Today we celebrate the return of Jesus from a death
ordered by God as a human sacrifice.
The holiday was
named “Easter” after Eostre, the Saxon goddess whose feast was celebrated at
the Spring equinox.
Ancient people
would not be surprised at our celebration of the resurrection of a living god
at this time of year. The death and resurrection
of gods was a well known scenario in ancient myth. The death and
resurrection of the Roman god Attis was celebrated on March 25th.
Attis was the son of Cyble, known as “The Great
Mother,” whose worship was introduced into Rome
from the Phrygia (in today’s Turkey )
around 204 BC.
The Greek god Dionysus was killed by his enemies and
died. He descended into Hades and arose again from the dead. He ascended into
heaven and sits at the right hand of Zeus.
His festival was celebrated in the Spring around the time that we now
celebrate Easter. Other gods and goddesses who died and arose again from the
dead before the birth of Jesus are Adonis, Mithras, Persephone, Semele, Heracles (or Herakles), Osirus,
Tammuz, Ishtar, and Melqart.
Christians today believe that Jesus
is the omnipotent and everlasting god who created the universe. The Catholic
Church and others believe that as the “Son of God,” Jesus is a manifestation of
God himself through the Holy Trinity. The idea of a holy trinity did not
originate with the Christians. Hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus, the
Egyptian goddess Isis was worshiped along with her consort, Sarapis, and their
child Harpocrates (Horus), as members of a Holy Trinity.
The central belief of Christianity
is that Jesus was a human sacrifice for mankind. Somehow, Christians have
accepted this teaching from an ancient, barbaric time, and still believe it
today. They believe that Man committed something called “Original Sin” and that
the only way he could achieve salvation from original and other sins was by
means of a human sacrifice. They believe that the almighty and eternal God, who
is a merciful, loving, and forgiving God, could be appeased only by this
hideous and grisly torture and lynching of a human being. Because an ordinary
human sacrifice would not be sufficient, the Son of God had to come down to
Earth to be the sacrificial victim. He had to be scourged, driven to Golgotha
under the weight of the cross, nailed to the cross, pierced with a spear, and
slowly suffocated in terrible pain until he bled to death. Crucifixion was one of the most
horrible forms of execution ever devised.
Human sacrifice was an integral part
of much early worship of the gods. Today many religions still use an altar, but
the first altars were used to sacrifice human and animal victims. References in
literature to the sacrifice of human individuals harks back to the days when
this was a routine and deeply reverent practice. In the story of the Trojan
War, Agamemnon tells his wife to prepare his daughter for her marriage. He then
takes her to the shore and sacrifices her to the gods in order to obtain
favorable winds for his trip to Troy .
You can be sure that the story is not pure whimsy. Human sacrifice was well
known in ancient Greece , as
it was in Mesopotamia , Egypt , India ,
Canaan, and Israel .
At the time of Jesus, human sacrifice was a recent memory.
It is clear
that back in the early history of the Israelites, human sacrifice was
customary. Consider the stories of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22:1-19, Japhthah and his daughter in Judges 11:30-31,
King Ahaz and his son in 2 Chronicles 28:3, and King Manasseh and his son in 2
Chronicles 33:6. Later in their history, the Israelites turned away from human
sacrifice and declared it an abomination.
Nevertheless, the New Testament repeatedly refers to
the idea that Jesus was a sacrifice for Mankind. For example, John 1:29,
“Behold the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the World;” John 2:2, “He
is propitiation for the sins of the world;” Matthew 20, “Á ransom for many;”
Matthew 26:28, “This is my blood of the New Testament which is shed for many
for the remission of sins;” Hebrews 9:23-28, “Christ was once offered to bear
the sins of many;” (See also Philippians 2:17, 4:18; Romans 12:1, 15:16; 1Peter
1:18-19, 2:5; Ephesians 1:7; and Titus 2:14).
The dogma that Jesus was crucified
as a form of atonement for Man’s sins did not become established as a doctrine
of the very early Church until the fourth century AD. Saint Augustine (354-430), who laid down many
of the Church doctrines, including the doctrine of atonement, said that man was
doomed to Hell until Jesus redeemed him. He regarded Jesus’ sacrifice “Not as
payment of a debt due to God, but as an act of justice to the Devil in
discharge of his fair and lawful claims.”
Like many other aspects of
Christianity, the idea of propitiating god with a human sacrifice, and even
having the god himself be the sacrificial victim, was not new when the Church
dreamed up this explanation of Jesus’ crucifixion. It was borrowed from old
pagan myths. I have mentioned the human sacrifices carried out by early
Israelites. The Canaanites sacrificed to the gods, and the prophets inveighed
against the sacrificing of Canaanite children to Moloch (See Samuel 17:17;
Jeremiah 7:31; Ezekiel 16:20, 20:26).
In Egypt , the priests performed human
sacrifice when the Pharaoh died. The Pharaoh was believed to be a god. His
family and servants were buried alive with him. Eventually the priests started
substituting animals, dolls and other forms of art for living victims. In
ancient Mesopotamia archaeologists have found
the tombs of kings with entire households that were buried alive when the king
was interred.
In India , it was the custom to perform
human sacrifice in order to guarantee a good harvest and appease the gods. The
victim was believed to be the god sacrificing himself, in the form of a man, to
himself as a god. The ancient Khonds of India believed that their sacrificial
victim died for all mankind and became a god.
The ancient Greeks sacrificed a
criminal at Rhodes after putting him in royal
robes. They did this in memory of the sacrifice by Kronos of his “Only begotten
Son.” Themistocles sacrificed Persian youths to Dionysus.
The feast we celebrate at Easter is nothing more than repetition of barbaric ancient mythological practices that should have died-out with the ancient religions.
