Christianity is one of the biggest religions in the world. With a religion being that dominant, it leaves a lot of room for people to say many things about it. There are so many people that will read the book of Christianity (called the Holy Bible) and make statements about it that will sway many people to believe what they say. More than that there are many other books that claim to be a part of the Holy Bible that some accept and others do not. A vast majority of these books have claimed the title of The Lost Books of the Bible. John Milton wrote a book in 1667 called Paradise Lost in which he talked about the Beginning of this Holy Bible. He focuses mostly on the first book in the Bible called Genesis. In Genesis, God (in Christianity the only true god) created the whole earth and everything in it, including man. Milton uses his book to talk about this and about the rebellion between the angels ( God's created helpers). The purpose of this essay will be to take the reader throughout Paradise Lost and show the parts that parallel to the Bible, the parts that parallel to the Lost Books of the Bible, and the parts that parallel to neither of them or both. In the end the hope is that the reader will understand more about Paradise Lost and its parallels to Christianity.
Paradise Lost is divided into twelve books. Is number is rather important because according to the Bible twelve is the number of tribes of Israel and the number of disciples that Jesus Christ (the son of God who is equal to God and God at the same time) chose to become his main friends and to travel with him throughout his life. This is also important because Milton said he wrote this epic to “justify the ways of God to man (book1, 26).” Milton calls upon the same inspiration that helped Moses (the man who wrote book of the Bible which Milton is writing an epic on) to help him write. In order for Milton to get people's attention into the book as being something that God would agree with he had to use things that people about see throughout the Bible. Now we will dig deeper into the first book Milton writes.
Milton's fist book begins telling the story of the fall of man from Satan (the enemy of God who was once one of the highest angels) being bounded in hell, which is a place of no light and hope. Satan is there with all of his fallen angels and is permitted by God to live and “Heap on himself damnation (book1,215).” Satan, though he has been defeated, still wants to fight against God and he calls all of the fallen angels to Pandemonium, “the high capitol of Satan and his peers (book1, 756),” to talk of a way to still wage war against God. The Bible talks about Satan and his angles in hell. In Matthew 25:41, Jesus says that hell was created for the Devil and his demons (NLT). There are also all of Satan's demons which come from the name of foreign gods which were not to be served by God's people, Deuteronomy 5:7(NLT). Each of these demon's names are drawn from different parts of the Bible where they were to have swindled the people into believing in them instead of believing in God. Though all of these names and places are mentioned in the Bible nothing to with the summoning of the demons to Pandemonium is found within its pages.
Book two of Milton's Paradise Lost is about the terms upon which the demons which to get back at God. They question if they should get back at God in open war, of if they should do it secretly. They are all in did agreement over what to do until Satan puts the thought into Beelzebub's, Satan's second in command, mind to attack man instead of God. They all agree with this because is this way they are not fighting God and they get their revenge at the same time. Satan then takes up the cause of the fallen angles and he leaves hell on his journey to Earth. At the gates of hell Satan meets his children, Sin and Death. The Bible tells nothing of Satan leaving hell and meeting his children at the gates thereof. The Bible does talk of Death as another person in saying that he will be the last enemy to be defeated (1 Corinthians 15:26), but the fact that Sin and Death are at the gates of hell is not found in detail in the Bible. It is found in detail in one of the Lost Book of the Bible. It is called the Gospel of Nicodemus. This Gospel is not accepted by many and is thought to have been made up around the close of the third century, but there are also many ancient Christians how appeal to this Gospel. When Milton, was seventeen he went to Christ's College at Cambridge University. There he revolted against what he thought was the irrelevant medieval scholastic curriculum of Cambridge. In 1632, he graduated with a M.A. He could have very easily became a Anglican minister, but he felt as if the Anglican church under Charles I and Archbishop Laud had become too corrupt and too tied with politics (Parker). It wouldn't have been anything out of the ordinary for him to have studied these Lost Books of the Bible.
