* St. Augustine, in his "City of God," allows that in his time, the whole story about Adam, Eve, the serpent, and the garden of Eden, with its forbidden fruit, was considered as allegorical. There was not one, but there were _two_ prohibited trees!
The Emperor Julian, with that wisdom which characterised him, observed that, "If there ever had been, or could be a tree of knowledge, instead of God forbidding man to eat thereof, it would be that of which he would order him to eat the most." Reason is the real forbidden tree of priestcraft.
From a mass of ill-strung fables, derived from such a variety of sources--a chaos of revolting prodigies, mixed up with a few probable facts, such as the expulsion or flight from Egyptian slavery, the murders and devastations in Southern Syria, etc., we cannot, in the bounds of a lecture, notice more than a few of the most prominent miracles, all of which had Pagan prototypes.
As every oriental country had its cosmogony, accounting very clearly, though contrarily to each other, for the origin of things, so all had traditionary floods, which each nation quoted as proof of its antiquity.* Why should not the Jews have one also? The Chaldeans said that theirs happened 25,000 years before the war of Troy, when the immense surface now occupied by the Mediterranean Sea was inundated.. The Egyptians had their inundations; and hence their ark of Osiris (the archetype of the Noah's ark) the same as the constellation Argo. The Greeks had their floods of Ogyges and Deucalion; the latter of which, was fully treated of by Berosus, and after him by Lucian, in his Syrian goddess; but the Jews, who took everything from their masters, borrowed the Chaldean pilot _Noe_, made him skipper of their ark, slightly changing his name to _Noah_, and appropriated to themselves the flood of Deucalion,** with all its details, almost word for word as fabled by Berosus and Lucian.. That this tradition was not adopted by the Jews until long after the alleged time of Jehovah's flood, is proved by the orders which he gave Noah respecting clean and unclean beasts, the distinction whereof not being made until several hundred years after the assumed time of Noah. Nothing can be more probable than that, amongst the initiated few, all these floods had secret reference to the supposed influence of the winter or watery constellations.