For decades, Armstrongism treated Alexander Hislop's The Two Babylons (1853 pamphlet, expanded 1858) and Ralph Woodrow's popularization of it in Babylon Mystery Religion (1966) as something close to sacred history. Herbert Armstrong and the various successor groups used the material to argue that the Roman Catholic Church was literally the continuation of ancient Babylonian worship of Nimrod and his wife Semiramis-the Great Whore of Revelation, mother of harlots, source of every "pagan" festival and ritual. It was the perfect prop for the "one true church" narrative: Rome was just baptized paganism, everyone else was a daughter of the harlot, and the little flock that kept the "true" calendar and Sabbath could claim clean hands.
The book is still reprinted and quoted in some Protestant circles. Most scholars, however, have long treated it as pseudohistory. Even the man who turned its thesis into a bestseller eventually dismantled it himself.
The Core Fantasy
Hislop's subtitle was not subtle: "The Papal Worship Proved to Be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife." He claimed that after the Flood, Nimrod and Semiramis founded a mystery religion of mother-and-child worship, sun-god motifs, and fertility rites. This system supposedly survived, mutated through every pagan culture on earth, and reappeared in Rome under Christian names. The Mass, Easter, Christmas, Lent, clerical celibacy, the rosary, the papal tiara, round communion wafers, and the letters IHS were all said to be Babylonian in origin. The Pope was essentially Belshazzar with better public relations.
To make this work, Hislop performed one of the most ambitious exercises in parallelomania ever put between covers. He equated Nimrod with Ninus, Tammuz, Osiris, Bacchus, Adonis, Apollo, Hercules, Mithra, Moloch, Orion, Pluto, Saturn, Vulcan, Zoroaster, and a long list of other figures. Semiramis was identified with Ishtar, Astarte, Isis, Aphrodite, Venus, Diana, Ceres, and others. A table of "father-mother-son" triads across cultures was offered as proof that the Catholic Madonna and Child, and even the doctrine of the Trinity itself, were simply rebranded Babylonian paganism.
The Timeline That Breaks Everything
The historical Semiramis (Sammu-ramat) was an Assyrian queen who ruled around 811-806 BC. That is more than a thousand years after any plausible post-Flood Nimrod horizon. No ancient source-Babylonian, Assyrian, biblical, or classical-connects them as husband and wife or makes Semiramis the mother of Tammuz. The Bible mentions Nimrod only briefly (Genesis 10; 1 Chronicles 1) and never mentions a wife or a son named Tammuz. Tammuz appears once in the Hebrew Bible (Ezekiel 8:14) as the object of women's weeping; he is not linked to Nimrod. The story of Nimrod + Semiramis + Tammuz as a foundational triad was invented by Hislop in the 1850s.
Lester Grabbe and other scholars have noted that Hislop's entire argument, especially the identification of Ninus with Nimrod and Semiramis as his consort, rests on a basic misunderstanding of historical Babylon and its religion. Hislop relied heavily on Greek writers (who often mythologized the ancient Near East) and on the early, incomplete reports of Austen Henry Layard's excavations at Nineveh. He wrote before cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs were fully deciphered. The result looks footnoted and scholarly to the casual reader and collapses under primary-source scrutiny.
Specific Claims That Do Not Survive Contact with Evidence
Easter. Hislop wrote: "Easter is nothing else than Astarte... That name, as found by Layard on the Assyrian monuments, is Ishtar." This is classic folk etymology. Philologists derive the English word "Easter" from Old English Ēostre (a West Germanic dawn goddess), ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root for "east/shine." The linguistic link to Ishtar is rejected.
Christmas and the winter solstice. Hislop claimed the December 25 date commemorated the birth of the Babylonian "messiah" (identified with Tammuz/Nimrod) and that the Christmas tree and Yule log were reenactments of Nimrod's death and rebirth as the sun-god. Round objects (wafers, tree ornaments) were said to honor the sun-god. These are free associations, not historical genealogy.
Lent. Hislop linked the 40 days of Lent to mourning for Tammuz, allegedly killed by a wild boar at age 40. He cited Egyptian and other fasts of varying lengths. Standard references do not support a Babylonian origin for the Christian practice of Lent as he described it. Woodrow later listed this among the unsubstantiated claims that circulated for decades.
IHS. Hislop claimed the Christogram IHS (the first three letters of the Greek name of Jesus, ΙΗΣΟΥΣ) stood for "Isis, Horus, Seb." It does not. This is one of the clearest, most easily checked errors in the book.
The colorful inventions. Woodrow later summarized the tabloid quality of Hislop's reconstructed "history": Nimrod was portrayed as a big, ugly, deformed black man; Semiramis as a beautiful white woman with blond hair and blue eyes, a backslider, the inventor of soprano singing, and the originator of priestly celibacy. Shem supposedly killed Nimrod; Semiramis was later killed by one of her sons who cut off her head. Babylonians supposedly baptized because Nimrod and Semiramis had "suffered" in water. None of this appears in recognized history books or primary sources. Woodrow checked encyclopedias on Nimrod and Semiramis; none said they were husband and wife or that they lived in the same century.
The cross, mitre, wafers, candles, steeples, etc. Similarities were treated as proof of origin. A papal mitre was said to derive from the fish-god Dagon; round wafers from sun disks; the cross from the initial of Tammuz's name; black clerical garments, halos, and church steeples from pagan sources. The method is the same throughout: find a resemblance, declare a connection, move to the next item.
Ralph Woodrow's Rare Act of Integrity
Woodrow's 1966 Babylon Mystery Religion distilled Hislop into a readable, widely distributed form. Armstrongist circles used it. Then Woodrow did something rare among popular authors of polemical bestsellers: he actually checked the footnotes against primary sources and standard references.
What he found was myth, misquotation, and lack of actual historical connection. In 1997 he withdrew his own bestseller from print-at real financial cost. He stated that the book had provided more income to his ministry than all other books and offerings combined, and that he had faced significant financial loss by pulling it. Rumors of Catholic pressure or money motives were false. He simply refused to continue selling what he now knew was unreliable. He replaced it with The Babylon Connection?, a direct refutation of both Hislop and his earlier work. In his own words, he could not "in good conscience continue to publish a book against pagan mixture knowing that it contained a mixture itself of misinformation about Babylonian origins." He noted that even the Worldwide Church of God had begun taking a second look once the problems surfaced.
Woodrow's point was methodological: similarities prove nothing without actual historical linkage. One can invent "connections" between almost anything (he used the analogy of a murder case in which every piece of circumstantial evidence points to a suspect who was in another city on the day of the crime). History is not a game of connect-the-dots in which inconvenient dots are ignored.
The Armstrongist Irony
Armstrongism's anti-Catholicism was never subtle. Rome was the mother of harlots, the system of Babylon, the Great Whore. Hislop and Woodrow supplied the historical "proof" that made the prophecy charts feel airtight. Yet the same movement that claimed unique access to restored truth spent decades leaning on a Scottish Free Church minister's 1850s polemic that fails basic chronology, primary-source tests, and linguistic scrutiny.
This is a familiar pattern. When a source flatters the "we alone have the pure doctrine, the true calendar, and the right understanding of prophecy" narrative, its scholarly status becomes optional. Groups that mock mainstream scholarship on British-Israelism, the 1975 prediction, or later date-setting suddenly treat Hislop's footnotes as authoritative. When the popularizer of those ideas publicly walks them back and removes his own book from the market, the older material stays in the libraries and the talking points continue.
There are legitimate reasons to critique Catholic doctrine, practice, or historical developments on scriptural or historical grounds. Marian dogmas, the Mass as a propitiatory sacrifice, claims of papal infallibility, and various medieval accretions can all be examined without inventing a thousand-year marriage between Nimrod and an Assyrian queen or equating half the gods of the ancient world with one another. Relying on discredited parallelomania does not strengthen the case; it undermines credibility with anyone who checks the sources.
Hislop produced myths while trying to expose paganism. Armstrongism imported those myths to bolster its own exclusivity. Ralph Woodrow, to his credit, eventually chose the evidence over the sales and the applause. The rest of the story is how long certain groups will keep quoting the original version of a book whose most influential modern champion spent money to take it off the market.
Silent Pilgrim
No comments:
Post a Comment