THE GROUND CLEARED FOR THE MYTH THEORY
The issue as between Schweitzer and Wrede comes to this. Wrede sees
that the Messiahship is a creation following upon the belief in the
resurrection, and only uncritically deducible from the documents. For
him, Jesus is a Teacher who was made into a Messiah by his followers
after his death, the Gospels being manipulated to conceal the fact
that he made no Messianic claims. Schweitzer sees that the Teaching
Jesus is a documentary construction; and that, unless the Crucified
One had some Messianic idea, the Gospel story as a whole crumbles to
nothing. And he asks:--
But how did the appearance of the risen Jesus suddenly become for
them [the disciples] a proof of His Messiahship and the basis of
their eschatology? That Wrede fails to explain, and so makes this
"event" an "historical" miracle which in reality is harder to
believe than the supernatural event. [216]
So be it: Wrede's thesis is here, after all, part of the common
content of the "liberal" ideal, which cannot stand. But how does
his critic make good the converse of a would-be Messiah who was
no Teacher, but yet had disciples, and was finally crucified for
making a secret Messianic claim? The answer is too naïve to be
guessed. Accepting, in defiance of every suggestion of common sense,
the story of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Dr. Schweitzer
decides that "the episode was Messianic for Jesus, but not Messianic
for the people." With no authority save the documents which at
this point he radically and recklessly alters, he decides that the
multitude had hailed Jesus "as the Prophet, as Elias," whatever
the texts may say; and Jesus, feeling he was the Messiah, "played
with his Messianic self-consciousness" all the while. Why, then,
was he put to death? Simply because Judas betrayed his secret to
the priests! Dr. Schweitzer can see well enough the futility of the
betrayal story as it stands, inasmuch as Judas is paid to do what was
not required--identifying a well-known public figure. But rather than
admit myth here he will invent a better story for himself, and we get
this: Jesus had dropped Messianic hints to his disciples, and Judas
sold the information. And all the while none of the other disciples
knew this, though at the trial the priests went among the people
and induced them "not to agree to the Procurator's proposal. How? By
telling them why He was condemned; by revealing to them the Messianic
secret. That makes him at once from a prophet worthy of honour into
a deluded enthusiast and blasphemer." [217]
"In the name of the Prophet, figs!" Dr. Schweitzer has, he believes,
saved the character of "the mob of Jerusalem" at last; and by what a
device! By assuming that to claim to be the Messiah was to blaspheme,
which it certainly was not; [218] and by assuming that the mob who
had (on Schweitzer's view) acclaimed an Elias would be struck dumb
with horror on being told that Elias claimed to be the Messiah. The
secret of this psychosis is in Dr. Schweitzer's sole possession,
as is the explanation of the total absence of his statement from all
the literature produced by the generation which, on his assumption,
knew all about the case. And this is what is left after a survey of
the German exegesis "from Reimarus to Wrede."
It is to be feared that neither the scholars nor the laity will
accept either of Dr. Schweitzer's alternatives, and that the nature
of his own prestidigitatory solution may tend somewhat to weaken
the effect of his indictment of the kaleidoscopic process which
has hitherto passed as a solution among the experts. Dr. Schweitzer
seems to realize all absurdities save his own. None the less, he has
done a critical service in arguing down all the rest, though even
in his final verdict he exhibits symptoms of the "sacred disease,"
the theologian's malady of self-contradiction:--
The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah,
who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the
Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give His work its final
consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by
rationalism, [219] endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed
by modern theology in an historical garb....
He passes by our time and returns to his own....
The historical foundation of Christianity as built up by
rationalistic, by liberal, and by modern theology no longer exists;
but that does not mean that Christianity has lost its historical
foundation....
Jesus means something to our world because a mighty spiritual force
streams forth from Him and flows through our time also [220]....
"Loves me, loves me not," as the little girls say in counting the
flower petals. We seem entitled to suggest in the interests of simple
science, as distinguished from Germanic Kultur, that temperament might
perhaps usefully be left out of the debate; and that the question of
what Jesus stands for may be left over till we have settled whether
the film presented to us by Dr. Schweitzer can stand between us and
a scientific criticism which assents to all of his verdict save the
reservation in favour of his own thesis.
Meantime, let us not seem to suggest that the English handling of
the historical problem during the nineteenth century has been any
more scientific than the German. Hennell's treatment of it was but
a simplification of Strauss's; and Thomas Scott's Life of Jesus
was but an honest attempt to solidify Renan. In the early part of
the nineteenth century little was achieved beyond the indispensable
weakening of the reign of superstition by critical propaganda. In early
Victorian England, where Freethought had been left to unprofessional
freelances, still liable to brutal prosecution, an anonymous attempt
was made to carry the matter further in a curious book entitled "The
Existence of Christ Disproved by Irresistible Evidence, in a Series
of Letters by a German Jew." It bears no date, but seems to have been
published between 1841 and 1849, appearing serially in thirty penny
weekly numbers, printed in Birmingham, and published in London by
Hetherington. As Hetherington, who died in 1849, was imprisoned in
1840 for the "blasphemous libel" of publishing Haslam's Letters to
the Clergy, but not earlier or later on any similar charge, he would
seem to have been allowed to publish this without molestation.
About the author I have no information. He writes English fluently
and idiomatically, and had read Strauss in the original. But though
he presses against Hennell the argument from the case of Apollos,
latterly developed by Professor W. B. Smith with such scholarly skill,
the book as a whole has little persuasive power. The author is one
of the violent and vehement men who alone, in the day of persecution,
were likely to hazard such a thesis; and he does it with an amount of
vociferation much in excess of his critical effort or his knowledge. It
made, and could make, no impression whatever on the educated world;
and I never met any Freethinker who had seen or heard of it.
It is in another spirit, and in the light of a far greater accumulation
of evidence than was available in the first half of the last century,
that the mythical theory has been restated in our day. In particular
it proceeds upon a treasury of anthropological lore which was lacking
to Bruno Bauer, as it was to Ghillany, who was so much better fitted
than Bauer to profit by such light. As knowledge of the past gradually
arranges itself into science, and the malice of religious resistance
recedes from point to point before the sapping process of culture,
the temper of the whole debate undergoes a transmutation. After a
generation in which a Lyell could only in privacy avow his views as
to the antiquity of man, came that in which Tylor, without polemic,
could establish an anthropological method that was to mean the
reduction of all religious phenomena, on a new line, to the status
of natural phenomena. And even the malice of the bigoted faithful,
which will subsist while the faith endures, falls into its place as
one of these, equally with the malice of the conventional theorists
who meet the exposure of their untenable positions with aspersion in
defect of argument.
But the fact that a recent German exegete has been found capable of
facing the problem in a spirit of scientific candour and good temper,
and with something of the old-time detachment which made Rosenkranz
marvel at Carlyle's tone towards Diderot, may be a promise of a more
general resort to civilized controversial methods. In any case, the
fact that a trained New Testament critic, undertaking to establish
the historicity of Jesus, has affirmed the scientific failure of all
the preceding attempts, and offered a historic residuum which few will
think worth an hour's consideration, seems a sufficient demonstration
that the mythical theory is the real battleground of the future.
In that connection it is interesting to note that Sir J. G. Frazer,
who has so warmly contended that, as history cannot be explained
"without the influence of great men," we must accept the historicity
of Jesus, [221] latterly propounds a tentative theory of a historic
original for Osiris, whom he supposes to have been perhaps evolved
from the idealized personality of an ancient King Khent, buried
at Abydos. [222] It is a mere suggestion, and it at once evokes the
reminder that, on the theorist's own general principles, King Khent may
be regarded as having been theocratically identified with the already
existing God. However that may be, the hypothesis does nothing to save
Sir James's irrelevant plea about the operation of "great men" and
"extraordinary minds" in the founding of all religions, for he does
not suggest that King Khent's career in any way resembled the myth
of Osiris, or that he first taught the things Osiris is said to have
taught. So that, in the case of Osiris as of Jesus, the required great
men and extraordinary minds may still, in the terms of the claim, be
inserted at any point rather than in the personage named or suggested
as Founder. [223] If we agree to call the compiler of the Sermon on
the Mount and the parables of the Kingdom and the Prodigal Son and
the Good Samaritan great men and extraordinary minds, Sir James's very
simple argument is turned. And we should still be left asking who were
the historic founders of the cults of Zeus and Brahma and Attis and
Adonis, Dionysos and Herakles and Krishna and Aphrodite and Artemis.
On the other hand, as it happens, that very suggestion as to King
Khent points afresh to the myth theory as the solution of the Gospel
problem. Nothing emerges oftener in Sir James's great survey than the
ancient connection between kingship and liability to sacrifice. It
will not avail to close off that connection by claiming King Khent as
a potentate of an age after that of sacrificed kings. The sacrificial
past would still have to be taken into account in explaining the
deification of King Khent. And it is just an analogous process that
is suggested in our theory of the Jesus myth. A long series of slain
Jesuses, ritually put to death at an annual sacrament "for the sins
of many," is the ultimate anthropological ground given for the special
cultus out of which grew the mythical biography of the Gospels.
And if Sir James remains satisfied with his charge that in putting
such a theory we "flatter the vanity of the vulgar," we may be
permitted to ask him which line of propaganda is likeliest to appeal
to the multitude. Let him, in his turn, be on his guard against the
vulgarity which seeks support in science from popular prejudice. As to
his pronouncement that the theory which he so inexpensively attacks
"will find no favour with the philosophic historian," one must just
point out that it does not lie with him to draw up the conclusions of
philosophic history outside of his own great department, or even, for
that matter, in that department. His own historical generalizations,
when they seek to pass from the strictly anthropological to the
sociological status, will often really not bear the slightest critical
analysis. They express at times an entire failure to realize the
nature of a historical process, offering as they do mere chance
speculations which patently conflict with the whole mass of the
evidence he has himself collected. It is not an isolated opinion that
by such abortive attempts at "philosophic history" he has tended to
lessen the usefulness even of that collection, for which all students
are his grateful debtors. In short, he would do well to turn from his
ill-timed incursion into dogmatics to the relevant problem which he
has forced upon so many of his readers--namely, What has become of
his mythological maxim that the ritual precedes the myth?
While the professed mythologist rejects the application of the
myth theory to the current religion in the name of "philosophic
history," students ostensibly more concerned about religion reject
the historicity theory in the name of their religious ideals, finding
in the myth theory the vindication of these. Thus Professor Drews has
from the first connected the argument of his Das Christusmythe with
a claim to regenerate religion by freeing it from anthropomorphism;
and I have seen other theistic pronouncements to the same effect;
to say nothing of the declarations of scholarly Churchmen that for
them the Jesus of the Gospels is a God or nothing, and that for them
the historicity argument has no religious value. Such positions seem
to me, equation for equation, very sufficiently to balance the bias
of Sir James Frazer. For my own part, I am content to maintain the
theory in the name of science, and it is by scientific tests that I
invite the reader to try it.
CONCLUSION
Enough has now been said to make it clear to the open-minded reader
that the myth-theory is no wanton challenge to belief in a clear
and credible historical narrative. It is not the advocates of the
myth-theory who have raised the issue. The trouble began with the
attempts of the believers to solve their own difficulties. Before
the rise of criticism so-called we find them hating and burning
each other in their quarrels over the meaning of their central
sacrament. As soon as criticism began to work on the problem of the
miracles and the contradictions in the narratives of these, they set
themselves to frame "Harmonies" of the Gospels which only brought
into clearer relief their discordance. After the spread of scientific
views had shaken the belief in miracles, they set themselves, still as
believers, to frame explanatory Lives of Jesus in which miracles were
dissolved into hallucinations or natural episodes misunderstood; and,
as before, no two explanations coincided. A "consensus of scholars"
has never existed.
It was after a whole generation of German scholars had laboured
to extract a historical Jesus from the Gospel mosaic that Strauss
produced his powerful and sustained argument to show that most of
the separate episodes which they had arbitrarily striven to reduce
to history were but operations of the mythopoeic faculty, proceeding
upon the mass of Jewish prophecy and legend under the impulse of the
Messianic idea. Strauss was no wanton caviller, but a great critic,
forced to his work by the failure of a multitude of Gelehrten vom
Fach to extract a credible result from what they admitted to be,
as it stood, a history in large part incredible.
Strauss, in turn, believing at once in a residual historical Jesus and
in the perfect sufficiency of a mere ideal personage as a standard for
men's lives and a basis for their churches, left but a new enigma to
his successors. He had stripped the nominal Founder of a mass of mythic
accretions, but, attempting no new portrait, left him undeniably more
shadowy than before. Later "liberal" criticism, tacitly accepting
Strauss's negations, set itself anew to extract from the Gospels,
by a process of more or less conscientious documentary analysis, the
"real" Jesus whom the critics and he agreed to have existed. Renan
undertook to do as much in his famous "romance"; and German critics,
who so characterized his work, produced for their part only much duller
romances, devoid of Renan's wistful artistic charm. And, as before,
every "biographer" in turn demurred to the results of the others.
It is the result of the utter inadequacy of all these attempts to solve
the historical problem, and of the ever-growing sense of the inadequacy
of a mere legendary construction to form a code for human life and a
basis for a cosmic philosophy, that independent inquirers in various
countries have set about finding out the real historical process of the
rise of Christianity, dismissing the worn-out convention. Small-minded
conservatives at once exclaim, and will doubtless go on saying, that
those who thus explain away the "historical Jesus," are moved by their
antipathy to Christianity, and to theism in general. The assertion
is childishly false. One of the leading exponents of the myth-theory
gives his theism--or pantheism--as the primary inspiration of his
work. The present writer, as he has more than once explained, began
by way of writing a sociological history of the rise of Christianity
on the foundation of a historical Jesus with twelve disciples--this
long after coming to a completely naturalistic view of religion,
which excluded theism. From such a point of view there was no à priori
objection whatever to a historical Jesus. At one time he sketched a
hypothesis of several successive Jesuses. The intangibility of any
historical Jesus was the conclusion slowly forced by a long attempt
to clear the historical starting-point, supposed to be irreducible.
Since that discovery was reached, the discrediting of the conventional
view has been carried to the verge of nihilism by men who still posit
a historical Jesus, but critically eliminate nearly every accepted
detail, leaving only a choice between two shadowy and elusive
historical concepts, even less tenable than those they reject. In
the works of Schweitzer and Wrede, there is literally more direct
and detailed destruction of Gospel-myth than had been attempted
by almost any advocate of the myth-theory who had preceded them;
though, as we have seen, it is not difficult to carry the process
further. In the name of the historicity claim, they have gone on
eliminating one by one myth elements where the myth-theorists had
been content to recognize myth in mass. He who would re-establish
the historical Jesus has to combat, first and foremost, the latest
scientific champions of the belief in the historicity.
Those English critics who, like Dr. Conybeare, have declaimed so
loudly of a consensus of critics and of historical common-sense on
the side of a "historical Christ," are simply fulminating from the
standpoint of the German "liberalism" of thirty years ago. Nine-tenths
of what they violently affirm has been definitely and destructively
rejected by the latest German representatives of the critical class,
in the very name of the defence of the historicity of Jesus. Orthodox
Germans, on the other hand, have been pointing out that the "liberal"
view is no longer "modern," the really modern criticism having
shown that the Gospel-figure is a God-figure or nothing. Vainly they
hope to reinforce orthodoxy by the operations of a strict critical
method. [224] Our English "liberal-conservatives," all the while,
are fighting with obsolete (German) weapons, and in total ignorance
of the real course of the campaign in recent years.
In such circumstances, those of us who did our thinking for ourselves,
without waiting for new German leads, have perhaps some right to appeal
anew to readers to do the same. There is no race quarrel involved. But
perhaps those students in the English-speaking countries who in the
past have been wont to follow the German leads of the generation
before their own, may now realize that they were unduly diffident,
and proceed to make that use of their own faculties which Germans
were always making from time to time.
NOTES
[1] See Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 179, note.
[2] That is, even supposing the Annals to be genuine. Professor
W. B. Smith speaks of a contention "of late" that they are forged by
Poggio Bracciolini, but refers only to the work of Ross, 1878. The
thesis has been far more efficiently maintained in a series of works
by Hochart (1890, etc.), which are worth Professor Smith's attention.
[3] See the collection of illustrations in Mr. Joseph McCabe's Sources
of the Morality of the Gospels (R. P. A., 1914), and his excellent
chapter on "The Parables of the Gospel and the Talmud."
[4] The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, ed. by R. H. Charles,
1908, pp. lxxx, 97, 122, 213, 214.
[5] Id. pp. lxxxi, 213.
[6] Id. pp. xciii-xciv.
[7] Id. Test. Iss. v, 2; Dan. v, 3; Iss. vii, 6.
[8] Id. p. xcv.
[9] Id. p. 210 sq.
[10] Bain, J. S. Mill, p. 139.
[11] Letter to W. S. Lilly, cited in his Claims of Christianity,
1894, pp. 30-31.
[12] Das Christenthum ... der drei ersten Jahrhunderte, 1853,
pp. 35-36. (Eng. trans, i, 38.)
[13] Prof. Flint in "St. Giles Lectures" on "The Faiths of the World,"
1882, p. 419.
[14] Jésus et la tradition évangélique, 1910, p. 45.
[15] It should be explained that in using, for convenience sake, the
traditional ascriptions of the four Gospels, I do not for a moment
admit that these hold good of the Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John of
the tradition. In not one case is that tradition historically valid.
[16] The Rev. A. Wright (N. T. Problems, 1898, p. 15) pronounces it
"completely unchronological." Sanday acquiesces (id., p. 177).
[17] Such details, imposed on an otherwise empty narrative, suggest
a pictorial basis, as does the account of the Baptist. Strauss cites
the Hebrew myth-precedent of the calling of Elisha from the plough
by Elijah.
[18] Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien, 1905, p. 51.
[19] Id. p. 47.
[20] Id. p. 51.
[21] Id. p. 52.
[22] Note the identity of terms, euergeton in Acts (x, 38), euergetesas
in Diodorus.
[23] Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 441 sq.; Pagan Christs,
2nd ed. pp. 229-236. A notably effective criticism is passed on the
thesis in Prof. W. B. Smith's Ecce Deus, p. 177 sq. Mr. Sinclair,
of course, does not dream of meeting such replies.
[24] What else is signified by Acts iii, 18; xvii, 3?
[25] Dr. W. B. Smith sees in the story a mere symbolizing of the
rejection of Jesus by the Jews. This may very well be the case.
[26] Dr. Flinders Petrie even infers a "late" reference to the
Virgin-Birth. The Growth of the Gospels, 1910, p. 86. This Loisy
rejects.
[27] See the useful work of Mr. A. J. Jolley, The Synoptic Problem
for English Readers, 1893.
[28] Yet B. Weiss had contended (Manual, Eng. tr. ii, 224) that Mark
ii, 24 ff., 28, "must be taken from a larger collection of sayings in
which the utterances of Jesus respecting the keeping of the Sabbath
were put together (Matt. xii, 2-8)."
[29] Cp. Dr. R. H. Charles, The Book of Jubilees, 1902, p. xiv.
[30] Work cited, p. 94.
[31] Manual of Introd. to the N. T., Eng. tr. 1888, ii, 261.
[32] Einleitung, p. 51.
[33] Id. p. 49.
[34] Some N. T. Problems, 1898, p. 176.
[35] I have wasted a good deal of time in reading and in confuting
the Baconians, but only in one or two of them have I met with any
etymologies. Their doctrine had no such origin, and in no way rests
on etymologies. Not once have I seen in their books an appeal to
anti-theological bias, and hardly ever an emendation, though there are
plenty of "forced parallels." Nor are etymologies primary elements
in any form of the myth theory. Mr. Sinclair seems to "unpack his
mouth with words" in terms of a Shakespearean formula.
[36] Eng. trans. by Prof. D. M. Kay, 1902.
[37] Wellhausen notably does--Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien,
1905, pp. 39-41. Dr. R. H. Charles, who in his masterly introduction to
the Assumption of Moses indicates so many blunders of German scholars,
may be reckoned quite able to criticize Dalman in his turn.
[38] Cp. Schechter, Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, 1909, pp. 65-66.
[39] Rev. A. Wright, Some New Testament Problems, p. 212.
[40] Blass, Philology of the Gospels, 1898, p. 35.
[41] Die Entstehung und der Charakter unserer Evangelien, 1907, p. 9.
[42] With the customary bad faith of the orthodox apologist,
Dr. Thorburn represents as a sudden change of thesis the proposition
that "the Christian narrative is merely an ethical adaptation of the
Greek story," because that proposition follows on the remark that the
Christian myth "might fairly be regarded" [as it actually has been]
"as a later sophistication" of the Buddhist myth. On this "might"
there had actually followed, in the text quoted, the statement: "There
are fairly decisive reasons, however, for concluding that the Christian
story was evolved on another line." This sentence Dr. Thorburn conceals
from his readers. There had been no change of thesis whatever.
[43] Rev. Dr. T. J. Thorburn, Jesus the Christ: Historical or
Mythical?, p. 231.
[44] Dr. Thorburn appears to be wholly unaware of this fact of Jewish
theology. See Dr. Schechter's Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology,
1909, ch. xv; Kalisch, Comm. on Leviticus, ii, 304.
[45] The Nemesis of this uncritical method appears in its development
at the hands of Dr. Conybeare: "That Jesus was a successful exorcist
we need not doubt, nor that he worked innumerable faith cures" (Myth,
Magic, and Morals, 2nd. ed., p. 142). Such a writer "need not doubt"
anything he wants to believe. In particular he "need not doubt"
that the disciples were "successful exorcists" also.
[46] Introd. to the N. T., 3rd. ed., i, 4.
[47] Work cited, p. 7.
[48] Put in the Neue Kirchliche Zeitschrift, 1896, p. 964 sq.; and
Philology of the Gospels, 1898, pp. 41-43. Professor Blass has worked
this argument diligently. See his Die Entstehung und der Charakter
unserer Evangelien, 1907, p. 24.
[49] Villari, Life of Savonarola, Eng. trans. 1-vol. ed. p. 185.
[50] Herbert Lucas, S.J., Fra Girolamo Savonarola, 2nd ed. 1906,
p. 116. Father Lucas does not deny that such a sermon might possibly
have been preached late in 1493. Cp. p. 118.
[51] Life of Savonarola, as cited, p. 186.
[52] Villari, p. 214.
[53] See the investigation of Father Lucas, pp. 114-18.
[54] I had written this, and the confutation of Villari, before
reading the work of Father Lucas.
[55] As cited, p. 189. Father Lucas comments more mildly on the
misstatement; but it is really a grave departure from historical truth.
[56] Cp. Lucas, p. 117 note.
[57] Lucas, p. 129 note.
[58] This, again, he might well expect, as he avows that he had
correspondents in Germany who applauded his attitude towards the
Papacy. Villari, pp. 439, 519, 609. But Maximilian was invited
by Sforza in the name of the Papal League, by way of forestalling
Charles. Id. p. 458.
[59] Villari, pp. 411-13. Cp. Perrens's Jérome Savonarole, 1854, ii,
88 sq., 95 sq.; Lucas, p. 201.
[60] Manifesto A tutti li Christiani; Lucas, p. 236.
[61] Id. p. 256.
[62] Id. p. 278.
[63] Lucas, p. 70.
[64] Nor are we here concerned with the question of Savonarola's
"sincerity." On that head it may be noted that Perrens the Rationalist
and Lucas the sympathetic and moderate Catholic are very much at one.
[65] Lucas, p. 69 note. Compare the references of Lucas and those of
Villari (p. 317) for researches on the subject.
[66] Cp. Perrens, as cited, ii, 94.
[67] 1 Mac. i, 47, 54, 59.
[68] Refs. in De Potter, L'Esprit de l'Église, 1821, iv, 95-98.
[69] Philology of the Gospels, p. 43.
[70] Growth of the Gospels, p. 45.
[71] Professed prophecies, that is, not political calculations.
[72] The systematic deposition of ordure in the drawers of commodes in
1870, in beds and rooms and on piles of food in 1914, is a historical
fact. As to the sack of Rome, Cantù's account is: "Delle bolle papali
stabbiano i cavalli" (Istoria degli Italiani, ed. 1876, ix, 372).
[73] History of Sacrilege, 1698, p. 113.
[74] Id. p. 122.
[75] Zeller, L'histoire de France racontée par les contemporains,
vol. 21, p. 102.
[76] Id. vol. 22, p. 17.
[77] Sismondi-Toccagni, Storia delle repub. ital., 1852, iv, 123.
[78] Burckhardt, Renaissance in Italy, Eng. tr., ed. 1892, p. 23.
[79] Villari, pp. 463, 532, 554-55.
[80] "Slay all! God will know his own!"
[81] Rev. W. Denton, England in the Fifteenth Century, 1888, pp. 81-82.
[82] Barante, Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne, ed. 7ième, iii, 234.
[83] Id. ib. p. 248.
[84] Id. ib. p. 416.
[85] This detail, from Niketas, is also given by Gibbon, ch. lx, near
end, and by Michaud, Hist. des Croisades, iii (1817), 154-55. Mills
omits it. Michaud, like Cantù, stresses the point of ordure. So does
Fleury, Hist. éccles., xvi, 149.
[86] Rev. Sir G. W. Cox, The Crusades, 8th ed. p. 157.
[87] Perrens, ii, 95.
[88] Memoirs of Philip de Commines, Bohn trans. i, 158.
[89] Hall's Chronicle, Hen. VIII, ed. 1550, fol. 112.
[90] Burckhardt, Renaissance in Italy, Eng. tr. ed. 1892, p. 29.
[91] Perrens, Hist. de Florence, 1434-1531, i, 385.
[92] Guicciardini, lib. x, c. 4.
[93] Id. xvii, 3.
[94] Though in reporting the sack of Rome he makes the Germans behave
the more brutally as regards the cardinals.
[95] Philology of the Gospels, p. 41.
[96] As cited, p. 46.
[97] Work cited, p. 34.
[98] Id. p. 40.
[99] Id. p. 38.
[100] Histor. Introd. to the N. T., 4th ed. 1889, p. 111.
[101] Nöldeke, Sketches from Eastern History, 1892, p. 28.
[102] The Odes and Psalms of Solomon, ed. Rendel Harris, 1909,
pp. 74, 118.
[103] Work cited, p. 49.
[104] Bousset (The Anti-Christ Legend, Eng. tr. p. 23) "assumes,
with many recent expositors, that the distinctly apocalyptic part of
Matt. xxiv and Mark xiii is a fragment of foreign origin introduced
amid genuine utterances of the Lord. It is also evident that, compared
with that of Mark, the text of Matthew is the original." Here we have
the old strategy of compromise.
[105] The assertion of Dr. Conybeare (Myth, Magic, and Morals,
p. 46), that the destruction of the temple was "an event which any
clear-sighted observer of the growing hostility between Jew and
Roman must have foreseen," is characteristic of that writer's way of
interpreting documents. A second reading may perhaps yield him another
impression. Forty years of non-fulfilment is a precious proof of the
"must."
[106] Muir and Weir, Life of Mohammed, ed. 1912, p. xlii.
[107] Muir and Weir, as cited, p. xxvi.
[108] Id. p. xxviii. Contrast the pronouncements of Palmer, Kuenen,
and Nicholson, cited in the author's History of Freethought, 3rd
ed. i, 250.
[109] Josephus, Antiq. xx, 5, § 1; Bel. Jud., vii, 11; Dio Cassius,
lxix; Orosius, vii, 12.
[110] E.g. the orthodox Ewald, Geschichte Christus' und seiner Zeit,
3te Ausg. p. 31 note.
[111] "Stupidity" is ascribed to him by Blass (Entstehung, p. 8),
who on his own principles has no right whatever to reject such a
"tradition."
[112] Compare with this avowal of an orthodox scholar, Mill's
assumption of the total absence of genius in Palestine apart from
Jesus.
[113] See the collection of opinions in Dr. Charles Taylor's The
Oxyrhynchus Logia and the Apocryphal Gospels, 1899, pp. 15-19, 23,
24, 25, 27, 39, 42, etc.
[114] These logia, it should be noted, are always ascribed to
"Ies." The full name Iesous is never given, and there is no cognomen.
[115] "Many," says Blass (Entstehung, p. 11), may mean 3, 4, 5,
or even more.
[116] Codices A and C preface this with "And turning to his disciples,
he said."
[117] Strauss speaks of it as having been "firmly established." Das
Leben Jesu, Einl. § 9, end.
[118] Some New Testament Problems, 1898, pp. 197-98.
[119] Id. p. 14.
[120] Id. p. 15.
[121] Elsewhere (p. 200) Mr. Wright speaks of the traditions as
"circulated in an oral form from very early times"; but he does not
appear to mean this in the natural sense.
[122] Id. p. 102.
[123] Id. p. 213.
[124] Would it? For Loisy it is stamped with Jewish exclusiveness. The
"dog" merely gets a compassionate crumb.
[125] Id. p. 209.
[126] Id. p. 215.
[127] See Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 388.
[128] The "Arise, let us go hence," at the end of ch. 14, is another
interpolation which has no meaning in the context.
[129] Work cited, p. 209.
[130] Id. p. 178.
[131] Id. p. 175.
[132] Id. p. 177.
[133] Id. p. 176.
[134] Id. p. 191.
[135] Id. p. 186.
[136] Id. p. 187.
[137] Id. pp. 222, 223.
[138] Id. p. 123.
[139] Jésus et la tradition évangélique, 1910, pp. 9, 12, 36, 40,
56, 57, 99, 102, 105, 113.
[140] So, for instance, Wernle: "On the basis of these oldest sources
we can write no biography, no so-called Life of Jesus" (Die Quellen
des Lebens Jesu, 1905, p. 82).
[141] Work cited, p. 56 sq.
[142] Les Évangiles, i, 663 sq.
[143] Encyc. Bib. as cited, col. 1,872.
[144] It should be remembered that the Gospels do not specify Nazareth,
but speak simply of "his own country" (patris). Professor Burkitt,
recognizing the mass of difficulties in regard to Nazareth, suggests
that that name is a "literary error," and that the patris of Jesus
was Chorazin (Proc. of Brit. Acad. vol. v, 1912, pp. 17-18).
[145] See above, p. 147, note, as to the theory of Prof. Burkitt, that
Jesus was born at Chorazin. On that view, the unbelieving birthplace
was denounced.
[146] Strauss, in pointing to this detail in Jewish Messianism (Das
Leben Jesu, Abschn. III, Kap. i, § 112) abstained from stressing it on
the score that there are no certain traces of it before the Babylonian
Gemara, the compilation of which took place in the Christian era,
and the book Sohar, of which the age is doubtful. Principal Drummond
(The Jewish Messiah, 1877, p. 357) further agreed, with Gfrörer, that
the doctrine of a Messiah Ben-Joseph is extremely unlikely to have
been pre-Christian. The obvious answer is that it is overwhelmingly
unlikely to have been post-Christian! But that thesis is apparently not
now maintained even by orthodox scholars. Bousset, who in his confused
way suggests that the notion of a suffering and dying Messiah "would
seem to have been suggested by disputations with the Christians"
(The Anti-Christ Legend, 1896, p. 103), avows immediately that
Wünsche traces "a very distinct application of Zechariah xii, 10,
to the Messiah Ben Joseph" in the Jerusalem Talmud; and goes on to
suggest that the notions of the "two witnesses" and the two Messiahs
"may rest upon a common source, which, however, is still to be sought
further back than Jewish tradition."
[147] Against Celsus, vi, 36, end.
[148] Protevang., ix, 1; Pseud. Matt., x, 1; xxxvii, 1 sq.; Hist. of
Joseph the Carpenter; Thomas, 1st. Gr. form, xiii, 1 sq.; 2nd Gr. form,
xi, 1 sq.; Lat. xi, 2 sq.; Arabic Gosp. of the Infancy, xxxviii, xxxix.
[149] Karppe, Essais de critique et d'histoire de philosophie, 1902,
pp. 51-52.
[150] Irenæus, Ag. Heresies, i, 26; Hippolytus, Ref. of all Heresies,
vii, 21. See Baur, Das Christenthum, p. 174. (Eng. trans. i, 199.) The
fact that Cerinthus is the earliest known Christian Gnostic, being
traditionally associated with the Apostle John (Euseb. Hist. Eccl. iii,
28) goes far to support Dr. Karppe's view that Gnosticism entered
Christianity from the Jewish side.
[151] Cp. Apoc. of Baruch, xxix, 3; 4 Esdras, vii, 28; xiii, 32; John,
vii, 27; Justin, Dial. cum Tryph., 8; and Charles's note on Apoc. of
Baruch, as cited, giving these and other references. See also Schodde's
ed. of the Book of Enoch, pp. 47, 57; and the Rev. W. J. Deane's
Pseudepigrapha, 1891, p. 17.
[152] Les évangiles synoptiques, 1907-8, ii, 697.
[153] The varying designations, certainly, point to repeated additions
to the text. But the question arises whether the Maria he Iose or
Maria Iose of Mk. xv, 47, may have been meant to specify "Mary the
wife of Joseph."
[154] Entstehung, p. 22. Of course Harnack's method is really only
a development of Baur's.
[155] Les évangiles synoptiques, ii, 617.
[156] Id. p. 618.
[157] Jésus et la tradition, p. 92.
[158] Les évangiles synoptiques, ii, 562.
[159] Id. p. 570.
[160] Id. p. 599.
[161] Id. p. 610.
[162] Jésus et la tradition, p. 102.
[163] Babl. Sanhedrin, ap. Lightfoot, cited by Strauss.
[164] Compare the other Jewish declarations collected by Brandt,
Die evangelische Geschichte, 1893, p. 150 sq.
[165] In Luke the high priest is not in the story, and the chief
priests and others take as well as try the prisoner.
[166] See Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. xviii, 2, 122;
Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. p. 287, note 4.
[167] Les évangiles, ii, 624.
[168] Die evangelische Geschichte, 1893, p. 88.
[169] Les évangiles, ii, 632.
[170] E.g. Dalman, The Words of Jesus, p. 312; Brandt, Die evangelische
Geschichte, p. 89; Loisy, Les évangiles, ii, 517, note; 604, note; 633.
[171] This is the one of the two stories preferred by the "liberal"
school, who dismiss the story of the two asses as a verbal
hallucination rather than recognize a zodiacal myth. It makes no
final difference. The "ass the foal of an ass," in their exegesis,
still means an unbroken colt, an impossible steed for a procession.
[172] See Pagan Christs, 2nd ed., and Christianity and Mythology,
2nd ed., per index.
[173] Les évangiles, ii, 643.
[174] Nicholson, The Gospel According to the Hebrews, 1879, pp. 141-42.
[175] Jésus et la tradition, p. 114.
[176] Id. pp. 117-18.
[177] A propos d'histoire des religions, 1911, pp. 274-281.
[178] Id. pp. 296-97.
[179] Id. p. 314.
[180] Id. p. 280.
[181] So Dalman (The Words of Jesus, p. 94 sq.), as well as Loisy. They
agree that "kingdom of heaven" was only a more reverent way of saying
the same thing. (Jésus et la tradition, p. 128.)
[182] Jésus et la tradition, pp. 125-26.
[183] Id. p. 105. Cp. p. 168.
[184] A propos d'histoire des religions, p. 287.
[185] Id. pp. 288-89.
[186] Jésus et la tradition, p. 136.
[187] Schmiedel pronounces it a
"conglomerate." Encyc. Bib. art. Gospels, col. 1,886.
[188] See Nicholson, The Gospel according to the Hebrews, 1879,
p. 52 sq.
[189] Jésus et la tradition, p. 143.
[190] Id. ib. and A propos d'histoire des religions, p. 288.
[191] Jésus et la tradition, p. 141.
[192] Les évangiles synoptiques, ii, 482-83.
[193] Id. ii, 357.
[194] Id. i, 152.
[195] See above, p. 127.
[196] A propos d'histoire des religions, p. 290.
[197] A propos d'histoire des religions, pp. 291, 304.
[198] Dr. G. A. van den Bergh van Eysinga, Radical Views about the
New Testament, Eng. tr. 1912, p. 102.
[199] Id. pp. 101-2.
[200] See Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 341, 357.
[201] A propos d'histoire des religions, p. 294.
[202] First published in 1886.
[203] J. W. Straatman, in Critical Studies on First Corinthians,
1863-65, cited by Mr. Whittaker.
[204] W. Seufert, Der Ursprung und die Bedeutung des Apostolates,
1887, p. 46; Sir G. W. Cox, lect. in Religious Systems of the World,
3rd ed. p. 242.
[205] A propos d'histoire des religions, p. 295.
[206] Id. p. 310.
[207] Les évangiles, i, 172, 173. Contrast the case put long ago by
Zeller, The Acts of the Apostles, Eng. tr. 1875, i, 129-30.
[208] Compare, however, the elaborate essay of Prof. G. A. Deissmann,
in his Bible Studies (Eng. tr. 1901), on "Letters and Epistles," p. 48.
[209] Short History of Christianity, 2nd ed. p. 4.
[210] Wieland was something of a Freethinker; but when Napoleon in
the famous interview mooted the problem raised by Dupuis and Volney,
Wieland treated it as pure absurdity. He was then an old man.
[211] The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Eng. tr. of Von Reimarus zu
Wrede), 1910, p. 153.
[212] Schweitzer, p. 151.
[213] Id. p. 159.
[214] Work cited, p. 161.
[215] Id. p. 329.
[216] Id. p. 343.
[217] Id. p. 395.
[218] Compare Dalman, The Words of Jesus, p. 313.
[219] I.e., the old German "rationalism" so-called, the theological
method of compromise with reason.
[220] Id. pp. 396-97.
[221] Adonis, Attis, Osiris, 3rd ed. (vols. v and vi of 3rd ed. of The
Golden Bough) i, 312, note. See the passage discussed in Christianity
and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 281.
[222] Adonis, Attis, Osiris, as cited, ii, 19 sq., and pref. to vol. i.
[223] Compare Prof. W. B. Smith's criticism of the "great man" theory
as put by Von Soden--Ecce Deus, p. 9 sq.
[224] See the brochure of Prof. R. H. Grützmacher, Ist das liberale
Jesusbild modern? 1907.