Note 35 — VII SYMBOLS OF THE MESSIAH: THE LAMB AND THE CROSS THE CHRISTIAN JESUS I THE PAULINE JESUS

If in such circumstances Paul, the citizen of Tarsus, heard of a Jewish God of the name of Jesus, the ideas which were connected with him were in no way quite new and unaccustomed. Nearer Asia was, indeed, as we have seen, filled with the idea of a young and beautiful God, who reanimated Nature by his death; with popular legends connected with his violent end and glorious resurrection: and not merely in Tarsus, but also in Cyprus and in countless other places of the Western Asiatic civilised world, there was the yearly celebration in most impressive fashion of the feast of this God, who was called Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, Osiris, &c. Nowhere, perhaps, was the celebration more magnificent than at Antioch, the Syrian capital. But at Antioch, if we may believe the Acts35 on this point, the Gospel of Jesus had been preached even before Paul. Men of Cyprus and Cyrene are said to have spoken there the Word of the dead and risen Christ, not only to the Jews but also to the Greeks, and they are said to have converted many of the heathens to the new “Lord.” The Acts tells us this after it has recounted the persecution of the community of the Messiah at Jerusalem; representing the spreading of the Gospel as a consequence of the dispersion of the community that followed the persecution. It seems, however, that Cyprus—where Adonis was particularly worshipped, at Paphos—and Cyrene were very early centres from which missionaries carried abroad the faith in Christ.36 Consequently the Gospel was in origin nothing but a Judaised and spiritualised Adonis cult.37 Those earliest missionaries of whom we hear would not have attacked the faith of the Syrian heathens: they would have declared that Christ, the Messiah, the God of the Jewish religions, was Adonis: Christ is the “Lord”! They would only have attempted to draw the old native religion of Adonis into the Jewish sphere of thought, and by this means to carry on the Jewish propaganda which they could find everywhere at work, and which developed an efficacy about the beginning of our epoch such as it had never before possessed. They would carry on the propaganda, not in the sense of the strict standpoint of the Law, but of the Jewish Apocalypses and their religious teachings.38