THE ALLEGED CONSENSUS OF SCHOLARS
Such is the historical impasse at which open-minded students find
themselves when they would finally frame a reasoned conception of
the origin of the Christian religion. The documentary analysis having
yielded results which absolutely repel the accepted tradition, however
denuded of supernaturalism, we are driven to seek a solution which
shall be compatible with the data. And some of us, after spending
many years in shaping a sequence which should retain the figure of
the Founder and his twelve disciples, have found ourselves forced
step by step to the conclusion that these are all alike products
of myth, intelligible and explicable only as such. And when, in
absolute loyalty to all the clues, with no foregone conclusions to
support--unless the rejection of supernaturalism be counted such--we
tentatively frame for ourselves a hypothesis of a remote origin in
a sacramental cult of human sacrifice, with a probable Jesus-God
for its centre in Palestine, we are not surprised at being met by
the kind of explosion that has met every step in the disintegration
of traditional beliefs from Copernicus to Darwin. The compendious
Mr. Sinclair, who makes no pretension to have read any of the works
setting forth the new theories, thus describes them:--
The arguments of Baconians and mythomaniacs are alike made up of
the merest blunders as to fact and the sheerest misunderstanding
of the meaning of facts. Grotesque etymologies, [35] arbitrary
and tasteless emendations of texts, forced parallels, unrestrained
license of conjecture, the setting of conjecture above reasonably
established fact, chains of argument in which every link is of
straw, appeals to anti-theological bias and to the miserable
egotism which sees heroes with the eyes of the valet--these are
some of the formidable "evidences" in deference to which we are
asked to reverse the verdicts of tradition, scholarship, and common
sense. They have never imposed on anyone fairly conversant with
the facts. Those who have not such knowledge may either simply
appeal to the authority of scholars, OR, BETTER STILL, SUPPORT that
authority by exercizing their own IMAGINATION AND COMMON SENSE.
That tirade has seemed to me worth preserving. It is perhaps a monition
to scholars, whose function is something higher than vituperation, to
note how their inadequacies are sought to be eked out by zeal without
either scholarship or judgment, and, finally, without intellectual
sincerity. The publicist who alternately tells the unread that they
ought to accept the verdict of scholars, and that it is "better still"
to "support" that verdict by unaided "imagination and common sense,"
has given us once for all his moral measure.
Dismissing him as having served his turn in illustrating
compendiously the temper which survives in Unitarian as in Trinitarian
traditionalism, we may conclude this preliminary survey with a comment
on the proposition that we should take the "verdict of scholars." It
has been put by men, themselves scholars in other fields, whom to
bracket with Mr. Sinclair would be an impertinence. But I have always
been puzzled by their attitude. They proceed upon three assumptions,
which are all alike delusions. The first is that there is a consensus
of scholars on the details of this problem. The second is that the
professional scholars have a command of a quite recondite knowledge as
regards the central issue. The third is that there is such a thing as
professional expertise in the diagnosis of Gods, Demigods, and real
Founders in religious history. Once more, the nature of the problem
has not been realized.
Let us take first the case of a real scholar in the strictest sense of
the term, Professor Gustaf Dalman, of Leipzig, author of "The Words
of Jesus, considered in the light of Post-Biblical Jewish Writings
and the Aramaic Language." [36] To me, Professor Dalman appears to be
an expert of high competence, alike in Hebrew and Aramaic--a double
qualification possessed by very few of those to whose "verdict" we
are told to bow. By his account few previous experts in the same field
have escaped bad miscarriages, as a handful of excerpts will show:--
M. Friedmann, Onkelos und Akylas, 1896, still holds fast to the
traditional opinion that even Ezra had an Aramaic version of the
Tora. In this he is mistaken.
H. Laible, in Dalman-Laible's Jesus Christ in the Talmud, etc.,
incorrectly refers it [the phrase "bastard of a wedded wife"] to
Jesus. The discussion treats merely of the definition of the term
"bastard."
Adequate proof for all three parts of this assertion [A. Neubauer's
as to the use of Aramaic in parts of Palestine] is awanting.
F. Blass ... characterizes as Aramaisms idioms which in some cases
are equally good Hebraisms, and in others are pure Hebraisms and
not Aramaisms at all.
P. W. Schmiedel ... does not succeed in reaching any really
tenable separation of Aramaisms and Hebraisms.
Resch entirely abandons the region of what is linguistically
admissible.... And the statement of the same writer that this
... "belongs very specially to the epic style of narration in
the Old Testament" is incomprehensible.
The idioms discussed above ... show at once the incorrectness of
Schmiedel's contention that the narrative style of the Gospels
and the Acts is the best witness of the Greek that was spoken
among the Jews. The fact is that the narrative sections of the
Synoptists have more Hebrew features than the discourses of Jesus
communicated by them.
Such a book as Wünsche's Neue Beiträge, by reason of quite
superficial and inaccurate assertions and faulty translations,
must even be characterized as directly misleading and confusing.
The want of due precaution in the use made of [the Jerusalem
Targums of the Pentateuch] by J. T. Marshall is one of the things
which were bound to render his efforts to reproduce the "Aramaic
Gospel" a failure.
Harnack supposes it to be an ancient Jewish conception that
"everything of genuine value which successively appears upon earth
has its existence in heaven--i.e., it exists with God--meaning in
the cognition of God, and therefore really." But this idea must be
pronounced thoroughly un-Jewish, at all events un-Palestinian,
although the medieval Kabbala certainly harbours notions of
this sort.
Holtzmann ... thereby evinces merely his own ignorance of Jewish
legal processes.
Especially must his [R. H. Charles's] attempts at retranslation
[of the Assumptio Mosis] be pronounced almost throughout a failure.
[Even in the pertinent observations of Wellhausen and Nestle]
we feel the absence of a careful separation of Hebrew and Aramaic
possibilities.... He [Wellhausen] must be reminded that the Jewish
literature to this day is still mainly composed in Hebrew.
These may suffice to illustrate the point. Few of the other experts
escape Dalman's Ithuriel spear; and as he frankly confesses past
blunders of his own, it is not to be doubted that some of the others
have returned his thrusts. [37] Supposing then that this body of
experts, so many of them deep in Aramaic, so opposed to each other
on so many issues clearly within the field of their special studies,
were to unite in affirming the historicity of the Gospel Jesus,
what would their consensus signify? Simply that they were agreed in
affirming the unknown, the improbable, and the unprovable, while they
disputed over the known. Their special studies do not give them the
slightest special authority to pronounce upon such an issue. It is
one of historic inference upon a mass of data which they among them
have made common property so far as it was not so already, in the main
documents and in previous literature. Dalman, who takes for granted
the historicity of Jesus and apparently of the tradition in general,
pronounces (p. 9) that
the actual discourses of Jesus in no way give the impression that
He had grown up in rural solitude and seclusion. It is true only
that He, like the Galileans generally in that region, would have
little contact with literary erudition.
If Professor Dalman cannot see that the proposition in the first
sentence is extremely disturbing to the traditional belief in its
Unitarian form, and that the second is a mere petitio principii which
cannot save the situation, other people can see it. His scholarship
gives him no "eminent domain" over logic; and it does not require a
knowledge of Aramaic to detect the weakness of his reasoning. Fifty
experts in Aramaic carry no weight for a thinking man on such a
non-linguistic issue; and he who defers to them as if they did is
but throwing away his birthright. When again Dalman writes (p. 60)
that "Peter must have appeared (Acts x, 24) from a very early date
as a preacher in the Greek language," he again raises an insoluble
problem for the traditionalists of all schools, and his scholarly
status is quite irrelevant to that.
When, yet again, he writes (p. 71) that "what is firmly established is
only the fact that Jesus spoke in Aramaic to the Jews," his mastery
of Aramaic has nothing to do with the case. He is merely taking for
granted the historicity of the main tradition; and until he faces the
problems he has ignored (having, as he may fairly claim, been occupied
with others), and repelled the criticisms which that tradition incurs,
his vote on the unconsidered issue has no more value to a rational
judgment than any other. I have seldom read a scholarly treatise more
satisfying than his within its special field, or more provocative of
astonishment at the extent to which specialism can close men's eyes
to the problems which overlap or underlie theirs.
And that is the consideration that has to be realized by those
who talk of scholarship (meaning simply what is called New
Testament scholarship) settling a historical problem which turns
upon anthropology, mythology, hierology, psychology, and literary
and historical science in general. On these sides the scholars in
question, "Wir Gelehrten vom Fach," as the German specialists call
themselves in the German manner, are not experts at all, not even
amateurs, inasmuch as they have never even realized that those other
sciences are involved. They have fallen into the rôle of the pedant,
properly so-called, who presumes to regulate life by inapplicable
knowledge. And even those who are wholly free of this presumptuous
pedantry, the sober, courteous, and sane scholars like Professor
Schmiedel, whose candour enables him to contribute a preface to
such a book as Professor W. B. Smith's Der vorchristliche Jesus,
to whose thesis he does not assent--even these, as we have seen,
can fail to realize the scope of the problem to the discussion of
which they have contributed.
Professor Schmiedel's careful argument from "derogatory" episodes
in the gospel of Mark, be it repeated, is not merely inconclusive;
it elicits a rebuttal which turns it into a defeat. Inadequate even
on the textual side, it is wholly fallacious on the hierological
and the mythological; and no more than the ordinary conservative
polemic does it recognize the sociological problem involved. For
those who seek to study history comprehensively and comprehendingly,
the residuum of the conservative case is a blank incredibility. Even
Dalman, after the closest linguistic and literary analysis, has
left the meaning of "the Kingdom of God" a conundrum; [38] and the
conservative case finally consists in asserting that Christianity
as a public movement arose in the simple announcement of that
conundrum--the mere utterance of the formula--throughout Palestine
by a body of twelve apostles, who for the rest "cast out devils,"
as instructed by their Teacher. The "scholarship" which contentedly
rests facing that vacuous conception is a scholarship not qualified
finally to handle a great historical problem as such. It conducts
itself exactly as did Biblical scholarship so long in face of the
revelations of geology, and as did Hebrew scholarship so long over
the problem of the Tabernacle in the wilderness.
Deeply learned men, in the latter case, went on for generations
solemnly re-writing history in the terms of the re-arranged documents,
when all the while the history was historic myth--perceptible as such
to a Zulu who had lived in a desert. And when the Zulu's teacher proved
the case by simple arithmetic, he met at the hands alike of pedants
and of pietists a volley of malignant vituperation, the "religious"
expert Maurice excelling many of the most orthodox in the virulence of
his scorn; while the pontifical Arnold, from the Olympian height of his
amateurism, severely lectured Colenso for not having written in Latin.
Until the scholars and the amateurs alike renounce their own
presumption, their thrice stultified airs of finality, their estimate
of their prejudice and their personal equation as a revelation from
within, and their sacerdotal conviction that their science is the
science of every case, they will have to be unkindly reminded that they
are but blunderers like other men, that in their own specialties they
convict each other of errors without number, and that the only path
to truth is that of the eternal free play and clash of all manner of
criticism. It is an exceptionally candid orthodox scholar who writes:
"It is a law of the human mind that combating error is the best way to
advance knowledge. They who have never joined in controversy have no
firm grasp of truth. Hateful and unchristian as theological disputes
are apt to become, they have this merit, that they open our eyes." [39]
Let the conservative disputants then be content to put their theses
and their arguments like other men, to meet argument with argument
when they can, and to hold their peace when they have nothing better
to add than boasts and declamation.
Before the end of the nineteenth century the very school which we
are asked to regard as endowed with quasi-papal powers in matters of
historical criticism was declared by one of its leading representatives
in Germany to have been on a wrong track for fifty years. In the
words of Professor Blass:--
Professor Harnack, in his most recent publication, even while
stating that now the tide has turned, and that theology, after
having strayed in the darkness and led others into darkness (see
Matt. xv, 14) for about fifty years, has now got a better insight
into things, and has come to a truer appreciation of the real
trustworthiness of tradition, still puts Mark's gospel between 65
and 70 A.D., Matthew's between 70 and 75, but Luke's much later,
about 78-93. [40]
And Blass, who dates Luke 56 or 60, goes on:--
Has that confessedly untrustworthy guide of laymen, scientific
theology, after so many errors committed during fifty years,
now of a sudden become a trustworthy one? Or have we good reason
to mistrust it as much, or even more than we had before? In
ordinary life no sane person would follow a guide who confessed
to having grossly misled him during the whole former part of
the journey. Evidently that guide was either utterly ignorant
of the way, or he had some views and aims of his own, of which
the traveller was unaware, and he cannot be assumed now to have
acquired a full knowledge, or to have laid those views and aims
wholly aside.
Thus does one Gelehrter vom Fach estimate the pretensions of
a whole sanhedrim of another Fach. Blass is a philologist;
and incidentally we have seen how another philologist, Dalman,
handles him in that capacity. Elsewhere, after another fling at the
theological scholars--with a salvo of praise to Harnack for his Lukas
der Arzt--and a comment on the fashion in which every German critic
swears by his master, he avows that "we classical philologists ... have
seen similar follies among ourselves in fair number." [41] It is most
true; and the philologists are as much divided as the theologians.
Of course, it is not by philology that Blass has reached the standpoint
from which he can contemn the professional theologians. He is really
on the same ground as they, making the same primary assumptions of
historicity: the only difference is that while they, following the
same historical tradition, yet scruple to accept prophecies as having
been actually made at the time assigned to them, and feel bound to date
the prophecy after the event, the consistent philologist recognizes no
such obligation in the present instance, and puts a rather adroit but
very unscholarly argument on the subject, with which we shall have to
deal later. But for those to whom the exact dating of the Gospels is a
subsidiary problem, his argument has only a subsidiary interest; and
the fact that he unquestioningly agrees with his flouted theological
colleagues in accepting the historicity of Jesus gives no importance
to their consensus.
If, as he says, they are in the mass utterly untrustworthy guides on
any historical issue (an extravagance to which, as a layman, I do
not subscribe), their agreement can be of no value to him where he
and they coincide. After telling Harnack that men who have confessedly
been astray for fifty years have no right to expect to be listened to,
he makes much of Harnack's support as to the historicity of the Acts--a
course which will not impose upon thoughtful readers. All the while,
of course, Professor Blass is simply applying a revised historical
criticism to a single issue or set of issues, and even if he chance
to be right on these he has set up no new historical method. No more
than the others has he recognized the central historical problem;
and he must be well aware that that reversion to tradition announced
by Harnack, and at this point acquiesced in by him, cannot for a
moment be maintained as a general critical principle in regard to
the New Testament any more than in regard to the Old. All that he can
claim is that many theologians have confessedly blundered seriously
on historical problems. But that is quite enough to justify us in
admonishing the mere middlemen and the experts alike to change the
tone of absurd assurance with which they meet further innovations of
historical theory.