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Tracking the First Pagans

Jimmy Akin

A certain strand of anti-Catholicism likes to claim that the Catholic faith is essentially a kind of repackaged paganism that supplanted biblical Christianity. In its most absurd form, it claims that Catholicism is the same as the religion of ancient Babylon, which is alleged to be the wellspring from which all paganism came.

That’s the thesis of the book The Two Babylons by an eccentric, nineteenth-century Anglican, Alexander Hislop, whose work has been widely quoted and plagiarized by other anti-Catholics. Hislop’s book seems to have been written partly in answer to the conversion of John Henry Newman and the publication of Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, in which he considered the subject of alleged pagan influences on early Christianity.

Unfortunately, Hislop seems to have known almost nothing about actual pagan religions. His book contains a wild mish-mash of truths, half-truths, and falsehoods. Sometimes individual charges from the book get thrown up in the face of Catholics, who are at a loss to answer them. Often the best way to respond is to look at the text where the charge is made, find the errors in it (even if it means looking in a textbook on mythology), and then use these to demonstrate the unreliability of the source making the paganism charge.

Recently one of my coworkers asked me how to respond to a couple of panels from a Hislop-influenced tract by vehement anti-Catholic Jack Chick. The tract is titled Are Roman Catholics Christians? (You can guess his answer.) The first panel bears the image of a grim-faced Egyptian with a mascara problem (see above left). The text reads, “In ancient Babylon, they worshipped the sun god, ‘Baal.’ Then this religion moved into Egypt using different names.”

I couldn’t keep from grinning as I explained the problems with this panel. In ancient Babylon, the sun god they worshiped was Shamash. Baal was neither a Babylonian deity nor the sun god. In fact, he was the Canaanite storm god. Further, the idea that the religion of Babylon started off in Mesopotamia, crossed the Levant, where Palestine is, and then became the Egyptian religion is simply absurd. Egypt, like Mesopotamia, was one of the cradles of civilization, with its own history and its own religion.

The second panel (above right) shows an Egyptian priest, wearing a Roman-looking tunic, standing over an altar with a line of little, round wafers on it. Also in the picture are a woman with a cup of wine, a blazing sun emblem, and — most oddly — a line of Egyptian anhks with the Christian chi-rho monogram among them.

“Why is a first-century Christian monogram made up of Greek letters — the first two letters of ‘Christ’ — being pictured in ancient Egypt?” one wonders.

Of course, the answer is obvious: It’s trying to make the ancient Egyptian ceremony look as much like the Catholic Mass as possible. (That’s also the purpose of the cups of wine and the Roman-looking clothes the priest is wearing.) It doesn’t matter that, centuries before Christ, the Greek chi-rho monogram would not have been used in Egypt. 

And then there’s the text: “On the altars of Egypt were sun-shaped wafers made of unleavened bread. These wafers were consecrated by the Egyptian priests and supposedly they magically became the flesh of the sun god, Osiris.”

As before, errors abound. While Osiris was an Egyptian god, he wasn’t the sun god. That was Ra (in some cases identified with Horus). Osiris was the corn god (corn meaning “grain”) and the god of the dead. While there were grain cakes (little and not so little) connected with the worship of Osiris, since he wasn’t the sun god they weren’t shaped like the sun. They were shaped like Osiris, who had the appearance of a man.

The use of these grain cakes was connected with Osiris’s personal myth. Osiris was originally the corn god, but he was killed by his evil brother, Set, who cut up his body and threw it in the Nile. Osiris’s wife, Isis, put the body back together and brought him back to life, whereupon he retired to the underworld and became the god of the dead. Afterward Osiris’s son, Horus, took revenge on Set.

All of this is bound up in Egypt’s agricultural cycle. Every year when the Nile began to lower, making agriculture difficult, it was interpreted as the death of Osiris. Then, a few months later, when the Nile began to rise, it was interpreted as the resurrection of Osiris the corn god, bringing fruitfulness back to the land.

That’s why, every year, the Egyptians made cakes shaped like Osiris out of grain. They were an offering asking the corn god to reappear and make the land fruitful again. According to Egyptian wall art, priests even watered the cakes to get the grain in them to sprout and send up shoots. Clearly, these Osiris cakes weren’t anything like communion wafers. And the Egyptians did not believe that they transubstantiated.

Thus one can see how a seed of truth — that there were grain-cakes associated with the worship of Osiris — grew and mutated under the influence of anti-Catholicism until we have Jack Chick depicting a pagan equivalent of the Mass, complete with vestments, cups of wine, and the chi-rho monogram. Chick’s portrayal is one percent fact, ninety-nine percent fiction.

This illustrates the kind of scholarship one finds in the writings of the Babylon-influence school. These kinds of problems apply not only to particular details but to the central thesis itself — that Babylon is the point from which paganism started and spread. 

Babylon was not the first human culture, nor the first pagan one. So why does it get fingered as the origin of paganism? The reason has nothing to do with world history or the development of world religions. Instead, it has to do with the anti-Catholic’s desire to use the book of Revelation against the Catholic Church. In the book, the author, John, sees a woman described as “Babylon the great, mother of harlots and of earth’s abominations” (Rev. 17:5). Ever since the Protestant breakaway, anti-Catholics have tried to identify the Catholic Church with this woman. 

They needed to do this to rationalize breaking away from what everyone to that point had acknowledged to be the one, true Church that Christ founded. The only way one can justify breaking away from such a church is if it really isn’t the one Christ founded, but something awful that must be rejected. Protestants needed to portray the Catholic Church not as the Bride of Christ, so they portrayed it instead as the Whore of Babylon.

Hislop seized on the word “Babylon” as the key to identifying the source of the paganism with which he believed the Catholic Church to be infected. However, since there was no direct connection between ancient Babylon in Mesopotamia and the Catholic Church in Europe, paganism had to take an indirect route through non-Babylonian cultures to get to the Church. Thus, for Hislop, Babylon became the original source of paganism wherever paganism appeared, from Rome to Greece to Egypt to Assyria to India. 

Again, this has nothing to do with history. There are other cultures, earlier or simultaneous with Babylon, that had their own, independent forms of paganism. That’s not to say that there were no early paganism religions that influenced later ones. There were, but Babylon wasn’t the ultimate source.

In all likelihood the most influential proto-paganism was the religion of the Indo-Europeans, a people who probably lived either in Russia or Turkey but who began to separate, migrating through Europe and Asia, taking their language and religion with them. As the Indo-Europeans spread, their language changed, interacted with other tongues, and give rise to languages like Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, German, English, Sanskrit, Hindii, and a host of others. Their religion too seems to have spread its influence. Thus scholars note that, in areas where the people spoke an Indo-European language, there were similarities in their mythology.

For example, competent scholars have conjectured that the Norse demigod Thor and the Hindu god Indra are both developments of an original Indo-European warrior deity. Similarly, in cultures the Indo-Europeans influenced, the deities representing Heaven and Earth tend to be represented as husband and wife, where Heaven is male (as the Greek Ouranos) and Earth female (as the Greek Gaia). This paradigm crops up across multiple mythologies. Wherever the Indo-Europeans went, there tends to be a Mother Earth and Father Sky.

But even the religion of the Indo-Europeans is not all-encompassing. It is not a wellspring that explains all forms of paganism. For example, Egypt was a land with a non-Indo-European language (Egyptian was a Hamitic tongue with Semitic influences), and it had a correspondingly non-Indo-European mythology. There, the sky deity (Nut) was female and the earth deity (Geb) was male. The Egyptians thus had a Father Earth and Mother Sky.

As so often when one investigates the facts, one finds Hislop and his imitators woefully misinformed. Anti-Catholicism’s “blame it all on Babylon” strategy just doesn’t work.

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