_THE ORIGIN OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH_
Among the many recent theories concerning the origin of religion,
certainly the most impressive is Mr. Frazer's hypothesis as to the
origin of the belief in the divinity of Christ. Unlike several modern
speculations, Mr. Frazer's is based on an extraordinary mass of
erudition. We are not put off with vague and unvouched-for statements,
or with familiar facts extracted from the collections of Mr. Tylor,
Lord Avebury, and Mr. Herbert Spencer. Mr. Frazer does not collect
knowledge, as his Babylonian kings are supposed by him to have been
sacrificed--by proxy. No writer is so erudite, and few are so exact in
their references. While venturing to differ from Mr. Frazer, I must
often, as it were, make use of his own ammunition in this war. Let me
say sincerely that I am not pitting my knowledge or industry against
his. I rather represent the student who has an interest in these
subjects, and peruses 'The Golden Bough,' not as 'the general reader'
does, but with some care, and with some verification of the citations
and sources.
It is first necessary to state, as briefly as possible, Mr. Frazer's
hypothesis as to the origin of the belief in the Divinity of our Lord,
or, at least, as to what he thinks a very powerful factor in the
evolution of that creed.
The Babylonians, he holds, and their Persian conquerors were wont
yearly, at a vernal feast, to dress a condemned criminal in the royal
robes, to enthrone him, to obey him, to grant him access to the ladies
of the royal harem, and then, at the end of five days, to strip, whip,
and hang him. The reason why they acted thus, Mr. Frazer guesses, was
that the condemned man acted as proxy for the divine King of Babylon,
who, in an age less civilised, had been sacrificed annually: so Mr.
Frazer conjectures. The King was thus sacrificed as a being of divine
or magical nature, a man-god, and the object, according to Mr. Frazer,
was to keep providing the god or magical influence resident in him with
a series of fresh human vehicles. It appears, or may appear, to be Mr.
Frazer's opinion, though the point is stated rather casually and late
in the long argument, that the King himself was believed to incarnate
a known and recognised god of vegetation, a personal principle of
vegetable life. The King's proxy, therefore, the condemned criminal, is
sacrificed (by hanging) in a character at once royal (as representing
the King) and divine (since the King incarnates a god). All this
occurs, by one of the theories advanced, at about the time of year in
which our Easter falls, at a feast called Zakmuk in Babylonian, in
Persian (by the theory) Sacæa: a period of hard drinking and singular
licence.
The Jews, by the theory, or by one of the theories, had probably no
such feast or custom before they were carried into exile in Babylonia.
But from the Babylonians and Persians Mr. Frazer holds that they
probably borrowed the festival, which they styled Purim, and also
borrowed the custom (historically unheard of among them) of crowning,
stripping, flogging, and hanging a mock-king, a condemned criminal,
in March. It does not appear that this man, in Judæa, was allowed
to invade the harem, for example, of Herod, as in the case of the
Persian royal harem. The Jews also are conjectured to have borrowed a
practice, presumed by Mr. Frazer to have perhaps prevailed at Babylon,
of keeping a pair of condemned criminals. One of them was hanged; the
other was set free for the year. The first died as an incarnation of
the god of vegetable life. The second, set free, represented in a
pseudo-resurrection the first, and also represented, I understand, the
revival of the god of vegetable life. The first man was called Haman,
probably in origin Humman, a deity of the vanquished foes of Babylon,
the Elamites. The second man, in Hebrew Mordecai, probably represented
Merodach, or Marduk, the supreme god of the victorious Babylonians.
Each man had a female consort, probably in Babylon a sacred harlot:
Haman had Vashti, probably an Elamite goddess; Mordecai had Esther,
doubtless Ishtar, the Venus of the Babylonian creed. These ladies do
not occur in any account of the Babylonian or Persian feasts, nor in
the Gospels: their existence is a conjecture.
The victims, as descending from the Babylonian and Persian criminals,
who stood both for the king and also, at least in some parts of the
theory, for a god of vegetation, were conceived of as divine. Since
Christ, by what looks like a chapter of accidents, was put to death as
one of these mock-kings, He inherited their recognised divinity, and
His mission, which had been mainly that of a moral lecturer, at once
was surrounded by a halo of divinity.
Such, in brief, if I follow Mr. Frazer, is the contention, which, I
must repeat, is presented as the combination of many hypotheses into a
single theory, offered for criticism.
To myself, after studying Mr. Frazer's theory with such care as it
deserves, an hypothesis of its evolution presents itself. Before
writing the first edition of 'The Golden Bough' (1890), Mr. Frazer
had become acquainted with a statement which Dio Chrysostom, a Greek
rhetorician of the first century, puts into the mouth of Diogenes the
Cynic, in an imaginary dialogue with Alexander the Great. In this essay
Diogenes is made to tell Alexander about the Persian custom of yearly
dressing up a condemned criminal in royal robes, at the feast called
Sacæa, allowing him to live 'like a king' for five days, giving him the
_entrée_ of the royal harem, and then stripping, scourging, and hanging
or crucifying him. The resemblance of Dio's words to the account of the
Mockery of Christ is very remarkable.
Mr. Frazer tells us that he saw this resemblance in 1890, but could
not explain it. In 1897 he became acquainted with a legend, written in
Greek, of the martyrdom of St. Dasius, a Roman Christian soldier, in
Mœsia (303 A.D.). According to this legend, Dasius was drawn by lot
as the yearly victim who, the story says, was made to represent King
Saturnus, for a month of military revelry, and then was sacrificed, or
obliged to slay himself, beside Saturn's altar, at the close of the
Saturnalia. Dasius declined the part, and was put to death.
Here, then, in Mœsia, if we believe the legend of St. Dasius, was
a mock-king, personating a god, sacrificed to a god, and therefore
himself, it may be, regarded as divine. At the other extreme, in
Jerusalem, was Christ, who, after mock royal honours, was scourged,
crucified, and acquired a halo of divinity. The middle term was the
criminal, who, in the character of a mock-king, was stripped, scourged,
and hanged in the Persian feast. There was no trace in Persia of
sacrifice, of a victim in the technical sense, or of any halo of
divinity. But Mr. Frazer was familiar with barbaric kings who are or
were put to death, to save them from dying naturally, or after a
fixed term of years. In his opinion they are killed to provide the
god whom they incarnate with a fresh vehicle. Combining all these
facts, and strongly drawn by the resemblance of Dio's anecdote to the
narratives of the Crucifixion, Mr. Frazer adopted the argument that
the criminal executed at the Sacæa, in Babylon, had once been, like
the Saturn sufferer in Mœsia, a divine victim, not at first hanged,
but sacrificed yearly, to redeem the life of the Persian king, who in
earlier ages must himself have been a yearly sacrifice. The divinity
inherited by the criminal from that divine King was transmitted by a
succession of executed malefactors to the victim of Calvary.
The ingenuity of the idea is undeniable. But it appears to me that the
author's mind was throughout unconsciously drawn to the Crucifixion.
This attraction became a 'mental prepossession.' In a recent work,
'Fact and Fable in Psychology' (Boston, U.S., 1900), Professor Jastrow
has illustrated 'mental prepossession' by a common and trivial
experience. A beginner in the art of bicycling is unconsciously drawn
into collision with every obstacle on the road which his conscious self
is doing its best to avoid.
In the same way, I fancy, our author's mind was led straight to an
explanation of the halo of divinity round the Cross, instead of to
what was needed first, an explanation of the Persian custom, isolated,
and examined only in the light of its attendant circumstances, as
described in our very scanty information. Had our author examined the
circumstances of the Persian custom with an intellect unattracted by
the hope of throwing new light on the Crucifixion, and uninfluenced
by a tendency to find gods of vegetation almost every where, he would
have found, I think, that they admit of being accounted for in a simple
manner, granting that our information is true. There was, as far as we
are informed, no sacrifice at the Sacæa, and in that Persian festival
nothing religious. The religious element has to be imported by aid of
remote inference, daring conjecture, and even, I venture to say, some
disregard of documentary history.
The consequence, as I shall try to show, is that the theory has, in
the Regent Moray's words, 'to pass over the bellies' of innumerable
obstacles, by aid of a series of conjectures increasing in difficulty.
Thus the reader's powers of acquiescence are strained afresh at the
introduction of each new trial of his faith. If one stage out of so
many stages of remote inference and bold presumption is unstable, the
whole edifice falls to the ground. Meanwhile we shall have to offer
a simple explanation of the circumstances of the Sacæan victim, only
in a single instance demanding the use of one of Mr. Frazer's own
conjectures, itself a legitimate hypothesis. The remainder of this
essay is concerned with an examination of the difficulties of his
theory, and of the 'bridges of hypothesis,' by which the 'yawning
chasms' are to be crossed.
V
_THE APPROACHES TO MR. FRAZER'S THEORY_