With respect to the opening lines of John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God . . . and the Word was made flesh,” Küng remarks that the author/authors “by no means say that Jesus was eternal like God, but only that he was created by God at a certain time as the incarnation of the Word.”18
Over the past decades, Bart D. Ehrman has been diligently discussing biblical corruptions in a clear and straightforward manner that has brought him many readers. Ehrman recently left the church; we’ll probably never know the extent to which this was prompted by his growing awareness, based on his research, of the fraudulent nature of certain passages in the New Testament. In The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (1993), Ehrman tells us that “proto-orthodox scribes of the second and third centuries occasionally modified their texts of Scripture in order to make them coincide more closely with the christological views embraced by the party that would seal its victory at Nicaea and Chalcedon.”19
Stephen Snobelen wrote in 2002 that the recent work of Bart D. Ehrman “reveals a growing awareness on the part of contemporary textual critics that proto-Trinitarian forces were responsible for a large number of doctrinally-inspired textual corruptions of the New Testament.”20
If for Newton, God and Jesus were not one and the same, then what were they? What was the nature of their relationship?
First, regarding God, Voltaire summed up Newton’s beliefs as follows: “Sir Isaac Newton was firmly persuaded of the Existence of God; by which he understood not only an infinite, omnipotent, and creating being, but moreover a Master who has a Relation between himself and his Creatures.”21 The key word is “master.” Newton never speaks of a compassionate God or a loving God; he speaks of a God of dominion, a God of providence. This is the God who made his presence known by acting in the world (see chapter 18). In the “General Scholium” that ends the Principia Mathematica, Newton writes:
The supreme God is . . . all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all power to perceive, to understand, and to act; but in a manner not at all human, in a manner not at all corporeal, in a manner utterly unknown to us. As a blind man has no idea of colours, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things. He is utterly void of all body and bodily figure, and can therefore neither be seen, nor heard, nor touched; nor ought to be worshiped under the representation of any corporeal thing.22
To have in mind, while worshipping, a description of God, or to have in view, while worshipping, an image of God, is seriously misleading, since the nature of God cannot be grasped by the senses. Fixating on an image of him, whether in the imagination or in the real world as a painting or a statue or whatever, is, Newton believes, idolatrous. It is demeaning to God. Newton continues:
We have ideas of his attributes, but what the real substance of any thing is, we know not. In bodies we see only their figures and colors, we hear only the sounds, we touch only their outward surfaces, we smell only the smells, and taste the favours; but their inward substances are not to be known, either by our senses, or by any reflex act of our minds; much less then have we any idea of the substance of God. We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes.23
If we wish to grasp what is God, the only way we can do so is by becoming aware of his activities in the world (“his most wise and excellent contrivances of things”). These are ubiquitous; we should show “reverence and adore him on account of his dominion.”24
Second, regarding Jesus, Newton was not a Trinitarian. He did not believe God and Christ were the same.
But Newton believed that, if Christ was not God, he was very nearly God. Newton belonged to a heretical sect of Christianity called Arianism, of which John Locke, William Whiston, the founder of modern chemistry Robert Boyle, and many other outstanding Englishmen were adherents. Arius (AD 256–336) was a Libyan presbyter and theologian, descended from Berbers, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt. Arius spent decades warring with Athanasius, the fiery orthodox bishop of Alexandria, over the nature of the relationship between Jesus Christ and God. In the next two chapters, we will describe in detail the phases of that war. Suffice it to say for the moment that Athanasius finally triumphed; because of him, the idea of the Trinity—that God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit are one—became the cornerstone doctrine of the orthodox Roman Catholic Church.
Arius was a subtle, probing, and responsible theologian who has had a powerful impact on thinkers through the ages (see chapter 4). He believed God was “uncreated and unbegotten, eternal, without a beginning and unchangeable.” Christ was all of these except one: he had been created by God. Arius qualifies this: Christ was “not simply created in time” but “before all time.” The Libyan bishop said, famously, “There was once [a time], when he [the Son] was not.”
Newton Project director Rob Iliffe writes:
The fourth-century theologian Arius opposed the doctrine of the Trinity, maintaining that Jesus was a figure distinct from and inferior to God. According to most accepted church histories of Newton’s time, Arius’s views were rightly condemned as heretical by the contemporary champion of trinitarianism, Athanasius (later Saint Athanasius). Newton, however, turned this version on its head, maintaining that it was Athanasius who was the heretic while poor honest Arius had been repeatedly misrepresented and slandered by the wicked trinitarians from his own lifetime right up to Newton’s.25
So Newton did not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity; he did not believe that the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit were one.
But he believed that a Christ who was so very nearly identical with God was a powerful being whom God must have deployed in a plenitude of powerful ways. Arius believed God had created Christ so the Son could make manifest the physical universe, which was something God could not do directly. Christ created the material reality in which we live in his capacity as the link between the physical nature of the universe and the spiritual nature of God. Spirit and matter are different and opposed; they cannot “touch”; they require an intermediary who partakes in the nature of each. This intermediary is Christ, who is both God (though not quite the God) and man; it is through this Chrst that spirit and matter interact.
For Newton, Christ is God’s agent, “His Man in the Physical Universe.” He is the Deity’s district manager, the executive officer of physical creation. In The Janus Faces of Genius, Newton scholar B. T. J. Dobbs writes:
Newton’s Christ is a very unorthodox Christ indeed but one whose many duties keep him engaged with the world throughout time. A part of his function is to insure God’s continued relationship with His creation. Even though Newton’s God is exceedingly transcendent, He never loses touch with His creation, for He always has the Christ transmitting His will into action in the world.26
There existed in the Newton papers at one time an unusual collection of essays, and perhaps even an entire book, called On the Church, whose contents suggest that Newton at the end of his life was still elaborating on a highly unusual (and certainly heretical) concept of Christ. The Newton scholar (and also playwright and drama scholar) David Castillejo was able to see these papers in the late 1970s. He drew from them some astonishing conclusions. Castillejo wrote:
the fragments that have survived on Christ are . . . astounding. Newton believed that Christ dominates both the Old and the New Testament. All appearances of Jehovah in the Bible are in fact appearances of Christ: it was Christ who walked in the Garden of Eden, who gave Moses the Ten Commandments, who appeared to Abraham as an Angel, who fought with Jacob, who gave the prophecies to the prophets. He is the Prince Michael mentioned by Daniel, and he will come to judge the quick and the dead. The Jews are ruled by Christ in an absolute monarchy, and he is their lord.
Castillejo continues:
What Newton has done is push God right out of the Bible and back into nature, where he is everywhere present, immovable and invisible. Conversely he
has brought Christ forward as a moving, living and commanding being, who crosses back and forth over the boundary of immortality, and dominates the whole of the Jewish and Christian religious experience. It is an amazing transformation of traditional opinion. Newton’s whole book is in some way a commentary on the true and false relationship between Christ and God.27
The identity of Jesus Christ, the extent to which he participated in the essence of God—these questions were not absolutely essential for Newton when it came to having a correct understanding of the practice of Christianity. Newton saw the Christian faith as having a double aspect: it could be “meat for men,” and it could be “milk for babes.”
“Meat for men” involved acquiring a profound and comprehensive knowledge of Christianity, historically, philosophically, and indeed in all of its facets. “Milk for babes” was the more important aspect. It meant that, to be a decent Christian, you had to do only two things: adore God, and love your neighbor. Newton wrote: “In matters of religion the first & great Commandment hath always been: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart & with all thy soul & with all thy mind. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy self. On these two hang all the Law & the Prophets (Matthew 22:27).”28
Newton’s devastating critique of the “orthodox corruption of scripture” was only a part of his massive assault on the Roman Catholic Church’s insistence, even to committing fraud, on the absolute primacy of the doctrine of the Trinity. A key element of that assault was the great mathematician’s bitter, brilliant, and devastating examination of the life and character of the celebrated champion of the doctrine of the Trinity, Athanasius, archbishop of Alexandria.
In the two chapters that follow, we won’t only have a look at Athanasius’s conduct at the paradigm-destroying Council of Nicaea of AD 325, but we’ll also take a tour through many other aspects of Athanasius’s life and discover that he in his way was as corrupt as many of the corruptions that Newton found in the New Testament. We’ll do all this looking through the prism of one of the least known and most shocking documents in the entire history of religion: Isaac Newton’s own “Paradoxical Questions Concerning the Morals and Actions of Athanasius and His Followers.”
What happened to the two letters that Newton sent to Locke? Did they have any effect on the history of theology, particularly regarding biblical text?
Locke made a copy of the first letter and, thinking he was complying with Newton’s half-expressed wishes, sent it, without revealing the author’s name, to a friend of his, an M. Le Clerc, in Amsterdam. He asked Le Clerc to have the letter translated into French and published. In his reply dated April 11, 1691, Le Clerc agreed that it should be published and offered to translate it into Latin or French.
Locke informed Newton of what he had done—and Newton panicked. He insisted that the letter be suppressed. Locke wrote Le Clerc a second time, and Le Clerc complied, merely having the letter deposited in a private museum in Holland, that of the Remonstrants (a group of religious dissenters).
In 1754—twenty-six years after Newton’s death—the letter was published in London. A historian published the text to a wider audience in 1785, in the middle of a heated controversy over the text of John 1:7–8. The contents of the second letter weren’t published until the mid-twentieth century, when the text appeared in the third volume of the University of Cambridge Press’s Correspondence of Isaac Newton.
It’s not easy to assess the general effect of Newton’s letters to Locke. Most of the corruptions he pointed out have by now been corrected (though not in the official Roman Catholic Church edition of the Bible). Already during the last third of Newton’s life a number of scholars had begun to make quietly devastating statements about the number of “variant” readings between manuscripts of the Bible. Diarmaid MacCulloch writes that “by 1707 one distinguished mainstream English biblical scholar, John Mill [the father of philosopher John Stuart Mill], reckoned these to be around thirty thousand in number. Some of these variable readings could plausibly be considered as later interpolations in the interests of Trinitarian belief.”29
What about Trinitarianism in relation to the other two great monotheistic religions of the world, Judaism and Islam? In Judaism there is only one God, Jehovah, and he does not have a son. Islam too eschews any thought that God could have a son. MacCulloch writes: “In a much-discussed and not conclusively understood verse [4.171] of the Qur’an, God is represented as telling the Christians ‘believe in God and his messengers and do not speak of a “Trinity.”’ . . . God is only one God, He is far above having a Son.”30
Now let us a look at the ferocious struggle in the fourth century AD that made the doctrine of the Trinity part of Christianity—a struggle that Newton documented endlessly even as he endlessly reviled it. The archbishop Athanasius will take center stage as antihero and archvillain.
CHAPTER FOUR
BLOODBATH IN A BOGHOUSE
Murder in the Fourth Century AD, Part 1
If it hadn’t been for the determination of Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, the doctrine of the Trinity probably would not have survived long enough to be declared, near the end of the fourth century AD, the cornerstone doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. That’s why the Vatican reveres Athanasius, now Saint Athanasius, calling him the Father of Orthodoxy.
Isaac Newton believed that the doctrine of the Trinity was erroneous and that Athanasius had not only led Christianity down the wrong path but also had blood, real blood, on his hands. He believed that the Father of Orthodoxy was a murderer, a rapist, a slanderer of his peers, a falsifier of documents, a rewriter of history to serve his own interests, and truly one of the worst men in the world.
In the 1690s, Newton labored over draft after draft of an incendiary 43,000-word, twenty-four-point legal brief setting out in minute detail the evidence to prove that Athanasius had committed all these crimes. The document bears the unexciting title of “Paradoxical Questions Concerning the Morals and Actions of Athanasius and His Followers.” Newton didn’t publish it, and in his lifetime few knew that it existed. Some time after Newton’s death, the manuscript found its way into the Clark Library in Cambridge, where it was kept under lock and key; Newton’s heirs didn’t want the world to know that their illustrious ancestor had been a nonconforming anti-Trinitarian. Edward Gibbon, at work in Lausanne, Switzerland, on The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote to Cambridge for permission to come and read “Paradoxical Questions” in the library, but permission was denied; his assessment of Athanasius in his masterpiece might have been significantly different if he’d read Newton’s withering words.1 Only when Newton’s nonscientific writings were auctioned off in 1936 did “Paradoxical Questions” become available to the general public and begin to figure in discussions about Sir Isaac Newton.
“Paradoxical Questions Concerning the Morals and Actions of Athanasius and His Followers” is written in a dry-as-dust style that contains not a single surplus adjective or adverb. It’s a bare-bones string of sentences as spare as a page of equations. It’s easy to believe that Newton didn’t want anyone to read it, for he makes no concessions whatsoever to the reader. Perhaps his unforgiving style was meant in part to deter people from discovering his heretical beliefs.
Even with a cursory reading, Newton’s hatred of Athanasius shows through. Richard Westfall writes that in “Paradoxical Questions” he “virtually stood Athanasius in the dock and prosecuted him for a litany of sins, . . . [seeking to show] not only that Athanasius was the author of ‘the whole fornication’—that is, of trinitarianism, ‘the cult of three equal gods’—but also that Athanasius was a depraved man ready even to use murder to promote his ends.”2
That being said, “Paradoxical Questions” is a story—a scoop!—that would whet the appetite of any journalist, provided that person knew enough about its implications to want to work his or her way through its rebarbative phraseology. For, if you look hard beneath the surface, you see that Sir Isaac ha
s written a sordid drama of murder, fraud, character assassination, and interfaith conflict in the best tradition of religious holy wars. It’s what you might get if Agatha Christie had woven a detective thriller out of the more sordid episodes of the New Testament. The plot includes:
The ignominious death of a controversial prelate in a public latrine in Constantinople. This prelate might have been struck down by God, or he might have been murdered by his enemies, or the whole thing might not have happened at all.
The forgotten other Council of Nicaea—namely its dark twin, the Council of Tyre—convened in AD 335. This council, attended by as many bishops as had attended Nicaea, dealt with human sin and folly rather than the divine Word and came perilously close to reversing the most important decisions made at the Council of Nicaea.
Rape; a severed hand; a second murdered bishop; falsified letters; the wholesale rewriting of ecclesiastical history; “Words, Whips, Clubs, and all methods of Cruelty and Severity, not sparing even the devoted Virgins, whom they suffered the very Gentiles to strip naked”; and numerous other elements smacking of the surrealist, the macabre, and the horror entertainment of the Grand Guignol of Paris.
A notorious ecclesiastic trial of which history has given us two different versions, in some places three, and which transports us to the same subjective, relativistic, and shifting world as the one created by Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Rashomon.
A celibate monk so horribly tormented by imaginary visions and demons, against all of which he resisted nobly, that for almost 2,000 years he has been a poster monk promoting the miseries and splendors of the monastic life.
The most famous collectors in the ancient world of the bones of saints and all other holy relics.
A bloody battle between Roman legionnaires and ecstatic Christians inside a church in Alexandria, during which “the drawn swords shone by candle light and Virgins were slain and trodden under foot.”
The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton Page 7