SELF-KNOWLEDGE: A FACTOR IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL AND OF THE NATION
The path of development of a person, as of a nation, begins with one and the same important question: «Who am I?», «Who are we?»… For the individual this is the question of self-knowledge; for the nation, that of national self-consciousness.
A person cannot effectively develop that which he does not know. If a person has no self-knowledge and does not know his own capacities, he cannot apply them as is fitting. If he does not see his shortcomings, the causes that hold him back, he cannot correct them and move forward. It is the same with a nation – if it does not know its history, the value system of its Ancestors, their worldview and culture, their traditions and historical experience, it can only with difficulty organize its present consciously or determine its further path.
Self-knowledge is therefore one of the first stages of development, both for the individual and for the nation. For a nation, history – historical memory – is not simply knowledge about the past, but also the mirror of the nation’s self-knowledge. The glorious or painful pages wrought by our forefathers, the achievements and the losses, are that cultural foundation upon which identity, the sense of unity and the vision of the future are formed.
It is the knowledge of the history and the deeds of our Ancestors that smooths the path towards the recognition of one’s own identity. That is to say, a person’s self-knowledge begins with the knowledge of his roots, for he is one link in a long chain stretching from age to age, the heir of his father and the ancestor of his future generations. Consequently, he must consider not only what he has inherited, but also what he is going to leave behind him. When a person knows the history of his family and of his nation, he perceives himself not only as an inhabitant of the present, but also as the heir of the past and the forefather of the future, endowed with a great sense of responsibility: «What have I received, and what am I going to pass on?»…
For the individual, self-knowledge is a path of development; for the nation, it is the path towards the formation of national self-consciousness. An individual who possesses self-knowledge can shape his life more consciously. A nation well versed in its history and its culture can build its future with great awareness.
Below, an interesting interview on the importance of preserving national identity, with the participation of Kurm Harut Arakelyan…
In the Haykian teaching, Man is the result of the material and biological history of the Universe, one who possesses the Creator’s qualities – consciousness, ideas – and who creates values. Since time immemorial Man has been shaping: building, sculpting, depicting – embodying his conceptions, his values, his high moral standards, his perception of beauty…
Man creates art and, reciprocally, art shapes Man: it educates and forges his worldview. Art, like language, is a means of communication, with its symbols and its expressive means. And the most ancient images, the sculptures fashioned from various materials – forged or hammered – were the transmitters of ideas, the educators of generations: through the figures of the Deities they sowed the striving for perfection and expressed the harmony of strength, beauty and goodness…
After the spread of Christianity, the denial, the rejection, the negation and the repudiation of the culture of the preceding period continued from century to century, and to this day many hold mistaken notions about Armenian national culture, even though the holidays and rites that continue to be observed are rooted precisely in the national worldview.
Below we present a short explanation of the words «HETANOS» (PAGAN), «KURK» (IDOL) AND «KRAPASHT» (IDOLATER), as interpreted by the Kurm (pagan priest) Mihr Haykazuni.
ABOUT THE WORDS «PAGAN» AND «IDOLATER»
Language is not only a means of communication, but also a mode of thinking, a worldview. Accordingly, when examining the writings of manuscript codices, one takes into account the era, the author, the language of the original, the whole completed utterance, the entire content…
Many words travel a «long road» through the centuries: the world changes, and under the influence of «historical processes» words too sometimes undergo a shift of meaning. They lose their initial significance, undergo a change of value, are reinterpreted…
It is therefore necessary to know the etymology of the word in question, its most ancient meaning – its textual usage in the primary sources, its medieval reinterpretation, its later shift of meaning.
Among such words are «hetanos» (pagan), «kurk» (idol) and «krapasht» (idolater).
The initial meaning of these words, so frequently used in modern Armenian, differs sharply from the present-day religious – Christian – «negative», discrediting perception.
Etymologically, the word «hetanos» derives from the Greek «ethnos» (ἔθνος) – «people», «nation», «tribe» (in Latin «ethnicus» – «pagan», «heathen»).
It is this word «ethnos» that underlies many modern scholarly terms designating a historically formed human group with shared cultural, linguistic or identity features. In Syriac it occurs in the forms «htnos / hetnos / hetanos».
From the same root as the word «ethnos» is formed the adjective «ethnikos» ἐθνικός, meaning «national», «belonging to the people»; later, in Christian literature, it takes on the meaning «non-Hebrew», «non-Christian» – «of another religion» – often with a strongly negative sense: «impure», «abominable».
In the Greek translation of the books of the Old Testament – the «Septuagint», made in the 3rd-2nd centuries before the Roman era in the city of Alexandria in Egypt, and from which the Classical Armenian (Grabar) translation was later made – the word «ethnos» is used to designate the other nations apart from the people of Israel, in the sense of «foreigner», as a person belonging to another nation: as the equivalent of the Hebrew word «goy», which at the outset meant precisely «nation», in the general sense of «any nation», but which was thereafter used as an expression of insult and dishonour, with a disdainful, sharply contemptuous shade of meaning.
That is to say: those who call the Haykian teaching – which glorifies Creation, Wisdom and Light, and one’s own Ancestors – «pagan» and «heathen» are defiling, reviling, debasing and dishonouring the Armenian’s sanctities, Armenianness, the Armenian’s identity…
In the case of the words «kurk» (idol) and «krapasht» (idolater) too, a change in the significance and meaning of the word came about through historical circumstances. At their root lies «kurn, kur», in the sense of «compact, dense, hard, firm, solid», and the verb «krel»: to strengthen, to hammer, to cast – and figuratively to forge, to fashion, to create.
«Kur – the root of krel (to forge) and kran (hammer): as in «forged, beaten, cast and trodden, compact, thronged, dense, firm, steadfast, exceedingly hard, enduring: …(«Turn not aside from the royal solid (kur) highway»).
In the most ancient times, the sculptures and statues of stone, of wood, or cast from metal – forged and hammered – were the symbols of the presence of the Deities, of the remembrance of their Creator’s power, of the «embodiment» of their qualities and virtues.
After the spread of Christianity, as an expression of its worldview, the former beliefs and the teachings differing from Christianity were rejected, were regarded negatively, and were presented as the symbol of «error», «evil», «immorality», «darkness and delusion». Hence those cast, forged and hammered sculptures, as well as the images made of wood or of stone, were branded «idolatry» – and yet to this day, within Christianity itself, those very same sculptures and images and the frescoes have been used with even greater display, as an accessible «illustrated history» of Christian themes for the unknowing, which recounted the religious «stories» to illiterate believers who could not read, and conveyed to them the content of the «religious writings»…
Faithful to the teaching of his Ancestors, the Armenian strove always to hold fast to the luminous ideas of Sun-worship, and continued his national holidays and rites, in defiance of the religion imposed with great violence through foreigners.
He consciously rejected the appellation «pagan» bestowed by another nation – an appellation which denied, condemned and devalued what was national: the Haykian teaching, the road leading towards Knowledge and Light, towards Higher consciousness. It denied national identity, deemed the national culture of the Armenians «darkness», «error», «vulgar» and «evil», and did away with the memory of the Armenian Forefathers and with the songs and the tales that immortalized their deeds of valour…
Let us be conscious and dignified Haykazunis, holding high the Haykian system of values and our national identity. Notwithstanding a usage that has continued from century to century, let us not tolerate the humiliating labels «pagan» and «heathen» applied to the highly valuable culture the Armenian has created, nor the ideological struggle waged against Light and Knowledge, imposed ever since the 4th century…
«Just as in the works of Shakespeare, in Rome we seek ourselves, the mirror of our own being. And perhaps that is why it so bewitches everyone»… (Avetis Aharonyan)
Standing in Rome before the column of Marcus Aurelius, Avetis Aharonyan set down his reflections, the last part of which we present below at last.
The beginning is in the preceding publications…
6. DOES HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF? This is an old and grievous question, and always with differing answers, according to the conditions of place and of time. This wretched history repeats itself to the degree that the human creature who fashions it repeats himself as a social factor – with his blind passions, with his emotions, with his instincts now destructive and now constructive, now with the riches of his soul and now captive to the fury of his accursed matter. Destructive and unbridled whirlwinds and tempests and so many merciless collapses follow one upon another, as do radiant, exquisite dawns – out of the eternally storm-tossed bosom of one and the same nature.
I do not know about other times, but with this past war it seems that before our stunned gaze the events accomplished two thousand years ago came to be told over again, so that the new generations, rebellious after the torpor of the centuries, might live through the whole shudder of life and of human destiny.
Indeed, the first clash between Armenia and Rome and, in general, the development of the mutual relations of East and West in those times is a disheartening reminder of the political and economic interrelations between the great imperialist states of our own day and the small nations that strive for independence. Let us set aside the question of history repeating itself; but after seeing all that we saw and lived through, how can we not say, with sorrow and soul-wearing bitterness, that two thousand years of high civilization, borne upon the wings of the wondrous doctrine of the «Great Crucified One», have apparently not at all sufficed to cleanse humanity of the density of its original sin, of the pestilential outbursts of its animal nature (atavism), which, like the flood tide and the ebb of the human sea, rise and fall in torrents of blood, and menstruate.
Put today’s great states in the place of Rome – with their covetous ambitions, their perfidious and conspiratorial politics, their plundering, predatory manner of acting, with all their military perfection and capability – against backward or simply less numerous peoples, and the picture will be complete. Certainly, twenty centuries and more before this, the name «Rome» and «Roman» thundered throughout the whole East, as in modern times the name «Europe» and «European». In the old days in the East, by «Roman» men understood not only force, might and invincible military capacities, but also philosophy, letters, the high arts – in a word, civilization, and above all law and justice, which lent so much allure and grandeur to this wondrous empire risen in the distant West.
The same was true, before the great war, of the name of the European for the peoples of the East, to which was always bound not only the notion of good breeding, of cultivated taste, of intelligence and of military might, but also something else that is hard to define: that mysterious, magical meaning of Europe which, even before its appearance, already morally subdued and ruled Asia from one end to the other. This hard-to-define, vague, almost mysterious quality of the European – as of the Roman in antiquity – is the notion of human perfection: a new and more excellent apprehension of high morality, of freedom, of right and of justice. Just as in our own days the civilized West, in consequence of this world war, spread out before the East its complete spiritual and moral bankruptcy concealed beneath an outward veneer, in just the same way civilized Rome, together with the superiority of its force, displayed in Asia Minor a squalid pettiness and a conspiratorial politics unworthy of a great empire, a dishonourable trampling of justice and of right, the devastation and the violence visited upon defeated nations and cities – often in their most merciless forms.
Just as in our times the East knelt before Europe, before the European, from afar, without even coming into close contact, so too in antiquity Armenia and Asia Minor worshipped the civilization of the West. Certainly, by an unforced impulse they turned their gaze towards Rome – until they saw and tasted, together with its might, its boundless mercilessness and its trampling and contempt towards the so-called «barbarian nations». And just as today, by a wretched coincidence, Armenia lived through most profoundly all the bitterness, all the injustice, all the intrigue and perfidy of that fateful encounter. And in that time, as now, Armenia received from the West the most treacherous blow, and beheld from close at hand, with loathing, the morality of the rulers of the great empire.
The nations saw with pain and astonishment that Rome’s much-vaunted law and its expression were one thing for the Roman and something different for themselves. And it seems that the Armenian nation, already in the days of Tigranes the Great and his immediate successors, saw the very same disillusionments that we see – we, the living generations – through the baseness of the Allied powers. And yet twenty centuries have passed since that time…
Is there a curse upon this West, that it has remained always unjust, squalid and perfidious, even towards those nations which cast themselves open-heartedly towards the West and its civilization, and whose only shortcoming is that they are not savage and are «exceedingly few» in number? I speak of Armenia. The unthinkable conspiratorial fraud and baseness committed against us has still not received its full elucidation. We saw what brilliant possibilities Rome annihilated in the East – and particularly in the Armenian world – by dismantling our state, created by wise and solid Armenian efforts. Thanks to an upright and mighty Armenia, how many later catastrophes, how many miseries would have vanished, and from how many devastations and massacres would Armenia and Asia Minor have been spared! How many barbarians of Central Asia would have been buried in their sandy deserts, and the fury and the onrush of how many bloodthirsty world-conquerors would have been shattered upon the granite of our mountains; and the Balkans, Hellas and the West in general would not have seen the abominable domination of the Turkic-Mongol hordes, who for whole centuries thrust back every possibility of civilization in those flourishing lands. It is not in vain that from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean the shoots still rise with difficulty to this day, that the annihilated forests are still only now putting forth new tendrils, and that the mother soil still groans from the blows dealt it by the yatagans. The devastation of Armenia – like a divine vengeance – became the devastation of the whole East. And in the 15th century Byzantium met exactly the same fate as Armenia, with its marvellously built capitals.
I have said that the whole measure and depth of the Allies’ intrigue and baseness against Armenia has still not been fully brought to light. By the turn of history and of fortune, Armenia became the vanguard of the civilization of the West, and the guardian and the leader of the Aryan spirit and of the Aryan peoples in Asia Minor. Armenia – this little Europe of the East, a kind of advanced sentinel of the West – was unexpectedly abandoned to its fate at the very hour when it stood most in need of help. To leave the solitary and far-flung sentinel without relief, without help, against enemies storming in from all four sides: that is the sign of the spirit of modern times and the greatest crime of the states that call themselves civilized.
There are injustices that bear within them the germ of a terrible requital. Rome and Byzantium destroyed Armenia, only to feel in their own turn the weight of the barbarians’ heels. Will it remain, then, without a terrible requital – this most recent enmity and crime committed against Armenia? The future history of the world will tell. For now, what we see is the death of trust and of faith towards Europe and the European. The whole East has already been shaken; and there are millions who grind their teeth and shake their fists at the civilized world. On the Russian steppes there has risen the fearsome Demos, which lays waste and annihilates all those things for the sake of which the Allies supposedly waged this past unthinkable war and these massacres. The gigantic fraud has been laid bare; no one is deceived any longer. The blood of Armenia cries out for justice…
… But I am in the new Rome, standing beneath the column of Marcus Aurelius, and I am stirring the ashes of the old, old memories of my native world: Armenia!, Armenia!, thou forever unforgotten, thou forever sacrificed and ever just, let me believe once more in thy destiny.
A nation preserves its existence not only by political power, but also by culture, by national memory, by creative force…
In his travel reflections, Avetis Aharonyan addresses the role of the historical past and of national culture in the shaping of a new identity. In Italy, before the monuments of the past, the Armenian intellectual meditates upon the influence of civilization and upon self-examination…
How does a people preserve its memory? How does art contribute to the development of national self-consciousness?… The continuation of «Italian Sketches» is below. The beginning is in the preceding publications.
3. THE «NO» OF TIGRANES THE GREAT
I am not writing history, but historical and literary sketches. Yet how am I to leave unmentioned the fateful meeting of Tigranes the Great with Rome’s first envoy, Claudius Appius, at Antioch, which at that time lay under the suzerainty of the Armenian King of Kings? Certainly the Romans were not unacquainted with Tigranes; but the interview at Antioch took place in such extraordinary circumstances that it might truly be called dramatic.
Mithridates had already been defeated by Lucullus and, a fugitive who had escaped by a hair’s breadth, had thrown himself within the borders of Armenia, seeking refuge and protection from his son-in-law, the mighty king of the Armenians. Tigranes knew that Rome’s envoy had come, in the name of Lucullus, to demand that Mithridates be surrendered to Rome.
The Armenian monarch received Appius with all his royal pomp and splendour. He was seated upon a gold-embroidered throne, surrounded by his generals, his high-ranking courtiers and his counsellors, the sceptre in his hand and the pearl-strung crown upon his head. Tigranes was by then an elderly man, long past sixty. The years, however, had bent neither his back, nor his manly vigour and strength, nor his royal bearing. He was a powerfully built man; clean-shaven after the Roman fashion and sinewy, he seemed far younger than his years. His strong profile, dominated by a shapely nose and a firm, obstinate jaw, his high and proud forehead, his wise and deep-set eyes and his thunderous, thoughtful gaze were all comeliness and strength, and an unforced, spontaneous majesty. At least thus do we see him upon the coins he left behind, which are reckoned the finest in the history of numismatics.
Before the Armenian king sat Appius Claudius, the young Roman, the envoy of Lucullus, who, in spite of his age, possessed the world-conquering spirit and consciousness of his great and powerful homeland, and bore himself with the cold-blooded composure of a seasoned and elderly man. And there sat face to face not two men, but two worlds: East and West.
On that day, at that hour, in Antioch, in the palace of the Armenian king, the fate of numerous nations was being decided for centuries to come. To whom was Asia to belong – to Armenia or to Rome? The aged Armenian king looked from beneath his brows at the bold young man seated before him. Not only did he already know the purpose of this Roman’s coming, but he was also well acquainted with all the intrigues that Appius Claudius had contrived against him along his way, within his own country. His agents had kept the King of Kings informed hour by hour of his guest’s perfidious undertakings, and he knew full well which of his vassal princes had forged a secret alliance against him.
Plutarch tries in vain to persuade us that Tigranes was merely an Oriental despot, filled with boundless arrogance and captive to the fluctuations of his violent and elemental temperament, and above all to his wrath. Tigranes’ diplomatic capacity is indisputable: he knew how to weigh his word and his deed. Otherwise he would have been incapable of directing the destiny of the peoples of Anterior Asia for twenty-five years. He grasped profoundly the fateful value of the moment; he knew who was seated before him, even though the Roman strove to give his bearing a simple and innocent character. This, no doubt, was the reason why, over the gloom of his keen eyes, there lay a subtle, ironic smile, which Plutarch inaccurately calls «an open and cheerful countenance».
Tigranes received Appius with restraint and courtesy, and the latter handed him the letter of Lucullus, in which the Roman general had deliberately omitted the title of King of Kings … Tigranes frowned severely: this was his most sensitive point and, in spite of his sharp inner agitation, he once again restrained himself. He understood well that this contemptuous attitude of Lucullus towards his person was a political act greater than a mere want of decorum: brutal in its form and weighty in its presumed consequences.
It was by now clear to him that Rome, in disowning his title, was indirectly refusing to recognize his dominions and the empire he had founded. The great and historic struggle between East and West was beginning anew. What Tigranes had heard was correct. By his letter Lucullus demanded Mithridates, which Appius confirmed orally as well, adding that he had come expressly to take away the king of Pontus, who belonged to the victories of Lucullus, and that if Tigranes refused, then there would be war. Silence fell. This declaration of the young Roman was audacious. The king’s entourage waited with bated breath to hear what Tigranes would answer. And suddenly, in the stony silence, the word of the sombre king was heard.
«NO»,- said Tigranes in a deep and tranquil voice,- «No, Mithridates is the guest of the Armenian King of Kings and shall never be surrendered to you. And if Rome needs war, he will be able to defend himself. Say so to him who sent you». He deliberately refrained from calling Lucullus a general, just as the latter had intentionally ignored his title of «King of Kings». In this same manner, by his command, his letter of reply to the Roman general was drawn up.
The audience was at an end. Between Armenia and Rome there was war. Tigranes cast his heavy sword decisively into the scales of Mars… For the sake of Mithridates? No, certainly not. Tigranes knew perfectly well that Lucullus’ demand for Mithridates was merely a pretext for declaring war upon him. He was profoundly convinced that the war against Armenia had already been resolved upon long before the coming of Appius.
Tigranes, who had succeeded in bringing almost the whole of Asia Minor, together with Mesopotamia, under his authority not only by the power of arms but also by his extraordinary abilities as a statesman, would not have been so imprudent and short-sighted as to expose his state lightly to danger for the sake of Mithridates, even though the latter was the father of his beloved wife Cleopatra.
The great collisions of nations do not spring from the caprices of individuals, nor from anyone’s love: the war of Troy, supposedly waged for the sake of the beautiful Helen, is a charming myth that cradled the childhood of mankind.
The true causes of wars escape the sight of the crowds and always remain hidden, and armies are very often set in motion by attractive pretexts.
After settling its accounts with Pontus, avaricious Rome had turned its predatory gaze towards Armenia. Tigranes knew this very well and grasped very quickly that to accept humiliations at the hands of Lucullus, or to make himself abject and abase himself, was not only unworthy of his royal glory and his political standing, but also entirely useless for the peace of himself and of his state. And he accepted Rome’s challenge in a manner befitting a king.
The outcome of this war proved unfortunate for Armenia. Lucullus, and Pompey who succeeded him, raised the glory and the might of Rome in Armenia after Pontus. A little above we saw that this was inevitable for many reasons.
Did Tigranes expect these consequences? Probably not. But whatever might come, he could not bow his head to Rome without a fight. Otherwise he would have had to destroy with his own hands the structure of that vast and glorious empire raised by twenty-five years of effort. It is fitting to recall here that this fateful «no» of Tigranes the Great, as an expression of our racial temperament, was repeated afterwards, by an astonishing coincidence, in the most anguished periods of our history. Every time the Armenian people was called upon to speak its decisive word, between the independence of its homeland and submission to the foreign tyrant, its answer was always a firm and conscious «no».
Thus, some five centuries after Tigranes the Great, when Yazdegerd II of the Persians demanded of the Armenian people the renunciation of its conscience and of its freedom, the Armenian nation rose up once more as one man and uttered its contemptuous and audacious «no». And in the year 451 the Armenian national assembly of Ashtishat, in spite of extraordinary and difficult circumstances, at once found its national hero, who embodied the will of the race, and placed the ancient Armenian sword in Vardan’s mighty right hand.
And thereafter, how many, how many times did the Armenian people, often leaderless and its homeland parcelled out piece by piece, rise to its feet against the mightiest of enemies for its freedom and for its just, unfettered conscience. Let me recall at least the very last of these, the one accomplished in our own days, before our own eyes, which so recalls the sacred war of the Vardanank. I speak of the Armenian National Assembly convened at Alexandropol in the spring of 1918. The Russians had fled from the Caucasus, the neighbours all around us were against us, the Turkish invasion was advancing menacingly towards our frontiers, and our army, though self-sacrificing and brave, was few in number and still young. And behold, at that anguished hour the representatives of the nation were called, as in the fifth century, to accept either struggle or slavery. The Turk demands the acceptance of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. «NO», answers the Armenian National Assembly once again, unanimously, and accepts war against the superior forces of the enemy.
After the event, expert diplomats are born who will perhaps attempt to cast a shadow over the supreme and magnificent onslaught of a freedom-craving nation. There will come wise knights of submission who, clad in priestly purple, observe with narrowed eyes the storm-swept course of history and make attempts at condemnation or at vulgar criticism addressed to the leaders of the nation’s anguished days. All this is understandable and logically inevitable. But a defeat suffered in a terrible and decisive struggle has a meaning that escapes the eyes of the faint-hearted and that silently governs the destiny of defeated and bowed-down peoples.
Nations deprived of freedom and broken often draw courage out of tears and bitter grief. The searing memories of defeat and the gnashing of teeth never remain without consequence.
«Igdirmava, 1866. Even a man possessing the most elementary and meagre acquaintance with Armenian literature knows that this proper name, lost and forsaken among those distant plains, set side by side with a date a hundred years old, signify only and always the Swarthy Aramazd of Armenian literature, that is to say the one born in the very heart of Armenia itself, Avetis Aharonyan»… So wrote, on the occasion of the centenary of Avetis Aharonyan’s birth, the Armenian poet, prose writer, publicist, critic, editor and teacher Eduard Boyajian, who was born on 9 April 1915 and was three months old when he took shelter upon the mountain together with the other participants in the heroic battle of Musa Dagh, and was afterwards moved to Egypt. The continuation of Avetis Aharonyan’s «Italian Sketches» is below (the beginning is in the previous publication).
2. A PREMATURE AND FATEFUL ENCOUNTER
Indeed, Armenia did not easily bow its head before Rome. This «supreme war» befitted, more than anything else, the audacious and obstinate resistance of Armenia. And this in spite of the wholly exceptional and unequal conditions in which that collision took place, from the very outset. Rome moved towards the Near East and Armenia in the period of the full maturity of its governmental, military and political development, when almost the whole of today’s civilized West had, as we have said, long since been bent beneath its sword and its law. It had a thousand years of military glory and experience. It had assimilated the exemplary military and political methods of Hellas and knew how to apply them admirably. It knew the last word in the military art of those days, and its army, mercenary though it was, loved its trade of war, in which the hope of gain and plunder and of easy enrichment, rather than of glory, was very often borne out.
Thus, in the first century (B.C.), Rome’s rear was quite untroubled for a campaign towards the East, since the West, after numerous convulsions, had already grown calm. And around the command of the army of the East there was every time a tremendous struggle among the ever-renowned generals. Thus Lucullus, Pompey, Crassus, Marcus Antonius – each in his turn was obliged in Rome to overcome great obstacles, to resort to many machinations, to make his way through intrigues, in order to secure the command of the army of the East. Victory there seemed easy, and glory assured.
And then, the whole of Asia Minor, with its wealth and its opulence, was as alluring as a promised land. Already in all of Rome’s campaigns the thirst for gold occupied a foremost place. The generals returning from the East in particular entered Rome with boundless riches, and in their triumphal processions what most enticed the avaricious and pleasure-loving crowd of Rome was the variety and the abundance of the booty brought back by the hero. Certainly these fortunate commanders did not forget their own persons either. Lucullus and Pompey are very interesting examples from this point of view.
Such was this thousand-year-old Rome, suckled at the teats of the she-wolf, implacable in its ferocious appetite, which moved in solid array, militarily, politically and as a state, against our Tigranes the Great, in the first half of the first century (B.C.). It is true: Armenia at that time was a mighty world-ruling state, and Tigranes II was emperor of the Armenians, or King of Kings, as he was then called. And by the power of arms he had already brought under his imperial sceptre the numerous nations on all four sides of him. He had wrested from the Parthians the title of «king of kings»; he had subdued Greek, Jew, Seleucid, Arab and Mede, as well as numerous Caucasian hordes. All the countries stretching from the Caucasus range and the Caspian Sea to Ecbatana (Hamadan), Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine and Cappadocia were united to Armenia, under the absolute authority of Tigranes the Great.
«This King of Kings,- says Plutarch,- who is so mighty that he has snatched Asia from the Parthians, who has transported whole Greek cities as far as Media, who has subjugated Palestine and Syria, has exterminated the successors of the Seleucids and has carried off their wives and daughters into captivity» (Plutarch, volume 2, page 516). «He, Tigranes,- Plutarch continues,- with very slender means was able to subdue numerous nations and to humble the state of the Parthians, as no other prince had ever been able to do before that. Tigranes peopled Mesopotamia with Greeks, displacing them from Cilicia and from Cappadocia, and he removed the nomadic Arabs from their dwelling places and settled them within his borders, in order to make them serve commerce» (Plutarch, volume 2, page 526).
Furthermore, what Plutarch says of the court life of Tigranes and of the captive kings, four of whom supposedly served him like slaves, seems a fable whose purpose is to present the Armenian emperor as a ferocious Oriental tyrant. Here, as in many other instances, it is not the historian who speaks, but a partial man who, being a Greek, cannot tolerate the dominion of Tigranes, especially over the Greeks. It is evident too that Plutarch, by exaggerating the might of Tigranes, strives to make his defeat more stupefying, the sting of the humiliation suffered more searing, and the worth of the victory won greater. The fact is, however, that however truly mighty Tigranes may have been in the East over the Parthians and over Asia Minor, the empire he had founded was still an infant compared with Rome. The nations he had crushed and subjugated, for the most part barbarous hordes, were utterly devoid of any conception of statehood. And the more civilized Greek and Jewish elements were to him a veiled enemy.
Rome had evidently long been working to destroy the state of Tigranes from within, since Plutarch speaks explicitly of a Roman party in Armenia. Thus Appius, who was going as envoy from Lucullus to Tigranes to demand Mithridates, was able along his way to win over to the side of the Romanophiles, very easily, many kings who were disaffected with the authority of Tigranes.
«Numerous newly subjugated cities,- says Plutarch,- secretly sent envoys to Appius, who promised them the help of Lucullus, enjoining them, however, to remain quiet for the time being until the hour should come». And then Plutarch adds in passing, as an insignificant fact: «The dominion of Tigranes was unbearable to the Greeks» (Plutarch, volume 2, page 525).
And certainly the real and secret aim of Appius’ mission was precisely this: to contrive intrigues against Tigranes. The whole secret of the history of Tigranes lies here. The numerous Greek cities that lay under his dominion had already undermined the foundations of the Armenian empire even before the coming of Lucullus. The appearance of the Roman armies was merely the signal for dealing the final blow to the newly formed state.
The new capital of the empire, Tigranakert, which Tigranes founded in great haste by the force of his sceptre in order to place the centre of his state in a fitting location, was not free from the malady of this anti-Armenian policy. Its Greek inhabitants were waiting for the Romans to arrive, in order to revolt.
Armenia, upon this path of world dominion, still had neither the military, nor the governmental, nor above all the civic traditions by which Rome was so strong. Everything was new and unsteady, and needed time in order to be consolidated. And that time was fatefully wanting to it. This collision of Armenia and Rome resembles a struggle between a strong, fully armed man and a promising, stout-hearted, sprightly youth with a rich future before him, the outcome of which was not difficult to foresee. The greatest calamity of our whole national existence and of our racial destiny was Armenia’s premature collision with the invincible might of Rome. Our entire subsequent history has borne the disastrous consequences of that collision, and bears them to this day.
The writer, publicist and political figure Avetis Aharonyan, who spent his childhood and his youth in Igdirmava beneath the «mysterious gaze» of Masis, was in Paris in 1919-1920, at the Peace Conference, together with the members of the two Armenian delegations, in order to present the struggle of the Armenian people and its just claims.
The intellectual, conscious of the importance of self-knowledge, everywhere raised his voice upon the questions of the Homeland, of Armenian culture and of the preservation of national memory. In the course of his journey in Italy he delivered to his readers, with an eloquent pen, the reflections that came to him in Rome before the column of Marcus Aurelius. That monument is a fragment of the heritage of ancient Rome, and it is also a testimony to one of the periods in the millennia-long history of the struggle waged by the Armenian people.
In the entry below we present the first part of the chapter that concludes Avetis Aharonyan’s travelogue «Italian Sketches», written in a vivid and emotional style, which was published in the magazine «Hayrenik» (1929, April, no. 6). The continuation is in the following publications…
ARMENIA AGAINST ROME Written by A. AHARONYAN
1. ARMENIS DEVICTIS I found Armenia in Rome: my brave, my valiant and mournful homeland. This was no surprise to me. Ancient Rome knew geography and loved to forge history beneath very distant horizons. Armenia did not remain unknown to it, any more than many other countries of the Near East did. I saw Armenia upon the triumphal column of Marcus Aurelius. And so I dedicate this last chapter of my «Sketches» to the old and the new, the evil and the good of our world. (This series of articles forms the last chapter of «Italian Sketches», which we judged it fitting to publish under a separate title.)
For two weeks now I have been roaming about this magical city, and my steps lead me almost mechanically towards the Piazza Colonna, where since the year 176 there has risen the triumphal column of Marcus Aurelius, dedicated to the memory of his father Antoninus Pius. The Roman Senate erected it in order to immortalize the glory of the philosopher emperor and the memory of his spiritual father. This marble column is twenty-six metres high, and upon it, in serpentine reliefs, the images of the victories of Marcus Aurelius stretch upwards. At the summit there stood at first the statue of the emperor, which Pope Sixtus V took down, setting in its place the effigy of St. Paul.
The art of this monument is the same as that of all similar structures in Rome – massiveness, a want of grace and severity of taste. What draws me, however, is not this column itself so much as the inscription carved in large Latin letters upon its pedestal, with its mention of the Armenian and of Armenia:
M. AVRELIUS IMP. Armenis, Parthis, Germanis, Bello Maximo devictic Triumphalem Hanc colomnam Rebus gestisinsignem Imp. Antonio Pio patri dedicaviti.
Which means approximately the following.. «Marcus Aurelius Imperator, having vanquished in the supreme war the Armenians, the Parthians and the Germans, dedicated this triumphal column, a glorification of the deeds he accomplished, to his father, the Imperator Antoninus Pius».
Armenis ! … What a terrible abyss is the human soul, with its hidden longings unknown to us, which flash out unexpectedly and all at once upon our inner darkness, like thunderbolts furrowing a sombre sky. And how unhappy it is, that soul, which often writhes in silence from a dark, tormenting pain, while we, believing it long since worn away and soothed, smile at the world and at life. Unhappy and mighty at once, since, hidden from us and independent of us, it is the master and the governor of our inner world: the source of our thoughts, the ruler of our will, which, alas, we wretchedly suppose to be free and independent. It has roads foreign and unknown to us, along which we walk obediently, against our will, and when we pass through its crossroads we hear with astonishment the ringing of footsteps beside us – we, the eternal pitiful wayfarers. And our life proceeds always along paths hidden from us, which we imagine that we ourselves have traced.
How many, how many times have I seen this Piazza, and always upon a new pretext, but in truth in the depths of my soul one single magical word has kept sounding: Armenis ! … The bustle of the crowd, the rumbling of carriages, the shouting of the newspaper sellers, dust, jostling, and I alone in the centre of this square, my gaze fixed upon this enchanting column.
What witchery, what an exquisite dream, what glory, rising from the depths of the centuries beneath this smiling sky, amid this human din. The image of an intimate kinsman that suddenly rears up before you; the sweet lullaby of your aged mother, which this time sounds like a heavenly melody. My soul, obedient to that voice, huddles against the cold marble like a homeless bird, to warm itself with the warmth of old memories. I am stirring the ashes of my native hearth; I read again and again.
Armenia ! … my sweet, my immortal homeland, that one day measured yourself against the terrible might of Rome. And against whom did you not stand in battle? Against which world-conqueror, which tyrant did you not rise up, for your just, everlastingly radiant conscience and for the freedom of your unstained arms? Armenia… my unhappy homeland, our present is a nightmare after so many glories; it is a shame upon us, the generations now living…
To what have we come? The Armenian who once clashed with Rome has, because of the barbarous Turk, nowhere in all the world to lay his head.
Armenia, Armenia, the Armenia remaining from those «terrible and illustrious» (Khorenatsi) giants – an enchanting music sounding out of thirty centuries…
Around me the panting life of the great city seethes and groans like one in agony. Its yesterday and its today confounded together, this people has a kind of convulsive tremor that shakes it with dreaming and audacious longings. Obedient to the voice of their native ruins, many gazes are turned towards the east. The passers-by salute one another like the Catos, the Pompeys and the Caesars, extending the right arm towards the distant horizon. Behind me is the Consulta, the ministry of foreign affairs, where there sits a man with muscles of iron, with full and powerful jaws and a will of bronze, who shows his fist to the West and smiles at the East… I know that diabolical agents have arrived from Angora; after defiling, devastating and bloodying the whole of the Anterior East, they have hastened to the new Rome to understand the meaning of this salute of the ancient Roman arm…
My mind has become a whirling river which, beating «century by century», carries within its surges so many glories and so many collapses. Triumphant ascent and calamitous fall, military onrush with storm-breathing steeds, and the sting of history; the blossoming of new vigour and new life upon the graves of enemies, and the fresh devastation wrought by barbarous hordes… And the nations pass in rows before my eyes, like forests uprooted by a tempest, and they rush over our land, now shattered beneath the blows of our armies, now walking victorious upon our backs. There is in the world no history more tragically great, more terrible in its depth, more stupefying in its upheavals, richer in the sinewy convulsions of the will of a race and forged with iron vigour, than ours. The rhythm of the life of the Armenian land is the measure of universal history. The impiety of nations and the inner worth of their conduct were revealed in our land. Agents from Angora have arrived in Rome…
The Roman soldier who shattered the golden statue of our Golden Mother Anahit, according to tradition, withered away. Is this true? I do not know. But it is known that Marcus Antonius, the true author of that sacrilege, paid for that crime as he deserved. The Turk, who devastates and profanes tens of thousands of temples and memorials, and this dull-witted and savage race, which destroys by the million those human temples not made by hands, are they then to remain unpunished… I do not know. Agents have arrived from Angora in Rome, to understand the worth of its new salute…
And I read once more: Armenis … devietis … «The Armenians, vanquished». I read, and I do not blush in the least at this defeat of my great forefathers, for before us stood Rome, which had never been vanquished. And then, in this reverse we have as companions in fortune the formidable Parthians and the ever-ferocious Germans.
And why these alone? From the British isles and Spain as far as Persia, Mesopotamia and Arabia, and of all the nations perched around the Mediterranean, which one withstood the might of Rome? Which one did not bend its back before its legions and its law? Which even among today’s great nations has not tasted the severity of Rome’s dominion? All of these without distinction, all in their turn, for centuries breathed the dust from the feet of the Caesars’ steeds and felt the weight of their hooves upon their backs. And how many of their princes passed in chains along the via Sacra, lending splendour to the processions of victorious generals, and went to be sacrificed in the temple of Capitoline Zeus.
Gauls, Germans and Britons by the thousand, in the course of the centuries, served in the circuses of Rome, on a par with barbarians, to amuse the crowd. A little further on we shall see that in those same days Armenia, «exceedingly small in number», like its own sacred native river Araks, always remained «a caster-down of bridges», even in the face of Rome’s crushing, universal might.
The scant fragments of songs rescued from the most ancient Armenian epic, handed down orally from age to age, «by word of mouth», later appeared in manuscript codices, bringing down to us the breath and the spirit of far-off days…
«Who would give me the smoke of the chimney, And the morning of Navasard, The running of the deer, And the coursing of the stags; We sounded the horn, And we beat the drum, As is the custom of kings»…
K. Atoyan addressed the Navasard games in an article decades ago, which we publish below.
THE NAVASARD GAMES
Among all the most ancient peoples, the Armenians included, beginning as early as the pagan period, a great place was given to mass festivals and rites, in which, together with other ceremonies, sporting festivals and games were also held. The sporting festivals introduced into those celebrations were regarded by the ancient Armenians as a means of developing physical qualities (strength, agility, speed, endurance, suppleness), as well as of cultivating moral and volitional qualities. Among the ancient Armenian celebrations it is important to mention the Navasard festivals, which encompassed a number of popular games. It is of course of interest to know whence these celebrations or games received the name «Navasardian». Since the ancient Armenians held their greatest and most thronged (national) feast in the month of Navasard, which corresponds to the present-day August and in part to September, these feasts were therefore called «Navasardian», and the sporting festivals that found a place in the programme of those feasts, «the Navasard games».
Among the ancient Armenians, physical culture and the activities comprised within it are bound up with the picturesque places of Armenia, in whose embrace the popular celebrations and the sporting festivals were held. Even foreign chroniclers speak of the fact that the ancient Armenians loved to hold a number of mass festivals in the open air. The Navasard celebrations and the sporting festivals that found a place in their programme were concentrated and held at Shahapivan in Bagrevand, a place «fair to look upon» and «fragrant with flowers». The Navasard celebrations, and among them the sporting festivals, were held with the participation of a great throng of people.
Armenian historians describe how people came from every extremity of Armenia in order to take part in these celebrations; on foot (day and night) the people covered hundreds of kilometres in order to take part in their national feast, and some part of them in the sporting festivals as well. As to the time from which the Navasard sporting festivals or celebrations began to be held, the first to report it is Alishan, according to whom the Navasard celebrations were held for the first time 2492 years before our era. If that date is correct, then it must be said that the Navasard celebrations, and among them the Navasard sporting festivals, have a history of approximately 4450 years. The sporting festivals were held over a duration of 6 days.
The 6th day of the celebration was dedicated to Hayk, the «forefather» of the Armenians, who, according to tradition, having entered into a wrestling match with Bel, the tyrant of Assyria, defeated him and delivered Armenia from destruction. The feast dedicated to Hayk was held on the 11th of August. In the sporting festivals of the celebrations dedicated to the memory of Hayk, the forms of single combat (wrestling, spear-fighting, swordsmanship and the like) found an especially large place; in the course of these, valiant young men, displaying their strength and their other physical qualities, wished to be like brave Hayk. These forms of sport, like other games of strength, the people displayed also on the day dedicated to Vahagn, who according to tradition was held to be the god of valour.
There is information that «special games» were also given a place in the ceremonies dedicated to these two mythological heroes, but as to what games these were, nothing is said about it. Therefore, taking into account that at the Vardavar celebrations various games were held, active ones as well as sporting and military ones, it must be supposed that these games found a place in the Navasard celebrations or sporting festivals as well, since the Vardavar celebrations are by their nature almost the same as the Navasard celebrations, or their continuation in the Christian period. The ancient Armenian Navasard sporting festivals resembled in their nature the world-renowned Greek Olympic games.
From our historians we learn that at the Greek Olympiads the victors received a laurel wreath as a prize. There was an award of the very same kind for the victors of the Navasard games as well. At the same time other gifts too were presented to the victors. The awarding of the victors took place in the presence of the king or of the nobles. Another of the features these two most ancient festivals had in common is that, if at the Greek Olympic games the kindling of the Olympic fire was a tradition, then a ceremony of the same type found a place in the Navasard celebrations as well.
There is information that the unquenchable fire of the Navasard festivals was kept burning upon the «Mirhakan Mehyan» of the city of Bagrevand for as long a time as it took for the festivals to come to an end. In the Navasard sporting festivals a large place was found by the idea of the harmonious or beautiful development (build) of the body, something which found its expression among the Greeks as well.
There is information that at the Navasard sporting festivals many of the wrestlers anointed their bodies with various oils, which served, first, the purpose of making holds more difficult; second, so that the body should shine and take on a beautiful appearance; and third, as Yeghishe, the 5th-century Armenian writer, says, this anointing also had a strengthening significance. We see the same among the Greek professional wrestlers, who, after anointing their bodies, also rubbed themselves with dry sand.
The Armenian people, in spite of the fierce resistance of Christianity, was able to preserve the Navasard celebrations and the sporting festivals inherited from the pagan period, because these celebrations, besides their other purposes, were also held to be the largest and most popular of the ancient Armenian sporting events. In these festivals the people found the very means of all-round physical development; it fostered, cultivated and developed a number of moral, volitional and physical qualities which, in that period, were a necessity in the struggle against foreign tyrants as well.
Now a few words about the contests. There is information that the Navasard sporting festivals were held in an organized manner and took place after the completion of special rites, in which the whole multitude took part. The principal and mass contests were held in special arenas (according to the data reported by our writers, by «asparez» are understood the grounds for horse racing, games, wrestling, foot races and the like).
Both youths and grown men took part in the contests. Besides the individual contests, competitions were also held between the athletes of the provinces. In the Navasard celebrations a large place was found by the contests of wrestling, or, as the historians call it, «fighting locked in close embrace», in which both youths and grown men took part. The fist-fighters (boxing) competed as well. They wore upon their hands special bindings of leather or of cloth, which took the place of gloves. As a military game, swordsmanship was very widespread; during it the combatants also bore shields upon them in order to protect themselves from the blows. What is interesting is that in the forms of sporting single combat the combatants, in order to give the people amusement, would mask themselves by putting on various costumes, and only then fight (it must be supposed that such festivals were also considered theatrical spectacles).
In the programme of the Navasard sporting festivals a large place was found also by the various games connected with running, by races over various distances, by spear-fighting and the throwing of the spear, by various active and military games and the like. In these festivals a large place was found, and great amusement given to the people, by the various exercises connected with equestrian sport (horse races, various games on horseback), and by the ball game, which must be considered a specimen of stick-play, in which the players struck the ball with sticks. Besides those mentioned above, at the Navasard celebrations the people also made use of various water games, of buffalo-loosing (bullfighting), of the releasing of doves and the like.
It must not be thought that in antiquity the Armenians took part in such manifold celebrations in every period. Our forebears held events of this kind in the peaceful years, which were of a temporary character. Such thronged rejoicings, and among them the mass sporting festivals, were repeatedly disrupted on account of the invasions of foreign tyrants.
Besides the foreign enemies, Christianity too organized a great campaign against the ancient Armenian culture that took its beginning in the pagan period.
After being recognized as the state religion in Armenia, Christianity began to wage a merciless struggle against every domain of the centuries-old culture created in the pagan period, including the sporting festivals, calling them «satanic» performances.
In spite of the fact that Christianity became an obstacle to the holding of the old popular celebrations and of the sporting festivals, and in the course of its struggle attained certain «successes», it was nevertheless unable to do away with them entirely. The Navasard celebrations and the sporting festivals that found a place within them, with their characteristic features, passing from century to century and from generation to generation, have been preserved in living form down to our own days.
In the course of its existence of many centuries the Armenian people has fashioned a rich and substantial culture, one of whose constituent parts is physical culture, which comprises within it an entire system of physical education. The sporting festivals that found a place in this system, and the various sporting games and exercises comprised within them, received their origin, as well as their development, for the most part from the Navasard festivals.
K. ATOYAN Senior lecturer at the Armenian State Institute of Physical Culture
In the April 1929 number of the magazine «Hayrenik» there was published M. Terpeterean’s article «Jesus of Nazareth», which we present below.
IT MAY BE DECLARED without reservation that Christianity is the greatest revolution in history. Over approximately half the surface of the world, one third of civilized humanity labours today beneath the Christian banner, and the helm of human progress is thus far in the hands of the Christian nations. It is true that the Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilizations, with their great men and their great works, hold sway to this day over the intellectual life of the world; but it is in the name of Jesus that history has recorded the greatest events of Western civilization for close upon two thousand years. Buddha and Muhammad too have left indelible traces in history, and to this day nearly one milliard of men are guided by their precepts and their laws; but Jesus is the greatest figure of the Western world. It is he who succeeds Julius Caesar as the sovereign of the world: upon Byzantine coins the radiant image of Jesus is to be seen in place of the emperor’s countenance. In his name empires and sovereign rights are transferred from one occupant of the throne to another. From Rome and from Byzantium he passes to the whole of Europe, and all authorities issue from him in order to return to him: the prophecy of the Revelation is fulfilled completely.
Who was Jesus Christ? According to the testimony of the Gospels, Jesus was the son of God, who took flesh of a virgin Jewess called Mary; he was born as a man in the manger of Bethlehem; he preached the Christian religion; by the order of Pilate he was crucified in his thirtieth year; he was buried, and on the third day he rose again and with a human body ascended into heaven to his father, God. Jesus, therefore, is at one and the same time both man and God, and those two natures are united to each other in a manner incomprehensible and, consequently, inexplicable.
This faith, which for nearly two thousand years has prevailed among the overwhelming majority of Christians, has naturally no scientific foundation whatever. It is a religious revelation, that is to say a truth revealed by God, in which one must believe without criticism or hesitation in order to be found worthy of the kingdom of God. Mary conceived without a husband; Jesus raised the dead, and he himself rose again after being crucified and buried… These are miracles which cannot be proved by experiment, as one can, for example, test with instruments that water is composed of oxygen and hydrogen. One must believe that it is so. Faith is a virtue which God bestows upon his elect. Blessed are they to whom that virtue has been given; but faith lies outside history: it can content itself with the mysteries of which it has need. But the period of the origin of Christianity, and the historicity of Jesus, that is to say whether he really lived or not, belong to science. The Church has prepared that history in accordance with its own aims and its own interests. It is the duty of critical history to verify whether things really are as they have been represented. Blessed, I say, are the believers, for it is indeed a happiness to live tranquilly without seeking the «why» and the «how» of events and phenomena. But even were it desirable, is it possible, especially in such an age as this, when science is advancing gigantically in every field?
Apart from credulity and superstition, no proof exists, nor can exist, that demonstrates the immaculate birth of Jesus and his supernatural resurrection and divinity… And without having any aim of anti-Christian or anti-religious propaganda, I desire that our intellectual youth too should know what contemporary historical critics think concerning Jesus, and what the prevailing opinion is regarding the historicity of Jesus. Whoever believes that he knows a truth has not only the right but also the duty to communicate it to his fellows. «It is from the collision of ideas that light bursts forth»,- says the wisdom of the peoples. In order to give occasion to no misunderstanding, however, I must say beforehand that to reject the divinity or the historicity of Jesus does not mean to reject the existence of God. It is possible to be a sincere worshipper of God without believing in the divinity of Jesus. The subject of this article is Jesus of Nazareth and not God the creator.
It is wrong, of course, to make anti-religious propaganda to those who do not possess the necessary scientific and moral equipment. Religion is a bridle for the ignorant common man who acts by instinct. Faith is a lamp for the despairing man who gropes in darkness and uncertainty, and whoever desires to snatch that lamp from his hand has the duty of guiding him. To wrest away that lamp without replacing it with a guide of equal power means to lead the despairing common man astray in the darkness and to condemn him to perdition.
It is possible, of course, to object that the bridle of religion is not strong enough, and that murderers and evildoers have continued their exploits from time immemorial, and now more than ever. Undoubtedly. But humanity is not composed solely of ferocious brutes who count hell, the gallows and the torments of prison as nothing. There are also honest men in countless numbers, for whom the moral bridle of religion is far stronger than any other restraining force. The vast multitude of the martyrs is a witness to those sentiments. This article is for those who have moral strength and conscience enough to refrain from evil, not in order to escape punishment in any form whatever, but as a useful and fraternal member of the universal human family; and to do good, not in order to be found worthy of any earthly or heavenly recompense, but purely for the love of the good, that is to say for the supreme and irreplaceable personal pleasure that beneficence bestows.
This article is for those who, without prejudice or preconceived opinion, without passion or hatred, have goodwill and courage enough to study any question impartially and without bias, and to express the idea they have formed without reservation.
All religions have played their great and often important part in human history, and it is unseemly for any cultivated man to mock them or to bear himself insolently towards them. Respectful behaviour, however, must not prevent any honest man from studying freely, without exaggeration or extenuation and, above all, without bigotry.
The data of today’s documents are not sufficient to prove the existence of Jesus as a historical person. If, however, it should tomorrow be possible to prove the contrary, we must at once be able to yield before the stronger evidence. Today’s truth may tomorrow be declared a falsehood, and today’s falsehood may prove to be tomorrow’s truth.
Some say that it is of no importance whether Jesus existed or did not exist. The question is the existence of Christianity, which has been a fact for two thousand years. And yet, in my view, no honest man can remain indifferent to this question. The denial of the existence of a person who dominated a period of two thousand years is a sufficiently grave matter for not only the Christian world but even non-Christian humanity to take a serious interest in it. Let us pass on, then, to our subject.
Is there any undeniable proof of the historical existence of Jesus as a man? Doubtless thousands of Jews lived before Jesus, in his time and after him, under the name of Yeshoa, Yesua and so forth; but it is difficult to prove that the Jesus described in the Gospels, as the founder of the Christian religion, really lived and preached in Palestine or elsewhere. There have been those who denied the divine origin of Jesus from the earliest centuries, and today it is almost impossible to find anyone sufficiently cultivated who sincerely gives credence to the miraculous birth or the resurrection of Jesus. But those who call the historical existence of Jesus into question have appeared only in the last centuries.
Ernest Renan is the best-known historian to have occupied himself with Jesus. According to him, Jesus lived as a man, and his extraordinary abilities and his boundless goodness were the cause of his being made a god in the eyes of the people after his death, like many heroes of legend; and the gospels are the miraculous biographies of the man Jesus. Renan’s aim was to divest Jesus of his divinity and to place him at the summit of human perfection. According to Renan, no man higher than Jesus has existed nor will be able to exist. His cult will always remain fresh upon the earth, and his legend will everlastingly draw tears from the most beautiful eyes.
Recently Henri Barbusse, the communist writer, has also published a work in which he defends the idea that Jesus was a revolutionary active in the time of the Herods who, endowed with an extraordinary genius, broke with the past and preached the greatest idea of the future: internationalism. The revolutionaries born before him and after him occupied themselves only with the Jewish people, whereas Jesus speaks to the unfortunate and the lowly of the whole world.
All the pre-Jesus religions,- says Barbusse,- had been revealed from heaven: an invisible and inexplicable god dictates his laws and his will to men, who are his children, his slaves. To this idea Jesus opposes the idea of the god-man, which every man can find within himself: every devout person can forge his own personal and inward god by his efforts towards the good, towards the beautiful and towards the true. By the collectivity of those individual gods the real god is constituted, whose will is the universal laws, composed of all the joys, the sorrows and the mysteries of man.
But, as with Renan, so too the chief object of Barbusse’s concern is the denial of the divinity of Jesus and not the demonstration of the historicity of the man Jesus. They do not occupy themselves with historical documents. For both of them the existence of Jesus is undeniable, since Christianity exists.
There are critics who conclude, from the various topographical and biographical particulars mentioned in the gospels, that Jesus was one of the leaders of the revolt that arose in the year 760 of Rome, the year 7 of the Christian era, at the time of the census organized by the order of Quirinius: a son of Judas the Gaulonite, who was seized by the hand of Pilate and put to death with all his partisans. There are also many other critics who think that the gospels are wholly fabricated, and that Jesus is a legend like many another legend of history.
Following Prof. Mangasarian, I published a series of articles on this subject in the May and June numbers of «Yerkunk» in 1913, and if I am not mistaken that was the first Armenian publication to call the historicity of Jesus into question. A good while afterwards I learned that it had given occasion to many criticisms in the Armenian religious papers published at that time. It is not surprising, of course; on the contrary, it is very natural that religious leaders should be disturbed on the occasion of any article that casts doubt upon the existence of Jesus, which constitutes the foundation of their religion. What indeed will become of the prestige and the influence that the Christian church has enjoyed for nearly 2000 years, if it should be absolutely proved that the gospels are fabricated? If those millions and milliards of Christians who, though with different tongues and different manners, lived, laboured and suffered for his ideal, first upon the shores of the Mediterranean and by degrees over the whole world, had known the reality, had been aware that his virgin birth and his divine resurrection are legends… History would assuredly have taken an entirely different course, and half our planet would present a different aspect today.
Incalculable are the material and moral sacrifices that have been made, and are still being made today, in the name of Jesus throughout the whole Christian world. Beginning with the magnificent mediaeval Gothic cathedrals of Rome, Paris, London and so forth, each of which is the fruit of several centuries of sacrifice and labour, there is not the smallest village that does not have its church, its meeting-house, where multitudes of believers have gone and still go to open their hearts to the unknown and invisible son of God and to await from him, in the world to come, the requital of the injustices of this world. Every dead person, prince or subject, wise or foolish, man or woman, has upon his grave the cross, the symbol of Jesus, as a witness of the covenant sealed with him, of the immortality promised.
On the other hand, it is in the name of Jesus that the greatest atrocities of history have been committed, and in his name that the greatest wars have been waged. In his name were carried out the horrifying crimes and persecutions of the Middle Ages against everything that was displeasing to the church. In spite of the very great advances that have taken place in the social, the scientific and other fields, even today Jesus is the foundation of family life in civilized Europe and America. As soon as the infant is born it is baptized in his name, for the expiation of original sin.
The religious marriage follows upon the civil marriage, and burial does not take place without a priest. Fortunately, science is already strong enough to make its voice heard, and the pyres of the Inquisition no longer threaten its pioneers. With gratitude humanity ought to remember all those who in modern times, by their deeds, their words and their boldness, and often at the cost of their lives, bestowed this freedom upon us.
Intellectual bondage weighs more heavily upon men than political bondage. Unfortunately, I have had no occasion to read the criticisms of my article in «Yerkunk», and I do not know upon what historical or scientific proofs they rest. I am sure, however, that their only weapon is blind faith. It is impossible to argue with someone who can believe that a man can be born of a virgin, die, be buried and rise again and ascend into heaven…
While respecting those believers who are sincere in their thinking, let us examine the life of Jesus in the light of history and by the ordinary methods of critical history.
History too is a science, like chemistry or physics: it demands a certain preparation, at least elementary knowledge of the condition of the various peoples and countries and of the relations they had with one another. It is necessary to transport oneself in mind into the environment in which the event occurred, and to take into account the time and the conditions with all their circumstances. Today, for example, only the common people still believe in the existence of demons or jinn, of witches or sorcerers. But there was a time when serious men too believed in them sincerely. Luther once hurled his inkpot at the devil, who had come to disturb his labours… It has rightly been said that our children of today know more than the philosophers of antiquity.
In order to follow our inquiries with understanding, let us briefly recall the political situation of the first centuries of the Christian era and the conditions prevailing in Palestine. The whole of Europe, Asia Minor and Judaea lay under Roman dominion. Julius Caesar was succeeded by the emperor Augustus, who died in the year 14 of the Christian era. He was succeeded upon the throne of Rome by Tiberius (14-37), Caligula (37-41), Claudius (41-54), Nero (54-68), Vespasian (69-79), Titus (79-81), Domitian (81-96), Trajan (89-117), Hadrian (117-138), Antoninus (138-161) and Marcus Aurelius (161-180). Palestine was divided into three provinces – from north to south: Galilee, Samaria, and Judah or Judaea. Over it, with the consent and the help of Rome, there ruled as king of Judaea Herod the Great, who died 4 years before the Christian era, Herod Agrippa, until the year 38 after Christ, Herod Agrippa I (37-44) and Herod Agrippa II (52-69). Under their hand were the procurators who, as representatives of the emperor of Rome, discharged the office of judge and of tax-collector. Pilate, who tried Jesus, was a procurator.
Throughout Palestine and Syria the Aramaic vernacular was spoken, while the literary language was Greek, and it is in that language that the gospels are written, as well as many other religious and messianic works and revelations, all of them by Jews. Hebrew was already dead and out of use outside the synagogue; three centuries before the birth of Christ the scriptures had already been translated into Greek, by the order of Ptolemy, at the hands of seventy Egyptian Jews upon the island of Pharos.
What are the methods of critical history for studying the authenticity of any historical event or person? – To collate all the documents – histories, chronicles, letters, inscriptions and so forth – and to arrange them in chronological order, giving precedence to contemporaries, and above all to those historians who have no interest of any kind in giving a particular colour to the event or the person under examination. To verify the events, where possible, by different sources independent of one another and unknown to one another, and to endeavour to explain the discrepancies, if there be any, and to determine which is the more worthy of credence.
And what, then, are the historical documents for the existence of Jesus? – The four gospels; the «Epistles of the Apostles» and the «Acts of the Apostles», called the «New Testament» and accepted by the church as authentic, for there are also many gospels and writings declared apocryphal, in the Greek and Latin languages, which came to light for mercenary purposes in the third and fourth centuries. Let us say first of all that not one of the manuscripts that are today in our hands is an original: all of them are transcriptions of presumed copies, and the heading translated from the Greek original, marked upon the first page of the printed gospels, is an absolute falsehood, if original means written by the author.
The four authentic Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have as it were been set apart by a miracle from among many other gospels – the Gospel of the Infancy, the «Gospel of the Shepherd» and so forth – and, according to the church, were written by the apostles contemporary with Jesus himself or by their disciples. These four may be reduced to two, because the gospels of Matthew and of Luke are variants (variante) of the gospel of Mark, written for different environments – Luke in Rome and Matthew in Syria. Those three, which are called synoptic (Synoptique), are often almost literally alike and relate the same events. Thus we have only the gospels of John and of Mark as the object of our examination. Now the Gospel of John is entirely worthless as a historical document: it is wholly a theological, mystical dream, a vision, a Revelation (apocalypse), like many others that existed among the Jews, written in the last days of the approaching end of the world and by the hand of men fired with the hope of the coming of the messiah. The author knows only the Word (logos), which is the light and the life; there is nothing tangible, nothing real in the Revelation. The Word, in the language of Plato, signified the source of ideas. Philo of Alexandria, the Jewish philosopher, a neo-Platonist, presents the word as an outward manifestation, a reflection, of God. For the gnostic (gnostique) philosophers, on the other hand, the Word is an emanation of the ineffable God, which goes and chooses a human body as its dwelling while it is upon the earth. All the epic poets too have written in the same manner. In the Iliad Homer likewise gives a human body to the gods and goddesses of Olympus, every time they wish to defend some hero from death. In order to give an idea of the style of John’s Revelation, let us cite a passage. Revelation Ch. IV. «I saw that there was a door opened in heaven, and the first voice that I heard was like a trumpet, which said to me: «Come up hither, and I will show thee the things which shall be hereafter»; the spirit came upon me and I saw a throne which was set in heaven, and upon the throne one was seated, and he that sat was like in appearance to a jasper stone, while round about the throne there was a rainbow like unto an emerald; round about the throne there were four and twenty elders with white raiment and with crowns of gold upon their heads; from the throne there went forth lightnings and voices, and before it there were seven lamps of fire, which are the seven spirits of God; and round about the throne there were four living creatures, which had eyes before them and behind them; the first was like a lion, the second like a calf, the third like a man and the fourth like an eagle. Each one of the creatures had six wings and they never rested, but said: holy, holy, holy Lord God, who was, who is and who is to come». A writing of such style and such content cannot pass through the crucible of critical method. A dream is not open to criticism. It is possible to dream all manner of absurd things, but a dream is not reality… There remains, then, only the gospel of Mark as a document. But before proceeding to examine it, let us study that customary supposition that, since Christianity exists, Jesus therefore existed.
This is a very strong and logical inference, upon superficial consideration. Every effect has a cause, and since the religion exists, the hero of that religion must therefore have existed as well. But we must not forget that we are not in the physical and material world, but in the field of feeling and of conjecture. To declare that humanity is incapable of creating or of imagining so perfect a being as Jesus is highly dishonouring to man. Were Osiris a pharaoh, Adonis a hunter, Demeter a peasant woman or Mithra a Persian prince, to begin with? Do not all poets create their ideal heroes in order to give body to some ideal of their own?
In order to grasp the Christian origin well, let us see what the religious condition was among the peoples living under Roman dominion in the first century of Christ. The Jewish Jehovah was a national god, peculiar to Israel alone. Among the Greek-speaking elements of Asia Minor the intellectuals were tossed about among Stoic, Epicurean, Sceptic, Platonic, Pythagorean and other manifold and often contradictory philosophical ideas. The Greek and Roman mythologies had lost their charm, and Roman officials compelled the people to bow down before the images of the emperors, even during their lifetime.
All these confused conceptions, united with the practice of Egyptian, Chaldean, Assyrian and other manifold religious cults, formed a conflagration ready to burst into flame, which wanted only a match. That match was kindled by the messianists: the apostles who preached Christianity were all of them messianists, fanatical Jews who preached not the God made man of the gospels but the Messiah promised by their prophets. In order to grasp their ideas well, their origin must be recalled. Israel held the faith that the delights of the world had been created for it: Israel is the chosen people of Jehovah, and even the apostle Paul himself, who preached to the heathen, let no occasion slip of declaring that salvation is from the Jews, because they are the first. According to the Mosaic traditions, a bilateral covenant had been sealed between Jehovah and Israel which, beginning with Noah and with Abraham, had received its final form at the hands of Moses upon Mount Sinai – stamped upon tablets of stone by the very fingers of Jehovah himself: the Torah (the law). By putting that Torah into execution, Israel served Jehovah, who in return was himself to give to the seed of Israel the strength and the possibility of ruling the whole world. But when, at what hour, how and by whose hand… These questions have been answered by the prophets at different times, with different conceptions and in different ways. But the foundation is the same: the expectation of the coming of the Messiah – messianism. God will fulfil his promise by the hand of his Servant, his son, his beloved, the messiah (anointed=Christ). Beginning from the times of David the realization of that hope was discerned at various periods, but especially after the destruction of the kingdom, during the Babylonian captivity, that imperishable hope took body beneath the pens of the greater and the lesser prophets. Before ruling the world, that Messiah was naturally to save Israel from its captivity, and that is the reason why Isaiah does not hesitate to call king Cyrus a Messiah – a Goy (heathen, non-Jew), an uncircumcised Persian who put an end to the Babylonian captivity. Since those days – perhaps until this very day – all the Jews, with their eyes turned towards heaven, await that saviour (Salvator, Soter) who is to be born of the seed of David in order to save them.
From the first period of the dominion of the Herods the messianic hope began to grow strong, and John the Baptist from the Jordan proclaimed that the kingdom of God was at hand. From 50 years before the Christian era until 150 years after it – from the emperor Augustus until Hadrian – Palestine was delivered to fire and sword on account of various insurrections. Many messiahs arose at once and with their adherents stirred up the people to revolt against the Romans.
The chief of the leaders of those insurrectionary movements are, beginning with the Maccabees: Ezekias, in the time of Herod the Great, 50 years before the Christian era; Judas the Gaulonite (Gaulonite), who founded the fanatical sect of the Zealots – his maxim was to call no mortal «Lord»: Jehovah alone is the lord, and it is sacrilege to name Herod or the emperor of Rome «Lord»; Judas and Matthew the Zealots, who in the year 5 of the Christian era shattered the golden eagles set up by the order of Herod the Great above the chief gate of the temple of Solomon; Theudas, who in the time of the emperor Claudius advanced as far as the Jordan with his soldiers; and Menahem, one of the sons of Judas of Gamala, who ruled Jerusalem for three days, until the arrival of the Roman legions. An Egyptian Jew reached as far as the Mount of Olives with his satellites, while later still, in the time of the emperor Hadrian, Bar-Kochba for several years together inflicted defeat upon the Roman garrisons, waging a perfect partisan warfare. The Jewish people was divided into two groups – the messianists (Davidists, Christists), who were against the dominion of Rome and against the Herods, and the temple party, the rabbis, who preached prudence and tolerated the yoke of Rome, since the worship of their religion was free. These messianic and Christist sectaries, after the destruction of Jerusalem, were scattered together with the people into Asia Minor, Athens and Rome. Defeated in the political field, they laid the foundation of Christianity, which is Judaism adapted to the heathen. They are always the chief leaders, the shepherds, and all the Jewish writings are holy and sacred for all the Christists and likewise for the Christians who issued from them.
The chief difference of Christianity from Judaism is its universal, international character. Jehovah, who belonged to the Jews alone, is preached to the heathen. Long before the Christian era, Simon the Just, Jesus the son of Sirach, Hillel and, above all, Philo had discredited Judaic formalism and the divine monopoly. Rabbi Yohanan preached that mercy is more vital than the law. Withdrawing by degrees from the Judaic monopoly, Jehovah was easily preached to the heathen.
The cult of a great dead man is different from a divine cult. The charm of a crucified man could not have upon his contemporaries the influence that was had by the God preached by Paul and by Peter, as a new manifestation of Jehovah, as a spirit that revealed itself to its believers by visions and by miracles; the new description was already there in the Revelations. According to the apostle Paul, the death and the resurrection of Jesus are mystical, they take place in heaven and not upon the earth; those events are outside time and outside space – they are objects of faith and not historical events.
Christianity is not the work of one individual: its founders are the prophets who described the Messiah – John the Baptist, who proclaimed his imminent coming; Cephas (Peter), who saw Jesus upon the seashore and upon the mountain of Galilee; Stephen the Protomartyr, who before dying saw him above the Sanhedrin; the apostle Paul, who met him in the desert of Damascus, and so forth. But let us not confuse these founders of the religion with the God whom they preached. The gospels are the fruit and the consequence of these visions, of these beliefs, and not their point of departure. It is possible to object that, since Peter, Paul, Stephen and so forth, who are Jews of bone and of flesh, saw Jesus, he therefore lived as a man. Yes; but all of them saw the risen Jesus. The man Jesus before his death – the son of man – has not been described by them. They did not know, they did not see, the Jesus who was born of a virgin in Bethlehem and went to a wedding in Cana. The difference, I think, is plain, and the apostle Paul in Galatians I. 16 emphasizes that difference, saying:- «When God willed it, he determined to reveal his son to me, that I should preach him to the heathen»… Between the heavenly-bodied Jesus and the earthly-bodied apostle there is, as it were, an everlasting appointment. Paul in Corinthians Ch. XII. verses 2-4 says: «Behold the visions and the Revelations that I have had concerning the Lord – I was caught up unto the third heaven and heard words which may not be told»…
Let us grant his sincerity and banish from our minds every suspicion of hallucination (hallucination): could a real Jesus have raised him up to the third heaven? In the apostolic epistles there are passages from which it may be inferred that Jesus really had a body; but it is a body of such a kind as is in all times and in every place: it cannot have been our body – that body is, in any case, not the body we understand, but an incorporeal body, if you will.
But when the primitive mystical period had passed and the believers multiplied, Jesus ceased to be a spirit, a phantom. The simple-minded and heathen believer did not grasp the ideas of a Jewish messianist. For him matter was needed, and the shepherds understood that they would imperil their position if they did not give way. The cruelties of the Herods, the authority of Pilate, the messianic revolutions and so forth were fresh memories, and since the Psalm said that the servant of God should be crucified, who could crucify him but the Romans?
When the material had thus been amassed – the Messiah, the cross and so forth – the writing of a gospel became very easy for any person versed in the Scriptures, and we shall see how closely the Gospels are bound to the Scriptures. The part of the match that kindled the conflagration of Christianity was performed by Peter, Paul, Stephen and so forth, who thought that they saw Jesus and made their vision known to the people. Before passing to the Gospels, let us examine the Apostolic Epistles, of which those of Paul, fourteen in number, are the most ancient. According to the most certain researches, they are far more ancient than the gospels.
What do we see in the epistles of Paul? The author makes not a single mention of a virgin-born Jesus; he does not know Bethlehem and its famous manger; the apostle Paul takes no interest in any event whatever of the human life of Jesus… Let us reflect well, I beg: one of the founders of Christianity, not to say the chief of them, goes to Asia Minor, to Athens and as far as Rome to preach Jesus, and forgets to mention even once his virgin-born nature…
In all his letters he preaches love, and not once does he have occasion to mention that Jesus spoke thus upon love in such and such a place… Is it not astonishing that Paul does not once mention any one of the four gospels…
It is logical, I think, to infer that he does not mention them because neither the gospels nor the legend of the virgin birth of Jesus existed… These epistles of Paul were probably written in the years 50-60 of the Christian era, and they are the earliest Christian documents. In those epistles God and Jesus are identified with each other. In Thessalonians Ch. III Paul says:- «God himself and our father and our Lord Jesus Christ prosper our way unto you». The verb is in the singular, by which he means to say that God, who is the father, is at the same time our lord Jesus Christ. The Jewish four-letter word «Yehveh», which is God, Jehovah, is expressed in the Greek translation of the Seventy by the word «Lord» (Kyrios). Paul, who writes in Greek, uses the same word «Kyrios», «Lord», for Jesus as well as for God. To say «Lord» to anyone save God was sacrilege for the Jews, and Paul always says «lord» of Jesus, without any fear of uttering a forbidden word. The prophet Zechariah in Ch. XIII verse 5 says: «And my Lord God shall come together with all the saints». And Paul writes in Thessalonians III. 13: «At the coming of our lord Jesus Christ together with all his saints». Jehovah, the Lord, the Kyrios according to the Greek, who had been revealed by means of the prophets to Jerusalem and to Israel alone – now, after the destruction of Jerusalem and the scattering (diaspora) of the Jews, is revealed to the heathen by means of the apostles and the evangelists.
As we have said, the Jews were forbidden by Jehovah himself to take his name upon their lips. Now how is it possible to accept that Paul could say «Lord» to a man, or attribute to him the creation of the world and of man? Either Paul did not exist, or Jesus did not. There is no third possibility. For Paul the man Jesus does not exist, but the Lord Jesus, the God. He opens the Scripture, which says (the prophecy of Joel II. 32): «Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be delivered»… and he writes in Romans X. 13: «Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved»… The first is for Jehovah, the second for Jesus. The prophet Isaiah writes concerning Jehovah, XLV 23: «I am the Lord, there is no other saviour beside me; before me shall every knee bow and every tongue shall confess me». Paul writes concerning Jesus, Philippians II 10-11: «That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord»… In the times of Paul there were many men who had been made gods. The subjects of the whole empire bowed down before the image of the emperor Claudius himself. But what was permissible and possible for everyone was impossible for a Jew. It is impossible to imagine that the Jew Paul, the son of a Jew, grown up in the synagogue, could say «God» of a man… Every upright man must revolt against this supposition. That later on Greeks and Syrians, who had no connection whatever with the Torah and with the synagogue, identified the man Jesus with the God Jehovah – that is comprehensible. But the first Jewish apostles were incapable of committing that sacrilege: the Jew would endure every torment, but from his lips he could not pronounce the four letters of Jehovah, much less identify him with one born of a human womb…
Christianity was born when there were identified with Jehovah the Messiah of the prophets, the God-Servant of Isaiah and the Persecuted Just One of the Psalms, and thus there appeared the idea of a son of God who had died and risen again and who was to judge the world. But that vague spirit took body at the moment when, in a vision, it appeared as a man to Peter, to Paul, to Stephen and so forth. Those visions of the apostles and the descriptions of them became the spark that kindled the conflagration of Christianity. Peter and Paul saw, or thought that they saw, an outward manifestation of Jehovah, as Abraham, Jacob, Moses and so forth had seen. It was later still that they gave that Jehovah a human body, and were by degrees compelled also to give him a place in history by fabricating miraculous and spurious tales. Jesus was not a teacher of religion but the faith itself: he was not a Muhammad but the Allah.
Let us pass to the evangelists. It is perhaps wrong to say «evangelists», because they are probably not the works of a single author. A Gospel according to John, according to Luke and so forth signifies that they are compilations. The epistles of Paul display the author’s literary erudition, his vivid imagination and his brilliant mind, whereas the Gospels are often senseless, diffuse and incoherent compositions, full of numberless repetitions, contradictions and chronological errors: they are events moulded upon the Scriptures, often in a literal manner. The passion, the death and the resurrection of Jesus are founded chiefly upon the LIIIrd chapter of the prophet Isaiah, upon the XXIInd, XLIst and XLIInd psalms and upon the prophecies of Zechariah. Let us recall a few of them. Zechariah IX 9. «Rejoice, O daughter of Zion, behold thy king cometh unto thee; he is just and a saviour, and riding upon an ass and upon a colt the foal of an ass»… «It is needful that the Son of Man suffer many torments and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests and of the scribes, and be slain, and rise again after three days». Psalm XXII 1. «My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?» XXII 18. «They part my garments among them and cast lots upon my vesture»… Although the evangelists take the same events from one another, they often relate them in different ways and contradict one another carelessly. After saying of Jesus that he was virgin-born, when it comes to setting down his genealogy they write (Matthew I 16) – «Jacob begat Joseph the man of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ. Man signifies «husband» and not «betrothed», and Jesus, being the son of God, ought to have had no connection or relation whatever with the genealogy of Joseph… It is plain, I think. If Jesus really preached that «render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s», Herod and Pilate had no reason whatever to condemn him. On the contrary, they ought to have appealed to his help in order to extirpate the messianic Zealots and to keep the people quiet. The Jesus who said «If they strike thee upon one cheek, turn the other» could not have driven out or expelled the hawkers of the Temple by force… But the aim of the authors of the gospels was not to write real history, but to have Jesus fulfil the prophecies of the Scriptures to the letter, «that the words might be fulfilled»…
Mark begins his gospel with the title «Beginning of the good news concerning Jesus the Messiah, son of God», and without mentioning any historical source or document. One who wishes to write a real history does not begin thus. Paul in his First epistle to the Corinthians, 23-24, says that the Lord revealed to him that upon the night of his betrayal he took bread, and giving thanks he broke it and said – «Take, eat, this is my body, which is broken for you»; likewise also after supper he took the cup and said: «This is the blood of my new covenant»… Paul learned this story in a vision from Jesus himself, whereas Mark relates literally the same thing as having taken place at the table of the supper.
There are many events which in the gospel of Mark are attributed to Jesus, and in the Acts of the Apostles to the apostle Peter. Let us recall one or two examples. Acts of the Apost. VIII 33-35. «Peter came and found there a man who had lain palsied for eight years. Peter said: «Jesus healeth thee; arise and make thy bed»; and he arose straightway…». Mark II 3-4 and 11-12. «Jesus said unto the palsied man: «Arise, take up thy bed and go unto thy house, and he arose straightway». Acts of the Apost. IX 36-42. «And in Joppa there was a woman named Tabitha, who fell sick and died – Peter kneeled down, prayed and said: «Tabitha, arise and stand»; and she opened her eyes and, seeing Peter, rose up and sat upright»… Mark V 38-42. «And Jesus, taking the dead child by the hand, said: «Talitha cumi», which is interpreted «Damsel, arise»; and immediately the damsel stood up and walked»… It is beyond doubt that talitha and tabitha refer to one and the same event.
Let us speak also of the chronological and other errors of the gospels. The census of Quirinius, at the time of which the infant Jesus is supposed to have been carried off to Egypt, falls in the year 760 of Rome, which is equal to the year 6-7 of the Christian era and not to the year 1. It is in the VIth century of the Christian era that a Scythian named Dionysius the Younger arbitrarily determined that Jesus was born in the year 654 of Rome, and established the Christian reckoning, which afterwards, at the coronation of Charlemagne, was put into execution by an imperial edict.
The birthplace of Jesus is Bethlehem, yet he is called «the Nazarene». Why? – He had to be born in Bethlehem, because he had to be descended from the tribe of David, and David was of Bethlehem. The prophet Micah wrote, II 2: «And thou, Bethlehem, out of thee shall come forth he that is to be prince of Israel». He is born of a virgin, because Isaiah VII. 14 says: «Behold, the virgin shall conceive and shall bear a son»… Jesus had to come out of Egypt, because the prophet Hosea says, XI 1-2: «And I called my son out of Egypt»… A tale made to measure…
Where is the city of Nazareth? No village or city of that name is known at all until the VIIth century of the Christian era. The poor evangelist has fallen victim to his own ignorance. The prophet, in saying «Nazarene», meant to say «nazir», which signifies «dedicated, consecrated». According to the Mosaic law the firstborn (bekor-bokhor) were consecrated to Jehovah and became «nazir». That word is written in Hebrew «Nzr» according to the Semitic alphabet, which is read «nazir, nazar, nazove» and so forth… If he was from the city of Nazareth, one ought to say «of Nazareth» and not «the Nazarene».
As we have said, the Roman geographers, who have extensive descriptions and topographies of the most remote villages of the known world, know no city by the name of Nazareth. It is in the VIIIth (8th) century that the church takes an interest in it and places it at the site of the present Nazareth – not forgetting to build the cave as well, in which Jesus was born…
According to the topographical particulars given by the gospels, Nazareth is identical with the city of Gamala, where Judas of Gamala, the founder of the sect of the Zealots, had been born. According to Luke, Jesus was born in the manger of a stable. The evangelist John has no news of a manger. Mary and the child are found in a dwelling (mansio), while a cave exists only in the apocryphal gospels. The birth of Jesus is a likeness of the traditions found among the Chaldeans concerning the birth of the Sun god. The Virgin is one of the twelve constellations of the Zodiac: upon December 24 (the solstice) Bootes rises and, uniting with the Virgin, gives life to the so-called Sun god… These are not history, but legend and allegory…
These proofs are strong enough in favour of the legendary character of Jesus. But there is also the mathematical proof. Imagine that not one Greek, Latin or Jewish historian contemporary with Jesus mentions the name of Jesus, or any one of the gospels.
No one knows Paul, who preaches the new religion, or Peter, who held the papacy for 25 years in Rome. It would have been possible to forget Paul and Peter; but if the gospels are true, Jesus was not so insignificant a person as to escape the pens of the historians… This silence of his contemporaries until the year 125-130 of Christ is indeed astonishing, especially if we bear in mind that in those times the Roman empire is at the summit of its power. Upon all the emperors there is the most detailed and extensive information, from different sources and in different forms. No event can pass unnoticed by Rome. Throughout the whole empire there are governors, procurators, consuls and so forth, who keep the great capital informed of the events that have taken place even in the most distant corners of the state.
Navigation upon the Mediterranean is more unsafe than in the time of the mediaeval corsairs. The Jews are scattered along all the shores of the Mediterranean, and in Rome alone there was a colony of ten thousand of them. In all the provinces Roman garrison legions watch over law and order, and Palestine in particular is occupied by considerable military forces, on account of the frequent messianic disturbances. And in spite of all this, not one Roman historian mentions the Jesus of Palestine or the gospels containing his life and his doctrine. Do you not find this general silence astonishing? In the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era the fathers of the church realized how unstable was the Jesus they preached, without the testimony of contemporary historians, and they embarked upon a shameful and unsparing literary forgery. They falsified all the literature of the first and second centuries at will, often very clumsily and in a manifest manner, adding favourable passages, striking out the unfavourable ones, altering names and dates and so forth and so forth, and above all fabricating false writings and attributing them to various well-known authors of the first and second centuries.
The most notable of these forgeries is the following passage in the book «Antiquities», written in the Greek language by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus: «In those times there appeared Jesus, a wise man, if it be possible to call him a man, because he wrought miracles, and many Jews and Greeks followed him – this Jesus was the Christ; by the denunciation of our chief men Pilate raised him upon the cross, but those who had loved him before did not cease, and he appeared to them alive upon the third day» … All the manuscripts of Flavius that have come down to us contain this passage, but even the most fanatical of ecclesiastical critics hesitate to accept it as authentic. Renan says that «a Christian hand has been laid upon this passage». The forgery is very plain: if this passage existed in Flavius, who wrote in the year 70-80, why was it not mentioned and cited by the Christian fathers until the fourth century, in their disputations with the heathen? What stronger proof than this could have been shown to the Jews – that their own great historian had believed in Jesus Christ? Justinian, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian and so forth have made use in their martyrologies even of writings declared apocryphal, and have forgotten to mention the passage of Flavius: all of them are silent upon the subject. Origen (185-254) makes other citations from Flavius and yet forgets that famous passage, which would have served the cause he defended in the best manner.
What does this mean? – That in the third century of the Christian era that forgery had not yet been introduced there. It is Eusebius of Caesarea who for the first time mentions that passage in his ecclesiastical history (in the first half of the fourth century) and, according to all probability, the forger is himself, that bishop of Caesarea whose falsehoods are more than one, perhaps committed in good faith.
If Flavius wrote that «that Jesus is the Christ, that is to say the Messiah», then he too was a Christian. In that case how is his silence concerning the remaining parts of the life of Jesus to be explained? Is it a possible thing that in his enormous works the Christian Flavius should not have had occasion to write anything more than those few lines concerning the god he worshipped? Flavius, who describes in such detail all the happenings of Judaea from 50 years before the Christian era until the destruction of Jerusalem (70 years after the Christian era), knows only so much concerning Jesus. Let it suffice to recall the words of the Anglican bishop Warburton, that that passage of Flavius «is a stupid lie».
The silence of Flavius concerning Jesus is doubtless very significant and decisive; but let us admit for a moment that he forgot that great event or that he deliberately did not write of it. Contemporary with Flavius there was another Jewish historian named Justus of Tiberias, who likewise wrote two books entitled «The Wars of the Jews» and «Chronicle of the Kings of the Jews», which are lost. In the ninth century, however, the bishop Photius had those two books before his eyes and wondered in his simplicity that there is in them no mention whatever of Jesus…
Pliny the Younger is the first heathen historian who, in his letter addressed to the emperor Trajan in the year 112, says that in Bithynia and in Pontus there were Christians who renounced their Christianity and, imploring the mercy of the gods, bowed down before your image. They cursed the Messiah and confessed that, gathering at sunrise upon appointed days, they blessed the Messiah in turn, as God (Christ quasi deo). Pliny grasped well the difference of the Christians from the other sectaries: they worship as a god the Messiah, who belonged to Jewish mythology and who, grafted upon the jealous Jewish Jehovah, is irreconcilable towards the other gods of the empire and towards the cult of the emperor… Pliny is a witness to the god Jesus, but not to the historical man Jesus.
The name «Messiah» is mentioned twice also in Latin literature, in two friends of Pliny: Tacitus and Suetonius. In the «Annals» of Tacitus there is one line concerning him, mentioned on the occasion of the fire of Rome in the time of Nero. Tacitus says that Nero suspected the ill-famed sectaries called «Christiani», the author of whose religion, the Messiah – the Christ, was crucified by the hand of Pilate of Pontus. These «Annals» were compiled in the years 115-117 of the Christian era, when the gospels had probably already been written and there were many Christians in Rome, and Tacitus had had occasion to know their traditions, of which that line is the echo. There is one line also in Suetonius’s book «The Lives of the Caesars», which was written in the year 121 of the Christian era. Suetonius says that «the Jews, being the cause of frequent disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, the emperor Claudius (41-54) drove them out of Rome». Who is this Christ? – perhaps a common agitator, because there were many slaves and freedmen of that name in Rome: in the Latin inscriptions of Rome there are Christs mentioned by the dozen. Perhaps also Christ is an adjective and the mention really concerns Jesus, although in that case the phrase «at the instigation of Chrestus» would seem meaningless with regard to a dead man who was absent.
The probable explanation is that in the time of Claudius the Jews who were in Rome were divided into two groups and often fought with one another: one group said that the Messiah had appeared, the other that he had not. The Jewish family that gave hospitality to the apostle Paul in Corinth was likewise of those Jews expelled from Rome, who believed that the Messiah had appeared; so that if that mention of Chrestus by Suetonius really belongs to Jesus, that is the most ancient record of Christianity, even more ancient than the epistles of Paul.
These are the only three testimonies concerning the historical Jesus that are found in non-Christian authors, and those written in the years 120-130 of Christ; before that, nothing…
Pliny the Younger testifies that there were Christians in Bithynia who worshipped the Messiah as a god; Tacitus echoes the rumours current concerning a Jesus crucified by the hand of Pilate; and Suetonius describes disturbances that occurred at the instigation (impulsore) of a Chrestus. Are these sufficient to prove the historicity of Jesus? Neither biographical particulars, nor the testimony of an eyewitness, nor any definite information. The three testimonies together do not make up half a page, and they bear no proportion whatever to the revolution that a real Jesus would have brought about. In vain too do we turn to the ocean of the Talmud, where the two or three mentions that are found there are mockeries of the Jesus-Christ described by the gospels. Those parts of the Talmud were compiled in the third and fourth centuries, and the name Jesus is written there in the Greek form and not in the Jewish Yeshua or Yoshua. The rabbi deliberately confuses Mary the Mother of God with the courtesan of Magdala and writes that Jesus is the child of Mary the Hairdresser. «magdalene» signifies «Hairdresser», and of Pandera the carpenter, who had grown up among Egyptian magi and had learned their craft…
Let us conclude: with regard to Jesus as a historical person, no undeniable testimony or document exists throughout the whole of the first century; he is unknown to the historians contemporary with him, whether Jewish or foreign. Many Jesuses may have lived in those times, but the Jesus who founded Christianity probably did not exist.
The first Christians, beginning with Paul and with Peter, were Jewish messianists who preached Jehovah and his anointed servant, the Christ, as a new manifestation of him, in bodily form, if you will, but never mortal like ourselves.
Christianity was born with the incarnation of the messianic idea; that is to say, Jesus is not a mortal who was made a god, but a god who was by degrees made man by the people, and who has no place upon the earth.
Lambert has rightly said that in the Old Testament the prophets feel and speak under the influence of events that have occurred, whereas in the New Testament the events are accomplished precisely in accordance with those prophecies.
From the historical-critical point of view, the first century of the Christian era may be divided into four periods. I. From 20 to 50 – for this period there is no document whatever: it is entirely in darkness and we must content ourselves with conjectures only. The faith in Jesus is probably born in Galilee, under the influence of dreams and of visions; Peter works miracles and utters prophecies. That faith is introduced into Jerusalem at the hands of James the brother of the Lord and reaches as far as the Jewish Synod – the Sanhedrin, which condemns Stephen the Protomartyr to death. Being expelled from Jerusalem, the new sect goes as far as Antioch and Rome; from Antioch it spreads into Asia Minor and from Rome into Macedonia and Greece. This first period, the dawn of Christianity, is very faint, and it will probably never be possible to know under what form Jesus was represented.
II. This period, which is the time of the epistles of Paul, 50-55, is more luminous. In Salonica, in Corinth, in Rome and so forth there are already groups of believers who used to hold sacred assemblies. We have already seen that the Jesus of that period is a theological and mystical idea which has issued from the data of the Scriptures. The gifted Christian prophet Paul directs those assemblies and presents to them the Messiah who, laying aside the divine form, is visible to the enthusiastic believers in the bodily appearance imagined by David and by Isaiah. Satan is vanquished, and the risen Messiah saves humanity from Sin and from Death.
III. This period is dark again, from 55 to the year 80. The believers multiply, rites make their appearance – baptism, the cup of the supper and a hierarchical order. It is in this period that a notable event occurs: in the year 70 of the Christian era Jerusalem is destroyed at the hands of Titus, and the Jews are crushed. Therefore the Jews are dishonoured and forsaken by Jehovah. It is his son who must take the work in hand in order to reconcile the Jews with Jehovah. Salvation is from the Messiah. In this period the precepts, the commandments and the revelations of the new religion are composed. To the heavenly history of the Son of God there are attached – without yet being united with it – the earthly relations of the Spirit Jesus, exactly like that which the prophets imagined.
The IVth period, from 80 to 120, is the period of the formation of the gospels. Rome, Antioch and Ephesus are the leaders of the movement and in open conflict with the Roman authority. The messianic mystery is established by history: it passes from the lyrical state to the descriptive, and the more it spreads, the more it takes on a popular colour in order to be intelligible. It is not easy for a beginner to grasp a religious mystery: he needs tales and commandments, and from that is born the gospel of Mark… The unnarratable epic of Paul is turned into artificial traditions which are supposed to have taken place in Palestine, half a century before the destruction of Jerusalem. The mysterious Son of God is presented as a victim of Pilate, and Jesus becomes material by degrees. In the second century the gospels are already mentioned as martyrologies, and the man-god has his history, thanks to the united efforts of mystical Greeks and despairing Jews.
It is necessary also to refute in two words that commonly accepted prejudice that Christianity is the source of morality. This is an absolute error. In the New Testament there is not a single moral precept or sublime idea that is a novelty. «Love thy neighbour as thyself» is verse 18 of the XIXth chapter of Leviticus, which says: «Thou shalt not take vengeance nor bear a grudge against the sons of thy people, but shalt love thy neighbour as thyself; I am the Lord»… Hillel, the great rabbi, expanded and expounded this principle in a far more beautiful manner than the Gospels, and long before Christ. The Lord’s prayer «Our Father» is a dry and insipid imitation of the beautiful prayer of the Stoic Cleanthes. The golden precept «Do not unto another that which thou wouldst not have others do unto thee», in its positive and consequently more sublime form, was preached by Confucius several centuries before Chrestus. Many of the precepts of the gospels are literal copies of the commandments of the Holy Scriptures. The novelty preached by Christianity is: «if they strike thee upon one cheek, turn the other». But I do not know what great morality there is in encouraging the wicked and the impudent, the unjust and the deceiver. This is meekness or humility wrongly understood, and it is unworthy of a free man. Jesus grants the kingdom to a robber who said to him upon the cross: «Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom». It is no matter how those words befit the mouth of a robber; taking the moral part alone into account, one is compelled to infer that according to that doctrine it is possible to do the basest deeds and, while working evil a whole lifetime long, to be found worthy of the kingdom of heaven by coming to faith at the last moment of death… According to an honest understanding, this is not morality but the denial of morality. For religion faith alone is needful, the deed has no importance; whereas for us it is the deed that is important, and it is by the deed that a man must be judged.
Jesus, after his betrayal, in the garden of Gethsemane is afraid, turns pale, sweats and says that he is sorrowful even unto death (Matt. XXVI, 38); he beseeches God that, if it be possible, those afflictions be spared him, that that cup pass from him… Are such dispositions befitting a real hero, a son of God appointed to save the world… Socrates drank the cup of poison far more philosophically and with far more composure, and later on countless Christian martyrs faced death far more bravely – for the love of that very Jesus… The man of the East is more inclined to bow his head to violence than the man of the West. The East is the cradle of despotic gods, whereas the West is the cradle of republican ones. The religious form of government of the East is despotism, that of the West is the republic. This is the reason why Christianity, in passing into Europe, caused the glorious Greek and Roman civilization to vanish throughout the whole thousand-year period of the Middle Ages.
It is wrong also to think that monotheism originated with the Jews: long before Abraham the pre-Zoroastrian Persian religion preached Ahura Mazda as the sole god. The Jehovah of the Jews is their own particular god, as Zeus is of the Greeks, Jupiter of the Romans and Baal of the Phoenicians. Jehovah is the father, «abba», and the Jews are his sons, «bar», whereby all the Jews are sons of god, «barabbas». These particular gods must not be confused with the universal god of Plato, of Cicero or of Seneca, who is the «theos» or the «deus». The Jews, alongside Jehovah, worshipped also other gods – El, Elohim, Adonai, of whom Jehovah was jealous. The commandment «Ye shall worship no other god beside me» is explicit, and the word «Elohim» is already plural and signifies «gods».
One of the differences between the Old and the New Testaments is also the idea of the Trinity, although in the Old Testament too the spirit of God is often mentioned in an indefinite manner. The idea of the three persons of the New Testament probably has an Indian origin and has been expressed in such confused forms that the ecclesiastical fathers of the following centuries have been subjected to great difficulties in explaining and formulating it. If Christianity is really the deification of a dead man, as Renan says, it is very unworthy of the respect it has enjoyed, in spite of its wide reach. Judaism and Islam have taken care not to deify Moses and Muhammad: it was not worth making such great sacrifices, and carrying those sacrifices even to martyrdom, in order to replace the deification of the emperors of Rome by the deification of one of its subjects. «O ye believers of the Holy Scriptures, carry not the just precepts of your religion to excess: Jesus is the son of Mary, and God is one». Thus is it inscribed in letters of gold upon the front of the mosque of Omar, built upon the site of the temple of Jerusalem.
It cannot be denied that this is a just reproach cast at the Christians by the Muslims and the Mosaists. And as for us Armenians, whether the preaching of Gregory the Illuminator was favourable or unfavourable, that too is a debatable question, the care of whose elucidation I leave to the Armenian historians. If, however, we owe our letters and our literature to Christianity, is not our martyrology of so many centuries, on the other hand, due to it as well – a martyrology which has not yet found its end…
In the magazine «Hayrenik», published in Boston, in the issue of 1930 (January, year VIII, no. 3 (87), p. 114), in the article «Sun-Worship» published there, M. Terpeterean dealt with sun-worship as it comes down from the most ancient times and with its manifestations in various cultures over the course of millennia.
The noteworthy article in question follows below…
SUN-WORSHIP
THE ORIGIN of religions has furnished the subject of an immense literature in every language. Religion was born together with man. The longing to penetrate the secrets of the nature that surrounded him, the innate effort to protect himself from her disastrous blows and, above all, the dread of dangers and of death impelled primitive man to interpret those phenomena and to seek the cause of them all. Religion is the attempt to enter into relations with that cause in order to appease its wrath or to be found worthy of its favours, and the visible sign of religion is worship. Before surrendering himself to the flights of his imagination, man long contented himself with the testimony of his eyes. The visible cause was too strong for primitive man to be able to free himself quickly from its influence. Before attempting to grope in the unknown beyond the heavens, primitive man worshipped the nature that he saw, the sky and the stars shining upon its surface, the earth and the elements acting upon it. Before imagining an invisible light, he worshipped the visible light and its greatest furnace, the Sun. Metaphysical subtleties are the attempts of comparatively recent ages. For all primitive peoples too, God, or the Great Cause, was nature, and its most powerful representative was the Sun. Incalculable are its benefits. No one was more worthy of worship and of reverence.
It is he who with the inexhaustible rays of his light floods the universe and gives life to nature. The blue vault of heaven is the most suitable place as a dwelling for God, and it is from its summit that he holds the rein of the world in order to direct the various motions of its vast body. Man had believed, and believes still, that everything is for his enjoyment, and that if there is anything that is not as he desires, it must be amended by prayers, by offerings or by sacrifices. Nature-worship was the religion of antiquity. All the ancient peoples worshipped nature in her various manifestations, and the Sun was regarded as the eye or the executive force of that nature. Pliny, one of the greatest philosophers of antiquity, a contemporary of Jesus, says: «The world, which contains within its sides all created things, is an eternal and infinite god, which has never been created and will never be destroyed. It is beyond human capacity to seek anything beyond it. The world is the true God, the sacred being which encloses within itself everything. There is nothing outside it. The cause of all effects is Nature, which contains within itself both the cause and the effects».
This idea prevailed in Egypt and in India before passing from thence into Judaea and Greece. One of the inscriptions of the Temple of Sais – in Lower Egypt – says, «I am all that has been, all that is, all that shall be, and no mortal has yet lifted the veil that covers me».
That Temple was dedicated to the god Pan, who was worshipped as the representative of nature. The world and the sun were one, they completed each other, and everything was by means of them. There have of course been audacious mortals who wished to usurp the rights of the gods. But those forced cults lasted only so long as fear and flattery compelled them.
The cult of the emperor Domitian barely lasted until Trajan. Even the emperor Augustus was soon forgotten. But Aramazd remained sovereign in the Capitol, and the aged Cronus was always revered by the inhabitants of Italy. It is not Heracles or Vahagn who were made gods, but the sun-God who was made man in them, because man felt himself incapable of describing him worthily. The primitive religions were not the deification of men, but the incarnation of the god-nature, represented by mysteries and by images. If it was feelings of gratitude that were to impel men to worship one of themselves, how was it possible to disregard the benefits of the Sun and of the Earth, by which alone primitive men lived? The cult of a man could not be eternal, since man is born, grows, dies and vanishes, whereas nature is eternal. Everything is weak in man; nature is great and powerful; man is born of dust and returns to dust, whereas nature knows no old age. Her force is eternal and unchangeable, and from that eternity of hers arose the idea of an eternal Godhead, incarnate in her mightiest representative, the Sun.
The Greek Zeus, the Anglo-Saxon Tiw (Tiw), the Scandinavian Tir (Туr), the Deus of the Latins, the Pav, and the Tiu of the Armenians, which signifies «Day and Light», are epithets of that Sun-God. It is the Sun that charmed man’s first glance. It is his rays that dispel the darkness, melt the frost, make the fields blossom and revive nature. Before bowing to any metaphysical religion, man knelt to the heaven and the earth of universal nature, to the Sun and to the stars.
In more recent ages man’s imagination swept past the limit of the sight of his eyes and grew curious as to who had created the sun and the earth. But if the undeniable answer to that question is the real God – that is to say, if the strongest proof of the existence of God is the law of causality, according to which every effect has a cause – why not ask also who created that god? And if god could exist from the beginning, why could not the sun and the earth exist in the same manner? Which is the easier and the more logical, to accept that from the beginning there was a conscious and immaterial god who created the universe out of nothing, or to affirm that the universe, which is indestructible, cannot have been created and existed from the beginning?
For the Brahmins too the world was not created by God, but is simply a transformation of him: the world is the divine body; there is nothing more powerful than it.
The poets of antiquity, in singing of the world or in praising the universe, glorified the Eternal god. All the temples of the world too were dedicated to nature, and the members of her vast body were the objects of the reverence and the worship of the peoples. From the wisest priests of Egypt down to the sorcerers of the most backward people, all have always turned their eyes to the vault of heaven and to the stars that rule it. What reason suggests to us is confirmed also by real history. The Osiris and the Isis of Egypt are the sun and the moon. The animals they worshipped were the representatives of the heavenly bodies upon the earth. Anubis, the Sacred dog, represented Sirius or the Dog-star. Heliopolis was a city consecrated to the Sun, and in its temple stood the statue of the Sun-God: a golden youth who had raised his right hand in order to drive the chariot of the world with a whip; in his left hand he held a thunderbolt and ears of corn, as a declaratory sign of the power and the fruitfulness of the Sun and of the earth. The Nile too, as an object of worship, represented a member of the God-Nature.
Upon an Egyptian column the air, the sky, the sun, the moon, night and day are commemorated as gods.
The Phoenicians worshipped the Sun, the moon and the stars. The Sun was the chief god and was called Heracles. According to the historian Diodorus, a contemporary of Jesus, the Ethiopians too worshipped the sun and the moon and, like the Incas of Peru or the Persians of Bactria, they too called themselves «sons of the sun».
In the treaty concluded between the Carthaginians and Philip of Macedon, the Sun, the moon, the earth, the rivers, the meadows and the waters are commemorated as witnesses. The moon was the greatest God of the Arabs of the desert, and to this day it is the crescent of the moon that adorns their banners. The famous temple of the Kaaba at Mecca was dedicated to the moon before the coming of Muhammad. That black stone which to this day is the object of their worship and which is supposed to stand in the void without any support has, according to tradition, been a statue representing Saturn.
Among the ruins of Babylon there is a temple which to this day is called «Masjid esh-Shams»- «the temple of the sun», and the Bel of the Babylonians too was worshipped as the representative of the sun. Pythagoras accepted the Ethereal Fire as the first cause of life, and the sun as its furnace. The colossal statue of Rhodes, one of the seven wonders of the world, was dedicated to the Sun.
A proof of nature-worship is the cult of the forests of Sosiats among the Armenians in the times of Anushavan. The forests, the trees and the rivers represented nature. The Huns worshipped the heaven and the earth, and their high priest was called «Tanjau» or «son of heaven», as the mikado of Japan is styled by his subjects to this day.
According to Clement of Alexandria, it was Nature that was the greatest god of the eastern peoples, whose eyes were the two luminaries of heaven – the sun and the moon. Plato testifies that the early Greeks had no other god save the sun, the moon and the stars worshipped by the barbarians of the east. Orpheus accepted the Sun as «chief of the gods» and at every sunrise would go up to a high place in order to render him reverence. In the Iliad Agamemnon makes his sacrifices to the sun and says: «O Sun, who seest and hearest all things». In Sophocles’ «Oedipus» the chorus addresses the sun as the chief of the Gods.
In Thessaly sacred ravens consecrated to the sun were kept, and it is figures of ravens that appear also upon the monuments of the Persian Mithra. Rome too had her temples dedicated to Nature and to the Sun. Tatius, the chief of the Sabines, a contemporary of Romulus, was a sun-worshipper. Before the altar of Vesta the Vestal virgins had the duty – like the magi of the Persians – of keeping unextinguished the eternal fire, which was regarded as the earthly representative of the heavenly luminary. In Latium there was a spring consecrated to the Sun, with two temples, in which Aeneas offered sacrifice at the time of his arrival in Italy.
The emperor Augustus, having images of the sun and of the moon brought from Egypt, had them placed in the temples of Rome in memory of the victories he had won over Antony and Cleopatra.
I have deliberately kept for the last the cult of the Persian Mithra – the Mihr of the Armenians – which was the greatest and most universal divinity of antiquity. Who was Mihr? What did the eternal fire preserved by the hands of the magi in the sacred fire-temples represent? Assuredly the sun is the foundation of the religion of Zoroaster, and since Mithra is far more ancient than the like Egyptian and Greek divinities – Osiris and Isis, Heracles and Bacchus – Mazdeism is the prototype of all sun-worshipping religions, as we shall see by degrees. The cult of Mihr has struck far deeper roots among the Armenians than even Christianity.
The vast variety of the variants of the name «Mihr» is a manifest proof of the heaven-wide diffusion of his cult. Mihr had his own temple at Bagarij, near Mamakhatun, where his traces are visible to this day. In the village of Tordan-Mitrodan in the province of Daranaghi too there was a temple whose name recalls Mihr. According to M. Emin the word «mehean» already signifies «mihrean», and the seventh of the Armenian months was called «mehekan» and was probably dedicated to him.
According to Avdalbegian, variants or derivatives of Mihr are Mir, Mihrdat, Mihran, Mirh, Mirhean, Mirhavan, Miran, Amir, Meher, Mher, Meruzhan, Mehrunik, Mahevan and so forth, as well as, according to Hübschmann, mithr, mither, thor and so forth. No name among the Armenian heroes has had so frequent and so varied expressions among us. A name is not only the index of a particular culture; having also a religious and magical sense, it is the immediate expression of worship. And these numerous variants are an incontestable proof that the worship of the sun and of fire penetrated far more deeply into the folds of Armenian civilization than is commonly accepted.
If in the Armenian Christian environment we meet with so ardent a love for the name Mihr, which has lasted for centuries and for millennia, then it is possible to imagine how great the charm of Mihr must have been in pre-Christian times. The cult of Mihr has undoubtedly been one of the chief axes of the development of the Armenian religion, having its primitive centre in the province of Vaspurakan, according to Kanayants.
What was the form of the Armenian worship of Mihr? The Armenian writers give us no direct information concerning the concrete character of that faith; but supposing that it was the same as that among our Persian neighbours, we see the following…
Mihr is the god of the sun and of fire. He fights against Ahriman, against dragons and against demons. In the last days of the world a virgin shall conceive and shall bear the Messiah-Mihr, who shall raise the dead. Now that man-Mihr was born upon December 25. He is the mediator between man and Ahura-Mazda – Aramazd. He is a divinity that has taken flesh, Astfaderta, according to Brekner. The legend of Artavazd too is probably another variant of Mihr, according to linguistic etymology. The name Artavazd, the Asavazdanh or Asawazd of the Avesta, signifies, according to Justi and Hübschmann, art – «one who renders pure (fervent) veneration», like Prometheus. And if we accept Atravazd instead of Artavazd, «Atr» signifies «fire» and «Atravazd» «one who renders veneration to fire». (It is interesting to note Avdalbegian’s supposition that, just as «Hithra» was changed into «Misa», according to Justi, so «Atravazd» could be changed into «Asawaz» – God).
According to Yeznik, Artavazd was carried off by the dragons and imprisoned in the caverns of Masis. The Varalez dogs that raised up Ara the Beautiful lick his chains, so that he may be freed and may save mankind. According to Khorenatsi every Sunday, while according to other historians «on the first of Navasard» – therefore once a year, at the autumn equinox – the smiths strike their anvils, and «he is alive until now, and he is to come forth and to possess this world». (Yeznik, I. 74). This popular belief probably has no political foundation and, according to Gr. Khalatian, «Artavazd is the luminous principle, the Armenian Mihr, a new transformation of him». The cult of Mihr was spread also in neighbouring Georgia. Amiran is the Mihr of the Georgians. His tale too is simply a legend of a fight with demons or of the slaying of a dragon. If «Amira» is not the word «Mihr», it may, according to Prof. Marr, be the Abkhaz word «a-mra», which signifies «the sun».
Among the ruins of Persepolis there is a sculpture of a king who kneels to the sun, and beside whom blazes the perpetual fire of the magi. To this day too the Parsees of India, as offshoots of the believers of Zoroaster, direct their prayers to the Sun, to the moon, to the stars and to the fire deemed their representative upon earth, which is the purest and the subtlest of the elements.
Vagharshak set up in Armavir the statues of the Sun and of the Moon. The same divinities were worshipped also by the Albanians and in Colchis. Throughout Asia Minor the temples were dedicated to the sun, to the moon or to the stars. The moon was worshipped as Diana-Artemis at Ephesus, and the sun as Apollo in the Troad.
We have already proofs strong enough that the religion of antiquity was sun-worship. Let us now attempt to prove that, as Osiris and Isis, Bacchus and Heracles, so too Christ are legends copied upon the legend of Mihr. In order to make our task easier, let us recall here that astronomy is one of the most ancient of the sciences and had been cultivated in a fairly profound manner by the Chaldeans and the Egyptians. They were acquainted with the seven chief heavenly bodies – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Moon and the Sun. They knew the twelve signs of the Zodiac, as twelve constellations through which the sun passed in the course of its apparent annual revolution.
Those constellations are, in the order of the sun’s course: the Ram or the Lamb, the Bull, the Twins, the Crab, the Lion, the Virgin, the Balance, the Scorpion, the Archer, the Goat-horn, the Water-pourer and the Fish. Of these the first three correspond to the season of spring, the second three to summer, the third three to autumn and the last three to winter. These numbers seven and twelve have acquired a sacred character in Christianity as well as in the ancient religions. Let us recall the 12 sons of the patriarch Jacob, the 12 tribes of Israel, the 12 temples of Janus, the 12 labours of Heracles, the 12 shields of Mars, the city with 12 gates of the Revelation and so forth and so forth, as well as the lamps with seven branches of the temple of Solomon, the seven walls of the temple of Ecbatana, the seven gates of the cave of Mithra, the seven storeys of the tower of Babylon, the seven wonders of the world and the seven sages, the seven deadly sins, the seven sacraments and so forth and so forth. In the Revelation the number seven is mentioned 24 times, and the number 12 is mentioned 14 times. The feasts of all these religions too are bound to the chief stages of the sun’s revolution – the solstices, December 21-22 and June 21-22, and the equinoxes, March 21-22 and September 21-22. Upon September 22 the Sun is upon the equator. From that day it begins to descend towards the southern hemisphere and the days grow shorter, until the solstice of December 21-22 as the final limit, and we have the longest night and the shortest day of the year. From that day the sun begins to turn back, and behold, upon December 24-25, when the shortening of the night is already evident, all the gods are born – Mithra, Christ, the Shang-Ti god of the Chinese and so forth.
The sun, advancing by degrees, reaches upon March 21-22 the vernal equinox, when night and day are again equal. Within one or two days the victory of the days over the night, or allegorically the victory of light over darkness, is already distinctly seen; that is to say, the god is revived: Christ rises again… From that day the Romans and the Persians begin their new year. Before passing to the analysis of the ancient mythological works, let us see whether our forefathers worshipped nature as a rational and living being, or simply as a blind force.
Primitive man had not yet vanity enough to attribute life and soul to himself alone. He did not rank himself higher than nature… Analysing the works of all the ancient philosophers and teachers of religion, it is possible to arrive at the conclusion that nature was supposed to be a living and wise being whose soul was fire.
Pythagoras, the founder of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, explains the nature and the origin of the soul thus: «The heaven and the earth, the sea and the moon, together with all the stars, move by an inward force which is the great soul of the vast body of the universe. That soul is the source of the souls of men and of animals. When any living creature dies, that particle of the universal soul returns to the mother soul, after completing its earthly course».
Plato believes in a soul of the world which, under the name of Aramazd and with thousands of variants and forms, is worshipped everywhere. Cleanthes accepts the universe as God, while Cicero says that it is impossible that Man, a particle in the great All, should have feeling and wisdom while the universe should be lifeless. «One and the same spirit is distributed to all living creatures,- says Marcus Aurelius,- and one and the same wise spirit to all rational beings. Just as all created things are made of one and the same earth, which breathe the same air and see the same light of the sun, so too the life of the universe is one».
Greek mythology is a theocratic republic, and every part of the universe is under the administration of its own chief. Poseidon rules the waters, Pluto hell, Hephaestus is the god of iron, Diana of the hunt, Ceres occupies herself with the harvests, Bacchus with the vintage, Minerva watches over the arts and the Naiads over the springs, and so forth.. The living and wise universe was divided between two great forces – the active and the passive, the male and the female. The heaven is the active force, the earth and the elements the passive. In the words of Plutarch, the heaven is the father and the earth the mother, as the singer of Goghtn too sang: «Heaven was in travail, earth was in travail».
Virgil describes this immaculate marriage of Nature with the following allegory… «In spring the earth opens in order to receive the seed of fecundation; the ether descends into the bosom of its spouse and with the rains pours forth its seed, which fecundates the earth».
It is in the same season of the beginning of spring, upon March 25, that Mary the Mother of God conceives of the angel. The Sun is the masculine spirit, while the earth or the moon is the feminine. Among the Armenians it is Vahagn and Anahit who are worshipped as male and female gods, and in the temple of Ashtishat the statues of the two divinities stood side by side. The root «vah» of the word Vahagn is the Zend word «vah or veh», which signifies «sublime, exalted, supreme». Anahit or Anaitis, on the other hand, was the goddess of love, the feminine principle, the moist and fecundable matter, being at the same time the representative of the moon, like the Ana, the Ishtar and the Melita of Babylonia and of Asia Minor. The cult of Anahit was very ancient among the Armenians and perhaps even earlier than the coming of the Armens to Armenia. According to Agathangelos, Anahit was the glory and the providence of Armenia, and in the provinces of Taron and Yekeghiats Trdat met with great difficulties in abolishing her faith.
As a natural consequence of the male and female principles there arises the idea of good and of evil. The Sun is the male god who fecundates the earth, vanquishing the darkness and the frost. Darkness and frost are the greatest enemies of primitive man, who is not yet in a condition to defend himself strongly against them. It is the Sun that rends the darkness; therefore it is the good that vanquishes the evil. And behold, with the doctrine of the male and the female is coupled the doctrine of good and evil also. Euripides says that the harmony of the world lies in the synthesis of these opposing forces and, according to Plutarch, this doctrine of duality prevailed among the most intelligent peoples of the world and, in particular, in Egypt, in Persia and in India.
In «the book of Genesis» God creates the earth and sees «that it was good»; but Satan comes and, deceiving Eve, spreads sin and death over the world. Man is subjected, therefore, to the influence of the destroying evil Satan as well as to that of the creating good god.
The Ormizd and Ahriman of the Mazdean religion, the Osiris and Typhon of the Egyptians, are these two opposing forces. The evil is often manifested under the form of a serpent or of a dragon, and for that reason those who fight against the evil are called «dragon-slayers» or «serpent-fighters».
The Armenians had the spirits «ayk» and «Kajk», which were the agents of evil and of good upon the earth. The Yezidis to this day worship the evil principle, because God is good by nature, they say, and it is man’s duty to appease the heart of Satan in order to restrain the evil.
In the third century of Christ Manes, following Zoroaster, founded the Manichaean sect, whose fundamental doctrine was the principle of good and evil and which in the days of king Shapuh was the cause of great upheavals throughout the whole East.
Returning to our proper subject, we must say also that all the allegorical or mythological poems of ancient classical literature are dedicated to the Sun. Without a knowledge of the zodiac and of the stars it is impossible to understand and to interpret the Heraclean, Dionysiac and Thesean myths, as well as the Revelation of John.
In all of them too it is the sun and the stars that act, sometimes in a very easily intelligible and simple manner and sometimes with complex allegorical turns of phrase. It is above all the revolution of the sun about the earth and the changes of the seasons proceeding therefrom that form the foundation of those tales. A cursory comparison, for example, between the legends of Heracles and of Osiris and the signs of the Zodiac will fully establish that that allegory is dedicated to the Sun.
The twelve labours of Heracles are the description of the twelve signs of the zodiac – the Lion, the Bull, the Ram, the Crab and so forth. According to the Egyptian legend, Osiris is slain by his adversary Typhon with the participation of an Ethiopian queen. Now the Sun, after passing the sign of the Scorpion of the southern solstice, approaches the constellation of Cassiopeia, and Cassiopeia is the name of an Ethiopian queen. Naturally the astronomer priests could not explain the signs of the Zodiac and the course of the sun in a simple manner to the common people, and were compelled to give them a human form. In order not to make the deception evident they were compelled even to prepare tombs upon earth for those heavenly bodies: one of the pyramids was supposedly the tomb of Osiris, but it is of course useless to look for bones beneath it.
Antony had instructed the Egyptian courtiers to call him «Osiris» and queen Cleopatra «Isis». Herodotus says indefinitely that the Osiris of Egypt is the Bacchus of the Greeks. Diodorus of Sicily, on the other hand, relates how the Egyptian priests called the Greeks deceivers for affirming that Bacchus was born in Thebes like Osiris. That falsehood, said the Egyptians, was framed by Orpheus, who had studied the mysteries of the Egyptian cult and introduced them into Greece, adapting them to local conditions. The tale of the Argonauts too is a eulogy of the Sun, related by the Thessalians. Jason’s victory over the golden-fleeced ram of the east is the vernal equinox; the Dragon and the Bull are the guardians of the fleece of the Ram, and Castor and Pollux (the Twins) are the chief actors of the tale. It is superfluous to prolong this parallel. All those who are interested may compare all those tales with the signs of the zodiac and with the other constellations, and they will realize that, as Apollo, Bacchus, Heracles, Osiris, Mihr and so forth, so too Jesus is nothing other than legends of the sun and of the moon.
For Greek, Egyptian or Roman heroes we can easily accept a fabulous character, but we find it difficult to give the same character to the hero of the Jewish tale. This hesitation is natural. A cult of two thousand years cannot easily be effaced from the mind of the common man from one day to the next. As a slave finds difficulty in the first days of freedom, or as a subterranean worm is made uneasy under the influence of the rays of light, in the same manner the benighted bigot too shrinks from the light of science…
In a previous article we nearly succeeded in proving that proofs strong enough do not exist in favour of the historicity of Jesus, that is to say of his having lived and acted as a philosopher, as a teacher of religion or as a deceiving neuropath. The aim of this article too is to show the identity of the legends of Bacchus, of Mithra and of Jesus, elaborated in different environments.
The dates of the conception, the birth and the resurrection of Jesus are like the corresponding stages of the sun. Jesus is surrounded by twelve apostles and, like Mithra, vanquishes the princes of darkness, that is to say the months of winter.
What is the essence of the Christian religion? A serpent deceives the first woman, who eats the forbidden fruit. Because of this dreadful original sin the whole of mankind – on condition that those not yet born be included in it – is condemned by the Most High. After a certain time the heart of the Most High is appeased, and he sends his only-begotten child to the earth, that it may expiate with its blood that sin of mankind. It is impossible to separate the doctrine of salvation from the doctrine of original sin. If sin did not exist, there would be no need of salvation; if there were no guilty one, the need of a saviour would not be felt. Now the subjection of the good creature created by the good to the dominion of the evil, and its being led back once more towards the good by the grace of that same good principle, is the universal faith in the principles of good and evil, whose primitive form is the religion of Zoroaster with his gods Ormizd and Ahriman. According to the Bundahishn – the Mazdean book of genesis – half of the world belongs to Ormezd, who is the god of good and of light, and half to Ahriman, who is the god of evil and of darkness. It is at the autumn equinox that the evil begins with cold, long nights, snow, wind and so forth (as also the apple ripens and the serpent deceives Eve with the apple), and it lasts until the vernal equinox. The gardens wither, paradise is closed before Adam and Eve – and Ahriman places in the river of the garden of Eren (in the Jewish, «Eden?») the great serpent, which is the mother of winter.
The Persian Eren – paradise – is described far more beautifully than the Jewish Eden, which is simply a copy of it: no place in the world, says the Bundahishn, equals the garden of Ormazd… That garden, laid waste by the hand of Ahriman’s serpent, is revived once more – the world is saved from the dominion of the evil at the vernal equinox, when the sun passes out of the constellation of the Ram or the Lamb. Behold the «Lamb of God» of the Christians. In no other way is it possible to interpret the likeness of Jesus to a lamb, if the Lamb sign of the Zodiac and the stage of the vernal equinox were not known…
The Persian designation Eren is perhaps a variant of the word «Iran» or «Ari», but the Jewish word «Eden» is not Hebrew and is probably a faulty reading of the Persian one. The identity of the theologies of Zoroaster and of Moses is evident. Both of them settle man in a marvellous garden, into which the evil is introduced in the form of a serpent. In the one the actors are Ahuramazda and Ahriman, in the other Jehovah and Satan. Both saviours too are born of a virgin, precisely at the time when the sun, passing at the winter solstice out of the constellation of the Virgin, turns towards the northern hemisphere. The child Mihr described by the magi of Zoroaster too had, like the child Jesus, been exposed to various dangers and had fled in order not to fall into the hands of the hostile king who persecuted him. Mihr too, like Jesus, had been subjected to temptation by Satan, and so forth. It is of course in order to give satisfaction to Jewish ambition that the authors of the legend of Jesus bring magi from the east to the manger of the Child Jesus…
The variants of the same tale related in different countries are in direct proportion to the conditions of the different environments. In one place the representative of the sun vanquishes giants, in another he slays dragons, while in Judaea he preaches Roman humility among a people crushed by the iron arms of Rome and with the mentality of the austere Essene sectaries.
Tertullian, who is a father of the church enjoying great authority, of the second-third century of Christ, writes that the religion of Mihr too had its mysteries – baptism, communion and so forth – and that his believers too made a mark with a pencil upon their foreheads in order to recognize one another; even their priests too must not be the husbands of two wives… According to the same Tertullian, when Christianity made its entry into Greece and Rome, enlightened minds expressed the suspicion that it was a modification of Mithraism, and it is for that reason that Christians turn towards the east in order to pray.
The miracle is the greatest mainspring of all religions. All the founders of religions too have worked miracles, and there is always a vast multitude which not only believes in them and follows them, but also bears witness everywhere. Bacchus too healed the sick, and even turned water into wine for the three sacred pitchers of his temple.
The common man believes the incredible more readily than simple events, because it is the incredible that excites his imagination and gives flight to his soul. In the religious and mystical field the duration of centuries proves nothing. Great errors spread more widely than great truths, because it is easier to believe than to reason.
From the most ancient ages countless stories and tales of satans, of demons and of jinn have been written and related; yet today no sensible man believes them any longer. Credulity is a disease, a deep-rooted epidemic, thanks to which men are divided into two distinct classes – leading deceivers and following dolts. Credulity is a bottomless abyss, capable of swallowing whatever is poured into it, without any selection. The bounds of reason are very narrow, unfortunately. When any unfettered and unprejudiced mind studies impartially the martyrology of the first three centuries of Christ and the descriptions of the miracles, it blushes for shame at seeing, on the one hand, so much credulity and blind conformity and, on the other hand, so much shameless falsehood among its fellows. And it is upon foundations so unstable that the existence of the god-man has been established, whom no one of his contemporaries saw, knew or mentioned for a hundred years.
The monotheistic principle too has no Jewish origin. That idea is the natural consequence of the unity of the world. All the ancient heathen philosophers too accepted and preached it. Even the polytheistic religions give the presidency to a chief, whom the others obey. The satans and the angels of the Holy Scriptures too give us the right, upon that ground, to rank the Judaic religion among the polytheistic ones. Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher emperor, wrote long before the spread of Christianity that «there is a single world which encloses everything; there is a single god who is everywhere, and there is a single eternal substance which is the same for all».
The idea of the Trinity too is not a Christian peculiarity. The Indian Vishnu (the second person of the Trinity) had taken flesh under the name of «Krishnu», under the shelter of the Lamb and Ram sign of the month of March.
To sum up this article, I repeat that, according to all probability, like all the great religions of antiquity, Christianity too is simply the worship of the Sun, and Nerses Shnorhali was quite right to identify the Sun with Christ in his immortal hymn: Morning of light O righteous Sun upon me light hath dawned.
P. S. – In answer to my article «Jesus of Nazareth», published in the magazine «Hayrenik», I have thus far seen only one reply in an Armenian-American paper, in which a simple-minded Armenian priest, instead of refuting what I have written with proofs, asks what right I have to write thus. The question, however, is not one of having the right or of not having it: it must be proved whether Jesus really lived as a man. But that, I think, is already beyond the capacity of the priest who wrote the article.
A fable about the nail and the horseshoe is told from generation to generation in various cultures and admonishes, stressing conscientiousness toward work and each person’s responsibility in the success of a common undertaking.
«Once a horseman was preparing to set out on the road. His horse was strong and swift, but a nail in one of the horseshoes had grown loose. The horseman noticed this, but thought: «What can come of one nail, I shall put it right later». On the road the nail fell out. A little later the horseshoe loosened and came off. Without the horseshoe the horse began to limp, and then it stopped. At that moment the horseman could not continue his journey, did not reach his goal and lost an important affair. And people say: Because of one nail the horseshoe was lost, because of the horseshoe — the horse, because of the horse — the road, and because of the road — the whole affair. The moral – never ignore «seeming trifles»: sometimes it is precisely a small omission that becomes the cause of a great loss».
For centuries this wise thought is repeated and reminds us that negligence which seems «insignificant» can become the beginning of a great disaster, «a small problem can have great consequences»…
«For want of a nail a horseshoe fell. For want of a horseshoe a horse fell. For want of a horse a horseman fell. For want of a horseman a battle was lost. For want of a battle a war was lost. For want of a war a fatherland was destroyed. And all this because of that very man who had not fastened the horseshoe well with a nail»… The counsel: every trifle is a responsibility, for the world is often built precisely upon «nails».
«If our people’s head is thick, it does not recognize its right and its duty, it does not understand the good and the bad, it takes the false in the place of the true, the true in the place of the false, what more can you say, whose word can you make understood… Boasting of their heads, inwardly cowardly and slavish wretched souls live on, they pass along the dark road, scorning and trampling underfoot the one who understands, flattering the one who does not understand, praising him, bowing before the shadow and begging salvation of it»,- Ghazaros Aghayan wrote with concern in 1890.
In the same year Hovhannes Tumanyan was ironically «giving bliss» to «the simple-minded».
TO THE SIMPLE-MINDED
Blessed are you, who do not understand Why men do such things, Blessed are you, who do not deprive a man And do not even feel the blow that has reached you. Blessed are you, who know nothing, Who are calm in spirit, at rest in heart.
«Rome is going toward destruction, because the singers have ceased to educate and only amuse»,- some 2000 years ago the Greek writer Lucian (120-180) was warning.
Again in 1890 H. Tumanyan was directing his wise admonition to «the Poet».
TO THE POET
Hide, O poet, thy accumulated sorrows In the great secret-chamber of thy tempest-wearied soul, Do not sing them before the crowd, And why lament in vain?
And thou art not called, that with the tears Of faint-heartedness thou shouldst sing thy sorrows, Thou must, before oppressed mankind, Deny the existence of a black fate.
Even if the smile upon thy face be false, Though it is hard for thee to feign, Thou must, for the erring, uncultured and narrow-hearted Crowd, create faith.
Cherish it as a naughty child, In the time of punishment be merciless, Have in thy hand a shining lash, Strike it and drive it forward.
Lead it forward and stretch out thy hand, Show the bloodstained path of salvation, With mockery scoff at him who flees the fight, With a song of glory praise the one who fights.
Give heart to the fallen, pull him up from the ground. Never leave him to remain below. With a living song awaken, stir His despairing feelings.
Breathe with the fire of wrath against the evil That with poison and with money has risen to the throne, And enlighten, show the crowd By what course it has worked evil.
Let it recognize and punish His all-perfect wickedness, And thereafter not say blindly: «Great» or «philanthropist, benefactor of the nation»…
