THE HISTORICAL CHRIST;
OR,
AN INVESTIGATION OF THE VIEWS OF Mr. J. M. ROBERTSON,
Dr. A. DREWS, and Prof. W. B. SMITH
BY
FRED. C. CONYBEARE, M.A., F.B.A.,
HONORARY FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD;
HON. LL.D. OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS;
HON. DOCTOR OF THEOLOGY OF GIESSEN
[ISSUED FOR THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LIMITED]
LONDON:
WATTS & CO.,
17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
1914
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE vii
CHAP.
I. HISTORICAL METHOD 1
II. PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS 81
III. THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE 96
IV. THE EPISTLES OF PAUL 125
V. EXTERNAL EVIDENCE 154
VI. THE ART OF CRITICISM 167
VII. DR. JENSEN 202
EPILOGUE 214
INDEX 227
PREFACE
This little volume was written in the spring of the year 1913, and is
intended as a plea for moderation and good sense in dealing with the
writings of early Christianity; just as my earlier volumes entitled
Myth, Magic, and Morals and A History of New Testament Criticism were
pleas for the free use, in regard to the origins of that religion,
of those methods of historical research to which we have learned
to subject all records of the past. It provides a middle way between
traditionalism on the one hand and absurdity on the other, and as doing
so will certainly be resented by the partisans of each form of excess.
The comparative method achieved its first great triumph in the
field of Indo-European philology; its second in that of mythology
and folk-lore. It is desirable to allow to it its full rights in
the matter of Christian origins. But we must be doubly careful
in this new and almost unworked region to use it with the same
scrupulous care for evidence, with the same absence of prejudice
and economy of hypothesis, to which it owes its conquests in other
fields. The untrained explorers whom I here criticize discover on
almost every page connections in their subject-matter where there
are and can be none, and as regularly miss connections where they
exist. Parallelisms and analogies of rite, conduct, and belief
between religious systems and cults are often due to other causes
than actual contact, inter-communication, and borrowing. They may
be no more than sporadic and independent manifestations of a common
humanity. It is not enough, therefore, for one agent or institution
or belief merely to remind us of another. Before we assert literary
or traditional connection between similar elements in story and myth,
we must satisfy ourselves that such communication was possible. The
tale of Sancho Panza and his visions of a happy isle, over which he
shall hold sway when his romantic lord and master, Don Quixote, has
overcome with his good sword the world and all its evil, reminds us
of the naïf demand of the sons of Zebedee (Mark x, 37) to be allowed
to sit on the right hand and the left of their Lord, so soon as he
is glorified. With equal simplicity (Matthew xix, 28) Jesus promises
that in the day of the regeneration of Israel, when the Son of Man
takes his seat on his throne of glory, Peter and his companions shall
also take their seats on twelve thrones to judge the twelve tribes
of Israel. The projected mise en scène is exactly that of a Persian
great king with his magnates on their several "cushions" of state
around him. There is, again, a close analogy psychologically between
Dante's devout adoration of Beatrice in heaven and Paul's of the risen
Jesus. These two parallels are closer than most that Mr. Robertson
discovers between Christian story and Pagan myth, yet no one in his
senses would ever suggest that Cervantes drew his inspiration from
the Gospels or Dante from the Pauline Epistles. In criticizing the
Gospels it is all the more necessary to proceed cautiously, because
the obscurantists are incessantly on the watch for solecisms--or
"howlers," as a schoolboy would call them; and only too anxious to
point to them as of the essence of all free criticism of Christian
literature and history.
Re-reading these pages after the lapse of many months since they were
written, I have found little to alter, though Prof. A. C. Clark, who
has been so good as to peruse them, has made a few suggestions which,
where the sheets were not already printed, I have embodied. I append
a list of errata calling for correction.
Fred. C. Conybeare.
March 1, 1914.
CHAPTER I
HISTORICAL METHOD
[Orthodox obscurantism the parent of Sciolism] In Myth, Magic, and
Morals (Chapter IX) I have remarked that the Church, by refusing to
apply in the field of so-called sacred history the canons by which
in other fields truth is discerned from falsehood, by beatifying
credulous ignorance and anathematizing scholarship and common sense,
has surrounded the figure of Jesus with such a nimbus of improbability
that it seems not absurd to some critics of to-day to deny that he
ever lived. The circumstance that both in England and in Germany the
books of certain of these critics--in particular, Dr. Arthur Drews,
Professor W. Benjamin Smith, and Mr. J. M. Robertson--are widely read,
and welcomed by many as works of learning and authority, requires
that I should criticize them rather more in detail than I deemed it
necessary to do in that publication.
[B. Croce on nature of History] Benedetto Croce well remarks in his
Logica (p. 195) that history in no way differs from the physical
sciences, insofar as it cannot be constructed by pure reasoning,
but rests upon sight or vision of the fact that has happened, the
fact so perceived being the only source of history. In a methodical
historical treatise the sources are usually divided into monuments
and narratives; by the former being understood whatever is left to
us as a trace of the accomplished fact--e.g., a contract, a letter,
or a triumphal arch; while narratives consist of such accounts of
it as have been transmitted to us by those who were more or less
eye-witnesses thereof, or by those who have repeated the notices or
traditions furnished by eye-witnesses.
[Relative paucity of evangelic tradition] Now it may be granted that
we have not in the New Testament the same full and direct information
about Jesus as we can derive from ancient Latin literature about
Julius Cæsar or Cicero. We have no monuments of him, such as are the
commentaries of the one or the letters and speeches of the other. It
is barely credible that a single one of the New Testament writers,
except perhaps St. Paul, ever set eyes on him or heard his voice. It
is more than doubtful whether a single one of his utterances, as
recorded in the Gospels, retains either its original form or the idiom
in which it was clothed. A mass of teaching, a number of aphorisms
and precepts, are attributed to him; but we know little of how they
were transmitted to those who repeat them to us, and it is unlikely
that we possess any one of them as it left his lips.
[and presence of miracles in it,] And that is not all. In the four
Gospels all sorts of incredible stories are told about him, such as
that he was born of a virgin mother, unassisted by a human father;
that he walked on the surface of the water; that he could foresee the
future; that he stilled a storm by upbraiding it; that he raised the
dead; that he himself rose in the flesh from the dead and left his
tomb empty; that his apostles beheld him so risen; and that finally
he disappeared behind a cloud up into the heavens.
[explains and excuses the extreme negative school] It is natural,
therefore--and there is much excuse for him--that an uneducated man
or a child, bidden unceremoniously in the name of religion to accept
these tales, should revolt, and hastily make up his mind that the
figure of Jesus is through and through fictitious, and that he never
lived at all. One thing only is certain--namely, that insofar as the
orthodox blindly accept these tales--nay, maintain with St. Athanasius
that the man Jesus was God incarnate, a pre-existent æon, Word of God,
Creator of all things, masked in human flesh, but retaining, so far as
he chose, all his exalted prerogatives and cosmic attributes in this
disguise--they put themselves out of court, and deprive themselves of
any faculty of reply to the extreme negative school of critics. The
latter may be very absurd, and may betray an excess of credulity in
the solutions they offer of the problem of Christian origins; but
they can hardly go further along the path of absurdity and credulity
than the adherents of the creeds. If their arguments are to be met,
if any satisfactory proof is to be advanced of the historicity
of Jesus, it must come, not from those who, as Mommsen remarked,
"reason in chains," but from free thinkers.
[Yet Jesus is better attested than most ancients] Those, however,
who have much acquaintance with antiquity must perceive at the outset
that, if the thesis that Jesus never existed is to be admitted, then
quite a number of other celebrities, less well evidenced than he,
must disappear from the page of history, and be ranged with Jesus in
the realm of myth.
[Age of the earliest Christian literature] Many characteristically
Christian documents, such as the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd
of Hermas, and the Teaching of the Apostles, are admitted by Drews to
have been written before A.D. 100. [1] Not only the canonical Gospels,
he tells us, [2] were still current in the first half of the second
century, but several never accepted by the Church--e.g., spurious
gospels ascribed to Matthew, Thomas, Bartholomew, Peter, the Twelve
Apostles. These have not reached us, though we have recovered a large
fragment of the so-called Peter Gospel, and find that it at least
pre-supposes canonical Mark. The phrase, "Still current in the first
half of the second century," indicates that, in Dr. Drews's opinion,
these derivative gospels were at least as old as year 100; in that
case our canonical Gospels would fall well within the first. I will
not press this point; but, anyhow, we note the admission that within
about seventy years of the supposed date of Jesus's death Christians
were reading that mass of written tradition about him which we call
the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They were also reading
a mass of less accredited biographies--less trustworthy, no doubt,
but, nevertheless, the work of authors who entertained no doubt that
Jesus had really lived, and who wished to embellish his story.
[If Jesus never lived, neither did Solon,] If, then, armed with
such early records, we are yet so exacting of evidence as to deny
that Jesus, their central figure, ever lived, what shall we say of
other ancient worthies--of Solon, for example, the ancient Athenian
legislator? For his life our chief sources, as Grote remarks (History
of Greece, Pt. II, ch. 11), are Plutarch and Diogenes, writers who
lived seven and eight hundred years after him. Moreover, the stories
of Plutarch about him are, as Grote says, "contradictory as well
as apocryphal." It is true that Herodotus repeats to us the story of
Solon's travels, and of the conversations he held with Croesus, King of
Lydia; but these conversations are obviously mere romance. Herodotus,
too, lived not seventy, but nearly one hundred and fifty years later
than Solon, so that contemporary evidence of him we have none. Plutarch
preserves, no doubt, various laws and metrical aphorisms which were
in his day attributed to Solon, just as the Christians attributed an
extensive body of teaching to Jesus. If we deny all authenticity to
Jesus's teaching, what of Solon's traditional lore? Obviously Jesus
has a far larger chance to have really existed than Solon.
[or Epimenides,] And the same is true of Epimenides of Crete, who
was said to be the son of the nymph Balte; to have been mysteriously
fed by the nymphs, since he was never seen to eat, and so forth. He
was known as the Purifier, and in that rôle healed the Athenians
of plagues physical and spiritual. A poet and prophet he lived,
according to some, for one hundred and fifty-four years; according
to his own countrymen, for three hundred. If he lived to the latter
age, then Plato, who is the first to mention him in his Laws, was
his contemporary, not otherwise.
[or Pythagoras,] Pythagoras, again, can obviously never have lived
at all, if we adopt the purist canons of Drews. For he was reputed,
as Grote (Pt. II, ch. 37) reminds us, to have been inspired by the
gods to reveal to men a new way of life, and found an order or
brotherhood. He is barely mentioned by any writer before Plato,
who flourished one hundred and fifty years later than he. In the
matter of miracles, prophecy, pre-existence, mystic observances,
and asceticism, Pythagoras equalled, if he did not excel, Jesus.
[or Apollonius of Tyana] Apollonius of Tyana is another example. We
have practically no record of him till one hundred and twenty
years after his death, when the Sophist Philostratus took in hand
to write his life, by his own account, with the aid of memorials
left by Damis, a disciple of the sage. Apollonius, like Jesus and
Pythagoras, was an incarnation of an earlier being; he, too, worked
miracles, and appeared after death to an incredulous follower, and
ascended into heaven bodily. The stories of his miracles of healing,
of his expulsions of demons, and raising of the dead, read exactly
like chapters out of the Gospels. He, like Jesus and Pythagoras,
had a god Proteus for his father, and was born of a virgin. His birth
was marked in the heavens by meteoric portents. His history bristles
with tales closely akin to those which were soon told of Jesus; yet
all sound scholars are agreed that his biographer did not imitate the
Gospels, but wrote independently of them. If, then, Jesus never lived,
much less can Apollonius have done so. Except for a passing reference
in Lucian, Philostratus is our earliest authority for his reality;
the life written of him by Moeragenes is lost, and we do not know
when it was written. On the whole, the historicity of Jesus is much
better attested and documented than that of Apollonius, whose story
is equally full of miracles with Christ's.
[Miracles do not wholly invalidate a document] The above examples
suffice. But, with the aid of a good dictionary of antiquity,
hundreds of others could be adduced of individuals for whose reality
we have not a tithe of the evidence which we have for that of Jesus;
yet no one in his senses disputes their ever having lived. We take
it for certain that hundreds--nay, thousands--of people who figure
on the pages of ancient and medieval history were real, and that,
roughly speaking, they performed the actions attributed to them--this
although the earliest notices of them are only met with in Plutarch,
or Suidas, or William of Tyre, or other writers who wrote one hundred,
two hundred, perhaps six hundred years after them. Nor are we deterred
from believing that they really existed by the fact that, along with
some things credible, other things wholly incredible are related of
them. Throughout ancient history we must learn to pick and choose. The
thesis, therefore, that Jesus never lived, but was from first to last
a myth, presents itself at the outset as a paradox. Still, as it is
seriously advanced, it must be seriously considered and that I now
proceed to do.
[Proof of the unhistoricity of Jesus, how attainable] It can obviously
not pass muster, unless its authors furnish us with a satisfactory
explanation of every single notice, direct or indirect, simple or
constructive, which ancient writers have transmitted to us. Each
notice must be separately examined, and if an evidential document
be composite, every part of it. Each statement in its primâ facie
sense must be shown to be irreconcilable with what we know of the
age and circumstances to which it pretends to relate. And in every
case the new interpretation must be more cogent and more probable
than the old one. Jesus, the real man, must be driven line by line,
verse by verse, out of the whole of the New Testament, and after that
out of other early sources which directly or by implication attest his
historicity. There is no other way of proving so sweeping a negative
as that of the three authors I have named.
[How to approach ancient documents] For every statement of fact in
an ancient author is a problem, and has to be accounted for. If it
accords with the context, and the entire body of statement agrees
with the best scheme we can form in our mind's eye of the epoch,
we accept it, just as we would the statement of a witness standing
before us in a law court. If, on the other hand, the statement does not
agree with our scheme, we ask why the author made it. If he obviously
believed it, then how did his error arise? If he should seem to have
made it without himself believing it, then we ask, Why did he wish
to deceive his reader? Sometimes the only solution we can give of
the matter is, that our author himself never penned the statement,
but that someone covertly inserted it in his text, so that it might
appear to have contained it. In such cases we must explain why and in
whose interest the text was interpolated. In all history, of course,
we never get a direct observation, or intuition, or hearing of what
took place, for the photographic camera and phonograph did not exist
in antiquity. We must rest content with the convictions and feelings
of authors, as they put them down in books. To one circumstance,
however, amid so much dubiety, we shall attach supreme importance; and
that is to an affirmation of the same fact by two or more independent
witnesses. One man may well be in error, and report to us what never
occurred; but it is in the last degree improbable that two or more
[Value of several independent witnesses in case of Jesus] independent
witnesses will join forces in testifying to what never was. Let us,
then, apply this principle to the problem before us. Jesus, our authors
affirm, was not a real man, but an astral myth. Now we can conceive of
one ancient writer mistaking such a myth for a real man; but what if
another and another witness, what if half a dozen or more come along,
and, meeting us quite apart from one another and by different routes,
often by pure accident, conspire in error. If we found ourselves in
such case, would we not think we were bewitched, and take to our heels?
[The oldest sources about Jesus] Well, I do not intend to take to my
heels. I mean to stand up to the chimeras of Messrs. Drews, Robertson,
and Benjamin Smith. And the best courage is to take one by one the
ancient sources which bear witness to the man Jesus, examine and
compare them, and weigh their evidence. If they are independent,
if they agree, not too much--that would excite a legitimate
suspicion--but only more or less and in a general way, then, I
believe, any rational inquirer would allow them weight, even if none
were strictly contemporaries of his and eye-witnesses of his life. In
the Gospel of Mark we have the earliest narrative document of the New
Testament. This is evident from the circumstance that the three other
evangelists used it in the composition of their Gospels. Drews, indeed,
admits it to be one of the "safest" results of modern discussion
of the life of Jesus that this Gospel is the oldest of the surviving
four. He is aware, of course, that this conclusion has been questioned;
but no one will doubt it who has confronted [The Gospel of Mark used
in Matthew and Luke] Mark in parallel columns with Luke and Matthew,
and noted how these other evangelists not only derive from it the
order of the events of the life of Jesus, but copy it out verse
after verse, each with occasional modifications of his own. Drews,
however, while aware of this phenomenon, has yet not grasped the
fact that it and nothing else has moved scholars to regard Mark as
the most ancient of the three Synoptics; quite erroneously, as if he
had never read any work of modern textual criticism, he imagines that
they are led to their conclusion, firstly by the superior freshness
and vividness of Mark, by a picturesqueness which argues him to
have been an eye-witness; and, secondly, by the evidence of Papias,
who, it is said, declared Mark to have been the interpreter of the
Apostle Peter. In point of fact, the modern critical theologians,
for whom Drews has so much contempt, attach no decisive weight in
this connection either to the tradition preserved by Papias or to the
graphic qualities of Mark's narratives. They rest their case mainly
on the internal evidence of the texts before them.
[Contents of Mark] What, then, do we find in Mark's narrative?
Inasmuch as my readers can buy the book for a penny and study it
for themselves, I may content myself with a very brief résumé of
its contents.
It begins with an account of one John who preached round about Judæa,
but especially on the Jordan, that the Jews must repent of their sins
in order to their remission; in token whereof he directed them to take
a ritual bath in the sacred waters of the Jordan, just as a modern
Hindoo washes away his sins by means of a ritual bath in the River
Jumna. An old document generally called Q. (Quelle), because Luke and
Matthew used it in common to supplement Mark's rather meagre story,
adds the reason why the Jews were to repent; and it was this, that
the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. [Drews's account of Messianism]
Drews, in his first chapter of The Christ Myth, traces out the idea
of this Kingdom of God, which he finds so prominent in the Jewish
Apocalyptics of the last century before and the first century after
Christ, and attributes it to Persian and Mithraic influence. Mithras,
he says, was to descend upon the earth, and in a last fierce struggle
overwhelm Angromainyu or Ahriman and his hosts, and cast them down
into the nether world. He would then raise the dead in bodily shape,
and after a general judgment of the whole world, in which the wicked
should be condemned to the punishments of hell and the good raised
to heavenly glory, establish the "millennial kingdom." These ideas,
he continues, penetrated Jewish thought, and brought about a complete
transformation of the former belief in a messiah, a Hebrew term
meaning the anointed--in Greek Christos. For, to begin with, the Christ
was merely the Jewish king who represented Jahwe before the people,
and the people before Jahwe. He was "Son of Jahwe," or "Son of God"
par excellence; later on the name came to symbolize the ideal king
to come--this when the Israelites lost their independence, and were
humiliated by falling under a foreign yoke. This ideal longed-for
king was to win Jahwe's favour; and by his heroic deeds, transcending
those of Moses and Joshua of old, to re-establish the glory of Israel,
renovate the face of the earth, and even make Israel Lord over all
nations. But so far the Messiah was only a human being, a new David
or descendant of David, a theocratic king, a divinely favoured prince
of peace, a just ruler over the people he liberated; and in this
sense Cyrus, who delivered the Jews from the Babylonian captivity,
the rescuer and overlord of Israel, had been acclaimed Messiah.
At last and gradually--still under Persian influence, according to
Drews--this figure assumed divine attributes, yet without forfeiting
human ones. Secret and supernatural as was his nature, so should the
birth of the Messiah be; though a divine child, he was to be born in
lowly state. Nay, the personality of the Messiah eventually mingled
with that of Jahwe himself, whose son he was. Such, according to Drews,
were the alternations of the Messiah between a human and a divine
nature in Jewish apocalypses of the period B.C. 100 to A.D. 100. They
obviously do not preclude the possibility of the Jews in that epoch
acclaiming a man as their Messiah--indeed, there is no reason why
they should not have attached the dignity to several; and from sources
which Drews does not dispute we learn that they actually did so.
[John and Jesus began as messengers of the divine kingdom on earth]
Let us return to Mark's narrative. Among the Jews who came to John to
confess and repent of their sins, and wash them away in the Jordan,
was one named Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee; and he, as soon as
John was imprisoned and murdered by Herod, caught up the lamp,
if I may use a metaphor, which had fallen from the hands of the
stricken saint, and hurried on with it to the same goal. We read
that he went to Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying:
"The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent ye,
and believe in the gospel or good tidings."
The rest of Mark is a narrative of what happened to Jesus on this
self-appointed errand. We learn that he soon made many recruits,
from among whom he chose a dozen as his particular missionaries
or apostles. These, after no long time, he despatched on peculiar
beats of their own. [Jesus's anticipations of its speedy advent]
He was certain that the kingdom was not to be long delayed, and on
occasions assured his audience that it would come in their time. When
he was sending out his missionary disciples, he even expressed to
them his doubts as to whether it would not come even before they had
had time to go round the cities of Israel. [He confined the promises
to Jews] It was not, however, this consideration, but the instinct
of exclusiveness, which he shared with most of his race, that led
him to warn them against carrying the good tidings of the impending
salvation of Israel to Samaritans or Gentiles; the promises were not
for schismatics and heathens, but only for the lost sheep of the
house of Israel. Some of these details are derived not from Mark,
but from the document out of which, as I remarked above, the first
and second evangelists supplemented Mark.
[Was rejected by his own kindred] Like Luther, Loyola, Dunstan,
St. Anthony, and many other famous saints and sinners, Jesus, on the
threshold of his career, encountered Satan, and overthrew him. A
characteristically oriental fast of forty days in the wilderness
equipped him for this feat. Thenceforth he displayed, like Apollonius
of Tyana and not a few contemporary rabbis, considerable familiarity
with the demons of disease and madness. The sick flocked to him to
be healed, and it was only in districts where people disbelieved
in him and his message that his therapeutic energy met with a
check. Among those who particularly flouted his pretensions were
his mother and brethren, who on one occasion at least followed him
in order to arrest him and put him under restraint as being beside
himself or exalté. [His Parables all turn on the coming Kingdom]
A good many parables are attributed to him in this Gospel, and yet
more in Matthew and Luke, of which the burden usually is the near
approach of the dissolution of this world and of the last Judgment,
which are to usher in the Kingdom of God on earth. We learn that the
parable was his favourite mode of instruction, as it always has been
and still is the chosen vehicle of Semitic moral teaching. [No hint in
the earliest sources of the miraculous birth of Jesus] Of the later
legend of his supernatural birth, and of the visits before his birth
of angels to Mary, his mother, and to Joseph, his putative father,
of the portents subsequently related in connection with his birth at
Bethlehem, there is not a word either in Mark or in the other early
document out of which Matthew and Luke supplemented Mark. In these
earliest documents Jesus is presented quite naturally as the son of
Joseph and his wife Mary, and we learn quite incidentally the names
of his brothers and sisters.
[Late recognition of Jesus as himself the Messiah] Towards the middle
of his career Jesus seems to have been recognized by Peter as the
Son of God or Messiah. Whether he put himself forward for that rôle
we cannot be sure; but so certain were his Apostles of the matter
that two of them are represented as having asked him in the naivest
way to grant them seats of honour on his left and right hand, when
he should come in glory to judge the world. The Twelve expected to
sit on thrones and judge the twelve tribes of Israel, and this idea
meets us afresh in the Apocalypse, a document which in the form we
have it belongs to the years 92-93.
[His hopes shattered at approach of death] But the simple faith
of the Apostles in their teacher and leader was to receive a
rude shock. They accompany him for the Passover to Jerusalem. An
insignificant triumphal demonstration is organized for him as he
enters the sacred city on an ass; he beards the priests in the temple,
and scatters the money-changers who sat there to change strange coins
for pilgrims. The priests, who, like many others of their kind, were
much too comfortable to sigh for the end of the world, and regarded
enthusiasts as nuisances, took offence, denounced him to Pilate as a
rebel and a danger to the Roman government of Judæa. He is arrested,
condemned to be crucified, and as he hangs on the cross in a last
moment of disillusionment utters that most pathetic of cries: "My God,
my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" He had expected to witness the
descent of the kingdom on earth, but instead thereof he is himself
handed over helpless into the hands of the Gentiles.
Such in outline is the story Mark has to tell. The rival and
supplementary document of which I have spoken, and which admits of
some reconstruction from the text of Matthew and Luke, consisted
mainly of parables and precepts which Jesus was supposed to have
delivered. It need not engage our attention here.
[The mythical theory of Jesus] Now the three writers I have
named--Messrs. Drews, Robertson, and W. B. Smith--enjoy the singular
good fortune to be the first to have discovered what the above
narratives really mean, and of how they originated; and they are
urgent that we should sell all we have, and purchase their pearl
of wisdom. They assure us that in the Gospels we have not got any
"tradition of a personality." Jesus, the central figure, never
existed at all, but was a purely mythical personage. The mythical
character of the Gospels, so Drews assures us, has, in the hands of
Mr. J. M. Robertson, led the way, and made a considerable advance
in England; he regrets that so far official learning in Germany
has not taken up a serious position regarding the mythic symbolical
interpretation of the latter. [3] Let us then ask, What is the gist
of the new system of interpretation. It is as follows:--
[Jesus = Joshua, a Sun-god, object of a secret cult] Jesus, or Joshua,
was the name under which the expected Messiah was honoured in a certain
Jewish secret society which had its headquarters in Jerusalem about
the beginning of our era. In view of its secret character Drews warns
us not to be too curious, nor to question either his information or
that of Messrs. Smith and Robertson. This recalls to me an incident
in my own experience. I was once, together with a little girl,
being taken for a sail by an old sailor who had many yarns. One of
the most circumstantial of them was about a ship which went down in
mid ocean with all hands aboard; and it wound up with the remark:
"And nobody never knew nothing about it." Little girl: "Then how
did you come to hear all about it?" Like our brave old sailor,
Dr. Drews warns us (p. 22) not to be too inquisitive. We must not
"forget that we are dealing with a secret cult, the existence of
which we can decide upon only by indirect means." His hypothesis,
he tells us, "can only be rejected without more ado by such as seek
the traces of the pre-Christian cult of Jesus in well-worn places,
and will only allow that to be 'proved' which they have established
by direct original documentary evidence before their eyes." In other
words, we are to set aside our copious and almost (in Paul's case)
contemporary evidence that Jesus was a real person in favour of a
hypothesis which from the first and as such lacks all direct and
documentary evidence, and is not amenable to any of the methods of
proof recognized by sober historians. We must take Dr. Drews's word
for it, and forego all evidence.
But let our authors continue with their new revelation. By Joshua, or
Jesus, we are not to understand the personage concerning whose exploits
the Book of Joshua was composed, but a Sun-god. The Gospels are a
veiled account of the sufferings and exploits of this Sun-god. "Joshua
is apparently [why this qualification?] an ancient Ephraimitic god
of the Sun and Fruitfulness, who stood in close relation to the Feast
of the Pasch and to the custom of circumcision." [4]
[Emptiness of the Sun-god Joshua hypothesis] Now no one nowadays
accepts the Book of Joshua offhand as sound history. It is a
compilation of older sources, which have already been sifted a good
deal, and will undergo yet more sifting in the future. The question
before us does not concern its historicity, but is this: Does the Book
of Joshua, whether history or not, support the hypothesis that Joshua
was ever regarded as God of the Sun and of Fruitfulness? Was ever such
a god known of or worshipped in the tribe of Ephraim or in Israel at
large? In this old Hebrew epic or saga Joshua is a man of flesh and
blood. How did these gentlemen get it into their heads that he was a
Sun-god? For this statement there is not a shadow of evidence. They
have invented it. As he took the Israelites dryshod over the Jordan,
why have they not made a River-god of him? And as, according to Drews,
he was so interested in fruitfulness and foreskins, why not suppose he
was a Priapic god? They are much too modest. We should at least expect
"the composite myth" to include this element, inasmuch as his mystic
votaries at Jerusalem were far from seeing eye to eye with Paul in
the matter of circumcision.
[The Sun-myth stage of comparative mythology] There was years ago
a stage in the Comparative History of Religions when the Sun-myth
hypothesis was invoked to explain almost everything. The shirt of
Nessus, for example, in which Heracles perished, was a parable of the
sun setting amidst a wrack of scattered clouds. The Sun-myth was the
key which fitted every lock, and was employed unsparingly by pioneers
of comparative mythology like F. Max Müller and Sir George Cox. It
was taken for granted that early man must have begun by deifying
the great cosmic powers, by venerating Sun and Moon, the Heavens,
the Mountains, the Sea, as holy and divine beings, because they,
rather than humble and homelier objects, impress us moderns by their
sublimity and overwhelming force. Man was supposed from the first to
have felt his transitoriness, his frailty and weakness, and to have
contrasted therewith the infinities of space and time, the majesty
of the starry hosts of heaven, the majestic and uniform march of
sun and moon, the mighty rumble of the thunder. Max Müller thought
that religion began when the cowering savage was crushed by awe of
nature and of her stupendous forces, by the infinite lapses of time,
by the yawning abysses of space. As a matter of fact, savages do not
entertain these sentiments of the dignity and majesty of nature. On
the contrary, a primitive man thinks that he can impose his paltry
will on the elements; that he knows how to unchain the wind, to oblige
the rain to fall; that he can, like the ancient witches of Thessaly,
control sun and moon and stars by all sorts of petty magical rites,
incantations, and gestures, as Joshua made the sun stand still till
his band of brigands had won the battle. It is to the imagination
of us moderns alone that the grandeur of the universe appeals, and
it was relatively late in the history of religion--so far as it can
be reconstructed from the scanty data in our possession--that the
higher nature cults were developed. The gods and sacred beings of
an Australian or North American native are the humble vegetables and
animals which surround him, objects with which he is on a footing of
equality. His totems are a duck, a hare, a kangaroo, an emu, a lizard,
a grub, or a frog. In the same way, the sacred being of an early
Semite's devotion was just as likely to be a pig or a hare as the sun
in heaven; the cult of an early Egyptian was centred upon a crocodile,
or a cat, or a dog. [5] In view of these considerations, our suspicion
is aroused at the outset by finding Messrs. Drews and Robertson to be
in this discarded and obsolete Sun-myth stage of speculation. They
are a back number. Let us, however, examine their mythic symbolic
theory a little further, and see what sort of arguments they invoke
in favour of it, and what their "indirect" proofs amount to.
[Examples of the Sun-god theory of Jesus. The Rock-Tomb] Why was Jesus
buried in a rock-tomb? asks Mr. Robertson. Answer: Because he was
Mithras, the rock-born Sun-god. We would like to know what other sort
of burial was possible round Jerusalem, where soil was so scarce that
everyone was buried in a rock-tomb. Scores of such tombs remain. Are
they all Mithraic? Surely a score of other considerations would equally
well explain the choice of a rock-tomb for him in Christian tradition.
[The date of birthday] Why was Jesus born at the
winter-solstice? Answer: Because he was a Sun-god.
Our author forgets that the choice of December 25 for the feast of
the physical birth of Jesus was made by the Church as late as 354
A.D. What could the cryptic Messianists of the first half of the first
century know about a festival which was never heard of in Rome until
the year 354, nor accepted in Jerusalem before the year 440? Time is
evidently no element in the calculations of these authors; and they
commit themselves to the most amazing anachronisms with the utmost
insouciance, or, shall we not rather say, ignorance; unless, indeed,
they imagine that the mystic worshippers of the God Joshua knew all
about the date, but kept it dark in order to mystify all succeeding
generations.
[The twelve disciples] Why did Jesus surround himself with twelve
disciples? Answer: Because they were the twelve signs of the Zodiac
and he a Sun-god. We naturally ask, Were the twelve tribes of Israel
equally representative of the Zodiac? In any case, may not Christian
story have fixed the number of Apostles at twelve in view of the
tribes being twelve? It is superfluous to go as far as the Zodiac
for an explanation.
[The Sermon on the Mount] Why did Jesus preach his sermon on the
Mount? Answer: Because as Sun-god he had to take his stand on the
"pillar of the world." In the same way, Moses, another Sun-god,
gave his law from the Mount.
I always have heard that Moses got his tables of the law up top of
a mountain, and brought them down to a people that were forbidden to
approach it. He did not stand up top, and shout out his laws to them,
as Mr. Robertson suggests. In any case, we merely read in Matthew v
that Jesus went up into a mountain or upland region, and when he had
sat down his disciples came to him, and he then opened his mouth and
taught them. In a country like Galilee, where you can barely walk
a mile in any direction without climbing a hill, what could be more
natural than for a narrator to frame such a setting for the teacher's
discourse? It is the first rule of criticism to practise some economy
of hypothesis, and not go roaming after fanciful and extravagant
interpretations of quite commonplace and every-day occurrences.
[The last Judgment] Why was it believed that Jesus was to judge men
after death? Answer: Because he was a Sun-god, and pro tanto identical
with Osiris.
Surely the more natural interpretation is that, so soon as Jesus
was identified in the minds of his followers with the Messiah or
Christ, the task of judging Israel was passed on to him as part of
the rôle. Thus in the Psalms of Solomon, a Jewish apocryph of about
B.C. 50, we read that the Messiah will "in the assemblies judge the
peoples, the tribes of the sanctified" (xvii, 48). Such references
could be multiplied; are they all Osirian? If Mr. Robertson had paid
a little more attention to the later apocrypha of Judaism, and made
himself a little better acquainted with the social and religious
medium which gave birth to Christianity, he would have realized how
unnecessary are these Sun-mythic hypotheses, and we should have been
spared his books.
[The Lamb and Fish symbolism] Why is Jesus represented in art and
lore by the Lamb and the Fishes? Answer: As a Sun-god passing through
the Zodiac.
This is amazing. We know the reason why Jesus was figured as a Lamb
by the early Christians. It was because they regarded the paschal
lamb as a type of him. Does Mr. Robertson claim to know the reasons
of their symbolism better than they did themselves?
And where did he discover that Jesus was represented as Fishes in Art
and Lore? He was symbolized as one fish, not as several; and Tertullian
has told us why. It was because, according to the popular zoology of
the day, fishes were supposed to be born and to originate in the water,
without carnal connection between their parents. For this reason the
fish was taken as a symbol of Jesus, who was born again in the waters
of the Jordan. A later generation explained the appellation of ichthys
(ichthus), or Fish, as an acrostic. The letters of the Greek word are
the initials of the words: Iesous Christos Theou uios soter--i.e.,
Jesus Christ of God Son, Saviour; but this later explanation came
into vogue in an age when it was already heretical to say that Jesus
was reborn in baptism; nor does it explain why the multitude of the
baptized were symbolized as little fishes in contrast with the Big
Fish, Christ.
[The two asses] Why did Jesus ride into Jerusalem before his death on
two asses? Answer: Because Dionysus also rides on an ass and a foal
in one of the Greek signs of Cancer (the turning point in the sun's
course). "Bacchus (p. 287) crossed a marsh on two asses."
Mr. Robertson does not attempt to prove that the earliest Christians,
who were Jews, must have been familiar with the rare legend of Bacchus
crossing a marsh on two asses; still less with the rare representation
of the zodiacal sign Cancer as an ass and its foal. It is next to
impossible; and, even if they were, what induced them to transform the
myth into the legend of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on two donkeys
at once? If they had so excellent a legend of Bacchus on his asses
crossing a marsh, why not be content with it? And the same question
may be asked in regard to all the other transformations by which these
"mystic sectaries," who formed the early Church, changed myths culled
from all times and all religions and races into a connected story of
Jesus, as it lies before us in the Synoptic Gospels.
Mr. Robertson disdains any critical and comparative study of the
Gospels, and insists on regarding them as coeval and independent
documents. Everything inside the covers of the New Testament is
for him, as for the Sunday-school teacher, on one dead level of
importance. All textual criticism has passed over his head. He has
never learned to look in Mark for the original form of a statement
which Luke or Matthew copied out, and in transferring them to their
Gospels scrupled not to alter or modify. Accordingly, to suit the
exigencies of his theory that the Gospels are an allegory of a
Sun-god's exploits, he here claims to find the original text not in
Mark, but in Matthew; as if a transcript and paraphrase could possibly
be prior to, and more authoritative than, the text transcribed and
brodé. Accordingly, he writes (p. 339) as follows: "In Mark xi and Luke
xix, 30, the two asses become one.... In the Fourth Gospel, again, we
have simply the colt." And yet by all rules of textual criticism and
of common sense the underlying and original text is Mark xi, 1-7. In
it the disciples merely bring a colt which they had found tied at a
door. The author of the Gospel called of Matthew, eager to discern in
every incident, no matter how commonplace, which he found in Mark, a
fulfilment of some prophecy, or another, drags in a tag of Zechariah:
"Behold, the King cometh to thee, meek, and riding on an ass and upon
a colt, the foal of an ass." Then, to make the story told of Jesus
run on all fours with the prophecy, he writes that the disciples
"brought the ass and the colt, and put on them their garments, and he
(Jesus) sat on them." He was unacquainted with Hebrew idiom, and so
not aware that the words, "a colt the foal of an ass," are no more
than a rhetorical reduplication [6] of an ass. There was, then, but
one animal in the original form of the story, and, as the French say,
it saute aux yeux that the importation of two is due to the influence
of the prophecy on the mind of the transcriber. Why, therefore, go
out of the way to attribute the tale to the influence of a legend of
Bacchus, so multiplying empty hypotheses? Mr. Robertson, with hopeless
perversity, takes Dr. Percy Gardner to task for repeating what he
calls "the fallacious explanation, that 'an ass and the foal of an
ass' represents a Greek misconception of the Hebrew way of saying
'an ass,' as if Hebrews in every-day life lay under a special spell
of verbal absurdity." [7] [Jewish abhorrence of Pagan myths] But did
Hebrews in every-day life mould their ideas of the promised Messiah
on out-of-the-way legends of Bacchus? Were they likely to fashion a
tale of a Messianic triumph out of Gentile myths? Do we not know from
a hundred sources that the Jews of that age, and the Christians who
were in this matter their pupils, abhorred everything that savoured
of Paganism. They were the last people in the world to construct
a life of the Messiah out of the myths of Bacchus, and Hermes, and
Osiris, and Heracles, and the fifty other heathen gods and heroes
whom Mr. Robertson rolls up into what he calls the "composite myth"
of the Gospels. But let us return to his criticism of Dr. Gardner. Why,
it may be asked, was it à priori more absurd of Matthew to turn one ass
into two in deference to Hebrew prophecy, than for Hebrews to set their
Messiah riding into the holy city on two asses in deference to a myth
of Bacchus crossing a marsh on two of them? Is it not Mr. Robertson,
rather than [Robertson on Drs. Gardner and Carpenter] Dr. Gardner,
who here lies under a special spell of absurdity? "A glance at the
story of Bacchus," writes Mr. Robertson, "crossing a marsh on two asses
... would have shown him that he was dealing with a zodiacal myth." The
boot is on the other foot. Had Mr. Robertson chosen to glance at the
Poeticon Astronomicon of Hyginus, a late and somewhat worthless Latin
author, who is the authority for this particular tale of Bacchus,
he would have read (ii, 23) how Liber (i.e., Dionysus) was on his
way to get an oracle at Dodona which might restore his lost sanity:
Sed cum venisset ad quandam paludem magnam, quam transire non posset,
de quibusdam duobus asellis obviis factis dicitur unum deprehendisse
eorum, et ita esse transvectus, ut omnino aquam non tetigerit.
In English: "But when he came to a certain spacious marsh, which he
thought he could not get across, he is said to have met on the way
two young asses, of which he caught one, and he was carried across
on it so nicely that he never touched the water at all."
Here there is no hint of Bacchus riding on two asses, and
Mr. Robertson's entire hypothesis falls to the ground like a house of
cards. The astounding thing is that, although he insists on pages 287
and 453 [8] that Bacchus rode on two asses, and that here is the true
Babylonian explanation of Jesus also riding on two, he gets the Greek,
or rather Latin, myth right on p. 339, and recognizes that Dionysus
was only mounted on one of the asses when he passed the morass or
river on his way to Dodona. Thus, by Mr. Robertson's own admission,
Bacchus never rode on two asses at all.
[The Pilate myth] Why was Jesus crucified by Pilate? For an
answer to this let us for a little quit "the very stimulating and
informing works," as Dr. Drews calls them, of Mr. Robertson, and
turn to Dr. Drews's own work on The Witnesses to the Historicity of
Jesus. [9] For there we find the true "astral myth interpretation"
in all its glory. The Pilate of Christian legend was, so we learn,
not originally an historical person at all; the whole story of
Christ is to be taken in an astral sense; and Pilate in particular
represents the story of Orion, the javelin-man (Pilatus), with the
Arrow or Lance constellation (Sagitta), which is supposed to be very
long in the Greek myth, and reappears in the Christian legend under
the name of Longinus.... In the astral myth the Christ hanging on
the cross or world-tree (i.e., the Milky Way) is killed by the lance
of Pilatus.... The Christian population of Rome told the legend of
a javelin-man, a Pilatus, who was supposed to have been responsible
for the death of the Saviour. Tacitus heard the myth repeated, and,
like the fool he was, took it that Pilate the javelin-man was no other
than Pilate the Roman procurator of Judæa under Tiberius, who must
have been known to him from the books of Josephus. [10] Accordingly,
Tacitus sat down and penned his account of the wholesale massacre
and burning of Christians by Nero in the fifteenth book of his Annals.
We shall turn to the evidence of Tacitus later on. Meanwhile it
is pertinent to ask where the myth of Pilatus, of which Drews here
makes use, came from. The English text of Drews is somewhat confused;
but presumedly Orion, with his girdle sword and lion's skin, is no
other than Pilatus; and his long lance, with which he kills Christ,
further entitles him to the name of Longinus. Or is it Pilatus who
stabs Orion? It does not matter. Let us test this hypothesis in its
essential parts.
[The Longinus myth] Firstly, then, Longinus was the name coined
by Christian legend-mongers of the third or fourth century for the
centurion who stabbed Jesus with a lance as he hung on the cross. How
could so late a myth influence or form part of a tradition three
centuries older than itself? The incident of the lance being plunged
into the side of Jesus is related only in the Fourth Gospel, and is
not found in the earlier ones. The author of that Gospel invented it
in order to prove to his generation that Jesus had real blood in his
body, and was not, as the Docetes maintained, a phantasm mimicking
reality to the ears and eyes alone of those who saw and conversed
with him. This Gospel, even according to the Christian tradition of
its date, is barely earlier than A.D. 100, and the name Longinus was
not heard of before A.D. 250 at the earliest. Yet Drews is ready to
believe that it was on the lips of Christians in the reign of Nero,
say in A.D. 64.
Secondly, what evidence is there that Pilatus could mean the
"javelin-man" for the earliest generations of Roman Christians? The
language current among them was Greek, not Latin, as the earliest
Christian inscriptions in the catacombs of Rome testify. The language
of Roman rites and popes remained Greek for three centuries. Why,
then, should they have had their central myth of the crucifixion in
a Latin form?
Thirdly, what evidence is there that Pilatus could mean a javelin-man
even to a Latin? Many lexicographers interpret it in Virgil in the
sense of packed together or dense, and in most authors it bears the
sense of bald or despoiled.
[Inadequacy of the mythic theory] But, letting that pass, we ask what
evidence is there that Orion ever had the epithet Pilatus in this
sense? What evidence that such a myth ever existed at all? There is
none, absolutely none. It is not enough for these authors to ransack
Lemprière and other dictionaries of mythology in behalf of their
paradoxes; but when these collections fail them, they proceed to coin
myths of their own, and pretend that they are ancient, that the early
Christians believed in them, and that Tacitus fell into the trap; as if
these Christians, whom they acknowledge to have been either Jews or the
converts of Jews, had not been constitutionally opposed to all pagan
myths and cults alike; as if a good half of the earliest Christian
literature did not consist of polemics against the pagan myths, which
were regarded with the bitterest scorn and abhorrence; as if it were
not notorious that it was their repugnance to and ridicule of pagan
gods and heroes and religious myths that earned for the Christians,
as for the Jews, their teachers, the hatred and loathing of the pagan
populations in whose midst they lived. And yet we are asked to believe
that the Christian Church, almost before it was separated from the
Jewish matrix, fashioned for itself in the form of the Gospels an
allegory of a Sun-god Joshua, who, though unknown to serious Semitic
scholars, is yet so well known to Mr. Robertson and his friends that
he identifies him with Adonis, and Osiris, and Dionysus, and Mithras,
and Krishna, and Asclepius, and with any other god or demi-god that
comes to hand in Lemprière's dictionary. After hundreds of pages of
such fanciful writing, Drews warns us in solemn language against the
attempts "of historical theologians to reach the nucleus of the Gospels
by purely philological means." The attempt, he declares, is "hopeless,
and must remain hopeless, because the Gospel tradition floats in
the air." One would like to know in what medium his own hypotheses
float. [Joshua the Sun-god a pure invention of the mythic school] Like
Dr. Drews, Mr. Robertson adopts the Joshua myth as if it were beyond
question. His faith in "the ancient Palestinian Saviour-Sun-God"
is absolute. This otherwise unknown deity was the core of what is
gracefully styled "the Jesuist myth." On examination, however, the
Joshua Sun-god turns out to be the most rickety of hypotheses. Because
the chieftain who, in old tradition, led the Jews across the Jordan
into the land of promise was named Joshua, certain critics, who are
still in the sun-myth phase of comparative mythology--in particular,
Stade and Winckler--have conjectured that the name Joshua conceals
a solar hero worshipped locally by the tribe of Ephraim. Even if
there ever existed such a cult, it had long vanished when the book
of Joshua was compiled; for in this he is no longer represented as a
solar hero, but has become in the popular tradition a human figure,
a hero judge, and leader of the armies of Israel. Of a Joshua cult
the book does not preserve any trace or memory; that it ever existed
is an improbable and unverifiable hypothesis. We might just as well
conjecture that Romulus, and Remus, and other half or wholly legendary
figures of ancient history, were sun-gods and divine saviours. But
it is particularly in Jewish history that this school is apt to
revel. Moses, and Joseph, and David were all mythical beings brought
down to earth; and the god David and the god Joshua, the god Moses,
the god Joseph, form in the imagination of these gentlemen a regular
Hebrew prehistoric Pantheon. I say in their imagination, for it is
certain that when the Pentateuch was compiled--at the latest in the
fifth century B.C.--the Jews no longer revered David, and Joshua, and
Joseph as sun-gods; while of what they worshipped even locally before
that date we have little knowledge, and can form only conjectures. In
any case, that they continued to worship a sun-god under the name of
Joshua as late as the first century of our era must strike anyone who
has the least knowledge of Hebrew religious development, who has ever
read Philo or Josephus, or studied Jewish sapiential and apocalyptic
literature of the period B.C. 200-A.D. 100, as a wildly improbable
supposition. [Supposed secrecy of early Christian cult a literary
trick] Sensible that their hypothesis conflicts with all we know about
the Jews of these three centuries, these three authors--Messrs. Drews,
Robertson, and W. B. Smith--insist on the esoterism and secrecy of the
cryptic society which in Jerusalem harboured the cult. This commonest
of literary tricks enables them to evade any awkward questions, and
whenever they are challenged to produce some evidence of the existence
of such a cult they can answer that, being secret and esoteric, it
could leave little or no evidence of itself, and that we must take
their ipse dixit and renounce all hope of direct and documentary
evidence. They ask of us a greater credulity than any Pope of Rome
ever demanded.
[Joshua ben Jehozadak also a Sun-god] The divine stage of Joshua,
then, if it ever existed, was past and forgotten as early as 500
B.C. It has left no traces. Of the other Joshuas, who meet us in the
pages of the Jewish scriptures, the most important one is Jeshua or
Joshua ben Jehozadak, a high priest who, together with Zerubbabel,
is often mentioned (according to the Encyclopædia Biblica) in
contemporary writings. Not only, then, have we contemporary evidence
of this Joshua as of a mere man and a priest, but we know from it
that he stooped to such mundane occupations as the rebuilding of the
Temple. He also had human descendants, who are traced in Nehemiah xii,
10 fol. down to Jaddua. Of this epoch of Jewish history, in which
the Temple was being rebuilt, we have among the Jewish and Aramaic
papyri lately recovered at Elephantine documents that are autographs
of personages with whom this Joshua may well have been in contact. His
contemporaries are mentioned and even addressed in these documents,
so that he and his circle are virtually as well evidenced for us as
Frederick the Great and Voltaire. Is it credible in the face of such
facts that the authors we are criticizing should turn this Joshua,
too, into a solar god? Yet Drews turns with zest to the notice of
this Joshua, the high priest in Zechariah iii, as "one of the many
signs" which attest that "Joshua or Jesus was the name under which
the expected Messiah was honoured in certain Jewish sects." Unless
he regards this later Joshua also as a divine figure, and no mere
man of flesh and blood, why does he thus drag him into his argument?
[The suspicion that the compilers of the Old Testament burked
evidence favourable to the Sun-myth hypothesis] But, after all,
Messrs. Drews and Robertson are uneasy about the book of Joshua, and
not altogether capable of the breezy optimism of their instructor,
Mr. W. B. Smith, who, in Ecce Deus (p. 74), commits himself to the
naive declaration that, "even if we had no evidence whatever of
a pre-Christian Jesus cult, we should be compelled to affirm its
existence with undiminished decision." Accordingly, they both go
out of their way to hint that the ancient Jews suppressed the facts
of the Joshua or Jesus Sun-God-Saviour cult. Thus Mr. Robertson
(Christianity and Mythology, p. 99, note 1), after urging us to
accept a late and worthless tradition about Joshua, the Son of Nave,
remarks that "the Jewish books would naturally drop the subject." How
ill-natured, to be sure, of the authors of the old Hebrew scriptures to
suppress evidence that would have come in so handy for Mr. Robertson's
speculations. Dr. Drews takes another line, and in a note draws our
attention to the fact that the Samaritans possessed an apocryphal book
of the same name as the canonical book of Joshua. This book, he informs
us, is based upon an old work composed in the third century B.C.,
containing stories which in part do not appear in our Book of Joshua.
He here suggests that something was omitted in canonical Joshua by its
authors which would have helped out his hypothesis of a Joshua Sun-god
cult. He will not, however, find the Samaritan book encouraging,
for it gives no hint of such a cult; of that anyone who does not mind
being bored by a perusal of it can satisfy himself. Drews's statement
that it is based on an old work composed in the third century B.C. is
founded on pure ignorance, and the Encyclopædia Biblica declares it
to be a medieval production of no value to anyone except the student
of the Samaritan sect under Moslem rule.
[The evidence of El Tabari about Joshua] Mr. Robertson thinks he has
got on a better trail in the shape of a tradition as to Joshua which
he is quite sure the old Jewish scripture writers suppressed. Let us
examine it, for it affords a capital example of his ideas of what
constitutes historical evidence. "Eastern tradition," he writes,
"preserves a variety of myths that the Bible-makers for obvious
reasons suppressed or transformed." In one of those traditions
"Joshua is the son of the mythical Miriam; that is to say, there was
probably an ancient Palestinian Saviour-Sun-God, Jesus, the son of
Mary." So on p. 285 we learn that the cult of Jesus of Nazareth was
"the Survival of an ancient solar or other worship of a Babe Joshua,
son of Miriam." And he continually alludes to this ancient form of
devotion, not as a mere hypothesis, but as a well-ascertained and
demonstrable fact. [11]
Let us then explore this remarkable tradition by which "we are
led to surmise that the elucidation of the Christ myth is not yet
complete." For such is the grandiose language in which he heralds
his discovery. And what does it amount to? An Arab, El Tabari, who
died in Bagdad about the year 925, compiled a Chronicle, of which
some centuries later an unknown native of Persia made an abridgement
in his own tongue, and inserted in it as a gloss "the remarkable
Arab tradition," as it is called in the Pagan Christs (p. 157) of
Mr. Robertson, albeit he acknowledges in a footnote that it is "not
in the Arabic original." He asks us accordingly, on the faith of an
unknown Persian glossator of the late Middle Ages, to believe that the
canonical Book of Joshua originally contained this absurd tradition,
and why? Because it would help out his hypothesis that Jesus was an
ancient Palestinian Saviour-Sun-God, worshipped by a cryptic society
of Hebrews in Jerusalem, both before and after the beginning of the
Christian era; and this is the man who writes about "the psychological
resistance to evidence" of learned men, and sets it down to "malice and
impercipience" that anyone should challenge his conclusions. As usual,
Dr. Drews, who sets Mr. Robertson on a level with the author of the
Golden Bough [12] as a "leading exponent of his new mythico-symbolical
method," plunges into the pit which Mr. Robertson has dug for him, and
writes that, "according to an ancient Arabian tradition, the mother of
Joshua was called Mirzam (Mariam, Maria, as the mother of Jesus was)."
[W. B. Smith's hypothesis of a God Joshua] The source from which
Messrs. Drews and Robertson have drawn this particular inspiration is
Dr. W. B. Smith's work, The Pre-Christian Jesus (Der Vorchristliche
Jesus). This book, we are told, "first systematically set forth the
case for the thesis of its title." Let us, therefore, consider its
main argument. We have the following passages in Acts xviii, 24:--
Now a certain Jew named Apollos, an Alexandrian by race, a learned
man, came to Ephesus; and he was mighty in the Scriptures. This
man had been instructed in the way of the Lord; and, being fervent
in spirit, he spake and taught carefully the things concerning
Jesus, knowing only the baptism of John: and he began to speak
boldly in the synagogue. But when Priscilla and Aquila heard him,
they took him unto them, and expounded unto him the way of God
more carefully. And when he was minded to pass over into Achaia,
the brethren encouraged him, and wrote to the disciples to receive
him: and when he was come, he helped them much which had believed
through grace: for he powerfully confuted the Jews, publicly,
showing by the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ.
Availing ourselves of the canons of interpretation laid down by Drews
and Robertson, we may paraphrase the above somewhat as follows by
way of getting at its true meaning:--
"A certain sun-myth hero, as his name Apollos signifies, came to
Ephesus, which, being the centre of Astarte or Aphrodite worship,
was obviously the right place for such a hero to pilgrimage unto. He
was mighty in the Jewish Scriptures, and had been instructed in the
way of the Lord Joshua, the Sun-God-Saviour of ancient Ephraim. He
spake and taught carefully the things concerning this Joshua (or
Adonis, or Osiris, or Dionysus, or Vegetation-god, or Horus--for
you can take your choice among these and many more). But he knew
only of the prehistoric ritual of baptism of Cadmus or of Oannes-Ea,
the ancient culture-god of the Babylonians, who appeared in the form
of a Fish-man, teaching men by day and at night going down into the
sea--in his capacity of Sun-god." This Cadmus or Oannes was worshipped
at Jerusalem in the cryptic sect of the Christists or Jesuists under
the name of John. His friend Apollos, the solar demi-god, began to
speak boldly in the synagogue. Priscilla (presumably Cybele, mother
of the gods), and Aquila, the Eagle-God, or Jupiter, heard him; she
took him forthwith and expounded to him the way of Jahve, who also
was identical with Joshua, the Sun-god, with Osiris, etc.
[His forced and far-fetched interpretations of common phrases]
Professor W. B. Smith is a little more modest and less thorough-going
in his application of mythico-symbolic methods. He only asks us to
believe that the trite and hackneyed phrase, "the things concerning
Jesus," refers not, as the context requires, to the history and
passion of Jesus of Galilee, but to the mysteries of a prehistoric
Saviour-God of the same name. We advisedly say prehistoric, for he was
never mentioned by anyone before Professor Smith discovered him. The
name Jesus, according to him, means what the word Essene also meant, a
Healer. [13] Note, in passing, that this etymology is wholly false, and
rests on the authority of a writer so late, ignorant, and superstitious
as Epiphanius. Now, why cannot the words, "the things about Jesus,"
in this context mean the tradition of the ministry of Jesus as it had
shaped itself at that time, beginning with the Baptism and ending with
the Ascension, as we read in Acts i, 22? [Apollos and the Baptism of
John] It cannot, argues Professor Smith, because Apollos only knew the
baptism of John. The reference to John's baptism may be obscure, as
much in early Christianity is bound to be obscure, except to Professor
Smith and his imitators. Yet this much is clear, that it here means,
what it means in the sequel, the baptism of mere repentance as opposed
to the baptism of the Spirit, which was by laying on of hands, and
conferred the charismatic gifts of the Holy Ghost. The Marcionites, and
after them the Manichean and Cathar sects, retained the latter rite,
and termed it Spiritual or Pneumatic Baptism; while they dropped as
superfluous the Johannine baptism with water. It would appear, then,
that Apollos was perfectly acquainted with the personal history of
Jesus, and understood the purport of the baptism of repentance as a
sacrament preparing followers of Jesus for the kingdom of Heaven,
soon to be inaugurated on earth. Perhaps we get a glimpse in this
passage of an age when the mission of Jesus in his primitive rôle
as herald of the Messianic kingdom and a mere continuer of John's
mission was familiar to many who yet did not recognize him as the
Messiah. For, after instruction by Priscilla and Aquila, Apollos set
himself to confute the Jews who denied Jesus to have been Messiah,
which, as a mere herald of the approaching kingdom of God, he was
not. We know that Paul regarded him as having attained that dignity
only through, and by, the fact of the Spirit having raised him from
the dead; and did not regard him as having received it through the
descent of the Spirit on him in the Jordan, as the oriental Christians
presently believed. Still less did Paul know of the later teaching of
the orthodox churches--viz., that the Annunciation was the critical
moment in which Christ became Jesus. In any case, we must not interpret
the words, "the things about Jesus," in this passage in a forced and
unnatural sense wholly alien to the writer of Acts. This writer again
and again recapitulates the leading facts of the life and ministry of
Jesus, and the phrase, "the things concerning Jesus," cannot in any
work of his bear any other sense. Moreover, the same author uses the
very same phrase elsewhere (Luke xxiv, 19) in the same sense. Here
Cleopas asks Jesus (whom he had failed to recognize), and says:--
Dost thou alone sojourn in Jerusalem, and not know the things
which are come to pass there in these days? And he said unto him,
What things? And they said unto him, the things concerning Jesus
of Nazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed and word before
God and all the people: and how the chief priests and our rulers
delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him.
Such, then, were "the things about Jesus," and to find in them, as
Professor W. B. Smith does, an allusion to a pre-Christian myth of
a God Joshua is to find a gigantic mare's-nest, and fly in the face
of all the evidence. He verges on actual absurdity when he sees the
same allusion in Mark v, 26, where a sick woman, having heard "the
things concerning Jesus," went behind him, touched his garment, and
was healed. Her disease was of a hysterical description, and in the
annals of faith-healing such cures are common. What she had heard of
was obviously not his fame as a Sun-god, but his power to heal sick
persons like herself. [Magical papyrus of Wessely] Professor Smith
tries to find support for his hardy conjecture in a chance phrase in
a magical papyrus of Paris, No. 3,009, edited first by Wessely, and
later by Dieterich in his Abraxas, p. 138. It is a form of exorcism
to be inscribed on a tin plate and hung round the neck of a person
possessed by a devil, or repeated over him by an exorcist. In this
rigmarole the giants, of course, are dragged in, and the Tower of
Babel and King Solomon; and the name of Jesus, the God of the Hebrews,
is also invoked in the following terms: "I adjure thee by Jesus the
God of the Hebrews, Iabaiae Abraoth aia thoth ele, elô," etc. The age
of this papyrus is unknown; but Wessely puts it in the third century
after Christ, while Dieterich shows that it can in no case be older
than the second century B.C. It is clearly the composition of some
exorcist who clung on to the skirts of late Judaism, for he is at
pains to inform us in its last line that it is a Hebrew composition
and preserved among pure men. In that age, as in after ones, not a few
exorcists, trading on the fears and sufferings of superstitious people,
affected to be pure and holy; and the mention of Jesus indicates some
such charlatan, who was more or less cognisant of Christianity and of
the practice of Christian exorcists. He was also aware of the Jewish
antecedents of Christianity, and did not distinguish clearly between
the mother religion and its daughter. That is why he describes Jesus
as a Hebrew God. We know from other sources that even in the earliest
Christian age Gentiles used the name of Jesus in exorcisms. The author
of the document styles Jesus God, just as Pliny informs us that the
Christians sang hymns "to Christ as to God"--Christo quasi deo. How
Professor Smith can imagine that this papyrus lends any colour to
his thesis of a pre-Christian Jesus it is difficult to imagine.
[Jesus a Nazoræan in what sense] Still less does his thesis really
profit by the text of Matthew ii, 23, in which a prophecy is adduced
to the effect that the Messiah should be called a Nazoræan, and this
prophecy is declared to have been fulfilled in so far as Jesus was
taken by his parents to live at Nazareth in Galilee.