philosophy. This seems to
have been a mixture of Grecian philosophy and Oriental ideas.
According to this system, the Pleroma, or fulness of the Godhead,
was made up of the Divine Essence, and an endless series of
“ JEons ” which emanated from it. Some of these were very nearly
allied to the Supreme, and others were removed by generations or
descent from him, till at last they became bad or evil influences,—
the enemies of the good God. By these JEons, the Supreme wa3
thought to have made the world, and to rule mankind. This
Gnosticism tainted Judaism, and early in the second century, it
largely corrupted Christianity. Simon Magus claimed to be one
of these /Eons—“ gave himself out to be some great one to whom
the people all gave heed, saying, this man is the great Power of
God.”—Acts viii. 10. Paul, addressing a people, imbued with these
ideas, claims, for Jesus, that he was first and chief of these JEons,
or emanations or powers of God,—the Son or JEon of his love, who
made the world, and rules over all things.
�56
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
manner, that Jesus was the Logos in his character of
High Priest, and in this sense, invests him with a divine
*
nature.
But to both Paul and this writer, the Logos
is a spiritual being, and the human Jesus is, to a large
extent, lost sight of by them; their Christ is largely
ideal, and of Jesus, they have but the vague knowledge
of general repute. Paul distinctly refused to know
Jesus after the flesh. It marked, therefore, a further
stage of development when early in, or possibly towards
the middle of, the second century, the Fourth Gospel,
that attributed to the Apostle John, appeared. This
Gospel was written with an express purpose, that of
proving that Jesus was the Christ or Logos. The
people among whom Paul chiefly laboured, accepted
his teaching that Christ was the wisdom and the power
of God, the best beloved of the JEons or emanations from
the divine essence; but many of those versed in the
current philosophy, denied that Christ or the Logos
* Ernest De Bunsen, in his interesting work, “The Hidden
Wisdom of Christ,” ascribes the authorship of the Epistle to the
Hebrews to Apollos, the companion of Paul, and says “ that
Apollos has here applied to Christ the pre-Christian Alexandrian
doctrine about the first-born Wisdom, Spirit, or Word of God is
evident. For, as we have pointed out, in the book of Wisdom, the
same is called ‘ the brightness of the everlasting light, the un
spotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of His good
ness.’ Now we have seen that in the Apocrypha, God is not
revealed as a person, but merely as a spirit or glory......... But
Apollos conceived, and with him, as we may assume, all those who
believed in Christ, that since the mark of humanity’s high-calling had
been reached by and in Jesus,—since the perfect incarnation of
God’s holy spirit had been accomplished, the real pattern of man
kind has ceased to be a divine idea, has been manifested in the
flesh, has become a person.” ....
“ It is possible that by thus connecting an historical individual
with a pre-historical idea, Apollos did either consciously or un
consciously lay the foundation to that ‘ docetism ’ which denied
the humanity of Christ.” ....
“The Divine Spirit or Word thus personified, has taken the
place by the throne of God, which was, up to this time of reforma
tion, occupied by a merely ideal image of humanity’s high-calling.
Divine Wisdom, which, from the beginning, is by the throne of
God, henceforth is represented by the first-born of deified humanity.
The spiritual messiah has become personal.”—-Vol. I., p. 311, 323.
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
57
was a man. Jesus, they said, was simply a human
being on whom this Logos descended, with whom
Jesus as the Christ was mystically united, as a soul is
united with a body. The Fourth Gospel is written to
refute this teaching, and to assert that Jesus was him
self the Logos—Christ, “that the Word or Logos was
made flesh, and dwelt among us, so that men beheld
his glory as the only begotten of the Father.” (John i.
14.) Throughout this gospel, Jesus is spoken of as a
superhuman being, as wearing the human form, but
claiming a mysterious and intimate relationship with
God, as asserting, for himself, an equality with God,
and as claiming to have existed before the world was
made. This gospel, however, records but the fanciful,
though deep and philosophical, speculations of a
devout and spiritually-minded Christian, who lived
quite one hundred years after the crucifixion of Jesus.
It is an endeavour to identify the Platonic Logos with
the personality of Jesus, whom his Jewish followers
had accepted as a spiritual Messiah or Christ, and
whom his Gentile followers were anxious to exalt, by
asserting his identity with the “ Logos” or Divine Word.
The three earlier Gospels contain the real history of
Jesus, or rather, they record the traditions that were
current among his followers concerning him, some
thirty years after his death. These followers were, for
the most part, Jews, some of whom had been his
actual companions. They are a mixture of history and
legend,—nevertheless, all our knowledge of the actual
Jesus must be gathered from these sources. The so-called
Gospel of John is the record of the speculative fancy of
some Gentile Christian, who never had seen either
Jesus or his diciples, or conversed even with those of
the second generation from these ; who, moreover, knew
but little either of Judea or the Jewish religion ; who,
however, is thoroughly conversant with the Logos as a
personified power of God, and who is desirous of
identifying Jesus with this being.
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
In the three earlier Gospels, Jesus never claims to he
the Christ whom the Jews were expecting, till just at
the close of his ministry, when he bids his disciples to
keep his assumption of the office a profound secret till
after his resurrection. (Mark ix. 9.) In the fourth
Gospel, however, Jesus is represented as openly claim
ing this title from the very commencement of his
ministry, and as continually upbraiding the Jews for
refusing to recognise it. In this Gospel, it is the sum
and substance of his teaching. The same writer who
wrote the Gospel ascribed to John, is generally believed
to have written also the Epistles which claim the same
authorship. In these, we very clearly discern the
speculative controversy that occasioned their appear
ance, viz., the denial on the part of many Asiatic
Christians that the Logos, whom they now called
Christ, had ever possessed a personal and material
existence, had ever “come in the flesh.” So this
epistle commences—
“ That which was from the beginning (the pre-existent
Logos or Christ), which we have heard, which we have
seen with our eyes, and our hands have handled of the Word
(Logos) of Life.
*
“ (For the Life was manifested, and we have seen it, and
bear witness and show unto you that eternal life which was
with the Father, and was manifested unto us) ;
“ That which we have seen and heard, declare we unto
you, that ye also may have fellowship with us; and truly,
our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus
Christ.”
Again the writer says—
“ Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits
* The period of the appearance of the Gnostic heresy renders it
possible for those who took part in the controversies it occasioned to
have seen the living Jesus ; the writer of this epistle, however, to
add weight and authority to his arguments, writes in the name of
an apostle, who was the companion of Jesus, and thus antedates
his -work by upwards of half a century. Dr Davidson places the
epistle before the gospel, and dates the former about a.d. 130.
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
59
whether they are of God: because many false prophets are
gone out into the world.
“ Hereby know ye the Spirit of God, every spirit that
confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God.
“And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ
is come in the flesh, is not of God : and this is that spirit
of Anti-Christ whereof ye have heard that it should come ;
and even now, already is it in the world.”
During the larger portion of the second century, the
representatives of Hebrew Christianity, i.e., of the first
church of the apostles, which had its centre at
Jerusalem, were almost wholly extinct, and Christianity
was altogether in the hands of its Gentile converts.
Its severance from Judaism was complete, and the
churches that now existed, took their tone very largely
from the teachings of Paul.
The chief and almost the only Christian literature of
the second century, consists in the copious Apologies
made to the Roman Emperors on behalf of Christianity,
viz., that made by Justin Martyr to the Emperor
Marcus Aurelius, a.d. 160, and that made by Tertullian
about a.d. 200,—and in the celebrated dialogue or
controversy of the former, with the Jew Trypho.
Justin was a native of Palestine, but a Grecian by
birth and education, a student and teacher of the Gentile
philosophies. Plato was his great master till his con
version to Christianity. After this event, however,
he still continued to wear the philosopher’s mantle, and
endeavoured to reconcile much that he had learned from
Plato’s writings with the spirit he had imbibed from
his new faith. His conception of Jesus was necessarily
largely ideal, and Justin claimed, on his behalf, that he
was the pre-existing Logos of whom Plato had taught.
Commenting in his “ Apology ” on the passage from
Matthew’s gospel, “No man knoweth the Son but
the Father, neither knoweth any man the Father but
the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal
him.” Justin says—
�6o
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
“ The Jews therefore for maintaining that it was the
Father of the Universe who had the conference with Moses,
when it was tbe very Son of God who had it, and who is
styled both Angel and Apostle, are justly accused by the
prophetic spirit, and Christ himself, for knowing neither the
Father nor the Son. For they who assert the Son to be the
Father, are guilty of not knowing the Father, and likewise
of being ignorant that the Father of the Universe has a
Son, who being the Logos, and first-begotten of God, is
God. And he it is who heretofore appeared to Moses and
the rest of the Prophets, sometimes in fire, and sometimes
in the form of angels. But now, under your empire, as I
mentioned, was born of a virgin, according to the will of
his Father, to save such as should believe in him, and was
content to be made of no reputation, and to suffer, that by
his death and resurrection, he might conquer death.”
Justin here asserts Jesus to be God, but God in such
a subordinate sense as not to interfere with the unity
and supremacy of the Father. A confused thought
that literally implies the recognition of two deities. In
the old philosophy, the Logos was the spirit, or active
power, or wisdom of God. But this idea, when
identified with Jesus, suggests two distinct persons in
the Godhead, and takes a large step towards the Trini
tarian dogma.
In his “ Dialogue with Trypho,”
Justin speaks yet more clearly—
“I will produce another proof from the scriptures to
*
show that God did, before all creation, beget of Himself a
beginning, a certain rational power, which, by the Holy
Ghost, is called also the glory of the Lord, and sometimes
the Son, sometimes wisdom, sometimes an angel, sometimes
the Lord, and the Logos or Word. Just like what we see
done in ourselves, for when we speak any word, we beget
that word: but not by separating it from us, so as to
diminish the word that is in us by our speaking it. Just as
we see, also, that one fire is lighted from another, without
diminishing that from which it is lighted from, that still
continuing to be the same.”
* The proof consists in quotations from the Book of Proverbs,
describing the personification of wisdom.
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
6'i
Here, again, we have, in this attempted definition of
the Logos, a confusion of thought, seeing that it may
imply a soul lit by the spirit of God, as well as a
separate and subordinate divinity. This confusion of
ideas and perplexity of thought is well seen in the
following passage from the ££ Apology ” of Tertullian, who
was born at Carthage, of heathen parents, about the
year 160, who as a youth, was instructed in the whole
round of philosophic study ; but becoming a convert to
Christianity, wrote, about the year 200, a powerful
Apology, for the purpose of showing its superiority to
the heathen religions, yet who eventually lapsed into
the Montanist heresy, which looked for another Christ
or Paraclete yet to come. In the chapter concerning
the God of the Christians, Tertullian says—
“ The God we worship is one God, that Almighty Being
who fetched this whole mass of matter, with all the ele
ments, bodies, and spirits which compose the universe,
purely out of nothing by the word of his power, which
spoke them into being, and by that wisdom which ranged
them into this admirable order for a becoming image and
glorious expression of his Divine Majesty, which world the
Greeks call by a word implying beauty (/coa/zos). This same
God is invisible, though we discern his infinite majesty in
all his works, and whom we cannot touch though represented
to us by divine revelation, and united to us by his spirit;
and incomprehensible, though we come to some imperfect
ideas of him by the help of our senses.”
Later on, in a chapter concerning the birth and
crucifixion of Christ, who, he says, was born of a pure
virgin, he adds :—
“ I have already said, that God reared this fabric of the
world out of nothing, by his word, wisdom, or power ; and
it is evident that your sages of old were of the. same
opinion, that the “ Logos,” that is, the word or the wisdom,
was the maker of the universe, for Zeno determines the
Logos to be the creator and adjuster of every thing in
nature. The same Logos he affirms to be called by the
name of Fate, God, mind of Jove, and necessity of all
�6i
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
things. Cleanthes will have the author of the world to be
a spirit that pervades every part of it. And we Christians
also do affirm a spirit to be the proper substance of the
“ Logos,” by whom all things were made, in which he
subsisted before he was spoken out, and was the wisdom
that assisted at the creation, and the power that presided
over the whole work. The Logos or Word issuing forth
from that spiritual substance at the creation of the world,
and generated by that issuing or progression, is for this
reason called the Son of God, and the God, from his unity
of substance with God the father, for God is a Spirit. An
imperfect image of this you have in the derivation of a ray
from the body of the sun ; for his ray is a part without any
diminution of the whole, but the sun is always in the ray,
because the ray is always from the sun; nor is the substance
separated, but only extended.
“ Thus is it in some measure in the eternal generation of
“ The Logos,” he is a spirit of a spirit, a God of God, as
one light is generated by another, the original parent light
remaining entire and undiminished, notwithstanding the
communication of itself to many other lights. Thus it is
that the Logos which came forth from God, is both God
and the Son of God, and those two are one. Hence it is
that a spirit of a spirit, or a God of God, makes another in
mode of subsistence, but not in number; in order of nature,
but not in numericalness or identity of essence ; and so the
Son is subordinate to the Father as he comes from him as the
principle, but is never separated.”—(Tertullian’s Apology—
Reeves’ Translation).
Such were the confused ideas as to the nature
and person of Jesus considered as the Christ,
that prevailed at the close of the second century.
We have got, it will be seen, half way towards
a Trinity.
We have a” Father who is God, and a
Son who is of the same substance with him, being
begotten by him, who is, however, at this era, not
the equal, but the subordinate, of the Father. We are,
it is evident, approaching the era of the Nicene creed,
are already far in advance of the Apostle’s symbol, but
are yet some centuries removed from the Athanasian
dogma.
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
63
From this date to the early part of the third century,
fierce controversies raged in the Christian church, as
to the proper relation which the Son bore to the
Father. Moreover, another personage was introduced
serving to increase the perplexity, viz., the Holy
Spirit or Ghost.
Early in the third century Noetus, a native of
Smyrna, maintained
‘‘ that God himself, whom he denominated the Father, and
held to be absolutely one and indivisible, united himself
with the man Christ, whom he called the Son, and in him
was born and suffered. From this dogma of Noetus his
adherents were called Patripassians, be., persons who held
that the great parent of the universe himself, and not
merely some one person of the Godhead, had made expia
tion for the sins of men.”—Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History.
Later on in this century lived Sabellius, an African
Presbyter or Bishop.
He was the founder of the
famous Sabellian heresy, which asserted in opposition
to the followers of Noetus, that only a power from
God, and not the Father himself, was united with the
Son, or the man Christ; the Holy Spirit he considered
as another power or portion of the Eternal Father.
The controversies that prevailed about this period, as
to the true nature of Christ and his relation to the
Supreme God, were innumerable.
The religion of
Jesus as a moral force was consequently all hut lost
sight of in the clouds of metaphysical subtleties that
veiled the pure, bright light of God. These specula
tive fancies were cobwebs spun by the heated imagina
tions of fierce and fiery disputants, and had no
foundation whatever on the rock of Eternal truth.
Yet these grotesque and fantastic speculations were
laying the foundation of the creeds and dogmas that
■were to dominate the Christian church for succeeding
centuries ; that were to fill it with bitter strifes, to
fetter its freedom, and effectually to stop its growth.
By the close of the third century, it came to be
�64
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
generally recognised that the Godhead was to be con
ceived of in three aspects, or understood as comprising
three persons. The former was a heretic opinion, the
latter the orthodox faith.
But this orthodox faith
was by no means clearly defined, and endless disputes
prevailed as to the relation which the persons of the
Trinity bore to each other. Early in the fourth
century, Alexander, who was bishop of Alexandria in
Egypt, the metropolitan city alike of philosophy and
religion, and now the chief seat of Christianity, the
workshop where its chief doctrines were moulded,
maintained, among other things, that the Son possesses
not only the same dignity, but the same essence as the
Father. Arius, one of the presbyters, and who was
ultimately the great opponent of Athanasius, the
successor of Alexander in the Alexandrian Bishopric,
condemned these views as allied to Sabellianism, and
maintained
“ that the Son is totally and essentially distinct from the
Father; that he was only the first and noblest of those
created beings whom God the Father formed out of nothing,
and the instrument which the father used in creating this
material universe, and therefore that he was inferior to the
father both in nature and dignity. He defended his heresy
by showing that if the Father begat a Son, he who was
begotten had a beginning of existence, and therefore once
had no existence.”
Alexander accused Arius of blasphemy, and excom
municated him. But Arius had numerous followers ;
and the church at large was rent by a wide-spread
schism on this account. The Emperor Constantine,
who had recently been converted to Christianity, and
who had little taste for this theological hair-splitting,
deeming it remote from the true use of religion, tried
in vain to quiet the controversy, and at last as a means
of effectually settling it, and putting an end to the
disgraceful strifes that were raging with regard to it,
he summoned, in the year a.d. 325, the famous council
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
65
of the entire church, which met at Nice in Bythinia, at
which three hundred and eighteen bishops assembled to
decide the question as to whether the Son was of the
same essence with the Father, or a distinct being from
him, and an inferior being to him.
The good Bishops, who sat in great state with the
Emperor as their president, had a somewhat warm dis
cussion, during which blows as well as words were
interchanged. The conncil lasted for two months, and
the result was, that a majority declared that “ Christ
was of the same essence as the Father.” Arius, who
had asserted the contrary, was sent into exile in
Illyricum, and his followers were compelled to sub
scribe their belief in the following confession of faith,
composed by the council.
The reader will detect in
the strange theological jargon which it contains, the
natural sequence of the forms of thought we have been
considering.
“We believe in one God the Father Almighty, the maker
of all things visible and invisible; and in one Lord Jesus
Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, only
begotten, of the substance of the Father. God of
from
or out of) God, light of light, very God of very God;
begotten, not made; of the same substance with the
Father, by whom all things are made that are in heaven
and that are in earth ; who for us men and for our salvation
descended and was incarnate, and became man, suffered
and rose again the third day, ascended into the heavens,
and will come to judge the living and the dead ; and in the
Holy Spirit. But those who say that there was a time
when he was not, and that he was not before he was
begotten, or affirm that he is of any other substance or
essence, or that the Son of God is created and mutable or
changeable, the Catholic Church doth pronounce accursed.”
The Nicene creed, as it appears in the Church of
England prayer-book, and as it has been generally
used by the Christian Church, is a modification of the
above, which was made by the council of Constanti
nople in the year 381. Its chief difference consists in
E
�66
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
the removal of the appended excommunication, and
in the addition of the following clauses in reference to
the Holy Ghost.
“ I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life,
who proceeded from the Father (and the Son) who with
*
the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified,
who spake by the Prophets.”
The Eastern Church severed itself from the Western
Church on the clause which makes the Holy Ghost to
proceed from the Son in conjunction with the Father,
instead of (as it held) from the Father alone. In this
later creed we have a near approach to the Triune
Godhead, which forms the fundamental dogma of
modern Christianity; and from this time—the latter
half of the fourth century—speculations about the
Christian Trinity were more thought of than considera
tions concerning Christian duty, while a correct belief
in this matter was regarded by many of the clergy as
being of infinitely higher importance than a virtuous
life. Historians of this date inform us that while the
morals of the people -were degenerating, so that a great
preacher (Gregory Nazianzen) described the people as
being composed of “ the bad who wore a mask, and the
bad who appeared without one ; ” yet the interest even
of the poorer classes of the people in the theological
speculations of the period was as intense as that shown
in the present day by the English public in the result
of some popular horse or boat race. At Constantinople,
which was now the capital city of the empire, it is
recorded that
‘‘knots of people stood at the street corners, discussing
incomprehensibilities; in the markets, clothes-sellers, money
changers, provision dealers, were similarly employed. When
a man was asked, How many oboli a thing cost? he started
a discussion upon generated and ungenerated existence.
* The word “Filioque” was appended by the Latin Church
early in the fifth century.
�Plato, Plilo, and Paul.
&7
Inquiries as to the price of bread were answered by the
assertion that the Father is greater than the Son. When
one wanted a bath, the reply was that the Son of God was
created from nothing.”
Such is the picture of the condition of the public
mind as drawn by Gregory of Nyssa, a preacher of this
period. This deep popular interest, which existed
towards the close of the fourth century, concerning the
subordination of the Son to the Father, and the status
of the different personages of the Godhead, affords con
vincing evidence that the Council of Nicsea had by no
means furnished a satisfactory settlement of the ques
tion, and that a fierce and virulent controversy was
raging with regard to it. This was conducted with
arguments of a very questionable nature. Athanasius,
who was then Archdeacon of Alexandria, as secretary
of the Nicsean Council, drew up the formularies of the
Nicene creed, which is much more truly his creed than,
the one which has been made to bear his name, and
which was not in existence till centuries after his death.
This creed was opposed at first by seventeen bishops;
'these, however, were ultimately reduced to two, who,
with Arius, were sent into exile as soon as the decision
was made. Considering the penalties that were conse
quent on voting in the minority, it is surprising that
even two were found prepared to suffer banishment and
loss of high office on account of the faith they held.
On the death of Alexander, Bishop of Alexandria,
Athanasius was promoted to the office, and Athanasian
dogma ruled in the ascendant, yet not without consider
able opposition; and Athanasius had to use very rough
and violent measures to silence this. History tells,
possibly with some exaggerations, for the charges are
brought by his opponents, of his flogging several
bishops, interrupting divine service, burning the sacred
books, breaking the chalices, overthrowing the com
munion table, and causing the building to be razed to
the ground. Still the views of Arius progressed in
�68
Plato Philo, and Paul.
spite of this high-handed persecution; they even in
fected the court, and the emperor’s sister espoused them.
Possibly through her influence, Arius is recalled, and
the bishops who were exiled with him, Eusebius of
Nicomedia and Theognis of Nice, are restored to their
sees. Athanasius, however, is now Bishop of Alex
andria, and Arius, on his return, is neither allowed
to teach, nor to be received into communion in any
of the churches. The Church, as represented by
Athanasius, sets the State, as represented by the
emperor, at defiance; yet a synod of the clergy assem
bled at Jerusalem recognised the status of Arius in the
Church. The tide, however, is about to turn. Com
plaints against the overbearing tyranny of Athanasius
are heard on every side, and he is summoned to answer
them before a council of bishops at Caesarea; but he
declines to appear, and, as a consequence, is eventually
deposed and exiled. Arius now drew7 up a Confession
of Faith, without the controversial points relating to
the consuljstantiality of the Father and Son, and pre
sented it to Constantine, with a memorial praying that
this confession might be deemed a sufficient test of
Catholic orthodoxy. To this Constantine assented,
and was so well satisfied with the faith of Arms, that
he sent for Alexander, the Bishop of Constantinople,
and enjoined him to admit Arius to communion on the
following Sunday. The terrified bishop, over-awed by
the authority of the emperor, retired to the church of
Irene, and there prayed “ that God would call himself
from the world, or let that Arius die.” On the follow
ing Sunday, as Arius, accompanied by Eusebius of
Nicomedia and others of his adherents, was proceeding
to make a sort of triumphal entry into the church 01
Constantinople, he was seized with a sudden colic, and
expired in dreadful torments. Thus the bishop’s prayer
was answered, but suspicion was rife that poison had
lent a helping-hand towards the accomplishment of its
uncharitable request.
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
Cg
During the remainder of the reign of Constantine,
and till the death of his son and successor, Constantius,
- that is, for about forty years—Arian views were in
the ascendant; and a compromise was effected between
these views and the Nicene dogma, which declared
the Son to be of the same substance with the Father,
by substituting the word o^oiougioi; (like essence) for
o^oovcioq
(the same essence). Under Julian and
Theodosius, however, the tide again turned, the latter
emperor, towards the close of the century, depriving
the Arians of all their churches, and enacting severe
laws against them, persecuted Arianism to its virtual
extinction ; and the doctrine of the complete Godhead
of Christ was henceforth the ruling dogma of Chris
tendom.
This result was largely helped by the powerful
advocacy of the great preacher of this period, Gregory
Nazianzen, whose public discourses were chiefly directed
to prove the existence in one Godhead of three self
depending hypostases or persons—Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost—each of whom was distinguished by
peculiar qualities or attributes. During this period a
fierce and protracted theological strife prevailed through
out the empire, and discussions concerning the Trinity
engrossed the public thought. Eventually the Nicene
dogma of a Godhead composed of three equal and dis
tinct persons, of which Athanasius had been the dis
tinguished advocate, became the settled faith of Chris
tendom. It was doubtless to make assurance doubly
sure, and to prevent all further controversy on the
matter, that the Athanasian creed was in course of
time constructed, or was for this purpose accepted, if, as
rumour states, it owed its origin to the polished satire
of an opponent of the dogma it professes to uphold.
This creed, which was wholly unknown till at least two
centuries after the death of its professed author, Athan
asius, sets forth the Catholic faith on this knotty
question; and, after making the subject, by way of
�jo
Plato, Philo, and Paul.
explanation, infinitely more dark and perplexing and
contradictory than it was before, it declares that
“ except every one do keep this faith whole and unde
filed, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly ! ”
Shall be consigned by a merciful Father and a loving
God to the eternal torments of a cruel and pitiless
Hell!
Apart from the frightful blasphemy of such a
declaration, this creed is a mass of absurdity and
*
nonsense.
It reminds us of theological speculation
gone mad. It professes to reason concerning subjects
far beyond the grasp of the highest and largest thought.
It declares “the Father to be God, the Son to be God,
and the Holy Ghost to be God
asserts that each of
these Gods has a separate and distinct personality ;
that each is uncreated, incomprehensible, eternal, and
almighty, and yet while compelling us by the “ Chris
tian verity,” to acknowledge every person by himself
to be God and Lord, it forbids us by the Catholic
religion to say “there be three Gods or three Lords !”
and it declares that if we “ confound the persons or
divide the substance,” the flames of an eternal hell will
be our portion ! This theological monstrosity, which
some assert was penned in satire by a drunken monk
* Yet last year densely crowded meetings, composed largely of
the higher church clergy, and the nobility, and influential laity,
were held in St James and Exeter Halls, for the purpose of main
taining this creed as the foundation dogma of the national religion.
If we are asked to account for such a sad spectacle, we say the
following facts explain it. It is the party cry rather than the real
belief of the church and people. “The kingdoms of the world
and the glory of them,” the high honours of society, and the
wealth and prestige of the National Church, are to be had by
professing a belief here, or rather this profession is one of the
essential conditions to their possession, while till a century or two
ago, it was death to openly express a disbelief in the Athanasian
dogmas, and till the early part of the present century it involved
outlawry. Even now penury and neglect, and the starving
inquisition of modern times, wait to punish by various forms of
social persecution, those who are earnest enough to think for
themselves, and to avow their disbelief in orthodox creeds.
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
71
of the middle ages; which makes philosophy ridiculous
aud religion an absurdity and a lie, every clergy
man of the Church of England is bound to subscribe
as a believer, and, thirteen times a year, to read in the
services of his church. It asserts the co-equality of
the Son with the Father, the identity of Jesus, as
Christ, with God.
Here, then, with this precious document we termi
nate our enquiry. The sun itself is not more plainly
visible in the bright blue sky of a summer’s day, than
is the fact evidenced to us by the religious history of
the past two thousand years, that the dogma of “ the
Deity of Christ ” is the product of the speculations of
ancient heathen philosophy carried to insane and sense
less lengths, and is not, as our clergy represent it to be,
and as the English people are taught to regard it as
being, a special revelation from God.
We put it as an alternative to our readers, either
this dogma, which makes Jesus to be an incarnate God,
is a revealed truth, or it is a blasphemous idolatry. If
it be a revealed truth, we assert that God W'ould have
given sufficient and satisfactory evidences with a
revelation so startling and so strange.
We ask in
vain for these evidences and the churches of whom we
ask them, and in whose keeping they should be, if
they were in existence at all, only threaten us with
eternal damnation for our non-belief, and bid us
believe in order to escape this terrible fate. This
absence of real evidence should convince all reasonable
minds, that this strange dogma was a figment of
human fancy, if not the product of human fraud,
should assure them that it was no truth of the eternal
God. Moreover, we have evidence, clear, conclusive,
irrefutable evidence, as to what this doctrine really
is. We can trace its birth-place in the philosophic
speculations of the ancient world, we can note its
gradual development and growth,—we can see it in its
early youth passing, through Philo and others, from
�72
Plato, Philo, and Paul
Grecian philosophy into the current of Jewish thought;
then after resting awhile in the Judaism of the period
of the Christian era, we see it slightly changing its
character, as it passes through Gamaliel, Paul,—the
writers of the Fourth Gospel, and of the Epistle to
the Hebrews,—through Justin Martyr and Tertullian,
into the stream of early Christian thought, and now from
a sublime philosophical speculation it becomes dwarfed
and corrupted into a church dogma, and finally gets
hardened as a frozen mass of absurdity, stupidity, and
blasphemy, in the Nicene and Athanasian creeds. The
dogma of the Godhead of Jesus, or the Deity of Christ,
we now know to be a falsity and a fraud.
*
The clergy
who teach it might and ought to know this as well as
ourselves. And being false this dogma is a tremendous
blasphemy. It is the shame and degradation of our
enlightened age, that this the worship of a man in
the place of God, is sanctioned and supported by law,
and that the wealth of the English Church is devoted
to its maintenance and dissemination. But for the
wealth and prestige which attach to those who hold it,
and the social persecution and hatred that attend its
repudiation, this dogma would long since hav6 died
out.
At heart, however, the nation, who bow in
reverence before it, give only a lip service to it. But
this is worse than all, for an earnest and heartfelt
idolatrous worship is infinitely better than a hollow
and formal hypocrisy.
AVe have shewn the doctrine to be false. The
church that rests upon it, rests therefore on the
sandy foundation of a known and proven lie, and the
people who cherish it, in blind and senseless indif
ference, they nourish a canker at the heart of their
religious life.
A new reformation is evidently near
at hand.
“ The times are ripe and rotten ripe for
change.” Religion is the life’s-blood of all true and
' * With the proven fallacy of the dogma of the Deity of Christ,
the doctrine of the Atonement collapses also.
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
7
noble peoples, but a religion that is not true is no
religion at all, and an idolatrous dogma seated on the
throne which truth, and truth alone, should fill, is as
poison in the waters of the well of life.
God is not a strange compound of co-equal person
ages, one of whom is a stern tyrant, and the other a
loving friend j God is not a Jewish peasant who,
centuries ago, under the name of Jesus, led a beautiful
life filled with love and service, and the spirit of just
and generous reform. God is the beneficent framer
and upholder of the universe; the Father and the
friend of man ; is, as the recorded words of Jesus
declare, an invisible and pervading Spirit, and they
who would worship him aright, must worship him
“ in spirit and in truth.” As a consequence of the
false and fictitious character of the dogma of the
Deity of Jesus, of the asserted identity of the
Creator of ten-thousand worlds with a Jewish peasant,
who lived in the time of Tiberius Csesar, religion
is in this nineteenth century divorced from the
intelligence and reason of educated and thoughtful
men, and is consequently ceasing to be a real power in
the world.
Still, underlying all these speculations,
whose crystallisation into church dogmas, that are at
once incredible and absurd, has done religion such
grievous injury, there exists a grand and glorious truth.
The “ Christ idea,” is the noblest thought that has
stirred the human mind. It is the idea of a godlike
humanity ; of man sharing a divine nature and thinking
the pure thought of God. It this ennobled humanity
that is the “ first begotten of the Father,” the true
“ Son of God.” Humanity in its perfectness is the
real Christ, and this is the great truth that the soul of
Jesus discerned, and that the life of Jesus emphasized.
To call Jesus God, is to do infinite injury to his
memory. As God, his faith was a fiction, his example
worthless, and his martyrdom a sham. It is only in
his absolute humanity, that the worth and excellence
of his life are seen. That life realised to the earnest
�74
‘Plato, Philo, and Paul.
and devout thought of its age, the Christ ideal with
which the ininds of men were at that time filled, and
the fault and folly of succeeding generations has been,
that men have determined to discern in Jesus alone,,
those godlike attributes in which humanity at large are
able and privileged to share.
The Sabellian heresy of the third century, which
recognised a trinity of
rather than of persons
in the Godhead, made a very near approach towards a
truthful expression of the close rela^on with each other,
which the human and the divine natures are able to
sustain. This view imagined that one and the same
Deity was manifested as Father, Son, and Spirit; as
Father in the overruling Providence, as Son in the
excellences of human character and conduct, as Spirit
ip. the pervading influence of the divine thought. A
system which finds clear and beautiful expression in
the following lines of the American Poet, Whittier,
and which we have no hesitation in offering to our
readers, as a charming and admirable substitute for the
perplexing dogmas and tremendous fallacies of the
_ Athanasian creed.
TRINITAS.
At morn I prayed, I fain would see
How three are One, and One is Three—
Read the dark riddle unto me.
I wandered forth ; the sun and air
I saw bestowed with equal care
On good and evil, foul and fair.
*
No partial favour dropped the rain ;—
Alike the righteous and profane
Rejoiced above their heading grain.
And my heart murmured, “ Is it meet
That blindfold nature thus should treat
With equal hand the tares and wheat?”
�Plato, Philo, and Paul. *
A presence melted through my mood,
A warmth, a light, a sense of good,
Like sunshine through a winter wood.
I saw that presence, mailed complete
In her white innocence, stoop to greet
A fallen sister of the street.
Upon her bosom, snowy pure,
The lost one clung as if secure
From inward guilt or outward lure.
“ Beware! ” 1‘said ; “ in this I see
No gain to her, but loss to thee ;
Who touches pitch defiled must be.
I passed the haunts of shame and sin,
And a voice whispered, “ Who therein
Shall these lost souls to Heaven’s peace win ?
“ Who there shall hope and health dispense,
And lift the ladder up from thence
Whose rounds are prayers of penitence ? ”
I said, “ No higher life they know ;
These earth worms love to have it so.;
Who stoops to raise them sinks as low.”
That night with painful care I read
What Hippo’s saint and Calvin said—•
The living seeking to the dead!
In vain I turned, in weary quest,
Old pages, where (God give them rest!)
The poor creed-mongers dreamed and guessed.
And still I prayed, “ Lord, let me see
How three are one, and one is three ;
Read the ctark riddle unto me.”
Then something whispered “ Dost thou pray
For what thou hast ? This very day
The Holy Three have crossed thv way.
“ Did not the gifts of sun and air
To good and ill alike declare
The all-compassionate Father’s care?
75
�Plato, Philo, and Paul.
“ In the white soul that stooped to raise
The lost one from her evil ways,
Thou saw’st the Christ whom angels praise!
“ A bodiless Divinity !
The still small voice that spake to thee
Was the Holy Spirit’s mystery !
“ Oh, blind of sight, of faith how small,
Father, and Son, and Holy Call;—
This day thou hast denied them all.
“ Revealed in love and sacrifice
The Holiest passed before thine eyes,
One and the same, in threefold guise !
“ The equal Father in rain and sun,
His Christ in the good to evil done,
His voice in thy soul;—and the Three are One.”
I shut my grave Aquinas fast;
The monkish gloss of ages past;
The schoolman’s creed aside I cast,
And my heart answered, “ Lord, I see
How Three are One, and One is Three,
Thy riddle hath been read to me.”
TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Plato, Philo, and Paul; the pagan conception of a "divine logos" shewn to have been the basis of the Christian dogma of the deity of Christ
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Lake, John William
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 76 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references. Ink stains on the title page. Pages 40-47 printed in double columns. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway and part of the NSS pamphlet collection. Printed by Turnbull and Spears, Edinburgh.
Publisher
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Thomas Scott
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[187?]
Identifier
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CT200
RA1831
N433
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Plato, Philo, and Paul; the pagan conception of a "divine logos" shewn to have been the basis of the Christian dogma of the deity of Christ), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Subject
The topic of the resource
Christianity
Saints
Paganism
Conway Tracts
Jesus Christ
Logos (Christian Theology)
NSS
Philo of Alexandria
Plato
Saint Paul
-
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PDF Text
Text
63
is proved by the fact that the most vigorous efforts and the most
dreadful persecutions have failed to secure it. (Hear, hear). Not
withstanding the cruelties of the Inquisition, the fires of Smithfield,
and the imprisonments through the Act of Uniformity, there is now
greater variety of religious thought than in any previous period of
the history of the world. The present freedom and variety of
thought show that the persecutions to secure unanimity have been
one huge aud cruel blunder ; a tremendous addition to the sum
total of human misery for an utterly useless and unattainable object.
And so also with the bigotry, sectarian jealousies, and uncharitable
ness of the present day,—they are all needless additions to human
unhappiness arising out of the profession of a religion that was
intended to bless mankind. (Cheers.) And suppose unanimity of
thought to be attainable, are we quite sure that it is desirable ?
What message have we from God to assure us that he desires us to
think alike ? We sometimes say “ actions speak louder than words,”
and if we look to the actions of God as manifested in his works, we
everywhere see that he delights in variety. (Cheers.) On the sur
face of the globe, in the size and form of the animals, in the colour
and odour of the flowers ; and even in the suns and astral systems
we see variety. And would unanimity of thought make it either
pleasanter or bettei* for us in our intercourse with each other ?
Would there be the same charm in conversation, the same exercise
and development of the faculties, the same opportunity of mani
festing self-control and kindly dispositions ? Unanimity of thought
is neither attainable nor desirable, neither is it necessary to a true
religious unity. In the midst of diversity of opinion there may be
unanimity in the desire for truth, in the love of free thought; and in
a willingness to work for the good of others. Any church to justify
its existence must be a working church, and there is so much work
to do that the churches need not be jealous of each other. Probably
each church brings new labourers into the field, and does a work
which would not be so well done by any other. (Hear, hear.)
Whatever may be the opinions of the church of the future, I am
quite sure that, to succeed, it must be a working church. In our
�64
own characters, as well as in the life of the church, there must be a
combination of truth and duty, light and love. Just as these flowers
on the table cannot develope all their beauty of form and colour
without both the light and heat of the sun ; so we, to become com
plete men and women, must manifest the combined influences of an
earnest love of the truth and charity and even affection towards
those who differ from us. (Loud cheers.)
The Chairman : I have now very great pleasure in asking Mr.
Moncure D. Conway, of London, to speak to the sentiment,—
The Sceptical Spirit a Reforming Spirit, leading Men to higher
and fairer forms of Faith.
When the cheers which greeted him had subsided, Mr. Conway
said:—I once met with a curious illustration of the notion many
people have of what a sceptic, or heretic, or freethinker is. In a
picture shop in a town of Normandy I once observed a painting
evidently by a clever artist, which was entitled “ Un libre penseur ”
(a free-thinker). It represented a half-dressed man, in an attic, in
which each article of the furniture was out of place, and everything
upside down. The clock was on the bed, the pillow upon the man
telpiece. (Laughter.) The artist had painted the free-thinker as
the genius of disorder. But what does free-thinker mean ? Simply
that one is not an enslaved thinker. The term, however, is equi
vocal ; for free thought, originally meaning thought emancipated
from the dictation of priests, must not be allowed freedom from the
laws of thought and rules of logic. Emancipation from priestly
dictation and from creeds really means a more complete submission
of the intellect to the sway of reason and to evidence. (Cheers.)
We leave to the orthodox the monopoly of the other kind of free
thought; for in one sense the rigidly orthodox man is the very
freest thinker in the world,—he leaps over fact, breaks the traces of
logic, kicks aside evidence, and bolts off into the wild forests of
primeval superstition with all the freedom of an untamed steed.
(Loud cheers an 1 laughter.) After analyzing the word “ sceptic ”
�65
(meaning to consider), and “heretic ” (a chooser of ¡bis own faith),
Mr. Conway continued :—A degradation of the human intellect is
implied in the degradation of these words which represent man
fulfilling his very highest functions—that of doubt, inquiry, by
which alone he can be freed from error and attain unto truth.
Archbishop Whateley has admonished us—“Misgive, that you may
not mistake.” And I hail this movement in Bolton as representing
that shrewd, searching, Anglo-Saxon intellect which makes our
greatness as a race. I rejoice that you have with you as a leader
on this ancient path of progress, a man who will never surrender
his moral and intellectual freedom or right of doubting and denying
that which he feels is doubtful or deniable. (Loud cheers.) I will
further say that while men who feel strongly in matters of right
and wrong may sometimes make mistakes, for myself it is
refreshing, in this smooth-tongued generation, to find a man, leading
a movement like yours, whose blood can boil with indignation when
wrong is done and falsehood uttered. (Loud applause.)
One of
your chief duties, as members of this Free Christian Church, is to
promote intellectual progress by means of sceptical inquiry.
Already one of the speakers who has preceded me (Mr. Farrington)
has alluded to your name ' Christian ’ as hardly wide enough for
all the religious elements of the age. That will, no doubt, be
examined honestly in time. Then Miss Cobbe had, in her letter
read to the meeting, spoken with some warmth against praying for
outward benefits such as rain and health—but in favour of praying
for inward blessings. Now it is remarkable that an ancient and
great Theist has taught the exact reverse of this. Cicero has
declared that men might well pray for those outward benefits and
fortunes which it might not be within the power of man to achieve;
but that no man should pray for virtue or piety, which it was the
duty of man to secure by his earnest exercises of mind and soul,
and whose whole merit consisted in the fidelity and labours bv
which they—the inward virtues—were attained. Thus we have
Cicero and Miss Cobbe on opposite sides; and it is for each to
inquire, and think, and determine which is right. There is no
�66
escape from intellectual any more than physical change and motion.
While we have been sitting here the earth has been spinning for
ward its many thousands of miles in space—‘ wheeled in her
ellipse ’—and the atoms of our bodies have been changing. We
are dying and being renewed in our frames as is the universe
around us. When that circulation and movement ceases it is—
Death. And it is the death of thought when it ceases to move and
advance. And he who seeks only mental repose and torpor, is as
one who cries to the Spirit of life—“ Pass on! Let the great flood
of life and light play everywhere; let it kindle every star, and beat
from pole to pole ; let it fill every leaf with sap, and break forth in
flower and fruit; but let none of it touch me, let it not fill or thrill
my heart or brain, but leave me to rust in a vile repose! ” (Repeated
cheering.)
Mr. J. P. Thomasson said :—After the very eloquent and in
teresting addresses we have had the pleasure of hearing to-night, I
am sure you will not care to listen to anything I may say. A reso
lution has been put into my hands which I have great happiness in
moving,—it is “ That the hearty thanks of this meeting be given to
the ladies who prepared tea for us and who presided at the tables.”
I am happy in moving this resolution ; for, as is well known to most
of you, I take a deep interest in all questions relating to woman and
her position in modern society. (Cheers.) It is a great gratifica
tion to me to know that there are so many women—I prefer the
good old-fashioned word women to ladies (Hear, hear.)—who
take a lively and an intelligent interest in the fortunes of our Free
Christian Church. (Applause.)
Mr. William Hart said :—I rise, Mr. Chairman, for the pur
pose of seconding that resolution. I do so the more readily because
I know we are not only indebted to the ladies for what they have
done to-day, but for what they have done for us during the past
year. To those of us who are earnest in this movement^ and who
have learned to love it, the past year has not been without its trials
and troubles. There were times during the year when it seemed
almost impossible the Church could go on.
At these timps when
�67
the men amongst us seemed to be losing hope and courage, the women
were most hopeful and most courageous. (Loud cheering.) They
have never once permitted our minister—whom we all love and
esteem so much—to be attacked without engaging in a brave
defence. They have set an example of sympathy, of zeal, of courage,
of determination to make our Church triumphant, which, 1 sincerely
hope, the men may learn to imitate. (Loud applause.)
On the resolution being put from the chair it was, of course,
enthusiastically carried.
Mr. D. Cordingly said :—Mr. Chairman, I beg to move “ That
the thanks of this meeting-.be given to Miss Bromley, Mr. Coun
cillor Bromley, and Mr. Henry Taylor, for the most admirable music
and singing with which they have favoured us this evening.” I
am in a difficulty, Mr. Chairman, I don’t know which to admire
most—the singing or the speaking. I have attended a good many
religious meetings in Bolton ; gnd I am sure I never listened to
better speechifying nor to sweeter singing in all my life. (Cheers.)
An election has been going on in Bolton to-day, and when we
leave this h^ll we may, perhaps, learn who has been victorious
(Cries of “ Cross and Knowles.”) . Well, I hope so ; but don’t be
premature. (Laughter.) ' Anyhow, Mr. Chairman, if Cross and
Knowles have been successful, what we have heard to-night will
enable us the more worthily to rejoice in their success ; and if they
have been defeated, what we have heard will enable us the more
bravely to bear the defeat. (Cheers.)
Mr. J. Kershaw seconded the resolution.
As a matter of form the Chairman put it to the meeting, for
the people had already carried it in their hearts. In this report
hitherto we have said nothing about the singing. The speeches
were good, but the best speechifying is apt to become wearisome
in time. The singing saved the speeches from all danger of being
considered uninteresting even by the most uninterested, or dull even
by the dullest. The song went with the speech, just as the per
fume goes with the violet. The singers are too well known, and
too much esteemed by our Bolton audiences, to need any laudation
�68
here. We can only assure them that their services are duly appre
ciated and held by the Bolton Free Christian Church in grateful
remembrance.
Mrs. S. Winkworth said :—I have peculiar pleasure in moving
“ That the thanks of this meeting be given to the visitors who have
come to us from a distance and spoken to us so well and so wisely
to-night.” We are not only grateful to, but proud of the kind and
able men who have come so far to speak to us to-night. We are
proud also of those noble and sympathetic souls who have sent us
their greeting by letter. We have responded to every sentiment
which has been uttered, and I hope the words spoken to-night may
be in the coming year a good help to us in our endeavours to pro
mote the life and work of our church. (Applause.)
Mr. T. Rigby seconded the resolution.
The resolution having been put and unanimously carried, Mr.
Conway said :—I am sure, Mr. Chairman and ladies and gentlemen,
instead of you thanking us we ought to thank you. For myself I
have got a good deal out of this meeting,—material for lots of
sermons—(Cheers and laughter),—and when I get back to London
I shall preach Bolton for at least a month to come. (Great
cheering.)
The Chairman having vacated the chair, it was taken by Mr.
Applebee, who called upon Mr. Alexander Lawson to move a
resolution.
Mr. Lawson said:—I beg to move that the thanks of this
meeting be given to Stephen Winkworth, Esq., for his kindness in
taking the chair. I need say nothing to you, ladies and gentlemen,
by way of commending this resolution. You have already deter
mined enthusiastically to carry it, I am sure. (Cheers). I can’t help
saying how much I have enjoyed this meeting. (Hear, hear.) It has
been verily “ A feast of reason and a flow of soul.” (Cheers.) It is the
first meeting we have had to commemorate the founding of our Free
Church. I hope it will not be the last by a long way. ('Loud
applause). I hope that we who are getting grey may live years and
years to commemorate year after year, by such meetings as the
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The sceptical spirit: a reforming spirit leading men to higher and fairer form of faith
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway, Moncure Daniel [1832-1907.]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [Bolton]
Collation: 64-68 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Handwritten note: 'Bolton Free Church Record April 17th, report of commemorative tea party and public meeting'. Includes comments from members on Conway's speech.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
[s.n.]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[187?]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G3587
Subject
The topic of the resource
Free thought
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The sceptical spirit: a reforming spirit leading men to higher and fairer form of faith), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Conway Tracts
Free Thought