To assure ourselves that Jesus was a true Nazarene--albeit with ideas of a new reform--we must not search for the proof in the translated _Gospels_, but in such original versions as are accessible. Tischendorf, in his translation from the Greek of _Luke_ iv. 34, has it “Iesou Nazarene;” and in the Syriac it reads “Iasoua, thou _Nazaria_.” Thus, if we take in account all that is puzzling and incomprehensible in the four _Gospels_, revised and corrected as they now stand, we shall easily see for ourselves that the true, original Christianity, such as was preached by Jesus, is to be found only in the so-called Syrian heresies. Only from them can we extract any clear notions about what was primitive Christianity. Such was the faith of Paul, when Tertullus the orator accused the apostle before the governor Felix. What he complained of was that they had found “that man a mover of sedition ... a ringleader of _the sect of the Nazarenes_;”[211] and, while Paul denies every other accusation, he confesses that “after the way which they call heresy, _so worship I the God of my fathers_.”[212] This confession is a whole revelation. It shows: 1, that Paul admitted belonging to the sect of the Nazarenes; 2, that he worshipped the _God of his fathers_, not the trinitarian Christian God, of whom he knows nothing, and who was not invented until after his death; and, 3, that this unlucky confession satisfactorily explains why the treatise, _Acts of the Apostles_, together with John’s _Revelation_, which at one period was utterly rejected, were kept out of the canon of the _New Testament_ for such a length of time. At Byblos, the neophytes as well as the hierophants were, after participating in the Mysteries, obliged to fast and remain in solitude for some time. There was strict fasting and preparation before as well as after the Bacchic, Adonian, and Eleusinian orgies; and Herodotus hints, with fear and veneration about the LAKE of Bacchus, in which “they (the priests) made at night exhibitions of his life and sufferings.”[213] In the Mithraic sacrifices, during the initiation, a preliminary scene of death was simulated by the neophyte, and it preceded the scene showing him himself “being born again by the rite _of baptism_.” A portion of this ceremony is still enacted in the present day by the Masons, when the neophyte, as the Grand Master Hiram Abiff, lies dead, and is raised by the strong grip of the lion’s paw.