INTRODUCTION. HEAD III. OF THE FOUR MODES OF CORRUPTION.

○It were premature, in a work of which the greater part of the testimony is still to be set before the reader, to attempt more under the present head than to show, from a single place, that the modes of corruption which are to be enumerated were not coeval, and that the order in which they operated may in some instances be recovered, not from the conjectures of the moderns, but from the relation of a heathen writer who had no thesis of his own to serve; and I shall accordingly confine myself, in the first instance, to the testimony of Philo Byblius, as it is preserved by Eusebius (Euseb. Praep. Evang. i. 10), upon the office of Thabion, reserving the application of it to those Books in which each of the modes is to be treated at length.¹ NB-36-009

○The testimony, which I give in substance, is that Philo relates that all the stories of the fragment, which he professes to have taken from the Phenician writings, were allegorised by Thabion, who is described as the very first hierophant of all the Phenicians from the beginning; that Thabion mixed them up with the physical and cosmical phenomena; and that he delivered them, so mingled, to the prophets who celebrated the orgies and inaugurated the mysteries.² It is to be observed, with the exactness which the place requires, that Philo does not say that the stories were invented by Thabion, nor that they were taken by him from the heavens; he says that they were allegorised, and mixed up with the phenomena of nature, which is to say that they existed before they were so treated; and that the treatment, so far from being the origin of the stories, was an act of a particular person, at a particular stage, and for the benefit of a particular class. What the stories were before Thabion touched them the passage does not declare; and it is not from the passage that I shall endeavour to learn it.³ NB-36-009

○The place has been read, as might have been expected, in more than one way. It might be urged by those who begin the interpretation of the heathen fables from the sun, and who regard the worship of that luminary as the original religion of mankind, that such a passage proves the physical meaning to have been the first; and it is not without some appearance of reason that they might appeal to a witness who speaks of the physical and cosmical phenomena as the matter with which the stories were mingled. But the words, when they are examined, say the contrary of this: by this relation the physical interpretation was laid upon the stories by a hierophant, and delivered by him to the prophets; it did not make the stories; and the order which the words determine, the tradition first and the physical reading after, is precisely the reverse of that which the opinion in question requires.⁴ To suppose that the physical reading is the earlier, and that the history is a later growth upon it, is to set aside the only testimony in which an ancient author dates one reading of the fables, and says by whom it was made, in favour of a supposition which has no testimony whatever. NB-54-002 NB-36-009

○I proceed, therefore, to name the four modes, as they are at present sketched, and in the order in which I conceive them to have operated, although the proof of the order is to be sought under the several Books. The first is the deifying of the patriarchs, by which the names, the genealogies and the inventions of the heads of the families were carried over to persons whom their descendants had come to adore. The second is the remembrance of the Deluge, which was preserved among the nations in the gods of the waters, and in which the vessel and its freight are to be recognised. The third is the transfer of the divine titles to the sun, which I hold to be late, and which, as the passage of Philo shews, is a reading laid upon the history and not the source of it. The fourth is the concealment of the deposit in the Mysteries, of which the delivery of the stories to the prophets who inaugurated them is, in the same passage, a notice not to be overlooked.⁵ That the stories were delivered to the prophets after they had been allegorised, and not before, is a circumstance which I shall have occasion to remark when the Mysteries come to be considered. NB-36-009

○It may be objected, in the first place, that Philo is not of the most ancient writers, and that his fragment has passed through more hands than one; to which I answer that I rest upon the order of his words, and upon nothing else, and that a witness who is late as to the matter may be good as to the sequence, which, being a fact of order and not of interpretation, is the less likely to have been altered in the carrying.⁶ It may be objected, in the second place, that a single instance does not establish a rule, and that what was done by Thabion among the Phenicians may not have been done elsewhere; to which I answer that I do not offer the instance as a proof of the rule, but as a proof that the question of the order is one which the testimony of the heathen is able to decide, and that those who have decided it by a conjecture have decided, without knowing it, what the testimony is able to determine for them. It may be objected, lastly, that the four modes are not distinct, since the same fable, as I have myself allowed, may exhibit two or more of them at once; to which I answer that the concurrence of the modes in a single fable is not an argument against their number, but a reason for distinguishing them; and that this objection, with others which may be urged with less force, will be considered at greater length under the several Books.⁷ NB-36-009 NB-54-002