Blind Faith

by Simon Gwylan

Where did Christianity begin? In a stable in Bethlehem? Well, maybe, but only if you think Jesus Christ founded Christianity. If you, like me, don't think that, then the answer might well be: on the road to Damascus:
Acts ix, 1. And Saul, breathing out threatening and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, 2. And desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. 3. And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: 4. And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? 5. And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.

Saul then became Paul, and the religion he persecuted became the religion he first espoused, then dominated, and finally moulded in his own image. For me, Christianity was invented by St Paul, and St Paul was invented on the road to Damascus. That's why, no doubt, Acts tells the above story no fewer than three times, in chapters nine, twenty-two, and twenty-six. There's a slightly different and even contradictory version each time, but the heart of the story is this: Saul is on the road to Damascus and encounters a heavenly light and voice. In two of the versions the light strikes him temporarily blind, as the narrator of Acts describes in chapter nine:
ix, 8. And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus.

and Paul himself describes in chapter twenty-two:
xxii, 11. And when I could not see for the glory of that light, being led by the hand of them that were with me, I came into Damascus.

In chapter twenty-six the blinding, if not implicit, is certainly not denied - it couldn't be, because it's an essential part of what is unmistakably a solar initiation ritual. Like the one undergone by Samson in Judges xvi:
19. And she [Delilah] made him sleep upon her knees; and she called for a main, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head; and she began to afflict him, and his strength went from him. ... 21. But the Philistines took him, and put out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison house.

Gaza, which is also the Greek word for 'treasure', is again mentioned in the description of a disguised solar ritual in Acts, when the apostle Philip meets and converts a 'man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians, who had charge of all her treasure':
viii, 26. And the angel of the Lord spake unto Philip, saying, Arise, and got toward the south unto the way that goeth down from Jerusalem unto Gaza, which is desert.

This odd episode may have been intended to supplement or explain Saul's initiation ritual, for it immediately precedes the first description of that in chapter nine. But the parallels between the contiguous stories are not as obvious as they might be: the two latter descriptions of the initiation ritual mention that it took place 'about noon' (xxii, 6) or 'at midday' (xxvi, 13); the first description mentions no time at all. Why? Perhaps because the Greek words translated as 'toward the south' in the story of Philip and the eunuch can also be translated as 'at midday'.

The editors of Acts didn't want things to be too obvious, in other words: there are enough parallels between the stories of Saul's conversion and the story of Philip and the eunuch already. Another is that Candace was, according to Pliny the Elder, 'blind of one eye'[1]. Her name is also very similar to the Latin candere, meaning 'to glow or shine', and to the Greek Candaon, which was 'Orion's Boeotian nickname' and is taken by Robert Graves to mean 'shining'.[2] Orion was a sun-hero who fell in love with Merope, daughter of a man called Oenopion who kept putting off her suitor because 'he was in love with her himself':
One night Orion, in disgust, drank a skinful of Oenopion's wine, which so inflamed him that he broke into Merope's bedroom, and forced her to lie with him. When dawn came, Oenopion invoked his father, Dionysus, who sent satyrs to ply Orion with still more wine, until he fell fast asleep; whereupon Oenopion put out both his eyes and flung him on the seashore.[3]

Orion restores his sight by rowing out to sea in a small boat to Lemnos, the island of Hephaestus, where he kidnaps an apprentice to guide him to the eastern rim of the world and the healing rays of the dawn sun. But how does he row in the right direction to get to Lemnos? By 'following the sound of a Cyclops's hammer'. The Cyclops were one-eyed giants who worked in Hephaestus's smithy, but their most famous representative was a freelance shepherd called Polyphemus:
He is represented to have been a monster of strength, of tall stature, and with one eye only, in the middle of the forehead. He fed upon human flesh, and kept his flocks on the coast of Sicily, when Ulysses, on his return from the Trojan war, was driven there. The Grecian prince, with twelve of his companions, visited the coast, and were[sic] seized by Polyphemus, who confined them in his cave, and daily devoured two of them. Ulysses would have shared the fate of his companions, had he not intoxicated the Cyclops, and put out his eye with a fire-brand while he was asleep.[4]

The Cyclops's single eye is a solar symbol and thirteen is the number of months in a lunar year, so the ritual is perhaps a little mixed here, but it nonetheless retains the element of blinding that, in a less permanent form, is so clearly important in the story of Saul's conversion on the road to Damascus. Damascus was not, in fact, an important centre of solar worship. In Saul's day you would have had to go a little further north for that, to the acropolis city of Emesa and the great temple of the sun-god Elah-Gabal. And perhaps Saul did go a little further north, and was approaching Emesa at noon rather than Damascus. In chapter 22 of Acts, he is speaking 'in the Hebrew tongue' when he describes the 'great light', and in Hebrew letters Damascus and Emesa might easily be confused: they have two letters in common as they do in English, and have others that are very similar in shape, plus or minus a jot or tittle. Acts was composed by a native speaker of Greek, but he might well have been working from notes or diaries in Hebrew for that section, perhaps through a careless or less than perfectly bilingual amanuensis.

Or perhaps the disguising of Emesa as Damascus is part of a solar-ritual conspiracy. Or perhaps there's no disguising at all. It doesn't exhaust the linguistic exegesis of the three passages in any case and it's an obscure clue to solar ritual anyway. Somewhat clearer is the divine cry that accompanies the blinding light:
xxvi, 13. At midday, O king, I saw in the way a light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun, shining round about me and them which journeyed with me. 14. And when we were all fallen to earth, I heard a voice speaking unto me, and saying in the Hebrew tongue, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.

In the Hebrew tongue Saul means 'asked-for', and is pronounced something like 'Shaa'ool': in Greek and Latin the first sound changes to a plain 's' and the word sounds much more like the Latin 'sol', which means, of course, 'sun'. The sun was a god who rode in a chariot and perhaps controlled his horses with a kentron, or 'goad', which is the word used in the proverbial expression in the second verse: 'kick against the pricks', a metaphor taken from the behaviour of goaded horses and also, perhaps, of ritually tortured sun-worshippers.

And the first half of the Lord's words - 'Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?' - are strongly reminiscent of words he is said to spoken years earlier on the cross:
Matthew xxvii, 45. Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour. 34. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? That is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? (cf. Mark xv, 33-4)

His God is, perhaps, the sun: Eli is very similar to Helie, the vocative form of Helios, the name of the Greek sun-god.[5] Spectators listening to the cry believe Jesus is calling on 'Elias' (xxvii, 47), who is only two letters away from Helios and who, as an ancient Hebrew prophet, is a much less logical addressee than the sun-god. The darkness is highly unnatural, after all: it cannot be due to a solar eclipse, which neither lasts three hours nor occurs around the time of the full moon.[6] Though a solar eclipse can certainly start at noon, which is when the 'darkness over all the land' occurs in the Gospels: the 'sixth hour' is the sixth hour counting from dawn.[7] At noon Jesus begins, like Saul, to 'look on darkness', 'skoton blepein', an idiom in Greek meaning 'to be blind'. Which means, you see, we've turned full circle: Christianity is literally a blind faith.

NOTES

1. Lempriere's Dictionary, which gives 'Plin. 6. c. 16' as the reference.
2. The Greek Myths, index.
3. Ibid., vol. 1, sec. 41, 'Orion', b.
4. Lempriere's Dictionary, entry for 'Polyphemus'.
5. I can't remember where I came across this idea: it was either in one of John Allegro's books or in Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man, a novella [later expanded into a novel] about Jesus.
6. Passover is celebrated at the full moon and had taken place just before the crucifixion.
7. 'The Greeks reckoned days from sunset to sunrise ... the day and night were divided each into 12 hours, which varied in length according to the time of year'. James Gow, A Companion to School Classics, Macmillan and Co., London, 1936, X, 'Greek Chronology', pp. 78-9.