civilized, they formed a higher conception of the deity.” Also, “As stated previously, the Sumerians originally believed in only one God, but after 3500 B.C. [Hyma’s dating] they developed various forms of polytheism. They began to worship a large number of gods, from among whom they transmitted to the later Babylonians their chief god Marduk.”⁹

Stephen Langdon, professor of Assyriology at Oxford, wrote an article on “Monotheism as the Predecessor of Polytheism in Sumerian Religion.”¹⁰ The Sumerians are claimed to be the oldest people known to archaeology and their concepts can be read in their ancient writings. Some of the sites of their prehistoric cities have been excavated down to virgin soil. “In doing this with three hundred workmen at Kish,” says Langdon, “over a period of twelve years, I came to the conclusion that the vast Sumerian polytheistic system was preceded by monotheism. This conclusion was also made more clear to me by the excavations of the Germans at Erech and a city Shuruppak, between Nippur and Erech.”

Professor Langdon makes these statements in his article: “We know from inscriptions of about 3000 B.C. that the Sumerian pantheon already contained about 750 deities. . . . It is, however, certain that when we press back towards the beginning of religion on written documents the pantheon of 3000 B.C. dwindles down to four and then only two deities.” “The pantheon in full bloom contained more than 5000 deities great and small. The early history of this pantheon can be traced back through the inscriptions to the most primitive pictographs. A large body of early texts from about 3300 B.C. shows a pantheon of only 500 gods. In all theological treatises of the pantheon right back to 3300 [Langdon’s dating] the Babylonians and Sumerians always place the Sky-God at the beginning.” “I should add at once that in these primitive records there is no trace of magic or demons. Everything points to a primitive personal god with the name An, Heaven, Sky.” “It seems to be admitted that the nature myth gods of India, Greece and Italy and all Indo-Germanic religions started with a Sky-God.”

EVOLUTIONARY THINKING A STONE OF STUMBLING

Professor Langdon noted the difficulty for students influenced by Darwinism to investigate the origin of religion, and he says he extracted himself from the lure of certain preconceptions by his own study of Semitic religions.

Schmidt observed the pitfalls of evolutionary thinking: “According to this, the lower, the more bestial and ugly, must also be the older; the better in each case was the higher, and therefore the later, stage of development.”¹¹ “They [movements under the influence of evolution] assumed that religion began with lower forms, and explained all its higher manifestations, especially monotheism, as the latest in time, the products of a long process of development.”¹²

Paul Radin pinpoints this evolutionary thinking as the thing that blinded scientists to monotheism’s preceding polytheism when the evidence was first somewhat vaguely presented by Andrew Lang in The Making of Religion, published 1898: “That the professional ethnologist and ethnological theorist should have scouted the idea is natural enough, considering the ascendancy of the evolutionary theory at the time. . . . To have admitted among primitive peoples the existence of monotheism in any form would have been equivalent to abandoning their whole doctrine of evolutionary stages.”¹³

Again: “The cardinal error is and always has been the assumption that every element in culture must have had an evolution . . . there is no reason whatsoever for supposing that certain concepts require a long period to evolve.”¹⁴

In criticizing Dr. Söderblom Radin says: “For, like the most orthodox of evolutionists, he cannot bring himself to believe that the mentality of primitive people is not essentially different in kind from our own. . . . to him explicit and implicit monotheism must represent the last phases of a long and gradual development.”¹⁵

Finally Radin observes: “I am afraid that the thesis I have advanced will seem to many exaggerated, quite contrary to all the ideas customarily associated with primitive peoples. Most of us have been brought up in the tenets of orthodox ethnology, and this was largely an enthusiastic and quite uncritical attempt to apply the Darwinian theory of evolution to the facts of social experience. Many ethnologists, sociologists and psychologists still persist in this endeavor. No progress will ever be achieved, however, until scholars rid themselves, once and for all, of the curious notion that everything possesses an evolutionary history.”¹⁶

THE CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE

The Bible states that Jehovah God created man and revealed Himself to the first man. Jehovah revealed himself to other men in the centuries that followed. As men drifted away from God they conceived false gods, hundreds and eventually thousands of them, to bring to birth polytheism. But the Bible shows that monotheism was first, and the facts both from primitive cultures of today and from archaeological discoveries confirm the Bible and repudiate the theory that the concept of one Supreme God evolved from polytheism. Jehovah God is no product of evolution. When Life magazine and others teach that he is, they are spreading a message of death.

Jehovah’s servants will not stumble blindly along in the darkness of evolutionary thinking, but will testify to the truth that before Jehovah there were no gods and after him there are no real gods, only the imaginary ones of polytheism. “Ye are my witnesses, saith Jehovah, and my servant whom I have chosen; that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he: before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me.”—Isa. 43:10, AS.

REFERENCES

¹ Origin and Growth of Religion, by Dr. Wilhelm Schmidt, professor at the University of Vienna, pages 242, 243.

² Ibid., pages 157, 158.

³ Ibid., page 191.

⁴ Ibid., page 88.

⁵ Ibid., page 190.

⁶ Monotheism Among Primitive Peoples, by Paul Radin, pages 8, 3.

⁷ Page 100 of Leuba’s A Psychological Study of Religion, Its Origin, Function and Future, as quoted by Schmidt on page 195 of Origin and Growth of Religion.

⁸ Modern Discovery and the Bible, by A. Rendle Short, pages 24, 25.

⁹ An Outline of Ancient History, by Albert Hyma, pages 10, 11, 14.

¹⁰ Published in the Evangelical Quarterly, April 1937, and reprinted in Sir Charles Marston’s The Bible Comes Alive, pages 189-200.

¹¹ Schmidt’s Origin and Growth of Religion, page 5.

¹² Ibid., page 12.

¹³ Monotheism Among Primitive Peoples, page 7.

¹⁴ Ibid., page 27.

¹⁵ Ibid., page 28.

¹⁶ Ibid., pages 29, 30.

Marginal Observation

The first English Bible to be translated directly from the original languages was made by William Tyndale in the first part of the sixteenth century. The margin of Tyndale’s Bible gives us an insight into the state of religion at that time. At Exodus 36:5, 6, where Moses forbids the people to bring any more offerings for the building of the tabernacle because they had more than enough, Tyndale’s marginal comment says: “When will the pope say Hoo! [hold!] and forbid an offering for the building of St. Peter’s Church? And when will our spirituality say Hoo! and forbid to give them more land? Never until they have all.”