 The King Mystery  Menu |
Introduction and Summary
Christianity is seen as something very special, which, of course, it is. The church year’s marking of Christmas, Easter, Ascension and Pentecost follows the magnificent parables and stories of the Gospels.
However, it is also based on one of the greatest and most widespread cult myths of ancient times, which recounts the death and return of the god, and about the king’s and the god’s right to kingship. In many of the ancient kingdoms, a dramatic mystery play was performed every New Year, which often fell in the spring. Here, the god came to celebrate a sacred wedding with his country and his people.
This mystical tradition also has deep roots among the ancestors of the Jews, the Judeans and the Israelites. Because they were certainly no “isolated island in the sea of cultures”. The kings followed the mythical examples of the neighbouring kingdoms. Including, of course, the annual mystery play about the return of the god and the king, and their right to the kingdom.
Like most great stories, the cult myth is about love and sex, failure and betrayal, and about reconciliation and reunion. Here, seen into a mystical universe of gods and spirits, prophets and oracles, and kings and ancestors of divine lineage.
The evangelists’ parables and stories are the baptist sect’s interpretation of this mystery tradition into a Jewish context.
But to understand the people of ancient times, we must understand their perception of the world and themselves. So, we will begin in a completely different place.
For them, the family and the clan were the most important thing of all. People were born, lived, had children, and died, and the individual became part of the family that he himself had helped to continue.
Something similar happened with the animals in nature and in the stable. The grain in the field grew up and set seeds, which were then put in the earth to “die”, but which sprouted and became new plants [John 12:23-24]. This wondrous and mysterious re-creation took place everywhere. The cycle of the day and the year also resembled a course of life that repeated itself endlessly.
The gods and ancestors had once founded the nations, and the status and deeds of the ancestors defined the families for all times to come. The ancestors were now in the realm of the dead, or the underworld, where they were surely dead but they were still mysteriously present, and ancestor worship took place almost everywhere.
Everything that happened now had already happened to the ancestors or the gods and was, therefore, just a repetition of the mythical role model[1]. The world was mystical and magical. Everyone was assigned a destiny at birth, which determined who they were and what they became. Not just people had a destiny; everything had a destiny, even the country and the world.
Ancient people understood their world using symbolism, a mystical interpretation, which meant that “it is what it looks like”. Sameness makes identity[2]. If something looked like something else, then there was a connection between them. The world of the gods resembled the world of men, and the earthly and physical were closely connected with the heavenly and spiritual. What happened in one place must also happen in the other place [Matthew 16:19] – in a mystical way.
Dragons, monsters, and other magical beings are frequent guests in myths and legends from ancient times and the Middle Ages. And from the Bible, we know of angels, cherubim, and sons of God. These beings were symbols of something that defied the notions of the ordinary world and could therefore only be described through images and symbolism. But even if the mythical figures were portrayed magnificently and in a supernatural light, the physical realities were often far more down-to-earth and real.
Humans encountered the gods in the mystery. A mystery is something secret or hidden, a sacred act or event with a symbolic meaning. A mystery is a secret, but a secret, by its very nature, requires that only a few know it. And the best way to hide something is often to show it fully visible but disguised as something else – that which we have learned from the Bible to call parables.
Myths, legends, and sacred writings are often built around the mystery, which has two sides: An open side, which was for everyone, and a closed side, only for the initiated. The open side of the mystery was based on a narrative about the gods and ancestors, as well as heroic figures or other role models. The closed side, on the other hand, consisted of a special knowledge of the god or of a personal encounter with the god or the divine.
The mystery is hardly anywhere expressed more intensely than in the Bible, which is filled with the prophets’ and priests’ attempts to understand the god Yahweh’s plan with Israel. There, we often see only the open side of the mystery. But in this book, we will delve into the closed, mystical world, which completely transforms their thoughts and writings.
The chieftain, prince or king was the leader of the people. The ancestor of the royal family was conceived by a deity, and all subsequent kings were mysteriously this ancestor, reborn in each new generation. Thus, the firstborn son of the king was considered the son of the god himself.
The myths about the mystical continuation of the royal families have often been recounted in an almost standardized form. This narrative will be referred to here as the King Myth. It was widespread across much of the world, existing in many variations.
The King Myth is the open side of the King Mystery. It recounts how the young prince is conceived in a sacred marriage with the god. He is raised as a king, often far from home, and as an adult he accomplishes great feats. Then the king is gone for a long time, and the kingdom is threatened by enemies. But then he finally returns and retakes his country.
The country and its people were the property of the god, and the king ruled the land for the god. The relationship was intimate, and the country and the people were mysteriously seen as the wife of the god and the king.
During the reigns of the kings of Israel and Judah, the prophets referred to their country and people as the Daughter of Jerusalem or the Daughter of Zion. Every year at Pentecost, the god Yahweh came to celebrate a sacred wedding with the Daughter of Zion. She was expected to remain faithful to Yahweh, but the kings and the people played the harlot with other peoples and their gods.
As punishment, Yahweh let the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar capture and destroy Jerusalem and the temple. The elite of the people were taken to Babylon, and only after more than two generations, many of them returned. But their own kingship did not come back, and in the following centuries, Judah was subject to foreign rulers.
Instead of a Jewish king, the priests took over as Yahweh’s representatives on earth. They legitimized their right to the leadership through the prophet figure of the past, Moses, and his brother, the priest Aaron, both from the tribe of Levi, which now became the “firstborn” among the tribes of Israel [Numbers 3:11-13]. The mystery cult of Israel’s king and the god-king Yahweh, and His beloved Daughter of Zion, was transformed into a priestly cult, where the priests and Pharisees ruled with the Law of Moses in hand.
Despite the kings’ many mistakes, the prophets nevertheless dreamed of the return of the kingdom. Centuries later, the prophet John the Baptist attempted to get the king and the cult of the king back by showing Yahweh that the Daughter of Zion sincerely repented of her many adulteries.
Now the people came to John to be baptized so that the Daughter of Zion could become ”… a people prepared for the Lord.” [Luke 1.17][3] – prepared to meet the king and the god again in a sacred marriage. Jesus of Nazareth was supposed to be the awaited king.
But once again, Yahweh was betrayed by the Daughter of Zion, who now played the harlot with the Herod kings and the Romans. His own son and reborn king was sentenced to death by the priests. The Baptists’ dreams of King David’s restored kingdom were dashed.
Jesus’ brother James, however, continued the Baptist sect, and he was a missionary among the Jews. Steadily, he fought for the return of Israel’s royal family, now with himself as the leader. But James got a formidable challenger in the apostle Paul.
The former Pharisee, Paul, changed the Baptist sect’s hope for the return of the King of Israel. He remade the failed Jewish mystery cult of the king in heaven and on earth to be for all people. Paul spread the new faith with great success among the Gentiles throughout the eastern Mediterranean.
The Baptist sect had many similarities with the other mystery religions of the time. It drew on the great tales of the deeds of the ancestors. And on God’s plan with Israel, which was a mystery.
The open stories in the Gospels tell of Jesus as the returned king, as the Son of God on earth and in heaven. The inner, secret teachings, on the other hand, were conveyed by the evangelists as mystical lessons to the students in the congregations – the disciples, ”… 'To you it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, but to the rest in parables; that 'seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.'” [Luke 8.10]. The “young” disciples were to be trained to become apostles, so that they themselves could bring the secret message out into the world.
In the Bible, there are two central events around which everything revolves. One in the Old Testament, and one in the New Testament.
In the Old Testament, the focal point is the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the Babylonians in 586 BC, when the people of Judah were taken into involuntary exile in Babylon from where they returned many years later. The royal line of Judah came to an end and was replaced by a priestly rule.
The central event in the New Testament is the destruction of Jerusalem and Yahweh’s temple by the Romans in AD 70. Here, the world of the Jews and the Jewish Christians was totally destroyed. Many were expelled or fled, a million Jews were killed, and nearly a hundred thousand were taken as slaves[4].
But despite the great importance of the disaster, it is almost invisible in the New Testament. It is the “elephant in the room”, which is never mentioned directly. The letters of the apostles were written before the destruction, and the Revelation of John is a “prophetic retrospective” of the catastrophe.
The Gospels are slightly later interpretations and post-rationalizations, intended to explain it all as part of God’s plan. The narratives in the parables of the evangelists takes place before the disaster, and therefore they contain only a few and indirect mentions of it in the form of Jesus’ prophecies [Matthew 24:1-22, Mark 13:1-2 and Luke 21:20].
The purpose of this book is not to mystify the world of ancient people – they managed that just fine themselves. On the contrary, it is to uncover and understand it and them, and what they have passed on to us. We owe it to ourselves to embrace the legacy of the great mystery narratives of ancient times as an essential part of the background of Christianity. Too much remains incomprehensible without it.
Noter:
- Mircea Eliade: Cosmos and History. The Myth of the Eternal Return, Ch. 1. Harper & Brothers (1959).
- Peter P. Rohde: Den græske kulturs historie, bind I, s. 26. Thanning & Appel (1959).
- World English Bible is used here and elsewhere.
- Flavius Josefus: The Wars of the Jews, 6.9.3. Translated By William Whiston (1737). Project Gutenberg.
|