The Cambrian Pesher*
Day of Transfiguration (August 6th), 2020
The Bible as Medieval Dissident Literature
They have now found out a new language called Greek: we must carefully guard ourselves against it. That language will be the mother of all sorts of heresies. I see in the hands of a great number of persons a book written in this language called “The New Testament.”; it is a book full of brambles, with vipers in them. As to the Hebrew, whoever learns that becomes a Jew at once.
a Roman cleric in the time of Pope Alexander VI
For we have not followed cunningly devised fables when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.
2 Peter 1:16
Beloved Friends,
From time-to-time, skeptics of the Christian religion will level the charge that the Bible, at least the New Testament, was the literary invention of the Roman Imperial bureaucracy which was ratified by the Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicea. It is true that the bishops at the Council formally recognized the 27 books which now constitute our New Testament. It became what was called the “Canon of Scripture” which represented apostolic authority along with the 39 books of the Old Testament.
But it is contrary to all historical accounts and common sense to suppose that the New Testament and the story of Christianity were invented at that Council. What would have been the point of the Council and the wranglings over the Nicene Creed – which almost failed to materialize – if there were not something already in existence to fight over?
Of course, the skeptics will say that there were numerous versions of Christianity and that the one approved by Constantine was the one used for purposes of a state religion. But once again, if that were the case, then why did Athanasius, the author of the Creed, have to live the rest of his life on the run from the Arian faction?
It seems that the Trinitarian form of Christianity was not the favorite of the Imperial Court after all. In fact, Athanasius claimed that the Imperial bureaucracy was dominated by eunuchs who seethed in hatred over the “doctrine of the father and the son”:
It was the eunuchs who instigated these proceedings against all [the Nicene Christians]. And the most remarkable circumstance in the matter is this; that the Arian heresy which denies the Son of God receives its support from eunuchs, who, as both their bodies are fruitless, and their souls barren of the seeds of virtue, cannot bear even to hear the name of son. . . The eunuchs of Constantius cannot endure the confession of Peter [Matthew 16:16], nay, they turn away when the Father manifests the Son, and madly rage against those who say that the Son of God is His genuine Son, thus claiming as a heresy of eunuchs that there is no genuine and true offspring of the Father.
Athanasius, “History of the Arians,” 5.38,
Nicene & Post-Nicene Fathers vol. 4, (Schaff, p. 283)
(emphasis added in brackets)
The notion that God could be a Father was offensive to the eunuch bureaucrats of the Roman Empire and especially the notion that His Son, Jesus Christ, was an authentically “begotten” son and not merely adopted as was argued by the Arians.
The Imperial bureaucracy wanted to extend its power over the bishoprics of the churches but they were out of reach. The requirement of a married clergy was an impregnable barrier, for obvious reasons. The Pastoral Epistles of Paul (1 & 2 Timothy and Titus) required that both bishops (overseers) and their deacons be family men. For the earliest Christians up to and including the Council of Nicea, unmarried clergy were barred from ordination. If ever the state wanted to get control of the Christian religion, it would have to get rid of that stupid rule. If anything, the bar to the eunuch bureaucracy was considered subversive at the time, and so was the Nicene Creed that insisted the Son was the same in essence as the Father – hence, the persecution of the Nicene Christians.
In the ancient world, men who wielded state power were customarily gelded to guarantee loyalty to the state. And to add a certain pomposity to the practice, the Imperial eunuchs were better educated and cosmopolitan than the rustic family elders of the burgeoning Christian movement. They were considered better suited to the concerns and interests of the Empire, which wanted to control religion like a department of state.
Sir Isaac Newton called this an antichrist doctrine of “the Mahuzzims” found in his commentary on Daniel, where the Prophet identifies one of the features of the antichrist system in “forsaking the desire of women.” The movement for celibacy was an essential feature of the Imperial religion from the days of Babylon and was the exact mechanism used to turn Christianity into a state religion.
Thus it was from the very first, Christianity was the enemy of the state: from the time of Christ’s condemnation of the religious rulers of His day who were the vicegerents of Rome, to Paul’s condemnation of the debauchery of Caligula and Nero (i.e. Epistle to the Romans chapter one, et al), to the Nicene Christians of the later Roman period, and then finally, to the dissidents of medieval times who found comfort and courage from the Scriptures enough to challenge the corruption of the Holy Roman Empire.
Throughout these centuries, copies of the New Testament were hunted and burned by the authorities and anyone who might have commited it to memory were consigned to the stake. It is an absurdity to think that Christianity was an invention to advance state power. The teachings of the Bible stand in judgment upon all tyrants and deny to them their pretended infallibility.
There were other dissident writings of importance during the medieval period, but none greater than copies of the New Testament.
Fables
As noted in the Apostle Peter’s attestation cited above, Christians have always been accused of following myths and the credulous belief in miracles. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, of course, drew the derision of the intellectual class as illustrated by Paul’s experience with the Athenians in Acts 17. Paul was no dummy or country bumpkin, having been educated by Gamaliel in the Torah and perhaps was the very first persecutor of the Church.
But like Peter, he was “an eyewitness of [Christ’s] majesty” and could not deny what he knew empirically: that Jesus Christ, though once dead, was now alive. He pleaded with the Athenian philosophers to consider that the Resurrection was at least philosophically plausible. However, in every evangelistic appeal, he recognized that the “proof” of the Resurrection comes from a personal faith experience with the risen Savior – maybe not in a dramatic display of power as it was for the Apostles, but certainly from an inward assurance. The truth seeker must humble himself before God and pray to Him to demonstrate the truth of the Gospel. While the Resurrection might be plausibly deduced philosophically, it still cannot be proved by people who claim to be eyewitnesses, simply because it requires a secondary line of reasoning to establish the credibility of the witnesses. All that we can hope for is that the testimony of eyewitnesses can convince us to pray for that inner confirmation:
Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.
John 20:29
Some of us may get that proof in this life, some of us in the life to come. Regardless, we are commanded to not “suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” We cannot reject Jesus Christ simply because it might be inconvenient or we don’t want to admit our need for a Savior. There is a certain wickedness in rejecting the gift of faith. We dare not commit the sacrilege cited in Christ’s Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man. After waking up in the torments of hell the Rich Man pleaded with Abraham for relief. When he was refused, he pleaded that Lazarus be raised from the dead to warn his brethren, to which Abraham replied:
If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.
Luke 16:31
That startling assertion should warn us that the selfish mind is clever at excusing its unbelief. If saving faith was possible under the Old Testament dispensation – through “Moses and the prophets” – how much more then under the Gospel! Having been exposed to the message of salvation and having rejected it, the unbeliever runs the risk of the Apostle’s warning:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness. . . Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.
Romans 1:18, 25
Demythologizing the Bible
Jesus taught in Parables. We do not always know how true His stories were. In the Parable cited above, we do not know if the existence of the Rich Man and Lazarus was true. Perhaps, the story was His invention to illustrate a moral truth. Perhaps the conversation between the Rich Man and Abraham never occurred. But certainly, the story itself was built upon the world view of his listeners. His Jewish followers believed there were two compartments in hell: gehenna, the place of torment, and then “Abraham’s bosom”, the place of comfort. So, His story seems to ratify that world view, even though the characters involved might have been fictional.
In fictional literature, there is often what we might call “biographical fiction.” A popular movie among vampire aficionados is Lincoln, the Vampire Slayer. It is a retelling of the known life of Abraham Lincoln and his secret life of killing vampires. We know that Lincoln is a true historical figure and the Civil War period is accurately portrayed. It’s just that a mythical story about vampires has been woven into the fabric of his life story.
A future historian, separated by centuries in time and culture might have to sift through the remains of our literature and separate the fact from fiction. He might have to confront the questions as to whether Abraham Lincoln was ever the President of the United States and also whether he killed vampires.
In the alternative, the historian could entertain the notion that the story is an allegory of Lincoln’s war against the bankers. A conspiracy theory could be argued that Lincoln’s “greenbacks” drove a dagger into the heart of the international banking establishment who were the culprits in the Civil War and his assassination. So, while we need not believe in vampires, we can believe that as mythical creatures they can be used in an allegory with genuine historical relevance.
When it comes to the Bible, skeptics want us to believe that the historical events it records are fictional or at least embellished legends. A shepherd boy got lucky and killed a giant warrior with a sling shot. An itinerant preacher in Palestine got lucky and resuscitated a man mistaken for dead in a tomb. Skeptics don’t believe in miracles and try to “demythologize” the stories of the Bible.
However, if we can argue that “miracles” merely represent natural laws that have not yet been discovered, and that “science” is merely man thinking God’s thoughts after Him, then the skeptic must hold his doubts in reserve; for he cannot know that the events described in the Bible by otherwise moral and sincere men are not true. It might seem easier for skeptics to believe that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is a fraud, than it is to believe that it represented a principle of life not yet known to science. But how can we hope to believe in anything about the past if eye witnesses cannot be trusted? And how can we gain any progress in science if anomalies are dismissed as quackery? That is the fundamental question.
Hermeneutics or Tradition?
When we as believers talk about demythologizing the Bible or any of the legends of Christian antiquities, we are not talking about disputing whether the events actually occurred. We are talking about whether the common or popularized “interpretation” of the events actually fit the language of the text and the causal factors which led them to occur. Sometimes these corrections can be unsettling to traditionalists.
For example, the names of the Gospels ascribed to their authors do not appear in the texts of Scripture but are supplied from Church Tradition. “Matthew,” “Mark,” “Luke,” and “John” do not appear in the texts themselves as the authors of the respective Gospels. They were labeled from the earliest times by the Church Fathers and we have no reason to disbelieve them, except for the Gospel of John. The internal evidence of that Gospel actually tells us who the author is: “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (21:20, 24). And the only person identified in that Gospel as the disciple Jesus loved is Lazarus (John 11:3).
Then, how did Church Tradition get mixed up and ascribe the authorship to the Apostle John? It is probably because the name “John” comes from the Hebrew word for “dove”: yownah. For reasons which cannot be explained here, the Grail Church identifies the Fourth Gospel as “the Gospel of the Dove.” The nomenclature was confused with the identity of John the Apostle.
The Firstborn of Egypt
Another example – and one which will probably be just as equally disturbing to traditionalists – is how we have interpreted the 10th Plague of Egypt: the one in which the firstborn were killed on the night of Passover.
Immanuel Velikovsky dedicates much space in his books discussing how the Ten Plagues of Egypt recorded in the early chapters of Exodus could have actually occurred as the result of natural disasters initiated by a close encounter of a planetary sized comet, perhaps the wayward planet, Venus.
Believers in a strict cosmic personalism will insist that the immediate cause of those disasters was the malevolence of an offended Deity – the Jewish God – who sent an angel to work the havoc. The notion of an “intermediate” cause – the Planet Venus – seems to be an atheistical introduction of randomness to diminish the miraculous quality of the disaster. If so, we might surmise that it wasn’t the work of Divine judgment after all to set the Israelites free, but rather a later theological explanation for how an opportunistic Egyptian rebel – Moses – took advantage of some unexpected catastrophes suffered by the ruling class to lead the slave population to freedom.
Then again, the pious believer should not expect that the cinematic portrayal of Moses’raised staff and his inaugural words of doom prior to each episode of catastrophe is necessary to the meaning of cosmic personalism. God told Abraham that He would free his descendants from Egyptian bondage in “four generations” (Genesis 15:13-16). Divine prescience would surely have known the trajectory of the wayward Venus and choreographed historical events to coincide with the approach of this instrument of His wrath.
The cometary tail of Venus may have indeed caused the bloody Nile, which in turn caused the plague of frogs, which died and caused the flies, which in the filth (dust) caused the lice, which caused the murain, which caused the boils, which then was followed by the locusts, darkness, and hail. These environmental disasters can find their origin in the various effects and consequences associated with the peculiar devastation of this unique comet.
But the advocates of a strict cosmic personalism find the night of Passover and the death of Egypt’s firstborn as a deeply personal, selective act. It does not seem possible that the poisons of a cometary tail could intelligently seek out the firstborn of every family to kill it and do so while skipping the homes marked by the blood of the lamb: “When I see the blood, I will pass over you” (Exodus 12:13).
Yet, the words of translation and popular imagination have clouded our understanding of an otherwise obvious causation. In other words, the Tenth Plague of Egypt has acquired a mythology surrounding its interpretation and consequently our understanding of it.
We find that the actual words of Scripture do not support the notion of the “firstborn” dying in the final Egyptian plague but rather the “favored,” as Velikovsky explains in commentary on Exodus 4:22-23:
“Israel, my chosen,” is “Israel bechiri”, or “bechori”.
“Israel, my firstborn,” is “Israel bekhori.”.
It is the first root which was supposed to determine the relation between God and his people. Therefore: “at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 12:29) must be read “all the select of Egypt,” as one would say, “all the flower of Egypt” or “all the strength of Egypt.” “Israel is my chosen: I shall let fall all the chosen of Egypt.”
Ages in Chaos, Vol I (Paradigma, 2009) p. 52 et al
Velikovsky inductively reviews all of the relevant Old Testament passages referring to the 10th Plague of Egypt and comes to the same conclusion, arguing against the translator’s inconsistencies, as found, for example in Psalms 78 and then asks rhetorically when comparing verse 51 to verse 31:
Were the firstborn destroyed when the wrath was turned against Egypt, and were the chosen destroyed when the wrath was turned against Israel?
(emphasis added)
Anecdotally, “the firstborn” is considered the “best” in ritual sacrifice which is why such a decision is not left to the subjective evaluation of the worshipper but rather the very firstborn is required. The firstborn is required because as a class it is designated the best – the firstfruits. It becomes the typical representation of the “best” in the land. That is why the ordinance exists in Israel’s sacrificial system as a memorial to this event.
While Velikovsky believes that it was a devastating earthquake which “destroyed nine tenths of the inhabitants according to the Midrashim” – as the Earth shook from the approaching Roche limit during the Venus flyby – The Kolbrin explains why it was the affluent Egyptians who were destroyed and not the Israelites:
On the great night of the Destroyer’s wrath, when its terror was at its height, there was a hail of rocks and the Earth heaved as pain rent her bowels. Gates, columns and walls were consumed by fire and the statues of gods were overthrown and broken. People fled outside their dwellings in fear and were slain by the hail. Those who took shelter from the hail were swallowed when the Earth split open.
The habitations of men collapsed upon those inside and there was panic on every hand, but the slaves who lived in huts in the reedlands, at the place of pits, were spared. . .
The land writhed under the wrath of the Destroyer and groaned with agony of Egypt. It shook itself and the temples and palaces of the nobles were thrown down from their foundations. The highborn ones perished in the midst of the ruins and all the strength of the land was stricken. Even the great one, the first born of Pharaoh, died with the highborn in the midst of the terror and falling stones. The children of princes were cast out into the streets and those who were not cast out died within their abodes.
The Kolbrin, page 191 (emphasis added)
Large stone structures typical of the domiciles of the wealthy are deadly during earthquakes. We surmise that “the slaves” here are the Israelites whose mud huts in the “pits” afforded them the protection of clay and low profile. Huts are usually windowless and even lack a chimney, as the open door is used for ventilation. Under these circumstances, it would be of particular value for the Israelites to shut themselves in and to seal the crevices of their doors with the coagulating blood of their lamb sacrifice. The blood would keep out the air poisoned with the sulfur dioxide (brimstone?) and deadly viruses in the comet’s tail.
While the provenance of the Kolbrin’s eyewitness account cannot be established, Velikovsky reaches the same conclusion citing the Papyrus Ipuwer (Ages in Chaos, p. 42-57) which does have an established provenance and quotes it side-by-side with the relevant texts from Exodus to show that the very same disaster as cited by the Kolbrin is what was being described here:
[T]he translator could not have been influenced by a desire to make his translation resemble the biblical text. . . Testimony from Egyptian sources about an earthquake were sought, with the purpose of establishing a synchronic moment in Egyptian and Jewish history. The evidence, when found, brought forth more analogies and showed greater resemblance to the scriptural narrative than I expected. Apparently, we have before us the testimony of an Egyptian witness of the plagues.
He also notes that the Hebrew word for “smote” in Exodus 12:27 is “nogaf” which means to “smite with a violent blow,” meaning that the night of the Angel of Death was not the quiet, creeping vapor as portrayed by Hollywood, but a deadly earthshaking and the biting suffocation of the poisonous air.
The Day of Transfiguration
Today, the Church commemorates the Transfiguration story of Christ. While we will save for another time a discussion on the nature of the miracle itself, it is important to remember to what Peter ascribed the “majesty” cited above at the beginning of this Pesher. It was not the shining garments or the presence of the great prophets, Moses and Elijah. Rather, it was the glory-cloud which engulfed them and the pronouncement:
This is my beloved Son . . .
The full text reads:
For he received from God the Father honour and glory, when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount.
2 Peter 2:17-18
It is important to remember that the Apostle refers to the Transfiguration as the “coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (2:16). It should give pause to reckless interpreters of Scripture who think “the Second Coming of Christ,” as it is used by the Apostles and by Christ Himself, is some far away event. His disciples asked for the “signs of your coming”(Matthew 24:1,2) at the Olivet discourse when they did not even yet know He was going away! The Prophet Daniel tells us what the coming of Christ really means:
I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him . . . (7:13,14)
Have you received this “coming” of Jesus Christ in faith?
With blessings,
James
Collect for the Day
O God, who on the holy mount revealed to chosen witnesses your well-beloved Son, wonderfully transfigured, in raiment white and glistening: Mercifully grant that we, being delivered from the disquietude of this world, may by faith behold the King in his beauty; who with you, O Father, and you, O Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
*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.
Copyright is reserved to the Cambrian Episcopal Church of the Grail