THE VISIONARY EVANGEL
All this applies, of course, to the "Primitive Gospel" held to
underlie all of the synoptics, Mark included--a datum which reduces
to comparative unimportance the question of priority among these. As
collected by the school of Bernhard Weiss, [27] the primitive Gospel,
like Mark, set out with a non-historical introduction of the Messiah
to be baptized by John. It then gives the temptation myth in full;
and immediately afterwards the Teacher is made to address to disciples
(who have not previously been mentioned or in any way accounted for)
the Sermon on the Mount, with variations, and without any mount. In
this place we have the uncompromising insistence on the Mosaic law;
and soon, after some miracles of healing and some Messianic discourses,
including the liturgical "Come unto me all ye that labour," we have
the Sabbatarian question raised on the miracle of the healing of the
man with the dropsy, but without the argument from the Davidic eating
of the shewbread. [28]
There is no more of the colour of history here than in Mark: so
obviously is it wanting in both that the really considerate exegetes
are driven to explain that history was not the object in either
writing. In both "the twelve" are suddenly sent--in the case of Mark,
after a list of twelve had been inserted without any reference to
the first specified five; in the reconstructed "primitive" document
without any list whatever--to preach the blank gospel, "The kingdom of
God is at hand," with menaces for the non-recipient, the allocutions
to Chorazin and Bethsaida being here made part of the instructions
to the apostles.
What, then, are the disciples supposed to have preached? What had
the Teacher preached as an evangel of "the Kingdom"? The record has
expressly represented that his parables were incomprehensible to his
own disciples; and when they ask for an explanation they are told
that the parables are expressly meant to be unintelligible, but that
to them an explanation is vouchsafed. It is to the effect that "the
seed is the word." What word? The "Kingdom"? The mystic allegories
on that head are avowedly not for the multitude: they could not have
been. Yet those allegories are the sole explanations ever afforded in
the Gospels of the formula of "the Kingdom" which was to be the purport
of the evangel of the apostles to the multitude. They themselves had
failed to understand the parables; and they were forbidden to convey
the explanation. What, then, had they to convey?
And that issue raises another. Why were there disciples at
all? Disciples are understood to be prepared as participants in
or propagandists of somebody's teaching--a lore either exoteric
or esoteric. But no intelligible view has ever been given of the
purpose of the Gospel Jesus in creating his group of Twelve. If we
ask what he taught them, the only answer given by the documents is:
(1) Casting out devils; (2) The meaning of parables which were meant
to be unintelligible to the people: that is, either sheer thaumaturgy
or a teaching which was never to be passed on. On the economic life
of the group not one gleam of light is cast. Judas carried a "bag,"
but as to whence came its contents there is no hint. The whole concept
hangs in the air, a baseless dream. The myth-makers have not even
tried to make it plausible.
The problems thus raised are not only not faced by the orthodox
exegetes; they are not seen by them. They take the most laudable
pains to ascertain what the primitive Gospel was like, and, having
settled it to the satisfaction of a certain number, they rest from
their labours. Yet we are only at the beginning of the main, the
historic problem, from which Baur recalled Strauss to the documentary,
with the virtual promise that its solution would clear up the other.
A "higher" criticism than that so-called, it is clear, must set about
the task; and its first conclusion, I suggest, must be that there
never was any Christian evangel by the Christ and the Twelve. These
allegories of the Kingdom are framed to conceal the fact that the
gospel-makers had no evangel to describe; though it may be claimed
as a proof of their forensic simplicity that they actually represent
the Founder as vetoing all popular explanation of the very formula
which they say he sent his disciples to preach to the populace. An
idea of the Kingdom of God, it may be argued, was already current
among the Jews: the documents assert that that was the theme of the
Baptist. Precisely, but was the evangel of Jesus then simply the
evangel of John, which it was to supersede? And was the evangel of
John only the old evangel, preached by Pharisees and others from
the time of the Maccabees onwards? [29] Whatever it was, what is
the meaning of the repeated Gospel declaration that the nature of
the Kingdom must not be explained to the people? There is only one
inference. The story of the sending forth of the twelve is as plainly
mythical as is Luke's story of the sending forth of the seventy,
which even the orthodox exegetes abandon as a "symmetrical" myth;
though they retain the allocution embodied in it. What is in theory
the supreme episode in the early propaganda of the cult is found to
have neither historical content nor moral significance. Not only
is there not a word of explanation of the formula of the evangel,
there is not a word of description of the apostles' experience,
but simply the usual negation of knowledge:--
And the disciples returned and told him all that they had done,
saying, Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy
name. And he said, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven;
behold I have given you power to tread on serpents and scorpions
and over all the power of the enemy; notwithstanding, in this
rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you, but rejoice
because your names are written in heaven.... (Luke x, 17-20, with
"the disciples" for "the seventy").
And this is history, or what the early Christian leaders thought fit
to put in place of history, for Christian edification. The disciples,
be it observed, had exorcized in the name of Jesus where Jesus had
never been, a detail accepted by the faithful unsuspectingly, and
temporized over no less unsuspectingly by the "liberal" school, but
serving for the critical student to raise the question: Was there,
then, an older cult of a Jesus-God in Palestine? Leaving that problem
for the present, we can but note that the report in effect tells
that there was no evangel to preach. To any reflecting mind, it is
the utterance of men who had nothing to relate, but are inserting an
empty framework, wholly mythical, in a void past. Themselves ruled by
the crudest superstition, they do but make the Divine Teacher talk on
their own level, babbling of Satan falling from heaven, and of treading
on serpents. All the labours of the generations of laborious scholars
who have striven to get to the foundations of their documents have
resulted in a pastiche which only the more clearly reveals the total
absence of a historic basis such as the Gospels more circumstantially
suggest. In the end we have neither history nor biography, but an
absolutely enigmatic evangel, set in a miscellany of miracles and of
discourses which are but devices to disguise the fact that there had
been no original evangel to preach. If the early church had any creed,
it was not this. It originated in a rite, not in an evangel.
One hypothesis might, indeed, be hazarded to save the possibility of
an actual evangel by the Founder. If, taking him to be historical,
we assume him to have preached a political doctrine subversive
of the Roman rule, and to have thereby met his death, we could
understand that, in a later period in which the writers connected
with the movement were much concerned to conciliate the Romans, it
might have been felt expedient, and indeed imperative, to suppress
the facts. They would not specify the evangel, because they dared
not. On this view the Founder was a Messiah of the ordinary Jewish
type, aiming at the restoration of the Jewish State. But such a Jesus
would not be the "Jesus of the Gospels" at all. He would merely be
a personage of the same (common) name, who in no way answered to
the Gospel figure, but had been wholly denaturalized to make him a
cult-centre. On this hypothesis there has been no escape from the
"myth-theory," but merely a restatement of it. A Jesus put to death
by the Romans as a rebel Mahdi refuses to compose with the Teacher
who sends out his apostles to preach his evangel; who proclaims,
if anything, a purely spiritual kingdom; and who is put to death as
seeking to subvert the Jewish faith, the Roman governor giving only
a passive and reluctant assent. On the political hypothesis, as on
the myth-theory here put, the whole Gospel narrative of the Tragedy
which establishes the cult remains mythical. We have but to proceed,
then, with the analysis which reveals the manner of its composition
and of its inclusion in the record.
It is admitted by the reconstructors that the primitive Gospel had
no conclusion, telling nothing of Last Supper, Agony, Betrayal,
Crucifixion, or Resurrection. It did not even name Judas as the
betrayer. And they explain that it was because of lacking these
details that it passed out of use, superseded by the Gospels which
gave them. As if the conclusion, were it compiled in the same fashion,
could not have been added to the original document, which ex hypothesi
had the prestige of priority. Why the composer of the original did not
add the required chapters is a question to which we get only the most
futile answers, as is natural when the exegetes have not critically
scrutinized the later matter. Thus even Mr. Jolley is content to say:--
The omission of any account of the Passion or Resurrection is
natural enough in a writing primarily intended for the Christians
of Judæa, some of them witnesses of the Crucifixion, and all,
probably, familiar with the incidents of the Saviour's Judæan
ministry, as well as with the events preceding and following
the Passion, especially when we remember that the author had no
intention (!) of writing a biography. [30]
Here the alleged fact that only some had seen the Crucifixion,
while all knew all about the ministry, is given as a reason why the
ministry should be described and the Crucifixion left undescribed
and unmentioned!
The problem thus impossibly disposed of is really of capital
importance. Any complete solution must remain hypothetical in the
nature of the case; but at least we are bound to recognize that
the Primitive Gospel may have had a different conclusion, as it may
further have contained matter not preserved in the synoptics. That
might well be a sufficient ground for its abandonment by the Christian
community; and some such suspicion simply cannot be excluded, though
it cannot be proved. But whatever we may surmise as to what may have
been in the original document, we can offer a decisive reason why the
existing conclusion should not have been part of it. That conclusion
is primarily extraneous to any gospel, and is not originally a piece
of narrative at all.
Bernhard Weiss ascribes to Mark the original narrative of the closing
events, making Matthew a simple copyist--a matter of no ultimate
importance, seeing that it is the same impossible and unhistorical
narrative in both documents. Like all the other professional exegetes,
Bernhard Weiss and his school have failed to discern that the document
reveals not only that it is not an original narrative at all, but that
it could not possibly be a narrative. "It was only in the history
of the passion," writes Weiss, "that Mark could give a somewhat
connected account partly of what he himself had seen and partly of
what he gathered from those who witnessed the crucifixion." [31]
Whether "passion" here includes the Agony in the Garden is not clear:
as it is expressly distinguished from the crucifixion, which Mark
by implication had not seen, the meaning remains obscure. Like the
ordinary traditionalists, Weiss assumes that "after Peter's death Mark
began to note down his recollections of what the Apostle had told him
of the acts and discourses of Jesus." Supposing this to include the
record of the night of the Betrayal, what were Mark's possible sources
for the description of the Agony, with its prayers, its entrances and
exits, when the only disciples present are alleged to have been asleep?
It is the inconceivable omission of the exegetes to face such problems
that forces us finally to insist on their serious inadequacy in this
regard. They laboriously conduct an investigation up to the point at
which it leaves us, more certainly than ever, facing the incredible,
and there they leave it. Their work is done. That the story of the
Last Night was never framed as a narrative, but is primarily a drama,
which the Gospel simply transcribes, is manifest in every section,
and is definitely proved by the verses (Mk. xiv, 41-42) in which,
without an intervening exit, Jesus says: "Sleep on now, and take
your rest.... Arise, let us be going." The moment the document is
realized to be a transcript of a drama it becomes clear that the
"Sleep on now, and take your rest" should be inserted before the
otherwise speechless exit in verse 40, where the text says that
"they wist not what to answer him." Two divergent speeches have by
an oversight in transcription been fused into one.
That the story of the tragedy is a separate composition has been
partly perceived by critics of different schools without drawing any
elucidating inference. Wellhausen pronounces that the Passion cannot
be excepted from the verdict that Mark as a whole lacks the character
of history. "Nothing is motived and explained by preliminaries." [32]
But "we learn as much about the week in Jerusalem as about the year in
Galilee." [33] And the Rev. Mr. Wright gets further, though following
a wrong track:--
The very fact that S. Mark devotes six chapters out of sixteen
to events which took place in the precincts of Jerusalem makes
me suspicious. Important though the passion was, it seems to
be narrated at undue length. The proportions of the history are
destroyed. [34]
Precisely. The story of the events in Jerusalem is no proper part
either of a primary document or of the first or second Gospel. In its
detail it has no congruity with the scanty and incoherent narrative
of Mark. It is of another provenance, although, as Wellhausen notes,
quite as unhistorical as the rest. The non-historicity of the entire
action is as plain as in the case of any episode in the Gospels. Judas
is paid to betray a man who could easily have been arrested without
any process of betrayal; and the conducting of the trial immediately
upon the arrest, throughout the night, the very witnesses being
"sought for" in the darkness, is plain fiction, explicable only by
the dramatic obligation to continuous action.