Professor W. B. Smith jumps to the conclusion that the Christians
were identical with the sect of Nazoræi mentioned in Epiphanius as
going back to an age before Christ; and he appeals in confirmation
of this quite gratuitous hypothesis [14] to Acts xxiv, 5, where the
following of Jesus is described as that of the Nazoræi. It in no way
helps the thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus, even if he and his
followers were members of this obscure sect; it would rather prove the
opposite. Drews, following W. B. Smith, pretends in the teeth of the
texts that the name is applied to Jesus only as Guardian of the World,
Protector and Deliverer of men from the power of sins and dæmons, and
that it has no reference to an obscure and entirely unknown village
named Nazareth. He also opines that Jesus was called a Nazarene,
because he was the promised Netzer or Zemah who makes all things new,
and so forth. Such talk is all in the air. Why these writers boggle
so much at the name Nazoræan is not easy to divine; still less to
understand what Professor Smith is driving at when he writes of those
whom he calls "historicists," that "They have rightly felt that the
fall of Nazareth is the fall of historicism itself." Professor Burkitt
has suggested that Nazareth is Chorazin spelt backwards. Wellhausen
explains Nazoræan from Nesar in the name Gennessaret. In any case,
as we have no first-century gazetteer or ordnance survey of Galilee,
it is rash to suppose that there could have been no town there of the
name. True the Talmuds and the Old Testament do not name it; but they
do not profess to give a catalogue of all the places in Galilee, so
their silence counts for little. [15] All we know for certain is that
for the evangelist Nazoræan meant a dweller in Nazareth, and that he
gave the word that sense when he met with it in an anonymous prophecy.
[Mr. Robertson on myths] I feel that I ought almost to apologize
to my readers for investigating at such length the hypothesis of a
pre-Christian Jesus, son of a mythical Mary, and for exhibiting over
so many pages its fantastic, baseless, and absurd character. But
Mr. Robertson himself warns us of the necessity of showing no
mercy to myths when they assume the garb of fact. For he adduces
(p. 126) the William Tell myth by way of illustrating once for all
"the fashion in which a fiction can even in a historical period find
general acceptance." Even so it is with his own fictions. We see them
making their way with such startling rapidity over England and Germany
as almost to make one despair of this age of popular enlightenment. It
is not his fault, and I exonerate him from blame. [His methods those of
old-fashioned orthodoxy] For centuries orthodox theologians have been
trying to get out of the Gospels supernaturalist conclusions which were
never in them, nor could with any colour be derived from them except
by deliberately ignoring the canons of evidence and the historical
methods freely employed in the study of all other ancient monuments and
narratives. They have set the example of treating the early writings of
Christianity as no other ancient books would be treated. Mr. Robertson
is humbly following in their steps, but à rebours, or in an inverse
sense. They insist on getting more out of the New Testament than
any historical testimony could ever furnish; he on getting less. In
other respects also he imitates their methods. Thus they insist on
regarding the New Testament, and in particular the four Gospels, as a
homogeneous block, and will not hear of the criticism which discerns
in them literary development, which detects earlier and later couches
of tradition and narrative. This is what I call the Sunday-school
attitude, and it lacks all perspective and orientation. Mr. Robertson
imbibed it in childhood, and has never been able to throw it off. For
him there is no before and after in the formation of these books,
no earlier and later in the emergence of beliefs about Jesus, no
stratification of documents or of ideas. If he sometimes admits it,
he withdraws the admission on the next page, as militating against
his cardinal hypothesis. He seems never to have submitted himself to
systematic training in the methods of historical research--never,
as we say, to have gone through the mill; and accordingly in the
handling of documents he shows himself a mere wilful child.
[Thus he insists on the priority in Christian tradition of the Virgin
Birth legend] His treatment of the legend of the Virgin Birth is an
example of this mental attitude, which might be described as orthodoxy
turned upside down and inside out. The Gospel of Mark is demonstrably
older than those of the other two synoptists who merely copied it
out with such variations, additions, omissions, and modifications
as a growing reverence for Jesus the Messiah imposed. It contains,
no more than the Pauline Epistles and the Johannine Gospel, any hint
of the supernatural birth of Jesus. It regards him quite simply and
naturally as the son of Joseph and Mary. In it the neighbours of Jesus
enumerate by way of contumely the names of his brothers and sisters. I
have shown also in my Myth, Magic, and Morals that this naturalist
tradition of his birth dominates no less the whole of the Gospels
of Matthew and Luke apart from the first two chapters of each, and
that even in the first chapter of Matthew the pedigree in early texts
ended with the words "Joseph begat Jesus." I have shown furthermore
that the belief in the paternity of Joseph was the characteristic
belief of the Palestinian Christians for over two centuries, that
it prevailed in Syria to the extent of regarding Jesus and Thomas as
twin brothers. I have pointed out that the Jewish interlocutor Trypho
in Justin Martyr's dialogue (c. 150) maintains that Jesus was born a
man of men and rejects the Virgin Birth legend as a novelty unworthy
of monotheists, and that he extorts from his Christian antagonist
the admission that the great majority of Christians still believed
in the paternity of Joseph.
[His exceptional treatment of Christian tradition] Now Mr. Robertson
evidently reads a good deal, and must at one time or another have
come across all these facts. Why, then, does he go out of his way to
ignore them, and, in common with Professors Drews and W. B. Smith,
insist that the miraculous tradition of Jesus's birth was coeval with
the earliest Christianity and prior to the tradition of a natural
birth? Yet the texts stare him in the face and confute him. Why does he
shut his eyes to them, and gibe perpetually at the critical students
who attach weight to them? The works of all the three writers are
tirades against the critical method which tries to disengage in the
traditions of Jesus the true from the false, fact from myth, and to
show how, in the pagan society which, as it were, lifted Jesus up
out of his Jewish cradle, these myths inevitably gathered round his
figure, as mists at midday thicken around a mountain crest.
[In secular history he uses other canons and methods,] Their
insistence that in the case of Christian origins the miraculous
and the non-miraculous form a solid block of impenetrable myth
is all the more remarkable, because in secular history they are
prepared, nay anxious, for the separation of truth from falsehood,
of history from myth, and continually urge not only its possibility,
but its necessity. Mr. Robertson in particular prides himself on
meting out to Apollonius of Tyana a measure which he refuses to
Jesus the Messiah. [e.g., in criticizing the story of Apollonius]
"The simple purport," he writes in the Literary Guide, May 1, 1913,
"of my chapter on Apollonius was to acknowledge his historicity,
despite the accretions of myth and more or less palpable fiction to
his biography." And yet there are ten testimonies to the historicity
of Jesus where there is one to that of Apollonius; yet Apollonius was
reputed to have been born miraculously, and his birth accompanied by
the portent of a meteor from heaven, as that of Jesus by a star from
the east. Like Jesus, he controlled the devils of madness and disease,
and by the power of his exorcisms dismissed them to be tortured in
hell. Like Peter, he miraculously freed himself from his bonds; like
Jesus, he revealed himself after death to a sceptical disciple and
viva voce convinced him of his ascent to heaven; like him, he ascended
in his body up to heaven amid the hymns of maiden worshippers. In
life he spent seven days in the bowels of the earth, and gathered a
band of disciples around him who acclaimed him as a divine being;
long after his death temples were raised to him as to a demigod,
miracles wrought by his relics, and prayer and sacrifice offered to
his genius. So considerable was the parallelism between his story
and that of Jesus that the pagan enemies of the Christians began
about the year 300 to run his cult against theirs, and it was only
yesterday that the orthodox began to give up the old view that the
Life of Apollonius was a blasphemous réchauffé of the Gospels. "There
is no great reason to doubt that India was visited by Apollonius of
Tyana," writes Mr. Robertson (Christianity and Mythology, p. 273);
and yet his visit in the only relation we have of it is a tissue of
marvels and prodigies, his Indian itinerary is impossible, and full of
contradictions not only of what we know of Indian geography to-day,
but of what was already known in that day. Yet about his pilgrimage
thither, declares Mr. Robertson, there is no more uncertainty than
about the embassies sent by Porus to Augustus, and by the king of
"Taprobane" to Claudius. "There is much myth," he writes again, p. 280,
"in the life of Apollonius of Tyana, who appears to be at the bottom
a real historical personage." In the Gospels we have the story of
Jairus's daughter being raised to life from apparent death. "A closely
similar story is found in Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana,
the girl in each case being spoken of in such a way as to leave open
the question of her having been dead or a cataleptic." So writes
Mr. Robertson, p. 334, who thinks that "the simple form preserved
in Matthew suggests the derivation from the story in Philostratus,"
overlooking here, as elsewhere, the chronological difficulties. We can
forgive him for that; but why, we must ask, does the presence of such
stories in the Gospel irrevocably condemn Jesus to non-historicity,
while their presence in the Life of Apollonius leaves his historical
reality intact and unchallenged? Is it not that the application of his
canons of interpretation to Apollonius would have deprived him of one
of the sources from which the mythicity of Jesus by his anachronistic
methods could be deduced?
[The early passion play of the Sun-god Joshua] Mr. Robertson endeavours
in a halting manner to justify his partiality for Apollonius. "We
have," he writes (Pagan Christs, p. 283, § 16), "no reason for doubting
that there was an Apollonius of Tyana.... The reasons for not doubting
are (1) that there was no cause to be served by a sheer fabrication;
and (2) that it was a much easier matter to take a known name as a
nucleus for a mass of marvels and theosophic teachings than to build it
up, as the phrase goes about the canon, 'round a hole.' The difference
between such a case and those of Jesuism and Buddhism is obvious. In
those cases there was a cultus and an organization to be accounted for,
and a biography of the founder had to be forthcoming. In the case
of Apollonius, despite the string of marvels attached to his name,
there was no cultus."
Let us examine the above argument. In the case of "Jesuism"
(Mr. Robertson's argot for early Christianity) there had to be
fabricated a biography of Jesus, because there existed an organized
sect that worshipped Jesus.
The organized sect consisted, according to Mr. Robertson,
of "Christists" or "Jesuists," and the chief incident for which
they were organized was an annual play in which the God Jesus was
betrayed, arrested, condemned, was crucified, died, was buried, and
rose again. Ober Ammergau has supplied him with his main conception,
and his annually recurring "Gospel mystery play," as he imagines it
to have been acted by the "Jesuists," who were immediate ancestors
of the Christians, is a faithful copy of the modern Passion Play. He
supposes it to have been acted annually because the hypothetical
Sun-God-Saviour Joshua, whose mythical sufferings and death it
commemorated, was an analogue of Osiris, whose sufferings and death
were similarly represented in Egypt each recurring spring; also
of Adonis, of Dionysus, of Mithras, and of sundry vegetation gods,
annually slain to revive vegetation and secure the life of the initiate
in the next world. Be it remarked also that the annually slain God
of the Jesuists was not only an analogue of these other gods, but a
"composite myth" made up of their myths. As we have seen, Mr. Robertson
is ready to exhibit to us in one or another of their mythologies the
original of every single incident and actor in the Jesuist play.
Such was the cultus and organization which, according to Mr. Robertson
and his imitator Dr. Drews, lies behind the Christian religion. The
latter began to be when the "Jesuist" cult, having broken away from
Judaism, was also concerned to break away from the paganism in contact
with which the play would first arise.
[The Gospels a transcript of this play] A biography of the Founder
of the cult was now called for, by the Founder oddly enough being
meant the God himself, and not the hierophant who instituted the
play. The Christian Gospels are the biography in question. They are
a transcript of the annually performed ritual drama, just as Lamb's
Tales from Shakespeare are transcripts of Shakespeare's plays.
The first performances of the play, we learn, probably took place in
Egypt. It ceased to be acted when "it was reduced to writing as part
of the gospel." How far away from Jerusalem it was that the momentous
decision was taken by the sect to give up play acting and be content
with the transcript Mr. Robertson "can hardly divine." He hints,
however, that some of the latest representations took place in the
temples built by Herod at Damascus and Jericho and in the theatres
of the Greek town of Gadara. "The reduction of the play to narrative
form put all the Churches on a level, and would remove a stumbling
block from the way of the ascetic Christists who objected to all
dramatic shows as such."
But where did the play come from? What inspired it? Mr. Robertson makes
a tour round the Mediterranean, and collects in Part II, Ch. I, of his
Pagan Christs a lot of scrappy information about mock sacrifices and
mystery dramas, all of them "cases and modes of modification" of actual
human sacrifices that were "once normal in the Semitic world." He
assumes without a tittle of proof, and against all probability, that
the annual sacrifice of a king or of a king's son, whether in real
or mimic, held its ground among Jews as a religious ceremony right
down into our era, and was "reduced among them to ritual form, like
the leading worships of the surrounding Gentile world." He fashions
a new hypothesis in accordance with these earlier ones as follows:--
[Joshua or Jesus slain once a year] "If in any Jewish community,
or in the Jewish quarter of any Eastern city, the central figure in
this rite (i.e., of a mock sacrifice annually recurring of a man got
up to represent a god) were customarily called Jesus Barabbas, 'Jesus
the Son of the Father'--whether or not in virtue of an old cultus of
a God Jesus who had died annually like Attis and Tammuz--we should
have a basis for the tradition so long preserved in many MSS. of the
first gospel, and at the same time a basis for the whole gospel myth
of the crucifixion."
Here we have a whole string of hypotheses piled one on the other. Let
us see which have any ground in fact, or cohere with what we know of
the past, which are improbable and unproven.
[Hypothesis of human sacrifice among Jews] That human sacrifice was
once in vogue among the Jews is probable enough, and the story of
the frustrated sacrifice of Isaac was no doubt both a memory and
a condemnation of the old rite of sacrificing first-born children
with which we are familiar in ancient Phoenicia and her colony of
Carthage. That such rites in Judæa and in Israel did not survive the
Assyrian conquest of Jerusalem is certain. The latest allusion to them
is in Isaiah xxx, 27-33. This passage is post-exilic indeed; but,
as Dr. Cheyne remarks (Encycl. Biblica, art. Molech, col. 3,187):
"The tone of the allusion is rather that of a writer remote from
these atrocities than of a prophet in the midst of the struggle
against them."
We may then assume (1) that the custom of human sacrifice disappeared
among Jews centuries before our era; (2) that in the epoch 100
B.C. to 100 A.D. every Jew, no matter where he lived, would view
such rites and reminiscences with horror. As a matter of fact, Philo
dwells in eloquent language on the horror and abomination of them as
they were still in his day sporadically celebrated, not among Jews,
but among pagans.
This being so, is it likely that any Jewish community would keep up
even the simulacrum of such rites? In Josephus and Philo, who are
our most important witnesses to the Judaism that just preceded or was
contemporary with early Christianity, there is no hint of such rites
as might constitute a memory and mimicry of human victims, whether
identified with a god or not. No serious pagan writer of that age
ever accused the Jews of keeping up such rites openly or in secret
among themselves. [Evidence of Apion accepted by Mr. Robertson]
Apion alone had a cock-and-bull story of how Antiochus Epiphanes,
when he took Jerusalem (c. 170 B.C.), found a Greek being fattened up
by the Jews in the adytum of the temple about to be slain and eaten
in honour of their god. Of course Mr. Robertson catches at this,
and writes (Pagan Christs, p. 161) that, "in view of all the clues,
we cannot pronounce that story incredible." What clues has he? The
undoubted survival of ritual murder among the pagans of Phoenicia
in that age is no clue, though it explains the genesis of Apion's
tale. And Mr. Robertson has one other treasure trove--to wit, the
obscure reading "Jesus Barabbas" in certain MSS. of Matthew xxvii, 17:
"Pilate said unto them, Whom will ye that I release unto you? (Jesus)
Barabbas, or Jesus which is called Christ?"
[The sacrificing of the mock king] It has been plausibly suggested
that the addition Jesus is due to a scribe's reduplication, such
as is common in Greek manuscripts, of the last syllable of the
word humin = unto you. The in in uncials is a regular compendium
for Iesun Jesus. In this way the name Jesus may have crept in before
Barabbas. The entire story of Barabbas being released has an apocryphal
air, for Pilate would not have let off a rebel against the Roman rule
to please the Jewish mob; and the episode presupposes that it was
the Sanhedrin which had condemned Jesus to death, which is equally
improbable. What is probable, however, is that the Syrian soldiery
to whom Pilate committed Jesus for crucifixion were accustomed to the
Sacæa festival of Babylonian origin, and perhaps to the analogous Roman
feast of the Saturnalia. In such celebrations a mock king was chosen,
and vested with the costume, pomp, and privileges of kingship perhaps
for as long as three days. Then the mimicry of slaying him was gone
through, and sometimes the mock king was really put to death. Among
Syrians the name Barabbas may--it is a mere hypothesis--have been the
conventional appellation of the victim slain actually or in mock show
on such occasions; and the soldiers of Pilate may have treated him en
Barabbas. Loisy suggests in his Commentary on the Synoptics that this
was the genesis of the Barabbas story. That a pagan soldiery treated
Jesus as a mock king, when they dressed him in purple and set a crown
of thorns on his head, and, kneeling before him, cried "Hail King of
the Jews," is quite possible; and serious scholars like Paul Wendland
(Hermes, Vol. XXXIII (1898), fol. 175) and Mr. W. R. Paton long ago
discerned the probability.
But it was one thing for Syrians and pagans to envisage the
crucifixion of Jesus under the aspect of a sacrifice to Molech,
quite another thing for Jews--whether as his enemies or as his
partisans--to do so; nor does the Gospel narrative suggest that
any Jews took part in the ceremony. Perhaps it was out of respect
for Jewish susceptibilities--and they were not likely to favour any
mockery of their Messianic aspirations--that Pilate caused Jesus to
be divested of the purple insignia of royalty and clad in his usual
garb before he was led out of the guardroom and through the streets
of Jerusalem on his way to Golgotha.
[Evidence of Philo] We read in Philo (In Flaccum, vi) of a very similar
scene enacted in the streets of Alexandria within ten years of the
crucifixion. The young Agrippa, elevated by Caligula to the throne
of Judæa, had landed in that city, where feeling ran high between
Jews and pagans. The latter, by way of ridiculing the pretensions of
the Jews to have a king of their own, seized on a poor lunatic named
Carabas who loitered night and day naked about the streets, ran him
as far as the Gymnasium, and there stood him on a stool, so that all
could see him, having first set a mock diadem of byblus on his head
and thrown a rug over his shoulders as a cloak of honour. In his hand
they set a papyrus stem by way of sceptre. Having thus arrayed him,
as in a mime of the theatre, with the insignia of mock royalty, the
young men shouldering sticks, as if they were a bodyguard, encircled
him, while others advanced, saluted his mock majesty, and pretended
that he was their judge and king sitting on his throne to direct the
commonwealth. Meanwhile a shout went up from the crowd around of Marin,
which in the Syrian language signified Lord.
This passage of Philo goes far to prove that the mockery of Jesus
in the Gospels was no more than a public ridiculing of the Jewish
expectations of a national leader or Messiah who should revive the
splendours of the old Davidic kingdom. In any case, the mockery
is conducted at Jerusalem by Pilate's soldiers (who were not Jews,
but a pagan garrison put there to overawe the Jews), at Alexandria by
such Greeks as Apion penned his calumnies to gratify. Mr. Robertson's
suggestion that the mock ceremony of the crucifixion was performed
by Jews or Christians is thus as absurd as it is gratuitous. It was
held in bitter despite of Jews and Christians, it was a mockery and
reviling of their most cherished hopes and ideals; and yet he does
not scruple to argue that it is "a basis for the whole gospel myth
of the crucifixion."
[Evidence of the Khonds] Thus he is left with the single calumny
of Apion, which deserves about as much credence as the similar
tales circulated to-day against the Jews of Bessarabia. That is the
single item of evidence he has to prove what is the very hinge of his
theory--the supposition, namely, that the Jews of Alexandria first,
and afterwards the Jews of Jerusalem, celebrated in secret once a year
ritual dramas representing the ceremonial slaying of a Sun-God-Saviour
Joshua, Son of the Father and of the Virgin Miriam. It is a far cry to
the horrible rites of the Khonds of modern India; but Mr. Robertson,
for whom wide differences of age and place matter nothing when he
is explaining Christian origins, has discovered in them a key to the
narrative of the crucifixion of Jesus. He runs all round the world and
collects rites of ritual murder and cannibal sacraments of all ages,
mixes them up, lumps them down before us, and exclaims triumphantly,
There is my "psychological clue" to Christianity. The most superficial
resemblances satisfy him that an incident in Jerusalem early in our
era is an essential reproduction of a Khond ritual murder in honour
of the goddess Tari. Was there ever an author so hopelessly uncritical
in his methods?
[Origin of the Gospels] The Gospels, then, are a transcript of a mock
murder of the Sun-god Joshua annually performed in secret by the
Jews of Jerusalem, for it had got there before it was written down
and discontinued. One asks oneself why, if the Jews had tolerated
so long a pagan survival among themselves, they could not keep it
up a little longer; and why the "Christists" should be so anxious
"to break away from paganism" at exactly the same hour. Moreover,
their breach with paganism did not amount to much, since they kept
the transcript of a ritual drama framed on pagan lines and inspired
throughout by pagan ideas and myths; not only kept it, but elevated it
into Holy Scripture. At the same time they retained the Old Testament,
which as Jews they had immemorially venerated as Holy Scripture; and
for generations they went on worshipping in the Jewish temple, kept
the Jewish feasts and fasts, and were zealous for circumcision. What
a hotchpotch of a sect!
[How could a Sun-god slain annually be slain by Pontius Pilate?] It
occurs to me to ask Mr. Robertson a few questions about this
transcript. It was the annual mystery play reduced to writing. The
central event of the play was the annual death and resurrection of a
solar or vegetation god, whose attributes and career were borrowed
from the cults of Osiris, Adonis, Dionysus, and Co. All these gods
died once a year; and, I suppose, had you asked one of the votaries
when his god died, he would have answered, Every spring. Now all the
Gospels (in common with all Christian tradition) are unanimous that
Jesus only died once, about the time of the Passover, when Pilate was
Roman Governor of Judæa, when Annas and Caiaphas were high-priests and
King Herod about. This surely is an extraordinary record for a Sun-god
who died once a year. And it was not in the transcript only that
all these fixities of date crept in, for Mr. Robertson insists most
vehemently that Pilate was an actor in the play. "Even the episode,"
he writes (Pagan Christs, p. 193), "of the appeal of the priests and
Pharisees to Pilate to keep a guard on the tomb, though it might be a
later interpolation, could quite well have been a dramatic scene." In
Mark and Matthew, as containing "the earlier version" of the drama,
he detects everywhere a "concrete theatricality." Thus he commits
himself to the astonishing paralogism that Pilate and Herod, Annas and
Caiaphas, and all the other personages of the closing chapters of the
Gospels, were features in an annually recurring passion play of the
Sun-god Joshua; and this play was not a novelty introduced after the
crucifixion, for there never was a real crucifixion. On the contrary,
it was a secret survival among paganized Jews, a bit of Jewish pagan
mummery that had been going on long ages before the actors represented
in it ever lived or were heard of. Such is the reductio ad absurdum of
the thesis which peeps out everywhere in Mr. Robertson's pages. And
now we have found what we were in search of--namely, the cultus and
organization to account for which a biography of Jesus had to be
fabricated. The Life of Apollonius, argues Mr. Robertson, cannot have
been built up round a hole, and as there was no organized cult of him
(this is utterly false), there must have been a real figure to fit the
biography. In the other case the organized and pre-existing cult was
the nucleus around which the Gospels grew up like fairy rings around
a primal fungus. It is not obvious why a cult should exclude a real
founder, or, rather, a real person, in honour of whom the cult was
kept up. In the worship of the Augustus or of the ancient Pharaoh,
who impersonated and was Osiris, we have both. Why not have both
in the case of Jesus, to whose real life and subsequent deification
the Augusti and the Pharaohs offer a remarkable parallel? But there
never was any pre-Christian cult and organization in Mr. Robertson's
sense. It is a monstrous outgrowth of his own imagination.
[Historicity of Plato falls by the canons of the mythicists] And
as in the case of Apollonius, so in the case of other ancients,
he is careful not to apply those methods of interpretation which he
yet cannot pardon scholars for not applying to Jesus. Let us take
another example. Of the life of Plato we know next to nothing. In
the dialogues attributed to him his name is only mentioned twice;
and in both cases its mention could, if we adopt Mr. Robertson's
canons of interpretation, be with the utmost ease explained away as
an interpolation. The only life we have of him was penned by Diogenes
Laertius 600 years after he lived. The details of his life supplied
by Aristoxenus, a pupil of Aristotle, are obviously false. The only
notices preserved of him that can be claimed to be contemporary are
the few derived from his nephew Speusippus. Now what had Speusippus
to tell? Why, a story of the birth of Plato which, as Mr. Robertson
(p. 293) writes, scarcely differs from the story of Matthew i, 18-25:
"In the special machinery of the Joseph and Mary myth--the warning in a
dream and the abstention of the husband--we have a simple duplication
of the relations of the father and mother of Plato, the former being
warned in a dream by Apollo, so that the child was virgin-born."
Again, just as the Christians chose a "solar date" for the birthday
of Jesus, so the Platonists, according to Mr. Robertson, p. 308,
"placed the master's birthday on that of Apollo--that is, either at
Christmas or at the vernal equinox."
Now in the case of Jesus such legends and events as the above suffice
to convince Mr. Robertson that the history of Jesus as told in the
Gospels is a mere survival of "ancient solar or other worship of a
babe Joshua, son of Miriam," of which ancient worship nothing is
known except that it looms large in the imagination of himself,
of Dr. Drews, and of Professor W. B. Smith. On the other hand, we
do know that a cult of Apollo existed, and that it is no fiction of
these modern writers. Surely, then, it is time we changed our opinion
about the historicity of Plato. Is it not as clear as daylight that
he was the survival of a pre-Platonic Apollo myth? We know the rôle
assigned to Apollo of revealer of philosophic truth. Well, here were
the dialogues and letters of Plato, calling for an explanation of
their origin; a sect of Platonists who cherished these writings and
kept the feast of their master on a solar date. On all the principles
of the new mythico-symbolic system Plato, as a man, had no right
to exist. "Without Jesus," writes Drews, "the rise of Christianity
can be quite well understood." Yes, and, by the same logic, no less
the rise of Platonism without Plato, or of the cult of Apollonius
without Apollonius. What is sauce for the goose is surely sauce for
the gander. With a mere change of names we could write of Plato what
on p. 282 Mr. Robertson writes of Jesus. Let us do it: "The gospel
Jesus (read dialogist Plato) is as enigmatic from a humanist as from
a supernaturalist point of view. Miraculously born, to the knowledge
of many (read of his nephew Speusippus, of Clearchus whose testimony
'belongs to Plato's generation,' of Anaxilides the historian and
others), he reappears as a natural man even in the opinion of his
parents (read of nephew Speusippus and the rest); the myth will not
cohere. Rationally considered, he (Plato) is an unintelligible portent;
a Galilean (read Athenian) of the common people, critically untraceable
till his full manhood, when he suddenly appears as a cult-founder."
[The Virgin Birth no part of the earliest Gospel tradition] Why does
Mr. Robertson so incessantly labour the point that the belief in
the supernatural birth of Jesus came first in time, and was anterior
to the belief that he was born a man of men? This he implies in the
words just cited: "Miraculously born, to the knowledge of many, he
reappears as a natural man." A story almost identical with that of
the Massacre of the Innocents by Herod was, Mr. Robertson tells us
(p. 184), told of the Emperor Augustus in his lifetime, and appears in
Suetonius "as accepted history." And elsewhere (p. 395) he writes:
"It was after these precedents (i.e., of Antiochus and Ptolemy)
that Augustus, besides having himself given out, like Alexander,
as begotten of a God, caused himself to be proclaimed in the East
... as being born under Providence a Saviour and a God and the
beginning of an Evangel of peace to mankind." Like Plato's story,
then, so the official and contemporary legends of Augustus closely
resembled the later ones of Jesus. Yet Mr. Robertson complacently
accepts the historicity of Plato and Augustus, merely brushing aside
the miraculous stories and supernatural rôle. Nowhere in his works
does he manifest the faintest desire to apply in the domain of profane
history the canons which he so rigidly enforces in ecclesiastical.
Yet there are passages in Mr. Robertson's works where he seems,
to use his own phrase, to "glimpse" the truth. Thus, on p. 124 of
Christianity and Mythology he writes: "Jesus is said to be born
of a Virgin; but not in the original version of the first gospel;
and not in the second; and not in the fourth; and not in any writing
or by any mouth known to or credited by the writers of the Pauline
Epistles. Here we see how a myth may be superimposed on a cult."
Does not this mean that a cult of Jesus already existed before
this myth was added, and that the myth is absent in the earliest
documents of the cult? Again, on p. 274, he writes that "the Christian
Virgin-myth and Virgin-and-child worship are certainly of pre-Christian
origin, and of comparatively late Christian acceptance." Yet, when
I drew attention in the Literary Guide of December 1, 1912, to
the inconsistency with this passage of the later one above cited,
which asserts that, "Miraculously born, to the knowledge of many,
he reappears as a natural man," he replied (January 1, 1913) that
"a reader of ordinary candour would understand that 'acceptance'
applied to the official action of the Church." It appears, therefore,
that in the cryptic secret society of the Joshua Sun-God-Saviour, which
held its séances at Jerusalem at the beginning of our era, there was
an official circle which lagged behind the unofficial multitude. The
latter knew from the first that their solar myth was miraculously
born; but the official and controlling inner circle ignored the
miracle until late in the development of the cult, and then at last
issued a number of documents from which it was excluded. One wonders
why. Why trouble to utter these documents in which Jesus "reappears as
a natural man," long after the sect as a whole were committed to the
miraculous birth? What is the meaning of these wheels within wheels,
that hardly hunt together? We await an explanation. Meanwhile let us
probe the new mythico-symbolism a little further.
[The cleansing of the temple] Why did the solar God Joshua-Jesus
scourge the money-changers out of the temple? Answer: Because it is
told of Apollonius of Tyana, "that he expelled from the cities of the
left bank of the Hellespont some sorcerers who were extorting money
for a great propitiatory sacrifice to prevent earthquakes."
The connection is beautifully obvious like the rest of our author's
rapprochements; but we must accept it, or we shall lay ourselves open
to the reproach of "psychological resistance to evidence." Nor must we
ask how the memoirs of Damis, that lay in a corner till Philostratus
got hold of them in the year 215, enjoyed so much vogue among the
"Christists" of Jerusalem long years before they can conceivably have
been written.
Why on the occasion in question did Jesus make a scourge of cords
with which to drive the sheep and oxen out of the Temple? Answer:
"Because in the Assyrian and Egyptian systems a scourge-bearing god is
a very common figure on the monuments ... it is specially associated
with Osiris, the Saviour, Judge, and Avenger. A figure of Osiris,
reverenced as 'Chrestos' the benign God, would suffice to set up among
Christists as erewhile among pagans the demand for an explanation."
Here we get a precious insight into the why and wherefore of the
Gospels. They were intended by the "Christists" to explain the
meaning of Osiris statues. Why could they not have asked one of the
priests of Osiris, who as a rule might be found in the neighbourhood
of his statues, what the emblem meant? And, after all, were statues
of Osiris so plentiful in Jerusalem, where the sight even of a Roman
eagle aroused a riot?
[Janus-Peter the bifrons] Who was Peter? Answer: An understudy of
Mithras, who in the monuments bears two keys; or of Janus, who bears
the keys and the rod, and as opener of the year (hence the name
January) stands at the head of the twelve months.
Why did Peter deny Jesus? Answer: Because Janus was called bifrons. The
epithet puzzled the "Christists" or "Jesuists" of Jerusalem, who,
instead of asking the first Roman soldier they met what it meant,
proceeded to render the word bifrons in the sense of "double-faced,"
quite a proper epithet they thought for Peter, who thenceforth
had to be held guilty of an act of double-dealing. For we must not
forget that it was the epithet which suggested to the Christists the
invention of the story, and not the story that of the epithet. But even
Mr. Robertson is not quite sure of this; and it does not matter, where
there is such a wealth of alternatives. For Peter is also an understudy
of "the fickle Proteus." Janus's double head was anyhow common on
coins, and with that highly relevant observation he essays to protect
his theories of Janus-Peter from any possible criticisms. Indeed,
we are forbidden to call in question the above conclusions. They are
quite certain, because the "Christists" were intellectually "about
the business of forming myths in explanation of old ritual and old
statuary" (p. 350). Wonderful people these early "Christists,"
who, although they were, as Mr. Robertson informs us (p. 348),
"apostles of a Judaic cult preaching circumcision," and therefore
by instinct inimical to all plastic art, nevertheless rivalled the
modern archæologist in their desire to explain old statuary. They
seem to have been the prototypes of the Jews of Wardour Street. No
less wonderful were they as philologists, in that, being Hebrews and
presumably speaking Aramaic, they took such a healthy interest in
the meaning of Latin words, and discovered in bifrons a sense which
it never bore in any Latin author who ever used it!
[The keys of Peter] It appears to have escaped the notice of Professor
Franz Cumont that Mithras carries in his monuments two keys. The two
keys were an attribute of the Mithraic Kronos, in old Persian Zervan,
whom relatively late the Latins confused with Janus, who also had
two heads and carried keys. That late Christian images of Peter were
imitated from statues of these gods no one need doubt, and Fr. Cumont
(Monuments de Mithras, i, 85) does not reject such an idea. It is
quite another thing to assume dogmatically that the text Matthew xvi,
19 was suggested by a statue of Janus or of Zervan. To explain it you
need not leave Jewish ground, but merely glance at Isaiah xxii, 22,
where the Lord is made to say of Eliakim: "And the key of the house
of David will I lay upon his shoulder; and he shall open and none
shall shut; and he shall shut and none shall open." The same imagery
meets us in Revelation iii, 7 (copied from Isaiah), Luke xi, 52, and
elsewhere. A. Sulzbach (in Ztschr. f.d. Neutest. Wissenschaft, 1903,
p. 190) points out that every Jew, up to A.D. 70, would understand
such imagery, for he saw every evening the temple keys ceremoniously
taken from a hole under the temple floor, where they were kept under a
slab of stone. The Levite watcher locked up the temple and replaced the
keys under the slab, upon which he then laid his bed for the night. In
connection with the magic power of binding and loosing the keys had,
of course, a further and magical significance, not in Judæa alone, but
all over the world, and the Evangelists did not need to examine statues
of Janus or Zervan in order to come by this bit of everyday symbolism.
N.B.--No connection of Janus-Peter of the Gospels with Peter of the
Pauline Epistles! The one was a mythical companion of the Sun-god,
the other a man of flesh and blood, according to Mr. Robertson.
[Joseph and his ass] Who was Joseph? Answer: Forasmuch as "the
Christian system is a patchwork of a hundred suggestions drawn
from pagan art and ritual usage" (p. 305), and "Christism was only
neo-Paganism grafted on Judaism" (p. 338), Joseph must be regarded as
"a partial revival of the ancient adoration of the God Joseph as well
as of that of the God Daoud" (p. 303). He was also, seeing that he
took Mary and her child on an ass into Egypt, a reminiscence; or,
shall we not say, an explanation of "the feeble old man leading an
ass in the sacred procession of Isis, as described by Apuleius in
his Metamorphoses."
There is no mention of Joseph's ass in the Gospels, but that does not
matter. Dr. Drews is better informed, and would have us recognize
in Joseph an understudy of Kinyras, the father of Adonis, who "is
said to have been some kind of artisan, a smith, or carpenter. That
is to say, he is supposed to have invented the hammer," etc. Might
I suggest the addition of the god Thor to the collection of gospel
aliases? The gods Joseph and Daoud are purely modern fictions; no
ancient Jew ever heard of either.
Why was Jesus crucified?
[The Crucifixion] "The story of the Crucifixion may rest on the remote
datum of an actual crucifixion of Jesus Ben Pandira, the possible
Jesus of Paul, dead long before, and represented by no preserved
biography or teachings whatever."
The Christists were clearly pastmasters in the art of explaining
ignotum per ignotius. For on the next page we learn that it is not
known whether this worthy "ever lived or was crucified." In Pagan
Christs he is acknowledged to be a "mere name." However this be,
"it was the mythic significance of crucifixion that made the early
fortune of the cult, with the aid of the mythic significance of the
name Jeschu = Joshua, the ancient Sun-god."
The meaning of this oracular pronouncement is too profound for me
to attempt to fathom it. Let us pass on to another point in the new
elucidation of the Gospels.
[W. B. Smith on exorcisms of devils] What were the exorcisms of evil
spirits ascribed to the ancient Sun-god Joshua, under his alias of
Jesus of Nazareth?
In his Pagan Christs, as in his Christianity and Mythology,
Mr. Robertson unkindly leaves us in the lurch about this matter,
although we would dearly like to know what were the particular
archæological researches of the "Christists" and "Jesuists" that led
them to coin these myths of exorcisms performed, and of devils cast
out of the mad or sick by their solar myth. Nor does Dr. Drews help us
much. Never mind. Professor W. B. Smith nobly stands in the breach, so
we will let him take up the parable; the more so because, in handling
this problem, he may be said to have excelled himself. On p. 57, then,
of Ecce Deus, he premises, in approaching this delicate topic, that
"in the activity of the Jesus and the apostles, as delineated in the
Gospels, the one all-important moment is the casting-out of demons."
With this all will agree; but what follows is barely consonant with
the thesis of his friends. He cites in effect Mark iii, 14, 15, and
the parallel passages in which Jesus is related to have sent forth
the twelve disciples to preach and to have authority to cast out the
demons. Now, according to the mythico-symbolical theory, the career
of Jesus and his disciples lay not on earth, but in that happy region
where mythological personages live and move and have their being. As
Dr. Drews says (The Christ Myth, p. 117): "In reality the whole of
the family and home life of the Messiah, Jesus, took place in heaven
among the gods."
Accordingly, Dr. W. B. Smith finds it "amazing that anyone should
hesitate an instant over the sense" of the demonological episodes
in the Gospels, and he continues: "When we recall the fact that the
early Christians uniformly understood the heathen gods to be demons,
and uniformly represented the mission of Jesus to be the overthrow
of these demon gods, it seems as clear as the sun at noon that this
fall of Satan from heaven [16] can be nothing less (and how could it
possibly be anything more?) than the headlong ruin of polytheism--the
complete triumph of the One Eternal God. It seems superfluous to
insist on anything so palpable.... Can any rational man for a moment
believe that the Saviour sent forth his apostles and disciples with
such awful solemnity to heal the few lunatics that languished in
Galilee? Is that the way the sublimist of teachers would found the
new and true religion?"
In the last sentence our author nods and lapses into the historical
mood; for how can one talk of a mythical Joshua being a teacher
and founding a new religion--of his sending forth the apostles and
disciples? These things are done on earth, and not up in heaven "among
the gods," as Drews says. It is, perhaps, impertinent, for the rest, to
criticize so exalted an argument as Professor Smith's; yet the question
suggests itself, why, if the real object of the mystic sectaries who
worshipped in secret the "Proto-Christian God, the Jesus," was to
acquaint the faithful with the triumph of the heavenly Jesus over
the demon-gods of paganism--why, in that case, did they wrap it up
in purely demonological language? All around them exorcists, Jewish
and pagan, were driving out demons of madness and disease at every
street corner--dumb devils, rheumatic devils, blind devils, devils
of every sort and kind. Was it entirely appropriate for these mystic
devotees to encourage the use of demonological terminology, when they
meant something quite else? "These early propagandists," he tells us,
p. 143, "were great men, were very great men; they conceived noble
and beautiful and attractive ideas, which they defended with curious
learning and logic, and recommended with captivating rhetoric and
persuasive oratory and consuming zeal."
Surely it was within the competence of such egregious teachers to say
without disguise what they really meant, instead of beating about the
bush and penning stories which so nearly reproduced the grovelling
superstitions of the common herd around them? They might at least have
issued a Delphin edition of their gospels, with a paraphrase in the
margin to explain the text and to save the faithful from taking these
stories literally--for so they took them as far back as we can trace
the documents; and, what is more, in all those derivative churches all
over the world which continued the inner life of Professor Smith's
mystic sectaries, we hear from the earliest age of the appointing
of vulgar exorcists, whose duty was to expel from the faithful the
demons of madness and of all forms of sickness.
But worse than this. We know from Mr. Robertson and Dr. Drews that
the same Proto-Christian Joshua-God, who was waging war in heaven
on the pagan gods and goddesses, was himself a composite myth made
up of memories of Krishna, Æsculapius, Osiris, Apollo, Dionysus,
Apollonius, and a hundred other fiends. Mr. Robertson attests this,
p. 305, in these words: "As we have seen and shall see throughout
this investigation, the Christian system is a patchwork of a hundred
suggestions drawn from pagan art and ritual usage."
Is it quite appropriate that the pre-Christian Jesus or Joshua
should turn and rend his pagan congeners in the manner described by
Professor W. B. Smith? His mythical antecedents, as ascertained by
Mr. Robertson and Dr. Drews, are grotesquely incompatible with the
rôle of monotheistic founder assigned him by Professor W. B. Smith. Are
we to suppose that the learned and eloquent propagandists of his cult
were aware of this incompatibility, and for that reason chose to veil
their monotheistic propaganda in the decent obscurity of everyday
demonological language?
[Mary and her homonyms] Who was Mary, the mother of Jesus?
Let Dr. Drews speak first:--
Now if Joseph, as we have already seen, was originally a god,
Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a goddess. Under the name of Maya,
she is the mother of Agni--i.e., the principle of motherhood
and creation simply, as which she is in the Rigveda at one time
represented by the fire-producing wood, the soft pith, in which
the fire-stick was whirled; at another as the earth, with which
the sky has mated. She appears under the same name as the mother of
Buddha as well as of the Greek Hermes. She is identical with Maira
(Maera) as, according to Pausanias, viii, 12, 48, the pleiad Maia,
wife of Hephaistos was called. She appears among the Persians as
the "virgin" mother of Mithras. As Myrrha she is the mother of
the Syrian Adonis; as Semiramis, mother of the Babylonian Ninus
(Marduk). In the Arabic legend she appears under the name of
Mirzam as mother of the mythical saviour Joshua; while the Old
Testament gives this name to the virgin sister of that Joshua
who was so closely related to Moses; and, according to Eusebius,
Merris was the name of the Egyptian princess who found Moses in
a basket and became his foster mother.
The above purpureus pannus is borrowed by Dr. Drews in the second
edition of his work from Mr. Robertson's book, p. 297. Here is the
original:--
It is not possible from the existing data to connect historically
such a cult with its congeners; but the mere analogy of names and
epithets goes far. The mother of Adonis, the slain "Lord" of the
great Syrian cult, is Myrrha; and Myrrha in one of her myths is the
weeping tree from which the babe Adonis is born. Again, Hermes,
the Greek Logos, has for mother Maia, whose name has further
connections with Mary. In one myth Maia is the daughter of Atlas,
thus doubling with Maira, who has the same father, and who, having
"died a virgin," was seen by Odysseus in Hades. Mythologically,
Maira is identified with the Dog-Star, which is the star of
Isis. Yet again, the name appears in the East as Maya, the
virgin-mother of Buddha; and it is remarkable that, according to
a Jewish legend, the name of the Egyptian princess who found the
babe Moses was Merris. The plot is still further thickened by the
fact that, as we learn from the monuments, one of the daughters
of Ramses II was named Meri. And as Meri meant "beloved," and the
name was at times given to men, besides being used in the phrase
"beloved of the gods," the field of mythic speculation is wide.
And we feel that it is, indeed, wide, when, on p. 301, the three
Marias mentioned by Mark are equated with the three Moirai or Fates!
In another passage we meet afresh with one of these equations,
p. 306. It runs thus: "On the hypothesis that the mythical Joshua,
son of Miriam, was an early Hebrew deity, it may be that one form
of the Tammuz cult in pre-Christian times was a worship of a mother
and child--Mary and Adonis; that, in short, Maria = Myrrha, and that
Jesus was a name of Adonis."
[Pre-philological arguments] From such deliverances we gather that
in Mr. Robertson and his disciples we have survivals of a stage of
culture which may be called prephilological. A hundred years ago or
more the most superficial resemblance of sound was held to be enough
of a ground for connecting words and names together, and Oxford
divines were busy deriving all other tongues from the Hebrew spoken
in the Garden of Eden by Adam and Eve. Mr. Robertson sets himself
(p. 139) to ridicule these old-fashioned writers, and regales us
with not a few examples of that over-facile identification of cult
names that have no real mutual affinity which was then in vogue. Thus
Krishna was held to be a corruption of Christ by certain oriental
missionaries, just as, inversely, within my memory, certain English
Rationalists argued the name Christ to be a disguise of Krishna. So
Brahma was identified with Abraham, and Napoleon with the Apollyon of
Revelation. One had hoped that this phase of culture was past and done
with; but Messrs. Robertson and Drews revive it in their books, and
seem anxious to perpetuate it. As with names, so with myths. On their
every page we encounter--to use the apt phrase of M. Émile Durkheim
[17]--ces rapprochements tumultueux et sommaires qui ont discredité
la méthode comparative auprès d'un certain nombre de bons esprits.
[Right use of comparative method] The one condition of advancing
knowledge and clearing men's minds of superstition and cant by
application of the comparative method in religion, is that we should
apply it, as did Robertson Smith and his great predecessor, Dr. John
Spencer, [18] cautiously, and in a spirit of scientific scholarship. It
does not do to argue from superficial resemblances of sound that
Maria is the same name as the Greek Moira, or that the name Maia has
"connections with Mary"; or, again, that "the name (Maria) appears
in the East as Maya." The least acquaintance with Hebrew would have
satisfied Mr. Robertson that the original form of the name he thus
conjures with is not Maria, but Miriam, which does not lend itself to
his hardy equations. I suspect he is carried away by the parti pris
which leaks out in the following passage of his henchman and imitator,
Dr. Drews [19]: "The romantic cult of Jesus must be combated at all
costs.... This cannot be done more effectually than by taking its
basis in the theory of the historical Jesus from beneath its feet."
If "at all costs" means at the cost of common sense and scholarship,
I cannot agree. I am not disposed, at the invitation of any
self-constituted high priest of Rationalism, to derive old Hebrew names
from Egyptian, Greek, and Buddhist appellations that happen to show
an initial and one or two other letters in common. I will not believe
that a "Christist" of Alexandria or Jerusalem, in the streets of which
the Latin language was seldom or never heard, took the epithet bifrons
in a wrong sense, and straightway invented the story of a Peter who
had denied Jesus. I cannot admit that the cults of Osiris, Dionysus,
Apollo, or any other ancient Sun-god, are echoed in a single incident
narrated in the primitive evangelical tradition that lies before us
in Mark and the non-Marcan document used by the authors of the first
and third Gospels; I do not believe that any really educated man or
woman would for a moment entertain any of the equations propounded
by Mr. Robertson, and of which I have given a few select examples.
[Marett on method] Mr. Marett, in his essay entitled The Birth
of Humility, by way of criticizing certain modern abuses of the
comparative method in the field of the investigation of the origin
of moral ideas and religious beliefs, has justly remarked that
"No isolated fragment of custom or belief can be worth much for the
purposes of comparative science. In order to be understood, it must
first be viewed in the light of the whole culture, the whole corporate
soul-life, of the particular ethnic group concerned. Hence the new way
is to emphasize concrete differences, whereas the old way was to amass
resemblances heedlessly abstracted from their social context. Which
way is the better is a question that well-nigh answers itself."
Apply the above rule to nascent Christianity. In the Synoptic Gospels
Jesus ever speaks as a Jew to Jews. Jewish monotheism is presupposed
by the authors of them to have been no less the heritage of Jesus
than of his audiences. The rare exceptions are carefully noticed
by them. This consideration has so impressed Professor W. B. Smith
that he urges the thesis that the Christian religion originated as a
monotheist propaganda. That is no doubt an exaggeration, for it was
at first a Messianic movement or impulse among Jews, and therefore
did not need to set the claims of monotheism in the foreground, and,
accordingly, in the Synoptic Gospels they are nowhere urged. In spite
of this exaggeration, however, Mr. Smith's book occupies a higher
plane than the works of Dr. Drews and Mr. Robertson, insofar as he
shows some slight insight into the original nature of the religion,
whereas they show none at all. They merely, in Mr. Marett's phrase,
"amass resemblances [would they were even such!] heedlessly abstracted
from their context," and resolve a cult which, as it appears on the
stage of history, is Jewish to its core, of which the Holy Scripture
was no other than the Law and the Prophets, and of which the earliest
documents, as Mr. Selwyn has shown, are saturated with the Jewish
Septuagint--they try to resolve this cult into a tagrag and bobtail
of Greek and Roman paganism, of Buddhism, of Brahmanism, of Mithraism
(hardly yet born), of Egyptian, African, Assyrian, old Persian, [20]
and any other religions with which these writers have a second-hand and
superficial acquaintance. Never once do they pause and ask themselves
the simple questions: firstly, how the early Christians came to be
imbued with so intimate a knowledge of idolatrous cults far and near,
new and old; secondly, why they set so much store by them as the
mythico-symbolic hypothesis presupposes that they did; and, thirdly,
why, if they valued them so much, they were at pains to translate them
into the utterly different and antagonistic form which they wear in
the Gospels. In a word, why should such connoisseurs of paganism have
disguised themselves as monotheistic and messianic Jews? Mr. Robertson
tries to save his hypothesis by injecting a little dose of Judaism
into his "Christists" and "Jesuists"; but anyone who has read Philo
or Josephus or the Bible, not to mention the Apostolic Fathers and
Justin Martyr, will see at a glance that there is no room in history
for such a hybrid.
[Methods of Robertson and Lorinser] That Mr. Robertson should put his
name to such works as Dr. Drews imitates and singles out for special
praise is the more remarkable, because, in urging the independence
of certain Hindoo cults against Christian missionaries who want
to see in them mere reflections of Christianity, he shows himself
both critical and wide-minded. These characteristics he displays
in his refutation of the opinion of a certain Dr. Lorinser that
the dialogue between Krishna and the warrior Arjuna, known as the
Bhagavat Gîtâ and embodied in the old Hindoo Epic of the Mahâbhârata,
"is a patchwork of Christian teaching." Dr. Lorinser had adduced a
chain of passages from this document which to his mind are echoes of
the New Testament. Though many of these exhibit a striking conformity
with aphorisms of the Gospels, we are nevertheless constrained to
agree with Mr. Robertson's criticism, which is as follows (p. 262):--
The first comment that must occur to every instructed reader on
perusing these and the other "parallels" advanced by Dr. Lorinser
is, that on the one hand the parallels are very frequently such
as could be made by the dozen between bodies of literature which
have unquestionably never been brought in contact, so strained
and far-fetched are they; and that, on the other hand, they are
discounted by quite as striking parallels between New Testament
texts and pre-Christian pagan writings.
Mr. Robertson then adduces a number of striking parallelisms between
the New Testament and old Greek and Roman writers, and continues thus:
"Such parallels as these, I repeat, could be multiplied to any extent
from the Greek and Latin classics alone.... But is it worth while to
heap up the disproof of a thesis so manifestly idle?"
[Dionysus and Jesus] It occurs to ask whether it was not worth
the while of Mr. Robertson to inquire whether the Evangelist could
"unquestionably have been brought in contact" with the Dionysiac
group of myths before he assumed so dogmatically, against students
of such weight as Professor Percy Gardner and Dr. Estlin Carpenter,
that the myth of Bacchus meeting with a couple of asses on his way
to Dodona was the "Christist's" model for the story of Jesus riding
into Jerusalem on an ass? Might he not have reflected that then,
as now, there was no other way of entering Jerusalem unless you
went on foot? And what has Jerusalem to do with Dodona? What has
Bacchus's choice of one ass to ride on in common with Matthew's
literary deformation, according to which Jesus rode on two asses at
once? Lastly, what had Bacchus to do with Jesus? Has the Latin wine-god
a single trait in common with the Christian founder? Is it not rather
the case that any conscious or even unconscious assimilation of Bacchus
myths conflicts with what Mr. Marett would call "the whole culture,
the whole corporate soul-life" of the early Christian community,
as the surviving documents picture it, and other evidence we have
not? Yet Mr. Robertson deduces from such paltry "parallels" as the
above the conclusion that Jesus, on whose real personality a score of
early and independent literary sources converge, never existed at all,
and that he was a "composite myth." There is no other example of an
eclectic myth arbitrarily composed by connoisseurs out of a religious
art and story not their own; still less of such a myth being humanized
and accepted by the next generation as a Jewish Messiah.
In the same context (p. 264) Mr. Robertson remarks sensibly enough
that "No great research or reflection is needed to make it clear
that certain commonplaces of ethics as well as of theology are
equally inevitable conclusions in all religious systems that rise
above savagery. Four hundred years before Jesus, Plato declared that
it was very difficult for the rich to be good; does anyone believe
that any thoughtful Jew needed Plato's help to reach the same notion?"
I would ask, does anyone believe that a thoughtful Jew needed the
stimulus of a statuette of Osiris in order that he should record,
or, maybe, invent, the story of Jesus clearing the money-changers out
of the temple with a scourge? Even admitting--what I am as little as
anyone inclined to admit--that the Peter of the early Gospels is, as
regards his personality and his actions, a fable, a mere invention of
a Jewish storyteller, need we suppose that the storyteller in question
depended for his inspiration on Janus? You might as well suppose that
the authors of the Arabian Nights founded their stories on the myths of
Greek and Roman gods. Again, the Jews were traditionally distributed
into twelve tribes or clans. Let us grant only for argument's sake
that the life of Jesus the Messiah as narrated in the first three
Gospels is a romance, we yet must ask, Which is more probable, that
the author of the romance assigned twelve apostles to Jesus because
there were twelve tribes to whom the message of the impending Kingdom
of God had to be carried, or because there are twelve signs in the
Zodiac? He agrees (p. 347) that Luke's story of the choice of the
seventy disciples "visibly connects with the Jewish idea that there
were seventy nations in the world." Why, then, reject the view that
Jesus chose twelve apostles because there were twelve tribes? Not
at all. Having decided that Jesus was the Sun-God-Saviour Joshua,
a pure figment of his brain, Mr. Robertson is ready to violate the
canons of evidence he appeals to on p. 347, and will have it that in
the Gospels the apostles are Zodiacal signs, and that their leader
is Janus, the opener of the year. "The Zodiacal sign gives the clue"
(p. 339), in his opinion, to this as to much else.
[Dr. Lorinser] Let us return to the case of Dr. Lorinser. "We are asked
to believe that Brahmans expounding a highly-developed Pantheism went
assiduously to the (unattainable) New Testament for the wording of a
number of their propositions, pantheistic and other, while assimilating
absolutely nothing of distinctively Christian doctrine.... Such a
position is possible only to a mesmerized believer." Surely one may
exclaim of Mr. Robertson, De te fabula narratur, and rewrite the
above as follows: "We are asked to believe that 'Christists,' who
were so far Jewish as to practise circumcision, to use the Hebrew
Scriptures, to live in Jerusalem under the presidency and patronage
of the Jewish High-priest, to foster and propagate Jewish monotheism,
went assiduously to the (unattainable) rites, statuary, art, and
beliefs of pagan India, Egypt, Ancient Babylon, Persia, etc., for all
'the narrative myths' (p. 263) of the story in which they narrated
the history of their putative founder Jesus, the Jewish Messiah,
while assimilating absolutely nothing of distinctively pagan doctrine."
Dr. Lorinser, for urging a thesis infinitely less absurd, is denounced
as "a mesmerized believer"; and on the next page Dr. Weber, who
agrees with him, is rebuked for his "judicial blindness." Yet in the
same context we are told that "a crude and naïf system, like the
Christism of the second gospel and the earlier form of the first,
borrows inevitably from the more highly evolved systems with which
it comes socially in contact, absorbing myth and mystery and dogma
till it becomes as sophisticated as they."
It is quite true, as Gibbon observed, that the naïf figure of Jesus,
as presented in the Synoptic Gospels, was soon overlaid with that
of the logos, and all sorts of Christological cobwebs were within
a few generations spun around his head to the effacement both of
the teacher and of what he taught. But in the earliest body of the
evangelical tradition, as we can construct it from the first three
Gospels, there is little or nothing that is not essentially Jewish and
racy of the soil of Judæa. The borrowings of Christianity from pagan
neighbours began with the flocking into the new Messianic society of
Gentile converts. The earlier borrowings with which Messrs. Robertson
and Drews fill their volumes are one and all "resemblances heedlessly
abstracted from their context," and are as far-fetched and as fanciful
as the dreams of the adherents of the Banner of Israel, or as the
cypher of the Bacon-Shakesperians, over which Mr. Robertson is prone
to make merry. "Is it," to use his own words, "worth while to heap
up the disproof of a thesis so manifestly idle?"