Euclid and Jesus

234 Pages·2013·2.08 MB·English

by  C. K. Raju

Euclid and Jesus
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EUCLID AND JESUS
How and why the church changed
mathematics and Christianity
across two religious wars
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C. K. R AJU
M ULTIVERSITY AND C ITIZENS I NTERNATIONAL
Copyright © C. K. Raju, 2012. All rights reserved.
The woman on the cover, with fire in her eyes, is an image of Hypatia by Lim
Jee Yuan. In the background is the burning Great Library of Alexandria.
Hypatia’s father, Theon, was its last librarian. The book tells Hypatia’s story.
ISBN-978-983-3046-17-1
ISBN-978-983-3046-17-1
Typeset by the author in 10 pt Baskerville, using LA TEX.
Prologue:
Who should read this book?
Euclid is celebrated as the father of geometry, and author of the Elements , a
book once revered like the Bible, but now a school text. The story goes that he
was a white-skinned man, strangely enough from Africa, who lived three
centuries before Jesus.
Now, what is the evidence for this extraordinary story? Remarkably few seem to
know. Most people hear the story of Euclid along with geometry lessons in
school. And children don’t ask for evidence—did you? This book gives you a
second chance to ask that long-unasked question. What is the evidence for
Euclid?
Strange things wriggle out the moment one digs for the evidence. Greek
manuscripts of the Elements do not mention Euclid as its author. Commentaries
speak anonymously of the “author of the Elements”. Now what was the terrible
crime for which the author of the Elements was made anonymous? Was it just
because she was a woman, Hypatia?
Why were mathematicians (or philosophers, as they were then called) so hated
by church priests? Isn’t mathematics universal? Today, our schools teach
mathematics on that belief. But it is well known that mathematics did not
develop in the same way in all cultures, so this universality is not a fact but a
norm. Western scholars insist that mathematics must imitate Euclid’s supposed
doctrine of proof, so that traditional Indian and Chinese mathematics (which had
a different notion of proof) was inferior and not quite mathematics! Now, if
mathematics is universal it should have developed the same everywhere. And if
that did not happen, then why should Euclid be the benchmark? Why not
Āryabhata or Hypatia?
Strangely, the philosophy attributed to Euclid exactly fits the church theology of
reason invented during the Crusades when Europe first heard of Euclid. So the
demand to imitate Euclid is also an implicit demand to accept that church
theology. That theology served (and still serves) as a key weapon against all
non-Christians, especially Muslims, as this book explains. This has some
non-Christians, especially Muslims, as this book explains. This has some
unexpected consequences, even for Christians!
Were you put off by math in school? Are your children weak in it? This book
explains why it wasn’t your fault! Present-day math is difficult just because it
got entangled with Christian metaphysics. 1 So, disengaging mathematics from
theology also makes math easy. I have demonstrated this in teaching
experiments in universities in three countries, by teaching calculus, with a new
philosophy of math, even to non-math students, in just five days. 2 But, to
understand all this, it is first necessary to understand how mathematics got
entangled with Christian theology across two religious wars. That is what this
book explains—to those ordinary people who never learnt math properly.
Now, the thought of a religious bias in present-day mathematics surprises many
people. They are unaware that the very word mathematics derives from
mathesis, a term imbued with deep religious meaning since Plato, and his black
Egyptian sources, down to Hypatia and her successor, Proclus. Those religious
beliefs were central also to original Christianity, and to the book Elements , as its
commentator Proclus states. But few know about those beliefs today for they
were cursed by the church and became taboo in the West. This book aims to
explain all this to a wide audience. Every true Christian too should know about
this, for it shows how the original Christian doctrine was repeatedly mangled by
the church, in its quest for world power.
My own reason for writing the book is the following. I believe that education
must free the mind, and not enslave it. So, I always encouraged my children to
question their school texts. The need to do so became particularly acute when
school texts were abruptly changed by the centre-right NDA government, after it
came to power in India in 1999. They wanted to instill pride in Indian culture.
Undoubtedly, there is much to be proud of in Indian culture, from which
Europeans learnt both arithmetic and calculus. 3 But the textbook writers did not
bother to research it: for them, pride was axiomatic. This led to many factual
inaccuracies, and there was an uproar over the saffronization of history in school
texts. My younger son was then in class 5, and I repeatedly showed him the
primary sources, to point out the errors in his school books. 4
Later, the NDA government was replaced by the centre-right UPA government.
There was no longer any question of a Hindu bias, for the new government was
led by an Italian-born Roman Catholic. The school texts were again changed.
My son was now in the 9th standard. His school text in math now contained a
My son was now in the 9th standard. His school text in math now contained a
long string of images of white-skinned Greeks, described in heroic terms as the
originators of mathematics. But by now my son had cast off the spell and
stopped trusting his school texts. He wryly asked: why do all Greeks look alike?
(Naturally one suspected that all those images were similar just because they
were based not on evidence, but only on the artists’ racist imagination, which
depicted a Caucasian stereotype.)
I took up the matter with the NCERT, the Indian government agency responsible
for those texts, and also with the authors of the texts. I asked them what evidence
they had for the existence of Euclid, or for the color of his skin, considering that
Euclid was supposedly from Alexandria, in Africa. The authors produced no
evidence. Nor did they modify the text, which still has a chapter on “Euclid’s
geometry”. All they did was to replace the image of one Greek, Euclid, with a
Chinese-looking one, to evade the charge of promoting racism! One of those
authors now heads the NCERT.
When the school texts were first changed, it was clear to all that mixing politics
with religion distorts history within a mere 5 years, and that distorted history can
be a dangerous source of propaganda. But the church mixed politics with
religion for the last 1700 years. It openly advocated distorted history as a
weapon since its first religious war against “pagans”. (This resulted in the 5th
c. History against the Pagans , written by Orosius, which said not a single good
word about any non-Christian.) History was again distorted during the second
religious war—the Crusades against Muslims—by attributing all knowledge in
Arabic books to early Greeks, real or imaginary. That was when Europe first
heard of the book Elements attributed to an early Greek, Euclid.
The Inquisition amplified this distortion of history. Copernicus, for example, like
so many others, was too afraid to acknowledge his “heretical” non-Christian
sources in the works of Ibn Shatir and Khwaja Nasiruddin Tusi. Thus, history
was Christianized, with all world-knowledge being attributed to the theologically
correct. This Christianization of history was used to justify racism by
philosophers like Hume, Kant and others. Racist and colonial historians built on
that legacy.
Colonialism globalised Western education—which was initiated by the church
during the Crusades, and remained under its control for the next 9 centuries.
Through Western education, that distorted history has acquired a canonical
status today. I naively thought that those who opposed saffronization of history
status today. I naively thought that those who opposed saffronization of history
did so because they were secular. Hence, I imagined they would be equally
sensitive to the possibility of Christianization of history, and the church-
instigated violence which accompanied it.
I wrote about this in books, 5 scholarly journals, 6 and newspapers. 7 I gave public
lectures, and offered a large reward for evidence about Euclid. 8 But there was no
outrage this time: the Western-educated were unperturbed with false history in
school texts, so long as it had a Western pedigree. They were constantly taught
from childhood to rely only on Western secondary sources (as Wikipedia still
teaches them), or on “primary” sources doctored by Western editors. So,
questioning the West is taboo for the indoctrinated colonised mind produced by
Western education. Those victims of Western superstitions should not read this
dangerous book for it breaks that taboo, and shows that Western sources are
completely unreliable even in the important case of Euclid.
While continued Western domination of education may be a fact, and it may be
hard to change the indoctrination inherent in the present-day educational system,
I owed it to my children to educate them about the truth. That is how this book
started. Those parents who feel the same need to free their children’s minds can
use this book to educate their children at home.
Last but not the least, there are also those young persons whose parents tell them
there is no alternative, and no way to remedy the current system. For these
young people, I have only one word of advice: revolt! If someone ties you in
chains, you at least have a chance to escape for you see those chains. But if your
mind is captured (as it is by false history) you have little hope. Certainly,
freedom will not come for free, especially when you confront an organization
which has aimed to grab world power, down the centuries, by casting a spell on
the young, like an evil sorcerer. But even to dream of freedom, you must first
break that spell, and that is what this book will enable you to do.
Since this book was originally told to a thoughtful child, some parts are like
stories to retain the child’s interest. The stories are in smaller print to separate
them from the fully factual presentation. Hopefully, this will help to make the
book easy to read for a wide audience.
Note: The dates in this book are given using CE, meaning Christian Era (and not
Common Era). This is intended to eliminate the ADBC Western superstition that
the Christian Era begins with the birth of Jesus. That superstition arose from the
demand to recite AD (“Year of our Lord”) and BC (“before our saviour”) just to
state any date. In fact, it is well known that the zero point of the Christian
calendar was fixed only in the 6th c. CE, in connection with the date of Easter,
and was not earlier regarded as connected with the birth of Jesus.
Contents
Prologue:
Who should read this book?
The Devil’s Parody
Euclid: Myth or History?
2.1 He who knows not…
2.2 He who knows he knows not…
2.3 He who knows he knows
2.4 How myth differs from history
Euclid: The Story
3.1 The greatest mathematician
3.2 The Greek race
3.3 The color of Euclid’s skin
3.4 Euclid’s images in school texts
3.5 The numerous works attributed to Euclid
Euclid: The Evidence
4.1 The expected evidence
4.2 The magic trick of myth building
4.3 The Dark Ages
4.4 Who wrote the Elements ? Two theories
4.5 Euclid of Megara
4.6 A single remark
4.7 Why was “Euclid” so little known?
4.8 The problem of papyrus technology
4.9 An isolated passage
4.10 Is the passage due to Proclus?
4.11 The spurious Archimedes citation
4.12 The archaeological evidence
4.13 Why was the Elements written?
4.14 A fishy proposition
4.15 The social circumstances
4.16 The clash of philosophies
Geometry and the Soul
5.1 The origin of geometry
5.2 The practical unimportance of the Elements
5.3 What mathematics means
5.4 Geometry and past lives: Socrates
5.5 Mathematics and virtue
5.6 The trial of Socrates
5.7 What happened to the religious view of geometry?
The Mysteries of the Lovers of Sophia
6.1 The Great Library of Alexandria
6.2 Not out of Greece
6.3 The origin of the Great Library
6.4 Sophia and her lovers
6.5 The Egyptian Mysteries
6.6 The Greek Mysteries
6.7 The popularity of the mysteries
6.8 Cosmos and soul
6.9 The Jesus Mystery
6.10 Early Christianity and Origen
The Altered Christian Doctrine
7.1 The council of Nicea
7.2 The date of Easter
7.3 The motive of state power
7.4 The Julian effect
7.5 The changed Bible
7.6 The politics of hatred
7.7 The end of the Great Library
Mathematics and the First Religious War
8.1 Cosmic recurrence
8.2 Past lives vs creationism
8.3 Eternity vs apocalypse
8.4 Images, idols, and geometric figures
8.5 Immanence: finding God inside man
8.6 Equity
8.7 Summary of mathematics as religion
Hypatia
9.1 Hypatia’s resolve
9.2 The Christian response
9.3 The successor: Proclus
9.4 The end of philosophy in the Roman empire
The New Alexandrias: Jundishapur and Baghdad
10.1 The story of Mazdak
10.2 The return of the philosophers