Pesher for the Day of the Holy Cross, 2021

The Cambrian Pesher
Day of the Holy Cross,
September 14, 2021

The Pagan’s Gospel

As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up.
John 3:14

And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.
Acts 7:22

Beloved Friends:

On the Act of “Saining”

It will come as a surprise to most people, I suppose, to learn that the making of the “sign of the Cross” with a hand gesture did not originate with the Roman Catholic Church. It was a custom of the Celtic saints which was later adopted by the Papal emissaries and then by the Church as a whole. This, we learn from the good Father and Episcopal Priest, Thomas F. Hudson, in his The High Age of the Celtic Church (Attic Press, 1992, p. 38):

There were other practices peculiar to the Celtic church. One was the use of the sign of the cross. The Celts frequently used the sign for all manner of blessings.

Making the sign of the Cross was a part of the process of “saining” by which the Celtic saints claimed and consecrated the world for Christ: the rocks and trees, the rivers and lakes, the animals and all things of the Earth:
The Celts did not upset the local custom, they sained it. Where a holy fountain was, or a sacred grove of trees, or a sacred stone, the Celtic missionary signed it with the Sign of the Cross, sanctifying (i.e., saining) it to Jesus and went on preaching and living an exemplary Christ-like life. (p. 42)

Saining became a part of the larger program of assimilation of cultures which was later the adopted imperative of the Catholic – the universal – Church. How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill (Doubleday, 1995) can be referenced here as another source to support the explanation as to how it was possible that the Celts could have had such an impact on the European form of Christianity. Cahill explains how the Celtic missionaries were gifted linguists and scholars. Not only did they preserve the ancient languages of Scripture (Greek and Hebrew) but they propagated the biblical writings in the monasteries they established throughout Europe.

Alternately, the need for saining could have sprung from the animistic superstitions of the Celts in which they believed that objects, whether living or non-living, could be possessed by spirits. The Celtic saints did not deny their existence, they simply subjugated and sanctified them to Christian rule through the sign of the Cross. In this respect, they were preterists and postmillennialists (for more see our Pesher on Demonic Possession https://2046ad.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/allhallows2020.pdf)

Father Hudson also points out other unique features of the early medieval Celtic Church: the formation of family abbeys and the consecration of bishops by one, not three bishops as was the custom of Rome. This made episcopal succession from father to son possible and the perpetuation of abbeys which were independent of Rome.

Elsewhere, we have pointed out that a married clergy lingered in the Celtic fringes of Europe almost to the time of the Reformation. Whenever the Roman clerics complained of the “pagan” influences among the Culdees (as the later Celtic priests were known), it was usually in reference to their marital state.

Among the Celtic saints, footwashing was practiced after the Holy Communion and their love for St. John’s Gospel and his Epistles was the cornerstone of their teaching.

However, as pointed out in our earlier Peshers, John’s Gospel was really the “Gospel of the Dove” (Heb:yonah) composed by the Bethany family and was much later mistakenly ascribed to John the Apostle. Go to https://2046ad.org/christmas2020/ and here https://2046ad.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/christmas2020.pdf for the Christmas Pesher for 2020 on “Obedience to the House of Bethany.” Consequently, this fact makes the Celtic Church the offspring of the House of Bethany and the family of Jesus.

The legends which place Jesus in Britain, with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, and specifically in Glastonbury, are probably conflated histories of His offspring. We also have legends of Jesus in India, and even prehistoric America. Again, all of these stories cannot possibly be true. We rather think that these represent the missionary travels of His sons and apostles during the inaugural age of the Church. It is more probable that Jesus spent His post-adolescent or silent years in Alexandria among the Essene scholars there and only returned to the Holy Land when news of John’s ministry of baptism was announced. Of course, He has appeared in visions to numerous people after His Ascension, but His locality is at the right hand of the Father in Heaven, and He will not return to Earth until the work of the Holy Spirit has been completed.

Thus, we consider it reactionary and founded in ignorance the condemnation by certain Protestant sects of the signing of the Cross, as also, the puritanical condemnation of Christmas, Easter, and Sunday worship, as “pagan” celebrations. “Woke fanatics” have existed in every age, people who betray ignorance of the origins of their faith by attacking the very ancestors which made their faith possible. The Reformation leaders should have known that the printed Bible was not enough. They should have known that their heritage in the Celtic saints would have to be relearned. They should have known that a long process of cultural acclimation was necessary before the Scriptures could be understood. There is much that Occidentals do not know about Orientals and the ancient culture from which the precepts and customs which gave us the Bible could have been known.

Instead, Europe became the arena of witch hunts, Inquisitions, wars, and despotisms by people who wanted “reform without tarrying for any.”

The Secular Republic and Monistic Religion
TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. (Paul on Mars Hill, Acts 17:23)

The three great monistic religions of the world are Judaism, Islam, and Masonry. Because of its doctrine of the Trinity, Christianity is not a monistic religion, even though it professes to believe in one God. Despite the jargon of the Creeds, which we embrace and admire, they would be better understood if the Fathers had used the term “Godkind” as a singular principle because the world cannot seem to grasp the theological and philosophical precision of the Creeds. Monistic religions insist on charging Christians with polytheism, and with the unfortunate adoration of icons and images, Christians are open to the charge of idolatry, as well.

The monists think they get away from paganism because they worship one God and do not bow down to idols. Judaism has the ineffable YHWH. The Muslims have “Allah.” And the Masons have “the Great Architect of the Universe.” But paganism and idolatry can take many forms.

The Freemasons have their own iconography, statuary, and adoration of great men. In contrast, Judaism does not have a problem with images, but its prominent sects, such as the Pharisees, indulged superstitions about powerful demons and rival pagan deities. Islam still yields to dualistic beliefs and the world of spirits as manifested in the starry hosts. In other words, these monistic faiths cheat and betray hypocrisy in their condemnation of Christians.

But paganism can be philosophical, as well, in its unitary faith in the “continuity of being” going all the way back to the time of the Pharaohs and the later Greek philosophers. These beliefs teach a radical immanence of God to the exclusion if not denial of His transcendence. Pantheism is another term for this philosophy: all of nature is God.

The bloody result of the European religious wars, especially the Thirty Years War between the Lutherans and Catholics, weighed heavily on the minds of America’s Founding Fathers. England’s experience during the age of Cromwell compelled them to seek out a secular foundation for the American Republic. Many of them thought they found their neutral ideology in Freemasonry. And for a time, the secrecy of the Masonic institution lent itself well to the operational needs of the American Revolution.

But Masonry undermined the miraculous foundation of Christianity and produced the bitter fruit of rationalism, agnosticism and finally atheism. Institutionally, atheism became the Unitarian Church and then later used aberrant science – such as Darwinism – in the public schools to create generations of Americans without a religious faith. The quest for secular foundations to American government in the end created a secular society and the cult of a different kind.

The Internal Compass

But like the law of gravity, the human tendency is to worship something. Unitarians have rediscovered the Bible. Unshackled by religious dogma, they have found that the Bible is full of stories illustrating life’s lessons. Early Unitarians, such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and perhaps, George Washington, were horrified at the implications of some Christian teachings. George Washington refused to partake of the Holy Communion, although he faithfully attended the Episcopalian Church. He would get up and leave at that time of the service when Christians engaged in their mock ritual of vampiric cannibalism. Can we blame him?

That aside, Thomas Jefferson preserved his own collection of the sayings of Jesus and John Adams, while clearly in the end an opponent of the Trinitarian formula, still valued the Bible’s contribution to Western Civilization. Unitarianism went through a long period of avoiding the biblical text. But as I discovered not so very long ago in one of my presentations to our local Unitarian congregation, Unitarians have found the biblical account useful in regaining an understanding of the world and the human condition and the need of a Savior-figure which the story of Jesus provides. Unitarians are becoming more than atheists who like to go to church. While most are dabbling in nature religions, some are beginning to revisit the journey of the Essenes in discovering “the Word made flesh.”

With this historical backdrop in mind, the pedagogical role of symbolic language in the Scriptures requires care and understanding. Fundamentalist Christians are completely oblivious to the spectacle they have become in their “Gospel-speak” about the “blood of Jesus.” Every Lord’s Day they assemble to sing about “the blood”: “Nothing but the Blood,” “Are You Washed in the Blood?,” “There is a Fountain filled with Blood,” ad nauseum, are sung with no understanding.

While I was a young seminarian, one of my college professors who happened to also be the adult Sunday School teacher in a large and nationally-known charismatic church, almost started a riot one Sunday morning because he had the temerity to declare that the “blood of Jesus dried-up at the foot of the Cross!”

Obviously, Fundamentalists indulge in their own form of “paganism” because they ascribe mystical powers to the physical blood of Christ and cannot understand its symbolic value in God’s moral government. In their metaphysics, anything “symbolic” is not real and has no power. The doctrine of the Divine Logos, naming, and noumenal concepts which lie at the foundation of Christian metaphysics and the doctrine of the covenants, is not something they can intellectually grasp, evidently . For them, power comes from the physical properties of a thing, not from its imputed value by a sovereign deity. Consequently, like the Catholics they despise, they ascribe magical powers to the blood of Christ and in more recent years, other metaphysical theories about DNA and the genetic code. It is the fount of witchcraft and racism. And as for the Founding Fathers and their Masonic Associations, it was ultimately impossible for them to break free of the magical view of the atonement; for we are told that in the end George Washington embraced the transubstantiation of the old Church, and its superstition of blood-letting and died at the hands of his personal physicians (or should I say “magicians”?)

The Conscience & Atonement

Humans are endowed with a conscience, an internal ethical monitor. For that reason, humans have had an historical struggle with guilt. Usually, it is justified. Humans do bad things.

Humans have tried to absolve the sense of guilt in three ways: either to argue that the guilt comes from an erroneous ethical standard, or by engaging in works of supererogation to make restitution for wrongdoing, or by atonement. Christianity has offered atonement: atonement based upon a one-time event in the distant past by the Incarnate Son of God.

Pagans have historically expiated guilt by atonement through animal sacrifices, sometimes human sacrifice. They too have myths and legends about the atonement of a god-man. In their polytheistic cultures, their kings were regarded as divine. Thus, the death of their kings made atonement for the land.

This was not so among the followers of Rabbinic Judaism. For Jews, the notion of Jesus Christ as a god-man sacrifice smacked of paganism, and still does to this day. The story of Jesus Christ bore closer similarities to pagan Christ figures such as Osiris, Dionysius and others, than of any sacrificial figure described by the Hebrew prophets. Christians do not sufficiently appreciate how much Jews must struggle with this paradox: the pagan Messiah.
Consequently, it can be argued that the Christian Gospel is more pagan than Jewish and might explain why it was more readily received among the Gentiles. Pagans as recipients of a universal sense of guilt and the need for atonement have been correct that animal and human sacrifice were not enough. Somehow, a god-like being was needed as sacrifice. However, pagans could not philosophically produce such a being. Their christs were half-god, half-man. The Christ of the Christian creeds was fully man and fully divine. And because of that, he was fully qualified to make atonement. The Christian God was big enough.

Sacred Writings: The External Compass

Theologians tell us that there are two revelations: there is natural revelation and there is special revelation.
Natural revelation is the truth that can be learned from observation and rational deduction. For thousands of years mankind was guided by natural revelation. The things God wanted us to know were discovered through nature and the inferences that could be made from what was discovered in nature.

In its etymology, the word “pagan” referred to the country folk. Country people have to interact with nature everyday to survive. Farmers and midwives were the first scientists because they had to learn and conform to the laws of nature in order to do their jobs. Sometimes, their ways seemed primitive and superstitious. It depended on their world view.

The Apostle Paul discusses the role of natural revelation in places like the first chapter of Romans and his speech to the Athenian philosophers in Acts 17. It can be argued that natural revelation is the realm of science:

Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead . . . Romans 1:19-20

Natural revelation was the principal source of Divine truth during the patriarchal age.

Special revelation is the truth that can be learned from God’s special messengers: angels, prophets, providence, dreams and so on. Usually, special revelation is information provided which cannot be obtained through normal channels. That is why it is special. Our sacred books, such as the Bible, we believe contain the record of special revelation. They were composed both as a record of the knowledge of the patriarchal age and of the miraculous communications from the Creator. As far as we know, Moses was the first scribe of sacred literature.

The Apocryphal Writings

There are other books which some regard as inspired on a deutero-canonical level. That is, there are writings which seem to contain special revelation, such as the Apocryphal books from the Intertestamental Period (Enoch, Jubilees, Esdras, etc.) but show evidence of tampering, anachronisms or other corruptions. Some commentators have relied upon these books for interpretive guidance of otherwise obscure stories in the Bible, with some limited success.
For example, the story of Noah in the Book of Genesis bears remarkable brevity. We wonder about some things like “Where did Cain get his wife?,” “Who were the giants of the time of Noah?”, and “What was the actual sin of Ham that his son Canaan would be cursed?” The Apocryphal books contain a record of Jewish traditions from the Intertestamental Period which provide more information on these and other questions.

But we cannot always be sure of their accuracy. For example, the Book of Jasher contains fantastical stories about the sons of Jacob displaying superhuman strength in battle. In some of these books, we are led down a path of involved and sometimes convoluted stories about Nimrod, Abraham and others. We wonder if these are simply campfire stories for the vivid imaginations of small children or real historical accounts. We can surmise that there was a reason why Judah was likened unto a lion’s whelp (Genesis 49:10), but his alleged exploits in battle do not match his timidity in the presence of Joseph, the Egyptian Prime Minister whom he did not recognize.

While the Book of Jasher is sometimes referenced directly in the Old Testament and at other times alluded to elsewhere in the New Testament, we don’t know if the Book of Jasher we have in our possession today is an authentic copy or just a pious fraud from a medieval monastery. The same is true of the Book of Enoch. The edition we have today is based upon an Ethiopic manuscript discovered by a Freemason. I find it remarkable that some commentators place so much confidence in it, while in the same breath condemn Freemasonry as a satanic delusion.

Portions of Enoch were found among the manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It appears to have been an important book to the spiritual community we call “Qumran.” It is not my intention to cast aspersions on these useful books, which I use freely. I merely caution against the sophomoric enthusiasm by some commentators who think they have found in them settled records of Divine truth.

The Pesher Rule of Interpretation

Having said that, at the very least, these books give us an account of the Old Testament through the eyes of post-Exile Judaism. It forms the foundation for us to understand New Testament writers. But we do not know if New Testament writers, including the teachings of Jesus, were using these Intertestamental writings as peshers or as literal history. When Jude quoted Enoch in describing “the coming of the Lord with ten thousands of his saints,” some commentators may surmise that he is describing the Second Coming of Christ as it is understood by modern dispensationalists. However, it may simply have been a pesher from the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 33:2 which describes the hosts of Israel:

The LORD came from Sinai, and rose up from Seir unto them; he shined forth from mount Paran, and he came with ten thousands of saints; from his right hand went a fiery law for them.

Jude may have been describing a different kind of “coming” than what is imagined by Bible teachers today.
More importantly, when Jesus referred to the “abomination of desolation, spoken of by the prophet Daniel” – “whoso readeth, let him understand” (Matthew 24:15) – we wonder if the Gospel of Matthew itself as it has come down to us, represents a 1st Century AD apostolic pesher of the Lord’s warnings or 2nd Century patristic editing. The expression “whoso readeth, let him understand” is not regarded as words spoken by Jesus, but a part of the Evangelist’s narration or a later editor’s interpolation. In either case, it is useful to keep in mind that the disciples at the time of this discourse did not have an understanding of Christ’s “coming” (v. 3) as modern dispensationalists would have it because the disciples did not yet have a comprehension that Jesus was going away. They scarcely understood the looming Crucifixion and Resurrection, let alone the Ascension and the Church Age to follow.

The pesher here would be grounded in the typology of past temple desecrations by apostates which led to its eventual destruction by Gentile armies, first by the Babylonians, then the Syrians, and then finally by the Romans.
We see this revisited in Acts Chapter 7 where Stephen was accused of this very apostasy and desecration but then he turns the tables on his accusers to show that they were the true apostates in making the Temple of Yahweh into one dedicated to the worship of Moloch (v. 43), i.e. an abomination which causeth desolation.

More could and should be said about this, but space requires that such be saved for another time.

The Day of the Holy Cross

Christianity is the only religion which can translate the shame of the Crucifixion into its life-changing opposite. As we prepare for the season of Thanksgiving and Christmas, let us not despair for the evil that now is, but aspire for the hope for the good that shall come.

A Servant of Jesus,

James

Collect for the Day
Almighty God, whose Son our Savior Jesus Christ was lifted high upon the cross that he might draw the whole world to himself: Mercifully grant that we, who glory in the mystery of our redemption, may have grace to take up our cross and follow him: who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

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*Cambrian Pesher is the pastoral epistle of the Cambrian Episcopal Church of the Grail, a fellowship and abbey adhering to a spiritual tradition from ancient Wales. We use the Authorized Version of the Bible (King James Version) as our default translation and the Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopalian Church for liturgical guidance. We are not an affiliate of any denomination.
Copyright is reserved to the Cambrian Episcopal Church of the Grail, 2021, Idaho, USA