ANCIENT CHRISTIAN SYMBOLISM.
By Dr. Mohiuddin Waseem
IN THE NAME
OF ALLAH, MOST GRACIOUS, MOST MERCIFUL.
This is what God told to
ancient Israelites saying, “Therefore take good heed to yourselves.
Since you saw no form on the day that the Lord spoke to you at Horeb (Mount Saini), out of the
midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a graven image for
yourselves, in the form of any image, the likeness of male or female, the
likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird
that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the
likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth. And beware lest you
lift up your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the
stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and worship them and serve
them, things which the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the
whole heaven (Holy Bible, RSV, Dt; 4; 15-19)”.
To put it simply don’t
follow the pagans who used to worship astral deities, and personified natural
powers into statues of both human and animal forms rather the imageless worship
of the invisible God should be the tenet of ones faith.
“You shall not make for
yourself a graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in the heaven
above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the
earth: you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the Lord your God am
a jealous God, (Ex: 20; 4-5)”.
The similar message you find
beautifully summarized in the Holy Quran when it says, “(He is) the Creator
of the heavens and the earth: He has made for you pairs from among yourselves
and pairs among cattle: By this mean does He multiply you: There is nothing
whatever like unto Him, And He is the One that hears and sees (all things). To
Him belong the keys of the heavens and the earth: He enlarges and restricts the
sustenance to whom He will: For He knows full well all
things” (Holy Quran 42; 11-12).
Unfortunately, this simple
Divine message of monotheism was forgotten many times in the course of history
by almost all the many sects in Abrahamic faiths-
Islam, Christianity and Judaism. We are all equal in ignorance and no different
from one another when we call upon the names of Prophets and saints for
assistance instead of God the Creator and therefore associate them in power and
might with Him, the worst kind of sin in all three Abrahamic
faiths. The religious history is witness to the fact that it is always the
literate ones who lead the unwary to wrong doings; therefore Jews required
rabbinic rulings, Muslims scholarly Fatwas and
Christians their councils and creeds to numb their conscience.
As the topic of current
discussion is Christianity I’ll show you how our Christian brethren under the
leadership of Paul corrupted the true message of Jesus Christ and introduced
the myth of “death and resurrection of a divine crucified savior for salvation
of the world” known to every heathen nation of his times, with clear political
intentions. His efforts, supposedly for the glory of God attracted pagans who
found themselves at home, having tons of divine incarnate saviors in their
surroundings.
The following example is
sufficient to illustrate how a preconceived ideology can change the truth in a
totally different direction. Geza Vermes,
a famous Jewish scholar says: “son of God” was always understood metaphorically
in Jewish circles. In Jewish sources, its use never implies participation by
the person so named in the divine nature. It may in consequence safely be
assumed that if the medium in which Christian theology developed had been
Hebrew and not Greek, it would not have produced an incarnation doctrine as
this is traditionally understood” (The Metaphor Of God Incarnate, John Hick,
p42-43). And if you allow me to add here that if the Jews would have accepted
Jesus and propagated his message instead of the heathen Greco Roman converts
the result would have been drastically different.
The most perverted ideology
from antiquities to present is the belief in astrology, with sun as the central
figure along with moon and five planets of ancient times and twelve signs of
zodiac. This pseudoscience is based on erroneous assumption that earth is the
center of the universe and all planets and the luminaries are revolving around
it (geocentric) which is contrary to what we know today of the nature of the
universe. There is a remarkable similarity of these imaginary signs in
different cultures and most of the scholars believe that their origin is from
ancient Babylon/Mesopotamia (modern day
The sphere of the ecliptic and the
celestial equator intersecting each other.
The other imaginary belt of
importance is known as orbit of Zodiac or Celestial equator, in which the
twelve constellations or signs of Zodiac revolve around the earth and this
orbit, intersects the Ecliptic (sun’s orbit) at a certain angle giving the
ancients the idea of heavenly cross. The most famous reference to this cross
formed by the ecliptic and the celestial equator is found in Plato’s dialogue “Timaeus”, where Plato tells us how Demiurge (the creator of
universe in Greek mythology) constructed the universe out of two circles which
he joined “in the form of the letter X” (The Origins Of The Mithraic
Mysteries, David Ulansey, p47).
To the pagans of antiquities
it was known that the sun moves backward through the Zodiac, one degree every
seventy-two years so that every 2160 years the spring point or vernal equinox
slips into a new Zodiacal sign. That is why we see the cult of Taurus (Bull)
flourishing in ancient
According to the Talmud, his
mother gave him the quite common name Yeshu’a,
meaning “the help of Yahweh”; the Greeks made this into Iesous,
the Romans into Iesus. The Greek word for the fish
is, i-ch-th-u-s, formed after the initials of the
phrase ‘Iesous Christos Theou Uios Soter’-
“Jesus Christ, Son Of God, Savior”. He was seen both as the “Lamb of God” whose
sacrifice closed the era of Aries and the rising sun of the Piscean era, the
celestial fish of new age (Jesus Christ, Sun Of God, David Fideler,
p160-69).
The early writers were so
mesmerized with these astrological myths that his disciples were known as
“fishers of men” while the early Christians were known as “little fishes” (Mk:
1; 17 & Mt: 4; 19).
The next symbol is cross,
which made its debut late in the evolution of Christianity. We know from the
religious history of antiquities that cross was used, as a religious emblem,
many centuries before the Christian era, by every nation in the world who
believed in a “divine crucifixion”, and perhaps to keep themselves unique,
despite obvious similarities the early Christians were hesitant in adopting
this symbol.
T. W. Doane
says, “Few cases have been more powerful in producing mistakes in ancient
history, than the idea, hastily taken by Christians in all ages that every
monument of antiquity marked with a cross, or with any of those symbols which
they conceived to be monogram of their god, was of Christian origin. The early
Christians did not adopt it as one of their symbols; it was not until Christianity
began to be paganized that it became a Christian
monogram, and even then it was not the cross, as we know it today. It is not
until the middle of fifth century that the pure form of the cross emerges to
light. The cross of
He further states that, “The
oldest representation of Jesus Christ was a figure of a lamb, to which
sometimes a vase was added, into which his blood flowed, and at other times
couched at the foot of a cross. This custom subsisted up to the year 680, and
until the pontificate of Agathon, during the reign of
Constantine Pogonat. By the sixth synod of
My dear brothers and sisters,
I have summarized for you the historical evolution of Christian Symbolism and
it would be superfluous to say that addition of mythologies to the simple
teaching of Jesus Christ has totally changed the real monotheistic message of
his ministry.
