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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Historical Christ;, by Fred. C. Conybeare
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
-
-
-Title: The Historical Christ;
-       Or, An investigation of the views of Mr. J. M. Robertson,
-       Dr. A. Drews, and Prof. W. B. Smith
-
-Author: Fred. C. Conybeare
-
-Release Date: September 18, 2017 [EBook #55575]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: ASCII
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-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORICAL CHRIST; ***
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-Produced by Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed
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-Gutenberg (This file was produced from images generously
-made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
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-
-                         THE HISTORICAL CHRIST;
-
-                                  OR,
-
-         AN INVESTIGATION OF THE VIEWS OF Mr. J. M. ROBERTSON,
-                  Dr. A. DREWS, and Prof. W. B. SMITH
-
-                                   BY
-
-                   FRED. C. CONYBEARE, M.A., F.B.A.,
-
-             HONORARY FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD;
-              HON. LL.D. OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS;
-                   HON. DOCTOR OF THEOLOGY OF GIESSEN
-
-
-        [ISSUED FOR THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LIMITED]
-
-
-                                LONDON:
-                              WATTS & CO.,
-                 17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
-                                  1914
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-CONTENTS
-
-
-                                                   PAGE
-
-                PREFACE                             vii
-
-        CHAP.
-
-        I.      HISTORICAL METHOD                     1
-        II.     PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS                  81
-        III.    THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE            96
-        IV.     THE EPISTLES OF PAUL                125
-        V.      EXTERNAL EVIDENCE                   154
-        VI.     THE ART OF CRITICISM                167
-        VII.    DR. JENSEN                          202
-
-                EPILOGUE                            214
-                INDEX                               227
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-PREFACE
-
-
-This little volume was written in the spring of the year 1913, and is
-intended as a plea for moderation and good sense in dealing with the
-writings of early Christianity; just as my earlier volumes entitled
-Myth, Magic, and Morals and A History of New Testament Criticism were
-pleas for the free use, in regard to the origins of that religion,
-of those methods of historical research to which we have learned
-to subject all records of the past. It provides a middle way between
-traditionalism on the one hand and absurdity on the other, and as doing
-so will certainly be resented by the partisans of each form of excess.
-
-The comparative method achieved its first great triumph in the
-field of Indo-European philology; its second in that of mythology
-and folk-lore. It is desirable to allow to it its full rights in
-the matter of Christian origins. But we must be doubly careful
-in this new and almost unworked region to use it with the same
-scrupulous care for evidence, with the same absence of prejudice
-and economy of hypothesis, to which it owes its conquests in other
-fields. The untrained explorers whom I here criticize discover on
-almost every page connections in their subject-matter where there
-are and can be none, and as regularly miss connections where they
-exist. Parallelisms and analogies of rite, conduct, and belief
-between religious systems and cults are often due to other causes
-than actual contact, inter-communication, and borrowing. They may
-be no more than sporadic and independent manifestations of a common
-humanity. It is not enough, therefore, for one agent or institution
-or belief merely to remind us of another. Before we assert literary
-or traditional connection between similar elements in story and myth,
-we must satisfy ourselves that such communication was possible. The
-tale of Sancho Panza and his visions of a happy isle, over which he
-shall hold sway when his romantic lord and master, Don Quixote, has
-overcome with his good sword the world and all its evil, reminds us
-of the naif demand of the sons of Zebedee (Mark x, 37) to be allowed
-to sit on the right hand and the left of their Lord, so soon as he
-is glorified. With equal simplicity (Matthew xix, 28) Jesus promises
-that in the day of the regeneration of Israel, when the Son of Man
-takes his seat on his throne of glory, Peter and his companions shall
-also take their seats on twelve thrones to judge the twelve tribes
-of Israel. The projected mise en scene is exactly that of a Persian
-great king with his magnates on their several "cushions" of state
-around him. There is, again, a close analogy psychologically between
-Dante's devout adoration of Beatrice in heaven and Paul's of the risen
-Jesus. These two parallels are closer than most that Mr. Robertson
-discovers between Christian story and Pagan myth, yet no one in his
-senses would ever suggest that Cervantes drew his inspiration from
-the Gospels or Dante from the Pauline Epistles. In criticizing the
-Gospels it is all the more necessary to proceed cautiously, because
-the obscurantists are incessantly on the watch for solecisms--or
-"howlers," as a schoolboy would call them; and only too anxious to
-point to them as of the essence of all free criticism of Christian
-literature and history.
-
-Re-reading these pages after the lapse of many months since they were
-written, I have found little to alter, though Prof. A. C. Clark, who
-has been so good as to peruse them, has made a few suggestions which,
-where the sheets were not already printed, I have embodied. I append
-a list of errata calling for correction.
-
-
-Fred. C. Conybeare.
-
-March 1, 1914.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER I
-
-HISTORICAL METHOD
-
-
-[Orthodox obscurantism the parent of Sciolism] In Myth, Magic, and
-Morals (Chapter IX) I have remarked that the Church, by refusing to
-apply in the field of so-called sacred history the canons by which
-in other fields truth is discerned from falsehood, by beatifying
-credulous ignorance and anathematizing scholarship and common sense,
-has surrounded the figure of Jesus with such a nimbus of improbability
-that it seems not absurd to some critics of to-day to deny that he
-ever lived. The circumstance that both in England and in Germany the
-books of certain of these critics--in particular, Dr. Arthur Drews,
-Professor W. Benjamin Smith, and Mr. J. M. Robertson--are widely read,
-and welcomed by many as works of learning and authority, requires
-that I should criticize them rather more in detail than I deemed it
-necessary to do in that publication.
-
-[B. Croce on nature of History] Benedetto Croce well remarks in his
-Logica (p. 195) that history in no way differs from the physical
-sciences, insofar as it cannot be constructed by pure reasoning,
-but rests upon sight or vision of the fact that has happened, the
-fact so perceived being the only source of history. In a methodical
-historical treatise the sources are usually divided into monuments
-and narratives; by the former being understood whatever is left to
-us as a trace of the accomplished fact--e.g., a contract, a letter,
-or a triumphal arch; while narratives consist of such accounts of
-it as have been transmitted to us by those who were more or less
-eye-witnesses thereof, or by those who have repeated the notices or
-traditions furnished by eye-witnesses.
-
-[Relative paucity of evangelic tradition] Now it may be granted that
-we have not in the New Testament the same full and direct information
-about Jesus as we can derive from ancient Latin literature about
-Julius Caesar or Cicero. We have no monuments of him, such as are the
-commentaries of the one or the letters and speeches of the other. It
-is barely credible that a single one of the New Testament writers,
-except perhaps St. Paul, ever set eyes on him or heard his voice. It
-is more than doubtful whether a single one of his utterances, as
-recorded in the Gospels, retains either its original form or the idiom
-in which it was clothed. A mass of teaching, a number of aphorisms
-and precepts, are attributed to him; but we know little of how they
-were transmitted to those who repeat them to us, and it is unlikely
-that we possess any one of them as it left his lips.
-
-[and presence of miracles in it,] And that is not all. In the four
-Gospels all sorts of incredible stories are told about him, such as
-that he was born of a virgin mother, unassisted by a human father;
-that he walked on the surface of the water; that he could foresee the
-future; that he stilled a storm by upbraiding it; that he raised the
-dead; that he himself rose in the flesh from the dead and left his
-tomb empty; that his apostles beheld him so risen; and that finally
-he disappeared behind a cloud up into the heavens.
-
-[explains and excuses the extreme negative school] It is natural,
-therefore--and there is much excuse for him--that an uneducated man
-or a child, bidden unceremoniously in the name of religion to accept
-these tales, should revolt, and hastily make up his mind that the
-figure of Jesus is through and through fictitious, and that he never
-lived at all. One thing only is certain--namely, that insofar as the
-orthodox blindly accept these tales--nay, maintain with St. Athanasius
-that the man Jesus was God incarnate, a pre-existent aeon, Word of God,
-Creator of all things, masked in human flesh, but retaining, so far as
-he chose, all his exalted prerogatives and cosmic attributes in this
-disguise--they put themselves out of court, and deprive themselves of
-any faculty of reply to the extreme negative school of critics. The
-latter may be very absurd, and may betray an excess of credulity in
-the solutions they offer of the problem of Christian origins; but
-they can hardly go further along the path of absurdity and credulity
-than the adherents of the creeds. If their arguments are to be met,
-if any satisfactory proof is to be advanced of the historicity
-of Jesus, it must come, not from those who, as Mommsen remarked,
-"reason in chains," but from free thinkers.
-
-[Yet Jesus is better attested than most ancients] Those, however,
-who have much acquaintance with antiquity must perceive at the outset
-that, if the thesis that Jesus never existed is to be admitted, then
-quite a number of other celebrities, less well evidenced than he,
-must disappear from the page of history, and be ranged with Jesus in
-the realm of myth.
-
-[Age of the earliest Christian literature] Many characteristically
-Christian documents, such as the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd
-of Hermas, and the Teaching of the Apostles, are admitted by Drews to
-have been written before A.D. 100. [1] Not only the canonical Gospels,
-he tells us, [2] were still current in the first half of the second
-century, but several never accepted by the Church--e.g., spurious
-gospels ascribed to Matthew, Thomas, Bartholomew, Peter, the Twelve
-Apostles. These have not reached us, though we have recovered a large
-fragment of the so-called Peter Gospel, and find that it at least
-pre-supposes canonical Mark. The phrase, "Still current in the first
-half of the second century," indicates that, in Dr. Drews's opinion,
-these derivative gospels were at least as old as year 100; in that
-case our canonical Gospels would fall well within the first. I will
-not press this point; but, anyhow, we note the admission that within
-about seventy years of the supposed date of Jesus's death Christians
-were reading that mass of written tradition about him which we call
-the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They were also reading
-a mass of less accredited biographies--less trustworthy, no doubt,
-but, nevertheless, the work of authors who entertained no doubt that
-Jesus had really lived, and who wished to embellish his story.
-
-[If Jesus never lived, neither did Solon,] If, then, armed with
-such early records, we are yet so exacting of evidence as to deny
-that Jesus, their central figure, ever lived, what shall we say of
-other ancient worthies--of Solon, for example, the ancient Athenian
-legislator? For his life our chief sources, as Grote remarks (History
-of Greece, Pt. II, ch. 11), are Plutarch and Diogenes, writers who
-lived seven and eight hundred years after him. Moreover, the stories
-of Plutarch about him are, as Grote says, "contradictory as well
-as apocryphal." It is true that Herodotus repeats to us the story of
-Solon's travels, and of the conversations he held with Croesus, King of
-Lydia; but these conversations are obviously mere romance. Herodotus,
-too, lived not seventy, but nearly one hundred and fifty years later
-than Solon, so that contemporary evidence of him we have none. Plutarch
-preserves, no doubt, various laws and metrical aphorisms which were
-in his day attributed to Solon, just as the Christians attributed an
-extensive body of teaching to Jesus. If we deny all authenticity to
-Jesus's teaching, what of Solon's traditional lore? Obviously Jesus
-has a far larger chance to have really existed than Solon.
-
-[or Epimenides,] And the same is true of Epimenides of Crete, who
-was said to be the son of the nymph Balte; to have been mysteriously
-fed by the nymphs, since he was never seen to eat, and so forth. He
-was known as the Purifier, and in that role healed the Athenians
-of plagues physical and spiritual. A poet and prophet he lived,
-according to some, for one hundred and fifty-four years; according
-to his own countrymen, for three hundred. If he lived to the latter
-age, then Plato, who is the first to mention him in his Laws, was
-his contemporary, not otherwise.
-
-[or Pythagoras,] Pythagoras, again, can obviously never have lived
-at all, if we adopt the purist canons of Drews. For he was reputed,
-as Grote (Pt. II, ch. 37) reminds us, to have been inspired by the
-gods to reveal to men a new way of life, and found an order or
-brotherhood. He is barely mentioned by any writer before Plato,
-who flourished one hundred and fifty years later than he. In the
-matter of miracles, prophecy, pre-existence, mystic observances,
-and asceticism, Pythagoras equalled, if he did not excel, Jesus.
-
-[or Apollonius of Tyana] Apollonius of Tyana is another example. We
-have practically no record of him till one hundred and twenty
-years after his death, when the Sophist Philostratus took in hand
-to write his life, by his own account, with the aid of memorials
-left by Damis, a disciple of the sage. Apollonius, like Jesus and
-Pythagoras, was an incarnation of an earlier being; he, too, worked
-miracles, and appeared after death to an incredulous follower, and
-ascended into heaven bodily. The stories of his miracles of healing,
-of his expulsions of demons, and raising of the dead, read exactly
-like chapters out of the Gospels. He, like Jesus and Pythagoras,
-had a god Proteus for his father, and was born of a virgin. His birth
-was marked in the heavens by meteoric portents. His history bristles
-with tales closely akin to those which were soon told of Jesus; yet
-all sound scholars are agreed that his biographer did not imitate the
-Gospels, but wrote independently of them. If, then, Jesus never lived,
-much less can Apollonius have done so. Except for a passing reference
-in Lucian, Philostratus is our earliest authority for his reality;
-the life written of him by Moeragenes is lost, and we do not know
-when it was written. On the whole, the historicity of Jesus is much
-better attested and documented than that of Apollonius, whose story
-is equally full of miracles with Christ's.
-
-[Miracles do not wholly invalidate a document] The above examples
-suffice. But, with the aid of a good dictionary of antiquity,
-hundreds of others could be adduced of individuals for whose reality
-we have not a tithe of the evidence which we have for that of Jesus;
-yet no one in his senses disputes their ever having lived. We take
-it for certain that hundreds--nay, thousands--of people who figure
-on the pages of ancient and medieval history were real, and that,
-roughly speaking, they performed the actions attributed to them--this
-although the earliest notices of them are only met with in Plutarch,
-or Suidas, or William of Tyre, or other writers who wrote one hundred,
-two hundred, perhaps six hundred years after them. Nor are we deterred
-from believing that they really existed by the fact that, along with
-some things credible, other things wholly incredible are related of
-them. Throughout ancient history we must learn to pick and choose. The
-thesis, therefore, that Jesus never lived, but was from first to last
-a myth, presents itself at the outset as a paradox. Still, as it is
-seriously advanced, it must be seriously considered and that I now
-proceed to do.
-
-[Proof of the unhistoricity of Jesus, how attainable] It can obviously
-not pass muster, unless its authors furnish us with a satisfactory
-explanation of every single notice, direct or indirect, simple or
-constructive, which ancient writers have transmitted to us. Each
-notice must be separately examined, and if an evidential document
-be composite, every part of it. Each statement in its prima facie
-sense must be shown to be irreconcilable with what we know of the
-age and circumstances to which it pretends to relate. And in every
-case the new interpretation must be more cogent and more probable
-than the old one. Jesus, the real man, must be driven line by line,
-verse by verse, out of the whole of the New Testament, and after that
-out of other early sources which directly or by implication attest his
-historicity. There is no other way of proving so sweeping a negative
-as that of the three authors I have named.
-
-[How to approach ancient documents] For every statement of fact in
-an ancient author is a problem, and has to be accounted for. If it
-accords with the context, and the entire body of statement agrees
-with the best scheme we can form in our mind's eye of the epoch,
-we accept it, just as we would the statement of a witness standing
-before us in a law court. If, on the other hand, the statement does not
-agree with our scheme, we ask why the author made it. If he obviously
-believed it, then how did his error arise? If he should seem to have
-made it without himself believing it, then we ask, Why did he wish
-to deceive his reader? Sometimes the only solution we can give of
-the matter is, that our author himself never penned the statement,
-but that someone covertly inserted it in his text, so that it might
-appear to have contained it. In such cases we must explain why and in
-whose interest the text was interpolated. In all history, of course,
-we never get a direct observation, or intuition, or hearing of what
-took place, for the photographic camera and phonograph did not exist
-in antiquity. We must rest content with the convictions and feelings
-of authors, as they put them down in books. To one circumstance,
-however, amid so much dubiety, we shall attach supreme importance; and
-that is to an affirmation of the same fact by two or more independent
-witnesses. One man may well be in error, and report to us what never
-occurred; but it is in the last degree improbable that two or more
-[Value of several independent witnesses in case of Jesus] independent
-witnesses will join forces in testifying to what never was. Let us,
-then, apply this principle to the problem before us. Jesus, our authors
-affirm, was not a real man, but an astral myth. Now we can conceive of
-one ancient writer mistaking such a myth for a real man; but what if
-another and another witness, what if half a dozen or more come along,
-and, meeting us quite apart from one another and by different routes,
-often by pure accident, conspire in error. If we found ourselves in
-such case, would we not think we were bewitched, and take to our heels?
-
-[The oldest sources about Jesus] Well, I do not intend to take to my
-heels. I mean to stand up to the chimeras of Messrs. Drews, Robertson,
-and Benjamin Smith. And the best courage is to take one by one the
-ancient sources which bear witness to the man Jesus, examine and
-compare them, and weigh their evidence. If they are independent,
-if they agree, not too much--that would excite a legitimate
-suspicion--but only more or less and in a general way, then, I
-believe, any rational inquirer would allow them weight, even if none
-were strictly contemporaries of his and eye-witnesses of his life. In
-the Gospel of Mark we have the earliest narrative document of the New
-Testament. This is evident from the circumstance that the three other
-evangelists used it in the composition of their Gospels. Drews, indeed,
-admits it to be one of the "safest" results of modern discussion
-of the life of Jesus that this Gospel is the oldest of the surviving
-four. He is aware, of course, that this conclusion has been questioned;
-but no one will doubt it who has confronted [The Gospel of Mark used
-in Matthew and Luke] Mark in parallel columns with Luke and Matthew,
-and noted how these other evangelists not only derive from it the
-order of the events of the life of Jesus, but copy it out verse
-after verse, each with occasional modifications of his own. Drews,
-however, while aware of this phenomenon, has yet not grasped the
-fact that it and nothing else has moved scholars to regard Mark as
-the most ancient of the three Synoptics; quite erroneously, as if he
-had never read any work of modern textual criticism, he imagines that
-they are led to their conclusion, firstly by the superior freshness
-and vividness of Mark, by a picturesqueness which argues him to
-have been an eye-witness; and, secondly, by the evidence of Papias,
-who, it is said, declared Mark to have been the interpreter of the
-Apostle Peter. In point of fact, the modern critical theologians,
-for whom Drews has so much contempt, attach no decisive weight in
-this connection either to the tradition preserved by Papias or to the
-graphic qualities of Mark's narratives. They rest their case mainly
-on the internal evidence of the texts before them.
-
-[Contents of Mark] What, then, do we find in Mark's narrative?
-
-Inasmuch as my readers can buy the book for a penny and study it
-for themselves, I may content myself with a very brief resume of
-its contents.
-
-It begins with an account of one John who preached round about Judaea,
-but especially on the Jordan, that the Jews must repent of their sins
-in order to their remission; in token whereof he directed them to take
-a ritual bath in the sacred waters of the Jordan, just as a modern
-Hindoo washes away his sins by means of a ritual bath in the River
-Jumna. An old document generally called Q. (Quelle), because Luke and
-Matthew used it in common to supplement Mark's rather meagre story,
-adds the reason why the Jews were to repent; and it was this, that
-the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. [Drews's account of Messianism]
-Drews, in his first chapter of The Christ Myth, traces out the idea
-of this Kingdom of God, which he finds so prominent in the Jewish
-Apocalyptics of the last century before and the first century after
-Christ, and attributes it to Persian and Mithraic influence. Mithras,
-he says, was to descend upon the earth, and in a last fierce struggle
-overwhelm Angromainyu or Ahriman and his hosts, and cast them down
-into the nether world. He would then raise the dead in bodily shape,
-and after a general judgment of the whole world, in which the wicked
-should be condemned to the punishments of hell and the good raised
-to heavenly glory, establish the "millennial kingdom." These ideas,
-he continues, penetrated Jewish thought, and brought about a complete
-transformation of the former belief in a messiah, a Hebrew term
-meaning the anointed--in Greek Christos. For, to begin with, the Christ
-was merely the Jewish king who represented Jahwe before the people,
-and the people before Jahwe. He was "Son of Jahwe," or "Son of God"
-par excellence; later on the name came to symbolize the ideal king
-to come--this when the Israelites lost their independence, and were
-humiliated by falling under a foreign yoke. This ideal longed-for
-king was to win Jahwe's favour; and by his heroic deeds, transcending
-those of Moses and Joshua of old, to re-establish the glory of Israel,
-renovate the face of the earth, and even make Israel Lord over all
-nations. But so far the Messiah was only a human being, a new David
-or descendant of David, a theocratic king, a divinely favoured prince
-of peace, a just ruler over the people he liberated; and in this
-sense Cyrus, who delivered the Jews from the Babylonian captivity,
-the rescuer and overlord of Israel, had been acclaimed Messiah.
-
-At last and gradually--still under Persian influence, according to
-Drews--this figure assumed divine attributes, yet without forfeiting
-human ones. Secret and supernatural as was his nature, so should the
-birth of the Messiah be; though a divine child, he was to be born in
-lowly state. Nay, the personality of the Messiah eventually mingled
-with that of Jahwe himself, whose son he was. Such, according to Drews,
-were the alternations of the Messiah between a human and a divine
-nature in Jewish apocalypses of the period B.C. 100 to A.D. 100. They
-obviously do not preclude the possibility of the Jews in that epoch
-acclaiming a man as their Messiah--indeed, there is no reason why
-they should not have attached the dignity to several; and from sources
-which Drews does not dispute we learn that they actually did so.
-
-[John and Jesus began as messengers of the divine kingdom on earth]
-Let us return to Mark's narrative. Among the Jews who came to John to
-confess and repent of their sins, and wash them away in the Jordan,
-was one named Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee; and he, as soon as
-John was imprisoned and murdered by Herod, caught up the lamp,
-if I may use a metaphor, which had fallen from the hands of the
-stricken saint, and hurried on with it to the same goal. We read
-that he went to Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying:
-"The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent ye,
-and believe in the gospel or good tidings."
-
-The rest of Mark is a narrative of what happened to Jesus on this
-self-appointed errand. We learn that he soon made many recruits,
-from among whom he chose a dozen as his particular missionaries
-or apostles. These, after no long time, he despatched on peculiar
-beats of their own. [Jesus's anticipations of its speedy advent]
-He was certain that the kingdom was not to be long delayed, and on
-occasions assured his audience that it would come in their time. When
-he was sending out his missionary disciples, he even expressed to
-them his doubts as to whether it would not come even before they had
-had time to go round the cities of Israel. [He confined the promises
-to Jews] It was not, however, this consideration, but the instinct
-of exclusiveness, which he shared with most of his race, that led
-him to warn them against carrying the good tidings of the impending
-salvation of Israel to Samaritans or Gentiles; the promises were not
-for schismatics and heathens, but only for the lost sheep of the
-house of Israel. Some of these details are derived not from Mark,
-but from the document out of which, as I remarked above, the first
-and second evangelists supplemented Mark.
-
-[Was rejected by his own kindred] Like Luther, Loyola, Dunstan,
-St. Anthony, and many other famous saints and sinners, Jesus, on the
-threshold of his career, encountered Satan, and overthrew him. A
-characteristically oriental fast of forty days in the wilderness
-equipped him for this feat. Thenceforth he displayed, like Apollonius
-of Tyana and not a few contemporary rabbis, considerable familiarity
-with the demons of disease and madness. The sick flocked to him to
-be healed, and it was only in districts where people disbelieved
-in him and his message that his therapeutic energy met with a
-check. Among those who particularly flouted his pretensions were
-his mother and brethren, who on one occasion at least followed him
-in order to arrest him and put him under restraint as being beside
-himself or exalte. [His Parables all turn on the coming Kingdom]
-A good many parables are attributed to him in this Gospel, and yet
-more in Matthew and Luke, of which the burden usually is the near
-approach of the dissolution of this world and of the last Judgment,
-which are to usher in the Kingdom of God on earth. We learn that the
-parable was his favourite mode of instruction, as it always has been
-and still is the chosen vehicle of Semitic moral teaching. [No hint in
-the earliest sources of the miraculous birth of Jesus] Of the later
-legend of his supernatural birth, and of the visits before his birth
-of angels to Mary, his mother, and to Joseph, his putative father,
-of the portents subsequently related in connection with his birth at
-Bethlehem, there is not a word either in Mark or in the other early
-document out of which Matthew and Luke supplemented Mark. In these
-earliest documents Jesus is presented quite naturally as the son of
-Joseph and his wife Mary, and we learn quite incidentally the names
-of his brothers and sisters.
-
-[Late recognition of Jesus as himself the Messiah] Towards the middle
-of his career Jesus seems to have been recognized by Peter as the
-Son of God or Messiah. Whether he put himself forward for that role
-we cannot be sure; but so certain were his Apostles of the matter
-that two of them are represented as having asked him in the naivest
-way to grant them seats of honour on his left and right hand, when
-he should come in glory to judge the world. The Twelve expected to
-sit on thrones and judge the twelve tribes of Israel, and this idea
-meets us afresh in the Apocalypse, a document which in the form we
-have it belongs to the years 92-93.
-
-[His hopes shattered at approach of death] But the simple faith
-of the Apostles in their teacher and leader was to receive a
-rude shock. They accompany him for the Passover to Jerusalem. An
-insignificant triumphal demonstration is organized for him as he
-enters the sacred city on an ass; he beards the priests in the temple,
-and scatters the money-changers who sat there to change strange coins
-for pilgrims. The priests, who, like many others of their kind, were
-much too comfortable to sigh for the end of the world, and regarded
-enthusiasts as nuisances, took offence, denounced him to Pilate as a
-rebel and a danger to the Roman government of Judaea. He is arrested,
-condemned to be crucified, and as he hangs on the cross in a last
-moment of disillusionment utters that most pathetic of cries: "My God,
-my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" He had expected to witness the
-descent of the kingdom on earth, but instead thereof he is himself
-handed over helpless into the hands of the Gentiles.
-
-Such in outline is the story Mark has to tell. The rival and
-supplementary document of which I have spoken, and which admits of
-some reconstruction from the text of Matthew and Luke, consisted
-mainly of parables and precepts which Jesus was supposed to have
-delivered. It need not engage our attention here.
-
-[The mythical theory of Jesus] Now the three writers I have
-named--Messrs. Drews, Robertson, and W. B. Smith--enjoy the singular
-good fortune to be the first to have discovered what the above
-narratives really mean, and of how they originated; and they are
-urgent that we should sell all we have, and purchase their pearl
-of wisdom. They assure us that in the Gospels we have not got any
-"tradition of a personality." Jesus, the central figure, never
-existed at all, but was a purely mythical personage. The mythical
-character of the Gospels, so Drews assures us, has, in the hands of
-Mr. J. M. Robertson, led the way, and made a considerable advance
-in England; he regrets that so far official learning in Germany
-has not taken up a serious position regarding the mythic symbolical
-interpretation of the latter. [3] Let us then ask, What is the gist
-of the new system of interpretation. It is as follows:--
-
-[Jesus = Joshua, a Sun-god, object of a secret cult] Jesus, or Joshua,
-was the name under which the expected Messiah was honoured in a certain
-Jewish secret society which had its headquarters in Jerusalem about
-the beginning of our era. In view of its secret character Drews warns
-us not to be too curious, nor to question either his information or
-that of Messrs. Smith and Robertson. This recalls to me an incident
-in my own experience. I was once, together with a little girl,
-being taken for a sail by an old sailor who had many yarns. One of
-the most circumstantial of them was about a ship which went down in
-mid ocean with all hands aboard; and it wound up with the remark:
-"And nobody never knew nothing about it." Little girl: "Then how
-did you come to hear all about it?" Like our brave old sailor,
-Dr. Drews warns us (p. 22) not to be too inquisitive. We must not
-"forget that we are dealing with a secret cult, the existence of
-which we can decide upon only by indirect means." His hypothesis,
-he tells us, "can only be rejected without more ado by such as seek
-the traces of the pre-Christian cult of Jesus in well-worn places,
-and will only allow that to be 'proved' which they have established
-by direct original documentary evidence before their eyes." In other
-words, we are to set aside our copious and almost (in Paul's case)
-contemporary evidence that Jesus was a real person in favour of a
-hypothesis which from the first and as such lacks all direct and
-documentary evidence, and is not amenable to any of the methods of
-proof recognized by sober historians. We must take Dr. Drews's word
-for it, and forego all evidence.
-
-But let our authors continue with their new revelation. By Joshua, or
-Jesus, we are not to understand the personage concerning whose exploits
-the Book of Joshua was composed, but a Sun-god. The Gospels are a
-veiled account of the sufferings and exploits of this Sun-god. "Joshua
-is apparently [why this qualification?] an ancient Ephraimitic god
-of the Sun and Fruitfulness, who stood in close relation to the Feast
-of the Pasch and to the custom of circumcision." [4]
-
-[Emptiness of the Sun-god Joshua hypothesis] Now no one nowadays
-accepts the Book of Joshua offhand as sound history. It is a
-compilation of older sources, which have already been sifted a good
-deal, and will undergo yet more sifting in the future. The question
-before us does not concern its historicity, but is this: Does the Book
-of Joshua, whether history or not, support the hypothesis that Joshua
-was ever regarded as God of the Sun and of Fruitfulness? Was ever such
-a god known of or worshipped in the tribe of Ephraim or in Israel at
-large? In this old Hebrew epic or saga Joshua is a man of flesh and
-blood. How did these gentlemen get it into their heads that he was a
-Sun-god? For this statement there is not a shadow of evidence. They
-have invented it. As he took the Israelites dryshod over the Jordan,
-why have they not made a River-god of him? And as, according to Drews,
-he was so interested in fruitfulness and foreskins, why not suppose he
-was a Priapic god? They are much too modest. We should at least expect
-"the composite myth" to include this element, inasmuch as his mystic
-votaries at Jerusalem were far from seeing eye to eye with Paul in
-the matter of circumcision.
-
-[The Sun-myth stage of comparative mythology] There was years ago
-a stage in the Comparative History of Religions when the Sun-myth
-hypothesis was invoked to explain almost everything. The shirt of
-Nessus, for example, in which Heracles perished, was a parable of the
-sun setting amidst a wrack of scattered clouds. The Sun-myth was the
-key which fitted every lock, and was employed unsparingly by pioneers
-of comparative mythology like F. Max Mueller and Sir George Cox. It
-was taken for granted that early man must have begun by deifying
-the great cosmic powers, by venerating Sun and Moon, the Heavens,
-the Mountains, the Sea, as holy and divine beings, because they,
-rather than humble and homelier objects, impress us moderns by their
-sublimity and overwhelming force. Man was supposed from the first to
-have felt his transitoriness, his frailty and weakness, and to have
-contrasted therewith the infinities of space and time, the majesty
-of the starry hosts of heaven, the majestic and uniform march of
-sun and moon, the mighty rumble of the thunder. Max Mueller thought
-that religion began when the cowering savage was crushed by awe of
-nature and of her stupendous forces, by the infinite lapses of time,
-by the yawning abysses of space. As a matter of fact, savages do not
-entertain these sentiments of the dignity and majesty of nature. On
-the contrary, a primitive man thinks that he can impose his paltry
-will on the elements; that he knows how to unchain the wind, to oblige
-the rain to fall; that he can, like the ancient witches of Thessaly,
-control sun and moon and stars by all sorts of petty magical rites,
-incantations, and gestures, as Joshua made the sun stand still till
-his band of brigands had won the battle. It is to the imagination
-of us moderns alone that the grandeur of the universe appeals, and
-it was relatively late in the history of religion--so far as it can
-be reconstructed from the scanty data in our possession--that the
-higher nature cults were developed. The gods and sacred beings of
-an Australian or North American native are the humble vegetables and
-animals which surround him, objects with which he is on a footing of
-equality. His totems are a duck, a hare, a kangaroo, an emu, a lizard,
-a grub, or a frog. In the same way, the sacred being of an early
-Semite's devotion was just as likely to be a pig or a hare as the sun
-in heaven; the cult of an early Egyptian was centred upon a crocodile,
-or a cat, or a dog. [5] In view of these considerations, our suspicion
-is aroused at the outset by finding Messrs. Drews and Robertson to be
-in this discarded and obsolete Sun-myth stage of speculation. They
-are a back number. Let us, however, examine their mythic symbolic
-theory a little further, and see what sort of arguments they invoke
-in favour of it, and what their "indirect" proofs amount to.
-
-[Examples of the Sun-god theory of Jesus. The Rock-Tomb] Why was Jesus
-buried in a rock-tomb? asks Mr. Robertson. Answer: Because he was
-Mithras, the rock-born Sun-god. We would like to know what other sort
-of burial was possible round Jerusalem, where soil was so scarce that
-everyone was buried in a rock-tomb. Scores of such tombs remain. Are
-they all Mithraic? Surely a score of other considerations would equally
-well explain the choice of a rock-tomb for him in Christian tradition.
-
-[The date of birthday] Why was Jesus born at the
-winter-solstice? Answer: Because he was a Sun-god.
-
-Our author forgets that the choice of December 25 for the feast of
-the physical birth of Jesus was made by the Church as late as 354
-A.D. What could the cryptic Messianists of the first half of the first
-century know about a festival which was never heard of in Rome until
-the year 354, nor accepted in Jerusalem before the year 440? Time is
-evidently no element in the calculations of these authors; and they
-commit themselves to the most amazing anachronisms with the utmost
-insouciance, or, shall we not rather say, ignorance; unless, indeed,
-they imagine that the mystic worshippers of the God Joshua knew all
-about the date, but kept it dark in order to mystify all succeeding
-generations.
-
-[The twelve disciples] Why did Jesus surround himself with twelve
-disciples? Answer: Because they were the twelve signs of the Zodiac
-and he a Sun-god. We naturally ask, Were the twelve tribes of Israel
-equally representative of the Zodiac? In any case, may not Christian
-story have fixed the number of Apostles at twelve in view of the
-tribes being twelve? It is superfluous to go as far as the Zodiac
-for an explanation.
-
-[The Sermon on the Mount] Why did Jesus preach his sermon on the
-Mount? Answer: Because as Sun-god he had to take his stand on the
-"pillar of the world." In the same way, Moses, another Sun-god,
-gave his law from the Mount.
-
-I always have heard that Moses got his tables of the law up top of
-a mountain, and brought them down to a people that were forbidden to
-approach it. He did not stand up top, and shout out his laws to them,
-as Mr. Robertson suggests. In any case, we merely read in Matthew v
-that Jesus went up into a mountain or upland region, and when he had
-sat down his disciples came to him, and he then opened his mouth and
-taught them. In a country like Galilee, where you can barely walk
-a mile in any direction without climbing a hill, what could be more
-natural than for a narrator to frame such a setting for the teacher's
-discourse? It is the first rule of criticism to practise some economy
-of hypothesis, and not go roaming after fanciful and extravagant
-interpretations of quite commonplace and every-day occurrences.
-
-[The last Judgment] Why was it believed that Jesus was to judge men
-after death? Answer: Because he was a Sun-god, and pro tanto identical
-with Osiris.
-
-Surely the more natural interpretation is that, so soon as Jesus
-was identified in the minds of his followers with the Messiah or
-Christ, the task of judging Israel was passed on to him as part of
-the role. Thus in the Psalms of Solomon, a Jewish apocryph of about
-B.C. 50, we read that the Messiah will "in the assemblies judge the
-peoples, the tribes of the sanctified" (xvii, 48). Such references
-could be multiplied; are they all Osirian? If Mr. Robertson had paid
-a little more attention to the later apocrypha of Judaism, and made
-himself a little better acquainted with the social and religious
-medium which gave birth to Christianity, he would have realized how
-unnecessary are these Sun-mythic hypotheses, and we should have been
-spared his books.
-
-[The Lamb and Fish symbolism] Why is Jesus represented in art and
-lore by the Lamb and the Fishes? Answer: As a Sun-god passing through
-the Zodiac.
-
-This is amazing. We know the reason why Jesus was figured as a Lamb
-by the early Christians. It was because they regarded the paschal
-lamb as a type of him. Does Mr. Robertson claim to know the reasons
-of their symbolism better than they did themselves?
-
-And where did he discover that Jesus was represented as Fishes in Art
-and Lore? He was symbolized as one fish, not as several; and Tertullian
-has told us why. It was because, according to the popular zoology of
-the day, fishes were supposed to be born and to originate in the water,
-without carnal connection between their parents. For this reason the
-fish was taken as a symbol of Jesus, who was born again in the waters
-of the Jordan. A later generation explained the appellation of ichthys
-(ichthus), or Fish, as an acrostic. The letters of the Greek word are
-the initials of the words: Iesous Christos Theou uios soter--i.e.,
-Jesus Christ of God Son, Saviour; but this later explanation came
-into vogue in an age when it was already heretical to say that Jesus
-was reborn in baptism; nor does it explain why the multitude of the
-baptized were symbolized as little fishes in contrast with the Big
-Fish, Christ.
-
-[The two asses] Why did Jesus ride into Jerusalem before his death on
-two asses? Answer: Because Dionysus also rides on an ass and a foal
-in one of the Greek signs of Cancer (the turning point in the sun's
-course). "Bacchus (p. 287) crossed a marsh on two asses."
-
-Mr. Robertson does not attempt to prove that the earliest Christians,
-who were Jews, must have been familiar with the rare legend of Bacchus
-crossing a marsh on two asses; still less with the rare representation
-of the zodiacal sign Cancer as an ass and its foal. It is next to
-impossible; and, even if they were, what induced them to transform the
-myth into the legend of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on two donkeys
-at once? If they had so excellent a legend of Bacchus on his asses
-crossing a marsh, why not be content with it? And the same question
-may be asked in regard to all the other transformations by which these
-"mystic sectaries," who formed the early Church, changed myths culled
-from all times and all religions and races into a connected story of
-Jesus, as it lies before us in the Synoptic Gospels.
-
-Mr. Robertson disdains any critical and comparative study of the
-Gospels, and insists on regarding them as coeval and independent
-documents. Everything inside the covers of the New Testament is
-for him, as for the Sunday-school teacher, on one dead level of
-importance. All textual criticism has passed over his head. He has
-never learned to look in Mark for the original form of a statement
-which Luke or Matthew copied out, and in transferring them to their
-Gospels scrupled not to alter or modify. Accordingly, to suit the
-exigencies of his theory that the Gospels are an allegory of a
-Sun-god's exploits, he here claims to find the original text not in
-Mark, but in Matthew; as if a transcript and paraphrase could possibly
-be prior to, and more authoritative than, the text transcribed and
-brode. Accordingly, he writes (p. 339) as follows: "In Mark xi and Luke
-xix, 30, the two asses become one.... In the Fourth Gospel, again, we
-have simply the colt." And yet by all rules of textual criticism and
-of common sense the underlying and original text is Mark xi, 1-7. In
-it the disciples merely bring a colt which they had found tied at a
-door. The author of the Gospel called of Matthew, eager to discern in
-every incident, no matter how commonplace, which he found in Mark, a
-fulfilment of some prophecy, or another, drags in a tag of Zechariah:
-"Behold, the King cometh to thee, meek, and riding on an ass and upon
-a colt, the foal of an ass." Then, to make the story told of Jesus
-run on all fours with the prophecy, he writes that the disciples
-"brought the ass and the colt, and put on them their garments, and he
-(Jesus) sat on them." He was unacquainted with Hebrew idiom, and so
-not aware that the words, "a colt the foal of an ass," are no more
-than a rhetorical reduplication [6] of an ass. There was, then, but
-one animal in the original form of the story, and, as the French say,
-it saute aux yeux that the importation of two is due to the influence
-of the prophecy on the mind of the transcriber. Why, therefore, go
-out of the way to attribute the tale to the influence of a legend of
-Bacchus, so multiplying empty hypotheses? Mr. Robertson, with hopeless
-perversity, takes Dr. Percy Gardner to task for repeating what he
-calls "the fallacious explanation, that 'an ass and the foal of an
-ass' represents a Greek misconception of the Hebrew way of saying
-'an ass,' as if Hebrews in every-day life lay under a special spell
-of verbal absurdity." [7] [Jewish abhorrence of Pagan myths] But did
-Hebrews in every-day life mould their ideas of the promised Messiah
-on out-of-the-way legends of Bacchus? Were they likely to fashion a
-tale of a Messianic triumph out of Gentile myths? Do we not know from
-a hundred sources that the Jews of that age, and the Christians who
-were in this matter their pupils, abhorred everything that savoured
-of Paganism. They were the last people in the world to construct
-a life of the Messiah out of the myths of Bacchus, and Hermes, and
-Osiris, and Heracles, and the fifty other heathen gods and heroes
-whom Mr. Robertson rolls up into what he calls the "composite myth"
-of the Gospels. But let us return to his criticism of Dr. Gardner. Why,
-it may be asked, was it a priori more absurd of Matthew to turn one ass
-into two in deference to Hebrew prophecy, than for Hebrews to set their
-Messiah riding into the holy city on two asses in deference to a myth
-of Bacchus crossing a marsh on two of them? Is it not Mr. Robertson,
-rather than [Robertson on Drs. Gardner and Carpenter] Dr. Gardner,
-who here lies under a special spell of absurdity? "A glance at the
-story of Bacchus," writes Mr. Robertson, "crossing a marsh on two asses
-... would have shown him that he was dealing with a zodiacal myth." The
-boot is on the other foot. Had Mr. Robertson chosen to glance at the
-Poeticon Astronomicon of Hyginus, a late and somewhat worthless Latin
-author, who is the authority for this particular tale of Bacchus,
-he would have read (ii, 23) how Liber (i.e., Dionysus) was on his
-way to get an oracle at Dodona which might restore his lost sanity:
-Sed cum venisset ad quandam paludem magnam, quam transire non posset,
-de quibusdam duobus asellis obviis factis dicitur unum deprehendisse
-eorum, et ita esse transvectus, ut omnino aquam non tetigerit.
-
-In English: "But when he came to a certain spacious marsh, which he
-thought he could not get across, he is said to have met on the way
-two young asses, of which he caught one, and he was carried across
-on it so nicely that he never touched the water at all."
-
-Here there is no hint of Bacchus riding on two asses, and
-Mr. Robertson's entire hypothesis falls to the ground like a house of
-cards. The astounding thing is that, although he insists on pages 287
-and 453 [8] that Bacchus rode on two asses, and that here is the true
-Babylonian explanation of Jesus also riding on two, he gets the Greek,
-or rather Latin, myth right on p. 339, and recognizes that Dionysus
-was only mounted on one of the asses when he passed the morass or
-river on his way to Dodona. Thus, by Mr. Robertson's own admission,
-Bacchus never rode on two asses at all.
-
-[The Pilate myth] Why was Jesus crucified by Pilate? For an
-answer to this let us for a little quit "the very stimulating and
-informing works," as Dr. Drews calls them, of Mr. Robertson, and
-turn to Dr. Drews's own work on The Witnesses to the Historicity of
-Jesus. [9] For there we find the true "astral myth interpretation"
-in all its glory. The Pilate of Christian legend was, so we learn,
-not originally an historical person at all; the whole story of
-Christ is to be taken in an astral sense; and Pilate in particular
-represents the story of Orion, the javelin-man (Pilatus), with the
-Arrow or Lance constellation (Sagitta), which is supposed to be very
-long in the Greek myth, and reappears in the Christian legend under
-the name of Longinus.... In the astral myth the Christ hanging on
-the cross or world-tree (i.e., the Milky Way) is killed by the lance
-of Pilatus.... The Christian population of Rome told the legend of
-a javelin-man, a Pilatus, who was supposed to have been responsible
-for the death of the Saviour. Tacitus heard the myth repeated, and,
-like the fool he was, took it that Pilate the javelin-man was no other
-than Pilate the Roman procurator of Judaea under Tiberius, who must
-have been known to him from the books of Josephus. [10] Accordingly,
-Tacitus sat down and penned his account of the wholesale massacre
-and burning of Christians by Nero in the fifteenth book of his Annals.
-
-We shall turn to the evidence of Tacitus later on. Meanwhile it
-is pertinent to ask where the myth of Pilatus, of which Drews here
-makes use, came from. The English text of Drews is somewhat confused;
-but presumedly Orion, with his girdle sword and lion's skin, is no
-other than Pilatus; and his long lance, with which he kills Christ,
-further entitles him to the name of Longinus. Or is it Pilatus who
-stabs Orion? It does not matter. Let us test this hypothesis in its
-essential parts.
-
-[The Longinus myth] Firstly, then, Longinus was the name coined
-by Christian legend-mongers of the third or fourth century for the
-centurion who stabbed Jesus with a lance as he hung on the cross. How
-could so late a myth influence or form part of a tradition three
-centuries older than itself? The incident of the lance being plunged
-into the side of Jesus is related only in the Fourth Gospel, and is
-not found in the earlier ones. The author of that Gospel invented it
-in order to prove to his generation that Jesus had real blood in his
-body, and was not, as the Docetes maintained, a phantasm mimicking
-reality to the ears and eyes alone of those who saw and conversed
-with him. This Gospel, even according to the Christian tradition of
-its date, is barely earlier than A.D. 100, and the name Longinus was
-not heard of before A.D. 250 at the earliest. Yet Drews is ready to
-believe that it was on the lips of Christians in the reign of Nero,
-say in A.D. 64.
-
-Secondly, what evidence is there that Pilatus could mean the
-"javelin-man" for the earliest generations of Roman Christians? The
-language current among them was Greek, not Latin, as the earliest
-Christian inscriptions in the catacombs of Rome testify. The language
-of Roman rites and popes remained Greek for three centuries. Why,
-then, should they have had their central myth of the crucifixion in
-a Latin form?
-
-Thirdly, what evidence is there that Pilatus could mean a javelin-man
-even to a Latin? Many lexicographers interpret it in Virgil in the
-sense of packed together or dense, and in most authors it bears the
-sense of bald or despoiled.
-
-[Inadequacy of the mythic theory] But, letting that pass, we ask what
-evidence is there that Orion ever had the epithet Pilatus in this
-sense? What evidence that such a myth ever existed at all? There is
-none, absolutely none. It is not enough for these authors to ransack
-Lempriere and other dictionaries of mythology in behalf of their
-paradoxes; but when these collections fail them, they proceed to coin
-myths of their own, and pretend that they are ancient, that the early
-Christians believed in them, and that Tacitus fell into the trap; as if
-these Christians, whom they acknowledge to have been either Jews or the
-converts of Jews, had not been constitutionally opposed to all pagan
-myths and cults alike; as if a good half of the earliest Christian
-literature did not consist of polemics against the pagan myths, which
-were regarded with the bitterest scorn and abhorrence; as if it were
-not notorious that it was their repugnance to and ridicule of pagan
-gods and heroes and religious myths that earned for the Christians,
-as for the Jews, their teachers, the hatred and loathing of the pagan
-populations in whose midst they lived. And yet we are asked to believe
-that the Christian Church, almost before it was separated from the
-Jewish matrix, fashioned for itself in the form of the Gospels an
-allegory of a Sun-god Joshua, who, though unknown to serious Semitic
-scholars, is yet so well known to Mr. Robertson and his friends that
-he identifies him with Adonis, and Osiris, and Dionysus, and Mithras,
-and Krishna, and Asclepius, and with any other god or demi-god that
-comes to hand in Lempriere's dictionary. After hundreds of pages of
-such fanciful writing, Drews warns us in solemn language against the
-attempts "of historical theologians to reach the nucleus of the Gospels
-by purely philological means." The attempt, he declares, is "hopeless,
-and must remain hopeless, because the Gospel tradition floats in
-the air." One would like to know in what medium his own hypotheses
-float. [Joshua the Sun-god a pure invention of the mythic school] Like
-Dr. Drews, Mr. Robertson adopts the Joshua myth as if it were beyond
-question. His faith in "the ancient Palestinian Saviour-Sun-God"
-is absolute. This otherwise unknown deity was the core of what is
-gracefully styled "the Jesuist myth." On examination, however, the
-Joshua Sun-god turns out to be the most rickety of hypotheses. Because
-the chieftain who, in old tradition, led the Jews across the Jordan
-into the land of promise was named Joshua, certain critics, who are
-still in the sun-myth phase of comparative mythology--in particular,
-Stade and Winckler--have conjectured that the name Joshua conceals
-a solar hero worshipped locally by the tribe of Ephraim. Even if
-there ever existed such a cult, it had long vanished when the book
-of Joshua was compiled; for in this he is no longer represented as a
-solar hero, but has become in the popular tradition a human figure,
-a hero judge, and leader of the armies of Israel. Of a Joshua cult
-the book does not preserve any trace or memory; that it ever existed
-is an improbable and unverifiable hypothesis. We might just as well
-conjecture that Romulus, and Remus, and other half or wholly legendary
-figures of ancient history, were sun-gods and divine saviours. But
-it is particularly in Jewish history that this school is apt to
-revel. Moses, and Joseph, and David were all mythical beings brought
-down to earth; and the god David and the god Joshua, the god Moses,
-the god Joseph, form in the imagination of these gentlemen a regular
-Hebrew prehistoric Pantheon. I say in their imagination, for it is
-certain that when the Pentateuch was compiled--at the latest in the
-fifth century B.C.--the Jews no longer revered David, and Joshua, and
-Joseph as sun-gods; while of what they worshipped even locally before
-that date we have little knowledge, and can form only conjectures. In
-any case, that they continued to worship a sun-god under the name of
-Joshua as late as the first century of our era must strike anyone who
-has the least knowledge of Hebrew religious development, who has ever
-read Philo or Josephus, or studied Jewish sapiential and apocalyptic
-literature of the period B.C. 200-A.D. 100, as a wildly improbable
-supposition. [Supposed secrecy of early Christian cult a literary
-trick] Sensible that their hypothesis conflicts with all we know about
-the Jews of these three centuries, these three authors--Messrs. Drews,
-Robertson, and W. B. Smith--insist on the esoterism and secrecy of the
-cryptic society which in Jerusalem harboured the cult. This commonest
-of literary tricks enables them to evade any awkward questions, and
-whenever they are challenged to produce some evidence of the existence
-of such a cult they can answer that, being secret and esoteric, it
-could leave little or no evidence of itself, and that we must take
-their ipse dixit and renounce all hope of direct and documentary
-evidence. They ask of us a greater credulity than any Pope of Rome
-ever demanded.
-
-[Joshua ben Jehozadak also a Sun-god] The divine stage of Joshua,
-then, if it ever existed, was past and forgotten as early as 500
-B.C. It has left no traces. Of the other Joshuas, who meet us in the
-pages of the Jewish scriptures, the most important one is Jeshua or
-Joshua ben Jehozadak, a high priest who, together with Zerubbabel,
-is often mentioned (according to the Encyclopaedia Biblica) in
-contemporary writings. Not only, then, have we contemporary evidence
-of this Joshua as of a mere man and a priest, but we know from it
-that he stooped to such mundane occupations as the rebuilding of the
-Temple. He also had human descendants, who are traced in Nehemiah xii,
-10 fol. down to Jaddua. Of this epoch of Jewish history, in which
-the Temple was being rebuilt, we have among the Jewish and Aramaic
-papyri lately recovered at Elephantine documents that are autographs
-of personages with whom this Joshua may well have been in contact. His
-contemporaries are mentioned and even addressed in these documents,
-so that he and his circle are virtually as well evidenced for us as
-Frederick the Great and Voltaire. Is it credible in the face of such
-facts that the authors we are criticizing should turn this Joshua,
-too, into a solar god? Yet Drews turns with zest to the notice of
-this Joshua, the high priest in Zechariah iii, as "one of the many
-signs" which attest that "Joshua or Jesus was the name under which
-the expected Messiah was honoured in certain Jewish sects." Unless
-he regards this later Joshua also as a divine figure, and no mere
-man of flesh and blood, why does he thus drag him into his argument?
-
-[The suspicion that the compilers of the Old Testament burked
-evidence favourable to the Sun-myth hypothesis] But, after all,
-Messrs. Drews and Robertson are uneasy about the book of Joshua, and
-not altogether capable of the breezy optimism of their instructor,
-Mr. W. B. Smith, who, in Ecce Deus (p. 74), commits himself to the
-naive declaration that, "even if we had no evidence whatever of
-a pre-Christian Jesus cult, we should be compelled to affirm its
-existence with undiminished decision." Accordingly, they both go
-out of their way to hint that the ancient Jews suppressed the facts
-of the Joshua or Jesus Sun-God-Saviour cult. Thus Mr. Robertson
-(Christianity and Mythology, p. 99, note 1), after urging us to
-accept a late and worthless tradition about Joshua, the Son of Nave,
-remarks that "the Jewish books would naturally drop the subject." How
-ill-natured, to be sure, of the authors of the old Hebrew scriptures to
-suppress evidence that would have come in so handy for Mr. Robertson's
-speculations. Dr. Drews takes another line, and in a note draws our
-attention to the fact that the Samaritans possessed an apocryphal book
-of the same name as the canonical book of Joshua. This book, he informs
-us, is based upon an old work composed in the third century B.C.,
-containing stories which in part do not appear in our Book of Joshua.
-
-He here suggests that something was omitted in canonical Joshua by its
-authors which would have helped out his hypothesis of a Joshua Sun-god
-cult. He will not, however, find the Samaritan book encouraging,
-for it gives no hint of such a cult; of that anyone who does not mind
-being bored by a perusal of it can satisfy himself. Drews's statement
-that it is based on an old work composed in the third century B.C. is
-founded on pure ignorance, and the Encyclopaedia Biblica declares it
-to be a medieval production of no value to anyone except the student
-of the Samaritan sect under Moslem rule.
-
-[The evidence of El Tabari about Joshua] Mr. Robertson thinks he has
-got on a better trail in the shape of a tradition as to Joshua which
-he is quite sure the old Jewish scripture writers suppressed. Let us
-examine it, for it affords a capital example of his ideas of what
-constitutes historical evidence. "Eastern tradition," he writes,
-"preserves a variety of myths that the Bible-makers for obvious
-reasons suppressed or transformed." In one of those traditions
-"Joshua is the son of the mythical Miriam; that is to say, there was
-probably an ancient Palestinian Saviour-Sun-God, Jesus, the son of
-Mary." So on p. 285 we learn that the cult of Jesus of Nazareth was
-"the Survival of an ancient solar or other worship of a Babe Joshua,
-son of Miriam." And he continually alludes to this ancient form of
-devotion, not as a mere hypothesis, but as a well-ascertained and
-demonstrable fact. [11]
-
-Let us then explore this remarkable tradition by which "we are
-led to surmise that the elucidation of the Christ myth is not yet
-complete." For such is the grandiose language in which he heralds
-his discovery. And what does it amount to? An Arab, El Tabari, who
-died in Bagdad about the year 925, compiled a Chronicle, of which
-some centuries later an unknown native of Persia made an abridgement
-in his own tongue, and inserted in it as a gloss "the remarkable
-Arab tradition," as it is called in the Pagan Christs (p. 157) of
-Mr. Robertson, albeit he acknowledges in a footnote that it is "not
-in the Arabic original." He asks us accordingly, on the faith of an
-unknown Persian glossator of the late Middle Ages, to believe that the
-canonical Book of Joshua originally contained this absurd tradition,
-and why? Because it would help out his hypothesis that Jesus was an
-ancient Palestinian Saviour-Sun-God, worshipped by a cryptic society
-of Hebrews in Jerusalem, both before and after the beginning of the
-Christian era; and this is the man who writes about "the psychological
-resistance to evidence" of learned men, and sets it down to "malice and
-impercipience" that anyone should challenge his conclusions. As usual,
-Dr. Drews, who sets Mr. Robertson on a level with the author of the
-Golden Bough [12] as a "leading exponent of his new mythico-symbolical
-method," plunges into the pit which Mr. Robertson has dug for him, and
-writes that, "according to an ancient Arabian tradition, the mother of
-Joshua was called Mirzam (Mariam, Maria, as the mother of Jesus was)."
-
-[W. B. Smith's hypothesis of a God Joshua] The source from which
-Messrs. Drews and Robertson have drawn this particular inspiration is
-Dr. W. B. Smith's work, The Pre-Christian Jesus (Der Vorchristliche
-Jesus). This book, we are told, "first systematically set forth the
-case for the thesis of its title." Let us, therefore, consider its
-main argument. We have the following passages in Acts xviii, 24:--
-
-
-    Now a certain Jew named Apollos, an Alexandrian by race, a learned
-    man, came to Ephesus; and he was mighty in the Scriptures. This
-    man had been instructed in the way of the Lord; and, being fervent
-    in spirit, he spake and taught carefully the things concerning
-    Jesus, knowing only the baptism of John: and he began to speak
-    boldly in the synagogue. But when Priscilla and Aquila heard him,
-    they took him unto them, and expounded unto him the way of God
-    more carefully. And when he was minded to pass over into Achaia,
-    the brethren encouraged him, and wrote to the disciples to receive
-    him: and when he was come, he helped them much which had believed
-    through grace: for he powerfully confuted the Jews, publicly,
-    showing by the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ.
-
-
-Availing ourselves of the canons of interpretation laid down by Drews
-and Robertson, we may paraphrase the above somewhat as follows by
-way of getting at its true meaning:--
-
-"A certain sun-myth hero, as his name Apollos signifies, came to
-Ephesus, which, being the centre of Astarte or Aphrodite worship,
-was obviously the right place for such a hero to pilgrimage unto. He
-was mighty in the Jewish Scriptures, and had been instructed in the
-way of the Lord Joshua, the Sun-God-Saviour of ancient Ephraim. He
-spake and taught carefully the things concerning this Joshua (or
-Adonis, or Osiris, or Dionysus, or Vegetation-god, or Horus--for
-you can take your choice among these and many more). But he knew
-only of the prehistoric ritual of baptism of Cadmus or of Oannes-Ea,
-the ancient culture-god of the Babylonians, who appeared in the form
-of a Fish-man, teaching men by day and at night going down into the
-sea--in his capacity of Sun-god." This Cadmus or Oannes was worshipped
-at Jerusalem in the cryptic sect of the Christists or Jesuists under
-the name of John. His friend Apollos, the solar demi-god, began to
-speak boldly in the synagogue. Priscilla (presumably Cybele, mother
-of the gods), and Aquila, the Eagle-God, or Jupiter, heard him; she
-took him forthwith and expounded to him the way of Jahve, who also
-was identical with Joshua, the Sun-god, with Osiris, etc.
-
-[His forced and far-fetched interpretations of common phrases]
-Professor W. B. Smith is a little more modest and less thorough-going
-in his application of mythico-symbolic methods. He only asks us to
-believe that the trite and hackneyed phrase, "the things concerning
-Jesus," refers not, as the context requires, to the history and
-passion of Jesus of Galilee, but to the mysteries of a prehistoric
-Saviour-God of the same name. We advisedly say prehistoric, for he was
-never mentioned by anyone before Professor Smith discovered him. The
-name Jesus, according to him, means what the word Essene also meant, a
-Healer. [13] Note, in passing, that this etymology is wholly false, and
-rests on the authority of a writer so late, ignorant, and superstitious
-as Epiphanius. Now, why cannot the words, "the things about Jesus,"
-in this context mean the tradition of the ministry of Jesus as it had
-shaped itself at that time, beginning with the Baptism and ending with
-the Ascension, as we read in Acts i, 22? [Apollos and the Baptism of
-John] It cannot, argues Professor Smith, because Apollos only knew the
-baptism of John. The reference to John's baptism may be obscure, as
-much in early Christianity is bound to be obscure, except to Professor
-Smith and his imitators. Yet this much is clear, that it here means,
-what it means in the sequel, the baptism of mere repentance as opposed
-to the baptism of the Spirit, which was by laying on of hands, and
-conferred the charismatic gifts of the Holy Ghost. The Marcionites, and
-after them the Manichean and Cathar sects, retained the latter rite,
-and termed it Spiritual or Pneumatic Baptism; while they dropped as
-superfluous the Johannine baptism with water. It would appear, then,
-that Apollos was perfectly acquainted with the personal history of
-Jesus, and understood the purport of the baptism of repentance as a
-sacrament preparing followers of Jesus for the kingdom of Heaven,
-soon to be inaugurated on earth. Perhaps we get a glimpse in this
-passage of an age when the mission of Jesus in his primitive role
-as herald of the Messianic kingdom and a mere continuer of John's
-mission was familiar to many who yet did not recognize him as the
-Messiah. For, after instruction by Priscilla and Aquila, Apollos set
-himself to confute the Jews who denied Jesus to have been Messiah,
-which, as a mere herald of the approaching kingdom of God, he was
-not. We know that Paul regarded him as having attained that dignity
-only through, and by, the fact of the Spirit having raised him from
-the dead; and did not regard him as having received it through the
-descent of the Spirit on him in the Jordan, as the oriental Christians
-presently believed. Still less did Paul know of the later teaching of
-the orthodox churches--viz., that the Annunciation was the critical
-moment in which Christ became Jesus. In any case, we must not interpret
-the words, "the things about Jesus," in this passage in a forced and
-unnatural sense wholly alien to the writer of Acts. This writer again
-and again recapitulates the leading facts of the life and ministry of
-Jesus, and the phrase, "the things concerning Jesus," cannot in any
-work of his bear any other sense. Moreover, the same author uses the
-very same phrase elsewhere (Luke xxiv, 19) in the same sense. Here
-Cleopas asks Jesus (whom he had failed to recognize), and says:--
-
-
-    Dost thou alone sojourn in Jerusalem, and not know the things
-    which are come to pass there in these days? And he said unto him,
-    What things? And they said unto him, the things concerning Jesus
-    of Nazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed and word before
-    God and all the people: and how the chief priests and our rulers
-    delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him.
-
-
-Such, then, were "the things about Jesus," and to find in them, as
-Professor W. B. Smith does, an allusion to a pre-Christian myth of
-a God Joshua is to find a gigantic mare's-nest, and fly in the face
-of all the evidence. He verges on actual absurdity when he sees the
-same allusion in Mark v, 26, where a sick woman, having heard "the
-things concerning Jesus," went behind him, touched his garment, and
-was healed. Her disease was of a hysterical description, and in the
-annals of faith-healing such cures are common. What she had heard of
-was obviously not his fame as a Sun-god, but his power to heal sick
-persons like herself. [Magical papyrus of Wessely] Professor Smith
-tries to find support for his hardy conjecture in a chance phrase in
-a magical papyrus of Paris, No. 3,009, edited first by Wessely, and
-later by Dieterich in his Abraxas, p. 138. It is a form of exorcism
-to be inscribed on a tin plate and hung round the neck of a person
-possessed by a devil, or repeated over him by an exorcist. In this
-rigmarole the giants, of course, are dragged in, and the Tower of
-Babel and King Solomon; and the name of Jesus, the God of the Hebrews,
-is also invoked in the following terms: "I adjure thee by Jesus the
-God of the Hebrews, Iabaiae Abraoth aia thoth ele, elo," etc. The age
-of this papyrus is unknown; but Wessely puts it in the third century
-after Christ, while Dieterich shows that it can in no case be older
-than the second century B.C. It is clearly the composition of some
-exorcist who clung on to the skirts of late Judaism, for he is at
-pains to inform us in its last line that it is a Hebrew composition
-and preserved among pure men. In that age, as in after ones, not a few
-exorcists, trading on the fears and sufferings of superstitious people,
-affected to be pure and holy; and the mention of Jesus indicates some
-such charlatan, who was more or less cognisant of Christianity and of
-the practice of Christian exorcists. He was also aware of the Jewish
-antecedents of Christianity, and did not distinguish clearly between
-the mother religion and its daughter. That is why he describes Jesus
-as a Hebrew God. We know from other sources that even in the earliest
-Christian age Gentiles used the name of Jesus in exorcisms. The author
-of the document styles Jesus God, just as Pliny informs us that the
-Christians sang hymns "to Christ as to God"--Christo quasi deo. How
-Professor Smith can imagine that this papyrus lends any colour to
-his thesis of a pre-Christian Jesus it is difficult to imagine.
-
-[Jesus a Nazoraean in what sense] Still less does his thesis really
-profit by the text of Matthew ii, 23, in which a prophecy is adduced
-to the effect that the Messiah should be called a Nazoraean, and this
-prophecy is declared to have been fulfilled in so far as Jesus was
-taken by his parents to live at Nazareth in Galilee.
-
-What prophecy the evangelist had in mind is not known. But
-Professor W. B. Smith jumps to the conclusion that the Christians
-were identical with the sect of Nazoraei mentioned in Epiphanius as
-going back to an age before Christ; and he appeals in confirmation
-of this quite gratuitous hypothesis [14] to Acts xxiv, 5, where the
-following of Jesus is described as that of the Nazoraei. It in no way
-helps the thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus, even if he and his
-followers were members of this obscure sect; it would rather prove the
-opposite. Drews, following W. B. Smith, pretends in the teeth of the
-texts that the name is applied to Jesus only as Guardian of the World,
-Protector and Deliverer of men from the power of sins and daemons, and
-that it has no reference to an obscure and entirely unknown village
-named Nazareth. He also opines that Jesus was called a Nazarene,
-because he was the promised Netzer or Zemah who makes all things new,
-and so forth. Such talk is all in the air. Why these writers boggle
-so much at the name Nazoraean is not easy to divine; still less to
-understand what Professor Smith is driving at when he writes of those
-whom he calls "historicists," that "They have rightly felt that the
-fall of Nazareth is the fall of historicism itself." Professor Burkitt
-has suggested that Nazareth is Chorazin spelt backwards. Wellhausen
-explains Nazoraean from Nesar in the name Gennessaret. In any case,
-as we have no first-century gazetteer or ordnance survey of Galilee,
-it is rash to suppose that there could have been no town there of the
-name. True the Talmuds and the Old Testament do not name it; but they
-do not profess to give a catalogue of all the places in Galilee, so
-their silence counts for little. [15] All we know for certain is that
-for the evangelist Nazoraean meant a dweller in Nazareth, and that he
-gave the word that sense when he met with it in an anonymous prophecy.
-
-[Mr. Robertson on myths] I feel that I ought almost to apologize
-to my readers for investigating at such length the hypothesis of a
-pre-Christian Jesus, son of a mythical Mary, and for exhibiting over
-so many pages its fantastic, baseless, and absurd character. But
-Mr. Robertson himself warns us of the necessity of showing no
-mercy to myths when they assume the garb of fact. For he adduces
-(p. 126) the William Tell myth by way of illustrating once for all
-"the fashion in which a fiction can even in a historical period find
-general acceptance." Even so it is with his own fictions. We see them
-making their way with such startling rapidity over England and Germany
-as almost to make one despair of this age of popular enlightenment. It
-is not his fault, and I exonerate him from blame. [His methods those of
-old-fashioned orthodoxy] For centuries orthodox theologians have been
-trying to get out of the Gospels supernaturalist conclusions which were
-never in them, nor could with any colour be derived from them except
-by deliberately ignoring the canons of evidence and the historical
-methods freely employed in the study of all other ancient monuments and
-narratives. They have set the example of treating the early writings of
-Christianity as no other ancient books would be treated. Mr. Robertson
-is humbly following in their steps, but a rebours, or in an inverse
-sense. They insist on getting more out of the New Testament than
-any historical testimony could ever furnish; he on getting less. In
-other respects also he imitates their methods. Thus they insist on
-regarding the New Testament, and in particular the four Gospels, as a
-homogeneous block, and will not hear of the criticism which discerns
-in them literary development, which detects earlier and later couches
-of tradition and narrative. This is what I call the Sunday-school
-attitude, and it lacks all perspective and orientation. Mr. Robertson
-imbibed it in childhood, and has never been able to throw it off. For
-him there is no before and after in the formation of these books,
-no earlier and later in the emergence of beliefs about Jesus, no
-stratification of documents or of ideas. If he sometimes admits it,
-he withdraws the admission on the next page, as militating against
-his cardinal hypothesis. He seems never to have submitted himself to
-systematic training in the methods of historical research--never,
-as we say, to have gone through the mill; and accordingly in the
-handling of documents he shows himself a mere wilful child.
-
-[Thus he insists on the priority in Christian tradition of the Virgin
-Birth legend] His treatment of the legend of the Virgin Birth is an
-example of this mental attitude, which might be described as orthodoxy
-turned upside down and inside out. The Gospel of Mark is demonstrably
-older than those of the other two synoptists who merely copied it
-out with such variations, additions, omissions, and modifications
-as a growing reverence for Jesus the Messiah imposed. It contains,
-no more than the Pauline Epistles and the Johannine Gospel, any hint
-of the supernatural birth of Jesus. It regards him quite simply and
-naturally as the son of Joseph and Mary. In it the neighbours of Jesus
-enumerate by way of contumely the names of his brothers and sisters. I
-have shown also in my Myth, Magic, and Morals that this naturalist
-tradition of his birth dominates no less the whole of the Gospels
-of Matthew and Luke apart from the first two chapters of each, and
-that even in the first chapter of Matthew the pedigree in early texts
-ended with the words "Joseph begat Jesus." I have shown furthermore
-that the belief in the paternity of Joseph was the characteristic
-belief of the Palestinian Christians for over two centuries, that
-it prevailed in Syria to the extent of regarding Jesus and Thomas as
-twin brothers. I have pointed out that the Jewish interlocutor Trypho
-in Justin Martyr's dialogue (c. 150) maintains that Jesus was born a
-man of men and rejects the Virgin Birth legend as a novelty unworthy
-of monotheists, and that he extorts from his Christian antagonist
-the admission that the great majority of Christians still believed
-in the paternity of Joseph.
-
-[His exceptional treatment of Christian tradition] Now Mr. Robertson
-evidently reads a good deal, and must at one time or another have
-come across all these facts. Why, then, does he go out of his way to
-ignore them, and, in common with Professors Drews and W. B. Smith,
-insist that the miraculous tradition of Jesus's birth was coeval with
-the earliest Christianity and prior to the tradition of a natural
-birth? Yet the texts stare him in the face and confute him. Why does he
-shut his eyes to them, and gibe perpetually at the critical students
-who attach weight to them? The works of all the three writers are
-tirades against the critical method which tries to disengage in the
-traditions of Jesus the true from the false, fact from myth, and to
-show how, in the pagan society which, as it were, lifted Jesus up
-out of his Jewish cradle, these myths inevitably gathered round his
-figure, as mists at midday thicken around a mountain crest.
-
-[In secular history he uses other canons and methods,] Their
-insistence that in the case of Christian origins the miraculous
-and the non-miraculous form a solid block of impenetrable myth
-is all the more remarkable, because in secular history they are
-prepared, nay anxious, for the separation of truth from falsehood,
-of history from myth, and continually urge not only its possibility,
-but its necessity. Mr. Robertson in particular prides himself on
-meting out to Apollonius of Tyana a measure which he refuses to
-Jesus the Messiah. [e.g., in criticizing the story of Apollonius]
-"The simple purport," he writes in the Literary Guide, May 1, 1913,
-"of my chapter on Apollonius was to acknowledge his historicity,
-despite the accretions of myth and more or less palpable fiction to
-his biography." And yet there are ten testimonies to the historicity
-of Jesus where there is one to that of Apollonius; yet Apollonius was
-reputed to have been born miraculously, and his birth accompanied by
-the portent of a meteor from heaven, as that of Jesus by a star from
-the east. Like Jesus, he controlled the devils of madness and disease,
-and by the power of his exorcisms dismissed them to be tortured in
-hell. Like Peter, he miraculously freed himself from his bonds; like
-Jesus, he revealed himself after death to a sceptical disciple and
-viva voce convinced him of his ascent to heaven; like him, he ascended
-in his body up to heaven amid the hymns of maiden worshippers. In
-life he spent seven days in the bowels of the earth, and gathered a
-band of disciples around him who acclaimed him as a divine being;
-long after his death temples were raised to him as to a demigod,
-miracles wrought by his relics, and prayer and sacrifice offered to
-his genius. So considerable was the parallelism between his story
-and that of Jesus that the pagan enemies of the Christians began
-about the year 300 to run his cult against theirs, and it was only
-yesterday that the orthodox began to give up the old view that the
-Life of Apollonius was a blasphemous rechauffe of the Gospels. "There
-is no great reason to doubt that India was visited by Apollonius of
-Tyana," writes Mr. Robertson (Christianity and Mythology, p. 273);
-and yet his visit in the only relation we have of it is a tissue of
-marvels and prodigies, his Indian itinerary is impossible, and full of
-contradictions not only of what we know of Indian geography to-day,
-but of what was already known in that day. Yet about his pilgrimage
-thither, declares Mr. Robertson, there is no more uncertainty than
-about the embassies sent by Porus to Augustus, and by the king of
-"Taprobane" to Claudius. "There is much myth," he writes again, p. 280,
-"in the life of Apollonius of Tyana, who appears to be at the bottom
-a real historical personage." In the Gospels we have the story of
-Jairus's daughter being raised to life from apparent death. "A closely
-similar story is found in Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana,
-the girl in each case being spoken of in such a way as to leave open
-the question of her having been dead or a cataleptic." So writes
-Mr. Robertson, p. 334, who thinks that "the simple form preserved
-in Matthew suggests the derivation from the story in Philostratus,"
-overlooking here, as elsewhere, the chronological difficulties. We can
-forgive him for that; but why, we must ask, does the presence of such
-stories in the Gospel irrevocably condemn Jesus to non-historicity,
-while their presence in the Life of Apollonius leaves his historical
-reality intact and unchallenged? Is it not that the application of his
-canons of interpretation to Apollonius would have deprived him of one
-of the sources from which the mythicity of Jesus by his anachronistic
-methods could be deduced?
-
-[The early passion play of the Sun-god Joshua] Mr. Robertson endeavours
-in a halting manner to justify his partiality for Apollonius. "We
-have," he writes (Pagan Christs, p. 283, Sec. 16), "no reason for doubting
-that there was an Apollonius of Tyana.... The reasons for not doubting
-are (1) that there was no cause to be served by a sheer fabrication;
-and (2) that it was a much easier matter to take a known name as a
-nucleus for a mass of marvels and theosophic teachings than to build it
-up, as the phrase goes about the canon, 'round a hole.' The difference
-between such a case and those of Jesuism and Buddhism is obvious. In
-those cases there was a cultus and an organization to be accounted for,
-and a biography of the founder had to be forthcoming. In the case
-of Apollonius, despite the string of marvels attached to his name,
-there was no cultus."
-
-Let us examine the above argument. In the case of "Jesuism"
-(Mr. Robertson's argot for early Christianity) there had to be
-fabricated a biography of Jesus, because there existed an organized
-sect that worshipped Jesus.
-
-The organized sect consisted, according to Mr. Robertson,
-of "Christists" or "Jesuists," and the chief incident for which
-they were organized was an annual play in which the God Jesus was
-betrayed, arrested, condemned, was crucified, died, was buried, and
-rose again. Ober Ammergau has supplied him with his main conception,
-and his annually recurring "Gospel mystery play," as he imagines it
-to have been acted by the "Jesuists," who were immediate ancestors
-of the Christians, is a faithful copy of the modern Passion Play. He
-supposes it to have been acted annually because the hypothetical
-Sun-God-Saviour Joshua, whose mythical sufferings and death it
-commemorated, was an analogue of Osiris, whose sufferings and death
-were similarly represented in Egypt each recurring spring; also
-of Adonis, of Dionysus, of Mithras, and of sundry vegetation gods,
-annually slain to revive vegetation and secure the life of the initiate
-in the next world. Be it remarked also that the annually slain God
-of the Jesuists was not only an analogue of these other gods, but a
-"composite myth" made up of their myths. As we have seen, Mr. Robertson
-is ready to exhibit to us in one or another of their mythologies the
-original of every single incident and actor in the Jesuist play.
-
-Such was the cultus and organization which, according to Mr. Robertson
-and his imitator Dr. Drews, lies behind the Christian religion. The
-latter began to be when the "Jesuist" cult, having broken away from
-Judaism, was also concerned to break away from the paganism in contact
-with which the play would first arise.
-
-[The Gospels a transcript of this play] A biography of the Founder
-of the cult was now called for, by the Founder oddly enough being
-meant the God himself, and not the hierophant who instituted the
-play. The Christian Gospels are the biography in question. They are
-a transcript of the annually performed ritual drama, just as Lamb's
-Tales from Shakespeare are transcripts of Shakespeare's plays.
-
-The first performances of the play, we learn, probably took place in
-Egypt. It ceased to be acted when "it was reduced to writing as part
-of the gospel." How far away from Jerusalem it was that the momentous
-decision was taken by the sect to give up play acting and be content
-with the transcript Mr. Robertson "can hardly divine." He hints,
-however, that some of the latest representations took place in the
-temples built by Herod at Damascus and Jericho and in the theatres
-of the Greek town of Gadara. "The reduction of the play to narrative
-form put all the Churches on a level, and would remove a stumbling
-block from the way of the ascetic Christists who objected to all
-dramatic shows as such."
-
-But where did the play come from? What inspired it? Mr. Robertson makes
-a tour round the Mediterranean, and collects in Part II, Ch. I, of his
-Pagan Christs a lot of scrappy information about mock sacrifices and
-mystery dramas, all of them "cases and modes of modification" of actual
-human sacrifices that were "once normal in the Semitic world." He
-assumes without a tittle of proof, and against all probability, that
-the annual sacrifice of a king or of a king's son, whether in real
-or mimic, held its ground among Jews as a religious ceremony right
-down into our era, and was "reduced among them to ritual form, like
-the leading worships of the surrounding Gentile world." He fashions
-a new hypothesis in accordance with these earlier ones as follows:--
-
-[Joshua or Jesus slain once a year] "If in any Jewish community,
-or in the Jewish quarter of any Eastern city, the central figure in
-this rite (i.e., of a mock sacrifice annually recurring of a man got
-up to represent a god) were customarily called Jesus Barabbas, 'Jesus
-the Son of the Father'--whether or not in virtue of an old cultus of
-a God Jesus who had died annually like Attis and Tammuz--we should
-have a basis for the tradition so long preserved in many MSS. of the
-first gospel, and at the same time a basis for the whole gospel myth
-of the crucifixion."
-
-Here we have a whole string of hypotheses piled one on the other. Let
-us see which have any ground in fact, or cohere with what we know of
-the past, which are improbable and unproven.
-
-[Hypothesis of human sacrifice among Jews] That human sacrifice was
-once in vogue among the Jews is probable enough, and the story of
-the frustrated sacrifice of Isaac was no doubt both a memory and
-a condemnation of the old rite of sacrificing first-born children
-with which we are familiar in ancient Phoenicia and her colony of
-Carthage. That such rites in Judaea and in Israel did not survive the
-Assyrian conquest of Jerusalem is certain. The latest allusion to them
-is in Isaiah xxx, 27-33. This passage is post-exilic indeed; but,
-as Dr. Cheyne remarks (Encycl. Biblica, art. Molech, col. 3,187):
-"The tone of the allusion is rather that of a writer remote from
-these atrocities than of a prophet in the midst of the struggle
-against them."
-
-We may then assume (1) that the custom of human sacrifice disappeared
-among Jews centuries before our era; (2) that in the epoch 100
-B.C. to 100 A.D. every Jew, no matter where he lived, would view
-such rites and reminiscences with horror. As a matter of fact, Philo
-dwells in eloquent language on the horror and abomination of them as
-they were still in his day sporadically celebrated, not among Jews,
-but among pagans.
-
-This being so, is it likely that any Jewish community would keep up
-even the simulacrum of such rites? In Josephus and Philo, who are
-our most important witnesses to the Judaism that just preceded or was
-contemporary with early Christianity, there is no hint of such rites
-as might constitute a memory and mimicry of human victims, whether
-identified with a god or not. No serious pagan writer of that age
-ever accused the Jews of keeping up such rites openly or in secret
-among themselves. [Evidence of Apion accepted by Mr. Robertson]
-Apion alone had a cock-and-bull story of how Antiochus Epiphanes,
-when he took Jerusalem (c. 170 B.C.), found a Greek being fattened up
-by the Jews in the adytum of the temple about to be slain and eaten
-in honour of their god. Of course Mr. Robertson catches at this,
-and writes (Pagan Christs, p. 161) that, "in view of all the clues,
-we cannot pronounce that story incredible." What clues has he? The
-undoubted survival of ritual murder among the pagans of Phoenicia
-in that age is no clue, though it explains the genesis of Apion's
-tale. And Mr. Robertson has one other treasure trove--to wit, the
-obscure reading "Jesus Barabbas" in certain MSS. of Matthew xxvii, 17:
-"Pilate said unto them, Whom will ye that I release unto you? (Jesus)
-Barabbas, or Jesus which is called Christ?"
-
-[The sacrificing of the mock king] It has been plausibly suggested
-that the addition Jesus is due to a scribe's reduplication, such
-as is common in Greek manuscripts, of the last syllable of the
-word humin = unto you. The in in uncials is a regular compendium
-for Iesun Jesus. In this way the name Jesus may have crept in before
-Barabbas. The entire story of Barabbas being released has an apocryphal
-air, for Pilate would not have let off a rebel against the Roman rule
-to please the Jewish mob; and the episode presupposes that it was
-the Sanhedrin which had condemned Jesus to death, which is equally
-improbable. What is probable, however, is that the Syrian soldiery
-to whom Pilate committed Jesus for crucifixion were accustomed to the
-Sacaea festival of Babylonian origin, and perhaps to the analogous Roman
-feast of the Saturnalia. In such celebrations a mock king was chosen,
-and vested with the costume, pomp, and privileges of kingship perhaps
-for as long as three days. Then the mimicry of slaying him was gone
-through, and sometimes the mock king was really put to death. Among
-Syrians the name Barabbas may--it is a mere hypothesis--have been the
-conventional appellation of the victim slain actually or in mock show
-on such occasions; and the soldiers of Pilate may have treated him en
-Barabbas. Loisy suggests in his Commentary on the Synoptics that this
-was the genesis of the Barabbas story. That a pagan soldiery treated
-Jesus as a mock king, when they dressed him in purple and set a crown
-of thorns on his head, and, kneeling before him, cried "Hail King of
-the Jews," is quite possible; and serious scholars like Paul Wendland
-(Hermes, Vol. XXXIII (1898), fol. 175) and Mr. W. R. Paton long ago
-discerned the probability.
-
-But it was one thing for Syrians and pagans to envisage the
-crucifixion of Jesus under the aspect of a sacrifice to Molech,
-quite another thing for Jews--whether as his enemies or as his
-partisans--to do so; nor does the Gospel narrative suggest that
-any Jews took part in the ceremony. Perhaps it was out of respect
-for Jewish susceptibilities--and they were not likely to favour any
-mockery of their Messianic aspirations--that Pilate caused Jesus to
-be divested of the purple insignia of royalty and clad in his usual
-garb before he was led out of the guardroom and through the streets
-of Jerusalem on his way to Golgotha.
-
-[Evidence of Philo] We read in Philo (In Flaccum, vi) of a very similar
-scene enacted in the streets of Alexandria within ten years of the
-crucifixion. The young Agrippa, elevated by Caligula to the throne
-of Judaea, had landed in that city, where feeling ran high between
-Jews and pagans. The latter, by way of ridiculing the pretensions of
-the Jews to have a king of their own, seized on a poor lunatic named
-Carabas who loitered night and day naked about the streets, ran him
-as far as the Gymnasium, and there stood him on a stool, so that all
-could see him, having first set a mock diadem of byblus on his head
-and thrown a rug over his shoulders as a cloak of honour. In his hand
-they set a papyrus stem by way of sceptre. Having thus arrayed him,
-as in a mime of the theatre, with the insignia of mock royalty, the
-young men shouldering sticks, as if they were a bodyguard, encircled
-him, while others advanced, saluted his mock majesty, and pretended
-that he was their judge and king sitting on his throne to direct the
-commonwealth. Meanwhile a shout went up from the crowd around of Marin,
-which in the Syrian language signified Lord.
-
-This passage of Philo goes far to prove that the mockery of Jesus
-in the Gospels was no more than a public ridiculing of the Jewish
-expectations of a national leader or Messiah who should revive the
-splendours of the old Davidic kingdom. In any case, the mockery
-is conducted at Jerusalem by Pilate's soldiers (who were not Jews,
-but a pagan garrison put there to overawe the Jews), at Alexandria by
-such Greeks as Apion penned his calumnies to gratify. Mr. Robertson's
-suggestion that the mock ceremony of the crucifixion was performed
-by Jews or Christians is thus as absurd as it is gratuitous. It was
-held in bitter despite of Jews and Christians, it was a mockery and
-reviling of their most cherished hopes and ideals; and yet he does
-not scruple to argue that it is "a basis for the whole gospel myth
-of the crucifixion."
-
-[Evidence of the Khonds] Thus he is left with the single calumny
-of Apion, which deserves about as much credence as the similar
-tales circulated to-day against the Jews of Bessarabia. That is the
-single item of evidence he has to prove what is the very hinge of his
-theory--the supposition, namely, that the Jews of Alexandria first,
-and afterwards the Jews of Jerusalem, celebrated in secret once a year
-ritual dramas representing the ceremonial slaying of a Sun-God-Saviour
-Joshua, Son of the Father and of the Virgin Miriam. It is a far cry to
-the horrible rites of the Khonds of modern India; but Mr. Robertson,
-for whom wide differences of age and place matter nothing when he
-is explaining Christian origins, has discovered in them a key to the
-narrative of the crucifixion of Jesus. He runs all round the world and
-collects rites of ritual murder and cannibal sacraments of all ages,
-mixes them up, lumps them down before us, and exclaims triumphantly,
-There is my "psychological clue" to Christianity. The most superficial
-resemblances satisfy him that an incident in Jerusalem early in our
-era is an essential reproduction of a Khond ritual murder in honour
-of the goddess Tari. Was there ever an author so hopelessly uncritical
-in his methods?
-
-[Origin of the Gospels] The Gospels, then, are a transcript of a mock
-murder of the Sun-god Joshua annually performed in secret by the
-Jews of Jerusalem, for it had got there before it was written down
-and discontinued. One asks oneself why, if the Jews had tolerated
-so long a pagan survival among themselves, they could not keep it
-up a little longer; and why the "Christists" should be so anxious
-"to break away from paganism" at exactly the same hour. Moreover,
-their breach with paganism did not amount to much, since they kept
-the transcript of a ritual drama framed on pagan lines and inspired
-throughout by pagan ideas and myths; not only kept it, but elevated it
-into Holy Scripture. At the same time they retained the Old Testament,
-which as Jews they had immemorially venerated as Holy Scripture; and
-for generations they went on worshipping in the Jewish temple, kept
-the Jewish feasts and fasts, and were zealous for circumcision. What
-a hotchpotch of a sect!
-
-[How could a Sun-god slain annually be slain by Pontius Pilate?] It
-occurs to me to ask Mr. Robertson a few questions about this
-transcript. It was the annual mystery play reduced to writing. The
-central event of the play was the annual death and resurrection of a
-solar or vegetation god, whose attributes and career were borrowed
-from the cults of Osiris, Adonis, Dionysus, and Co. All these gods
-died once a year; and, I suppose, had you asked one of the votaries
-when his god died, he would have answered, Every spring. Now all the
-Gospels (in common with all Christian tradition) are unanimous that
-Jesus only died once, about the time of the Passover, when Pilate was
-Roman Governor of Judaea, when Annas and Caiaphas were high-priests and
-King Herod about. This surely is an extraordinary record for a Sun-god
-who died once a year. And it was not in the transcript only that
-all these fixities of date crept in, for Mr. Robertson insists most
-vehemently that Pilate was an actor in the play. "Even the episode,"
-he writes (Pagan Christs, p. 193), "of the appeal of the priests and
-Pharisees to Pilate to keep a guard on the tomb, though it might be a
-later interpolation, could quite well have been a dramatic scene." In
-Mark and Matthew, as containing "the earlier version" of the drama,
-he detects everywhere a "concrete theatricality." Thus he commits
-himself to the astonishing paralogism that Pilate and Herod, Annas and
-Caiaphas, and all the other personages of the closing chapters of the
-Gospels, were features in an annually recurring passion play of the
-Sun-god Joshua; and this play was not a novelty introduced after the
-crucifixion, for there never was a real crucifixion. On the contrary,
-it was a secret survival among paganized Jews, a bit of Jewish pagan
-mummery that had been going on long ages before the actors represented
-in it ever lived or were heard of. Such is the reductio ad absurdum of
-the thesis which peeps out everywhere in Mr. Robertson's pages. And
-now we have found what we were in search of--namely, the cultus and
-organization to account for which a biography of Jesus had to be
-fabricated. The Life of Apollonius, argues Mr. Robertson, cannot have
-been built up round a hole, and as there was no organized cult of him
-(this is utterly false), there must have been a real figure to fit the
-biography. In the other case the organized and pre-existing cult was
-the nucleus around which the Gospels grew up like fairy rings around
-a primal fungus. It is not obvious why a cult should exclude a real
-founder, or, rather, a real person, in honour of whom the cult was
-kept up. In the worship of the Augustus or of the ancient Pharaoh,
-who impersonated and was Osiris, we have both. Why not have both
-in the case of Jesus, to whose real life and subsequent deification
-the Augusti and the Pharaohs offer a remarkable parallel? But there
-never was any pre-Christian cult and organization in Mr. Robertson's
-sense. It is a monstrous outgrowth of his own imagination.
-
-
-[Historicity of Plato falls by the canons of the mythicists] And
-as in the case of Apollonius, so in the case of other ancients,
-he is careful not to apply those methods of interpretation which he
-yet cannot pardon scholars for not applying to Jesus. Let us take
-another example. Of the life of Plato we know next to nothing. In
-the dialogues attributed to him his name is only mentioned twice;
-and in both cases its mention could, if we adopt Mr. Robertson's
-canons of interpretation, be with the utmost ease explained away as
-an interpolation. The only life we have of him was penned by Diogenes
-Laertius 600 years after he lived. The details of his life supplied
-by Aristoxenus, a pupil of Aristotle, are obviously false. The only
-notices preserved of him that can be claimed to be contemporary are
-the few derived from his nephew Speusippus. Now what had Speusippus
-to tell? Why, a story of the birth of Plato which, as Mr. Robertson
-(p. 293) writes, scarcely differs from the story of Matthew i, 18-25:
-
-"In the special machinery of the Joseph and Mary myth--the warning in a
-dream and the abstention of the husband--we have a simple duplication
-of the relations of the father and mother of Plato, the former being
-warned in a dream by Apollo, so that the child was virgin-born."
-
-Again, just as the Christians chose a "solar date" for the birthday
-of Jesus, so the Platonists, according to Mr. Robertson, p. 308,
-"placed the master's birthday on that of Apollo--that is, either at
-Christmas or at the vernal equinox."
-
-Now in the case of Jesus such legends and events as the above suffice
-to convince Mr. Robertson that the history of Jesus as told in the
-Gospels is a mere survival of "ancient solar or other worship of a
-babe Joshua, son of Miriam," of which ancient worship nothing is
-known except that it looms large in the imagination of himself,
-of Dr. Drews, and of Professor W. B. Smith. On the other hand, we
-do know that a cult of Apollo existed, and that it is no fiction of
-these modern writers. Surely, then, it is time we changed our opinion
-about the historicity of Plato. Is it not as clear as daylight that
-he was the survival of a pre-Platonic Apollo myth? We know the role
-assigned to Apollo of revealer of philosophic truth. Well, here were
-the dialogues and letters of Plato, calling for an explanation of
-their origin; a sect of Platonists who cherished these writings and
-kept the feast of their master on a solar date. On all the principles
-of the new mythico-symbolic system Plato, as a man, had no right
-to exist. "Without Jesus," writes Drews, "the rise of Christianity
-can be quite well understood." Yes, and, by the same logic, no less
-the rise of Platonism without Plato, or of the cult of Apollonius
-without Apollonius. What is sauce for the goose is surely sauce for
-the gander. With a mere change of names we could write of Plato what
-on p. 282 Mr. Robertson writes of Jesus. Let us do it: "The gospel
-Jesus (read dialogist Plato) is as enigmatic from a humanist as from
-a supernaturalist point of view. Miraculously born, to the knowledge
-of many (read of his nephew Speusippus, of Clearchus whose testimony
-'belongs to Plato's generation,' of Anaxilides the historian and
-others), he reappears as a natural man even in the opinion of his
-parents (read of nephew Speusippus and the rest); the myth will not
-cohere. Rationally considered, he (Plato) is an unintelligible portent;
-a Galilean (read Athenian) of the common people, critically untraceable
-till his full manhood, when he suddenly appears as a cult-founder."
-
-[The Virgin Birth no part of the earliest Gospel tradition] Why does
-Mr. Robertson so incessantly labour the point that the belief in
-the supernatural birth of Jesus came first in time, and was anterior
-to the belief that he was born a man of men? This he implies in the
-words just cited: "Miraculously born, to the knowledge of many, he
-reappears as a natural man." A story almost identical with that of
-the Massacre of the Innocents by Herod was, Mr. Robertson tells us
-(p. 184), told of the Emperor Augustus in his lifetime, and appears in
-Suetonius "as accepted history." And elsewhere (p. 395) he writes:
-"It was after these precedents (i.e., of Antiochus and Ptolemy)
-that Augustus, besides having himself given out, like Alexander,
-as begotten of a God, caused himself to be proclaimed in the East
-... as being born under Providence a Saviour and a God and the
-beginning of an Evangel of peace to mankind." Like Plato's story,
-then, so the official and contemporary legends of Augustus closely
-resembled the later ones of Jesus. Yet Mr. Robertson complacently
-accepts the historicity of Plato and Augustus, merely brushing aside
-the miraculous stories and supernatural role. Nowhere in his works
-does he manifest the faintest desire to apply in the domain of profane
-history the canons which he so rigidly enforces in ecclesiastical.
-
-Yet there are passages in Mr. Robertson's works where he seems,
-to use his own phrase, to "glimpse" the truth. Thus, on p. 124 of
-Christianity and Mythology he writes: "Jesus is said to be born
-of a Virgin; but not in the original version of the first gospel;
-and not in the second; and not in the fourth; and not in any writing
-or by any mouth known to or credited by the writers of the Pauline
-Epistles. Here we see how a myth may be superimposed on a cult."
-
-Does not this mean that a cult of Jesus already existed before
-this myth was added, and that the myth is absent in the earliest
-documents of the cult? Again, on p. 274, he writes that "the Christian
-Virgin-myth and Virgin-and-child worship are certainly of pre-Christian
-origin, and of comparatively late Christian acceptance." Yet, when
-I drew attention in the Literary Guide of December 1, 1912, to
-the inconsistency with this passage of the later one above cited,
-which asserts that, "Miraculously born, to the knowledge of many,
-he reappears as a natural man," he replied (January 1, 1913) that
-"a reader of ordinary candour would understand that 'acceptance'
-applied to the official action of the Church." It appears, therefore,
-that in the cryptic secret society of the Joshua Sun-God-Saviour, which
-held its seances at Jerusalem at the beginning of our era, there was
-an official circle which lagged behind the unofficial multitude. The
-latter knew from the first that their solar myth was miraculously
-born; but the official and controlling inner circle ignored the
-miracle until late in the development of the cult, and then at last
-issued a number of documents from which it was excluded. One wonders
-why. Why trouble to utter these documents in which Jesus "reappears as
-a natural man," long after the sect as a whole were committed to the
-miraculous birth? What is the meaning of these wheels within wheels,
-that hardly hunt together? We await an explanation. Meanwhile let us
-probe the new mythico-symbolism a little further.
-
-[The cleansing of the temple] Why did the solar God Joshua-Jesus
-scourge the money-changers out of the temple? Answer: Because it is
-told of Apollonius of Tyana, "that he expelled from the cities of the
-left bank of the Hellespont some sorcerers who were extorting money
-for a great propitiatory sacrifice to prevent earthquakes."
-
-The connection is beautifully obvious like the rest of our author's
-rapprochements; but we must accept it, or we shall lay ourselves open
-to the reproach of "psychological resistance to evidence." Nor must we
-ask how the memoirs of Damis, that lay in a corner till Philostratus
-got hold of them in the year 215, enjoyed so much vogue among the
-"Christists" of Jerusalem long years before they can conceivably have
-been written.
-
-Why on the occasion in question did Jesus make a scourge of cords
-with which to drive the sheep and oxen out of the Temple? Answer:
-"Because in the Assyrian and Egyptian systems a scourge-bearing god is
-a very common figure on the monuments ... it is specially associated
-with Osiris, the Saviour, Judge, and Avenger. A figure of Osiris,
-reverenced as 'Chrestos' the benign God, would suffice to set up among
-Christists as erewhile among pagans the demand for an explanation."
-
-Here we get a precious insight into the why and wherefore of the
-Gospels. They were intended by the "Christists" to explain the
-meaning of Osiris statues. Why could they not have asked one of the
-priests of Osiris, who as a rule might be found in the neighbourhood
-of his statues, what the emblem meant? And, after all, were statues
-of Osiris so plentiful in Jerusalem, where the sight even of a Roman
-eagle aroused a riot?
-
-[Janus-Peter the bifrons] Who was Peter? Answer: An understudy of
-Mithras, who in the monuments bears two keys; or of Janus, who bears
-the keys and the rod, and as opener of the year (hence the name
-January) stands at the head of the twelve months.
-
-Why did Peter deny Jesus? Answer: Because Janus was called bifrons. The
-epithet puzzled the "Christists" or "Jesuists" of Jerusalem, who,
-instead of asking the first Roman soldier they met what it meant,
-proceeded to render the word bifrons in the sense of "double-faced,"
-quite a proper epithet they thought for Peter, who thenceforth
-had to be held guilty of an act of double-dealing. For we must not
-forget that it was the epithet which suggested to the Christists the
-invention of the story, and not the story that of the epithet. But even
-Mr. Robertson is not quite sure of this; and it does not matter, where
-there is such a wealth of alternatives. For Peter is also an understudy
-of "the fickle Proteus." Janus's double head was anyhow common on
-coins, and with that highly relevant observation he essays to protect
-his theories of Janus-Peter from any possible criticisms. Indeed,
-we are forbidden to call in question the above conclusions. They are
-quite certain, because the "Christists" were intellectually "about
-the business of forming myths in explanation of old ritual and old
-statuary" (p. 350). Wonderful people these early "Christists,"
-who, although they were, as Mr. Robertson informs us (p. 348),
-"apostles of a Judaic cult preaching circumcision," and therefore
-by instinct inimical to all plastic art, nevertheless rivalled the
-modern archaeologist in their desire to explain old statuary. They
-seem to have been the prototypes of the Jews of Wardour Street. No
-less wonderful were they as philologists, in that, being Hebrews and
-presumably speaking Aramaic, they took such a healthy interest in
-the meaning of Latin words, and discovered in bifrons a sense which
-it never bore in any Latin author who ever used it!
-
-[The keys of Peter] It appears to have escaped the notice of Professor
-Franz Cumont that Mithras carries in his monuments two keys. The two
-keys were an attribute of the Mithraic Kronos, in old Persian Zervan,
-whom relatively late the Latins confused with Janus, who also had
-two heads and carried keys. That late Christian images of Peter were
-imitated from statues of these gods no one need doubt, and Fr. Cumont
-(Monuments de Mithras, i, 85) does not reject such an idea. It is
-quite another thing to assume dogmatically that the text Matthew xvi,
-19 was suggested by a statue of Janus or of Zervan. To explain it you
-need not leave Jewish ground, but merely glance at Isaiah xxii, 22,
-where the Lord is made to say of Eliakim: "And the key of the house
-of David will I lay upon his shoulder; and he shall open and none
-shall shut; and he shall shut and none shall open." The same imagery
-meets us in Revelation iii, 7 (copied from Isaiah), Luke xi, 52, and
-elsewhere. A. Sulzbach (in Ztschr. f.d. Neutest. Wissenschaft, 1903,
-p. 190) points out that every Jew, up to A.D. 70, would understand
-such imagery, for he saw every evening the temple keys ceremoniously
-taken from a hole under the temple floor, where they were kept under a
-slab of stone. The Levite watcher locked up the temple and replaced the
-keys under the slab, upon which he then laid his bed for the night. In
-connection with the magic power of binding and loosing the keys had,
-of course, a further and magical significance, not in Judaea alone, but
-all over the world, and the Evangelists did not need to examine statues
-of Janus or Zervan in order to come by this bit of everyday symbolism.
-
-N.B.--No connection of Janus-Peter of the Gospels with Peter of the
-Pauline Epistles! The one was a mythical companion of the Sun-god,
-the other a man of flesh and blood, according to Mr. Robertson.
-
-[Joseph and his ass] Who was Joseph? Answer: Forasmuch as "the
-Christian system is a patchwork of a hundred suggestions drawn
-from pagan art and ritual usage" (p. 305), and "Christism was only
-neo-Paganism grafted on Judaism" (p. 338), Joseph must be regarded as
-"a partial revival of the ancient adoration of the God Joseph as well
-as of that of the God Daoud" (p. 303). He was also, seeing that he
-took Mary and her child on an ass into Egypt, a reminiscence; or,
-shall we not say, an explanation of "the feeble old man leading an
-ass in the sacred procession of Isis, as described by Apuleius in
-his Metamorphoses."
-
-There is no mention of Joseph's ass in the Gospels, but that does not
-matter. Dr. Drews is better informed, and would have us recognize
-in Joseph an understudy of Kinyras, the father of Adonis, who "is
-said to have been some kind of artisan, a smith, or carpenter. That
-is to say, he is supposed to have invented the hammer," etc. Might
-I suggest the addition of the god Thor to the collection of gospel
-aliases? The gods Joseph and Daoud are purely modern fictions; no
-ancient Jew ever heard of either.
-
-Why was Jesus crucified?
-
-[The Crucifixion] "The story of the Crucifixion may rest on the remote
-datum of an actual crucifixion of Jesus Ben Pandira, the possible
-Jesus of Paul, dead long before, and represented by no preserved
-biography or teachings whatever."
-
-The Christists were clearly pastmasters in the art of explaining
-ignotum per ignotius. For on the next page we learn that it is not
-known whether this worthy "ever lived or was crucified." In Pagan
-Christs he is acknowledged to be a "mere name." However this be,
-"it was the mythic significance of crucifixion that made the early
-fortune of the cult, with the aid of the mythic significance of the
-name Jeschu = Joshua, the ancient Sun-god."
-
-The meaning of this oracular pronouncement is too profound for me
-to attempt to fathom it. Let us pass on to another point in the new
-elucidation of the Gospels.
-
-[W. B. Smith on exorcisms of devils] What were the exorcisms of evil
-spirits ascribed to the ancient Sun-god Joshua, under his alias of
-Jesus of Nazareth?
-
-In his Pagan Christs, as in his Christianity and Mythology,
-Mr. Robertson unkindly leaves us in the lurch about this matter,
-although we would dearly like to know what were the particular
-archaeological researches of the "Christists" and "Jesuists" that led
-them to coin these myths of exorcisms performed, and of devils cast
-out of the mad or sick by their solar myth. Nor does Dr. Drews help us
-much. Never mind. Professor W. B. Smith nobly stands in the breach, so
-we will let him take up the parable; the more so because, in handling
-this problem, he may be said to have excelled himself. On p. 57, then,
-of Ecce Deus, he premises, in approaching this delicate topic, that
-"in the activity of the Jesus and the apostles, as delineated in the
-Gospels, the one all-important moment is the casting-out of demons."
-
-With this all will agree; but what follows is barely consonant with
-the thesis of his friends. He cites in effect Mark iii, 14, 15, and
-the parallel passages in which Jesus is related to have sent forth
-the twelve disciples to preach and to have authority to cast out the
-demons. Now, according to the mythico-symbolical theory, the career
-of Jesus and his disciples lay not on earth, but in that happy region
-where mythological personages live and move and have their being. As
-Dr. Drews says (The Christ Myth, p. 117): "In reality the whole of
-the family and home life of the Messiah, Jesus, took place in heaven
-among the gods."
-
-Accordingly, Dr. W. B. Smith finds it "amazing that anyone should
-hesitate an instant over the sense" of the demonological episodes
-in the Gospels, and he continues: "When we recall the fact that the
-early Christians uniformly understood the heathen gods to be demons,
-and uniformly represented the mission of Jesus to be the overthrow
-of these demon gods, it seems as clear as the sun at noon that this
-fall of Satan from heaven [16] can be nothing less (and how could it
-possibly be anything more?) than the headlong ruin of polytheism--the
-complete triumph of the One Eternal God. It seems superfluous to
-insist on anything so palpable.... Can any rational man for a moment
-believe that the Saviour sent forth his apostles and disciples with
-such awful solemnity to heal the few lunatics that languished in
-Galilee? Is that the way the sublimist of teachers would found the
-new and true religion?"
-
-In the last sentence our author nods and lapses into the historical
-mood; for how can one talk of a mythical Joshua being a teacher
-and founding a new religion--of his sending forth the apostles and
-disciples? These things are done on earth, and not up in heaven "among
-the gods," as Drews says. It is, perhaps, impertinent, for the rest, to
-criticize so exalted an argument as Professor Smith's; yet the question
-suggests itself, why, if the real object of the mystic sectaries who
-worshipped in secret the "Proto-Christian God, the Jesus," was to
-acquaint the faithful with the triumph of the heavenly Jesus over
-the demon-gods of paganism--why, in that case, did they wrap it up
-in purely demonological language? All around them exorcists, Jewish
-and pagan, were driving out demons of madness and disease at every
-street corner--dumb devils, rheumatic devils, blind devils, devils
-of every sort and kind. Was it entirely appropriate for these mystic
-devotees to encourage the use of demonological terminology, when they
-meant something quite else? "These early propagandists," he tells us,
-p. 143, "were great men, were very great men; they conceived noble
-and beautiful and attractive ideas, which they defended with curious
-learning and logic, and recommended with captivating rhetoric and
-persuasive oratory and consuming zeal."
-
-Surely it was within the competence of such egregious teachers to say
-without disguise what they really meant, instead of beating about the
-bush and penning stories which so nearly reproduced the grovelling
-superstitions of the common herd around them? They might at least have
-issued a Delphin edition of their gospels, with a paraphrase in the
-margin to explain the text and to save the faithful from taking these
-stories literally--for so they took them as far back as we can trace
-the documents; and, what is more, in all those derivative churches all
-over the world which continued the inner life of Professor Smith's
-mystic sectaries, we hear from the earliest age of the appointing
-of vulgar exorcists, whose duty was to expel from the faithful the
-demons of madness and of all forms of sickness.
-
-But worse than this. We know from Mr. Robertson and Dr. Drews that
-the same Proto-Christian Joshua-God, who was waging war in heaven
-on the pagan gods and goddesses, was himself a composite myth made
-up of memories of Krishna, AEsculapius, Osiris, Apollo, Dionysus,
-Apollonius, and a hundred other fiends. Mr. Robertson attests this,
-p. 305, in these words: "As we have seen and shall see throughout
-this investigation, the Christian system is a patchwork of a hundred
-suggestions drawn from pagan art and ritual usage."
-
-Is it quite appropriate that the pre-Christian Jesus or Joshua
-should turn and rend his pagan congeners in the manner described by
-Professor W. B. Smith? His mythical antecedents, as ascertained by
-Mr. Robertson and Dr. Drews, are grotesquely incompatible with the
-role of monotheistic founder assigned him by Professor W. B. Smith. Are
-we to suppose that the learned and eloquent propagandists of his cult
-were aware of this incompatibility, and for that reason chose to veil
-their monotheistic propaganda in the decent obscurity of everyday
-demonological language?
-
-[Mary and her homonyms] Who was Mary, the mother of Jesus?
-
-Let Dr. Drews speak first:--
-
-
-    Now if Joseph, as we have already seen, was originally a god,
-    Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a goddess. Under the name of Maya,
-    she is the mother of Agni--i.e., the principle of motherhood
-    and creation simply, as which she is in the Rigveda at one time
-    represented by the fire-producing wood, the soft pith, in which
-    the fire-stick was whirled; at another as the earth, with which
-    the sky has mated. She appears under the same name as the mother of
-    Buddha as well as of the Greek Hermes. She is identical with Maira
-    (Maera) as, according to Pausanias, viii, 12, 48, the pleiad Maia,
-    wife of Hephaistos was called. She appears among the Persians as
-    the "virgin" mother of Mithras. As Myrrha she is the mother of
-    the Syrian Adonis; as Semiramis, mother of the Babylonian Ninus
-    (Marduk). In the Arabic legend she appears under the name of
-    Mirzam as mother of the mythical saviour Joshua; while the Old
-    Testament gives this name to the virgin sister of that Joshua
-    who was so closely related to Moses; and, according to Eusebius,
-    Merris was the name of the Egyptian princess who found Moses in
-    a basket and became his foster mother.
-
-
-The above purpureus pannus is borrowed by Dr. Drews in the second
-edition of his work from Mr. Robertson's book, p. 297. Here is the
-original:--
-
-
-    It is not possible from the existing data to connect historically
-    such a cult with its congeners; but the mere analogy of names and
-    epithets goes far. The mother of Adonis, the slain "Lord" of the
-    great Syrian cult, is Myrrha; and Myrrha in one of her myths is the
-    weeping tree from which the babe Adonis is born. Again, Hermes,
-    the Greek Logos, has for mother Maia, whose name has further
-    connections with Mary. In one myth Maia is the daughter of Atlas,
-    thus doubling with Maira, who has the same father, and who, having
-    "died a virgin," was seen by Odysseus in Hades. Mythologically,
-    Maira is identified with the Dog-Star, which is the star of
-    Isis. Yet again, the name appears in the East as Maya, the
-    virgin-mother of Buddha; and it is remarkable that, according to
-    a Jewish legend, the name of the Egyptian princess who found the
-    babe Moses was Merris. The plot is still further thickened by the
-    fact that, as we learn from the monuments, one of the daughters
-    of Ramses II was named Meri. And as Meri meant "beloved," and the
-    name was at times given to men, besides being used in the phrase
-    "beloved of the gods," the field of mythic speculation is wide.
-
-
-And we feel that it is, indeed, wide, when, on p. 301, the three
-Marias mentioned by Mark are equated with the three Moirai or Fates!
-
-In another passage we meet afresh with one of these equations,
-p. 306. It runs thus: "On the hypothesis that the mythical Joshua,
-son of Miriam, was an early Hebrew deity, it may be that one form
-of the Tammuz cult in pre-Christian times was a worship of a mother
-and child--Mary and Adonis; that, in short, Maria = Myrrha, and that
-Jesus was a name of Adonis."
-
-[Pre-philological arguments] From such deliverances we gather that
-in Mr. Robertson and his disciples we have survivals of a stage of
-culture which may be called prephilological. A hundred years ago or
-more the most superficial resemblance of sound was held to be enough
-of a ground for connecting words and names together, and Oxford
-divines were busy deriving all other tongues from the Hebrew spoken
-in the Garden of Eden by Adam and Eve. Mr. Robertson sets himself
-(p. 139) to ridicule these old-fashioned writers, and regales us
-with not a few examples of that over-facile identification of cult
-names that have no real mutual affinity which was then in vogue. Thus
-Krishna was held to be a corruption of Christ by certain oriental
-missionaries, just as, inversely, within my memory, certain English
-Rationalists argued the name Christ to be a disguise of Krishna. So
-Brahma was identified with Abraham, and Napoleon with the Apollyon of
-Revelation. One had hoped that this phase of culture was past and done
-with; but Messrs. Robertson and Drews revive it in their books, and
-seem anxious to perpetuate it. As with names, so with myths. On their
-every page we encounter--to use the apt phrase of M. Emile Durkheim
-[17]--ces rapprochements tumultueux et sommaires qui ont discredite
-la methode comparative aupres d'un certain nombre de bons esprits.
-
-[Right use of comparative method] The one condition of advancing
-knowledge and clearing men's minds of superstition and cant by
-application of the comparative method in religion, is that we should
-apply it, as did Robertson Smith and his great predecessor, Dr. John
-Spencer, [18] cautiously, and in a spirit of scientific scholarship. It
-does not do to argue from superficial resemblances of sound that
-Maria is the same name as the Greek Moira, or that the name Maia has
-"connections with Mary"; or, again, that "the name (Maria) appears
-in the East as Maya." The least acquaintance with Hebrew would have
-satisfied Mr. Robertson that the original form of the name he thus
-conjures with is not Maria, but Miriam, which does not lend itself to
-his hardy equations. I suspect he is carried away by the parti pris
-which leaks out in the following passage of his henchman and imitator,
-Dr. Drews [19]: "The romantic cult of Jesus must be combated at all
-costs.... This cannot be done more effectually than by taking its
-basis in the theory of the historical Jesus from beneath its feet."
-
-If "at all costs" means at the cost of common sense and scholarship,
-I cannot agree. I am not disposed, at the invitation of any
-self-constituted high priest of Rationalism, to derive old Hebrew names
-from Egyptian, Greek, and Buddhist appellations that happen to show
-an initial and one or two other letters in common. I will not believe
-that a "Christist" of Alexandria or Jerusalem, in the streets of which
-the Latin language was seldom or never heard, took the epithet bifrons
-in a wrong sense, and straightway invented the story of a Peter who
-had denied Jesus. I cannot admit that the cults of Osiris, Dionysus,
-Apollo, or any other ancient Sun-god, are echoed in a single incident
-narrated in the primitive evangelical tradition that lies before us
-in Mark and the non-Marcan document used by the authors of the first
-and third Gospels; I do not believe that any really educated man or
-woman would for a moment entertain any of the equations propounded
-by Mr. Robertson, and of which I have given a few select examples.
-
-[Marett on method] Mr. Marett, in his essay entitled The Birth
-of Humility, by way of criticizing certain modern abuses of the
-comparative method in the field of the investigation of the origin
-of moral ideas and religious beliefs, has justly remarked that
-"No isolated fragment of custom or belief can be worth much for the
-purposes of comparative science. In order to be understood, it must
-first be viewed in the light of the whole culture, the whole corporate
-soul-life, of the particular ethnic group concerned. Hence the new way
-is to emphasize concrete differences, whereas the old way was to amass
-resemblances heedlessly abstracted from their social context. Which
-way is the better is a question that well-nigh answers itself."
-
-Apply the above rule to nascent Christianity. In the Synoptic Gospels
-Jesus ever speaks as a Jew to Jews. Jewish monotheism is presupposed
-by the authors of them to have been no less the heritage of Jesus
-than of his audiences. The rare exceptions are carefully noticed
-by them. This consideration has so impressed Professor W. B. Smith
-that he urges the thesis that the Christian religion originated as a
-monotheist propaganda. That is no doubt an exaggeration, for it was
-at first a Messianic movement or impulse among Jews, and therefore
-did not need to set the claims of monotheism in the foreground, and,
-accordingly, in the Synoptic Gospels they are nowhere urged. In spite
-of this exaggeration, however, Mr. Smith's book occupies a higher
-plane than the works of Dr. Drews and Mr. Robertson, insofar as he
-shows some slight insight into the original nature of the religion,
-whereas they show none at all. They merely, in Mr. Marett's phrase,
-"amass resemblances [would they were even such!] heedlessly abstracted
-from their context," and resolve a cult which, as it appears on the
-stage of history, is Jewish to its core, of which the Holy Scripture
-was no other than the Law and the Prophets, and of which the earliest
-documents, as Mr. Selwyn has shown, are saturated with the Jewish
-Septuagint--they try to resolve this cult into a tagrag and bobtail
-of Greek and Roman paganism, of Buddhism, of Brahmanism, of Mithraism
-(hardly yet born), of Egyptian, African, Assyrian, old Persian, [20]
-and any other religions with which these writers have a second-hand and
-superficial acquaintance. Never once do they pause and ask themselves
-the simple questions: firstly, how the early Christians came to be
-imbued with so intimate a knowledge of idolatrous cults far and near,
-new and old; secondly, why they set so much store by them as the
-mythico-symbolic hypothesis presupposes that they did; and, thirdly,
-why, if they valued them so much, they were at pains to translate them
-into the utterly different and antagonistic form which they wear in
-the Gospels. In a word, why should such connoisseurs of paganism have
-disguised themselves as monotheistic and messianic Jews? Mr. Robertson
-tries to save his hypothesis by injecting a little dose of Judaism
-into his "Christists" and "Jesuists"; but anyone who has read Philo
-or Josephus or the Bible, not to mention the Apostolic Fathers and
-Justin Martyr, will see at a glance that there is no room in history
-for such a hybrid.
-
-[Methods of Robertson and Lorinser] That Mr. Robertson should put his
-name to such works as Dr. Drews imitates and singles out for special
-praise is the more remarkable, because, in urging the independence
-of certain Hindoo cults against Christian missionaries who want
-to see in them mere reflections of Christianity, he shows himself
-both critical and wide-minded. These characteristics he displays
-in his refutation of the opinion of a certain Dr. Lorinser that
-the dialogue between Krishna and the warrior Arjuna, known as the
-Bhagavat Gita and embodied in the old Hindoo Epic of the Mahabharata,
-"is a patchwork of Christian teaching." Dr. Lorinser had adduced a
-chain of passages from this document which to his mind are echoes of
-the New Testament. Though many of these exhibit a striking conformity
-with aphorisms of the Gospels, we are nevertheless constrained to
-agree with Mr. Robertson's criticism, which is as follows (p. 262):--
-
-
-    The first comment that must occur to every instructed reader on
-    perusing these and the other "parallels" advanced by Dr. Lorinser
-    is, that on the one hand the parallels are very frequently such
-    as could be made by the dozen between bodies of literature which
-    have unquestionably never been brought in contact, so strained
-    and far-fetched are they; and that, on the other hand, they are
-    discounted by quite as striking parallels between New Testament
-    texts and pre-Christian pagan writings.
-
-
-Mr. Robertson then adduces a number of striking parallelisms between
-the New Testament and old Greek and Roman writers, and continues thus:
-"Such parallels as these, I repeat, could be multiplied to any extent
-from the Greek and Latin classics alone.... But is it worth while to
-heap up the disproof of a thesis so manifestly idle?"
-
-[Dionysus and Jesus] It occurs to ask whether it was not worth
-the while of Mr. Robertson to inquire whether the Evangelist could
-"unquestionably have been brought in contact" with the Dionysiac
-group of myths before he assumed so dogmatically, against students
-of such weight as Professor Percy Gardner and Dr. Estlin Carpenter,
-that the myth of Bacchus meeting with a couple of asses on his way
-to Dodona was the "Christist's" model for the story of Jesus riding
-into Jerusalem on an ass? Might he not have reflected that then,
-as now, there was no other way of entering Jerusalem unless you
-went on foot? And what has Jerusalem to do with Dodona? What has
-Bacchus's choice of one ass to ride on in common with Matthew's
-literary deformation, according to which Jesus rode on two asses at
-once? Lastly, what had Bacchus to do with Jesus? Has the Latin wine-god
-a single trait in common with the Christian founder? Is it not rather
-the case that any conscious or even unconscious assimilation of Bacchus
-myths conflicts with what Mr. Marett would call "the whole culture,
-the whole corporate soul-life" of the early Christian community,
-as the surviving documents picture it, and other evidence we have
-not? Yet Mr. Robertson deduces from such paltry "parallels" as the
-above the conclusion that Jesus, on whose real personality a score of
-early and independent literary sources converge, never existed at all,
-and that he was a "composite myth." There is no other example of an
-eclectic myth arbitrarily composed by connoisseurs out of a religious
-art and story not their own; still less of such a myth being humanized
-and accepted by the next generation as a Jewish Messiah.
-
-In the same context (p. 264) Mr. Robertson remarks sensibly enough
-that "No great research or reflection is needed to make it clear
-that certain commonplaces of ethics as well as of theology are
-equally inevitable conclusions in all religious systems that rise
-above savagery. Four hundred years before Jesus, Plato declared that
-it was very difficult for the rich to be good; does anyone believe
-that any thoughtful Jew needed Plato's help to reach the same notion?"
-
-I would ask, does anyone believe that a thoughtful Jew needed the
-stimulus of a statuette of Osiris in order that he should record,
-or, maybe, invent, the story of Jesus clearing the money-changers out
-of the temple with a scourge? Even admitting--what I am as little as
-anyone inclined to admit--that the Peter of the early Gospels is, as
-regards his personality and his actions, a fable, a mere invention of
-a Jewish storyteller, need we suppose that the storyteller in question
-depended for his inspiration on Janus? You might as well suppose that
-the authors of the Arabian Nights founded their stories on the myths of
-Greek and Roman gods. Again, the Jews were traditionally distributed
-into twelve tribes or clans. Let us grant only for argument's sake
-that the life of Jesus the Messiah as narrated in the first three
-Gospels is a romance, we yet must ask, Which is more probable, that
-the author of the romance assigned twelve apostles to Jesus because
-there were twelve tribes to whom the message of the impending Kingdom
-of God had to be carried, or because there are twelve signs in the
-Zodiac? He agrees (p. 347) that Luke's story of the choice of the
-seventy disciples "visibly connects with the Jewish idea that there
-were seventy nations in the world." Why, then, reject the view that
-Jesus chose twelve apostles because there were twelve tribes? Not
-at all. Having decided that Jesus was the Sun-God-Saviour Joshua,
-a pure figment of his brain, Mr. Robertson is ready to violate the
-canons of evidence he appeals to on p. 347, and will have it that in
-the Gospels the apostles are Zodiacal signs, and that their leader
-is Janus, the opener of the year. "The Zodiacal sign gives the clue"
-(p. 339), in his opinion, to this as to much else.
-
-[Dr. Lorinser] Let us return to the case of Dr. Lorinser. "We are asked
-to believe that Brahmans expounding a highly-developed Pantheism went
-assiduously to the (unattainable) New Testament for the wording of a
-number of their propositions, pantheistic and other, while assimilating
-absolutely nothing of distinctively Christian doctrine.... Such a
-position is possible only to a mesmerized believer." Surely one may
-exclaim of Mr. Robertson, De te fabula narratur, and rewrite the
-above as follows: "We are asked to believe that 'Christists,' who
-were so far Jewish as to practise circumcision, to use the Hebrew
-Scriptures, to live in Jerusalem under the presidency and patronage
-of the Jewish High-priest, to foster and propagate Jewish monotheism,
-went assiduously to the (unattainable) rites, statuary, art, and
-beliefs of pagan India, Egypt, Ancient Babylon, Persia, etc., for all
-'the narrative myths' (p. 263) of the story in which they narrated
-the history of their putative founder Jesus, the Jewish Messiah,
-while assimilating absolutely nothing of distinctively pagan doctrine."
-
-Dr. Lorinser, for urging a thesis infinitely less absurd, is denounced
-as "a mesmerized believer"; and on the next page Dr. Weber, who
-agrees with him, is rebuked for his "judicial blindness." Yet in the
-same context we are told that "a crude and naif system, like the
-Christism of the second gospel and the earlier form of the first,
-borrows inevitably from the more highly evolved systems with which
-it comes socially in contact, absorbing myth and mystery and dogma
-till it becomes as sophisticated as they."
-
-It is quite true, as Gibbon observed, that the naif figure of Jesus,
-as presented in the Synoptic Gospels, was soon overlaid with that
-of the logos, and all sorts of Christological cobwebs were within
-a few generations spun around his head to the effacement both of
-the teacher and of what he taught. But in the earliest body of the
-evangelical tradition, as we can construct it from the first three
-Gospels, there is little or nothing that is not essentially Jewish and
-racy of the soil of Judaea. The borrowings of Christianity from pagan
-neighbours began with the flocking into the new Messianic society of
-Gentile converts. The earlier borrowings with which Messrs. Robertson
-and Drews fill their volumes are one and all "resemblances heedlessly
-abstracted from their context," and are as far-fetched and as fanciful
-as the dreams of the adherents of the Banner of Israel, or as the
-cypher of the Bacon-Shakesperians, over which Mr. Robertson is prone
-to make merry. "Is it," to use his own words, "worth while to heap
-up the disproof of a thesis so manifestly idle?"
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER II
-
-PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS
-
-
-[Is Mark's Gospel a religious romance?] I can imagine some people
-arguing that Mark's Gospel might be a religious novel, of which the
-scene is laid in Jerusalem and Galilee among Jews; that it was by a
-literary artifice impregnated with Jewish ideas; that the references
-to Sadducees and Pharisees were introduced as appropriate to the age
-and clime; that the old Jewish Scriptures are for the same reason
-acknowledged by all the actors and interlocutors as holy writ;
-that demonological beliefs were thrown in as being characteristic
-of Palestinian society of the time the writer purported to write
-about; that it is of the nature of a literary trick that the peculiar
-Messianic and Apocalyptic beliefs and aspirations rife among Jews of
-the period B.C. 50-A.D. 160 and later, are made to colour the narrative
-from beginning to end. All these elements of verisimilitude, I say,
-taken singly or together, do not of necessity exclude the hypothesis
-that it may be one of the most skilfully constructed historical novels
-ever written. Have we not, it may be urged, in the Recognitions or
-Itinerary of Saint Clement, in the Acts of Thomas, in the story of
-Paul and Thecla, similar compositions?
-
-[Certainly not in the way assumed by Drews and Robertson,] In view
-of what we know of the dates and diffusion of the Gospels, of their
-literary connections with one another, and of the reappearance of
-their chief personae dramatis in the Pauline letters, such a hypothesis
-is of course wildly improbable, yet not utterly absurd. We have to
-assume in the writer a knowledge of the Messianic movement among the
-Jews, a familiarity with their demonological beliefs and practices,
-with their sects, and so forth; and it is all readily assumable. In
-the Greek novel of Chariton we have an example of such an historical
-romance, the scene being laid in Syracuse and Asia Minor shortly
-after the close of the Peloponnesian war. But such romances are not
-cult documents of a parabolic or allegorical kind, as the Gospels
-are supposed by these writers to be. They do not bring a divine
-being down from Olympus, and pretend all through that he was a man
-who was born, lived, and died on the cross in a particular place and
-at a particular date. We have no other example of documents whose
-authors, by way of honouring a God up in heaven who never made any
-epiphany on earth nor ever underwent incarnation, made a man of him,
-and concocted an elaborate earthly record of him. Why did they do
-it? What was the object of the "Jesuists" and "Christists" in hoaxing
-their own and all subsequent generations and in building up a lasting
-cult and Church on what they knew were fables?
-
-[whose hypothesis is self-destructive,] In the Homeric hymns and other
-religious documents not only of the Greeks, but of the Hindoos, we have
-no doubt histories of the gods written by their votaries; but in these
-hymns they put down what they believed, they did not of set design
-falsify the legend of the god, and describe his birth and parentage,
-when they knew he never had any; his ministrations and teaching career,
-when he never ministered or taught; his persecution by enemies and
-his death, when he was never persecuted and never died. Or are we
-to suppose that all these things were related in the Sun-god Joshua
-legend? No, reply Messrs. Drews and Robertson. For the stories told
-in the Gospels are all modelled on pagan or astral myths; the persons
-who move in their pages are the gods and demigods of Egyptian, Greek,
-Latin, Hindoo legends. Clearly the Saviour-God Joshua had no legend
-or story of his own, or it would not be necessary to pad him out
-with the furniture and appurtenances of Osiris, Dionysus, Serapis,
-AEsculapius, and who knows what other gods besides. And--strangest
-feature of all--it is Jews, men circumcised, propagandists of Jewish
-monotheism, who, in the interests of "a Judaic cult" (p. 348), go
-rummaging in all the dustbins of paganism, in order to construct a
-legend or allegory of their god. Why could they not rest content with
-him as they found him in their ancient tradition?
-
-[and irreconcilable with ascertained history of Judaism] The Gospels,
-like any other ancient document, have to be accounted for. They did
-not engender themselves, like a mushroom, nor drop out of heaven ready
-written. I have admitted as possible, though wild and extravagant,
-the hypothesis of their being a Messianic romance, which subsequently
-came to be mistaken for sober history; and there are of course plenty
-of legendary incidents in their pages. But such a hypothesis need
-not be discussed. It is not that of these three authors, and would
-not suit them. They insist on seeing in them so many manifestoes of
-the secret sect of Jews who worshipped a god Joshua. For Dr. Drews
-and Mr. Robertson the Gospels describe a "Jesuine" mystery play
-evolved "from a Palestinian rite of human sacrifice in which the
-annual victim was 'Jesus the Son of the Father.'" There is no trace
-in Jewish antiquity of any such rite in epochs which even remotely
-preceded Christianity, nor is the survival of such a rite of human
-sacrifice even thinkable in Jerusalem, where the "Christists" laid
-their plot. And why should they eke out their plot with a thousand
-scraps of pagan mythology?
-
-[Prof. Smith's hypothesis of a mythical Jesus mythically humanized in
-a monotheistic propaganda,] I was taught in my childhood to venerate
-the Gospels; but I never knew before what really wonderful documents
-they are. Let us, however, turn to Professor W. B. Smith, who does not
-pile on paganism so profusely as his friends, nor exactly insist on
-a pagan basis for the Gospels. His hypothesis in brief is identical
-with theirs, for he insists that Jesus the man never existed at
-all. Jesus is, in Professor Smith's phrase, "a humanized God"; in the
-diction of Messrs. Drews and Robertson, a myth. Professor Smith allows
-(Ecce Deus, p. 78) that the mere "fact that a myth, or several myths,
-may be found associated with the name of an individual by no means
-relegates that individual into the class of the unhistorical." That is
-good sense, and so is the admission which follows, that "we may often
-explain the legends from the presence of the historical personality,
-independently known to be historic." But in regard to Jesus alone
-among the figures of the past he, like his friends, rules out both
-considerations. The common starting-point of all three writers is that
-the earliest Gospel narratives do not "describe any human character
-at all; on the contrary, the individuality in question is distinctly
-divine and not human, in the earliest portrayal. As time goes on it
-is true that certain human elements do creep in, particularly in Luke
-and John.... In Mark there is really no man at all; the Jesus is God,
-or at least essentially divine, throughout. He wears only a transparent
-garment of flesh. Mark historizes only."
-
-[lacks all confirmation, defies the texts,] How is it, we ask, that
-humanity has pored over the Synoptic Gospels for nearly two thousand
-years, and discerned in them the portraiture at least of a man of flesh
-and blood, who can be imaged as such in statuary and painting? Even
-if it were conceded, as I said above, that the Gospel representation
-of Jesus is an imaginary portrait, like that of William Tell or
-John Inglesant, still, who, that is not mad, will deny that there
-exist in it multiple human traits, fictions may be of a novelist,
-yet indisputably there? Mr. Smith's hardy denial of them can only
-lead his readers to suspect him of paradox. Moreover, the champions
-of traditional orthodoxy have had in the past every reason to side
-with Professor Smith in his attempted elimination of all human traits
-and characteristics. Yet in recent years they have been constrained
-to admit that in Luke and John the human elements, far from creeping
-in, show signs of creeping out. "The received notion," adds Professor
-Smith, "that in the early Marcan narratives the Jesus is distinctly
-human, and that the process of deification is fulfilled in John, is
-precisely the reverse of the truth." Once more we rub our eyes. In Mark
-Jesus is little more than that most familiar of old Jewish figures,
-an earthly herald of the imminent kingdom of heaven; late and little
-by little he is recognized by his followers as himself the Messiah
-whose advent he formerly heralded. As yet he is neither divine nor the
-incarnation of a pre-existent quasi-divine Logos or angel. In John,
-on the other hand, Jesus has emerged from the purely Jewish phase of
-being Messiah, or servant of God (which is all that Lord or Son of God
-[21] implies in Mark's opening verses). He has become the eternal Logos
-or Reason, essentially divine and from the beginning with God. [and
-rests on an obsolete and absurd allegorization of them] Here obviously
-we are well on our way to a deification of Jesus and an elimination
-of human traits; and the writer is so conscious of this that he goes
-out of his way to call our attention to the fact that Jesus was after
-all a man of flesh and blood, with human parents and real brethren who
-disbelieved in him. He was evidently conscious that the superimposition
-on the man Jesus of the Logos scheme, and the reflection back into the
-human life of Jesus of the heavenly role which Paul ascribed to him
-qua raised by the Spirit from the dead, was already influencing certain
-believers (called Docetes) to believe that his human life and actions
-were illusions, seen and heard indeed, as we see and hear a man speak
-and act in a dream, but not objective and real. To guard against this
-John proclaims that he was made flesh. Nevertheless, he goes half way
-with the Docetes in that he rewrites all the conversations of Jesus,
-abolishes the homely parable, and substitutes his own theosophic
-lucubrations. He also emphasizes the miraculous aspect of Jesus,
-inventing new miracles more grandiose than any in previous gospels,
-but of a kind, as he imagines, to symbolize his conceptions of sin
-and death. He is careful to eliminate the demonological stories. They
-were as much of a stumbling-block to John as we have seen them to be
-to Mr. W. B. Smith. We must, therefore, perforce accuse the latter of
-putting a hypothesis that from the outset is a paradox. The documents
-contradict him on every page.
-
-[Why should the robber chief Joshua have been selected as prototype of
-Jesus?] A thesis that begins by flying in the face of the documents
-demands paradoxical arguments for its support; and the pages of all
-three writers teem with them. Of a Jesus that is God from the first
-it is perhaps natural to ask--anyhow our authors have asked it of
-themselves--which God was he? And the accident of his bearing the
-name Jesus--he might just as well have been called Jacob or Sadoc or
-Manasseh, or what not--suggests Joshua to them, for Joshua is the
-Hebrew name which in the LXX was Grecized as Iesoue, and later as
-Iesous. That in the Old Testament Joshua is depicted as a cut-throat
-and leader of brigands, very remote in his principles and practice from
-the Jesus of the Gospels, counts for nothing. The late Dr. Winckler,
-who saw sun and moon myths rising like exhalations all around
-him wherever he looked in ancient history and mythology, [22] has
-suggested that Joseph was originally a solar hero. Ergo, Joshua was one
-too. Ergo, there was a Hebrew secret society in Jerusalem in the period
-B.C. 150-A.D. 50 who worshipped the Sun-God-Saviour Joshua. Ergo,
-the Gospels are a sustained parable of this Sun-god. Thus are empty,
-wild, and unsubstantiated hypotheses piled one on top of the other,
-like Pelion on Ossa. Not a scintilla of evidence is adduced for any
-one of them. First one is advanced, and its truth assumed. The next
-is propped on it, et sic ad infinitum.
-
-[Why make him the central figure of a monotheistic cult?] What,
-asks Professor Smith (Ecce Deus, p. 67), was the active principle of
-Christianity? What its germ? "The monotheistic impulse," he answers,
-"the instinct for unity that lies at the heart of all grand philosophy
-and all noble religion." Again, p. 45: "What was the essence of this
-originally secret Jesus cult, that was expressed in such guarded
-parabolic terms as made it unintelligible to the multitude?... It
-was a protest against idolatry; it was a Crusade for monotheism."
-
-[The earliest Christianity was no monotheistic propaganda] This is,
-no doubt, true of Christianity when we pass outside the Gospels. It is
-only not true of them, because on their every page Jewish monotheism
-is presupposed. Why are no warnings against polytheism put into the
-mouth of Jesus? Why is not a single precept of the Sermon on the
-Mount directed against idolatry? Surely because we are moving in a
-Jewish atmosphere in which such warnings were unnecessary. The horizon
-is purely Jewish, either of Jerusalem as we know it in the pages of
-Josephus or of certain Galilean circles in which even a knowledge of
-Greek seems not to have existed before the third century. The very
-proximity of Greek cities there seems to have confirmed the Jewish
-peasant of that region in his preference of Aramaic idiom, just as
-the native of Bohemia to-day turns his back on you if you address
-him in the detested German tongue.
-
-[Robertson and Drews allow the Jesuists to have been mainly Jewish in
-cult and feeling] Messrs. Robertson and Drews concede that the original
-stock of Christianity was Jewish. Thus we read in Christianity and
-Mythology (p. 415) that the Lord's Prayer derives "from pre-Christian
-Jewish lore, and, like parts of the Sermon (on the Mount), from an
-actually current Jewish document." The same writer admits (p. 338)
-the existence of "Judaic sections of the early Church." When he talks
-(p. 337) of the tale of the anointing of Jesus in Matthew xxvi, 6-13,
-and parallel passages, being "in all probability a late addendum" to
-the "primitive gospel" of Bernhard Weiss's theory, "made after the
-movement had become pronouncedly Gentile," he presupposes that, to
-start with anyhow, the movement was mainly Jewish. He admits that in
-the first six paragraphs of the early Christian document entitled the
-Didache we have a purely Jewish teaching document, "which the Jesuist
-sect adopted in the first or second century." He cannot furthermore
-contest the fact that the Jesuists "took over the Jewish Scriptures
-as their sacred book; that they inherited the Jewish passover and
-the Paschal lamb, which is still slain in Eastern churches; that the
-leaders of the secret sect in Jerusalem upheld the Jewish rite of
-circumcision against Paul." [23] All this is inconceivable if the
-society was not in the main and originally one of Hebrews. When he
-goes on to argue that the Gospels are the manifesto of a cult of an
-old Sun-god Joshua, son of a mythic Miriam, he at least admits that
-the early "Christists" selected from ancient Jewish superstition,
-and not from pagan myth, the central figure of their cult, and that
-they chose for their deity a successor and satellite of Moses with a
-Hebrew lady for his mother. We may take it for granted, then, that the
-parent society out of which the Christian Church arose was profoundly
-and radically Jewish; and Mr. Robertson frankly admits as much when he
-affirms that "it was a Judaic cult that preached circumcision," and
-that "its apostles with whom Paul was in contact were of a Judaizing
-description." Here is common ground between myself and him.
-
-[If so, how could they devote themselves to pagan mystery plays?] What
-I want to know is how it came about that a society of which Jerusalem
-was the focus, and of which the nucleus and propagandists were Jews
-and Judaizers, could have been given over to the cult of a solar god,
-and how they could celebrate mystery plays and dramas in honour of that
-god; how they can have manufactured that god into "a composite myth"
-(p. 336), and constructed in his honour a religious system that was
-"a patchwork of a hundred suggestions drawn from pagan art and ritual
-usage." For such, we are told (p. 305), was "the Christian system."
-
-[Robertson admits that Jews could never borrow from pagan rituals
-in that age] We are far better acquainted with Jewish belief and
-ritual during the period B.C. 400-A.D. 100 than we are with that of
-the pagans. The content of the Greek mysteries is an enigma to our
-best Hellenists; we know next to nothing of the inside of Mithraism;
-for the oriental cults of the late Roman republic and early empire
-we are lamentably deficient in writings that might exhibit to us the
-arcana of their worship and the texture of their beliefs. Not so with
-Judaism. Here we have the prophets, old and late; for the two centuries
-B.C. we have the apocrypha, including the Maccabean books; we have the
-so-called Books of Enoch, of Jubilees, of the Twelve Patriarchs, the
-Fourth Ezra, Baruch, Sirach, and many others. We have the voluminous
-works of Philo and Josephus for the first century of our era; we have
-the Babylonian and other Talmuds preserving to us a wealth of Jewish
-tradition and teaching of the first and second centuries. Here let
-Mr. Robertson speak. As regards the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon
-on the Mount, he insists (p. 415 foll.) that they were inspired by
-parallel passages in the Talmud and the Apocrypha, and he argues with
-perfect good sense for the priority of the Talmud in these words:
-"It is hardly necessary to remark here that the Talmudic parallels
-to any part of the Sermon on the Mount cannot conceivably have been
-borrowed from the Christian gospels; they would as soon have borrowed
-from the rituals of the pagans."
-
-[Yet affirms that Christists, indistinguishable from Jews, did
-so borrow wholesale] And yet he asks us to believe that a nucleus
-of Jews, hidden in Jerusalem, the heart of Judaism, a sect whose
-apostles were Judaizers and vehement defenders of circumcision--all
-this he admits--were, as late as the last half of the first century,
-maintaining among themselves in secret a highly eclectic pagan cult;
-that they evolved "a gospel myth from scenes in pagan art" (p. 327);
-that they took a sort of modern archaeological interest in pagan art
-and sculpture, and derived thence most of their literary motifs;
-that the figure of Jesus is an alloy of Dionysus, Osiris, Adonis,
-Krishna, AEsculapius, and fifty other ancient gods and demigods,
-with the all-important "Sun-God-Saviour Joshua, son of Miriam";
-that the story of Peter rests on "a pagan basis of myth" (p. 340);
-that Maria is the true and original form of the Hebrew Miriam, and
-is the same name as Myrrha and Moira (moira), etc., etc.
-
-[The central idea of a God Joshua a figment of Robertson's fancy]
-Such are the mutually destructive arguments on the strength of which
-we are to adopt his thesis of the unhistoricity of Jesus. His books,
-like those of Dr. Drews, are a welter of contradictory statements,
-unreconciled and irreconcilable. Nevertheless, they reiterate them in
-volume after volume, like orthodox Christians reiterating articles of
-faith and dogmas too sacred to be discussed. Who ever heard before them
-of a Jewish cult of a Sun-God-Saviour Joshua? Such a cult must have
-been long extinct when the book of Joshua was written. Who ever heard
-of this Sun-god having for his mother a Miriam, until Mr. Robertson
-discovered a late Persian gloss to the effect that Joshua, son of Nun,
-had a mother of the name? Even if this tradition were not so utterly
-worthless as it is, it would prove nothing about the Sun-god. On the
-basis of such gratuitous fancies we are asked to dismiss Jesus as a
-myth. [It does not even explain the birth legends of the Christians] It
-does not even help us to understand how the myths of the Virgin Birth
-arose. Since when, I would like to know, did we need such evidence
-against that legend? If I thought that the rebuttal of it depended
-on such evidence, I should be inclined to become a good Papist and
-embrace it. It is enough for me to have ascertained, by a comparison
-of texts and by a study of early Christian documents, that it is a
-late accretion on the traditions of Jesus of Nazareth. That is the
-real evidence, if any be wanted, against it. Mr. Robertson admits that
-the first two chapters of Luke which are supposed--perhaps wrongly--to
-embody this legend are "a late fabulous introduction." Again he writes
-(p. 189): "Only the late Third Gospel tells the story (of Luke i and
-ii); the narrative (of the Birth) in Matthew, added late as it was
-to the original composition, which obviously began at what is now
-the third chapter, has no hint of the taxing."
-
-[Evidence of the Protevangelion] This is good sense, and I am indebted
-to him for pointing out that so loosely was the myth compacted that
-in the Protevangelion (c. 17) the statement is that it was decreed
-"that all should be enrolled who were in Bethlehem of Judaea," not
-all Jews over the entire world.
-
-[Robertson assumes the antiquity of the legend merely to suit his
-theory] Surely all this implies that the legend of the miraculous birth
-was no part of the earliest tradition about Jesus. Nevertheless, it
-is so important for Mr. Robertson's thesis (that Jesus was a mythical
-personage) that he should from the first have had a mythical mother,
-that he insists on treating the whole of Christian tradition, early
-or late, as a solid block, and argues steadily that the Virgin Birth
-legend was an integral part of it from the beginning. Jesus was a
-myth; as such he must have had a myth for a mother. Now a virgin
-mother is half-way to being a mythical one. Therefore Mary was a
-virgin, and must from the beginning have been regarded as such by the
-"Christists." Such are the steps of his reasoning.
-
-[The "Christists" at once extravagantly pagan and extravagantly
-monotheist and Jewish] I have adduced in the preceding pages a
-selection of the mythological equations of Mr. Robertson and Dr. Drews
-in order that my readers may realize how faint a resemblance between
-stories justifies, in their minds, a derivation or borrowing of
-one from the other. Nor do they ever ask themselves how Jewish
-"Christists" were likely to come in contact with out-of-the-way
-legends of Bacchus or Dionysus, of Hermes, of old Pelasgic deities,
-of Cybele and Attis and Isis, Osiris and Horus, of Helena Dendrites,
-of Krishna, of Janus, of sundry ancient vegetation-gods (for they
-are up to the newest lights), of Apollonius of Tyana, of AEsculapius,
-of Herakles and Oceanus, of Saoshyant and other old Persian gods
-and heroes, of Buddha and his kith and kin, of the Eleusinian and
-other ancient mysteries. Prick them with a pin, and out gushes
-this lore in a copious flood; and every item of it is supposed
-to have filled the heads of the polymath authors of the Christian
-Gospels. Every syllable of these Gospels, every character in them,
-is symbolic of one or another of these gods and heroes. Hear,
-O Israel: "Christians borrowed myths of all kinds from Paganism"
-(Christianity and Mythology, p. xii). And we are pompously assured
-(p. xxii, op. cit.) that this new "mythic" system is, "in general,
-more 'positive,' more inductive, less a priori, more obedient to
-scientific canons, than that of the previous critics known to me
-[i.e., to Mr. Robertson] who have reached similar anti-traditional
-results. It substitutes an anthropological basis, in terms of
-the concrete phenomena of mythology, for a pseudo-philosophical
-presupposition." Heaven help the new science of anthropology!
-
-[A receipt for the concoction of a gospel] And what end, we may ask,
-had the "Jesuists" and "Christists" (to use Mr. Robertson's jargon)
-in view, when they dressed up all this tagrag and bobtail of pagan
-myth, art, and ritual, and disguised it under the form of a tale of
-Messianic Judaism? For that and nothing else is, on this theory, the
-basis and essence of the Gospels. Was it their aim to honour paganism
-or to honour Jewish monotheism, when they concocted a "Christ cult"
-which is "a synthesis of the two most popular pagan myth-motives,
-[24] with some Judaic elements as nucleus and some explicit ethical
-teaching superadded" (p. 34). We must perforce suppose that the
-Gospels were a covert tribute to the worth and value of Pagan
-mythology and religious dramas, to pagan art and statuary. If we
-adopt the mythico-symbolical method, they can have been nothing
-else. Its sponsors might surely condescend to explain the alchemy
-by which the ascertained rites and beliefs of early Christians were
-distilled from these antecedents. The effect and the cause are so
-entirely disparate, so devoid of any organic connection, that we would
-fain see the evolution worked out a little more clearly. At one end
-of it we have a hurly-burly of pagan myths, at the other an army of
-Christian apologists inveighing against everything pagan and martyred
-for doing so, all within a space of sixty or seventy years. I only hope
-the orthodox will be gratified to learn that their Scriptures are a
-thousandfold more wonderful and unique than they appeared to be when
-they were merely inspired by the Holy Spirit. For verbal inspiration
-is not, as regards its miraculous quality, in the same field with
-mythico-symbolism. Verily we have discovered a new literary genus,
-unexampled in the history of mankind. You rake together a thousand
-irrelevant thrums of mythology, picked up at random from every age,
-race, and clime; you get a "Christist" to throw them into a sack
-and shake them up; you open it, and out come the Gospels. In all the
-annals of the Bacon-Shakesperians we have seen nothing like it.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER III
-
-THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE
-
-
-[Multiplicity of documents converging on and involving an historical
-Jesus] I have remarked above that if the Gospel of Mark were an
-isolated writing, if we knew nothing of its fortunes, nothing of any
-society that accepted it as history; if, above all, we were without any
-independent documents that fitted in with it and mentioned the persons
-and events that crowd its pages, then it would be a possible hypothesis
-that it was like the Recognitions of Clement, a skilfully contrived
-romance. Such a hypothesis, I said, would indeed be improbable, yet
-not unthinkable or self-destructive. But as a matter of fact we have
-an extensive series of documents, independent of Mark, yet attesting
-by their undesigned coincidences its historicity--not, of course,
-in the sense that we must accept everything in it, but anyhow in
-the sense that it is largely founded on fact and is a record of real
-incident. Were it a mere romance of events that never happened, and
-of people who never lived, would it not be a first-class miracle that
-in another romance, concocted apart from it and in ignorance of its
-contents, the same outline of events met our gaze, the same personages,
-the same atmosphere, moral, intellectual, and religious, the same
-interests? If in a third and fourth writing the same phenomenon
-recurred, the marvel would be multiplied. Would any sane person doubt
-that there was a substratum of fact and real history underlying them
-all? It would be as if several tables in the gambling saloon of Monte
-Carlo threw up the same series of numbers--say, 8, 3, 11, 7, 33,
-21--simultaneously and independently of one another. A few of the
-habitues--for Monte Carlo is a great centre of superstition--might
-take refuge in the opinion that the tables were bewitched; but most
-men would infer that there was human collusion and conspiracy to
-produce such a result, and that the croupiers of the several tables
-were in the plot.
-
-[Mark and Q the two earliest documents] Now Mark's Gospel does not
-stand alone. As I have pointed out in Myth, Magic, and Morals, Luke
-and Matthew hold in solution as it were a second document, called Q
-(Quelle), or the non-Marcan, which yields us a few incidents and a
-great many sayings and parables of Jesus. Now this second document,
-so utterly separate from and independent of Mark that it does not
-even allude to the crucifixion and death episodes, nevertheless has
-Jesus all through for its central figure. No doubt it ultimately came
-out of the same general medium as Mark; but that consideration does
-not much diminish the weight of its testimony. If I met two people
-a hundred yards apart both coming from St. Paul's Cathedral, and if
-they both assured me that they had just been listening to a sermon
-of Dr. Inge's, I should not credit them the less because they had
-been together in church.
-
-That both these documents--I mean Mark and the non-Marcan--were in
-circulation at a fairly early date is certain on many grounds. So great
-a scholar as Wellhausen, a scholar untrammelled by ties of orthodoxy,
-shows in his commentary that Mark, as it lies before us, must have
-been redacted before the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70; so vague are
-its forecasts of disasters that were to befall the holy city. In Luke,
-on the other hand, these forecasts are accommodated to the facts,
-as we should expect to be the case in an author who wrote after the
-blow had fallen.
-
-[The first and third Gospels constitute two more such documents]
-And another consideration arises here. Matthew and Luke wrote quite
-independently of one another--for they practically never join hands
-across Mark--and yet they both assume in their compilations that these
-two basal documents, Mark and the non-Marcan, are genuine narratives of
-real events. They allow themselves, indeed, according to the literary
-fashion of the age, to re-arrange, modify, and omit episodes in them;
-but their manner of handling and combining the two documents is in
-general inexplicable on the hypothesis that they considered them to
-be mere romances. They are too plainly in earnest, too eager to find
-in them material for the life of a master whom they revered. Luke in
-particular prefixes a personal letter to one Theophilus, explaining
-the purpose of his compilation. In it we find not a word about the
-transcribing of Osiris dramas. On the contrary, it will set in order
-for Theophilus a story in which he had already been instructed. It
-is clear that Theophilus had already been made acquainted with "the
-facts about Jesus," perhaps insufficiently, perhaps along lines which
-Luke deprecated. [Luke's prologue argues an indefinite number more
-of such documents] However this be, Luke desires to improve upon the
-information which Theophilus had so far acquired about Jesus. It is
-clear that written and unwritten traditions of Jesus were already
-disseminated among believers. The prologue is inexplicable otherwise,
-and it implies a whole series of witnesses to the historicity of Jesus
-prior to Luke himself, of whom, as I have said, we still have Mark
-and can reconstruct Q. Both Matthew (whoever he was) and Luke, then,
-are convinced of the historicity of Jesus, and regarded Mark and Q as
-historical sources. They exploit them, and they also try to fill up
-lacunas left in these basal documents, and in particular to supply
-their readers with some account of his birth and upbringing. Both
-supplements, of course, are largely fictitious, that of Matthew
-in particular; but they both testify to a fixed consciousness and
-belief among early Christians that the Messiah was a real historical
-person. Such an interest in the birth and upbringing of Jesus as
-Matthew and Luke reveal could never have been felt by sectaries who
-were well aware that he was not a real person, but a solar myth and
-first cousin of Osiris. Had he been known, even by a few believers and
-no more, to have been not a man but a composite myth, people would
-not have craved for details, even miraculous, about his birth and
-parentage and upbringing. Was it necessary to concoct human pedigrees
-for a solar myth, and to pretend that Jacob begat Joseph, and Joseph
-begat Jesus? The very idea is absurd. They wanted such details, and
-got them, just as did the worshippers of Plato, Alexander, Augustus,
-Apollonius, and other famous men. In connection with Osiris and
-Dionysus such details were never asked for and never supplied.
-
-[Implications of Luke's exordium] In the covering letter which forms
-a sort of exordium to his Gospel the following are the words in which
-Luke assures us that others before himself had planned histories of
-the life of Jesus:--
-
-
-    Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative
-    concerning those matters which have been fully established (or
-    fulfilled) among us, even as they delivered them unto us which
-    from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word,
-    it seemed good to me also, having traced out the course of all
-    things accurately from the first, to write them unto thee in order,
-    most excellent Theophilus; that thou mightest know the certainty
-    concerning the things wherein thou wast instructed.
-
-
-This is not the tone of a man who trades in sun-myths. The passage
-has a thoroughly bona fide ring, and declares (1) that Theophilus had
-already been instructed in the Gospel narrative, but not so accurately
-as the writer could wish; (2) that several accounts of Jesus's life
-and teaching were in circulation; (3) that these accounts were based
-on the traditions of those who had seen Jesus and assisted in the
-diffusion of his Messianic and other teachings.
-
-The passage cannot be later than A.D. 100, and is probably as early
-as A.D. 80; many scholars put it earlier. In any case, it reveals a
-consciousness, stretching far back among believers, that Jesus had
-really lived and died. Moreover, it is from the pen of one who either
-had himself visited, with Paul, James the brother (or, according to
-the orthodox, the half-brother) of Jesus at Jerusalem (Acts xxi, 17),
-or--if not that--anyhow had in his possession and made copious use
-of a travel document written by the companion of Paul.
-
-[Luke probably used a document independent of Mark and Q] A study
-of Luke also suggests that he had a third narrative document of his
-own. Thus, without going outside the Synoptic Gospels, we have two,
-if not three, wholly independent accounts of the doings and sayings
-of Jesus, and an inferential certainty that they were not the only
-ones which then existed. In the earliest Christian writers, moreover,
-citations occur that cannot well be referred to the canonical Gospels,
-but which may very well have been taken from the other narratives which
-Luke assures us were in the possession of the earliest Church. These
-narratives, like all other wholly or partly independent documents,
-must have differed widely from one another in detail; for their authors
-probably handled the tradition as freely as Matthew and Luke handle
-Mark. [Messianic and apocalyptic character of these early documents]
-But the inspiring motive of them all was the belief that a human
-Messiah had founded, or rather begun, the community of believers in
-Palestine. That any of them were contemporary is improbable, for the
-simple reason that the eyes of believers were turned, not backward on
-the life of the herald, but forward to the Kingdom of God or kingdom
-of heaven on earth which he heralded. They all felt themselves to be
-living in the last days, and that the Kingdom was to surprise many
-of them during their lifetime. Nor among the earliest believers
-was this expectation confined to Jews alone; it extended equally
-to Gentile converts. Thus Paul, in his epistles to the Corinthians,
-labours to answer the pathetic query his converts had addressed to
-him--namely, why the kingdom to come so long delayed; why many of them
-had fallen sick and some had died, while yet it tarried. Men and women
-who breathed such an atmosphere of tense expectation, as a passage
-like this and as the Gospel parables reveal, could not be solicitous
-for annals of the past. Still less is the attitude revealed that of
-people nurtured on ritual dramas of an annually slain and annually
-resuscitated god; for in that case they only needed to wait for the
-manifestation they yearned for, until the following spring, when the
-god would rise afresh to secure salvation for his votaries. The tone
-of this passage of Paul, as of all the earliest Christian documents,
-shows that the mind's eye of the common believer, as had been the
-founder's, was dazzled with the apocalyptic splendours soon to
-be revealed, with the beatitudes shortly to be fulfilled in the
-faithful. They were as wayfarers walking in a dark night towards
-a light which is far off, yet, because of its brightness and of the
-lack of an interposed landscape to fix the perspective, seems close at
-hand. Many a Socialist workman, especially on the continent, cherishes
-a similar dream of a good time coming ere long for himself and his
-fellows. He has no sense of the difficulties which for many a weary
-year--perhaps for ever--will hinder the realization of his passionately
-desired ideal. It is better so, for we live by our enthusiasms, and
-are the better for having indulged in them; if the labourer had none,
-he would be a chilly, useless being. Happily the Socialist seldom
-reflects how commonplace he would probably find his ideal if it were
-suddenly realized around him. Such were the eschatological hopes and
-dreams rife in the circles among which the Synoptic Gospels and their
-constituent documents first saw the light; they are revealed on their
-every page, and, needless to say, are inexplicable on Mr. Robertson's
-hypothesis. Devoid of sympathy with his subject, incapable of seeing
-it against its true background, without tact or perspective, he has
-never felt or understood the difficulties which beset his central
-hypothesis. He therefore attempts no explanation of them.
-
-[Character of the Fourth Gospel] Of the Fourth Gospel I have already
-said whatever is strictly necessary in this connection. It hangs
-together with the Johannine epistles; and its writer certainly had
-the Gospel of Mark before him, for he derives many incidents from it,
-and often covertly controverts it. It seems to belong to the end of
-the first century, and was in the hands of Gnostic sects fairly early
-in the second--say about 128. When it was written, the Gnosis of the
-Hellenized Jews, and in especial of Philo, was invading the primitive
-community. The Messianic and human traits of Jesus, still so salient
-in Mark and Matthew, though less so in Luke, are receding into the
-background before the opinion that he had been the representation
-in flesh of the eternal Logos. All his conversations are re-written
-to suit the newer standpoint; the homely scenes and surroundings of
-Galilee are forgotten as much as can be, and Samaria and Jerusalem--a
-more resounding theatre--are substituted. The teaching in parables
-is dropped, and we hear no more of the exorcisms of devils. Such
-things were unedifying, and unworthy of so sublime a figure, as
-much in the mind of this evangelist as of the fastidious Professor
-W. B. Smith. Hence it may be said that the Fourth Gospel has made
-the fortune of the Catholic Church; without it Athanasius could never
-have triumphed, nor the Nicene Creed have been penned, nor Professor
-Smith's diatribes have attracted readers. [It is half-docetic] For
-in it Jesus is becoming unreal, a divine pedant masquerading in a
-vesture of flesh. When it was written, the Docetes, as they were
-called, were already beginning to dot the "i's" and cross the "t's"
-of the teachers who sublimated Jesus into the Philonian Logos; and,
-as I said above, it is against them, no doubt, that the caveat--so
-necessary in the context--is entered that in Jesus the Word was
-made flesh. Similarly, in the Johannine epistles certain teachers
-are denounced who declared that Jesus Christ had not come in the
-flesh, and taught that his flesh was only a blind. [Ignatius's
-account of Docetism] We have a fairly full account of these docetic
-teachers in the Epistles of Ignatius, which cannot be much later than
-A.D. 120. From these we gather that they adopted the ordinary tradition
-about Jesus, and believed that he had been born, and eaten and drunk,
-had walked about with his disciples, had delivered his teaching by
-word of mouth, had been crucified by Pontius Pilate, had died, and
-been buried. But all these operations had been unreal and subjective
-in the minds of those who were present at them, as are things we see
-in a dream. They had taken place to the eye and ear of bystanders,
-but not in reality. The partizans, therefore, of the view that Jesus
-never lived deceive themselves when they appeal to the Docetes as
-witnesses on their side. The Docetes lend no colour to their thesis
-of the non-historicity of Jesus, but just the opposite. Drews writes
-(p. 57) that
-
-
-    [Drews misunderstands Gnosticism] the Gnostics of the second
-    century really questioned the historical existence of Jesus by
-    their docetic conception; in other words, they believed only in a
-    metaphysical and ideal, not an historical and real, Christ. The
-    whole polemic of the Christians against the Gnostics was based
-    essentially on the fact that the Gnostics denied the historicity
-    of Jesus, or at least put it in a subordinate position.
-
-
-This is nonsense. The Docetes admitted to the full that the Messiah
-had appeared on earth; but, partly to meet the Jewish objections to
-a crucified Messiah, and partly inspired by that contempt for matter
-which was and is common in the East, and has been the inspiring
-motive of much vain asceticism, they shrank from believing that he
-shared with ordinary men their flesh and blood, their secretions and
-evacuations. Matter was too evil for a Messiah, much more for the
-heavenly Logos, to have been encased in it, and so subjected to its
-dominion; to ascribe real flesh to him was to humble him before the
-evil Demiurge, who created matter. [Docetes accepted current Christian
-tradition] The Docetes accordingly took refuge in the idea that his
-body was a phantom, and that in phantom form he had undergone all
-that was related of him in Christian tradition; to which their views
-bear testimony, instead of contradicting it, as Dr. Drews and his
-friends pretend. "If these things," writes Ignatius, "were done by
-our Lord in Semblance, then am I also a prisoner in semblance." This
-means that--mutatis mutandis--the arguments of the Docetes would turn
-Ignatius too, chains and all, into a phantom. Again and again this
-writer affirms that the Docetes believed quite correctly that Jesus
-was born of a virgin and baptized by John, was nailed up for our
-sakes under Pontius Pilate and Herod the Tetrarch, that he suffered,
-died, and raised himself up out of the grave. They only would not
-believe that he underwent and performed all this truly--that is,
-objectively. They insisted that the Saviour had only been among men as
-a phantom, in the same manner as Helen had gone through the siege of
-Troy as a mere phantom. She was not really there, though Greeks and
-Trojans saw and met her daily. She was all the time enjoying herself
-amid the asphodel meadows of the Nile. Even so the disciples, according
-to the Docetes, had heard and seen Jesus all through his ministry;
-yet the body they saw was phantasmal only. The Docetes also argued--so
-we can infer from Ignatius's Epistle to the Church of Smyrna--that, as
-Jesus ate and drank after the resurrection in phantom guise, so he had
-eaten and drunk before his death in no other than phantom guise. The
-answer of Ignatius to this is: "I know and believe that he was in the
-flesh even after the resurrection"; and he forthwith relates how the
-risen Jesus approached Peter and his company, who thought they were
-in the presence of a phantom or ghost, and said to them: "Lay hold and
-handle me, and see that I am not a demon without a body." Everything,
-then, that we read about the Docetes shows that on all points, in
-respect of the miraculous incidents of Jesus's life no less than
-of the natural, they blindly accepted the record of evangelical
-tradition. Their heresy was not to deny what the tradition related,
-but to interpret it wrongly. [Docetism in Philo,] Philo had long before
-set the example of such an interpretation, when in his commentaries,
-which were widely read by Christians in the second century, he asserted
-that the angels who appeared to Abraham at the oak of Mambre, and
-ate and drank with him, only ate and drank in semblance, and not in
-reality. They laid a spell on the eyes of Abraham, and of the other
-guests at the banquet. [and in Tobit] So in the Book of Tobit xii,
-19, the angel says: "All these days did I appear unto you; and I did
-neither eat nor drink, but it was a vision ye yourselves saw."
-
-In the same way, Jesus laid a spell on the eyes of his followers, in
-the belief of this very early sect of Christian believers. [Professor
-Smith and Hippolytus] Professor W. B. Smith, like his two companions,
-writes as if Docetism were an asset in favour of his thesis
-that Christianity began as the cult of a slain God, and that "the
-humanization of this divinity proceeds apace as we descend the stream
-of tradition." Yet the Docetic doctrine, as given in the report of
-Hippolytus, and adduced by Mr. Smith himself (p. 88), exactly bears
-out the estimate of its import with which one rises from a study of
-the Ignatian Epistles. It is from Hippolytus's Refutation of Heresies,
-viii, 10, and runs thus:--
-
-
-    Having come from above, he (Jesus) put on the begotten (body),
-    and did all things just as has been written in the Gospels;
-    he washed himself in Jordan, etc.
-
-
-Hippolytus was in contact with Docetes, and familiar with their
-writings and arguments. What better proof could we have than this
-citation of the fact that they servilely adopted the traditions of
-Jesus recorded in the Gospels? They were not supplying an answer to
-imaginary Jews who had objected to Christianity on the score that
-Jesus had never lived. Their speciality was to interpret the Gospel
-record, which they did not dream of disputing, along phantasmagoric
-lines. There was still left in the Church enough common sense
-and historic insight to brush their interpretation on one side as
-nonsensical.
-
-[Drews misunderstands Justin Martyr] Drews once more has conjured up
-out of Justin Martyr a Jew of the second century who denied the human
-existence of Jesus. The relevant passage is at p. 16 of his Witnesses
-to the Historicity of Jesus, and runs as follows:--
-
-
-    It is not true, however, as has recently been stated, that no Jew
-    ever questioned the historical reality of Jesus, so that we may
-    see in this some evidence for his existence. The Jew Trypho, whom
-    Justin introduces in his Dialogue with Trypho, expresses himself
-    very sceptically about it. "Ye follow an empty rumour," he says,
-    "and make a Christ for yourselves." "If he was born and lived
-    somewhere, he is entirely unknown" (viii, 3). This work appeared
-    in the second half of the second century; it is therefore the
-    first indication of a denial of the human existence of Jesus,
-    and shows that such opinions were current at the time.
-
-
-Professor Drews has, I regret to say, failed to read his text
-intelligently. So I will transcribe the passage of Justin in full,
-premising that it was more probably written in the first than in the
-second half of the second century. The dialogue is between a Jew and
-an ex-Platonist who has turned Christian, and the Jew says with an
-ironical smile to the Christian:--
-
-
-    The rest of your arguments I admit, and I admire your religious
-    enthusiasm. Nevertheless, you would have done better to stick to
-    Plato's or any other sage's philosophy, practising the virtues of
-    endurance and continence and temperance, rather than let yourself
-    be ensnared by false arguments and follow utterly worthless
-    men. For if you had remained loyal to that form of philosophy and
-    lived a blameless life, there was left a hope of your rising to
-    something better. But as it is you have abandoned God and put your
-    trust in man, so what further hope is left to you of salvation? If,
-    then, you are willing to take advice from myself--for I already
-    have come to regard you as a friend--begin first by circumcising
-    yourself, and next keep in the legal fashion the sabbath and the
-    festivals and the new moons of God, and in a word fulfil all the
-    commandments written in the Law, and then perhaps you will attain
-    unto God's mercy. But Messiah (or Christ), even supposing he has
-    come into being and exists somewhere or other, is unrecognized,
-    and can neither know himself as such nor possess any might,
-    until Elias having come shall anoint him and make him manifest
-    unto all. But you (Christians), having lent ear to a vain report,
-    feign a sort of Messiah unto yourselves, and for his sake are
-    now rashly going to perdition.
-
-
-There is a parallel passage in the Dialogue, c. cx, where the
-Christian interlocutor, after reciting the prophecy of Micah, iv,
-1-7, adds these words:--
-
-
-    I am quite aware, gentlemen, that your rabbis admit all the words
-    of the above passage to have been uttered about, and to refer to
-    the Messiah; and I also know that they deny him so far to have
-    come, or, if they say he has come, then that it is not yet known
-    who he is. However, when he is manifested and in glory, then,
-    they say, it will be known who he is. And then, so they say,
-    the things foreshadowed in the above passage will come to pass.
-
-
-[The Jews in Justin testify to Jesus's historicity] The sense, then,
-of the passage adduced by Drews is perfectly clear, and exactly the
-opposite of that which he puts upon it. The Christ or Messiah referred
-to by the Jew is not that man of Nazareth in whom the Christians
-had falsely recognized the signs of Messiahship. No, he is, on the
-contrary, the Messiah expected by the Jews; but the latter has not so
-far come; or, if he has come, still lurks in some corner unrecognized
-until such time as Elias, to whom the role appertains, shall appear
-again and proclaim him. There is not a word of Jesus of Nazareth not
-having come, or of his being still unrecognized. The gravamen of the
-Jew is that the ex-Platonist had been chicaned by Christians into
-believing that the Messiah had already come in the person of Jesus,
-and had been recognized in him. The passage, therefore, has exactly
-the opposite bearing to what Drews imagines.
-
-[Second century Jews did not detest mere shadows] There is, too,
-another very significant point to be made in this connection. It is
-this, that the Jews of that age would not have borne the bitter grudge
-they did against the Christians if the latter had merely devoted
-themselves to the cult of a mythical personage, a Sun-God-Saviour,
-who never existed at all. They were quite well capable of ridiculing
-myths of such a kind, as the story of Bel and the Dragon shows. Jesus,
-however, was a real memory to them, and one which they detested. Their
-hatred for him was that which you bear for a man who has upset your
-religion and trampled on your prejudices--the sort of hatred that
-Catholics have for the memory of Luther and Calvin; it was not in any
-way akin to their mockery of idols, their disgust for the demons that
-inhabited them, their abhorrence of their votaries. It was hatred
-of a religious antagonist, odium theologicum of the purest kind,
-and hatred like that with which the Ebionites for generations hated
-the memory of Paul. Jesus had violated and set at naught the law of
-Moses. A solar myth could not do that.
-
-To this hatred of the Jews for the memory of Jesus, and to the early
-date at which it showed itself, Dr. Drews himself bears witness when,
-on p. 12 of the work cited, he writes as follows:--
-
-
-    There is no room for doubt that after the destruction of Jerusalem,
-    and especially during the first quarter of the second century,
-    the hostility of the Jews and Christians increased; indeed, by the
-    year 130 the hatred of the Jews for the Christians became so fierce
-    that a rabbi whose niece had been bitten by a serpent preferred
-    to let her die rather than see her healed "in the name of Jesus."
-
-
-[Chwolson on early Rabbis] Chwolson argues from this and similar
-episodes that the Rabbis of the second half of the first century,
-or the beginning of the second, were well acquainted with the person
-of Christ. "Here," says Drews, "he clearly deceives himself and
-his readers if the impression is given that they had any personal
-knowledge of him." The self-deception is surely on the part of
-Dr. Drews. Chwolson does not imply that any Rabbis of the years 50-100
-had a personal knowledge of Jesus, in the sense of having seen him
-or conversed with him; for he is not given to writing nonsense. He
-does, however, imply that they knew of him as a real man who had
-lived and done them a power of evil. If they had only known him as
-a solar myth, their hostility to his followers, admitted by Drews,
-would be inexplicable; equally inexplicable if, as Dr. W. B. Smith
-contends, he had been a merely heavenly power, a divine Logos or God,
-incidentally the object of a monotheist cult. In that case the Jews
-would rather have been inclined to fall on the neck of the Christians
-and welcome them; and their cult would have been no more offensive
-to them than the theosophy of Philo the Jew, from which it would
-have been hardly distinguishable. Justin Martyr furthermore makes
-statements on this point which perfectly agree with the story of the
-hostile Rabbi adduced by Drews. [In the Jewish synagogues Jesus was
-regularly execrated] Not in one, but in half-a-dozen, passages he
-testifies that in his day the Jews in all their synagogues, at the
-conclusion of their prayers, cursed the memory of Jesus, execrated
-his name and personality (for name meaned personality in that age),
-and poured ridicule on the soi-disant Messiah that had been crucified
-by the Romans. "Even to this day," Justin exclaims (ch. xciii), "you
-persevere in your wickedness, imprecating curses on us because we can
-prove that he whom you crucified is Messiah." He records (ch. cviii)
-"that the Jews chose and appointed emissaries whom they sent forth
-all over the world to proclaim that a godless heresy and unlawful had
-been vamped up by a certain Jesus, a charlatan of Galilee. They were
-to warn their compatriots that the disciples had stolen him out of the
-tomb in which, after being unnailed from the cross, he had been laid,
-and then pretended that he had been raised from the dead and ascended
-into heaven."
-
-[Eusebius's evidence on this point] At first sight the above is a
-mere rechauffe of Matt. xxviii, 13; but Eusebius, who had in his
-hands much first- and second-century literature of the Christians
-and Hellenized Jews that we have not, attests a similar tradition,
-and declares that he found it in the publications of the ancients. [25]
-
-
-    The priests and elders of the Jewish race who lived in Jerusalem
-    wrote epistles and sent them broadcast to the Jews everywhere among
-    the Gentiles, calumniating the teaching of Christ as a brand-new
-    heresy and alien to God; and they warned them by letters not to
-    receive it. And their apostles took their epistles, written on
-    papyrus ... and ran up and down the earth, maligning our account
-    of the Saviour.... It is still the custom of the Jews to give
-    the name of Apostles to those who carry encyclical letters from
-    their rulers.
-
-
-Note that Eusebius does not weave in the story of the disciples
-stealing their Master's body from out of the tomb. From his omission of
-it, and from the dissimilarity of his language, we can infer that the
-"publications of the ancients" from which he derived his information
-were not the works of Justin, but an independent source, which may also
-have been in Justin's hands. In any case, the Jews were not given to
-tilting at windmills; their secular and bitter hatred of the very name
-of Jesus, the relentless war waged with pen and sword from the first
-between the Christians and themselves--all this is attested by the
-earliest writings of the Church. It already colours Luke's Gospel, and
-is a leading inspiration of the Johannine. It alone is all-sufficient
-to dissipate the hypotheses of these twentieth-century fabulists.
-
-[Evidence of Acts] Let us turn to the Acts of the Apostles, the only
-book of the New Testament which contains a history of the Apostolic
-age. In the last half of this book is embedded, as even Van Manen
-admitted, a travel document or narrative of voyage undertaken by
-its author in common with Paul. Whether or no the fellow-traveller
-was the compiler of the Third Gospel and of Acts is not certain; but
-he was assuredly a man named Luke. It does not matter. "It is not,"
-writes Dr. Drews (Christ Myth, p. 19),
-
-
-    the imagined historical Jesus, but, if anyone, Paul, who is
-    that "great personality" that called Christianity into life as
-    a new religion; and the depth of his moral experience gave it
-    the strength for its journey, the strength which bestowed upon it
-    victory over the other competing religions. Without Jesus the rise
-    of Christianity can be quite well understood; without Paul, not so.
-
-
-[Van Manen on Acts and Paul] We infer from the above that, on the
-whole, Drews accepts the narrative of Paul's sayings and doings as
-given in Acts, and does not consider it a mere record of the feats a
-solar hero performed, not on earth, but in heaven. We gather also that
-Mr. Robertson takes the same indulgent view of Acts, for he frequently
-impugns the age of the Pauline epistles and the evidence they contain
-on the strength of "Van Manen's thesis of the non-genuineness" of
-them. "In point of fact," he writes (p. 453), "Van Manen's whole case
-is an argument; Dr. Carpenter's is a simple declaration."
-
-But Van Manen never for a moment questioned the historical reality
-of Jesus. What he insisted upon is [26] that
-
-
-    there is no word, nor any trace, of any essential difference as
-    regards faith and life between Paul and other disciples.... He
-    is a "disciple" among the "disciples." What he preaches is
-    substantially nothing else than what their mind and heart are
-    full of--the things concerning Jesus.
-
-
-Van Manen, however, allows
-
-
-    that Paul's journeyings, his protracted sojourn outside of
-    Palestine, his intercourse in foreign parts with converted Jews
-    and former heathen, may have emancipated him (as it did so many
-    other Jews of the Dispersion) without his knowing it, more or
-    less--perhaps in essence completely--from circumcision and other
-    Jewish religious duties, customs, and rites.
-
-
-Concerning Paul the same writer says (op. cit., art, "Paul") that
-Acts gives us
-
-
-    a variety of narratives concerning him, differing in their dates,
-    and also in respect of the influences under which they were
-    written.... With regard to Paul's journeys, we can in strictness
-    speak with reasonable certainty and with some detail only of
-    one great journey, which he undertook towards the end of his
-    life. (Acts xvi, 10-17; xx, 5-15; xxi, 1-18; xxvii, 1-xxviii, 16.)
-
-
-[Evidence of the we sections of Acts] It is upon Acts, then, that Van
-Manen bases his estimate, which we just now cited, of Paul's relations
-with the other disciples. He refuses, and rightly, "to assume that
-Acts must take a subordinate place in comparison with the principal
-epistles of Paul." In effect, his assault on the Pauline Epistles
-rests on the assumption that the record of Paul's activity presented
-in Acts is the more trustworthy wherever it appears to conflict with
-the Pauline Epistles, and in particular with Galatians. In accepting
-Van Manen's conclusion, Mr. Robertson implicitly accepts his premises,
-one of which is the superior reliability of Acts in general, and in
-particular of the four sections enumerated above, and characterized by
-the use of the word "we." For the moment, therefore, let us confine
-ourselves to the ninety-seven verses of these "we" sections, which
-are obviously from the pen of a fellow-traveller of Paul. We find it
-recorded in them that Paul was moved by a vision to go and preach the
-Gospel [27] in Macedonia; that at Philippi a certain woman named Lydia,
-who already worshipped God--i.e., was a heathen converted to Jewish
-monotheism--had opened her heart in consequence to give heed to the
-things spoken by Paul. We infer that Paul's Gospel supplemented in
-some way her monotheism. She and her household became something more
-than mere worshippers of God, and were baptized. We learn that Paul
-and his companion reckoned time by the Jewish feasts and fasts--e.g.,
-by the days of unleavened bread--but at the same time were in the habit
-of meeting together with the rest of the faithful on the first day of
-the week, in order to break bread and discourse about the faith. At
-Tyre, as at Troas, they found "disciples" who, like Paul, arranged
-future events, or were warned of them through the Spirit. At Caesarea,
-of Palestine, they stayed with Philip the evangelist, who was one
-of the seven, and had four daughters--virgins who did prophesy. They
-also met there a certain prophet Agabus, who was a mouthpiece of the
-Holy Ghost, and as such foretold that the Jews at Jerusalem, of whose
-plots against Paul we elsewhere hear in these sections, would deliver
-him into the hands of the Gentiles. Paul, in his turn, declares his
-readiness to be bound and die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord
-Jesus. they stay with an early disciple from Cyprus, Mnason, and,
-on reaching Jerusalem, the brethren received them gladly. And the
-day following Paul went in with us unto James; and all the elders
-(of the Church) were present. Paul relates to them the facts of his
-ministry among the Gentiles. In the course of the final voyage to
-Rome, when all the crew have despaired of their lives, because of
-the violence of the storm and of the ship leaking, Paul comes to the
-rescue, and informs them that the angel of the God whom he served,
-and whose he was, had stood by him in the night, saying: "Fear not,
-Paul; thou must stand before Caesar." He therefore could not perish by
-shipwreck, nor they either. In Melita the trivial circumstance that
-the bite of a viper, promptly shaken off by him into the fire, did
-not cause Paul to swell up (i.e., his hand to be inflamed), or die,
-caused the barbarians to acclaim him as a god; and in the sequel the
-sick in the island flock to him, and are healed. At Puteoli Paul and
-his companion find brethren, as they had found them at Jerusalem and
-elsewhere; and presently they enter Rome.
-
-In these sections, then, we have glimpses of a brotherhood disseminated
-all about the Mediterranean whose members were Monotheists of the
-Jewish type, but something besides, in so far as they accepted a
-gospel which Paul also preached, about a Lord Jesus Christ; these
-brethren solemnly broke bread on the first day of the week. In these
-sections we breathe the same atmosphere of personal visions, of angels,
-of prophecy, of direct inspiration of individuals by the Holy Ghost,
-of the cult of virginity, which we breathe in the rest of Acts and
-throughout the Pauline Epistles. [Philip one of the seven] We meet
-also with a Philip, an evangelist, and one of the seven. Who were the
-seven? We turn to an earlier chapter of Acts, [28] and read that in
-the earliest days of the religion at Jerusalem, in order to satisfy
-the claims of the widows of Greek Jews who were neglected in the daily
-ministration, the twelve apostles had called together the multitude
-of the faithful, and chosen seven men of good report, full of the
-Spirit and of wisdom to serve the tables, because they, the Twelve,
-were too busy preaching the word to attend to the catering of the new
-Messianic society. The first on the list of these seven deacons was
-Stephen, the second Philip. When, therefore, in the later passage
-the fellow-traveller of Paul refers to Philip as one of the seven,
-he assumes that we know who the seven were; and he can only expect
-us to know it because we have read the earlier chapter which narrates
-their appointment. The fellow-traveller of Paul, therefore, was aware
-of the appointment of the seven deacons, and testifies thereto. Here
-we have irrefragable evidence of the historicity of verses 1-6 of
-chapter vi of Acts, and at the same time a strong presumption that the
-fellow-traveller of Paul was himself the redactor, if not the author,
-of the earlier chapters (i-xv) of Acts, as he is obviously of the
-last half (ch. xvi to end); for that last half coheres inseparably
-with the contiguous we sections.
-
-[Literary unity of Acts] Have we, then, any way of testing this
-presumption that the fellow-traveller who penned these we sections
-also penned the rest of Acts? We have, though it is one which can
-only appeal to trained philologists, and I doubt if Messrs. Drews and
-Robertson are likely to give to such an argument its due weight. The
-linguistic evidence of the we sections has been sifted and tested by
-Sir John Hawkins in his Horae Synopticae. The statistic of words and
-phrases cannot lie. It proves that the writer of Acts, and consequently
-of the Third Gospel, "was from time to time a companion of Paul in
-his travels, and that he simply and naturally wrote in the first
-person when narrating events at which he had been present."
-
-This is the best hypothesis which a study of the language of Acts
-and of the Third Gospel permits us to accept. I do not say it is
-the only possible one, and I expect Mr. Robertson and his pupil,
-Dr. Drews, to reject it with scorn, for their philology is of the
-sort which recognizes in Maria the same name as Moira and Myrrha. The
-only other explanations of the presence of we in these sections are,
-either that a compiler who used the diary of the fellow-traveller
-left it standing in the document when he embodied it in his narrative,
-through carelessness and by accident, or else that he left it of set
-design, and because he wished his readers to identify him with the
-older reporter, and so to pass for a companion of Paul. The first
-of these explanations is very improbable; the second not only much
-too subtle, but out of keeping with the babbling, but credulous,
-honesty which everywhere shows itself in Acts.
-
-[Van Manen's system of dating Luke and Acts would postpone all
-ancient literature to the Middle Ages] It is true that Van Manen
-assumes a priori, and without a shadow of proof, that Luke and Acts
-were written as late as the period 125-150. His only argument is
-that Marcion already had the former in his hands as early as 140;
-and he is prone to make the childish assumption that the date of
-composition of any book in the New Testament is exactly that of
-its earliest ascertainable use by a later author. Such a mode of
-reasoning is utterly false and uncritical, and would, if applied in
-other fields, prove that the great mass of ancient literature was
-not ancient at all, but composed in the tenth or later centuries
-to which our earliest MSS. belong; for we have no citations either
-in contemporary or in nearly contemporary writers of nine-tenths of
-the whole volume of the old Greek and Latin literatures. Most of it,
-if we applied Van Manen's canons of evidence (which, of course, are
-accepted and improved upon by the three writers I am criticizing),
-would turn out to have been written as late as the renaissance of
-European learning. It is a fallacious test, and Van Manen would
-have shrunk from the paradox of enforcing it in regard to any other
-literature than the New Testament. It would appear as if the orthodox
-traditionalists, by insisting that the Bible must not be judged and
-criticized like other books, have prejudiced not merely their own
-cause--that would not matter--but the cause of sober history. They
-have invested it with such an atmosphere of mystery and falsetto, with
-what I may call a Sunday-school atmosphere, that a certain class of
-inquirers rush to an opposite extreme, and insist on canons of evidence
-and authenticity which would, if consistently used, eliminate all
-ancient literature and history. One form of error provokes the other.
-
-[Ephrem's commentary on Acts] We have examined for their evidence
-as regards the Early Church those sections which directly evidence
-the hand of a companion of Paul, who was probably Luke the physician,
-seeing that tradition was unanimous in ascribing the Third Gospel and
-Acts to him. Some scholars have observed that the old Syriac version
-cited by Ephrem the Syrian in his commentary [29] on Acts read in Acts
-xx, 13, as follows: "But I, Lucas, and those with me, going before
-to the ship, set sail for Assos," where the conventional text reads:
-"But we, going before." The pronoun we in this passage cannot include,
-as it usually does, Paul, who had taken another route and had left
-directions that they should call for him; this may have led Ephrem
-to substitute the paraphrase I, Lucas, and those with me. Anyhow,
-without further evidence, we can hardly use Ephrem's citation as a
-proof of the Lucan authorship of Acts. [Evidence of those parts of
-Acts which cohere with the we sections] But we must anyhow consider
-the evidence as to Paul's beliefs which is to be gathered from the
-sections of Acts which immediately cohere with the travel document,
-and which clearly depended for their information on a source closely
-allied to them and of the same age and provenance. Firstly, then,
-it is noticeable that all this last part of Acts is relatively free
-from the fabulous details which mar the earlier part descriptive of
-the exploits of Peter. Next we note that Paul, on entering a city,
-goes straight to the Jewish Synagogue, and that the gospel with which
-he undertakes to supplement their monotheism consisted not of tidings
-about an ancient Palestinian Sun-god named Joshua, or Dionysus or
-Krishna, or Osiris, or AEsculapius, or Mithras, nor about a vegetation
-or harvest demon of any kind, nor about any of the other members
-of the Christian pandemonium invented by Mr. Robertson and adopted
-by Dr. Drews. No; on the contrary, at Thessalonica Paul spent three
-sabbaths trying to convince the Jews in their synagogue that Jesus
-must have been the Jewish Messiah promised in the Jewish scriptures,
-because in accordance with prophecy he had suffered and risen from
-the dead. That he taught them, further, that Jesus, qua Christ or
-Messiah, was also the Jewish king whose advent they looked for, is
-obvious from the fact that he was accused on this occasion, as on
-others, of teaching, "contrary to the decrees of Caesar, that there
-was another king, one Jesus." At Corinth Paul found he was wasting
-time in trying to persuade the Jews that Jesus was the Messiah whose
-advent they expected; and he declared to them that thenceforth he would
-devote himself to spreading his good news among the Gentiles. None
-the less he persisted, wherever he afterwards went, in going first
-to the synagogue, so as to give his compatriots a prior chance of
-accepting his spiritual wares, according to the principle enunciated
-in his epistles, that the promises were for the Jews first and only
-after them for the Gentiles. In Acts xxv, 19, Festus lays before King
-Agrippa the case against Paul as he had learned it from the Jewish
-priests and elders at Jerusalem. It amounted to this, that Paul
-affirmed that "one Jesus, who was dead, was really alive." We learn
-in an earlier passage that Paul was a Jew of Tarsus, an adherent
-of the Pharisaic sect which believed in a general resurrection of
-good Jews, that nevertheless he had persecuted the adherents of
-Jesus of Nazareth and connived at the murder of Stephen. He has some
-difficulty in convincing the Roman governor of Judaea that he is not
-a leader of the Jewish sicarii, or sect of assassins, who were ever
-anxious to range themselves on the side of any Messiah ready to show
-fight against the Roman Legions. The impression made on Festus, the
-Roman Governor, by Paul's prophetic arguments about a Messiah who
-had suffered and then risen from the dead was (Acts xxvi, 24) that
-"much learning had made him mad." We can discern all through this
-last half of Acts that attitude of Paul to Jesus which confronts us
-in his epistles. Nothing interests him except his death on the cross
-and his resurrection. Of the rest of his career we learn nothing. In
-one passage, ch. xiii, 26 foll., we have a slightly more detailed
-account of the staple of Paul's teaching, as delivered to the Jews
-when he encountered them in their synagogues. He informed them of how
-"they that dwell in Jerusalem and their rulers" had condemned Jesus;
-"though they found no cause of death in him, yet asked they of Pilate
-that he should be slain." They afterwards "took him down from the
-tree and laid him in a tomb. But God raised him from the dead: and
-he was seen for many days of them that came up with him from Galilee
-to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses unto the people."
-
-There is not much of a vegetation-god story about the above concise
-narrative, which, however, is strikingly independent of the Gospel
-legends concerning the burial and resurrection of Jesus; for,
-according to them, it was the friends and adherents of Jesus, and
-not the rulers, who condemned him, that were careful to bury him;
-and his post-resurrectional appearances are here confined to his
-Galilean followers, who, by virtue of their longer association and
-intimacy with him, would be more likely than others to see him after
-death in dreams and visions.
-
-[Six independent and early documents involve a real Jesus] I have
-now reviewed the historical books of the New Testament. We have in
-them at least six monuments--to wit, Mark, the non-Marcan document,
-the parts of the First and Third Gospels peculiar to their authors,
-the Fourth Gospel, and the history of Paul and his mission given in
-chapters xiii to xxviii of Acts. Perhaps I ought to add the first
-twelve chapters of Acts, of which the information, according to
-Van Manen, was derived from an early and lost document, the Acts
-of Peter. That would make seven monuments. Unless all philological
-analysis is false, the Third Gospel and Acts are from the pen of a
-companion of Paul, and cannot be set later than about 90 A.D. Mark,
-which he used, must be indefinitely earlier, and I have pointed out
-that there are good reasons for setting its date before the year
-70. The non-Marcan document, which critics have agreed to call Q
-(Quelle), cannot be later than Mark, and is probably much earlier,
-judging from the fact that it as yet reported no miracles of Jesus,
-nor hints of his death and resurrection. Now all these documents
-are independent of one another in style and contents, yet they
-all have a common interest--namely, the memory of a historical man
-Jesus; and such data as they isolatedly afford about Jesus agree
-on the whole as closely as any profane documents ever agreed which,
-being written independently and from very different standpoints, yet
-refer to one and the same person. If we see a number of convergent
-rays of light streaming down under clouds across a widely extended
-landscape, we infer a central sun behind the clouds by which they are
-all emitted. Similarly, we have here several traditions and documents
-which converge on a single man, and are all and severally meaningless,
-and their genesis impossible of explanation unless we assume that he
-lived. It is sufficiently incredible that one tradition should (to take
-the hypothesis of non-historicity in its most rational form--that,
-namely, of Professor W. B. Smith) allegorize the myth of a Saviour
-God as the career of a man, and that man a Galilean teacher, in whose
-humanity the Church believed from the first. That six or seven parallel
-traditions should all have hit on the same form of deception and
-allegory is, as I said before, as incredible as that several roulette
-tables at Monte Carlo should independently and at one and the same
-time throw up an identical series of numbers. Credat Judaeus Apella,
-These writers who develop the thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus
-because miracles came to be attributed to him--how could they not in
-that age and social medium?--ask us to believe in a miracle which far
-outweighs any which any religionists ever reported of their founder;
-they themselves have fallen into fathomless depths of credulity.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER IV
-
-THE EPISTLES OF PAUL
-
-
-[Mr. Robertson's vital interpolations] Now let us turn to the Epistles
-of Paul, a person whom these writers, as we have seen above, admit
-to have lived, and to have played no small part in the establishment
-of Christianity.
-
-In using these Epistles, they all three make a reservation to the
-effect that any evidence which they may supply in favour of the
-historicity of Jesus, and which cannot be explained away, shall be
-regarded as an interpolation; and as it is something that slays his
-hypothesis, Mr. Robertson has taught us to call such evidence "vital
-interpolation." It must die in order that his hypothesis may live. They
-also claim, ab initio, to deny Pauline authorship to any epistles that
-may turn out to be a stumbling-block in the way of their theories,
-and lean to the view of Van Manen and others, who held that the
-entire mass of the Pauline letters are the "work of a whole school
-of second-century theologians"--in other words, forgeries of the
-period 130-140. [Defying textual evidence he relegates the Paulines
-to second century] They would, of course, set them later than that,
-only it is overwhelmingly certain that Marcion made about that time
-a collection of ten of them, which he expurgated to suit his views,
-and arranged in order, with Galatians first; this collection he
-called the Apostolicon. It runs somewhat counter to this view that,
-twenty years earlier, we already have a reference to these Epistles in
-Ignatius, who, with an exaggeration hardly excused by the fact that
-he is addressing members of the Ephesian Church, informs us that the
-Ephesians are mentioned "in every letter" by Paul. Those who desire
-ample proof that Ignatius was well acquainted with Paul's Epistles
-cannot do better than refer to a work, drawn up and published in 1905
-by members of the Oxford Society of Historical Theology, entitled
-The New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers. In this the New Testament
-originals and the citations are arranged in parallel columns in the
-order of their convincingness.
-
-[Professor Smith's kindred thesis offends the facts] At a still
-earlier date--say A.D. 95--Clement of Rome cites the Paulines. As
-Professor W. B. Smith makes Herculean efforts to show that he did
-not, I venture to set before my readers a passage--chap. xxxv, 5,
-6 of his Epistle face to face with Romans i, 29-32--so that they may
-judge for themselves. I print identical words in leaded type:--
-
-
-         1 Clement.                            Romans.
-
-aporripsantes aph' heauton pasan   pepleromenous pase adikia, poneria,
-adikian kai anomian, pleonexian,   pleonexia, kakia, mestous, phthonou,
-ereis, kakoetheias te kai dolous   phonou, eridos, dolou, kakoetheias,
-psithyrismous te kai katalalias,   psithyristas, katalalous,
-theostygian, hyperephanian te      theostygeis, hybristas,
-kai alazoneian, kenedoxian te      hyperephanous, alazonas, epheuretas
-kai aphiloxenian.                  kakon, goneusin apeitheis,
-                                   asynetous, asynthetous, astorgous,
-tauta gar hoi prassontes           aneleemonas, hoitines to dikaioma
-stygetoi to theo hyparchousin;     tou theou epignontes, hoti ta
-ou monon de hoi prassontes auta,   toiauta prassontes axioi thanatou
-alla kai hoi syneudokountes        eisin, ou monon auta poiousin, alla
-autois.                            kai syneudokousi tois prassousi.
-
-
-The dependence of Clement's Epistle on that of Paul's Letter to
-the Romans is equally visible if the English renderings of them be
-compared, as follows:--
-
-
-                             [Translation.]
-
-      Clement xxxv, 5, 6.               Romans i, 29-32.
-
-Casting away from ourselves all   Being filled with all
-unrighteousness and               unrighteousness, wickedness,
-lawlessness, covetousness,        covetousness, maliciousness; full of
-strife, malignity, and deceit;    envy, murder, strife, deceit,
-whisperings and backbitings,      malignity; whisperers, backbiters,
-hatred of God, haughtiness and    hateful to God, insolent, haughty,
-boastfulness, vainglory and       boastful, inventors of evil things,
-inhospitableness.                 disobedient to parents, without
-                                  understanding, covenant-breakers,
-For they that practise these      without natural affection,
-things are hateful to God. And    unmerciful: who, knowing the
-not only they which practise      ordinance of God, that they which
-them, but also they who consent   practise such things are worthy of
-with them.                        death, not only do the same, but also
-                                  consent with them that practise them.
-
-
-Some of the sources of Paul approximate in text still more to
-Clement--e.g., the reading poneria "wickedness" is not certain. In
-some, "malignity" precedes "deceit." In some, "and" is added before
-the words "not only."
-
-In the above parallel passages the agreement both in kind and sequence
-of the lists of vices is too close to be accidental; and this is
-clinched by the identity of sense and form of the clauses which follow
-the two lists. Nor is this the only example of the influence of the
-Paulines on Clement. We give one more, giving the English only:--
-
-
-     Paul (1 Cor. i, 11-13).                Clement xlvii, 1.
-
-For it hath been signified unto me    Take ye up the epistle of the
-concerning you, my brethren, by       blessed Paul, the Apostle, what
-those of Chloe, that there are        did he write first to you in the
-contentions among you. Now this I     beginning of the good tidings. In
-mean, that each one of you saith, I   verity he spiritually indited you
-am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I   a letter about himself and Cephas
-of Cephas; and I of Christ.           and Apollos.
-
-
-Here Clement only alludes to Paul's letter, not citing it, and he
-betrays a knowledge of the order and times in which Paul wrote his
-Epistles; for he declares that 1 Corinthians was written by Paul in
-the beginning of the good tidings--i.e., of his preaching to them of
-the Gospel. The Corinthians had been first evangelized by him three
-years before. The same phrase meets us in the same sense in Paul
-(Philippians iv, 15):--
-
-
-    And ye yourselves also know, ye Philippians, that in the beginning
-    of the Gospel, when I departed from Macedonia, etc.
-
-
-Altogether there are thirty passages in Clement's Epistle to the
-Corinthians which indicate more or less clearly a knowledge of the
-Pauline Epistles, including that to Hebrews. If we were tracing
-the relation of two profane authors, no scholar would hesitate to
-acknowledge a direct influence of one on the other. Merely because one
-of them happens to belong to the New Testament, such writers as Van
-Manen, W. B. Smith, et hoc genus omne, feel themselves in duty bound
-to run their heads against a brick wall. The responsibility, it must
-be admitted, lies at the door of orthodox theologians. For centuries
-independent scholars have been warned off the domain of so-called
-sacred literature. The Bible might not be treated as any other book. I
-once heard the late Canon Liddon forecast the most awful fate for
-Oxford if it ever should be. The nemesis of orthodox superstition is
-that such writers as those we are criticizing cannot bring themselves
-to treat the book fairly, as they would other literature; nor is any
-hypothesis too crazy for them when they approach Church history. The
-laity, in turn, who too often do not know their right hand from their
-left, are so justly suspicious of the evasions and arriere-pensee
-of orthodox apologists that they are ready to accept any wild and
-unscholarly theory that labels itself Rationalist.
-
-[Presuppositions of the argument from silence] The Epistles of Paul,
-then, must obviously have been widely known before Marcion issued an
-expurgated edition of them in the year 140. We have shown that many
-of them were familiar to Clement of Rome in the last decade of the
-first century. But even if we had no traces of the Pauline Epistles
-before the year 140, as Van Manen and these writers in the teeth of
-the evidence maintain, it would not follow that they were as late
-as the first irrefragable use of them by a later author. Professor
-W. B. Smith's argument is based on the supposed silence of earlier
-authors, and he entitles his chapter on this subject "Silentium
-Saeculi." A magnificent petitio principii! He has never thought
-over the aptitudes of the "argument from silence." This argument,
-as MM. Langlois and Seignobos remark in their Introduction to the
-Study of History (translation by Berry; London, Duckworth, 1898),
-
-
-    is based on the absence of indications with regard to a fact. From
-    the circumstance of the fact [e.g., of Paul's writing certain
-    epistles] not being mentioned in any document it is inferred
-    that there was no such fact.... It rests on a feeling which in
-    ordinary life is expressed by saying: "If it were true, we should
-    have heard of it." ... In order that such reasoning should be
-    justified it would be necessary that every fact should have been
-    observed and recorded in writing, and that all the records should
-    have been preserved. Now the greater part of the documents which
-    have been written have been lost, and the greater part of the
-    events which happen are not recorded in writing. In the majority
-    of cases the argument would be invalid. It must, therefore, be
-    restricted to the cases where the conditions implied in it have
-    been fulfilled. It is necessary not only that there should be
-    now no documents in existence which mention the fact in question,
-    but that there should never have been any.
-
-
-Now it is notorious that in the case of the earliest Christian
-literature there was a special cause at work of a kind to lead to
-its disappearance; this was the perpetual alteration of standards of
-belief, and the anxiety of rival schools of thought to destroy one
-another's books. The philosophic authors above cited further point
-out that "every manuscript is at the mercy of the least accident;
-its preservation or destruction is a matter of pure chance." In the
-case of Christian books malice prepense and odium theologicum were
-added to accident and mere chance.
-
-How, then, can Mr. W. B. Smith be sure that there were not fifty
-writings before the year 140 which by citation or otherwise attested
-the earlier existence of all or some of the Pauline Epistles? We
-have the merest debris of the earliest Christian literature. What
-right has he to argue as if he had the whole of it in the hollow of
-his hand? In such a context the argument from silence is absolute
-rubbish, and he ought to know it. But, alas, the orthodox apologist
-has trained him in this sphere to be content with "demonstrations"
-which in any other would be at once extinguished by ridicule.
-
-[Date of Paulines to be determined by contents] Obviously the
-genuineness and date of the Pauline Epistles can only be determined by
-their contents, and not by a supposed deficiency of allusions to them
-in a literature that is well-nigh completely lost to us. Judged by
-these considerations, and by the hundreds of undesigned coincidences
-with the Book of Acts, we must conclude in regard to most of them
-that they are from the hand of the Paul who is so familiar a figure
-in that book. The author of the Paulines has just the same supreme
-and exclusive interest in the crucifixion, death, and resurrection
-of Jesus the Messiah as the Paul of Acts; he manifests everywhere
-the same aloofness from the earthly life and teaching of Jesus. They
-yield the same story as does Acts of his birth and upbringing, of his
-persecution of the Messianist followers of Jesus and of his conversion;
-much the same record of his missionary travels can be reconstructed
-from the Letters as we have in Acts. Yet there is no sign of borrowing
-on either side. By way of casting doubt on the Pauline Letters the
-deniers of the historicity insist on the fact that in Acts there
-is no hint of Paul ever having written Epistles to the Churches
-he created or visited. Why should there be? [Undesigned agreement
-between Acts and Paulines] To a companion Paul must have been much
-more than a mere writer of letters. To Luke the letter writing must
-have seemed the least important part of Paul's activity, although
-for us the accident of their survival makes the Epistles seem of
-prime importance. In the Epistles, on the other hand, it is objected
-that there is no indication of any use of Acts. How could there be,
-seeing that the book was not penned (except on Van Manen's hypothesis)
-until long after the Epistles had been written and sent? I admit that
-Paul's account in Galatians of his personal history is difficult to
-reconcile with Acts, and has provided a regular crux for critics
-of every school. [30] The numerous coincidences, however, of the
-two writings are all the more worthy of attention. If we found them
-agreeing pat with each other we should reasonably suspect some form
-of common authorship, if not of collusion. As it is they attest one
-another very much in the way in which the letters of Cicero attest
-and are attested by Sallust, Julius Caesar, and other contemporary
-or later writers of Roman history. There is neither that complete
-accord nor complete discord between Acts and Paulines, which would
-lead a competent historian to distrust either as fairly contemporary
-and trustworthy witnesses to the same epoch and province of history.
-
-[Paul witnesses a real Jesus] The testimony of Paul to a real and
-historical Jesus is to be gathered from those passages in which he
-directly refers to him or in which he refers to his brethren and
-disciples, for obviously a solar myth cannot have had brethren nor
-have personally commissioned disciples and apostles. I have pointed
-out in the first chapter of Myth, Magic, and Morals that the interest
-of Paul in the historical Jesus was slender, and have explained why
-it was so. But that is no excuse for ignoring it, or pretending it
-is not there.
-
-[Summary of Pauline evidence] What does it amount to? This, that
-Jesus the Messiah "was born of the seed of David according to the
-flesh" (Rom. i, 2); that "he was born of a woman, born under the
-law"--that is to say, he was born like any other man, and not, as a
-later generation believed, of a virgin mother. It means also that he
-was born into Jewish circles, and that he was brought up as a Jew,
-obedient to the Mosaic law (Gal. iv, 4). His gospel was intended "for
-the Jews in the first instance, but also for the Greeks" (Rom. i, 16,
-ii, 11). He was "made a minister of the circumcision" (Rom. xv, 8);
-in other words, he had no quarrel with circumcision, even if he did
-not go out of his way to insist on it as part of the Law which, in
-the first Gospel it is recorded, he came not to destroy but to fulfil.
-
-[Evidence of Epistles to Timothy] According to Tim. ii, 8, Jesus
-was "of the seed of David according to my gospel." This implies that
-others than Paul did not admit the Davidic ancestry of Jesus, and it is
-implicitly rejected by Jesus himself in Mark xii, 35, as I point out in
-Myth, Magic, and Morals, ch. xii. That is good proof that the Epistle
-preserves a tradition that was quite independent on the later Gospels;
-and that proves that even if the Epistles to Timothy be not Paul's,
-they are anyhow very early documents, and constitute another witness
-to the historicity of Jesus. In the first of them, ch. vi, 13, we learn
-that Christ Jesus witnessed the good confession before Pontius Pilate.
-
-[Pauline evidence as to death of Jesus,] The passages in which Paul
-insists that Jesus was crucified, died, and rose again are so numerous
-that they almost defy collection. In 1 Cor. xv, 3, Paul relates the
-story of the resurrection at length. He says he had "received" it from
-those who believed before himself. From them he had learned that Christ
-had "died for our sins," had been "buried," and "raised on the third
-day," after which he appeared first "to Cephas" or Peter, next "to the
-Twelve"--i.e., the Twelve Apostles of whom we read in the Gospels that
-Jesus chose them and sent them forth to herald to the Jews the speedy
-approach of the Kingdom of God. Next "he appeared to 500 brethren at
-once" of whom most were still alive when Paul wrote; then "to James,"
-then "to all the apostles," and "last of all" to Paul himself.
-
-[and as to his Hebrew disciples] On the strength of this last vision
-of the Lord, Paul claimed to be as good an apostle as any of those who
-were apostles before him (Gal. i, 17). Accordingly, in 1 Cor. ix, 1,
-he writes in answer to those who pooh-poohed his mission: "Am I not
-an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?" And again, 2 Cor. xi, 22,
-in the same vein: "Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So
-am I. Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I. Are they ministers of
-Christ? I speak as one beside myself. I am more; in labours more
-abundantly, in prisons," etc.
-
-So 2 Cor. xii, 11: "In nothing came I behind the very chiefest
-apostles."
-
-From such passages we can realize what a purely Hebrew business the
-Church was to begin with. To be an apostle you had to be at least
-a Hebrew, and it is clear that the earlier apostles challenged the
-right of Paul to call himself an apostle on the ground that he had
-not, as they, been a personal follower of Jesus. Their challenge led
-him to preface his Epistles with an assertion of his apostleship:
-"Paul, an apostle of Messiah Jesus."
-
-We learn further (1 Cor. xi, 23 foll.) how on a certain night "the
-Lord Jesus was betrayed" or handed over to his enemies (N.B.--The
-occasion is referred to as one well known); how he then took bread,
-and when he had given thanks, brake it, etc. All this ill agrees with
-the view that Paul believed the Jesus of the Gospels to be an ancient
-Palestinian Sun-God-Saviour Joshua. We read also (1 Cor. ix, 5) that
-"the brethren of the Lord," like "the rest of the apostles and Cephas,"
-led about wives (probably spiritual ones), and Paul claims the same
-right for himself. In Galatians, ch. ii, he recounts how he went
-up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas, and tarried with him fifteen days,
-on which occasion he associated with James, the brother of the solar
-myth. On another occasion this brother of the Sun-god sent emissaries
-to Antioch to warn Peter or Cephas against eating with Gentiles, as
-Paul had taught him to do. Peter had been "intrusted with the gospel
-of the circumcision," as Paul with that of the uncircumcision. On
-this occasion there was a stand-up quarrel between Paul and the older
-apostle of the sun-myth, and Paul's Epistles ring from beginning to
-end with echoes of his quarrel over circumcision with the sun-myth's
-earlier followers.
-
-How do Mr. Robertson and his friends get round all this evidence? Their
-way out of it is beautifully simple. It consists in ruling out every
-passage as an interpolation that stands in their way. So I have seen
-an ill-tempered chess-player, when he lost his queen, kick over the
-chess-table and begin to swear. That is one device. The other is
-to pretend that the apostles with whom Paul was in personal touch
-were not apostles of the solar god, but of the Jewish high priest,
-who was also president of that secret society in whose bosom were
-acted the ritual and dramas or mystery-plays [31] of annually slain
-Joshuas, of vegetation-gods, of Osiris, Krishna, and the whole pack
-of mythical beings out of whom the Jewish Messiah Jesus was compacted.
-
-[The "myth" of the Twelve] Let us take first the "myth," as
-Mr. Robertson styles it, of the Twelve Apostles. Needless to say,
-Mr. Robertson and his friends regard the Gospel story of their choice
-and mission as a fable. But they have the bad grace to turn up afresh
-in Paul's Epistles. Away with them, therefore, exclaims Mr. Robertson;
-and his friends echo his cry.
-
-"In the documents from which all scientific study of Christian origins
-must proceed--the Epistles of Paul--there is no evidence of such a
-body" (Christianity and Mythology, p. 341).
-
-In the passage in which the Twelve are mentioned (1 Cor. xv,
-3 foll.) we are further instructed "there is one interpolation on
-another." It does not in the least matter that the passage stands in
-every manuscript, and in every ancient version and commentator. It
-offends Mr. Robertson and his friends; so we must cut it out. Bos
-locutus est; and he complacently sums up his argument (p. 342) in
-the words: "Paul, then, knew nothing of a 'twelve.'"
-
-[Difficulties about Judas] And yet he notes (p. 354) that in the
-fragments of the Peter Gospel recently recovered from the sands of
-Egypt, Jesus is still credited with twelve disciples immediately
-after the crucifixion, and it is therein related that they "wept and
-grieved" at the loss of their master. No hint, Mr. Robertson justly
-remarks, is here given of the defection of Judas from the group. No
-more is any hint given of it in Paul's Epistle. These two sources,
-therefore, support each other in a most unexpected manner in ignoring
-the Judas story. At the same time twelve disciples or apostles (in the
-context they are the same thing) are incredible as an interpolation;
-for an interpolator would have adjusted his interpolation to the early
-diffused story of Judas's treason, and have written not "the Twelve,"
-but "the Eleven."
-
-Mr. Robertson admits that "at the stage of the composition of this (the
-Peter) Gospel, the Judas myth was not current," and that therefore the
-"Judas myth" is later than that of the Twelve. It must, by parity
-of reasoning, be later than the text of Paul, which, therefore,
-if interpolated, must have been interpolated before the legend,
-if such it be, of Judas the traitor got abroad. Now we already meet
-with this legend in Mark, and it is taken over from him by the other
-evangelists, Matthew embellishing it with the tale of Judas hanging
-himself, and Luke in Acts with that of his bursting asunder. Papias,
-before A.D. 140, knew of further details of Judas's story of a most
-macabre kind; the story stood also in the lost form of gospel used by
-Celsus, about 160-180, against whom Origen wrote. The tale of Judas,
-then, was of wide and early diffusion; yet Mr. Robertson, as we have
-seen, admits that at the time when the Peter Gospel emerged the Judas
-myth was not yet abroad. Neither, then, can it have been current at the
-stage of the interpolating of Paul's Epistle, and this interpolation,
-therefore, is prior to all the Gospels, to Acts, and to the sources
-used by Papias and by the authors of the Peter Gospel and of Celsus's
-Gospel. Nevertheless, on p. 357, Mr. Robertson, as a last method of
-avoiding Paul's testimony on another point, is inclined to "decide
-with Van Manen that all the Pauline Epistles are pseudepigraphic," and
-merely express the views of "second-century Christian champions." He
-therefore commits himself to the supposition that Epistles forged
-not earlier than A.D. 130, were yet interpolated in the interests
-of a tradition in which "the Twelve are treated as holding together
-after the resurrection (p. 354)," which tradition, however, must have
-long before that date been abrogated by the growing popularity of the
-Judas myth. Could texts be treated with greater levity? I may also
-note that the inconsistency of Paul's statement that Jesus "was seen"
-by the Twelve with the Judas story was so patent to scribes of the
-third and fourth centuries that they had already begun to alter it
-in the Greek texts and versions to the statement that "he was seen by
-the Eleven." Now is it likely that Paul's text at any time would have
-been interpolated in such a way as to make it contradict so early
-and popular a Christian belief as that in the treason and hurried
-suicide of Judas? The hypothesis is absurd, and not the less absurd
-because it is framed merely to save the other hypothesis that the
-twelve apostles of the Gospels were for the authors of the Gospels
-and for their readers an allegory of the twelve signs of the Zodiac
-revolving round the solar myth Joshua. Such are the lengths to which
-the exigencies of his "mythic" system drive Mr. Robertson.
-
-[Paul testifies that the older apostles conversed with Jesus] Some
-texts which imply that Paul, if he did not actually see Jesus walking
-about on this earth, yet imply that he might have done so, he seems
-to despair of, and passes them over in silence. Such is the text,
-2 Cor. v, 16: "Wherefore we henceforth know no man after the flesh:
-even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know
-him so no more."
-
-The older apostles, as is implied in verse 12 of the same chapter,
-prided themselves on their personal intercourse with Jesus, and
-twitted Paul with never having enjoyed it. Paul's answer is that
-henceforth--i.e., now that he is converted--he has no interest in any
-man, not even in Jesus, as a being of flesh and blood, but only as a
-vessel filled with the spirit of election, and so a new creature in
-Christ, the first member of the heavenly kingdom on earth. He seems
-to aver that he had actually seen his Redeemer in the flesh, but
-before he was converted. But such knowledge with him counts nothing
-in his own favour; nor will he allow it to count in favour of the
-older apostles. Their association with Jesus in the flesh failed to
-render them apostles in any other sense than his vision of the risen
-Jesus rendered him one also.
-
-But there are other texts in Paul most inconvenient to the zodiacal
-theory of the apostles. Such are the texts I have cited from
-Galatians. How does Mr. Robertson get rid of their evidence?
-
-[Epistle to Galatians attests reality of Peter, John, and James]
-He begins (p. 342) with the usual caveat that the Epistle to the
-Galatians is probably not genuine, and, even if it be, is nevertheless
-"frequently interpolated." And yet any reader, with eyes in his head
-and an intelligence behind them, must recognize in this Epistle a
-writing which, above all other ancient writings, rings true, and
-is instinct with the personality of a missionary, who in it bares
-his inmost heart to his converts. Against this impression, which
-it must leave upon anyone but a pedant, and against the fact that
-in the external tradition there is nothing to suggest either that
-it is not genuine or that it is a mass of interpolations, what has
-Mr. Robertson to offer us in support of his thesis? Nothing, except
-his ipse dixit. We are to accept on a purely philological question the
-verdict of one whose mythological equations are on a par with those
-of the editors of the Banner of Israel. However, he does condescend to
-explain away the apostles with whom, at Jerusalem, Paul held personal
-converse; and, taking from Professor W. B. Smith a cue, which is also
-caught at by Professor Drews, he assures us that the Peter (or Cephas),
-James, and John, whom Paul knew personally, were not men who had been
-"in direct intercourse with Jesus," but were merely "leaders of an
-existing sect"--i.e., of the secret sect of Jews who, after celebrating
-endless ritual dramas of annually slain Joshuas and vegetation-gods,
-had, by dint of prolonged archaeological study of pagan mythology, art,
-and statuary, elaborated the four Gospels, adopted the Old Testament
-as their holy scripture, and Messianic Judaism as their distinctive
-creed; for such in essence the Christianity of the last half of the
-first century was, as even Mr. Robertson will hardly deny.
-
-But Paul (Gal. i, 18, 19) expressly ranks Peter, or Cephas, together
-with James, among the apostles, using that word in a wide sense of
-persons commissioned by Jesus; and he describes James and Cephas and
-John (ii, 9) as men "who were reputed to be pillars," or leading men
-of the Church. He declares that in the end they made friends with him,
-and arranged that he should preach the Kingdom to the uncircumcised
-Gentiles as they were doing to the circumcised Jews.
-
-[The "Twelve" were apostles of the Jewish High Priest!] Now who had
-commissioned these three apostles, if not Jesus? Who had taught them
-about the Kingdom and sent them forth to proclaim it? Mr. Robertson,
-oddly enough, scents a difficulty in the idea of a Sun-God-Saviour
-Joshua, albeit son of Miriam a virgin, sending forth apostles; so
-he decides that "apostles" in Galatians means "the twelve apostles
-of the Patriarch, of whom he must have had knowledge" (p. 342). Of
-what Patriarch? Why, of course, "of the Patriarch or High Priest,"
-whose "twelve apostles" formed "an institution which preceded and
-survived the beginning of the Christian era" (p. 344). And, to use
-Mr. Robertson's own phrase in such connections, "the plot thickens"
-when we find (ibid.) that
-
-
-    the twelve Jewish Apostles aforesaid, who were commissioned by the
-    High Priest--and later by the Patriarch at Tiberias--to collect
-    tribute from the scattered faithful,
-
-
-were no others than the Twelve Apostles who wrote the [And they wrote
-the Didache!] "teaching of the Twelve Apostles," recovered in 1873
-by Bryennios! These "Judaizing apostles preached circumcision,"
-[32] and "were among the leaders of the Jesuist community in its
-pre-Pauline days."
-
-This discovery of Mr. Robertson's is of stupendous interest. It
-amounts to nothing less than this: that the pre-Pauline secret sect of
-"Jesuists" which kept up in Jerusalem the cult of the Sun-God-Saviour
-Joshua, with his late Persian appendage of a virgin mother Miriam;
-and, not content with doing that, padded it out with ritual dramas
-of vegetation-gods, cults of Osiris, of Dionysus, Proteus, Hermes,
-Janus, and fifty other gods and heroes (whose legends Mr. Robertson
-has studied in Smith's Dictionary of Mythology)--this sect, I say,
-had for its president the Jewish High Priest, and for its "pillars"
-the apostles, or messengers, whom the said High Priest was in the
-habit of sending out to the Jews of the Dispersion for the collection
-of the Temple tribute!
-
-This High Priest, we further learn on p. 342, was the "man" who sent
-out the apostles in the first verse of Galatians, from which apostles
-Paul expressly dissociates himself when he writes: "Paul, an apostle,
-not from men, neither through a man, but through Jesus Christ." Here
-we are to understand that Paul is pitting his Sun-God-Saviour Joshua
-against the Jewish High Priest. The Sun-god has sent him forth, though
-not the other apostles. That must be Mr. Robertson's interpretation,
-and we must give up the older and more obvious one which saw in
-the words "not from men, neither through man," no reference to a
-Jewish high priest or priests, but a mere enhancement of the claim,
-ever reiterated by Paul, that he owed his apostleship direct to the
-risen Jesus Christ and God the Father; so that he held a divine and
-spiritual, not an earthly and carnal, commission.
-
-My readers must by now feel very much like poor little Alice when
-the Black Queen was dragging her across Wonderland. If they find the
-sensation delightful, they can, I daresay, enjoy plenty more of it by
-a closer study of Mr. Robertson's books on the subject. If they do
-not like it, then they must not blame me for taking him seriously;
-for is he not acclaimed by Dr. Drews as our greatest exegete of the
-New Testament, Dr. Frazer alone excepted? Is he not the spiritual
-guide of learned German orientalists like Winckler and Jensen? Has
-not Professor W. B. Smith assured us of how much he feels he can
-learn from such a scholar and thinker, though "he has preferred not
-to poach on his preserves." [33] It is, therefore, incumbent on me
-to probe his work a little further. Let us return to the passage, 1
-Cor. xv, 5, where we are told that Jesus appeared first to Cephas. We
-have already seen that the Peter of the Gospels is in this new system
-alternately a sign of the Zodiac, a Mithraic myth, an alias of Janus,
-of Proteus, a member of any other Pantheon you like. Obviously he has
-nothing to do with Paul's acquaintance. The latter in turn is "not one
-of the pupils and companions of the crucified Jesus" (p. 348). How,
-indeed, could he be, seeing that Jesus is a Sun-god crucified upon
-the Milky Way? No, he is something much humbler--to wit, "simply one
-of the apostles of a Judaic cult that preaches circumcision," and,
-more definitely, as we have seen, one of the twelve apostles of the
-Jewish High Priest. James and John must equally have belonged to this
-interesting band of apostles.
-
-[Jesus of Nazareth was Jesus Ben Pandira,] This being so, it is
-pertinent to ask why Paul so persistently indicates that these apostles
-and pillars of the Church had seen Jesus and conversed with him in
-the flesh. To this question Mr. Robertson attempts no answer. For
-he believes that the crucified Jesus, to whom Paul refers on every
-page of his Epistles, was not the Jesus of Christian tradition,
-but "Jesus Ben Pandira, dead long before, and represented by no
-preserved biography or teachings whatever" (p. 378). This Jesus had
-"really been only hanged on a tree" (ibid.); but "the factors of
-a crucifixion myth," among which we must not forget its "phallic
-significance," for that "should connect with all its other aspects"
-(p. 375),--these factors, says Mr. Robertson, "were conceivably strong
-enough to turn the hanging into a crucifixion."
-
-[who had died one hundred years before] It follows that Paul was quite
-mistaken in indicating the apostles whom he conversed with at Jerusalem
-to be apostles of the crucified one; in order to be so, they must all
-have been over-ripe centenarians, since Pandira had died at least a
-hundred years before. It matters nothing that on the next page (379)
-Mr. Robertson entertains doubts as to whether this worthy ever lived
-at all. Who else, he asks (p. 364), could "the Pauline Jesus, who has
-taught nothing and done nothing," be, save "a doctrinal evolution from
-the Jesus of a hundred years before?" We must, he adds with delightful
-ignoratio elenchi, "perforce assume such a long evolution." Otherwise
-it would not be "intelligible that, even if he had been only hanged
-after stoning, he should by that time have come to figure mythically as
-crucified." He admits that Paul's "references to a crucified Jesus are
-constant, and offer no sign of interpolation." And he is quite ready
-to admit also that, "if the Jesus of Paul were really a personage
-put to death under Pontius Pilate, the Epistles (of Paul) would give
-us the strongest ground for accepting an actual crucifixion." But,
-alas, the Jesus put to death under Pontius Pilate, the Javelin-man,
-is no more than an allegory of Joshua the ancient Palestinian Sun-god,
-rolled up with a vegetation-god and other mythical beings, and slain
-afresh once a year. There is thus no alternative left but to identify
-Paul's crucified Jesus with Jesus Ben Pandira; and Mr. Robertson,
-with a sigh of relief, embraces the alternative, for he feels that
-Paul's evidence is menacing his whole structure.
-
-It was nasty of Paul not to indicate more clearly to us that by
-his crucified Jesus he intended Jesus Ben Pandira; and, in view of
-the circumstance that we have left to us no "biography or teachings
-whatever" of this Jesus, Paul might surely have communicated to us
-some details of his career. It would have saved Mr. Robertson the
-trouble of inventing them.
-
-[James, brother of Jesus, only in a Pickwickian sense] At first
-sight, too, it was extremely inconsiderate of Paul to "thicken the
-plot" by bringing on his stage a brother of Jesus Ben Pandira or
-of the solar myth Joshua. I am not sure which. But Mr. Robertson,
-like Alice, is out for strange adventures, and prepared to face any
-emergency. "Brother," therefore, is here to be taken in a Pickwickian
-sense only. And here we will let Dr. W. B. Smith take up the parable,
-for it is he who has, with the help of St. Jerome, found his friends
-a way out of their difficulty. Moreover, he is more in need of a way
-out than even Mr. Robertson; for he declines to admit behind Jesus of
-Nazareth even--what Mr. Robertson styles, p. 364--"a Talmudic trace of
-a Jesus (Ben Pandira), who was put to death on the eve of the Passover
-about a century before the time of Pontius Pilate." Professor Smith
-cannot hesitate, therefore, to be of opinion that, when Paul calls
-James a brother of the Lord, he does not "imply any family kinship,"
-but one of a "class of earnest Messianists, zealots of obedience"
-to the Mosaic Law. He appeals in confirmation of his conjecture to
-the apostrophe of Jesus when his mother and brethren came to arrest
-him as an ecstatic (Mark iii, 31-35):--
-
-
-    Who is my mother and my brethren? ... whosoever shall do the will
-    of God, the same is my brother and sister and mother.
-
-
-He also appeals to 1 Cor. ix, 5, where Paul alludes to "the brethren
-of the Lord" as claiming a right to lead about a wife that is a
-sister. And he argues that those who in Corinth, to the imperilling
-of Christian unity, said, some, "I am of Cephas"; others, "I am of
-Christ"; others, "I am of Apollos," were known as brethren of Christ,
-of Cephas, etc. Now it is true that Paul and other early Christian
-writers regarded the members of the Church as brethren or as sisters,
-just as the members of monastic society have ever styled themselves
-brothers and sisters of one another. But there is no example of a
-believer being called a brother of the Lord or of Jesus. [34] The
-passage in Mark and its parallels are, according to Professor Smith,
-purely legendary and allegorical, since he denies that Jesus ever
-lived; and he has no right, therefore, to appeal to them in order to
-decide what Paul intended by the phrase when he used it, as before,
-not of a mythical, but of a concrete, case. However, if Professor
-Smith is intent on appealing to the Gospels, then he must allow equal
-weight to such a text as Matthew xiii, 55: "Is not this the carpenter's
-son? Is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren, James and Joseph
-and Simon and Judas? And his sisters, are they not all with us?"
-
-Did all these people, we may ask, including his mother, stand in a
-merely spiritual relationship to Jesus? Impossible. If they were not
-flesh and blood relations, then the passage is meaningless even as
-allegorical romance. Again, in the very passage to which Professor
-Smith appeals (Mark iii, 31-35), we read that his mother and brethren
-came and stood without, and it was their interference with him that
-provoked the famous apostrophe. Were they, too, only spiritually
-related to him? Were they, too, "earnest Messianists, zealots of
-obedience"? In John's Gospel we hear afresh that his brethren believed
-not in him. Were they, too, mere "earnest Messianists, zealots of
-obedience"? When Josephus, again, alludes to "James the Just who was
-brother of Jesus," is he, an enemy of the Christian faith, adopting
-Christian slang? Does he, too, mean merely to "denote religious
-relation without the remotest hint of blood kinship"? In 1 Cor. ix,
-5, the most natural interpretation is that the brothers of the Lord
-are his real brothers, whose names are supplied in the Gospels.
-
-[Both in Paul and in the Gospels the "myth" has parents and brothers
-and sisters] Here, then, are four wholly independent groups of ancient
-documents, of which one gives us the names of four of the brothers of
-Jesus, clearly indicating that they were real brothers, and sons of
-Mary and the Carpenter; while the other group (the Paulines) speak
-as ever of his "brothers," but give us the name of one only, James;
-the third--viz., the works of Josephus--allude to one only--viz.,
-James, but without indicating that there were not several. Lastly,
-the we document (Acts xxi, 18) testifies that "Paul went in with us
-unto James." Is not this enough? Surely, if we were here treating of
-profane history, no sane student would for a moment hesitate to accept
-such data, furnished by wholly independent and coincident documents,
-as historical. Professor Smith's other guess, that in 1 Cor. ix,
-5, brethren means spiritual brethren, just begs the question, and,
-like his spiritual interpretation of James's relationship, offends
-Greek idiom, as I said above. Paul, like the author of Acts xxi, 17,
-speaks of "the brother" or of "the brethren"--e.g., in 1 Cor. viii,
-11: "the brother for whose sake Christ died"; but when the person
-whose brother it is is named, a blood relationship is always conveyed
-in the Paulines as in the rest of the New Testament. If "brethren
-of the Lord" in 1 Cor. ix, 5, does not mean real brethren, why are
-they distinguished from all the apostles, who on Professor Smith's
-assumption, above all others, merited to be called "brethren of the
-Lord"? The appeal, moreover, to 1 Cor. i, 12 foll., is absurd; for
-Paul is alluding there to factions among the believers of Corinth;
-how is it possible to interpret these factions as brotherhoods? There
-was only one brotherhood of the faithful, according to Paul's ideal;
-and the relationship involved in such phrases as "I of Cephas," "I of
-Paul," is that of a convert to his teacher and evangelist, not that of
-spiritual brethren to each other. As used by his Corinthian converts,
-such phrases were a direct menace to spiritual brotherhood and unity,
-and not an expression of it; and that is why Paul wished to hear no
-more of them. When he makes appeal to them Professor Smith damages
-rather than benefits his argument.
-
-[Jerome's opinion about Jesus's brothers] There remains the appeal
-to Jerome (Ecce Deus, p. 237):--
-
-
-    No less an authority than Jerome has expressed the correct idea
-    on this point. In commenting on Gal. i, 19, he says (in sum):
-    "James was called the Lord's brother on account of his high
-    character, his incomparable faith, and his extraordinary wisdom;
-    the other apostles are also called brothers" (John xx, 17).
-
-
-Here Professor Smith withholds from his readers the fact that Jerome
-regarded James the brother of Jesus as his first cousin. It is just as
-difficult for a mythical personage to have a first cousin as to have
-a brother. Moreover, the reasons which actuated Jerome to deny that
-Jesus had real brethren was--as the Encyclopaedia Biblica (art. James)
-points out--"a prepossession in favour of the perpetual virginity
-of Mary the mother of Jesus." It is, indeed, a hollow theory that,
-in order to its justification, must take refuge in the Encratite
-rubbish of Jerome.
-
-[Mutual independence of Pauline and Gospel stories of the risen Christ]
-If the crucified Jesus of Paul was Jesus Ben Pandira, stoned to death
-and hanged on a tree between the years B.C. 106-79, then how can Paul
-have written (1 Cor. xv, 6) that the greater part of the 500 brethren
-to whom Jesus appeared were still alive? I neither assert nor deny
-the possibility of so many at once having fallen under the spell of a
-common illusion, though I believe the annals of religious ecstasy might
-afford parallels. But this I do maintain, that the passage records a
-conviction in Paul's mind that Jesus, after his death by crucifixion,
-had appeared to many at once, and that not a hundred years before,
-but at a comparatively recent time. That is also Mr. Robertson's view;
-for, rather than face the passage, he whips out his knife and cuts it
-out of the text. Yet there is not a single reason for doing so, except
-that it upsets his hypothesis; for the circumstance that the incident
-cannot be reconciled with the Gospel stories of the apparitions of
-the risen Christ clearly shows that Paul's text is independent on
-them. Mr. Robertson argues that, if it were not a late interpolation,
-the evangelists would have found it in Paul and incorporated it in
-their Gospels. I ask in turn, why did the interpolator thrust into
-the Pauline letter not only this passage, but at least two other
-incidents (the apparitions to Peter and James) which figure in no
-canonical Gospel? Why, if the Evangelists were bound to consult the
-Paulines in giving an account of these posthumous appearances, was
-not the hypothetical interpolator of the Paulines equally bound to
-consult them? The most natural hypothesis is that the Gospels on one
-side and the Pauline Epistles on the other led independent lives,
-till their respective traditions were so firmly fixed that no one
-could tamper with either of them. The conflict, therefore, such as
-it is, between this Pauline passage and the Gospels is the strongest
-possible proof of its genuineness.
-
-[The Pauline account of the Eucharist] Mr. Robertson's treatment of the
-Pauline description of the origin of the Lord's Supper as described in
-1 Cor. xi, 23-27, is another example of his determination simply to
-rule out all evidence which he cannot explain away. "It is evident,"
-he writes (p. 347), that this whole passage, "or at least the first
-part of it, is an interpolation." We would expect him to produce
-support for this view from some MS. or ancient version for what is so
-evident. Not at all; for he takes no interest in, and has no turn for,
-the scientific criticism of texts a posteriori, but deals with them by
-a priori intuitions of his own. "The passage in question (verses 23,
-24, 25) has every appearance of being an interpolation." He is the
-first to discover such an appearance. It is well known that the words
-"took bread" as far as "in my blood" recur in Luke xxii, 19, 20; and
-this is how Mr. Robertson deals with the problem of their recurrence:
-"No one pretends that the Third Gospel was in existence in Paul's
-time; and the only question is whether Luke copied the Epistle or a
-late copyist supplemented the Epistle from Luke."
-
-Surely there is another alternative--viz., that a copyist of Luke
-supplemented the Gospel from Paul. This is as conceivable as that
-a copyist of Paul supplemented the Epistle from Luke. It is also an
-hypothesis that has textual evidence in favour of it; for the Bezan
-Codex and several old Latin MSS., as well as the old Syriac version,
-omit the words, which is given on your behalf, as far as on your behalf
-is shed--that is to say, the end of verse 19 and the whole of verse
-20. But, since the Bezan omission does not cover the whole of the
-matter taken from Corinthians, we may suppose that Luke borrowed the
-words from the Epistle in question. Here we have a palmary example of
-the mingled temerity and ignorance with which Mr. Robertson applies
-his principle of "vital interpolations" to remove anything from
-the New Testament texts which stands in the way of his far-fetched
-hypotheses and artificial combinations.
-
-[Jesus Ben Pandira in Talmud is Jesus of Nazareth] But it is
-time to inquire whence Mr. Robertson derived his certainty
-that Jesus Ben Pandira died in the reign of Alexander Jannaeus,
-B.C. 106-79. Dr. Samuel Kraus, in his exhaustive study of Talmudic
-notices of Jesus of Nazareth (Das Leben Jesu nach juedischen Quellen,
-Berlin, 1902, p. 242) assumes as a fact beyond dispute that the
-Jeschu or Joshua Ben Pandira (or Ben Stada or Ben Satda) mentioned
-in the Toldoth Jeschu is Jesus of Nazareth. In the Toldoth he is set
-in the reign of Tiberius. This Toldoth is not earlier than A.D. 400,
-and took its information from the pseudo-Hegesippus. The Spanish
-historian Abraham b. Daud (about A.D. 1100) already noticed that
-the Talmudic tradition alluded to by Mr. Robertson set the birth of
-Jesus of Nazareth a hundred years too early; but the same tradition
-corrects itself in that it assigns Salome Alexandra to Alexander
-Jannai as his wife, and then, confusing her with Queen Helena the
-proselyte, brings the incident down to the right date. "The truth is,"
-says Dr. Kraus (p. 183), "we have got to do here with a chronological
-error." Lightfoot, to whose Horae Hebraicae Mr. Robertson refers in his
-footnote (p. 363), also assumed that by Jesus Ben Pandira, or son of
-Panthera, the Talmudists intended Jesus of Nazareth. Celsus (about
-A.D. 170) attested a Jewish tradition that Jesus Christ was Mary's
-son by a Roman soldier named Panthera, and later on even Christian
-writers worked Panthera into Mary's pedigree. Such is the origin of the
-Talmudic tradition exploited by Mr. Robertson. It is almost worthless;
-but, so far as it goes, it overthrows Mr. Robertson's hypothesis.
-
-[The disputed Epistles of Paul so many fresh witnesses] The Epistles
-to Colossians, Thessalonians, and the so-called Pastorals, if they are
-not genuine works of Paul, form so many fresh witnesses against the
-hypothesis of Mr. Robertson and his friends. Such a verse as Col. ii,
-14, where in highly metaphorical language Jesus is said to have
-nailed the bond of all our trespasses to the cross, is an unmistakable
-allusion to the historical crucifixion; as also is the phrase "blood of
-his cross" in the same epistle, i, 20. In 1 Thess. iv, 14, is attested
-the belief that Jesus died and rose again; and again in v, 10. I have
-already indicated the express reference to the crucifixion under
-Pontius Pilate in 1 Tim. v, 13, and the statement in 2 Tim. ii, 8,
-that Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, was of the seed of David. These
-epistles may not be from Paul's hand, but they are unmistakably early;
-and their forgers, if they be forged, undoubtedly held that Jesus had
-really lived. So also did the author, whoever he was, of Hebrews,
-who speaks, ch. ii, 9, of Jesus suffering death, in ii, 18, of his
-"having suffered, being tempted." In vii, 14, we read this: "For it
-is evident that our Lord hath sprung out of Judah." If Jesus was only
-a myth, how could this writer have written, probably before A.D. 70,
-that he was of the tribe of Judah? In ch. xii, 2, we are told that
-Jesus "endured the cross." That this epistle was penned before the
-destruction of Jerusalem by Titus is made probable by the statement
-in ix, 8, that "the first tabernacle is yet standing." Indeed, most
-of the epistle is turned into nonsense by any other hypothesis.
-
-[Catholic Epistles] The first Epistle of Peter is very likely
-pseudepigraphic, but it cannot be later than the year 100. It
-testifies, iv, 1, that Christ "suffered in the flesh."
-
-The Johannine Epistles are probably from the same hand as the Fourth
-Gospel, and belong to the period 90-110 A.D. Their author insists
-(1 John iv, 2), as against the Docetes, that "Jesus Christ is come
-in the flesh."
-
-The Epistle of Jude, about the same date, exhorts those to whom it
-was addressed to "remember the words which have been spoken before
-by the Apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ."
-
-[Book of Revelation] Lastly, the Revelation of John can be definitely
-dated about A.D. 93. It testifies to the existence of several churches
-in Asia Minor in that age, and, in spite of the fanciful and oriental
-character of its imagery, it is from beginning to end irreconcilable
-with the supposition that its author did not believe in a Jesus who
-had lived, died, and was coming again to establish the new Jerusalem
-on earth. In ch. xxii, 16, Jesus is made to testify that he is the
-root and offspring of David. That does not look as if its author
-regarded Jesus as a solar or any other sort of myth.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER V
-
-EXTERNAL EVIDENCE
-
-
-[Evidence of Josephus] It remains to examine how this school
-of writers handle the evidence with regard to the earliest
-church supplied by Jewish or Pagan writers. I have said enough
-incidentally of the evidence of the Talmud and Toldoth Jeschu, but
-there remains that of Josephus. In the work on the Antiquities of
-the Jews, Bk. xviii, 5, 2 (116 foll.), there is an account of John
-the Baptist, and it is narrated that Herod, fearing an insurrection
-of John's followers, threw him in bonds into the castle of Machaerus,
-and there murdered him. Afterwards, when Herod's army was destroyed,
-the Jewish population attributed the disaster to the wrath of God,
-and saw in it a retribution for slaying so just a man. [35] On the
-whole, Josephus's account accords with the picture we have of John
-in the Synoptic Gospels, except that in the Gospels the place and
-circumstances of his murder are differently given. This difference is
-good evidence that Josephus's account is independent of the Christian
-sources. Nevertheless, Dr. Drews airily pretends that there is a
-strong suspicion of its being a forgery by some Christian hand. As
-for John the Baptist as we meet him in the Gospels, he is, says Drews,
-no historical personage. One expects some reason to be given for this
-negative conclusion, but gets none whatever except a magnificent hint
-that "a complete understanding of the baptism in the Jordan can only
-be attained, if here, too, we take into consideration the translation
-of the baptism into astrological terms" (Christ Myth, p. 121).
-
-[The astral John Baptist] And he proceeds to dilate on the thesis that
-the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan was "the reflection upon earth of
-what originally took place among the stars." This discovery rests
-on an equation--pre-philological, of course, like that of "Maria"
-with "Myrrha"--of the name "John" or "Jehohanan" with "Oannes" or
-"Ea," the Babylonian Water-god. However, this writer is here not a
-little incoherent, for only on the page before he has assured us,
-as of something unquestionable, that John was closely related to the
-Essenes, and baptized the penitents in the Jordan in the open air. Was
-Jordan, too, up in heaven? Were the Essenes there also? Mr. Robertson,
-of course, pursues the same simple method of disposing of adverse
-evidence, and asserts (p. 396) that Josephus's account of John "is
-plainly open to that suspicion of interpolation which, in the case
-of the allusion to Jesus in the same book (Antiq., xviii, 3, 3),
-has become for most critics a certainty." He does not condescend
-to inform his readers that the latter passage [36] is absent from
-important MSS., was unknown to Origen, and is therefore rightly
-bracketed by editors; whereas the account of John is in all MSS.,
-and was known to Origen. But as we have seen before, Mr. Robertson is
-one of those gifted people who can discern by peculiar intuitions of
-their own that everything is interpolated in an author which offends
-their prejudices. He has a lofty contempt for the careful sifting of
-the textual tradition, the examination of MSS. and ancient versions
-to which a scholar resorts, before he condemns a passage of an ancient
-author as an interpolation. Moreover, a scholar feels himself bound to
-show why a passage was interpolated, in whose interests. For, regarded
-as an interpolation, a passage is as much a problem to him as it was
-before. Its genesis has still to be explained. But Messrs. Robertson
-and Drews and Smith do not condescend to explain anything or give
-any reasons. A passage slays their theories; therefore it is a "vital
-interpolation." It is the work of an ancient enemy sowing tares amid
-their wheat.
-
-[Josephus's reference to James, brother of Jesus] John the Baptist
-having been removed in this cavalier fashion from the pages of
-Josephus, we can hardly expect James the brother of Jesus to be left,
-and he is accordingly kicked out without ceremony. It does not matter
-a scrap that the passage (Antiquities xx, 9, 1, 200) stands in the
-Greek MSS. and in the Latin Version. As Professor W. B. Smith's
-argument on the point is representative of this class of critics,
-we must let him speak first (p. 235):--
-
-
-    Origen thrice quotes as from Josephus the statement that the
-    Jewish sufferings at the hands of Titus were a divine retribution
-    for the slaying of James.
-
-
-He then proceeds to quote the text of Origen, Against Celsus, i, 47,
-giving the reference, but mangling in the most extraordinary manner
-a text that is clear and consecutive. For Origen begins (ch. xlvii)
-by saying that Celsus "somehow accepted John as a Baptist who baptized
-Jesus," and then adds the following:--
-
-
-    In the Eighteenth Book of his Antiquities of the Jews Josephus
-    bears witness to John as having been a Baptist, and as promising
-    purification to those who underwent the rite. Now this writer,
-    although not believing in Jesus as the Christ, in seeking after the
-    cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple,
-    whereas he ought to have said that the conspiracy against Jesus was
-    the cause of these calamities befalling the people since they put
-    to death Christ, who was a prophet, says, nevertheless--although
-    against his will, not far from the truth--that these disasters
-    happened to the Jews as a punishment for the death of James the
-    Just, who was a brother of Jesus called Christ, the Jews having
-    put him to death, although he was a man most distinguished for
-    his righteousness (i.e., strict observance of the law).
-
-
-In a later passage of the same treatise (ii, 13), which Mr. Smith cites
-correctly, Origen refers again to the same passage of the Antiquities
-(xx, 200) thus: "Titus demolished Jerusalem, as Josephus writes,
-on account of James the Just, the brother of Jesus, the so-called
-Christ." Also in Origen's commentary on Matthew xiii, 55, we have a
-like statement that the sufferings of the Jews were a punishment for
-the murder of James the Just.
-
-Origen therefore cites Josephus thrice about James, and in each
-case he has in mind the same passage--viz., xx, 200. But Mr. Smith,
-after citing the shorter passage, Contra Celsum, ii, 13, goes on
-as follows:--
-
-
-    The passage is still found in some Josephus manuscripts; but,
-    as it is wanting in others, it is, and must be, regarded as a
-    Christian interpolation older than Origen.
-
-
-Will Mr. Smith kindly tell us which are the MSS. in which are found
-any passage or passages referring the fall of Jerusalem to the death of
-James, and so far contradicting Josephus's interpretation of Ananus's
-death in the History of the Jewish War, iv, 5, 2. Niese, the latest
-editor, knows of none, nor did any previous editor know of any.
-
-Mr. Smith then proceeds thus:--
-
-
-    Now, since this phrase is certainly interpolated in the one place,
-    the only reasonable conclusion is that it is interpolated in
-    the other.
-
-
-But "this phrase" never stood in Josephus at all, even as an
-interpolation, and on examination it turns out that Professor Smith's
-prejudice against the passage in which Josephus mentions James, is
-merely based on the muddle committed by Origen. Such are the arguments
-by which he seeks to prove that Josephus's text was interpolated by
-a Christian, as if a Christian interpolator, supposing there had
-been one (and he has left no trace of himself), would not, as the
-protest of Origen sufficiently indicates, have represented the fall of
-Jerusalem as a divine punishment, not for the slaying of James, but
-for the slaying of Jesus. Having demolished the evidence of Josephus
-in such a manner, Mr. Smith heads ten of his pages with the words,
-"The Silence of Josephus," as if he had settled all doubts for ever
-by mere force of his erroneous ipse dixit.
-
-[The testimony of Tacitus] The next section of Professor Smith's work
-(Ecce Deus) is headed with the same effrontery of calm assertion:
-"The Silence of Tacitus." This historian relates (Annals, xv, 44)
-that Nero accused the Christians of having burned down Rome. Nero
-
-
-    subjected to most exquisite tortures those whom, hated for
-    their crimes, the populace called Chrestians. The author of this
-    name, Christus, had been executed in the reign of Tiberius by
-    the Procurator Pontius Pilate; and, though repressed for the
-    moment, the pernicious superstition was breaking forth again,
-    not only throughout Judaea, the fountain-head of this mischief,
-    but also throughout the capital, where all things from anywhere
-    that are horrible or disgraceful pour in together and are made
-    a religion of.
-
-
-In the sequel Tacitus describes how an immense multitude, less for the
-crime of incendiarism than in punishment of their hatred of humanity,
-were convicted; how some were clothed in skins of wild beasts and
-thrown to dogs, while others were crucified or burned alive. Nero's
-savagery was such that it awoke the pity even of a Roman crowd for
-his victims.
-
-Such a passage as the above, written by Tacitus soon after A.D. 100, is
-somewhat disconcerting to our authors. Professor Smith, proceeding on
-his usual innocent assumption that the whole of the ancient literature,
-Christian and profane, of this epoch lies before him, instead of a
-scanty debris of it, votes it to be a forgery. Why? Because Melito,
-Bishop of Sardis about 170 A.D., is the first writer who alludes to
-it in a fragment of an apology addressed to a Roman Emperor. As if
-there were not five hundred striking episodes narrated by Tacitus,
-yet never mentioned by any subsequent writer at all. Would Mr. Smith
-on that account dispute their authenticity? It is only because this
-episode concerns Christianity and gets in the way of his theories,
-that he finds it necessary to cut it out of the text. You can prove
-anything if you cook your evidence, and the wanton mutilation of
-texts which no critical historian has ever called in question is a
-flagrant form of such cookery. In the hands of these writers facts
-are made to fit theory, not theory to fit facts.
-
-[Testimony of Clement agrees with Tacitus] I hardly need add that
-the narrative of Tacitus is frank, straightforward, and in keeping
-with all we know or can infer in regard to Christianity in that
-epoch. Mr. E. G. Hardy, in his valuable book Christianity and the Roman
-Government (London, 1894, p. 70), has pointed out that "the mode of
-punishment was that prescribed for those convicted of magic," and that
-Suetonius uses the term malefica of the new religion--a term which has
-this special sense. Magicians, moreover, in the code of Justinian,
-which here as often reflects a much earlier age, are declared to be
-"enemies of the human race." Nor is it true that Nero's persecution
-as recorded in Tacitus is mentioned by no writer before Melito. It
-is practically certain that Clement, writing about A.D. 95, refers to
-it. He records that a poly plethos, or vast multitude of Christians,
-the ingens multitudo of Tacitus, perished in connection with the
-martyrdom of Peter and Paul. He speaks of the manifold insults and
-torments of men, the terrible and unholy outrages upon women, in
-terms that answer exactly to the two phrases of Tacitus: pereuntibus
-addita ludibria and quaesitissimae poenae. Women, he implies, were,
-"like Dirce, fastened on the horns of bulls, or, after figuring as
-Danaides in the arena, were exposed to the attacks of wild beasts"
-(Hardy, op. cit., p. 72). [Drews on Poggio's interpolations of Tacitus]
-However, Drews is not content with merely ousting the passage from
-Tacitus, but undertakes to explain to his readers how it got there. It
-was, he conjectures, made up out of a similar passage read in the
-Chronicle of Sulpicius Severus (written about 407) by some clever
-forger, probably Poggio, who smuggled it into the text of Tacitus, "a
-writer whose text is full of interpolations." It is hardly necessary
-to inform an educated reader, firstly, that the text of Tacitus is
-recognized by all competent Latin scholars to be remarkably free from
-interpolations; secondly, that Severus merely abridged his account
-of Nero's persecution from the narrative he found in Tacitus, an
-author whom he frequently copied and imitated; thirdly, that Poggio,
-the supposed interpolator, lived in the fifteenth century, whereas
-our oldest MS. of this part of Tacitus is of the eleventh century;
-it is now in the Laurentian Library. I should advise Dr. Drews to
-stick to his javelin-man story, and not to venture on incursions into
-the field of classical philology.
-
-[Pliny's letter to Trajan] Having dispatched Josephus and Tacitus,
-and printed over their pages in capitals the titles The Silence of
-Josephus and The Silence of Tacitus, these authors, needless to say,
-have no difficulty with Pliny and Suetonius. The former, in his
-letter (No. 96) to Trajan, gives some particulars of the Christians
-of Bithynia, probably obtained from renegades. They asserted that
-the gist of their offence or error was that they were accustomed on a
-regularly recurring day to meet before dawn, and repeat in alternating
-chant among themselves a hymn to Christ as to a God; they also bound
-themselves by a holy oath not to commit any crime, neither theft,
-nor brigandage, nor adultery, and not to betray their word or deny a
-deposit when it was demanded. After this rite was over they had had
-the custom to break up their meeting, and to come together afresh
-later in the day to partake of a meal, which, however, was of an
-ordinary and innocent kind.
-
-In this repast we recognize the early eucharist at which Christians
-were commonly accused of devouring human flesh, as the Jews are accused
-by besotted fanatics of doing in Russia to-day, and by Mr. Robertson in
-ancient Jerusalem. Hence Pliny's proviso that the food they partook of
-was ordinary and innocent. The passage also shows that this eucharistic
-meal was not the earliest rite of the day, like the fasting communion
-of the modern Ritualist, but was held later in the day. Lastly, the
-qualification that they sang hymns to Christ as to a God, though to
-Pliny it conveyed no more than the phrase "as if to Apollo," or "as
-if to Aesculapius," clearly signifies that the person so honoured was
-or had been a human being. Had he been a Sun-god Saviour, the phrase
-would be hopelessly inept. This letter and Trajan's answer to it were
-penned about 110 A.D.
-
-Of this letter Professor W. B. Smith writes (p. 252) that in it
-"there is no implication, not even the slightest, touching the purely
-human reality of the Christ or Jesus." Let us suppose the letter had
-referred to the cult of Augustus Caesar, and that we read in it of
-people who, by way of honouring his memory, met on certain days and
-sang a hymn to Augustus quasi deo, "as to a God." We know that the
-members of a college of Augustals did so meet in most cities of the
-Roman Empire. Well, would Mr. Smith contend in such a case that the
-letter carried no implication, not even the slightest, touching the
-purely human reality of the Augustus or Caesar? Of course he would
-not. If this letter were the sole record in existence of early
-Christianity, we might perhaps hesitate about its implications;
-but it is in the characteristic Latin which no one, so far as we
-know, ever wrote, except the younger Pliny, and is accompanied by
-Trajan's answer, couched in an equally characteristic style. It is,
-moreover, but one link in a long chain, which as a whole attests and
-presupposes the reality of Jesus. Mr. Smith, however, does not seem
-quite sure of his ground, for in the next sentence he hints that
-after all Pliny's letter is not genuine. These writers are not the
-first to whom this letter has proved a pons asinorum. Semler began
-the attack on its genuineness in 1784; and others, who desired to
-eliminate all references to Christianity in early heathen writers,
-have, as J. B. Lightfoot has remarked (Apostolic Fathers, Pt. II,
-vol. i, p. 55), followed in his wake. Their objections do not merit
-serious refutation.
-
-[Evidence of Suetonius] There remains Suetonius, who in ch. xxv of his
-life of Claudius speaks of Messianic disturbances at Rome impulsore
-Chresto. Claudius reigned from 41-54, and the passage may possibly
-be an echo of the conflict, clearly delineated in Acts and Paulines
-between the Jews and the followers of the new Messiah. [37] Itacism
-or interchange of "e" and "i" being the commonest of corruptions in
-Greek and Latin MSS., we may fairly conjecture Christo in the source
-used by Suetonius, who wrote about the year 120. Christo, which means
-Messiah, is intelligible in relation to Jews, but not Chresto; and the
-two words were identical in pronunciation. Drews of course upholds
-Chresto, and in Tacitus would substitute for Christiani Chrestiani;
-for this there is indeed manuscript support, but it is gratuitous
-to argue as he does that the allusion is to Serapis or Osiris,
-who were called Chrestos "the good" by their votaries. He does not
-condescend to adduce any evidence to show that in that age or any
-other Chrestos, used absolutely, signified Osiris or Serapis; and
-there is no reason to suppose it ever had such a significance. He is
-on still more precarious ground when he surmises that Nero's victims
-at Rome were not followers of Christ, but of Serapis, and were called
-Chrestiani by the mob ironically, because of their vices. Here we
-begin to suspect that he is joking. Why should worshippers of Serapis
-have been regarded as specially vicious by the Roman mob? Jews and
-Christians were no doubt detested, because they could not join in
-any popular festivities or thanksgivings. But there was nothing to
-prevent votaries of Serapis or Osiris from doing so, nor is there
-any record of their being unpopular as a class.
-
-In his life of Nero, Suetonius, amid a number of brief notices,
-apparently taken from some annalistic work, includes the following:
-"The Christians were visited with condign punishments--a race of men
-professing a new and malefic superstition." On this passage I have
-commented above (p. 161).
-
-[Origin of the name "Christian"] Characteristically enough, Dr. Drews
-assumes, without a shadow of argument, that the famous text in Acts
-which says that the followers of Jesus were first called Christians
-in Antioch is an interpolation. It stands in the way of his new thesis
-that the Roman people called the followers of Serapis--who was Chrestos
-or "good"--Chrestiani, because they were precisely the contrary. [38]
-Tacitus does not say that Nero's victims were so called because of
-their vices. That is a gloss put on the text by Drews. We only learn
-(a) that they were hated by the mob for their vices, and (b) that
-the mob at that time called them Chrestiani. His use of the imperfect
-tense appellabat indicates that in his own day the same sect had come
-to be known under their proper appellation as Christiani. In A.D. 64,
-he implies, a Roman mob knew no better.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VI
-
-THE ART OF CRITICISM
-
-
-[Repudiation by the partisans of non-historicity of Jesus of regular
-historical method] Let us pause here and try to frame some ideas of
-the methods of this new school which denies that Jesus ever lived:--
-
-Firstly, they are all agreed that the method they would apply to all
-other figures in ancient history--for example, to Apollonius--shall
-not be used in connection with Jesus. They carelessly deride "the
-attempt of historical theologians to reach the historical nucleus of
-the Gospels by purely philological means" (The Witnesses, p. 129). "The
-process," writes Mr. Robertson, "of testing the Synoptic Gospels down
-to an apparent nucleus of primitive narrative" ... "this new position
-is one of retreat, and is not permanently tenable" (Christianity and
-Mythology, p. 284).
-
-If this be so, we had better abolish our chairs of history at the
-universities, and give up teaching it in the schools; for, in the
-absence of the camera and gramophone, this method is the only one we
-can use. When a Mommsen sets Polybius's, Livy's, and Plutarch's lives
-of Hannibal side by side and "tests them down to an apparent nucleus
-of primitive narrative," does Mr. Robertson take him as a text for a
-disquisition on "the psychological Resistance to Evidence"? If not,
-why does he forbid us to take the score or so of independent memories
-and records of the career of Jesus which we have in ancient literature
-between the years A.D. 50 and 120, and to try to sift them down? Why,
-without any evidence, should we rush to the conclusion that the
-figure on whom they jointly converge was a Sun-god, solar myth,
-or vegetation sprite?
-
-[New Testament literature taken en bloc] Secondly, we may note how
-this disinclination to sift sources and test documents prompts them
-to take en bloc sources and documents which arose separately and
-in succession. Yet it is not simple laziness which dictates to them
-this short and easy method of dealing with ancient documents. Rather
-they have inherited it from the old-fashioned orthodox teachers of
-a hundred years ago, who, convinced of the verbal inspiration of the
-Bible, forbade us to estimate one passage as evidence more highly than
-another. All the verses of the Bible were on a level, as also all the
-incidents, and to argue that one event might have happened, but not
-another, was rank blasphemy. All were equally certain, for inspiration
-is not given by measure. Their mantle has fallen on Mr. Robertson
-and his friends. All or none is their method; but, whereas all was
-equally certain, now all is equally myth. "A document," says (p. 159)
-the excellent work by MM. Langlois and Seignobos which I cited above,
-
-
-    (still more a literary work) is not all of a piece; it is composed
-    of a great number of independent statements, any one of which
-    may be intentionally or unintentionally false, while the others
-    are bona fide and accurate.... It is not, therefore, enough to
-    examine a document as a whole; each of the statements in it must
-    be examined separately; criticism is impossible without analysis.
-
-
-We have beautiful examples of such mixed criticism and analysis in
-the commentaries on the Synoptics of Wellhausen and Loisy, both of
-them Freethinkers in the best sense of the word.
-
-[Incapacity of this school to understand evolution of Christian ideas,]
-I have given several minor examples of the obstinacy with which
-the three writers I am criticizing shut their eyes to the gradual
-evolution of Christian ideas; they exhibit the same perversity in
-respect of the great development of Christological thought already
-traceable in the New Testament.
-
-Paul conceived of Jesus as a Jewish teacher elevated through his
-death and resurrection to the position of Messiah and Son of God. On
-earth he is still a merely human being, born naturally, and subject
-to the law--a weak man of flesh. Raised from the dead by the energy
-of the Spirit, he becomes future judge of mankind, and his gospel
-transcends all distinctions of Jew and Gentile, bondsman or free. In
-Mark he is still merely human; he is the son of Joseph and Mary,
-born and bred like their other sons and daughters. As a man he
-comes to John the Baptist, like others, to confess and repent of
-his sins, and wash them away in Jordan's holy stream. Not till then
-does the descent of the Spirit on him, as he goes up from the Jordan,
-confer a Messiahship on him, which his followers only recognize later
-on. Astounding miracles and prodigies, however, are already credited
-to him in this our earliest Gospel. In the non-Marcan document, or Q,
-so far as we can reconstruct it, he has become Messiah through baptism
-(supposing this section to have belonged to Q, and not to some other
-document used by Luke and Matthew); but few or no miracles [39]
-are as yet credited to him, and the document contained little except
-his teaching. His death has none of the importance assigned to it by
-Paul, and is not mentioned; his resurrection does not seem to have
-been heard of by the author of this document. In Matthew and Luke
-the figure before us is much the same as in Mark; but human traits,
-such as his mother's distrust of his mission, are effaced. We hear
-no more of his inability to heal those who did not believe in him,
-and we get in their early chapters hints of his miraculous birth. In
-John there is, indeed, no hint of such birth; but, on the other hand,
-the entire Gospel is here rewritten to suit a new conception of him as
-the divine, eternal Logos. Demonology tales are ruled out. His role
-as a Jewish Messiah, faithful to the law, has finally retired into
-the background, together with that tense expectation of the end of
-the world, of the final judgment and installation in Palestine of a
-renovated kingdom of David, which inspires the teaching and parables
-of the Synoptic Gospels, just as it inspired Philo, and the Apocalypse
-of the Fourth Esdras and other contemporary Jewish apocrypha.
-
-[especially in connection with the legend of Virgin Birth,] Now,
-in Mr. W. B. Smith's works this development of doctrine about
-Jesus, this succession of phases, is not only reversed, but, with
-singular perversity, turned upside down. Similarly, Mr. Robertson
-and Dr. Drews, in order to secure a favourable reception for their
-hypothesis that Jesus was a Sun-god, insist in the teeth of the
-evidence that the belief in the Virgin Birth was part and parcel of
-the earliest tradition. As a matter of fact, it was comparatively
-late, as the heortology or history of the feasts of the Church
-shows. Of specially Christian feasts, the first was the Sunday,
-which commemorated every week the Resurrection, and the hope of the
-Parousia, or Second Coming. The next was the Epiphany, on January 6,
-commemorative of the baptism when the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus
-and conferred Messiahship.
-
-This feast we cannot trace before the year 125 or 150, and then only
-among Basilidians; among Catholics hardly before 300. Just as the story
-of the Virgin Birth was the latest addition to evangelical tradition,
-so it was the latest of the dominical feasts; and not till 354 did it
-obtain separate recognition in Rome on December 25. Of the feast of the
-Annunciation and of the other feasts of the Virgin we first hear in the
-sixth and succeeding centuries. From this outline we can realize at
-how late a period the legend of the Virgin Birth influenced the mind
-of the Church at large; yet Mr. Robertson, to smooth the way for his
-"mythic" theory, pretends that it was the earliest of all Christian
-beliefs, and without a tittle of evidence invents a pre-Christian
-Saviour-Sun-god Joshua, born of a virgin, Miriam. The whole monstrous
-conception is a preposterous coinage of his brain, a figment unknown to
-anyone before himself and bristling with impossibilities. Witness the
-following passage (p. 284 of Christianity and Mythology), containing
-nearly as many baseless fancies as it contains words:--
-
-
-    The one tenable historic hypothesis left to us at this stage
-    is that of a preliminary Jesus "B.C.," a vague cult-founder
-    such as the Jesus ben Pandira of the Talmud, put to death for
-    (perhaps anti-Judaic) teachings now lost; round whose movement
-    there might have gradually clustered the survivals of an ancient
-    solar or other worship of a Babe Joshua son of Miriam.
-
-
-Such is the gist of the speculations of Messrs. Drews and Robertson,
-as far removed from truth and reality as the Athanasian Creed and
-from sane criticism as the truculent buffooneries of the Futurists
-from genuine art.
-
-We have more than once criticized this tendency of Mr. Robertson to
-insist on the primitiveness of the Virgin Birth legend. He urges it
-throughout his volume, although here and there he seems to see the
-truth, as, e.g., on p. 189, where he remarks that "only the late
-Third Gospel tells the story" of Mary and Joseph going to Bethlehem
-to be taxed, and "that the narrative in Matthew" was "added late to
-the original composition, which obviously began at what is now the
-third chapter." If the legend was part of the earliest tradition,
-why does it figure for the first time in the late Third Gospel and in
-a late addition to the first? In another passage he assures us that
-chapters i and ii of Luke are "a late fabulous introduction." Clearly,
-his view is that, just in proportion as any part of the Gospels is
-late, the tradition it contains must be early; and he it is who talks
-about "the methodless subjectivism" of Dr. Pfleiderer, who, he says,
-"like Matthew Arnold, accepts what he likes" (p. 450).
-
-[and in connection with Schmiedel's "Pillars"] The same inability to
-distinguish what is early from what is late is shown by Mr. Robertson
-in his criticism of Dr. Schmiedel's "pillars"--i.e., the nine Gospel
-texts (seven of them in Mark)--"which cannot have been invented by
-believers in the godhood of Jesus, since they implicitly negate that
-godhood." Of these, one is Mark x, 17 ff., where Jesus uses--to one
-who had thrown himself at his feet with the words: "Good teacher,
-what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" (i.e., life in the kingdom
-to come)--the answer: "Why callest thou me good? No one is good,
-save one--to wit, God." Here many ancient sources intensify Jesus's
-refusal of a predicate which is God's alone; for they run: "Call thou
-me not good." This apart, the Second and Third Gospels may be said
-to agree in reading, "Good master," and, "Why callest thou me good?"
-
-In Matthew, however (xix, 16), we read as follows: "Behold, one came
-to him and said: Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have
-eternal life? And he said unto him, Why askest thou me concerning
-that which is good? One there is who is good," etc.
-
-Now, it is a result of criticism universally accepted to-day that
-Matthew and Luke compiled their Gospels with Mark before them, and
-that any reading in which either of them agrees with Mark must be
-more original than the discrepant reading of a third. Here Matthew
-is the discrepant witness, and he has remodelled the text of Mark to
-suit the teaching which had established itself in the Church about
-A.D. 100 that Jesus was without sin. He accordingly makes Jesus
-reply as a Greek sophist might reply, and not as a Jewish rabbi; and,
-by omitting the predicate "good" before teacher, he turns the words,
-"One there is who is good," into nonsense. By adding it before "thing"
-he creates additional nonsense; for how could any but a good action
-merit eternal life? The epithet is here superfluous. Even then, if
-we were not sure on other grounds that the Marcan story is the only
-source of the Matthaean deformed text, we could be sure that it was,
-because in Mark we have simplicity and good sense, whereas in Matthew
-we have neither. Mr. Robertson, on an earlier page, has, indeed,
-done lip-service to the truth that Mark presents us with the earliest
-form of evangelical tradition; but here he betrays the fact that he
-has not really understood the position, nor grasped the grounds (set
-forth by me in Myth, Magic, and Morals) on which it rests. For he is
-ready to sacrifice it the moment it makes havoc of his "mythological"
-argument, and writes (p. 443): "On the score of simple likelihood,
-which has the stronger claim? Surely the original text in Matthew."
-
-Even if Matthew, Mark, and Luke were rival and independent texts,
-instead of the first and third being, as they demonstrably are,
-copies and paraphrases of Mark, the best--if not the only--criterion
-of originality would be such an agreement of two of them as Mark
-and Luke here present against Matthew. Mr. Robertson, with entire
-ignoratio elenchi, urges in favour of the originality of Matthew's
-variant the circumstance that the oldest MS. sources of that Gospel
-reproduce it. How could they fail to do so, supposing it to be due to
-the redactor or editor of Mark, who was traditionally, but falsely,
-identified with the apostle Matthew? If the reading of Mark be not
-original, how came Luke to copy it from him? The most obvious critical
-considerations are wasted on Mr. Robertson and his friends.
-
-[Schmiedel on the disbelief of Mary in her son] Dr. Schmiedel again
-draws attention to the narrative of how Jesus, at the beginning of his
-ministry, was declared by his own household to be out of his senses,
-and of how, in consequence, his mother and brethren followed him
-in order to put him under restraint. The story offended the first
-and third evangelists, and they partly omit it, partly obscure its
-drift. The fourth evangelist limits the disbelief to the brethren
-of Jesus. The whole narrative is in flagrant antagonism to the Birth
-stories in the early chapters of Matthew and Luke, and to the whole
-subsequent drift of Church tradition. Being gifted with common sense,
-Schmiedel argues that it must be true, because it could never have
-been invented. It, anyhow, makes for the historicity of Jesus. What
-has Mr. Robertson to say about it? He writes (p. 443): "Why should
-such a conception be more alien to Christian consciousness than, say,
-the story of the trial, scourging, and crucifixion?" Here he ignores
-the point at issue. In Christian tradition, whether early or late,
-it was not the mother and brethren of Jesus who tried and scourged and
-crucified him, but inimical Jews and pagans. The latter are at no time
-related to have received an announcement of his birth from an angel,
-as his mother was presently believed to have done. We have, therefore,
-every reason for averring that the conception or idea of his being
-flouted by his own mother and brethren was a thousand times more alien
-to Christian consciousness--at least, any time after A.D. 100--than
-that of his being flouted by a Sadducean priesthood and by Roman
-governors. Once the legend of the Virgin Birth had grown up, such a
-story could not have been either thought of or committed to writing
-in a Gospel. It is read in Mark, and must be what we call a bed-rock
-tradition. If Mr. Robertson cannot see that, he is hopeless. Did he
-not admit (p. 443) that it is "certainly an odd text," so revealing
-his inmost misgivings about it, we should think him so.
-
-[Jesus is not deified in the earliest documents, nor do they reveal
-a "cult" of him] The same vice of mixing up different phases of the
-Christian religion shows itself in the insistence of this school of
-critic that it was from the first a cult of a deified Jesus. Thus
-Mr. Smith writes (Ecce Deus) as follows (p. 6):--
-
-
-    We affirm that the worship of the one God under the name,
-    aspect, or person of the Jesus, the Saviour, was the primitive
-    and indefectible essence of the primitive teaching and propaganda.
-
-
-On the contrary, in the two basal documents, Mark and Q, no such
-worship is discernible. Jesus first comes on the scene as the humble
-son of Joseph and Mary to repent of his sins and purge them away
-in Baptism; he next takes up the preaching of the imprisoned John,
-which was merely that Jews should repent of their sins because the
-kingdom of God, involving a dissolution of the existing social and
-political order, was at hand. This was no divine role, and he is
-represented not as God, but only as the servant of God; for such
-in the Aramaic dialect of that age was the connotation of the title
-"Son of God." In Mark there is no sign of his deification, not even in
-the transfiguration scene; for in that he is merely the human Messiah
-attended by Elias and Moses. From a hundred early indicia we know that
-in the Semitic-speaking churches of the East he remained a human figure
-for centuries; and the Syrian Father Aphraat, as late as 336 in Persia,
-is careful to explain in his homilies that Jesus was only divine as
-Moses was, or as human kings are. It was not till the religion was
-diffused in a pagan medium in which gods had children by mortal women
-that the gross deification of Jesus emerged. The purport of these
-basal documents, moreover, is not to deify Jesus, but to establish as
-against the Jews that he was their promised Messiah and the central
-figure of the Messianic kingdom he preached. That figure, however,
-was never identified with Jehovah, but was only Jehovah's servant,
-anointed king and judge of Israel, restorer of Israel's damaged
-fortunes, fulfiller of her political ideals and hopes. Mr. Smith
-argues that Jesus was deified from the first because his name was
-so often invoked in exorcisms. He even makes the suggestion (p. 17)
-that the initial letter J of Jesus "must have powerfully suggested
-Jehovah to the Jewish consciousness." There is no evidence, and
-less likelihood, of any such thing. The name of Jesus was during
-his lifetime invoked against demons by exorcists who rejected his
-message; just as they used the names of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
-so they were ready to exploit his powerful name; but neither Jews nor
-Christians ever confounded with Jehovah the names or personalities
-they thus invoked; any Jew in virtue of his birth and breeding would
-have regarded such a confusion of a man with his God as flat blasphemy.
-
-[Worship of a slain God no part of the earliest Christianity]
-Messrs. Robertson and Drews similarly insist that Jesus was from the
-first worshipped as a slain God. In the Gospel documents there is
-no sign of anything of the sort. It was Paul who first diffused the
-idea that the crucified Jesus was a victim slain for the redemption
-of human sins. We already have Philo proclaiming that the just man
-is the ransom of the many, so that there is no need to go to pagan
-circles, no need to go outside the pale of Greek Jews, of whom Paul
-was one, for the origin of the idea. He probably found it even in the
-teaching of Gamaliel, in which he was brought up. Mark asks no more
-of his readers than to attribute the Messiahship--a thoroughly human
-role--to his hero, Jesus of Nazareth. Nor does Matthew, who seeks
-at every turn to prove that the actions of Jesus reported by Mark
-were those which, according to the old prophets, a Messiah might be
-expected to perform. How can writers who end their record of Jesus by
-telling us how in the moment of death he cried, "My God, my God, why
-hast thou forsaken me?" realizing no doubt that all his expectations
-of the advent of God's kingdom were frustrated and set at naught; how,
-I say, can such writers have believed that Jesus was Jehovah? The
-idea is monstrous. The truth is these writers transport back into
-the first age of Christianity the ideas and beliefs of developed
-Catholicism, and are resolved that the first shall be last and the last
-first. They have no perspective, and no capacity for understanding
-the successive phases through which a primitive Messianism, at first
-thoroughly monotheistic and exclusively Jewish in outlook and ideals,
-gradually evolved itself, with the help of the Logos teaching, into
-the Athanasian cult of an eternal and consubstantial Son of God.
-
-[Abuse of the comparative method by this school of writers] Thirdly,
-these writers abuse the comparative method. Applied discreetly and
-rationally, this method helps us to trace myths and beliefs back
-to their homes and earlier forms. Thus M. Emmanuel Cosquin (in
-Romania; Paris, 1912) takes the story of the cat and the candle,
-and traces out its ramifications in the mediaeval literature and
-modern folklore of Europe, and outside Europe, in the legends of
-the Pendjab, of Cashmir, Bengal, Ceylon, Tibet, Tunisia, Annam,
-and elsewhere. But the theme is always sufficiently like itself to
-be really recognizable in the various folklore frames in which it
-is found encased. The old philologists saw in the most superficial
-resemblance of sound a reason for connecting words in different
-languages. They never asked themselves how a word got out of Hebrew,
-say, into Greek, or out of Greek into Mexican. Volumes were filled
-with these haphazard etymologies, and the idea of the classification
-of languages into great connected families only slowly made its way
-among us in the last century. I have pointed out that in regard to
-names Messrs. Drews and Robertson are still in this prephilological
-stage of inquiry; as regards myths or stories of incident, they are
-wholly immersed in it. [They fit anything on to anything no matter how
-ineptly,] They never trouble themselves to make sure that the stories
-they connect bear any real resemblance to one another. For example,
-what have the Zodiacal signs and the Apostles of Jesus in common
-except the number twelve? As if number was not the most superficial
-of attributes, the least characteristic and essential. The scene of
-the Gospel is laid in Judaea, where from remote antiquity the Jews
-had classed themselves in twelve tribes. Is it not more likely that
-this suggested the twelve missionaries sent out by Jesus to announce
-the coming kingdom than the twelve signs of the Zodiac? Even if the
-story of the Twelve be legendary, need we go outside Judaism for our
-explanation of its origin?
-
-What, again, have the three Maries in common with the Greek Moirai
-except the number three and a delusive community of sound? Yet
-Mr. Robertson insists that the three Maries at the tomb of Jesus
-were suggested by the Moirai, because these, "as goddesses of birth
-and death, naturally figured in many artistic presentations of
-religious death scenes." As a matter of fact, the representation of
-the Parcae or Fates in connection with death is rare except on Roman
-sarcophagi, mostly of later date than the Gospel story. And when
-they are so found, they represent, not women bringing spices for
-the corpse or mourning for the dead, but the forces, often thought
-of as blind and therefore represented as veiled, which govern the
-events of the world, including birth, life and death. [and forget
-the innate hostility of Jews to Paganism] There was, therefore,
-nothing in the Moirai to suggest the three Maries at the tomb; nor
-is it credible that the Hebrew Christists, given as they must have
-been to monotheism and detesting all statuary, pagan or other, would
-have chosen their literary motives from such a source. Where could
-they see such statuary in or about Jerusalem? It is notorious that
-the very presence of a symbolic eagle used as a military standard
-was enough to create an emeute in Jerusalem. The scheme of the
-emperor Caligula or Caius to set up his statue in Jerusalem in 39-40
-A.D. provoked a movement of revolt throughout Palestine, with which
-the Jews of Egypt and elsewhere were in full sympathy. A deputation
-headed by Philo of Alexandria went to Rome to supplicate the emperor
-not to goad the entire race to frenzy. In the magnificent statues
-which surrounded him on the Parthenon hill, Paul could see nothing
-but idols, monuments of an age of superstition and ignorance which
-God had mercifully overlooked. [40] The hostility of the Jews to all
-pagan art and sculpture was as great as that of Mohammedans to-day. Yet
-Mr. Robertson asks us to believe (p. 327) that the Gospel myths, as
-he assumes them to be, are "evolved from scenes in pagan art." On the
-top of that we afterwards learn from him that it was the Jewish high
-priest with legalistic leanings that presided over the Christists or
-Jesuists. Imagine such a high priest's feelings when he beheld his
-"secret society" evolving their system under such an inspiration as
-Mr. Robertson outlines in the following canons of criticism:--
-
-
-    As we have seen and shall see throughout this investigation,
-    the Christian system is a patchwork of a hundred suggestions
-    drawn from pagan art and ritual usage (p. 305).
-
-    Christism borrowed myths of all kinds from paganism (p. xii).
-
-    ... the whole Christian legend, in its present terminology,
-    is demonstrably an adaptation of a mass of pre-Christian myths
-    (p. 136).
-
-
-What a budget of mutually destructive paradoxes; and to crown them
-all Mr. Robertson claims in his introduction (p. xxii) that the method
-of his treatise is
-
-
-    in general more "positive," less a priori, more obedient to
-    scientific canons than that of the previous critics ... who have
-    reached similar anti-traditionalist results. It substitutes an
-    anthropological basis, in terms of the concrete phenomena of
-    mythology, for a pseudo-philosophical presupposition.
-
-
-[Credulity attends hypercriticism] Fourthly, it is essential to
-note the childish, all-embracing, and overwhelming credulity of
-these writers. To them applies in its full force the paragraph in
-which MM. Langlois and Seignobos describe the perils which beset
-hypercriticism (p. 131, op. cit.):--
-
-
-    The excess of criticism, just as much as the crudest ignorance,
-    leads to error. It consists in the application of critical canons
-    to cases outside their jurisdiction. It is related to criticism as
-    logic-chopping is to logic. There are persons who scent enigmas
-    everywhere, even where there are none. They take perfectly clear
-    texts and subtilize on them till they make them doubtful, under
-    the pretext of freeing them from imaginary corruptions. They
-    discover traces of forgery in authentic documents. A strange
-    state of mind! By constantly guarding against the instinct of
-    credulity they come to suspect everything.
-
-
-For these writers, in their anxiety to be original and new, see fit to
-discard every position that earlier historians, like Mommsen, Gibbon,
-Bury, Montefiore--not to mention Christian scholars--have accepted
-as beyond doubt. Their temper is that of the Bacon-Shakesperians;
-and the plainest, simplest, most straightforward texts figure in
-their imaginations as a laborious series of charades, rebuses,
-and cryptograms. That Jesus never existed is not really the final
-conclusion of their researches, but an initial unproved assumption. In
-order to get rid of him, they feign, without any evidence of it, a
-Jewish secret society under the patronage of the Jewish High Priest,
-that existed in Jerusalem well down into the Christian era. This
-society kept up the worship of an old Palestinian and Ephraimitic
-Sun-god and Saviour, named Joshua, son of a virgin, Miriam. Where is
-the proof that such a god was ever heard of in ancient Palestine,
-either early or late, or that such a cult ever existed? There is
-none. It is the emptiest and wildest of hypotheses; yet we are asked
-to accept it in place of the historicity of Jesus. What, again, do
-we know of secret societies in Jerusalem? Josephus and Philo knew of
-none. For the Therapeutae, far from affecting secrecy, were anxious
-to diffuse their discipline and lore even among the Hellenes, while
-the Essenes had nothing secret save the names of the angels they
-invoked in spells. They were a well-known sect, and so numerous that
-a gate of Jerusalem was called the Essene Gate, because they so often
-came in and went forth by it. Were the Pharisees and Sadducees, the
-Scribes, or the Sicarii or zealots, secret sects? We know they were
-not. But is it likely that a sect composed in the main of Jews, and
-patronized, as Mr. Robertson argues, by the High Priest, would have
-kept up in the very heart of monotheistic Judaism a cult of Sun-gods
-and Vegetation-spirits? Could they there have given themselves up to
-the study of pagan statuary, art, and ritual dramas? What possible
-connection is there between the naive picture of Hebrew Messianism
-we have in the Synoptic Gospels and the hurly-burly, the tagrag and
-bobtail of pagan mythologies which Mr. Robertson and his henchman
-Drews rake together pell-mell in their pretentious volumes? How did
-all this paganism abut in a Messianic society which reverenced the
-Old Testament for its sacred scriptures, which for long frequented the
-Jewish Temple, took over the feasts and fasts of Judaism, modelled its
-prayers on those of the Synagogue, cherished in its eastern branches
-the practice of circumcision?
-
-[Mr. Robertson accepts the historicity of Jesus after all] After
-hundreds of pages devoted to the task of evaporating Jesus into
-a Solar or Vegetation-god, and all the personages we meet in the
-Gospels into zodiacal signs or pagan demigods, Mr. Robertson, as we
-have noticed above, finds himself, after all, confronted with the
-same personages in Paul's Epistles. There they are too real even for
-Mr. Robertson to dissipate them into cloud-forms, and too numerous
-to be cut out wholesale. He feels that, if all Paul's allusions to
-the crucified Jesus are to be got rid of as interpolations, then
-no Pauline Epistles will remain. He cuts out, indeed, all he can,
-but there is a residuum of reality. To identify Paul's Jesus with
-the Jesus of the Gospels is too humdrum and obvious a course for
-him. So common-sense and commonplace a scheme does not suit his
-subtle intelligence; moreover, such an identification would upset
-the hundreds of pages in which he has proved that Jesus of Nazareth
-and all his accessories are literary symbols employed by the Jewish
-"Jesuists" to disguise their pagan art and myths. Accordingly, he
-asks us to believe that Paul's Jesus is a certain Jesus Ben Pandira,
-stoned to death a hundred years earlier. This Jesus is a vague
-figure fished up out of the Talmud; but, on examination, we found
-Mr. Robertson's choice of him as an alias for Paul's Jesus to be most
-unfortunate, for competent Talmudic scholars are agreed that Jesus
-Ben Pandira in the Talmud was no other than Jesus of Nazareth in the
-Gospels. Jesus most unkindly insists on being in at his own death,
-[41] in spite of all Mr. Robertson can say or do; and his house
-of cards is crowned with the discovery that the apostles whom Paul
-knew--not being identical with the signs of the Zodiac, like those
-of the Gospels--were no other than the twelve apostles of the Jewish
-High Priest, and that they were the authors of the lately-discovered
-"Teaching of the Apostles." He is very contemptuous for other early
-Christian books which affect apostolic authorship in their titles,
-but falls a ready victim to the relatively late and anonymous editor
-of this "teaching," who to give it vogue entitled it "The Teaching of
-the Lord by the Twelve Apostles to the Gentiles." "The Jesuist sect,"
-he writes (p. 345), "founded on it (the Didache) the Christian myth
-of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus." Everywhere else in his books he
-has argued that the "myth" in question was founded on the signs of
-the Zodiac. Why give up at the eleventh hour the astral explanation
-for an utterly different one? I may add that in the body of the
-Didache the Twelve are nowhere alluded to; that it must be a much
-later document than the Gospels and Paulines, since it quotes them in
-scores of passages; and that the interpolation of the title, with a
-reference to the Twelve Apostles, was a literary trick scarcely older
-than the fourth century, long before which age the Pauline account of
-the resurrection was cited by a score of Christian writers. Lastly,
-we are fain to inquire of Mr. Robertson with whom he identifies "the
-Lord" of the above title--with the Jewish High Priest, or with Jesus
-Ben Pandira, or with the Sun-God-Saviour Joshua.
-
-[Theory of interpolations] I have given many examples of the tendency
-of all these authors to condemn as an interpolation any text which
-contradicts their hypotheses. There is only one error worse than that
-of treating seriously documents which are no documents at all. It is
-that of the man who cannot recognize documents when he has got them. It
-is well, of course, to weigh sources, and the critical investigation
-of authorship lies at the basis of all true history. But, as the
-authors above cited justly remark (p. 99):--
-
-
-    We must not abuse it. The extreme of distrust in these matters is
-    almost as mischievous as the extreme of credulity. Pere Hardouin,
-    who attributed the works of Virgil and Horace to medieval monks,
-    was every whit as ridiculous as the victim of Vrain-Lucas. It
-    is an abuse of the methods of this species of criticism to apply
-    them, as has been done, indiscriminately, for the mere pleasure
-    of it. The bunglers who have used this species of criticism
-    to brand as spurious perfectly genuine documents, such as the
-    writings of Hroswitha, the Ligurinus, and the bull unam sanctam,
-    or to establish imaginary filiations between certain annals, on
-    the strength of superficial indications, would have discredited
-    criticism before now, if that had been possible.
-
-
-It is unhappily easier to discredit criticism in the realm of
-ecclesiastical than of secular history; and this school of writers
-are doing their best to harm the cause of true Rationalism. They
-only afford amusement to the obscurantists of orthodoxy, and render
-doubly difficult the task of those who seek to win people over to a
-common-sense and historical envisagement, unencumbered by tradition
-and superstition, of the problems of early Christianity.
-
-[Professor Smith's monotheistic cult] Lastly, it is a fact deserving of
-notice that the genesis of Christianity as these authors present it is
-much more mysterious and obscure than before. Their explanation needs
-explaining. What, we must ask, was the motive and end in view of the
-adherents of the pre-Christian Jesus or Joshua in writing the Gospels
-and bringing down their God to earth, so humanizing in a story their
-divine myth? Let Professor W. B. Smith speak: "What was the essence,
-the central idea and active principle, of the cult itself?" Here he
-means the cult of the pre-Christian Christ that invented the Gospels
-and diffused them on the market place. "To this latter," he continues,
-"we answer directly and immediately: It was a Protest against idolatry;
-it was a Crusade for monotheism."
-
-And yet he cannot adduce a single text from the Gospels--not even from
-the Fourth--which betrays on the part of Jesus, their central figure,
-any such crusading spirit. Jesus everywhere assumes his hearers
-to be monotheists like himself--he speaks as a Jew to Jews--and
-perpetually reminds them of their Father in heaven. Thus Matt. vi,
-8: "Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of"; Matt. v, 48:
-"Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
-
-The monotheism of those who stood around the teacher is ever taken
-for granted by the evangelists, and in all the precepts of Jesus
-not one can be adduced that is aimed at the sins of polytheism
-and idolatry. His message lies in a far different region. It is the
-immediate advent of the Messianic kingdom, and the need of repentance
-ere it come. Only when Paul undertakes to bear this message to pagans
-outside the pale of Judaism do we get teaching directed against
-idolatry; and in his Epistles such precepts have a second place,
-the first being reserved to the preaching of the coming kingdom
-and of the redemption of the world by the merits of the crucified
-and risen Messiah, the man Jesus. Most of Paul's letters read as if
-those for whom he wrote them were already proselytes familiar with
-the Jewish scriptures.
-
-[His great Oriental cryptogram] Such is Mr. Smith's fundamental
-assumption, and it is baseless. On it he bases his next great
-hypothesis of "the primitive secrecy of the Jesus cult," which "was
-maintained in some measure for many years--for generations even"
-(p. 45). "Why," he asks, "was this Jesus cult originally secret, and
-expressed in such guarded parabolic terms as made it unintelligible
-to the multitude?" The reason lay in the fact that "it was exactly to
-save the pagan multitude from idolatry that Jesus came into the world"
-(p. 38).
-
-Here the phrase "Jesus came into the world," like all else he did or
-suffered, is, of course, to be understood in a Pickwickian sense,
-for he never came into the world at all. The Gospels are not only
-a romance concocted by "such students of religion as the first
-Christians were" (p. 65), and inspired by their study of Plato, [42]
-and of the best elements in ancient mythology; they are a romance
-throughout--an allegory of a secret pre-Christian Nazarene society
-and of its secret cult (p. 34). Of this society, he tells us, we
-know nothing; esoterism and cult secrecy were its chief interests;
-the "silence of the Christians about it was intentional," [43]
-and, except for the special revelation vouchsafed the other day
-to Professor W. B. Smith, it would have remained for ever unknown,
-and Christianity for ever enigmatic.
-
-In accordance with this postulate of esoterism and cult secrecy among
-the pre-Christian Nazarenes, who subsequently revealed themselves to
-the world as the Christian Church, though even then they "maintained
-for generations the secrecy [44] of their Jesus cult," the Gospels,
-as I said, are an allegory or a charade. Their prima facie meaning is
-never the true one, never more than symbolic of a moral and spiritual
-undersense such as old allegorists like Philo and Origen loved to
-discover in the Bible. Thus, as we saw above, when Jesus is reported to
-have cast out of the Jews who thronged around him devils of blindness,
-deafness, lameness, leprosy, death, what is really intended is that
-he argued pagans out of their polytheism. "It was spiritual maladies,
-and only spiritual, that he was healing" (p. 38). We ask of Mr. Smith,
-why was so much mystification necessary? We are only told that
-"it was in the main a prudential measure, well enough justified,
-but intended to be only temporary" (p. 39). What exact risks they
-were to shun which the sect kept itself secret, and only spake in
-far-fetched allegory, Mr. Smith does not inform us. Is he, too,
-afraid of being regarded as a "tell-tale" (p. 48)?
-
-[Professor Smith resolves all the New Testament as symbolic and
-allegorical] As with the exorcisms, so with all else told of
-Jesus. None of it really happened. As he never lived, so he never
-died. His human life and death are an allegory of the spiritual cult
-and mysteries which the pre-Christian Nazarenes and their descendants,
-the Christians, so jealously and for so long guarded in silence. If he
-never lived, then he never taught, not even in parables. By consequence
-the entire record of his parables, still more of his having chosen
-the parable as his medium of instruction in order to veil his real
-meaning from his audience, is all moonshine. Here, as elsewhere, the
-Gospel text does not mean what it says, but is itself only a Nazarene
-parable conveying, or rather concealing, a Nazarene secret--what sort
-of secret no one, save Professor Smith, the self-appointed revealer
-of their mysterious lore, can tell, and he is silent on the point. On
-Mr. Smith's premisses, then, we cannot rely on the Gospels to inform
-us of anything historical, and, so far as we can follow him, we must,
-if we would discern through them the mind of their Nazarene authors,
-take them upside down. We must discern a pagan medium and homilies
-against polytheism in discourses addressed to monotheistic Jews who
-needed no warnings against idolatry; we must also read the stories
-of Jesus healing paralytics and demoniacs as secret and disguised
-polemics against idolatry.
-
-[Yet claims, where it suits him, to treat it as historical narrative]
-But here mark Professor Smith's inconsistency. Why is he sure that
-the Nazarenes, and after them the earliest Christians, were a secret
-society with a secret cult? They must have been so, he argues, because
-Jesus taught in parables. "The primitive esoterism," he tells us,
-"is admittedly present in Mark iv, 11, 12, 33, 34." These verses
-begin thus: "And he said unto them, unto you is given the mystery
-of the kingdom of heaven: but unto them that are without, all things
-are done in parables."
-
-Now, Mr. Smith's postulate is that he--i.e., Jesus of Nazareth--never
-lived, and so never said anything to anyone. How, then, can he
-appeal to what he said to prove that there was a pre-Christian
-Jesus or Joshua sect, itself secret with a cult and ritual which
-its members were ever on their guard not to reveal? Surely he drops
-here into two assumptions which he has discarded ab initio: first,
-that there is a core of real history in the Gospels; and, second,
-that the Gospel can mean what it says, and that its Nazarene author
-is here not allegorizing, as he usually did.
-
-[His theory contradicts itself] But even if we allow Mr. Smith to break
-with his premisses wherever he needs to do so in order to substantiate
-them, do these verses of Mark support his hypothesis of a sect which
-kept itself, its rites, and its teaching secret? I admit that it was
-pretty successful when it veiled its anti-idolatrous teaching under
-the outward form of demonological anecdotes, and wrote Jews when it
-meant Pagans and Polytheists. But in Mark iv, 34, we are told that
-"to his own disciples Jesus privately expounded all things" after he
-had with many parables spoken the word to such as "were able to hear
-it." It appears, then, that for all their love of secrecy, and in spite
-of all their precautions against "tell-tale" writing, the Nazarenes
-on occasions went out of their way, in their allegorical romance of
-their God Joshua, to inform all who may read it what their parables
-and allegories meant; for in it Jesus sits down and expounds to the
-reader over some twenty-four verses (verses 10-34) the inner meaning
-of the parables which he had just addressed to the multitude. What
-on earth were the Nazarenes doing to publish a Gospel like this,
-and so let the cat out of the bag? Instead of keeping their secret
-they were proclaiming it on the housetops. Again, if the Gospels
-are to such an extent merely allegorical, that we must not assume
-their authors to have believed that Jesus ever lived, how can we
-possibly rely on them for information about such an obscure matter
-as a secret and esoteric pre-Christian Nazarene sect? We can only be
-sure that the evangelists never under any circumstances meant what
-they said; yet Mr. Smith, in defiance of all his postulates, writes,
-p. 40, as follows: "On the basis, then, of this passage alone [i.e.,
-Mark iv, 10-34] we may confidently affirm the primitive secrecy of
-the Jesus cult." Even if the passage rightly yielded the sense he
-tries to extort from it, how can we be sure that that sense is not,
-like the rest of the Gospel, an allegory of something else?
-
-The other passage of the Gospels, Matthew x, 26, 27, to which,
-with like inconsistency, Mr. Smith appeals by way of showing that
-the Nazarenes of set purpose hid their light under a bushel, does
-not bear the interpretation he puts on it. It runs thus: "Fear them
-not therefore: for naught is covered that shall not be revealed,
-and hidden that shall not be known. What I tell you in the darkness,
-speak ye on the housetops; and what ye hear in the ear, proclaim upon
-the housetops."
-
-[Absence of esoterism about Jesus's teaching] The reasonable
-interpretation of the above is that Jesus, being in possession, as he
-thought, of a special understanding, perhaps revelation, of the true
-nature of the Messianic kingdom, and convinced of its near approach,
-instructed his immediate disciples in privacy concerning it in order
-that they might carry the message up and down the land to the children
-of Israel. He therefore exhorts them not to be silent from fear of
-the Jews, who accused him of being possessed of a devil, somewhat as
-his own mother and brethren accused him of being an exalte and beside
-himself. No, they were to cast aside all apprehensions; they must go,
-not to the supercilious Pharisees or to the comfortable priests who
-battened on the people, still less to Gentiles and Samaritans, who
-had no part in the promises made to Israel, but to the lost sheep
-of the house of Israel, and they must preach as they went, saying,
-The kingdom of heaven is at hand. They were to heal the sick, raise
-the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils, and in general give
-freely the good tidings which freely they had received from their
-Master, and he from John the Baptist. If they so acted, discarding
-all timidity, then no human repression, no human time-serving, could
-prevent the spread of the good news. What was now hidden from the
-poor and ignorant among his compatriots would henceforth, thanks to
-the courage and devotedness of his emissaries, be made known to them;
-what was now covered, be revealed.
-
-Such is the context of "this remarkable deliverance," as Mr. Smith
-terms it; and nothing in all the New Testament savours less than it
-does of a secret cult of mysterious sectaries, waiting for Mr. Smith to
-manifest their arcana to us twenty centuries later. Here, as everywhere
-else in the New Testament, he has discovered a monstrous mare's nest;
-has banished the only possible and obvious interpretation, in order
-to substitute a chimera of his own.
-
-[It was not a protest against paganism] Mr. Smith credits his
-hypothetical pre-Christian Nazarenes with an ambition and anxiety
-to purge away the errors of mankind. The "essence, the central idea,
-and active principle of the cult itself," he tells us (p. 45), "was
-a protest against Idolatry, a crusade for monotheism." "The fact of
-the primitive worship of Jesus and the fact of the primitive mission
-to all the Gentiles are the two cardinal facts of Proto-Christianity"
-(p. xvii). Why on earth, then, in concocting that pronunciamento of
-their cult which we call the Gospels, did these Nazarenes represent
-the Jesus or Joshua God, even in allegory, as warning his disciples
-on no account to disseminate his cult among Gentiles and Samaritans,
-but only among Jews, who were notoriously monotheists and bitterly
-hostile to every form of idolatry? Why carry coals to Newcastle on
-so huge a scale?
-
-[Why turn God Jeshua into a man at all] And granted that the Nazarenes,
-in their anxiety to be parabolical and misunderstood of their readers,
-wrote Jews when they meant Pagans, was it necessary in the interests
-of their monotheistic crusade to nickname their One God Jesus, to
-represent him as a man and a carpenter, with brothers and sisters,
-and a mother that did not believe in him; as a man who was a Jew with
-the prejudices of a Jew, a man circumcised and insisting that he came
-not to destroy the law of Moses, but to fulfil it; as a man who was
-born like other men of a human father and mother; was crucified, dead
-and buried; whose disciples and Galilean companions, when in the first
-flush of their grief they heard from Mary Magdalene the strange story
-of his first appearing to her after death, still "disbelieved"? [45]
-
-[The comfort of the initial "J"] These Nazarenes were, in their
-quality of "students of religion" (p. 65), intent on converting the
-world from polytheism. Why, then, did they call their sublime deity
-by the name of Jesus? "The word Jesus itself," writes Mr. Smith,
-
-
-    also made special appeal to the Jewish consciousness, for it
-    was practically identical with their own Jeshua, now understood
-    by most to mean strictly Jah-help, but easily confounded with a
-    similar J'shu'ah, meaning Deliverance, Saviour, Witness, Matthew
-    i, 21. Moreover, the initial letter J, so often representing Jah
-    in Hebrew words, must have powerfully suggested Jehovah to the
-    Jewish consciousness.
-
-
-But what Jew of the first century, however fond of the tales about
-Joshua which he read in his scriptures, was ever minded to substitute
-his name for that of Jehovah merely because it began with a J and has
-been explained by twentieth-century Hebraists as meaning Jah-help? The
-idea is exquisitely humorous. While they were about it why did the
-Nazarenes not adopt the name Immanuel, which in that allegorical
-romance (which from Mr. Smith we know to be the character of Matthew's
-Gospel) they fished up out of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah? If Jehovah
-was not good enough for them, Immanuel was surely better than the
-name Jeshua, with its associations of pillage and murder. But apart
-from these considerations, as the name Jeshua is Hebrew, it follows
-that the secret sectaries who had this cult must have been of a Jewish
-cast. But, if so, what Jew, we ask, ever heard of a God called Jeshua
-or Joshua? As I have already pointed out, the very memory of such a
-God, if there ever was one, perished long before the Book of Joshua
-could have been written. Like the gods Daoud and Joseph, with whom
-writers of this class seek to conjure our wits out of our heads,
-a god Joshua is a mere preposterous superfetation of a disordered
-imagination. "There were abundant reasons," writes Mr. Smith (p. 16),
-
-
-    why the name Jesus should be the Aaron's rod to swallow up all
-    other designations. Its meaning, which was felt to be Saviour,
-    was grand, comforting, uplifting. The notion of the world-Saviour
-    thrust its roots into the loam of the remotest antiquity.
-
-
-[Supposed confusion of Jesus with iesomai] One regrets to have to
-criticize such dithyrambic outpourings of Mr. Smith's heart. But,
-granted there was a widespread expectation, such as Suetonius records,
-of Messiahs who were to issue from Judaea and conquer all the world,
-who ever heard of the name Joshua being assigned in advance to one of
-them? Who ever in that age felt the name Jesus to be grand, comforting,
-uplifting? Is not Mr. Smith attributing his own feelings, as he sat
-in a Sunday school, to Jews and Gentiles of the first century? I
-add Gentiles, for he pretends that the name Jesus appealed to the
-Greek consciousness also as a derivative of the Ionic future Iesomai
-iesomai = I will heal. Now what Christian writer ever made this
-rapprochement? Not a single one. Surely, if we are minded to argue
-the man Jesus out of existence, we ought to have a vera causa to put
-in his place, a belief, or, if we like it better, a myth which was
-really believed, and is known to have entered deeply into the lives
-and consciences of men? It is true that the idea of a Messiah did so
-enter, but not in the form in which Mr. Smith loves to conceive it. The
-Messiah was such a human figure as Suetonius had heard of; he was a man
-who should, as we read in Acts, restore the kingdom of David. "Lord,
-dost Thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" is the question
-the apostles are said (Acts i, 7) to have put to Jesus as soon as his
-apparitions before them had revived the Messianic hopes which his
-death had so woefully dashed. The incident is probably apocryphal,
-yet its presence in the narrative illustrates what a Messiah was then
-expected by Christians to achieve. Judas Maccabaeus, Cyrus, Bar Cochba,
-Judas of Galilee--these and other heroes of Israel had the quality
-of Messiahs. They were all men, and not myths. The suggestion, then,
-that the name Jesus was one to conjure with is idle and baseless; and
-if his name had been Obadiah or Nathaniel, Professor Smith would have
-been equally ready to prove that these were attractive names, bound to
-triumph and "swallow up all other designations." He only pitches on
-the name of Jesus for his pre-Christian Saviour-god because he finds
-it in the Gospels; but inasmuch as he sees in them mere allegorical
-romances, entirely unhistorical and having no root in facts, there
-is no reason for adopting from them one name more than another. How
-does he know that the appellation Jesus is not as much of a Nazarene
-fiction as he holds every other name and person and incident to be
-which the Gospels contain? Is it not more probable that this highly
-secretive sect, with their horror of "tell-tale," would keep secret
-the name of their Saviour-god, as the Essenes kept secret the names
-of their patron angels? The truth is, even Mr. Smith cannot quite
-divest himself of the idea that there is some historical basis for
-the Gospels; otherwise he would not have turned to them for the name
-of his Saviour-god.
-
-[Mr. Smith denies all historicity to Acts and Epistles] More
-consistently, however, than Mr. Robertson, Professor Smith denies
-that there are any allusions to the real Jesus in the rest of
-the New Testament. The Acts and Epistles do not, he says (p. 23),
-"recognize at all the life of Jesus as a man," though "their general
-tenour gives great value to the death of Jesus as a God." This is a
-new reading of the documents in question, for the Pauline conviction
-was that Jesus had been crucified and died as a man, and, being
-raised up from death by the Spirit, had been promoted to be, what he
-was antenatally, a super-human or angelic figure [46]--a Christ or
-Messiah, who was to come again on earth and judge mankind. Of his mere
-humanity while on this earth, and as long as he was associating with
-human disciples, Paul entertained no doubts. How could he, inasmuch
-as he had stayed with them at Jerusalem? Mr. Robertson, as we saw,
-although he dissipates Jesus in the Gospels into a Sun-God-Saviour
-Joshua, nevertheless is so impressed by the Pauline "references to a
-crucified Jesus" (p. 364) that he resuscitates Jesus Ben Pandira out of
-the limbo of the Talmud. Perhaps he strains at a gnat after swallowing
-a camel. Anyhow, I will leave Mr. Smith to settle accounts with him,
-and turn to a fresh point, which has not occurred to either of them.
-
-[Contrast of Christian belief in Jesus with cult of Adonis or Osiris]
-It is this. Adonis and Osiris were never regarded by their votaries
-as having been human beings that had recently lived and died on the
-face of this earth. The Christians, in strong contrast with them
-and with all other pagans ever heard of, did so regard Jesus from
-first to last. Why so, when they knew that from the first he was a
-God and up in heaven? Why has the fact of his unreality, as these
-writers argue it, left no trace of itself in Christian tradition and
-literature? According to this new school of critics, the Nazarenes,
-when they wrote down the Gospels, knew perfectly well that Jesus was
-a figment, and had never lived at all. And yet we never get a hint
-that he was only a myth, and that the New Testament is a gigantic
-fumisterie. Why so? Why from the very first did the followers of
-Jesus entertain what Mr. Smith denounces as "an a priori concept of
-the Jesus" (p. 35)? Why, in other words, were they convinced from the
-beginning that he was a man of flesh and blood, who had lived on earth
-among them? The "early secrecy," the "esoterism of the primitive cult"
-(p. 39), says Mr. Smith, "was intended to be only temporary." If
-so, why could not the Nazarenes, primarily interested as they were,
-not in lies and bogus, but in disseminating their lofty monotheism,
-have thrown off the disguise some time or other, and explained to
-their spiritual children that the intensely concrete life of Jesus
-which they had published in our Gospel of Mark meant nothing; that
-it was all an allegory, and no more, of a Saviour-god, who had never
-existed as a human being, nor even as the docetic phantasmagoria of the
-Gnostic? "Something sealed the lips of that (Nazarene) evangelist,"
-and the Nazarenes have kept their secret so well through the ages
-that it has been reserved for Mr. Smith first to pierce the veil
-and unlock their mystery. He it is who has at last discovered that
-"in proto-Mark we behold the manifest God" (p. 24).
-
-Now what possessed the Nazarenes so firmly to impose on the world
-through the Gospels an erroneous view of their God, that for 2,000
-years not only their spiritual offspring, the Christians, but Jews
-and pagans as well, have believed him to have lived on earth, a man
-of flesh and blood and of like passions with themselves? Was the
-deception necessary? The votaries of Osiris and Adonis were never so
-tricked. The adherents of the Augustalian cult, the pious Greeks and
-Syrians who thronged to be healed of their diseases at the shrines
-of Apollonius, believed, of course, that their patron saints and
-gods had lived, prior to their apotheosis, upon earth; and so they
-had. But a follower of Osiris or AEsculapius would have opened his
-eyes wide with astonishment if you asked him to believe that his
-Saviour had died only the other day in Judaea. Not so a Christian;
-for the Nazarene monotheists had so thoroughly fooled him with their
-Gospels that he was ready to supply you with dates and pedigrees and
-all sorts of other details about his Saviour's personal history. And
-yet all the time, had he only known it, his religion laboured under the
-same initial disadvantage as the cult of Osiris or AEsculapius--that,
-namely, of its founder never having lived at all. What, then, did
-"such students of religion, as the first Christians were" (Ecce Deus,
-p. 65), imagine was to be gained by hood-winking their descendants
-for the long centuries which have intervened between them and the
-advent of Professor W. B. Smith?
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VII
-
-DR. JENSEN
-
-
-[Babylonian influence on Greek religion slight;] The three writers
-whose views I have so far considered agree in denying that Jesus was
-a real historical personage; but their agreement extends no further,
-for the Jesus legend is the precipitate, according to Professor
-W. B. Smith, of a monotheistic propaganda; according to Mr. Robertson,
-of a movement mainly idolatrous, polytheistic, and pagan. There exists
-in Germany, however, a third school of denial, which sees in the Jesus
-story a duplicate of the ancient Babylonian Gilgamesch legend. The
-more extreme writers of this school have endeavoured to show that not
-only the Hebrews, but the Greeks as well, derived their religious
-myths and rites from ancient Babylon; and their general hypothesis
-has on that account been nicknamed Pan-Babylonismus. This is not
-the place to criticize the use made of old Babylonian mythology in
-explanation of old Greek religion, though I do well to point out that
-the best students of the latter--for example, Dr. Farnell--confine
-the indebtedness of the Greeks to very narrow limits.
-
-[on Hebrew religion more important;] The case of the Hebrew scriptures
-and religion stands on different ground; for the Jews were Semites,
-and their myths of creation and of the origin and early history
-of man are, by the admission even of orthodox divines of to-day,
-largely borrowed from the more ancient civilization of Babylon. Thus
-Heinrich Zimmern (art. "Deluge," in Encyclopaedia Biblica) writes: "Of
-all the parallel traditions of a deluge, the Babylonian is undeniably
-the most important, because the points of contact between it and
-the Hebrew story are so striking that the view of the dependence of
-one of the two on the other is directly suggested even to the most
-cautious of students."
-
-[yet a Jew may have possessed some imagination of his own] This
-undoubted occurrence of Babylonian myths in the Book of Genesis has
-provided some less critical and cautious cuneiform scholars with
-a clue, as they imagine, to the entire contents of the Bible from
-beginning to end. It is as if the Jews, all through their literary
-history of a thousand years, could not possibly have invented any
-myths of their own, still less have picked a few up elsewhere than in
-Babylon. Accordingly, in a volume of 1,030 enormous pages, P. Jensen
-has undertaken to show [47] that the New Testament, no less than
-the Old, was derived from this single well-spring. Moses and Aaron,
-Joshua, Jeroboam, Rehoboam, Hadad, Jacob and Esau, Saul, David and
-Jonathan, Joseph and his brethren, Potiphar, Rachel and Leah, Laban,
-Zipporah, Miriam sister of Moses, Dinah, Simeon and Levi, Jethro and
-the Gibeonites and Sichemites, Sarah and Hagar, [Gilgamesch, Eabani,
-and the holy harlot, protagonists of the entire Old Testament] Abraham
-and Isaac, Samson, Uriah and Nathan, Naboth, Elijah and Elisha, Naaman,
-Benhadad and Hazael, Gideon, Jerubbaal, Abimelech, Jephthah, Tobit,
-Jehu, and pretty well any other personage in the Old Testament,
-are duplicates, according to him, of Gilgamesch or his companion
-the shepherd Eabani (son of Ea), or of the Hierodule or sacred
-prostitute, and of a few more leading figures in the Babylonian
-epic. There is hardly a story in the whole of Jewish literature
-which is not, according to Jensen, an echo of the Gilgamesch legend;
-and every personage, every incident, is freely manipulated to make
-them fit this Procrustean bed. No combinations of elements separated
-in the Biblical texts, no separations of elements united therein,
-no recasting of the fabric of a narrative, no modifications of
-any kind, are so violent as to deter Dr. Jensen. At the top of
-every page is an abstract of its argument, usually of this type:
-"Der Hirte Eabani, die Hierodule und Gilgamesch. Der Hirte Moses,
-sein Weib und Aaron." In other words, as Moses was one shepherd and
-Eabani another, Moses is no other than Eabani. As there is a sacred
-prostitute in the Gilgamesch story, and a wife in the legend of Moses,
-therefore wife and prostitute are one and the same. As Gilgamesch was
-companion of Eabani, and Aaron of Moses, therefore Aaron was an alias
-of Gilgamesch. Dr. Jensen is quite content with points of contact
-between the stories so few and slight as the above, and pursues this
-sort of loose argument over a thousand pages. Here is another such
-rubric: "Simson-Gilgamesch's Leiche und Saul-Gilgamesch's Gebeine
-wieder ausgegraben, Elisa-Gilgamesch's Grab geoeffnet." In other words,
-Simson, or Samson, left a corpse behind him (who does not?); Saul's
-bones were piously looked after by the Jabeshites; Elisha's bones
-raised a dead Moabite by mere contact to fresh life. These three
-figures are, therefore, ultimately one, and that one is Gilgamesch;
-and their three stories, which have no discernible features in common,
-are so many disguises of the Gilgamesch epos.
-
-[as also of the entire New Testament] But Dr. Jensen transcends himself
-in the New Testament. "The Jesus-saga," he informs us (p. 933), "as
-it meets us in the Synoptic Gospels, and equally as it meets us in
-John's Gospel, stands out among all the other Gilgamesch Sagas which
-we have so far (i.e., in the Old Testament) expounded, in that it not
-merely follows up the main body of the Saga with sundry fragments of
-it, like so many stragglers, but sets before us a long series of bits
-of it arranged in the original order almost undisturbed." [48]
-
-And he waxes eloquent about the delusions and ignorance of Christians,
-who for 2,000 years have been erecting churches and cathedrals in
-honour of a Jesus of Nazareth, who all the time was a mere alias
-of Gilgamesch.
-
-[John--Eabani] Let us, then, test some of the arguments by which this
-remarkable conclusion is reached. Let us begin with John the Baptist
-(p. 811). John was a prophet, who appeared east of the Jordan. So was
-Elias or Elijah. Elijah was a hairy man, and John wore a raiment of
-camel's-hair; both of them wore leather girdles.
-
-Now, in the Gilgamesch story, Eabani is covered with hair all over
-his body (p. 579--"am ganzen Leibe mit Haaren bedeckt ist"). Eabani
-(p. 818) is a hairy man, and presumably was clad in skins ("ist
-ein haariger Mann und vermutlich mit Fellen bekleidet"). Dr. Jensen
-concludes from this that John and Elijah are both of them, equally
-and independently, duplicates or understudies of Eabani. It never
-occurs to him that in the desert camel's-hair was a handy material
-out of which to make a coat, as also leather to make girdles of,
-and that desert prophets in any story whatever would inevitably
-be represented as clad in such a manner. He has, indeed, heard of
-Jo. Weiss's suggestion that Luke had read the LXX, and modelled his
-picture of John the Baptist on Elijah; but he rejects the suggestion,
-for he feels--and rightly--that to make any such admissions must
-compromise his main theory, which is that the old Babylonian epic was
-the only source of the evangelists. No (he writes), John's girdle,
-like Elijah's, came straight out of the Saga ("wohl durch die Sage
-bedingt ist"). Nor (he adds) can Luke's story of Sarah and Zechariah
-be modelled on Old Testament examples, as critics have argued. On the
-contrary, it is a fresh reflex of Gilgamesch ("ein neuer Reflex"),
-an independent sidelight cast by the central Babylonian orb ("ein
-neues Seitenstueck"), and is copied direct. We must not give in to the
-suggestion thrown out by modern critics that it is a later addition
-to the original evangelical tradition. Far from that being so, it must
-be regarded as an integral and original constituent in the Jesus-saga
-("So wird man zugestehen muessen, dass sie keine Zugabe, sondern ein
-integrierender Urbestandteil der Jesus-sage ist").
-
-[Jesus--Gilgamesch] From this and many similar passages we realize that
-the view that Jesus never lived, but was a mere reflex of Gilgamesch,
-is not, in Jensen's mind, a conclusion to be proved, but a dogma
-assumed as the basis of all argument, a dogma to which we must adjust
-all our methods of inquiry. To admit any other sources of the Gospel
-story, let alone historical facts, would be to infringe the exclusive
-apriority, as a source, of the Babylonian epic; and that is why we are
-not allowed to argue up to the latter, but only down from it. If for
-a moment he is ready to admit that Old Testament narrative coloured
-Luke's birth-story, and that (for example) the angel's visit in the
-first chapter of Luke was suggested by the thirteenth chapter of
-Judges, he speedily takes back the admission. Such an assumption is
-not necessary ("allein noetig ist ein solche Annahme nicht").
-
-"So much," he writes (p. 818),
-
-
-    of John's person alone. Let us now pursue the Jesus Saga further.
-
-    In the Gilgamesch Epic it is related how the Hunter marched
-    out to Eabani with the holy prostitute, how Eabani enjoyed her,
-    and afterwards proceeded with her to Erech, where, directly or in
-    his honour, a festival was held; how he there attached himself to
-    Gilgamesch, and how kingly honours were by the latter awarded to
-    him. We must by now in a general way assume on the part of our
-    readers a knowledge of how these events meet us over again in
-    the Sagas of the Old Testament. In the numerous Gilgamesch Sagas,
-    then [of the Old Testament], we found again this rencounter with
-    the holy prostitute. And yet we seek it in vain in the three
-    first Gospels in the exact context where we should find it on
-    the supposition that they must embody a Gilgamesch Saga--that
-    is to say, immediately subsequent to John's emergence in the
-    desert. Equally little do we find in this context any reflex of
-    Eabani's entry into the city of Erech, all agog at the moment
-    with a festival. On the other hand, we definitely find in its
-    original position an echo of Gilgamesch's meeting with Eabani. [49]
-
-
-[Evangelists borrowed their saga from Gilgamesch epos alone] Let us
-pause a moment and take stock of the above. In the epic two heroes
-meet each other in a desert. John and Jesus also meet in a desert;
-therefore, so argues Jensen, John and Jesus are reproductions of the
-heroes in question, and neither of them ever lived. It matters nothing
-that neither John nor Jesus was a Nimrod. This encounter of Gilgamesch
-and Eabani was, as Jensen reminds us, the model of every Old Testament
-story in which two males happen to meet in a desert; therefore it must
-have been the model of the evangelists also when they concocted their
-story of John and Jesus meeting in the wilderness. But how about the
-prostitute; and how about the entry into Erech? How are these lacunae
-of the Gospel story to be filled in? Jensen's solution is remarkable;
-he finds the encounter with the prostitute to have been the model on
-which the fourth evangelist contrived his story of Jesus's visit to
-Martha and Mary. For that evangelist, like the synoptical ones, had
-the Gilgamesch Saga stored all ready in his escritoire, and finding
-that his predecessors had omitted the prostitute he hastened to fill
-up the lacuna, and doubled her into Martha and Mary. In this and many
-other respects, so we are assured by Jensen, the fourth evangelist
-reproduces the Gilgamesch epic more fully and systematically than
-the other evangelists, and on that account we must assign to John's
-setting of the life of Christ a certain preference and priority. He
-is truer to the only source there was for any of it. The other lacuna
-of the Synoptic Gospels is the feasting in Erech and Eabani's entry
-amid general feasting into that city. The corresponding episode in
-the Gospels, we are assured, is the triumphant entry of Jesus into
-Jerusalem, which the Fourth Gospel, again hitting the right nail on
-the head, sets at the beginning of Jesus's ministry, and not at its
-end. But what, we still ask, is the Gospel counterpart to the honours
-heaped by Gilgamesch on Eabani? How dull we are! "The baptism of
-Jesus by John must, apart from other considerations, have arisen out
-of the fact that Eabani, after his arrival at Gilgamesch's palace,
-is by him allotted kingly honours." [50]
-
-So then Eabani, who as a hairy man was John the Baptist, is now, by a
-turn of Jensen's kaleidoscope, metamorphosed into Jesus, for it is John
-who did Jesus the honour of baptizing him. Conversely, Gilgamesch,
-who began as Jesus, is now suddenly turned into John. In fact,
-Jesus-Gilgamesch and John-Eabani have suddenly changed places with one
-another, in accordance, I suppose, with the rule of interpretation,
-somewhere laid down by Hugo Winckler, that in astral myths one hero
-is apt to swop with another, not only his stage properties, but his
-personality. But fresh surprises are in store for Jensen's readers.
-
-Over scores of pages he has argued that John the Baptist is no other
-than Eabani, because he so faithfully fulfils over again the role of
-the Eabanis we meet with in the Old Testament. For example, according
-to Luke (i, 15, and vii, 33) John drinks no wine, and is, therefore,
-a Nazirean, who eschews wine and forbears to cut his hair. Therein
-he resembles Joseph-Eabani, and Simson-Eabani, and Samuel-Eabani,
-and also Absolom, who, as an Eabani, had at least an upper growth
-of hair. And as the Eabani of the Epic, with the long head-hair of a
-woman, drinks water along with the wild beasts in the desert, and as
-Eabani, in company with these beasts, feeds on grass and herbs alone,
-so, at any rate according to Luke, John ate no bread. [51]
-
-Imagine the reader's consternation when, after these convincing
-demonstrations of John's identity with Eabani, and of his consequent
-non-historicity, he finds him a hundred pages later on altogether
-eliminated, as from the Gilgamesch Epic, so from the Gospel. For
-the difficulty suddenly arises before Dr. Jensen's mind that John
-the Baptist, being mentioned by Josephus, must after all have really
-lived; but if he lived, then he cannot have been a mere reflex of
-Eabani. Had he only consulted Dr. Drews's work on the Witnesses to
-the Historicity of Jesus (English translation, p. 190), he would have
-known that "the John of the Gospels" is no other than "the Babylonian
-Oannes, Joannes, or Hanni, the curiously-shaped creature, half fish
-and half man, who, according to Berosus, was the first law-giver and
-inventor of letters and founder of civilization, and who rose every
-morning from the waves of the Red Sea in order to instruct men as to
-his real spiritual nature."
-
-Why could not Dr. Jensen consult Dr. Drews "as to the real spiritual
-nature" of John the Baptist? Why not consult Mr. Robertson, who
-overwhelms Josephus's inconvenient testimony to the reality of John
-the Baptist (in 18 Antiq., v, Sec. 2) with the customary "suspicion
-of interpolation." Poor Dr. Jensen lacks their resourcefulness, and
-is able to discover no other way out of his impasse than to suppose
-that it was originally Lazarus and not John that had a place in his
-Gilgamesch Epic, and that some ill-natured editor of the Gospels,
-for reasons he alone can divine, everywhere struck out the name
-of Lazarus, and inserted in place of it that of John the Baptist,
-which he found in the works of Josephus. Such are the possibilities
-of Gospel redaction as Jensen understands them.
-
-One more example of Dr. Jensen's system. In the Gospel, Jesus,
-finding himself on one occasion surrounded by a larger throng of
-people than was desirable, took a boat in order to get away from them,
-and passed across the lake on the shore of which he had been preaching
-and ministering to the sick. The incident is a commonplace one enough,
-but nothing is too slight and unimportant for Dr. Jensen to detect in
-it a Gilgamesch parallel, and accordingly he writes thus of it: "As
-for Xisuthros, so for Jesus, a boat is lying ready, and like Xisuthros
-and Jonas, Jesus 'flees' in a boat." [52] Xisuthros, I may remind the
-reader, is the name of the flood-hero in Berosus. Hardly a single one
-of the parallels which crowd the thousand pages of Dr. Jensen is less
-flimsy than the above. Without doing more violence to texts and to
-probabilities, one could prove that Achilles and Patroclus and Helen,
-AEneas and Achates and Dido, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and Dulcinea,
-were all of them so many understudies of Gilgamesch, Eabani and his
-temple slave; and we almost expect to find such a demonstration in
-his promised second volume.
-
-I cannot but think that my readers will resent any further specimens
-of Dr. Jensen's system. He has not troubled himself to acquire
-the merest a b c of modern textual criticism. He has no sense of
-the differences of idea and style which divide the Fourth from the
-earlier Gospels, and he lacks all insight into the development of the
-Gospel tradition. He takes Christian documents out of their historical
-context, and ignores their dependence on the Judaism of the period
-B.C. 100 to A.D. 100. He has no understanding of the prophetic,
-Messianic and Apocalyptic aspects of early Christianity, no sense
-of its intimate relations with the beliefs and opinions which lie
-before us in apocryphs like the Book of Enoch, the Fourth Esdras,
-the Ascent of Isaiah, the Testaments of the Patriarchs. He has never
-learned that in the four Gospels he has before him successive stages
-or layers of stratification of Christian tradition, and he accordingly
-treats them as a single literary block, of which every part is of the
-same age and evidential value. Like his Gilgamesch Epic the Gospels,
-for all he knows about them, might have been dug up only yesterday
-among the sands of Mesopotamia, instead of being the work of a sect
-with which, as early as the end of the first century, we are fairly
-well acquainted. Never once does he ask himself how the authors of
-the New Testament came to have the Gilgamesch Epic at the tips of
-their tongues, exactly in the form in which he translates it from
-Babylonian tablets incised 2,000 years before Christ? By what channels
-did it reach them? Why were they at such pains to transform it into
-the story of a Galilean Messiah crucified by the Roman Governor of
-Judaea? And as Paul and Peter, like everyone else named in the book,
-are duplicates of Gilgamesch and Eabani, where are we to draw the
-line of intersection between heaven and earth; where fix the year in
-which the early Christians ceased to be myths and became mere men and
-women? This is a point it equally behoves Dr. Drews and Mr. Robertson
-and Professor W. B. Smith to clear up our doubts about.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-EPILOGUE
-
-
-Of the books passed in review in the preceding pages, as of several
-others couched in the same vein and recently published in England
-and Germany, perhaps the best that can be said is this, that, at any
-rate, they are untrammelled by orthodox prejudice, and fearlessly
-written. That they belong, so to speak, to the extreme left,
-explains the favour with which they are received by that section
-of the middle-class reading public which has conceived a desire
-to learn something of the origins of Christianity. Unschooled in
-the criticism of documents, such readers have learned in the school
-Bible-lesson and in the long hours of instruction in what is called
-Divinity, to regard the Bible as they regard no other collection
-of ancient writings. It is, as a rule, the only ancient book they
-ever opened. They have discovered that orthodoxy depends for its
-life on treating it as a book apart, not to be submitted to ordinary
-tests, not to be sifted and examined, as we have learned from Hume
-and Niebuhr, Gibbon and Grote, to sift ancient documents in general,
-rejecting ab initio the supernatural myths that are never absent from
-them. The acuter minds among the clergy themselves begin nowadays to
-realize that the battle of Freethought and Rationalism is won as far
-as the miracles of the Old Testament are concerned; but as regards
-those of the New they are for ever trying to close up their ranks and
-rally their hosts afresh. Nevertheless, the man in the street has
-a shrewd suspicion that apologetics are so much special pleading,
-and that miracles cannot be eliminated from the Old and yet remain
-in the New Testament. He has never received any training in methods
-of historical research himself, and it is no easy thing to obtain;
-but he is clever enough to detect the evasions of apologists, and,
-with instinctive revulsion, turns away to writers who "go the whole
-hog" and argue for the most extreme positions, even to the length of
-asserting that the story of Jesus is a myth from beginning to end. Any
-narratives, he thinks, that have the germs of truth in them would not
-need the apologetic prefaces and commentaries, the humming and hawing,
-the specious arguments and wire-drawn distinctions of divines, any
-more than do Froissart or Clarendon or Herodotus. If the New Testament
-needs them, then it must be a mass of fable from end to end. Such is
-the impression which our modern apologists leave on the mind of the
-ordinary man.
-
-I can imagine some of my readers objecting here that, whereas I have so
-rudely assailed the method of interpretation of New Testament documents
-adopted by the Nihilistic school--I only use this name as a convenient
-label for those who deny the historical reality of Jesus Christ--I
-nevertheless propound no rival method of my own. The truth is there
-is no abstract method of using documents relating to the past, and you
-cannot in advance lay down rules for doing so. You can only learn how
-to deal with them by practice, and it is one of the chief functions
-of any university or place of higher education to imbue students with
-historical method by setting before them the original documents, and
-inspiring them to extract from them whatever solid results they can. A
-hundred years ago the better men in the college of Christchurch at
-Oxford were so trained by the dean, Cyril Jackson, who would set them
-the task of "preparing for examination the whole of Livy and Polybius,
-thoroughly read and studied in all their comparative bearings." [53]
-No better curriculum, indeed, could be devised for strengthening
-and developing the faculty of historical judgment; and the schools
-of Literae Humaniores and Modern History, which were subsequently
-established at Oxford, carried on the tradition of this enlightened
-educationalist. In them the student is brought face to face in the
-original dialects with the records of the past, and stimulated to
-"read and study them in their comparative bearings." One single branch
-of learning, however, has been treated apart in the universities of
-Oxford and Cambridge, and pursued along the lines of tradition and
-authority--I mean the study of Christian antiquities. The result has
-been deplorable. Intellectually-minded Englishmen have turned away from
-this field of history as from something tainted, and barely one of our
-great historians in a century deems it worthy of his notice. It has
-been left to parsons, to men who have never learned to swim, because
-they have never had enough courage to venture into deep water. As we
-sow, so we reap. The English Church is probably the most enlightened
-of the many sects that make up Christendom. Yet what is the treatment
-which it accords to any member of itself who has the courage to
-dissociate himself from the "orthodoxy" of the fourth century, of
-those Greek Fathers (so-called) in whom the human intelligence sank
-to the nadir of fanaticism and futility? An example was recently seen
-in the case of the Rev. Mr. W. H. Thompson, a young theological tutor
-of Magdalen College in Oxford, who, animated by nothing but loyalty
-for the Church, recently liberated his soul about the miracles of
-the Gospels in a thoroughly scholarly book entitled Miracles in the
-New Testament. The attitude of the clergy in general towards a work
-of genuine research, which sets truth above traditional orthodoxy,
-was revealed in a conference of the clergy of the southern province,
-held soon after its publication on May 19, 1911. The following account
-of that meeting is taken from the Guardian of May 26, 1911:--
-
-
-    The Rev. R. F. Bevan, in the Canterbury Diocesan Conference on
-    May 19, 1911, proposed "that this Conference is of opinion that
-    the clergy should make use of the light thrown on the Bible by
-    modern criticism for the purposes of religious teaching." The
-    Bishop of Croydon moved the following rider: "But desires to
-    record its distrust of critics who, while holding office in the
-    Church of Christ, propound views inconsistent with the doctrines
-    laid down in the creeds of the Church."
-
-    He said it was needful to define what was meant by modern
-    criticism. He referred to a book which had been published quite
-    lately by the Dean of Divinity of Magdalen College, Oxford, a
-    review of which would be found in the Guardian of May 12. He must
-    honestly confess he had not read the book for himself.... He then
-    premised from the review that the work in question rejects the
-    evidence both for the Virgin Birth of Christ and for his bodily
-    Resurrection from the tomb ..., and added that the toleration by
-    Churchmen of such doctrines and such views being taught within the
-    bosom of the Church was to him most sad and inexplicable. If such
-    was the instruction which young Divinity students were receiving
-    at the universities, no wonder that the supply of candidates for
-    ordination was falling off.
-
-    The Rev. J. O. Bevan said it was not in the power of any man or
-    any body of men to ignore the Higher Criticism or to suppress
-    it. It had "come to stay," and its influence for good or evil
-    must be recognized.
-
-    The President (Archbishop of Canterbury) said that "Bible teaching
-    ought to be given with a background of knowledge on the part of the
-    teacher. He should deprecate as strongly as anybody that men who
-    felt that they could not honestly continue to hold the Christian
-    creeds should hold office in the Church of England. But he saw
-    no connection between the sort of teaching which the Conference
-    had now been considering and the giving up of the Christian
-    creed. The Old Testament was a literature which had come down to
-    them from ancient days. Modern investigation enabled them now to
-    set the earlier stages of that literature in somewhat different
-    surroundings from those in which they were set by their fathers and
-    grandfathers." With regard to the book which had been referred to,
-    the Archbishop said that, if the rider proposed was intended to
-    imply a censure upon a particular writer, nothing would induce him
-    to vote for it, inasmuch as he had not read the book, and knew
-    nothing, at first hand, about it. He thought members ought to
-    pause before they lightly gave votes which could be so interpreted.
-
-    The motion, on being put to the meeting, was carried with one
-    dissentient. The rider was also carried by a majority.
-
-
-It amounts, then, to this, that a rule of limited liability is to
-be observed in the investigation of early Christianity. You may be
-critical, but not up to the point of calling in question the Virgin
-Birth or physical resurrection of Christ. The Bishop of Croydon opines
-that the free discussion of such questions in University circles
-intimidates young men from taking orders. If he lived in Oxford,
-he would know that it is the other way about. [54] If Mr. Thompson
-had been allowed to say what he thought, unmolested; if the Bishops
-of Winchester and of Oxford had not at once taken steps to silence
-and drive him out of the Church, students would have been better
-encouraged to enter the Anglican ministry, and the more intellectual
-of our young men would not avoid it as a profession hard to reconcile
-with truth and honesty and self-respect.
-
-In the next number of the same journal (June 2, 1911) is recorded
-another example of how little our bishops are inclined to face a
-plain issue. It is contained in a paragraph headed thus:--
-
-
-    SYMBOLISM OF THE ASCENSION.
-
-    The Bishop of Birmingham on the Second Coming.
-
-    Preaching to a large congregation in Birmingham Cathedral ... the
-    Bishop of Birmingham said that people had found difficulty in
-    modern times about the Ascension, because, they said, "God's
-    heaven is no more above our heads than under our feet." That
-    was perfectly true. But there were certain ways of expressing
-    moral ideas rooted in human thought, and we did not the less
-    speak continually of the above and the below as expressing what
-    was morally high and morally low, and we should go on doing so
-    to the end. The ascension of Jesus Christ and his concealment
-    in the clouds was a symbolical act, like all the acts after his
-    Resurrection; it was to impress their minds with the truth of
-    his mounting to the glory of God. Symbols were the best means
-    of expressing the truth about things which lay outside their
-    experience; and the Ascension symbolized Christ's mounting to the
-    supreme state of power and glory, to the perfect vision of God,
-    to the throne of all the world.... The Kingdom was coming--had to
-    come at last--"on earth as it is in heaven"; and one day, just
-    as his disciples saw him passing away out of their experience
-    and sight, would they see him coming back into their experience
-    and their sight, and into his perfected Kingdom of Humanity.
-
-
-Now, I am sure that what people in modern times chiefly want to know
-about the Ascension is whether it really happened. Did Jesus in his
-physical body go up like a balloon before the eyes of the faithful,
-and disappear behind a cloud, or did he not? That is the plain issue,
-and Dr. Gore seems to avoid it. If he believes in such a miracle,
-why expatiate on the symbolism of all the acts of Jesus subsequent to
-his resurrection? Such a miracle was surely sufficient unto itself,
-and never needed our attention to be drawn to its symbolical aspects
-and import. Does he mean that the legend is no more than "a certain way
-of expressing moral ideas rooted in human thought"? May we welcome his
-insistence on its moral symbolism as a prelude to his abandonment of
-the literal truth of the tale? I hope so, for in not a few apologetic
-books published by divines during the last twenty-five years I have
-encountered a tendency to expatiate on the moral significance of
-extinct Biblical legends. It is, as the Rev. Mr. Figgis expresses
-it, a way of "letting down the laity into the new positions of the
-Higher Criticism." Would it not be simpler, in the end, to tell
-people frankly that a legend is only a legend? They are not children
-in arms. Why is it accounted so terrible for a clergyman or minister
-of religion to express openly in the pulpit opinions he can hear in
-many academical lecture-rooms, and often entertains in the privacy of
-his study? When the Archbishop of Canterbury tells his brother-doctors
-that "modern investigation enables them now to set the earlier stages
-of Old Testament literature in somewhat different surroundings from
-those in which they were set by their fathers and grandfathers,"
-he means that modern scholarship has emptied the Old Testament of
-its miraculous and supernatural legends. But the Anglican clergyman
-at ordination declares that he believes unfeignedly the whole of
-the Old and New Testaments. How can an Archbishop not dispense his
-clergy from belief in the New, when he is so ready to leave it to
-their individual consciences whether they will or will not believe
-in the Old? The entire position is hollow and illogical, and most
-of the bishops know it; but, instead of frankly recognizing facts,
-they descant upon the symbolical meaning of tales which they know
-they must openly abandon to-morrow. One is inclined to ask Dr. Gore
-why Christ could not have imparted in words to his followers the
-secret of his mounting to the supreme state of power and glory? Did
-they at the time, or afterwards, set any such interpretation on
-the story of his rising up from the ground like an airship or an
-exhalation? Of course they did not. They thought the earth was a
-fixed, flat surface, and that, if you ascended through the several
-lower heavens, you would find yourself before a great white throne,
-on which sat, in Oriental state, among his winged cherubim, the Most
-High. They thought that Jesus consummated the hackneyed miracle of
-his ascension by sitting down on the right hand of this Heavenly
-Potentate. If Dr. Gore doubts this, let him consult the voluminous
-works of the early Fathers on the subject. The entire legend coheres
-with ancient, and not with modern, cosmogony. How can it possibly be
-defended to-day on grounds of symbolism, or on any other? The same
-criticism applies to the legend of the Virgin Birth. The Bishop of
-London is reduced to defending this thrum of ancient paganism by an
-appeal to the biological fact of parthenogenesis among insects. Imagine
-the mentality of a modern bishop who dreams that he is advancing the
-cause of true religion and sound learning by assimilating the birth
-of his Saviour to that of a rotifer or a flea!
-
-The books of Dr. Drews and Mr. Robertson and others of their school
-are, no doubt, blundering extravaganzas, all the more inopportune
-because they provoke the gibes of Dr. Moulton; but they are at least
-works of Freethought. Their authors do not write with one eye on the
-truth and the other on the Pope in the Vatican, or on the obsolete
-dogmas of Byzantine speculation. It is possible, therefore, to discuss
-with them, as it is not with apologists, who take good care never to
-lay all their cards on the table, and of whom you cannot but feel,
-as the great historian Mommsen remarked, that they are chattering in
-chains (ex vinculis sermocinantes). In the investigation of truth
-there can be no mental reserves, and argument is useless where the
-final appeal lies to a Pope or a creed. You cannot set your hand to
-the plough and then look back.
-
-It was not, then, within the scope of this essay to try to determine
-how much and what particular incidents traditionally narrated of Jesus
-are credible. Such a task would require at least a thousand pages for
-its discharge; I have merely desired to show how difficult it is to
-prove a negative, and how much simpler it is to admit that Jesus really
-lived than to argue that he was a solar or other myth. The latter
-hypothesis, as expounded in these works, offends every principle
-of philology, of comparative mythology, and of textual criticism;
-it bristles with difficulties; and, if no better demonstration of it
-can be offered, it deserves to be summarily dismissed.
-
-On the other hand, no absolute rules can be laid down a priori for
-the discerning in early Christian or in any other ancient documents
-of historical fact. But students embarking on a study of Christian
-origins will do well to lay to heart the aphorism of Renan (Les
-Apotres, Introd. xxix), that "one can only ascertain the origin of
-any particular religion from the narratives or reports of those who
-believed therein; for it is only the sceptic who writes history ad
-narrandum." It is in the very nature of things human that we could
-not hope to obtain documents more evidential than the Gospels and
-Acts. It is a lucky chance that time has spared to us the Epistles of
-Paul as well, and the sparse notices of first-century congregations
-and personalities preserved in Josephus and in pagan writers. For
-during the first two or three generations of its existence the Church
-interested few except itself. In the view of a Josephus, the Jewish
-converts could only figure as Jews gone astray after a false Messiah,
-just as the Gentile recruits were mere Judaizers, objects--as he
-remarks, B. J., II, 18, 2--of equal suspicion to Syrian pagans and Jews
-alike, an ambiguous, neutral class, spared by the knife of the pagans,
-yet dreaded by the Jews as at heart aliens to their cause. [55] There
-were no folklorists or comparative religionists in those days watching
-for new cults to appear; and there could be little or no inclination to
-sit down and write history among enthusiasts who dreamed that the end
-of the world was close at hand, and believed themselves to be already
-living in the last days. For this is the conviction that colours the
-whole of the New Testament; and that it does so is a signal proof of
-the antiquity of much that the book contains. If a Christian of the
-first century ever took up his pen and wrote, it was not to hand down
-an objective narrative of events to a posterity whose existence he
-barely contemplated, but, as against unbelieving Jews, to establish
-from ancient prophecy his belief in Jesus as the promised Messiah,
-or perhaps as the Word of God made flesh. All Christians were aware
-that Jews, both in Judaea and of the Dispersion, roundly denied their
-Christ to have been anything better than an impostor and violator
-of the Law. They heard the pagans round them echoing the scoffs of
-their Messiah's own countrymen. Accordingly, the earliest literature
-of the Church, so far as it is not merely homiletic and hortative,
-is controversial, and aims at proving that the Jewish people were
-mistaken in rejecting Jesus as the Messiah. The Jews neither then
-nor now have fought with mere shadows; and just in proportion as they
-bore witness against his Messiahship, they bore witness in favour of
-his historical reality. It is a pity that the extreme negative school
-ignore this aspect of his rejection by the Jews.
-
-Let me cite one more wise rule laid down by Renan in the same
-Introduction: "An ancient writing can help us to throw light, firstly,
-on the age in which it was composed, and, secondly, on the age which
-preceded its composition."
-
-This indicates in a general fashion the use which historians should
-make of the New Testament. We have at every turn to ask ourselves
-what the circumstances its contents reveal presuppose in the immediate
-past in the way both of ideas or aspirations and of fact or incidents.
-
-In conclusion, I cannot do better than quote the words in which Renan
-defines in general terms the sort of historical results we may hope to
-attain in the field of Christian origins. It is from the Introduction
-already cited, pp. vi and vii:--
-
-
-    In histories like this, where the general outline (ensemble)
-    alone is certain, and where nearly all the details lend themselves
-    more or less to doubt by reason of the legendary character of
-    the documents, hypothesis is indispensable. About ages of which
-    we know nothing we cannot frame any hypothesis at all. To try
-    to reconstitute a particular group of ancient statuary, which
-    certainly once existed, but of which we have not even the debris,
-    and about which we possess no written information, is to attempt an
-    entirely arbitrary task. But to endeavour to recompose the friezes
-    of the Parthenon from what remains to us, using as subsidiary to
-    our work ancient texts, drawings made in the seventeenth century,
-    and availing ourselves of all sources of information; in a word,
-    inspiring ourselves by the style of these inimitable fragments,
-    and endeavouring to seize their soul and life--what more legitimate
-    task than this? We cannot, indeed, after all, say that we have
-    rediscovered the work of the ancient sculptor; nevertheless, we
-    shall have done all that was possible in order to approximate
-    thereto. Such a method is all the more legitimate in history,
-    because language permits the use of dubitative moods of which
-    marble admits not. There is nothing to prevent our setting before
-    the reader a choice of different suppositions, and the author's
-    conscience may be at rest as soon as he has set forth as certain
-    what is certain, as probable what is probable, as possible what
-    is possible. In those parts of the field where our footstep slides
-    and slips between history and legend it is only the general effect
-    that we must seek after.... Accomplished facts speak more plainly
-    than any amount of biographic detail. We know very little of the
-    peerless artists who created the chefs d'oeuvre of Greek art. Yet
-    these chefs d'oeuvre tell us more of the personality of their
-    authors and of the public which appreciated them than ever could do
-    the most circumstantial narratives and the most authentic of texts.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-NOTES
-
-
-[1] Page 20 of The Christ Myth, from a note added in the third edition.
-
-[2] Op. cit. p. 214.
-
-[3] The Christ Myth, p. 9. (Zu Robertson hat sie meines Wissens noch
-keiner Weise ernsthaft Stellung genommen, p. vii of German edition.)
-
-[4] Christ Myth, p. 57. In the German text (first ed. 1909, p. 21)
-Mr. Robertson is the authority for this statement (so hat Robertson
-es sehr wahrscheinlich gemacht).
-
-[5] Cp. Emile Durkheim, La Vie Religieuse, Paris, 1912, p. 121,
-to whom I owe much in the text.
-
-[6] Such reduplications are common in Semitic languages, and in John
-xix, 23, 24, we have an exact analogy with this passage of Matthew. In
-Psalm xxii, 18, we read: "They parted my garments among them, and
-upon my vesture did they cast lots." Here one and the same incident
-is contemplated in both halves of the verse, and it is but a single
-garment that is divided. Now see what John makes out of this verse,
-regarded as a prophecy of Jesus. He pretends that the soldiers took
-Jesus's garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part,
-so fulfilling the words: "They parted my garments among them." Next
-they took the coat without seam, and said to one another: "Let us not
-rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be." The parallel with
-Matthew is exact. In each case what is mere rhetorical reduplication
-is interpreted of two distinct objects, and on this misinterpretation
-is based a fulfilment of prophecy, and out of it generated a new form
-of a story or a fresh story altogether. In defiance of the opinion of
-competent Hebraists, Mr. Robertson writes (p. 338) that "there is no
-other instance of such a peculiar tautology in the Old Testament." On
-the contrary, the Old Testament teems with them.
-
-[7] Christianity and Mythology, p. 286.
-
-[8] Dr. Carpenter had objected that "It has first to be proved
-that Dionysos rode on two asses, as well as that Jesus is the
-Sun-God." Mr. Robertson complacently answers (p. 453): "My references
-perfectly prove the currency of the myth in question"!
-
-[9] The Witnesses, p. 55 (p. 75 of German edition).
-
-[10] Why necessarily from Josephus? Were not other sources of recent
-Roman history available for Tacitus? Here peeps out Dr. Drews's
-conviction that the whole of ancient literature lies before him,
-and that even Tacitus could have no other sources of information than
-Dr. Drews.
-
-[11] On p. 299, Mary, mother of Joshua, does duty for Mary Magdalen. We
-there read as follows: "The friendship (of Jesus) with a 'Mary' points
-towards some old myth in which a Palestinian God, perhaps named Yeschu
-or Joshua, figures in the changing relations of lover and son towards a
-mythic Mary, a natural fluctuation in early theosophy." Very "natural"
-indeed among the Jews, who punished even adultery with death!
-
-[12] Needless to say, Dr. Frazer, as any scholar must, rejects the
-thesis of the unhistoricity of Jesus with derision. Mr. Robertson,
-in turn, imputes his rejection of it to timidity. "He (Frazer) has
-had some experience in arousing conservative resistance," he writes
-in Christianity and Mythology, p. 111. He cannot realize that any
-learned man should differ from himself, except to curry favour with
-the orthodox, or from fear of them.
-
-[13] I could have given Professor Smith a better tip. Philo composed a
-glossary of Biblical and other names with their meanings, which, though
-lost in Greek, survives in an old Armenian version. In this Essene is
-equated with "silence." What a magnificent aid to Professor Smith's
-faith! For if Essene meant "a silent one," then the pre-Christian
-Nazarenes must surely have been an esoteric and secret sect.
-
-[14] Of course, it is possible that Jesus, before he comes on the
-scene, at about the age of thirty, as a follower of John the Baptist,
-had been a member of the Essene sect, as the learned writer of the
-article on Jesus in the Jewish Encyclopaedia supposes. If such a
-sect of Nazoraei, as Epiphanius describes, ever really existed--and
-Epiphanius is an unreliable author--then Jesus may have been a
-member of it. But it is a long way from a may to a must. Even if it
-could be proved that Matthew had such a tradition when he wrote,
-the proof would not diminish one whit the absurdity of Professor
-Smith's contention that he was a myth and a mere symbol of a God
-Joshua worshipped by pre-Christian Nazoraei. The Nazoraei of Epiphanius
-were a Christian sect, akin to, if not identical with, the Ebionites;
-and the hypothesis that they kept up among themselves a secret cult
-of a God Joshua is as senseless as it is baseless, and opposed to all
-we know of them. In what sense Matthew, that is to say the anonymous
-compiler of the first Gospel, understood nazoraeus is clear to anyone
-who will take the trouble to read Matthew ii, 23. He understood by it
-"a man who lived in the village called Nazareth," and that is the
-sense which Nazarene (used interchangeably with it) also bears in
-the Gospel. Mr. Smith scents enigmas everywhere.
-
-[15] How treacherous the argumentum a silentio may be I can
-exemplify. My name and address were recently omitted for two years
-running from the Oxford directory, yet my house is not one of the
-smallest in the city. If any future publicist should pry into my life
-with the aid of this publication, he will certainly infer that I was
-not living in Oxford during those two years. And yet the Argument
-from Silence is only valid where we have a directory or gazetteer or
-carefully compiled list of names and addresses.
-
-[16] See Luke x, 17-20.
-
-[17] La Vie Religieuse, p. 134.
-
-[18] In his De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus et earum rationibus
-libri tres, printed at the Hague in 1686, but largely written twenty
-years earlier.
-
-[19] The Christ Myth, 2nd ed., p. 18.
-
-[20] It is possible, of course, that Jewish Messianic and apocalyptic
-lore in the first century B.C. had been more or less evolved through
-contact with the religion of Zoroaster; but this lore, as we meet
-with it in the Gospels, derives exclusively from Jewish sources,
-and was part of the common stock of popular Jewish aspirations.
-
-[21] In Mark xv, 39, the utterance of the heathen centurion, "truly
-this man was a Son of God," can obviously not have been inspired
-by messianic conceptions; it can have meant no more than that he
-was more than human, as Damis realized his master Apollonius to be
-on more than one occasion. Nor can Mark have intended to attribute
-Jewish conceptions to a pagan soldier.
-
-[22] For example, he gravely asserts (Die Weltanschauung des alten
-Orients, Leipzig, 1904, p. 41) that Saul's melancholy is explicable
-as a myth of the monthly eclipsing of the moon's light! Perhaps
-Hamlet's melancholy was of the same mythic origin. A map of the stars
-is Winckler's, no less than Jensen's, guide to all mythologies. But,
-to do him justice, Winckler never fell into the last absurdity of
-supposing that Jews at the beginning of our era were engaged in a
-secret cult of a Sun-god named Joshua; on the contrary, he declares
-(op. cit., p. 96), that, just in proportion as we descend the course
-of time, we approach an age in which the heroes of earlier myth are
-brought down to the level of earth. This humanization of the Joshua
-myth was, he held, complete when the book of Joshua was compiled.
-
-[23] Cp. p. 342: "In all his allusions to the movement of his
-day he (Paul) is dealing with Judaizing apostles who preached
-circumcision." And p. 348: "Paul's Cephas is simply one of the apostles
-of a Judaic cult that preaches circumcision."
-
-[24] To wit, of a Sun-god, who is also Mithras and Osiris, and of
-a Vegetation-god annually slain on the sacred tree. We are gravely
-informed that "not till Dr. Frazer had done his work was the psychology
-of the process ascertained." Dr. Frazer must be blushing at this
-tribute to his psychological insight.
-
-[25] Euseb., in Esai, xviii, 1 foll., p. 424, foll. The words might
-mean Justin; but when he quotes Justin he always gives his name. The
-Gospels cannot be intended.
-
-[26] Encycl. Bibl., art, "Paul."
-
-[27] Words italicized in the sequel are citations of the text of Acts.
-
-[28] I expect Dr. Drews and Mr. Robertson, in their next editions,
-to broach the view that the earlier chapter was forged to explain
-the later one, and that in the later one "The Seven" are a cryptic
-reference to the Pleiades.
-
-[29] The relevant part of this commentary is preserved in an old
-Armenian version of which we have ancient MSS.
-
-[30] The difficulties largely vanish on the assumption that Galatians
-is the earliest of the Epistles, and that in Gal. ii, 1, dia d "after
-four" was misread in an early copy as dia id "after fourteen." This
-is Professor Lake's conjecture. Such misreadings of the Greek numerals
-are common in ancient MSS.
-
-[31] Christianity and Mythology, p. 354.
-
-[32] Why did they not do so in their "teaching," if it was
-intended (see p. 344) for the Jews of the Dispersion, instead of
-confining themselves to precepts "simply ethical, non-priestly,
-and non-Rabbinical"?
-
-[33] Ecce Deus, p. 8.
-
-[34] Note in Matthew the phrase (xxiii, 8): "But be ye not called
-Rabbi: for one is your teacher, and all ye are brethren."
-
-[35] The passage in which Josephus mentions John the Baptist runs as
-follows: "To some of the Jews it seemed that Herod had had his army
-destroyed by God, and that it was a just retribution on him for his
-severity towards John called the Baptist. For it was indeed Herod who
-slew him, though a good man, and one who bade the Jews in the practise
-of virtue and in the use of justice one to another and of piety towards
-God to walk together in baptism. For this was the condition under which
-baptism would present itself to God as acceptable, if they availed
-themselves of it, not by way of winning pardon for certain sins,
-but after attaining personal holiness, on account of the soul having
-been cleansed beforehand by righteousness. Because men flocked to him,
-for they took the greatest pleasure in listening to his words, Herod
-took fright and apprehended that his vast influence over people would
-lead to some outbreak of rebellion. For it looked as if they would
-follow his advice in all they did, and he came to the conclusion that
-far the best course was, before any revolution was started by him, to
-anticipate it by destroying him: otherwise the upheaval would come, and
-plunge him into trouble and remorse. So John fell a victim to Herod's
-suspicions, was bound and sent to the fortress of Machaerus, of which
-I have above spoken, and there murdered. But the Jews were convinced
-that the loss of his army was by way of retribution for the treatment
-of John, and that it was God who willed the undoing of Herod."
-
-[36] The suspect passage in which Josephus refers to Jesus runs thus,
-Ant. xviii, 3, 3: "Now about this time came Jesus, a wise man, if
-indeed one may call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works,
-a teacher of such men as receive what is true with pleasure, and he
-attracted many Jews and many of the Greeks. This was the 'Christ.' And
-when on the accusation of the principal men amongst us Pilate had
-condemned him to the cross, they did not desist who had formerly
-loved him, for he appeared to them on the third day alive again;
-the divine Prophets having foretold both this and a myriad other
-wonderful things about him; and even now the race of those called
-Christians after him has not died out."
-
-I have italicized such clauses as have a chance to be authentic,
-and as may have led Origen to say of Josephus that he did not
-believe Jesus to be the Christ. For the clause "This was the Christ"
-must have run, "This was the so-called Christ." We have the same
-expression in Matt. i, 16, and in the passage, undoubtedly genuine,
-in which Josephus refers to James, Ant., xx, 9, 1. Here Josephus
-relates that the Sadducee High-priest Ananus (son of Annas of the
-New Testament), in the interval of anarchy between the departure of
-one Roman Governor, Festus, and the arrival of another, Albinus,
-set up a court of his own, "and bringing before it the brother of
-Jesus who was called Christ--James was his name--and some others,
-he accused them of being breakers of the Law, and had them stoned."
-
-In the History of the Jewish War, iv, 5, 2, Josephus records his
-belief that the Destruction of Jerusalem was a divine nemesis for
-the murder of this Ananus by the Idumeans.
-
-There is not now, nor ever was, any passage in Josephus where the
-fall of Jerusalem was explained as an act of divine nemesis for the
-murder of James by Ananus. Origen, as Professor Burkitt has remarked,
-"had mixed up in his commonplace book the account of Ananus's murder
-of James and the remarks of Josephus on Ananus's own murder."
-
-[37] So in Acts xviii, 12, we read of faction fights in Corinth
-between the Jews and the followers of Jesus the Messiah; Gallio,
-the proconsul of Achaia, who cared for none of the matters at issue
-between them, is a well-known personage, and an inscription has lately
-been discovered dating his tenure of Achaia in A.D. 52.
-
-[38] Tacitus very likely wrote Chrestiani. He says the mob called
-them such, but adds that the author of the name was Christ, so
-implying that Christianus was the true form, and Chrestianus a popular
-malformation thereof. The Roman mob would be likely to deform a name
-they did not understand, just as a jack-tar turns Bellerophon into
-Billy Ruffian. Chrestos was a common name among oriental slaves,
-and a Roman mob would naturally assume that Christos, which they
-could not understand, was a form of it.
-
-[39] Mr. Robertson recognizes (p. 124), though without realizing
-how much it damages his theory, that the miracles of the Gospels are
-"visibly unknown to the Paulinists"--presumably the early churches
-addressed by Paul in his Epistle. Do we not here get a glimpse of
-an early stage of the story of Jesus before it was overlaid with
-miracles? Yet Mr. Robertson, in defiance of logic, argues that the
-absence of miraculous tales of Jesus in the Paulines confirms what
-he calls "the mythological argument."
-
-[40] It is true that this is from a speech put into Paul's mouth by
-the author of Acts; but Paul himself is no less emphatic in Romans
-i, 23, where of the Greeks he writes that, "though they knew God,
-they glorified him not as God.... Professing themselves wise, they
-were turned into fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible
-God for the likeness of an image of a corruptible man." Such were the
-feelings excited in Paul by a statue of Pheidias; how different from
-those it roused in his contemporary Dion, who wrote as follows of it:
-"Whoever among mortal men is most utterly toilworn in spirit, having
-drunk the cup of many sorrows and calamities, when he stands before
-this image must utterly forget all the terrors and woes of this mortal
-life." So strong was the prejudice of the Church (due exclusively to
-its Jewish origin) against plastic or pictorial art that Eusebius and
-Epiphanius condemned pictures of Christ as late as the fourth century,
-while the Eastern churches, even to-day, forbid statues of Jesus and
-of the Saints. Of the great gulf which separated Jew from Gentile on
-such points Mr. Robertson seems not to have the faintest notion.
-
-[41] I trust my readers will forgive my use of a fox-hunting phrase
-in so serious a context, but I cannot think of any other so apt.
-
-[42] P. 48. After citing the rather problematic allusion to Plato
-(Rep. ii, 361 D) in the apology of Apollonius (c. 172), the just man
-shall be tortured, he shall be spat on, and, last of all, he shall
-be crucified. Harnack has said that there is no other reference to
-this passage of Plato in old-Christian literature. "Why?" asks
-Mr. Smith. "Because Christians were not familiar with
-it? Impossible. The silence of the Christians was intentional, and
-the reason is obvious. The passage was tell-tale. Similarly we are to
-understand their silence about the pre-Christian Nazarenes and many
-other lions that were safest when asleep." This is in the true vein
-of a Bacon-Shakesperians armed with his cypher.
-
-[43] See note (1).
-
-[44] Elsewhere Mr. Smith qualifies this position, p. 35: "Of course,
-the cult was not intended to remain, and did not in fact remain,
-secret; it was at length brought into the open." But perhaps Mr. Smith
-is here alluding to his own revelation.
-
-[45] Mark xvi, 9. The circumstance that Mark xvi, 9-20, was added to
-the Gospel by another hand in no way diminishes the significance of
-the passage here adduced.
-
-[46] In the same manner, as we know from Origen (Com. in
-Evang. Ioannis, tom. xiii, 27), the Samaritans had a Messiah named
-Dositheos, who rose from the dead, and professed himself to be the
-Messiah of prophecy. His sect survived in the third century, as also
-his books, which, as Origen says, were full of "myth" about him to the
-effect that he had not tasted of death, but was somewhere or other
-still alive. By all the rules of criticism as used by Mr. Robertson
-and his friends, we must deny that Dositheos ever lived. The idea
-of a human hero being an angel or divine power made flesh was common
-among Jews, and in their apocryph, "The Prayer of Jacob" (see Origen,
-op. cit., tom. ii, 25), that worthy represented himself as such in
-the very language of Paul and of the Fourth Gospel: "I who spoke to
-you, I, Jacob and Israel, am an angel of God and a primeval spirit,
-as Abraham and Isaak were created in advance of all creatures. But
-I, Jacob, ... called Israel by God, a man seeing God, because I am
-first-born of all living beings made alive by God." We also learn
-that Uriel was sent forth by God to herald Jacob's descent upon
-earth, where he "tabernacled among men." Jacob declares himself
-to be "archangel of the power of God, and arch-captain among the
-sons of God, Israel the foremost minister of the Presence." Paul,
-we observe, did not need to go outside Judaism for his conceptions
-of Jesus, nor Justin Martyr either, who regularly speaks of Jesus
-as an archangel. So also among the pagans. In Augustus Caesar his
-contemporaries loved to detect one of the great gods of Olympus just
-descended to earth in the semblance of a man. He was the god Mercury
-or some other god incarnate. His birth was a god's descent to earth
-in order to expiate the sins of the Romans. Thus Horace, Odes, I,
-2, v. 29: Cui dabit partes scelus expiandi Juppiter, and cp. v. 45:
-Serus in coelum redeas--"Mayest thou be late in returning to heaven."
-
-[47] Das Gilgamesch Epos in der Weltliteratur, 1906.
-
-[48] P. 933: "Die Jesus-sage nach den Synoptikern--wie auch die
-nach Johannes--unterscheidet sich nun aber von allen anderen bisher
-eroerterten Gilgamesch-sagen dadurch, dass sie hinter dem Gros der
-Sage nicht nur einzelne Bruchstuecke von ihr als Nachzuegler bringt,
-sondern eine lange Reihe von Stuecken der Sage in fast ungestoerter
-urspruenglicher Reihenfolge," etc.
-
-[49] P. 818. So weit von Johannis Person allein. Verfolgen wir nun
-die Jesus-Sage weiter.
-
-Im Gilgamesch Epos wird erzaehlt, wie zu Eabani in der Wueste der Jaeger
-mit der Hierodule hinauszieht, wie Eabani ihrer habe geniesst, und
-dann mit ihr nach Erech kommt, wo grade oder ihm zu Ehre ein Fest
-gefeiert wird, wie er sich dort an Gilgamesch anschliesst und ihn
-durch Diesen koenigliche Ehren zuteil werden. Welche Metamorphosen
-diese Geschehnisse in den Sagen des alten Testaments erlebt haben,
-darf jetzt in der Hauptsache als bekannt vorausgesetzt werden. In
-zahlreichen Gilgamesch-Sagen fanden wir nun die Begegnung mit
-der Hierodule wieder. Aber vergeblich suchen wir sie dort in den
-drei ersten Evangelien, wo ihr Platz waere, falls diese etwa eine
-Gilgamesch-Sage enthalten sollten, naemlich unmittelbar hinter Johannis
-Auftreten in der Wueste. Ebenso wenig finden wir an dieser Stelle etwa
-einen Reflex von Eabani's Einzug in das festlich erregte Erech. Wohl
-dagegen treffen wir an urspruenglicher Stelle ein Wiederhall von
-Gilgamesch's Begegnung mit Eabani.
-
-[50] P. 820. Jesu Taufe durch Johannes waere sonst auch daraus geworden,
-dass Eabani, nach dem er an Gilgamesch's Hof gelangt ist, durch Diesen
-Koeniglicher Ehren teilhaft wird.
-
-[51] Nach Lukas (i, 15 and vii, 33) trinkt Johannes keinen Wein,
-ist also ein Nasiraeer, der keinen Wein trinkt und dessen Haar nicht
-kekuerzt wird, ebenso wie Joseph-Eabani, wie Simson als ein Eabani,
-wie Samuel-Eabani, wie Absolom als Eabani wenigstens einen ueppigen
-Haarwuchs besitzt, und wie der Eabani des Epos, mit dem langen
-Haupthaar eines Weibes, in der Wueste mit den Tieren zusammen Wasser
-trinkt, und wie Eabani mit diesen Tieren zusammen nur Gras und Krauter
-frisst, so isst Johannes, nach Lukas wenigstens, kein Brot.
-
-[52] P. 838: Wie fuer Xisuthros, liegt fuer Jesus ein Schiff bereit,
-und, wie Xisuthros und Jonas, "flieht" Jesus in ein Schiff.
-
-[53] I cite an unfinished memoir of my grandfather, W. D. Conybeare,
-himself a pioneer of geology and no mean palaeontologist, who owed much
-of his discernment in these fields to such a training in historical
-method as he describes.
-
-[54] Within the last two months the theological faculties of Oxford and
-Cambridge, and the examining chaplains (of various bishops) resident
-in those universities, have addressed a petition to the Archbishop
-of Canterbury praying him to absolve candidates for Ordination of the
-necessity of avowing that "they believe unfeignedly in the whole of the
-Old and New Testaments," because so many competent and well-qualified
-students are thereby deterred from taking holy orders. The Archbishop
-would, it seems, make the individual clergyman's conscience the sole
-judge (to the exclusion of the Bishop of Croydon) of the propriety
-of his retaining his orders in spite of his rejection of this and
-that tradition or dogma. That is at least a sign that opinion is on
-the move.
-
-[55] Such is Renan's interpretation of this passage in L'Ante-Christ,
-ed. 1873, p. 259, and he is undoubtedly right in detecting in it a
-reference to the Christians scattered abroad in the half-Syrian and
-pagan, half-Jewish and monotheist, cities of Syria.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-End of Project Gutenberg's The Historical Christ;, by Fred. C. Conybeare
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