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The role of Constantine in the history and development of Christianity has been falsified, misrepresented, and misunderstood. The false eighth-century "Donation of Constantine," has served to confuse matters even further in the eyes subsequent writers. Nevertheless, Constantine is often credited with the decisive victory of the ‘adherents of the message’ —and not without justification.
According to later Church tradition Constantine had inherited from his father a sympathetic predisposition toward Christianity. In fact, this predisposition seems to have been primarily a matter of political expediency, for Christians by then were numerous and Constantine needed all the help he could get against Maxentius, his rival for the imperial throne. In AD. 312 Maxentius was routed at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, thus leaving Constantine’s claim unchallenged. Immediately before this crucial battle Constantine is said to have had a vision—later reinforced by a prophetic dream—of a luminescent cross hanging in the sky. A sentence was supposedly inscribed across it—"In Hoc Signo Vinces" ("By this sign you will conquer ).
Conventional wisdom recalls that Constantine ordered the shields of his troops to be emblazoned with the Christian monogram—the Greek letters Chi Rho, the first two letters of the word "Christos." As a result Constantine’s victory over Maxentius at Milvian Bridge came to represent a miraculous triumph of Christianity over paganism. This, then, is the popular Church tradition on the basis of which Constantine is often thought to have ‘converted’ the Roman empire to Christianity.
In actual fact, however, Constantine did no such thing. But in order to decide precisely what he did do, we must examine the evidence more closely. In the first place Constantine’s "conversion" does not seem to have been Christian at all but absolutely pagan. He appears to have had some sort of vision in the precincts of a pagan temple to Apollo, either in the Vosges or near Autun. According to a witness accompanying Constantine’s army at the time, the vision was of the sun god—the deity worshiped by certain cults under the name of "Sol Invictus," "the Invincible Sun." There is evidence that Constantine, just before his vision, had been initiated into a Sol Invictus cult.
In any case the Roman Senate, after the Battle of Milvian Bridge, erected a triumphal arch in the Coliseum. According to the inscription on this arch Constantine’s victory was won "through the prompting of the Deity." But the deity in question was not Jesus. It was Sol Invictus, the pagan sun god.
Contrary to tradition, Constantine did not make Christianity the official state religion of Rome. The state religion of Rome under Constantine was, in fact, pagan sun worship; and Constantine, all his life, acted as its chief priest. Indeed, his reign was called a "sun emperor-ship," and Sol Invictus appeared everywhere—including on the imperial banners and the coinage of the realm.
The image of Constantine as a fervent convert to Christianity is clearly wrong. He himself was not even baptized until 337—when he lay on his deathbed and was apparently too weakened or too apathetic to protest. Nor can he be credited with the Chi Rho monogram. An inscription bearing this monogram was found on a tomb at Pompeii dating from two and a half centuries before.
The cult of Sol Invictus was Syrian in origin and imposed by Roman emperors on their subjects a century before Constantine. Although it contained elements of Baal and Astarte worship, it was essentially monotheistic. In effect, it pronounced the sun god as the sum of all attributes of all other gods and thus potential rivals. Moreover, it conveniently harmonized with the cult of Mithras—which was also prevalent in Rome and the empire at the time and which also involved solar worship.
For Constantine the cult of Sol Invictus was, quite simply, expedient. His primary, indeed obsessive, objective was unity—unity in politics, in religion, and in territory. A cult or state religion that included all other cults within it obviously helped to achieve this objective. And it was under the auspices of the Sol Invictus cult that Christianity consolidated its position.
Christian orthodoxy had much in common with the cult of Sol Invictus, and thus the former was able to flourish unmolested under the latter’s umbrella of tolerance. The cult of Sol Invictus, being essentially monotheistic, paved the way for the monotheism of Christianity. And the cult of Sol Invictus was convenient in other respects as well—which both modified and facilitated the spread of Christianity. By an edict promulgated in AD. 321, for example, Constantine ordered the law courts closed on "the venerable day of the sun" and decreed that this day be a day of rest. Christianity had hitherto held the Jewish Sabbath—Saturday—as sacred. Now, in accordance with Constantine’s edict, it transferred its sacred day to Sunday. This not only brought it into harmony with the existing regime but also permitted it to further dissociate itself from its Judaic origins.
Until the fourth century, moreover, Jesus’ birthday had been celebrated on January 6th. For the cult of Sol Invictus, however, the crucial day of the year was December 25—the festival of Natalis Invictus, the birth (or rebirth) of the sun, when the days began to grow longer. In this respect, too, Christianity brought itself into alignment with the regime and the established state religion.
The cult of Sol Invictus meshed happily with that of Mithras—so much so, indeed, that the two are often confused. Both emphasized the status of the sun. Both held Sunday as sacred. Both celebrated a major birth festival on December 25. As a result Christianity could also find points of convergence with Mithraism—the more so as Mithraism stressed the immortality of the soul, a future judgment, and the resurrection of the dead.
In the interests of unity Constantine deliberately chose to blur the distinctions among Christianity, Mithraism and Sol Invictus—deliberately chose not to see any contradictions among them. Thus, he tolerated the deified Jesus as the earthly manifestation of Sol Invictus. Thus he would build a Christian church and, at the same time, statues of the mother goddess Cybele and of Sol Invictus, the sun god.
The amazing discovery of the ‘Dead Sea Scrolls and Napoleon’s discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1796 put to rest, once and for all, the notion that Christianity was a ‘Brand New Religion’ for Egyptian scholars discovered Christianity’s origins in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
There is a call for a new age in Bible interpretation from many religious quarters. St.Paul emphasized the subjectivity of pure spiritualism rather than the objective historical veracity of the Bible. Clement, Origen and even Augustine emphasized the allegorical nature of the Gospels yet the Church succeeded in imposing the historical code of interpretation until now. The Conservative Christian Right, so exclusively activated by ‘Blind Faith’, make it impossible to have an open dialogue with them.
The miraculous feeding of the five thousand with five small loaves and two small fishes is not history it is a zodiacal allegory of Virgo who holds sheaves of wheat in her arms and Pisces, the black and white fishes. Virgo is the Mother of the World and of Jesus the sun- god. Jesus' decent into Hell for 3 days is nothing more than a celestial allegory relating through the medium of personification the celestial facts surrounding the Winter Solstice. The order to put the baby Jesus to death by Herod is but another celestial allegory. In fact the whole "Jesus Story" is nothing more than the personification of the path of the Sun through the Zodiac and its 12 houses (the number of the disciples of Jesus, the Sun). We will look at more examples shortly.
It is unlikely that the writers of the ancient Divine Religious Myths, like those of Osiris and Horus for instance, myths that captured and related Divine Truths, foresaw that their allegorical genius would be mistakenly rendered and interpreted as if they were "literal" or "historical" and in so doing would be taken as the dramas of living humans or that their ideal world of living imagery would be mistaken for literal history. Egypt’s cryptic but enlightened paradigms of spiritual truth were turned into rigid mindsets and historical Hebrew miracles. The early religions had their myths interpreted. We have our misinterpreted. And a great deal of what we have imposed on us as God’s own true revelation to mankind is a mass of reversed myths and fossilized symbolism.
Gerald Massey the noted English scholar and Egyptologist explains quite lucidly: "The lost language of celestial allegory can now be restored, chiefly through the resurrection of ancient Egypt; the scriptures can be read as they were originally written, according to the secret wisdom, and we now know how history was first written as mythology."
Godfrey Higgins, in his monumental work, The Anacalypsis, says that " what are called early histories of man, but are contrivances under the appearance of history to perpetuate doctrines…in a manner only understood by those who had a key to the enigma". It is sad to say that in the early days of Christianity the cryptic keys necessary to correctly interpret the Ancient Spiritual Wisdom were lost and only now are being recovered. And the problems that plague our religions cannot be resolved until the whole body of sacred literature is reinterpreted through the magnifying glass of allegory. In ancient times the principles of Soul Science were at the core of the Wisdom Schools and no one with the sincere desire to know were refused entry. Christianity arose during a time of remarkable cultural and intellectual fusion and I am say to say as an ordained Pastor that this confusion yet holds the minds of billions of Christianity's adherents.
Bennoah1@airmail.net