THE FAMOUS QUOTE OF ST. AUGUSTINE:
"HOW COULD THERE BE A 'CHRISTIANITY BEFORE JESUS CHRIST'? "
I remember those days in Seminary quite well as they were definitely a turning point in my life; one that I had not expected. First of all I love history and at one time has wanted to be a history teacher when in high school but events would lead me elsewhere. I would end up almost going to Medical School but would reconsider and end up in Pharmacy and would practice this profession for about ten years before entering Southwestern Seminary in Ft. Worth, Texas on the way to my Pastorate. But I never lost my love for history and this love will serve me well when I attended Seminary later in my life. I can remember while in Seminary learning of the Apostolic Fathers of the early church. I, at first, was overwhelmed when confronted with volumes and volumes of written works from the Ante-Nicene Fathers, the writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, the Nicean Fathers and the post_Nicene Fathers. It would take several years of reading them familiarize myself with not only what they said and taught but to competently follow the chronological synthesis of religious ideas and theology which would develop over these several hundreds of years. But alone the way in my voracious reading and studying of my faith in preparation for my later ministry I was often taken back by what they said. I found that often within their personal writings came confessions of deceit and dishonesty regarding the message that they were leaving the world about Jesus as "the Christ". Some of these Church Fathers and their own declarations on the pages of these early works from these Church Fathers pulled the rug right out from under my "theological feet" and shook my very life. It seemed to me the more that I read that behind all the rhetoric was an "Ancient Story" of which they knew and were but "remolding" for their time and age. It appeared to me that many of them, who addressed this issue, knew quite well of the existence of this "Christ" in the Ancient past and was only retelling the story again for the ignorant laymen of their day. What amazed me more was that some of them thought it sport and jest to teach this "Ancient Christ" and "Jesus" to these ignorant people who knew no better. Equipped with the authority of the Roman Church who held the "keys" of Heaven and Hell and who dosed out large amounts to fear to control the masses it was easy to manipulate the minds of these people and teach them what you will regardless of truth. Understand Rome had a Empire to build an they would use religious ignorance of the vast majority of the illiterate people to build it. This brings me to St. Augustine.
Saint Augustine, who became Bishop of Hippo in 395, is touted today as one of the four greatest fathers of the Christian Church. Augustine was born in Tagaste (modern Algeria). He has been called the "most erudite" and the "most prolific" of all the Early Church Fathers and the greatest theologian of all Christian history. Augustine's writings developed the theory on the Church that he is given the designation as "Doctor of the Church". It it time now to look at one of his "writings".
One of the great admissions by Augustine in his writings is one which pulls the underpinnings out from under the whole of the "unique" Christian Religion as the "only" path to Heaven which Roman Christianity attests today. I can remember it well when studying Augustine and his theology the passage that jumped out at me like few that I had read in that time of my life. In what I was reading of Augustine one day I was startled by what he said and it stopped me on a dime and I had to re-read it several times to see not only the picture of what Augustine was painting but at the same time identify with his own concern about how could there be Christianity before Christ? I read more I felt the concern and identified with the great mystery of which Augustine had written. I began to see that Augustine, the supposed greatest Church Father ever, had studied this question regarding a "Christianity before Jesus" and answered it accordingly as follows:
That which is known as the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist; from the beginning of the human race until the time when Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which already existed began to be called Christianity. (Retractt. I, xiii, cited by Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn in his Shadow of The Third Century, Elizabeth N.J.: Academy Press, 1949, p.3). Please take the time to re-read this quote above from Augustine.
I wondered at what this astounding quote from Augustine could mean. It would take several years of study on my part to identity exactly what Augustine meant by that quote. He was speaking about Egypt and the Egyptian religion which was a mixture of the Mystical and Mythical representations of Divine Truth given to the earliest of mankind on this planet. Now Augustine wrote around 400 A.D. and mind you this is far removed from the time period supposedly of the "historical Jesus". I would come to see with more study that Augustine "assumes" something that was not in this "TRUE RELIGION" which "ALREADY EXISTED FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE HUMAN RACE" which is not true; namely, that nowhere in this "TRUE REGION FROM THE BEGINNING" was there ever a "Karast/Christ" who was to come in "the flesh". This is a major study to say the least that took several years to get to the bottom of it thoroughly on my part but I did and the fruits of my studies are becoming available in various websites as time permits.
Augustine's astonishing declaration was made in the early fourth century of our era. It can be asserted with little chance of refutation that if this affirmation of the pious Augustine had not sunk out of sight, but had been kept in open view through the period of Western history, the whole course of that history would have been vastly altered for the better. It is only too likely the case that the obvious implications of this startling passage were of such a nature that its availability to the public was purposely frowned upon by the ecclesiastical authorities in every age. Augustine startling honesty in this quote held the kernel of a great truth the common knowledge of which would have been a stumbling block in the way of the perpetuation of priestly power over the general Christian mind. It would have provoked personal inquiry and disarmed the ecclesiastical prestige of much of its power.
Augustine's quote sure set me to studying like I had never before. I was slowly beginning to see that as a Christian my religion and faith might not be as "sure" as I had assumed and the more I pursued such courses of study I found that all I had was a "Swiss cheese Christian theology" which was full of holes. But it was too late for me; Pandora's box was now open thanks to Augustine and I wanted to know what this "True Religion that had already existed since the beginning of the human race" truly consisted of and I would slowly gather the pieces to this tremendous 18,000 year old puzzle together and in so doing I was equally alarmed and shocked to see that the picture "painted then by these true Ancients of Egypt about the Creator", going way back before 13,000 B.C.E., had been blurred almost beyond belief in my present day with its false presentation of the Egyptian "Karast/Christ" to me through Rome's New Testament and its falsification and misrepresentation of these earlier Ancient Truths in their depiction of the "Jesus Story".
The commentary further stated:
For what is it that the Christian saint actually says? It stands as hardly less than a point-blank repudiation of all the chief asseverations on which the structure of Christian tradition rests. Every child born to Christian parents in eighteen centuries has been indoctrinated with the unqualified belief that Christianity was completely new, and the first true, religion in world history; that it was given to the world by God himself and brought to earth by the sole divine emissary ever commissioned to convey God's truth to mankind; that it flashed out amid the lingering of Pagan darkness as the first ray of true light to illumine the pathway of evolution for the safe treading of human feet. All previous religion was the superstitious product of primitive childishness of mind. Christianity was the first piercing of the long night of black heathenism by the benignant gift of God (John G. Jackson, Christianity Before Christ, p. 1-3). (nothing could be further from the truth)!
Finally, the commentary stated:
Augustine shatters this illusion and this jealously preserved phantom of blind credulity. From remotest antiquity, he asserts, there has always existed in the world the true religion. It illuminated the intellects of the most ancient Sages, Prophets, Priests and Kings. It built the foundation for every national religion, the tenets of which consisted of reformulation of its ubiquitous ageless principles of knowledge and wisdom. It went under a variety of designations:
- Hermeticism in ancient Egypt;
- Orphism in early Greece;
- Zoroastrianism in Persia;
- Brahmanism in India;
- Taoism in China;
- The Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece
- Mithraism in Rome
- Shintoism in Japan and China.
Answer for yourself: But I thought all the above were "pagan" and wrong and evil and full of idolatry? Well they can be when you lose the "gnosis" and the secrets of how to interpret these higher Divine that were captured for all of Eternity by these Ancient Spiritualist through the agency of symbol and religious myths. When we look at the above list and read their accounts and "literalize" them as we have done with Jesus in the "Jesus Story" then we are guilty of falling into idolatry but if we possess the wisdom and knowledge as these Ancients did, who never looked at these myths at "literal" but only as "allegories expressing higher Divine Truths, then we are awe stuck and taken back by the knowledge and wisdom of these Ancient sages and Priests of God. I cannot describe it as it should be, but I have found little in life as satisfying to my Soul and Spirit as the study of Egypt, the parents of the Jewish nation, and their faith as these higher Ancient Divine Truths come alive to me as I stand startled and amazed at the depth of their knowledge of God when compared to mine growing up with a "literal" Christianity. I have attempted to bring the reader the richness of this knowledge of God possessed, like Moses for example, who grew up in Pharaoh's house. Let me say that I have been breathless by what I have uncovered and seen the Creator as more awesome today than words can covey and sadly this knowledge lays covered with millennia of sand and neglect today with the world's refocus upon Rome and its lying replacement religion with a "literal godman" instead of the Mystical and Mythical Christ which only lives "within".
In no matter what garbled and perverted form, even tribal religionism fostered this "true" and "already existing religion from the beginning of time". I sadly had to admit as I studied the depth of Augustine's quote that as an Ordained Pastor of a mega church in Dallas that I did not have this "true" religion as has mankind down through time until the emergence of the Holy Roman Empire. Mystery cultism dramatized and ritualized it in many lands. Social usages, all the annual festivals centered around the equinoxes and solstices, folktales, tales, traditions, myths, legends, and oral traditions of the common people, carried these "Ancient Truths" down the corridors of time. Always it existed among men; never was it not present in the world. Hardly ever apprehended at its real value, its representations badly misconceived, its import warped and travestied at every turn in popular practice, it yet existed and came down to Augustine's day. (Kuhn, Shadow, pp. 3-4)
But Augustine was not through as he goes on to say more startling things few have ever heard today.
"I would not believe in the Gospel myself if the authority of the Catholic Church did not influence me to do so." Against the letter of Mani, 5,6, 397 A.D.
Answer for yourself: Is this an admission that Augustine knew that the "literal" Jesus of the Catholic "Jesus Story" was a lie and that only the Mystical and Mythical "Jesus Christ" as a Heavenly Concept was true? Did Augustine know that, as the Ancients had taught since the beginning of time, through both oral traditions first and then later with recorded works, that the only true faith given by God was one that expressed unity with the Creator through the Mystical Christ within and the representation of this "Indwelling God/Christ" through the agency of Myth (the Mythical Christ)? He sure did but few reads these men today and are relegated to listening to what others have heard preached on cassette tapes by other and assorted such hearsay instead of the truth.
There is an extensive literature on the Pagan origins of Christianity. Most of these works, written by scholars for scholars, never reached the general reader. It is time they do. Email us and we will send you a recommended book list whereby you no longer have to remain in the dark concerning the truth behind the "Jesus Story". We also provide to the interested student a ministry CD containing the study materials from all 13 of our websites. Let us know if you would desire to have one. In the study of this CD the dedicated will see how the "historical Jesus", first used a teaching tool and vehicle to express Divine Truths in Judaism, will dissolve in the light of today's evidence to the contrary and in its place emerge the Divine Truth behind the Mystical Christ within as believed by the earliest Christian Jewish and Gentile Gnostics and how these Divine Truths were captured for all Eternity by the Ancients through the medium of religious myth. With acquisition of the "gnosis" and proper way to interpret these Ancient writings then one sees the puzzle pieces for what they truly are and is capable of recovering the original truths behind the "Jesus Story" as first understood by these Ancient Sages and Priests. Thank you.
- Bet Emet Ministries
- Craig M. Lyons Ms.D., D.D., M.Div.
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