THE TRIAL CRUX
Thus lax in his treatment of the subsidiary historical problems,
M. Loisy is of necessity accommodating when he faces those which he
recognizes to be central. Over the story of the "purification" of
the temple--which Origen found at once unjustifiable and signally
miraculous, since it was inconceivable that so great a multitude
should have yielded to the mere attack of one man with a scourge of
small cords--he has again no misgivings. He feels that some such story
was needed to motive the priestly action against Jesus. [157] In the
story of the astonishing sophism ascribed to Jesus on the subject of
the tribute to Cæsar he sees only "cleverness" (habileté); and yet
he accepts as historical--again by necessity of his thesis--Jesus's
admission that he claimed to be king of the Jews. In the story of
the betrayal he sees fit, docilely following Brandt, to allege "a
little confused fighting, some blows given and received" over and
above the cutting off of the ear of Malchus, an imagined item which
he finds in none of the Gospels. Over the prayers of the Lord while
the disciples slept he had hesitated in his commentary; [158] falling
back on the notable avowal that "the sort of incoherence which results
from describing a scene which passed while the witnesses [!] were
asleep is without doubt to be explained by the origin and character
of the narrative rather than by a negligence of the narrator." For
once, I unreservedly assent to the sans doute. Quite unwittingly,
M. Loisy has put himself in line with our mythical theory, which
postulates a drama as the origin of the narrative.
All the same, he accepts the narrative as history; and he sees
nothing in the fusion of the two speeches: "Sleep on.... It is
enough.... Arise now,"... though he rejects the proposal of Bleek,
Volkmar, and Wellhausen to turn "Sleep on" into an interrogation,
[159] and admits that the "It is enough" is an "unclear and very
insufficient transition" from "Sleep on" to "Arise." Once more, which
is the more superficial, this lame handling or the recognition of a
transcribed drama with two speeches combined because of the omission
of an exit and an entrance, in what M. Loisy admits to be "a highly
dramatic mise en scène"?
But it is over the trial in the house of the high priest that M. Loisy
most astonishingly redacts the narrative. In his commentary he
recognizes that Matthew's story, in which the scribes and the elders
are "already gathered together" in the dead of night when Jesus is
brought for trial, and the story of Mark, in which they "come together
with" the high priest, are equally incredible; and that the story of
the quest for witnesses in the night is still more so.
Once again we have a sans doute with which we can agree. "The nocturnal
procedure, no doubt, did not take place." [160] Recognizing further
that a Jewish blasphemer was by the Levitical law to be stoned, not
crucified, he simply gives up the whole narrative as a product of
"the Christian tradition," bent on saddling the Jews rather than
the Romans with the responsibility of the crucifixion. [161] In his
smaller work he simply cuts the knot and alleges:--
"As soon as the first daylight had come (dès les premiers lueurs
du jour), a reunion was held at the house of (chez) the chief
priest," where it was without doubt [!] arranged that they should
content themselves with denouncing the Galilean prophet to the
Roman authority as a disturber and a false Messiah. But it was
necessary to arrange the terms of the accusation and distribute
the rôles, to get together and prepare the witnesses. These
measures were soon taken. As soon as morning had come (dès le
matin) the priests brought their prisoner chained before the
tribunal of Pontius Pilate. [162]
One certainly cannot call this manipulation of the texts
"superficial." It is sheer deliberate dissolution and reconstruction
of the narrative, by way of substituting something more plausible for
the incredible original, when all the while the credibility of the
original is the thesis maintained. And yet even the reconstruction is
so thoughtlessly managed that we get only a slightly less impossible
account. Only a scholar who never followed the details of a legal
process could suggest that the task of hunting up witnesses and
arranging a procedure could be carried through between "earliest dawn"
and "morning." And for the headlong haste of such a procedure, only
an hour or so after the arrest of the prisoner, no explanation is
even suggested. A violent impossibility in the record, destructive
of all faith in its historicity at this point, is sought to be
saved by a violent redaction which simply "makes hay" of the very
documents founded on. And this illicit violence is resorted to
because M. Loisy recognizes that if he is to retain a historical
Jesus at all he must bring the whole trial story into a historical
shape. He certainly had cause to take drastic measures. Long ago it
was pointed out that by Jewish law a prisoner must not be condemned
to death on the day of his trial: Judicia de capitalibus finiunt
eodem die si sint ad absolutionem; si vero sint ad damnationem,
finiuntur die sequente. [163] This might alone suffice to "bring
into doubt" the priestly trial; to say nothing of the modern Jewish
protest that a capital prosecution and execution on either the day
after or the day of the Passover, at the instance of the High Priest,
was unthinkable. [164] There were good reasons, then, for seeking to
found on the trial before Pilate.
Let us now survey broadly the process of historical criticism thus
far. 1. At an early stage the reconstructors gave up as pure fiction
the third trial before Herod, which appears solely in Luke. They did
not ask what historical knowledge, or what sense of history, can have
existed in a community among which such an absolute invention found
ready currency. 2. The next step was to reject as "unhistorical"
the narrative of the fourth Gospel, in which Jesus (a) is examined
by Annas the high priest, but in no sense tried; (b) is then sent
bound to Caiaphas the high priest; (c) is immediately passed on from
Caiaphas to Pilate, who examines him within doors while the priests
remain outside, there being thus no Jewish witnesses; (d) tells
Pilate "My kingdom is not of this world," and convinces him that
he is not punishable. Rejecting this account, as they well might,
the reconstructors failed to ask themselves what such an invention
signifies. 3. Next disappears the so-called historical narrative of the
trial before the high priest and chief priests in the synoptics. [165]
That in turn, taken on its merits, is found flagrantly incredible; and
now M. Loisy in effect puts it aside, reducing it to a fundamentally
different form.
Three of the trial stories are thus in turn rejected as hopelessly
unhistorical. And now we are invited to regard as "incontestable"
the fourth, the trial before Pilate as related in the synoptics; the
Johannine version being dismissed as fiction. In the scientific sense
of the word [166] the rejected stories have been classed as myths. And
still we are told that the "myth-theory" is outside discussion.
Yet, even in coming to the trial before Pilate, M. Loisy has to
begin by noting the improbability that the entire sanhedrim should
have attended it, as is alleged by the synoptics. "In the minds of
the evangelists the sanhedrim represents the Jews, and it was the
Jews who caused the death of Jesus. Hence the general expressions
which the redactors used the more willingly because they were very
incompletely informed on the facts." [167] Still, the trial must stand
good. Judas goes the way of myth; but the unintelligible procedure
of Pilate must be salved. With his general loyalty to the facts as
he sees them M. Loisy notes, with Brandt, that in the synoptics as
in John there is no Jesuist eye-witness or auditor to report for the
faithful what took place. "Here begin the gaps in the Passion-history,"
remarks Brandt. [168] "Tradition could learn only by indirect ways the
general features of the interrogation and the principal incidents which
passed between the morning of Friday and the hour of the crucifixion,"
says Loisy. [169] The student really concerned to get at history
is compelled to pronounce that the record thus avowed to be mainly
guesswork is myth. Let us take the report as we have it in Mark:--
And straightway [after the condemnation by the priests] in the
morning the chief priests, with the elders and scribes and the
whole council, held a consultation, and bound Jesus and carried
him away, and delivered him up to Pilate. And Pilate asked him,
Art thou the King of the Jews? And he answering saith unto him,
Thou sayest.... And Pilate again asked him, saying, Answerest
thou nothing? behold how many things they accuse thee of. But
Jesus no more answered anything; insomuch that Pilate marvelled.
To this meagre record, in which a capital case is carried before
the governor without the slightest documentary preliminaries, and in
which he begins to interrogate before a word has been said about the
indictment, Matthew adds nothing save the story of Pilate's wife's
dream, which the reconstructors are fain to dismiss; while Luke,
who sees fit to premise specific charges of anti-Roman sedition,
follows them up simply by Pilate's question and Jesus's assenting
answer; and then, quite unintelligibly, makes Pilate declare "unto
the chief priests and the multitudes, I find no fault in this man."
What can it mean? All the exegetes now agree that the "Thou sayest" of
Jesus has the force of "I am." [170] By avowing that he called himself
King of the Jews he committed a very grave offence towards Rome, unless
he explained the title in a mystic sense; and the records exclude any
such explanation. In Mark and Matthew the effect is the same: Pilate
finds no guilt, and proposes release; but yields to the multitude and
the priests. Could any serious student bring himself to regard this
as history unless he presupposed the historicity of the crucifixion
and was ready to let pass any semblance of motivation for it?
Once more we must affirm that the documents merely reveal entire
ignorance of any judicial procedure. Pilate finally puts to death a
Jewish prisoner at the request of the sanhedrim and the multitude on a
charge for which he finds no evidence. That Pilate should make light
of a Jew's life is indeed easily to be believed: he is exhibited to
us by Josephus as an entirely ruthless Roman; but both the synoptics
and the fourth Gospel present him in an entirely different light;
and no record or commentary makes it intelligible that the Roman
governor should crucify a politically unoffending Jew for a purely
ecclesiastical Jewish offence. The offence against Rome he is expressly
represented as finding imaginary; and yet on the other hand the offence
as avowed is very real. By the method of mere accommodation or partial
critical rationalism the ascription of the prosecution to the Jews is
accounted for as the result of the later developed anti-Judaism of the
Christians. But on that view what historical basis have we left? If
the later Christians could invent the trial and the Resurrection,
what was to prevent their inventing the crucifixion? M. Loisy admits
that if the trial goes the historicity of Jesus goes with it; then
the crucifixion becomes myth. To say that this is impossible is to
beg the question: the myth theory offers the solution.
Given the datum of an original cult-sacrament which had grown out of
an ancient ritual-sacrifice, the crucifixion is the first step towards
the establishment of a biography of Jesus. A trial and a condemnation,
again, are necessary preliminaries to that; and when we critically
examine these we find that they are patently unhistorical. Upon no
theory of historicity can their contradictions and impossibilities be
explained. Once we make the hypothesis, however, that the crucifixion
is itself myth, the imbroglio becomes intelligible.
What we do know historically is that the early Christists included
Judaizers and Gentilizers; this is established by the sect-history,
apart from the Acts and the Epistles. For the Judaizers an execution
by the Romans was necessary; for the Gentilizers, who were bound to
guard against official Roman resentment, and whose hostility to the
Jews was progressive, a Jewish prosecution was equally necessary. In
the surviving mystery-play, predominantly a Gentile performance as
it now stands in the Gospels, an impossible Jewish trial is followed
by an equally impossible Roman trial, in which Jesus by doctrinal
necessity avows that he is King of the Jews, thereby salving his
Messiahship; while, to keep the guilt on Jewish shoulders and
to exclude the suspicion of anti-Roman bias, Pilate is made to
disclaim all responsibility. Such is, briefly, the outcome of the
myth theory. Upon what other theory can the documents be explained?
Upon what other theory, again, can we explain the vast contrast between
the triumphal entry into Jerusalem a few days before and the absolute
unanimity of the priest-led multitude in demanding the execution
of Jesus against the wish of Pilate? The reconstructors accept both
items, with arbitrary modifications, as historical; though the story
of the entry is preceded by a mythical item about the choice of the
ass-foal whereon never man had sat, [171] which is much more stressed
and developed than the main point. We are asked to believe that Jesus
on his entry is enthusiastically acclaimed by a great multitude as
Son of David and King of Israel; and that a few days later not a
voice is raised to save his life. Gentilizing Christians could easily
credit such things of the Jews. Can a historical student do so? For
the former it was enough that in the narrative the Messiahship of
the Lord had been publicly accepted; coherence was not required. But
historicity means coherence.
Last of all, the item of Barabbas, one of the elaborate irrelevancies
which leap to the eye in a narrative so destitute of essentials,
turns out to carry a curious corroboration to the myth-theory. This is
not the place to develop the probable kinship of the Barabbas of the
Gospels with the (misspelt) Karabbas [172] of Philo; but we may note
the probable reason for the introduction of the name into the myth. As
the story stands, it serves merely to heighten the guilt of the Jews,
making them in mass save the life of a murderer rather than that of
the divine Saviour. The whole story is plainly unhistorical: "neither
these details nor those which follow," remarks M. Loisy (after noting
the "extremely vague indications under an appearance of precision"
in regard to the antecedents of Barabbas), "seem discussible from
the point of view of history." [173] In point of fact, Pilate is made
to release an ostensible ringleader of "men who in the insurrection
[unspecified] had committed murder," thus making his action doubly
inconceivable. Why was such an item introduced at all?
It is not a case for very confident explanation; but when we note
that Barabbas means "Son of the Father"; that the Karabbas of Philo
is treated as a mock-king; and that the reading "Jesus Barabbas" in
Matt, xxvii, 16, 17, was long the accepted one in the ancient church,
[174] we are strongly led to infer (1) that the formula "Jesus the
Son of the Father" was well known among the first Christians as
being connected with a popular rite--else how could such a strange
perplexity be introduced into the text?--and (2) that the real reason
for introducing it was that those anti-Christians who knew of the name
and rite in question used their knowledge against the faith. The way
to rebut them was to present Jesus Barabbas not only as a murderer
but as the man actually released to the Jewish people instead of
Jesus the Christ, proposed to be released by Pilate.
Again, then, on the mythical theory, we find a meaning and a sane
solution where the historical theory can offer none. Sir James Frazer's
hypothesis that the story of the triumphal entry may preserve a
tradition of a mock-royal procession for a destined victim is only a
partial solution; and his further hypothesis of a strangely ignored
coincidence between a Barabbas rite and the actual crucifixion of
the Christian "Son of the Father" is but a sacrifice of mythological
principle to the assumption of historicity. The conception of Jesus
as sacrificed lies at the core of early Christian cult-propaganda.