Christ Conspiracy_ The Greatest Story Ever Sold - Acharya S [97]
As to such "insider" knowledge of the true meaning of Christianity, Doane remarks:
Many Christian writers have seen that the history of their Lord and Saviour is simply the history of the Sun, but they either say nothing, or, like Dr. Parkhurst and the Rev. J. P. Lundy, claim that the Sun is a type of the true Sun of Righteousness.
This "type of" sophistry has been used frequently in "religious" debate to squeeze out of a tight corner. Yet, the Christian conspirators cannot hide the fact that their "Lord's Day" is indeed Sun-day; hence, their Lord is the sun.
Even though this information has been well hidden, the early Christians were aware that Christ was the sun, as they were truly Gnostic and the solar myth was known all around them. When a member of at least one such Gnostic sect wished to become orthodox, he was compelled to renounce his "heresy" of equating Christ with the sun. Higgins relates of the influential and widespread Gnostic group called the Manichaeans:
When a Manichaean came over to the orthodox he was required to curse his former friends in the following terms: "I curse Zarades [Zarathustra/Zoroaster] who, Manes said, had appeared as a God before his time among the Indians and Persians, and whom he calls the sun. I curse those who say Christ is the sun, and who make prayers to the sun, and to the moon, and to the stars, and pay attention to them as if they were really Gods, and who give them titles of most lucid Gods, and who do not pray to the true God, only towards the East, but who turn themselves round, following the motions of the sun with their innumerable supplications. I curse those persons who say that Zarades and Budas ]Buddha] and Christ and Manichaeus and the sun are all one and the same."3'
In his 2°.' Apology, Justin Martyr acknowledges that the Gnostic-Christian Manichaeans were "sun-worshippers" and says:
Accordingly, Menander seems to me to have fallen into error when he said: "0 sun! for thou, first of gods, ought to be worshipped, by whom it is that we are able to see the other gods." For the sun never could show me the true God; but that healthful Word, that is the Sun of the soul, by whom alone, when He arises in the depths of the soul, the eye of the soul itself is irradiated.
In order to obfuscate the origins of Christianity, Justin is attempting to distinguish between the sun of the Gnostics, which was the solar orb, and the "sun (sol) of the soul" in the "person" of Jesus Christ. In fact, the sun of the Gnostics and other "sunworshippers" also represented the cosmic and cellular "sun" found in living things, including human beings, who, it was perceived, by Gnosticism can become illuminated. Thus, both Gnostic and orthodox Christians were addressing the same "sun of the soul," but the orthodoxy insisted on putting a particular face and shape to it. One might also wonder how the omnipresent divine is separated out of its creation, such that it is "everywhere" but not in the sun, moon, stars, sky, earth and all of creation. To reiterate, the ancients were not just monotheistic, polytheistic and "atheistic"-as the Christians called and were called by their adversaries-but pantheistic, seeing the divine in everything, as is the definition of omnipresence.
It is clear that from early times Christ was correctly perceived by the Gnostic sects as the sun, a fact that the historicizing Christians were continuously compelled to combat, as is evidenced by the anti-Manichaean oath specifically designed to refute such assertions. Yet, as Higgins states, ". . . the Sun, lao, and Jesus, were all taken for the same being by the ancients, and it will require more than the skill