CONSERVATIVE POSITIONS
It is only just to confess that the conservatives are already
learning to employ some prudential expedients. Met by the
challenge to their own nakedly untenable positions, and offered a
constructive hypothesis, diversely elaborated from various quarters,
they mostly evade the discussion at nearly every point where
the impossible tradition is concretely confronted by a thinkable
substitute, and spend themselves over the remoter issues of universal
mythology. Habitually misrepresenting every argument from comparative
mythology as an assertion of a historical sequence in the compared
data, they expatiate over questions of etymology, and are loud in
their outcry over a suggestion that a given historical sequence may
be surmised from data more or less obscure. But to the question how
the evangel could possibly have begun as the record represents, or
how the consummation could possibly have taken place as described,
they either attempt no answer whatever or offer answers which are worse
than evasions. One professional disputant, dealing with the proposition
that such a judicial and police procedure as the systematic search
for witnesses described in the Gospel story of the Trial could not
take place by night, "when an Eastern city is as a city of the dead,"
did not scruple to say that the thesis amounted to saying that in an
Eastern city nothing could happen by night. This controversialist is
an instructor of youth, and claims to be an instructed scholar. And
his is the only answer that I have seen to the challenge with which
it professes to deal. Loisy agrees that the challenge cannot be met.
To the hypothesis that there was a pre-Christian cult of a Jesus-God,
the traditionalist--above all, the Unitarian, who seems to feel
the pinch here most acutely--retorts with a volley of indignant
contempt. He can see no sign of any such cult. In the mind's eye he
can see, as a historic process, twelve Apostles creating a Christian
community by simply crying aloud that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,
excommunicating for the after life those who will not listen, and all
the while assiduously casting out devils. His records baldly tell him
that this happened; and "we believe in baptism because we have seen
it done." But whereas, in the nature of the case, the reconstruction
of the real historic process must be by tentative inference from a
variety of data which for the most part the records as a matter of
course obscured, he makes loud play with the simple fact that the
records lack the required clear mention, and brands as "unsupported
conjecture" the theorem offered in place of the plain untruth with
which he has so long been satisfied.
In his own sifted and "primitive" records we have the narration of
the carrying of the Divine Man to a height ("pinnacle of the temple"
only in the supposed primitive Gospel) by Satan for purposes of
temptation. For a mythologist this myth easily falls into line as a
variant of the series of Pan and the young Zeus at the altar on the
mountain top, Pan and Apollo competing on the top of Mount Tmolus,
Apollo and Marsyas, all deriving from the Babylonian figures of the
Goat-God (Capricorn) and the Sun-God on the Mountain of the World,
representing the starting of the sun on his yearly course. That
assignment explains at once the Pagan myths and the Christian,
which is thus shown to have borrowed from the myth material of
the Greco-Oriental world in an early documentary stage. Challenged
to evade that solution, he mentions only the Pan-Zeus story, says
nothing of the series of variants or of the Babylonian original,
and replies that he is
unable to trace any real and fundamental connection between the
stories. In the Buddhist narrative [which had been cited as an
analogue [42]] the "temptation" to satisfy the cravings of hunger,
the promptings of ambition, and the doubts as to the overruling
Providence of God, are all wanting. In the Roman story, too, Pan,
as representing in satyr-form the lower and animal propensities
of man, is a very different being to the Hebrew Satan; moreover,
there is no tempting of Jupiter, as there is of Jesus. Jupiter,
likewise, is wholly a god; Jesus is a sorely bested Man, although
divine. There is, in short, not the least affinity between any
of these narratives beyond the general idea of trial. [43]
And this figures as a refutation. For our traditionalist, comparative
mythology does not and cannot exist; for him there can be no
fundamental connection between any two nominal myths unless they are
absolutely identical in all their details; and the goat-footed Pan and
the goat-footed Satan (certainly descended from the Goat-God Azazel)
are merely "very different beings," though Satan for the later Jews
and Jesuists actually corresponded to Pan (who is not a mere satyr
for the Greeks) not only in being the spirit of concupiscence [44]
but in being "the God of this world," as the Gospel myth in effect
shows him to be. And this exhibition of ignorance of every principle of
mythology passes for "scholarship," and will be duly so certificated
by Sir William Robertson Nicoll, who undertakes to preside in that
department, as in politics, with about equal qualifications.
By way of constructive solution of the problem we have from the
apologist this:--
If a conjecture may be hazarded here, we should be inclined to
say that the Christian narrative largely presents, in picturesque
and symbolic form, the subjective experiences and doubts of
Jesus--whether these were of internal origin merely, or were
suggested externally by some malignant spiritual being--as to His
capacities and power for the great work which He had undertaken.
The thoroughly orthodox, it would appear, must still be catered for,
albeit only by the concession of the possibility of "some" malignant
spiritual being, which seems a gratuitous slight to the canonical
Satan, whose moral dignity had immediately before been acclaimed. But,
after expressly insisting on the elements of "temptation" and
"ambition" in the story, with the apparent implication that the young
Teacher may have had a passing ambition to become a world conqueror,
our exegete, in conclusion, collapses to the position of the German
exegetes who, the other day, were still debating on the spiritual
interpretation of what they could not perceive to be a pure myth
of art.
At this stage of enlightenment we hear allusions to "psychology,"
though I have not yet met with any explicit pretence that the
traditionalist scholars know anything about psychology that is not
known to the rest of us. In any case, the suggestion may be hazarded
that the first researches they make into psychology might usefully
be directed to their own, which is a distressing illustration of the
survival of the intellectual methods of the ancient apologists for
the Vedas and for the mythology of the Greeks.
A severe scrutiny of psychic processes is indeed highly necessary in
this as in so many other disputes in which the affections wrestle with
the reason. Such a process of analysis gives us the real causation
of the testimony borne by Mill, which is so widely typical. For
non-religious as for religious minds the conception they form of the
Gospel Jesus is commonly a resultant of a few dominant impressions,
varying in each case but all cognate. Jesus is figured first to the
recipient spirit as a blessed babe in the arms of an idealized mother,
and last as dying on the cross, cruelly tortured for no crime--the
supreme example of the martyred philanthropist. In the interim he
figures as commanding his dull disciples to "Suffer little children to
come unto me," and as "going about doing good," all the while preaching
forgiveness and brotherly love. No knowledge of the impossibility of
most of the particularized cures will withhold even instructed men
from soothing their sensibilities by crediting the favourite figure
with some vague "healing power" and talking of the possibilities of
"faith healing," even as they loosely accredit some elevating quality,
some practical purport, to the visionary evangel, so absolutely
mythical that the Gospel writers can tell us not a word of its matter.
Even Professor Schmiedel, expressly applying the tests of naturalism,
negates those tests at the outset by taking for granted the Teacher's
possession of unquantified "psychic" healing powers, though the
narratives twenty times tell of cures which cannot possibly be
described as cases of faith-healing. [45] If for the sane inquirer
the absolute miracle stories are false, and these stories are false,
by what right does he allot evidential value to wholesale allegations
of multitudinous cures from the same sources? By the sole right
of his predilections. The measure which he metes to the thousand
prodigies in Livy is never meted to those of the Gospels. For him,
these are different things, being seen in another atmosphere.
In men concerned to be intellectually law-abiding, these dialectic
divagations are decently veiled; by others they are passionately
flaunted. No recollection of the anger of Plato at those who denied
that the Sun and Planets were divine and blessed beings can withhold
certain professed scholars from the same angry folly in a similar
predicament. But even where theological animus has been in a manner
disciplined by the long professional battle over documentary problems,
the sheer lack of logical challenge on fundamental issues has left
all the disputants alike, down till the other day, taking for granted
data to which they had no critical right.
Throughout the whole debate, even in the case of scholars who profess
to be loyal to induction, we find that there is a presupposition
upon which induction has no effect. Bernhard Weiss, quoting from
Holtzmann the profoundly subversive proposition that "Christianity
has been 'book-learning' from the beginning," in reply "can only say,
God be praised that it is not so." Yet the real effect of his own
research is to show us much--to show that there was no oral evangel,
that the formula of "the kingdom of heaven" is but a phrase to fill
a blank. Even candid inquirers who see the difficulty, like Samuel
Davidson, leave it unsolved. Says Davidson:--
When we try to form a correct view of Jesus's utterances
regarding this Kingdom of God, we find they have much vagueness
and ambiguity. Their differences also in the Synoptic Gospels
and the fourth are so apparent that the latter must be left
out of account in any attempt to get a proper sketch of Jesus's
hopes. His apostles and other early reporters misunderstood some
of His sayings, making them crasser. Oral tradition marred their
original form. This is specially the case with respect to the
enthusiastic hopes about the kingdom He looked for. But as the
ideal did not become actual we must rest in the great fact that
the Christianity He introduced was the nucleus of a perfect system
adapted to universal humanity. [46]
"We must" do no such thing. We "must" draw a licit inference. The
alleged great fact is morally a chimera, and historically a
hallucination. To admit that all the evidence collapses, and then
to posit the visionary gospel with a "must," is to abandon critical
principle. The "must" is simply the eternal presupposition. And the
choice of the sincere student "must" be between that negation of
science and a fresh scientific search, from which the presupposition,
as such, is excluded. If it can reappear as a licit conclusion,
so be it. But it has never yet so arisen.