I do apologize that today's post will be academic and boring. I never enjoy boring, but sometimes I find it useful.
Last year, I purchased a couple books by historian Ronald Hutton. I wanted to learn more about Halloween and Christmas, mistletoe and druids, and other such homely things long condemned in the extreme by Armstrongism. Turns out, as usual, we have been lied to by those busybody purveyors of paganism in the Church of God splinters (for example, read the posts "Samhain Was Not On October 31" and "Misinformed on Mistletoe").
Lately, I have been reading Hutton's "Blood and Mistletoe: The History of Druids in Britain". It is a difficult book, with long, tedious tracts of background information about authors since the 1600s who contributed to our [mis]understanding of Druids. It is packed with information. It was intentionally thorough, but its thorough nature makes it dry and laborious. By sheer force of will and natural stubbornness I am determined to finish it. I am only halfway through. Pray for me.
But it is not a bad book so far as it goes. Actually, it has some fantastic insights.
A curious thing occurred to me as I read it - this material applies to Alexander Hislop.
You might remember Alexander Hislop from such things as "The Two Babylons: Papal Worship Proved To Be the Worship of Nimrod And His Wife" - one of the most ridiculous pieces of anti-historical nonsense ever to waste paper and ink. A good amount of the garbage that came from Herbert Armstrong and "the most accurately informed historian in the world" Herman Hoeh was predicated on the toxic sludge left for us by Hislop.
Hislop was a Presbyterian minister who joined the Free Church of Scotland in 1843. Presbyterians and all Protestants are considered "daughters of the harlot church" (re. REV. 17: 5) by Armstrongism, and condemned. This one man gets a pass for purely utilitarian reasons. Notice that date there - 1843. What else was happening then? Why William Miller's Great Disappointment, of course. The 1800s were bad years for Christendom.
Hislop did consider the Catholic Church a harlot, but did not associate himself with being a daughter of it. His entire book was a condemnation of the Roman Catholic system. This was par for the course in the early 1800s. Hislop was not by any means alone. He was a product of his time. That is what Ronald Hutton's book makes clear.
In Hutton's book, he reviews several historians beginning in the 1600s who were instrumental in the study of the Druids of the British Isles. Hutton walks us through who these authors were, what their lives were like, who they knew, who inspired them, and other such details so that we can understand why they wrote what they did. Patterns emerge.
The authors of the 1600s were like babes in the woods. They had nothing to go on but ancient writers like Pliny and Julius Caesar, a scant few stone henges sticking out of the ground, some folklore, and the Bible. Every missing detail was filled in by pure imagination. But that wasn't abnormal in those days. That's how most everyone did most everything. It's not like the science of archeology was there to guide them.
The authors of the 1700s had the exact same resources, now colored by the fancies of earlier writers. Their main take was that the Druids were isolated and therefore kept a more pure form of the one true ancient religion of Noah's day. They lacked the divine revelation given to the Hebrews, but otherwise kept Noah's religion better than anyone else had. There was a sense of national pride here. That Britannia could be the home of such noble savages was uplifting to the national spirit. It was a tool to unify the United Kingdom yet provide a way to remain attached to old customs of Saxony, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales before they disappeared. It was also a poke in the eye of the Catholics. After Queen Elizabeth I solidified England as Protestant, and after the civil war "of three nations", the divide between Protestants and Catholics was growing. Anything and everything was fair game to use against Catholicism.
The authors of the 1800s yet had the same resources, yet again colored by earlier writers, but the Industrial Revolution and contact with the Far East afforded by the British Empire was changing their view of the Druids. Rather than a pure and proud people, the Druids were seen as murderous and thoroughly corrupt. The Druids were no better than the easterners who practiced head hunting, human sacrifice, and other various cruelties of rank paganism. These points were all used against Catholicism, but they had now begun to be used against Protestantism as well. Any organized and influential ministry was becoming fair game.
Bear in mind, none of these people knew what the Druids actually did outside of the details left by the Romans. Few of them actually trusted the Romans. Roman renditions were more likely propaganda than they were honest telling of wrote fact. We still today know barely more than they did and we still use mostly the same resources. We might know the stone henges predated the Druids by quite some time, but we don't know what the Druids did with them, if anything. We still have people who fill in the blanks with wild imagination. And we still use what we find in games of religious one-upmanship.
The more things change....
But here is what I've been driving at --
You might see in here the seeds of Alexander Hislop's approach. You might also see in here the seeds of ideas such as we find in "The United States and Britain In Propehcy" - a book Herbert Armstrong plagiarized from J. H. Allen's "Judah's Scepter and Joseph's Birthright". (We have articles on this. Go to the Categories page and look for British-Israelism.)
The notion that Alexander Hislop knew what he was talking is laughable. Babylon wasn't even unearthed yet and the language barely translated by the time he finished his book. Serious scholars were calling him out from the very beginning. He had very little facts to rely on and none of his claims line up with what we have learned since. Why would he do this? Why would he make things up whole cloth like this? Why would he fill entire books with little other than fanciful imaginations?
Because that's what most people did back then! They filled in details with imagination and attacked the Catholics with it. Hislop is a product of his time.
And why would Armstrongism give him a pass to this day; to this very minute ignoring everything that has been proven over and over and over again to be false? Because it's convenient.
God's truth? Not even close.
Let this be a lesson to use only the most reliable sources and to employ older material only with utmost caution.
I don't condemn Hislop. If we were born then and there, we'd probably be doing much the same things. I don't like this silly notion of moral superiority based on what time we live in. He wasn't evil. He did what he thought was right given what resources he had. It's just that the result of his works are entirely destructive. It's the works, not the man, that I criticize here. He is almost as much a victim of this as we are. His works should have been forgotten but they were abused by charlatans and false prophets.
Herbert Armstrong, on the other hand, knew good and well what he was doing and was a liar and a thief on purpose. Knowingly. Willfully. I will not extend him this same courtesy.
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It is important that you understand; Everything on this blog is based on the current understanding of each author. Never take anyone's word for it, always prove it for yourself, it is your responsibility. You cannot ride someone else's coattail into the Kingdom. ; )
Acts 17:11
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