Who was Alexander Hislop?
Alexander Hislop (Born at Duns, Berwickshire, 1807; died Arbroath, 13 March 1865) was a Free Church of Scotland minister famous for his outspoken criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church. He was the son of Stephen Hislop (died 1837), a mason by occupation and an elder of the Relief Church. Alexander's brother was also named Stephen Hislop (lived 1817–1863) and became well known in his time as a missionary to India and a naturalist.
Alexander was for a time parish schoolmaster of Wick, Caithness. In 1831 he married Jane Pearson. He was for a time editor of the Scottish Guardian newspaper. As a probationer he joined the Free Church of Scotland at the Disruption of 1843. He was ordained in 1844 at the East Free Church, Arbroath, where he became senior minister in 1864. He died of a paralytic stroke the next year after being ill for about two years.
He wrote several books, his most famous being The Two Babylons: Papal worship Revealed to be the worship of Nimrod and His wife.
The Two Babylons (get the cd)
Tommy film Tremors 3: Back to Perfection ipod Strictly Sexual download
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow dvdrip
This book was initially published in 1853 as a pamphlet, then greatly revised and expanded and released as a book in 1858.
He claimed the Roman Catholic Church was a Babylonian mystery cult, and pagan, whereas Protestants worshipped the true Jesus and the true God. He contended that Roman Catholic religious practices are actually pagan practices grafted onto true Christianity during the reign of Constantine. At this point, he alleged, the merger between the Roman state religion and its adoration of the mother and child was transferred to Christianity, merging Christian characters with pagan mythology. The Goddess was renamed Mary, and Jesus was the renamed Jupiter-Puer, or "Jupiter the Boy".
Hislop's theory was that the goddess, in Rome called Venus or Fortuna, was the Roman name of the more ancient Babylonian cult of Ishtar, whose origins began with a blonde-haired and blue-eyed woman named Semiramis.
According to Hislop, Semiramis was an exceedingly beautiful woman, who gave birth to a son named Tammuz, was instrumental as the queen, and wife of Nimrod the founder of Babylon, and its religion, complete with a pseudo-Virgin Birth. This he called a foreshadowing of the birth of Christ, prompted by Satan. Later, Nimrod was killed, and Semiramis, pregnant with his child, claimed the child was Nimrod reborn.
Hislop claimed that the cult and worship of Semiramis spread globally, her name changing with the culture. In Egypt she was Isis, in Greece and Rome she was called Venus, Diana, Athena, and a host of other names, but was always prayed to and central to the faith which was based on Babylonian mystery religion.
Then, according to Hislop, Constantine, though claiming to convert to Christianity, remained pagan but renamed the gods and goddesses with Christian names to merge the two faiths for his political advantage, under Satan's guidance.
The book has been severely criticized by many of being insidiously hateful, and in much of it supporting evidence being found in ante -nicene testimonies, as well as Josephus, and other ancient varifications as some existing evidence: for instance, the Roman state religion before Christianity did worship a central Mother Goddess, Venus and Cupid. Yet many women named Semiramis lived centuries after Nimrod, and not all could be the famed original, and some legend seems to mix them. Hislop also makes some questionable linguistic connections and fanciful word plays, e.g. the letters IHS on hosts in Catholic Holy Communion are alleged to stand for Egyptian deities Isis, Horus and Seth, but in reality they are an abbreviation for Ihsous, the Latin spelling of Jesus's name in Greek (Ιησους), although popularly, they stand for the Latin Iesus Hominum Salvator meaning Jesus, Savior of Mankind.
Despite this, and the fact that his book, if proven true, would discredit Christian traditions as a whole, since the concepts that it attacks in Roman Catholicism are shared uniformly by Eastern Christianity and by some Protestants, this book was, and still remains in some circles, a staple of anti-Catholic polemic. Hislop is a favorite source of Jack Chick, who published reprints of his book, and Dave Hunt, who on occasion alludes to his work. While the book is mostly looked upon as a work of bigotry and conspiracy theory, it is still considered by some small sects as a definitive work of Protestant Christian apologetics.
Hislop's goddess hypothesis
Protestant minister Alexander Hislop in The Two Babylons (1853) imagined Semiramis as an actual person in ancient Mesopotamia who single-handedly invented polytheism and, with it, goddess worship.
In this telling, Semiramis is a consort of Nimrod, builder of the Bible's Tower of Babel. (The Bible actually makes no mention of consorts of Nimrod, of Nimrod as the builder of the tower, or of the name Semiramis.)
Semiramis invents polytheism in an effort to corrupt her subjects' original faith in the god of Genesis and deify herself in their eyes.
In support of his hypothesis Hislop mentioned legends of Semiramis being raised by doves. He invoked writings by the church's Ante Nicene Fathers to suggest that these stories began as propaganda invented and circulated by Semiramis herself so her subjects would ascribe to her the status of virgin birth and view her child as the fulfillment of the "seed" prophecy in Genesis 3:15.
Hislop identified Semiramis's child as the Bible's Tammuz.
He went on to maintain that all divine pairings in world myths, such as Isis/Osiris, Aphrodite/Cupid, Asherah/Orion and others, represent nothing more than retellings of this original story.
Hislop took literary references to Osiris and Orion as "seed of woman" to be evidence in support of his thesis. The legends already existing in his day about Semiramis and Ninus he viewed as distortions of history.The Keeper full
