On this day exactly 120 years ago,
the New York Times published an article, "The Abolition of History," about the posthumous publication of a book by the English historian Edwin Johnson that, in a "scientific, dispassionate, searching method and manner," total revision of the Christian history of Europe and the history of England in particular.
Abolition of History.
Generations of English schoolboys yet unborn will rise up and call blessed Edwin Johnson, if the contentions of his posthumous book just published here by the Putnams are successfully established. "The Rise of English Culture," which appears three years after the author's death, undertakes to abolish all English history before the end of the fifteenth century. There simply is no such thing. It is an invention, not of the devil, as no doubt large numbers of English schoolboys in the past have thought, but of the Benedictine monks. Respect for the powers and industry of this great hierarchy will be vastly enhanced if what Mr. Johnson maintains is true. In their monasteries was manufactured and turned out all the information, or what has hitherto passed for information, in regard to all the English Kings, all the achievements of the English people, nay, even all the history of Europe and all the literature that is supposed to date before that time. "A wall of darkness seems to rise behind the faintly outlined figure of- Henry Tudor and the fiendlike Richard," says this uncompromising skeptic, "which shuts in the view of the observer and hides from him the earlier past." The author puts it mildly when he says that this must come upon the unprepared mind with "a shock of surprise."
Mr. Johnson is perfectly calm about it. His method and his manner are scientific, dispassionate, searching. He scrutinizes, and he gives his reasons. Being accused of having "Benedictines on the brain," he gravely replies that it is modern history which he has on the brain, and he knows that this subject cannot be understood without attention to the Benedictine system. That system, as he explains it, is of a band of "dishonest fabulists organized and disciplined in the use of the pen," "taught to agree upon a dogma and a fable." From their hands came the whole of our Christian literature, the whole of our history, arranged to suit their purposes. Why have these points been so long neglected, and why have they escaped the notice of the most skeptical and thoughtful historians? These fables were founded, to begin with, on "the imagination of the world." Already during the Revival of Letters there were brought to light expressions of doubt. They were forgotten or suppressed. The fabulists were organized and disciplined, working for self-interest; the critics were not.
The imagination, fertility, and intellectual power of the fabulists at least are worthy of admiration. Not only all the Saxons, the English Kings downward from "William the Conqueror" — so our skeptic designates his mystical character in quotation marks — are phantasmagoria of Benedictine brains, but laws and literature, the bedrock of our ancient belief, are all products of "the forge and writing house of fable" in the monasteries. St. Augustine and St. Jerome and Tertullian and a St. Thomas Aquinas and their works came thence. So did the Venerable Bede, the symbol of the literary activity of a knot of Benedictines, told off to the duty of illustrating the imaginary past of England. John Wiclif is no historic-personality, but a convenient figure of the poor priests at which the monks and friars aimed their polemical arrows. "Chaucer" (and Mr. Johnson mentions with modest pride that he is the first to point it cut) is a name under which masked a group of men of the English renaissance, keen but genial critics of the monastic system; we first hear of the "Chaucer legend" in 1540. Dante is in a similar predicament. Rabelais is another mask, worn by a jesting monk, who poured contempt through it on the whole system of historic fiction then coming into vogue. Roger Bacon is another mythological figure set up, by the Merton friars through the necessity felt for cultivating the little science then current. We may not even keep our Caxton; he is a legend and not the man who first introduced printing Into England. We must even give up Domesday Book and such a safeguard of our liberties as Magna Charta. Both are real, but both are late — and all that about King John and the Barons at Runnymede is fable.
In an introductory chapter, signed by Edward A. Pretherick, the reader is informed that Edwin Johnson was born in 1842 and died in 1901. He was a Congregational minister until he accepted the Professorship of Classical Literature in New College, London, in 1870. He wrote "The Rise of Christendom," (1889) and translated the "Prolegomena" of Father Hardouin.
Published: May 14, 1904
The New York Times
Contemporary information about Johnson from the English Wikipedia:
Edwin Johnson (1842–1901) was an English historian, best known for his radical criticisms of Christian historiography.
Among his works are Antiqua Mater: A Study of Christian Origins (1887, published in London anonymously) and The Pauline Epistles: Re-studied and Explained (1894).
In Antiqua Mater Johnson examines a great variety of sources related to early Christianity "from outside scripture", coming to the conclusion that there was no reliable documentary evidence to prove the existence of Jesus Christ or the Apostles.
He asserts that Christianity had evolved from a Jewish diaspora movement, he provisionally called the Hagioi. They adhered to a liberal interpretation of the Torah with simpler rites and a more spiritualized outlook. Hagioi is a Greek word meaning "saints", "holy ones", "believers", "loyal followers", or "God's people", and was usually used in reference to members of the early Christian communities. It is a term that was frequently used by Paul in the New Testament, and in a few places in Acts of the Apostles in reference to Paul's activities.
Both Gnosticism as well as certain Bacchic pagan cults are also mentioned as likely precursors of Christianity.
In The Pauline Epistles and The Rise of English Culture Johnson made the radical claim that the whole of the so-called Dark Ages between 700 and 1400 A. D. had never occurred, but had been invented by Christian writers who created imaginary characters and events. The Church Fathers, the Gospels, St. Paul, the early Christian texts as well as Christianity in general are identified as mere literary creations and attributed to monks (chiefly Benedictines) who drew up the entire Christian mythos in the early 16th century. As one reviewer said, Johnson "undertakes to abolish all English history before the end of the fifteenth century." Johnson contends that before the "age of publication" and the "revival of letters" there are no reliable registers and logs, and there is a lack of records and documents with verifiable dates.
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