PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS
[Is Mark's Gospel a religious romance?] I can imagine some people
arguing that Mark's Gospel might be a religious novel, of which the
scene is laid in Jerusalem and Galilee among Jews; that it was by a
literary artifice impregnated with Jewish ideas; that the references
to Sadducees and Pharisees were introduced as appropriate to the age
and clime; that the old Jewish Scriptures are for the same reason
acknowledged by all the actors and interlocutors as holy writ;
that demonological beliefs were thrown in as being characteristic
of Palestinian society of the time the writer purported to write
about; that it is of the nature of a literary trick that the peculiar
Messianic and Apocalyptic beliefs and aspirations rife among Jews of
the period B.C. 50-A.D. 160 and later, are made to colour the narrative
from beginning to end. All these elements of verisimilitude, I say,
taken singly or together, do not of necessity exclude the hypothesis
that it may be one of the most skilfully constructed historical novels
ever written. Have we not, it may be urged, in the Recognitions or
Itinerary of Saint Clement, in the Acts of Thomas, in the story of
Paul and Thecla, similar compositions?
[Certainly not in the way assumed by Drews and Robertson,] In view
of what we know of the dates and diffusion of the Gospels, of their
literary connections with one another, and of the reappearance of
their chief personæ dramatis in the Pauline letters, such a hypothesis
is of course wildly improbable, yet not utterly absurd. We have to
assume in the writer a knowledge of the Messianic movement among the
Jews, a familiarity with their demonological beliefs and practices,
with their sects, and so forth; and it is all readily assumable. In
the Greek novel of Chariton we have an example of such an historical
romance, the scene being laid in Syracuse and Asia Minor shortly
after the close of the Peloponnesian war. But such romances are not
cult documents of a parabolic or allegorical kind, as the Gospels
are supposed by these writers to be. They do not bring a divine
being down from Olympus, and pretend all through that he was a man
who was born, lived, and died on the cross in a particular place and
at a particular date. We have no other example of documents whose
authors, by way of honouring a God up in heaven who never made any
epiphany on earth nor ever underwent incarnation, made a man of him,
and concocted an elaborate earthly record of him. Why did they do
it? What was the object of the "Jesuists" and "Christists" in hoaxing
their own and all subsequent generations and in building up a lasting
cult and Church on what they knew were fables?
[whose hypothesis is self-destructive,] In the Homeric hymns and other
religious documents not only of the Greeks, but of the Hindoos, we have
no doubt histories of the gods written by their votaries; but in these
hymns they put down what they believed, they did not of set design
falsify the legend of the god, and describe his birth and parentage,
when they knew he never had any; his ministrations and teaching career,
when he never ministered or taught; his persecution by enemies and
his death, when he was never persecuted and never died. Or are we
to suppose that all these things were related in the Sun-god Joshua
legend? No, reply Messrs. Drews and Robertson. For the stories told
in the Gospels are all modelled on pagan or astral myths; the persons
who move in their pages are the gods and demigods of Egyptian, Greek,
Latin, Hindoo legends. Clearly the Saviour-God Joshua had no legend
or story of his own, or it would not be necessary to pad him out
with the furniture and appurtenances of Osiris, Dionysus, Serapis,
Æsculapius, and who knows what other gods besides. And--strangest
feature of all--it is Jews, men circumcised, propagandists of Jewish
monotheism, who, in the interests of "a Judaic cult" (p. 348), go
rummaging in all the dustbins of paganism, in order to construct a
legend or allegory of their god. Why could they not rest content with
him as they found him in their ancient tradition?
[and irreconcilable with ascertained history of Judaism] The Gospels,
like any other ancient document, have to be accounted for. They did
not engender themselves, like a mushroom, nor drop out of heaven ready
written. I have admitted as possible, though wild and extravagant,
the hypothesis of their being a Messianic romance, which subsequently
came to be mistaken for sober history; and there are of course plenty
of legendary incidents in their pages. But such a hypothesis need
not be discussed. It is not that of these three authors, and would
not suit them. They insist on seeing in them so many manifestoes of
the secret sect of Jews who worshipped a god Joshua. For Dr. Drews
and Mr. Robertson the Gospels describe a "Jesuine" mystery play
evolved "from a Palestinian rite of human sacrifice in which the
annual victim was 'Jesus the Son of the Father.'" There is no trace
in Jewish antiquity of any such rite in epochs which even remotely
preceded Christianity, nor is the survival of such a rite of human
sacrifice even thinkable in Jerusalem, where the "Christists" laid
their plot. And why should they eke out their plot with a thousand
scraps of pagan mythology?
[Prof. Smith's hypothesis of a mythical Jesus mythically humanized in
a monotheistic propaganda,] I was taught in my childhood to venerate
the Gospels; but I never knew before what really wonderful documents
they are. Let us, however, turn to Professor W. B. Smith, who does not
pile on paganism so profusely as his friends, nor exactly insist on
a pagan basis for the Gospels. His hypothesis in brief is identical
with theirs, for he insists that Jesus the man never existed at
all. Jesus is, in Professor Smith's phrase, "a humanized God"; in the
diction of Messrs. Drews and Robertson, a myth. Professor Smith allows
(Ecce Deus, p. 78) that the mere "fact that a myth, or several myths,
may be found associated with the name of an individual by no means
relegates that individual into the class of the unhistorical." That is
good sense, and so is the admission which follows, that "we may often
explain the legends from the presence of the historical personality,
independently known to be historic." But in regard to Jesus alone
among the figures of the past he, like his friends, rules out both
considerations. The common starting-point of all three writers is that
the earliest Gospel narratives do not "describe any human character
at all; on the contrary, the individuality in question is distinctly
divine and not human, in the earliest portrayal. As time goes on it
is true that certain human elements do creep in, particularly in Luke
and John.... In Mark there is really no man at all; the Jesus is God,
or at least essentially divine, throughout. He wears only a transparent
garment of flesh. Mark historizes only."
[lacks all confirmation, defies the texts,] How is it, we ask, that
humanity has pored over the Synoptic Gospels for nearly two thousand
years, and discerned in them the portraiture at least of a man of flesh
and blood, who can be imaged as such in statuary and painting? Even
if it were conceded, as I said above, that the Gospel representation
of Jesus is an imaginary portrait, like that of William Tell or
John Inglesant, still, who, that is not mad, will deny that there
exist in it multiple human traits, fictions may be of a novelist,
yet indisputably there? Mr. Smith's hardy denial of them can only
lead his readers to suspect him of paradox. Moreover, the champions
of traditional orthodoxy have had in the past every reason to side
with Professor Smith in his attempted elimination of all human traits
and characteristics. Yet in recent years they have been constrained
to admit that in Luke and John the human elements, far from creeping
in, show signs of creeping out. "The received notion," adds Professor
Smith, "that in the early Marcan narratives the Jesus is distinctly
human, and that the process of deification is fulfilled in John, is
precisely the reverse of the truth." Once more we rub our eyes. In Mark
Jesus is little more than that most familiar of old Jewish figures,
an earthly herald of the imminent kingdom of heaven; late and little
by little he is recognized by his followers as himself the Messiah
whose advent he formerly heralded. As yet he is neither divine nor the
incarnation of a pre-existent quasi-divine Logos or angel. In John,
on the other hand, Jesus has emerged from the purely Jewish phase of
being Messiah, or servant of God (which is all that Lord or Son of God
[21] implies in Mark's opening verses). He has become the eternal Logos
or Reason, essentially divine and from the beginning with God. [and
rests on an obsolete and absurd allegorization of them] Here obviously
we are well on our way to a deification of Jesus and an elimination
of human traits; and the writer is so conscious of this that he goes
out of his way to call our attention to the fact that Jesus was after
all a man of flesh and blood, with human parents and real brethren who
disbelieved in him. He was evidently conscious that the superimposition
on the man Jesus of the Logos scheme, and the reflection back into the
human life of Jesus of the heavenly rôle which Paul ascribed to him
qua raised by the Spirit from the dead, was already influencing certain
believers (called Docetes) to believe that his human life and actions
were illusions, seen and heard indeed, as we see and hear a man speak
and act in a dream, but not objective and real. To guard against this
John proclaims that he was made flesh. Nevertheless, he goes half way
with the Docetes in that he rewrites all the conversations of Jesus,
abolishes the homely parable, and substitutes his own theosophic
lucubrations. He also emphasizes the miraculous aspect of Jesus,
inventing new miracles more grandiose than any in previous gospels,
but of a kind, as he imagines, to symbolize his conceptions of sin
and death. He is careful to eliminate the demonological stories. They
were as much of a stumbling-block to John as we have seen them to be
to Mr. W. B. Smith. We must, therefore, perforce accuse the latter of
putting a hypothesis that from the outset is a paradox. The documents
contradict him on every page.
[Why should the robber chief Joshua have been selected as prototype of
Jesus?] A thesis that begins by flying in the face of the documents
demands paradoxical arguments for its support; and the pages of all
three writers teem with them. Of a Jesus that is God from the first
it is perhaps natural to ask--anyhow our authors have asked it of
themselves--which God was he? And the accident of his bearing the
name Jesus--he might just as well have been called Jacob or Sadoc or
Manasseh, or what not--suggests Joshua to them, for Joshua is the
Hebrew name which in the LXX was Grecized as Iesoue, and later as
Iesous. That in the Old Testament Joshua is depicted as a cut-throat
and leader of brigands, very remote in his principles and practice from
the Jesus of the Gospels, counts for nothing. The late Dr. Winckler,
who saw sun and moon myths rising like exhalations all around
him wherever he looked in ancient history and mythology, [22] has
suggested that Joseph was originally a solar hero. Ergo, Joshua was one
too. Ergo, there was a Hebrew secret society in Jerusalem in the period
B.C. 150-A.D. 50 who worshipped the Sun-God-Saviour Joshua. Ergo,
the Gospels are a sustained parable of this Sun-god. Thus are empty,
wild, and unsubstantiated hypotheses piled one on top of the other,
like Pelion on Ossa. Not a scintilla of evidence is adduced for any
one of them. First one is advanced, and its truth assumed. The next
is propped on it, et sic ad infinitum.
[Why make him the central figure of a monotheistic cult?] What,
asks Professor Smith (Ecce Deus, p. 67), was the active principle of
Christianity? What its germ? "The monotheistic impulse," he answers,
"the instinct for unity that lies at the heart of all grand philosophy
and all noble religion." Again, p. 45: "What was the essence of this
originally secret Jesus cult, that was expressed in such guarded
parabolic terms as made it unintelligible to the multitude?... It
was a protest against idolatry; it was a Crusade for monotheism."
[The earliest Christianity was no monotheistic propaganda] This is,
no doubt, true of Christianity when we pass outside the Gospels. It is
only not true of them, because on their every page Jewish monotheism
is presupposed. Why are no warnings against polytheism put into the
mouth of Jesus? Why is not a single precept of the Sermon on the
Mount directed against idolatry? Surely because we are moving in a
Jewish atmosphere in which such warnings were unnecessary. The horizon
is purely Jewish, either of Jerusalem as we know it in the pages of
Josephus or of certain Galilean circles in which even a knowledge of
Greek seems not to have existed before the third century. The very
proximity of Greek cities there seems to have confirmed the Jewish
peasant of that region in his preference of Aramaic idiom, just as
the native of Bohemia to-day turns his back on you if you address
him in the detested German tongue.
[Robertson and Drews allow the Jesuists to have been mainly Jewish in
cult and feeling] Messrs. Robertson and Drews concede that the original
stock of Christianity was Jewish. Thus we read in Christianity and
Mythology (p. 415) that the Lord's Prayer derives "from pre-Christian
Jewish lore, and, like parts of the Sermon (on the Mount), from an
actually current Jewish document." The same writer admits (p. 338)
the existence of "Judaic sections of the early Church." When he talks
(p. 337) of the tale of the anointing of Jesus in Matthew xxvi, 6-13,
and parallel passages, being "in all probability a late addendum" to
the "primitive gospel" of Bernhard Weiss's theory, "made after the
movement had become pronouncedly Gentile," he presupposes that, to
start with anyhow, the movement was mainly Jewish. He admits that in
the first six paragraphs of the early Christian document entitled the
Didaché we have a purely Jewish teaching document, "which the Jesuist
sect adopted in the first or second century." He cannot furthermore
contest the fact that the Jesuists "took over the Jewish Scriptures
as their sacred book; that they inherited the Jewish passover and
the Paschal lamb, which is still slain in Eastern churches; that the
leaders of the secret sect in Jerusalem upheld the Jewish rite of
circumcision against Paul." [23] All this is inconceivable if the
society was not in the main and originally one of Hebrews. When he
goes on to argue that the Gospels are the manifesto of a cult of an
old Sun-god Joshua, son of a mythic Miriam, he at least admits that
the early "Christists" selected from ancient Jewish superstition,
and not from pagan myth, the central figure of their cult, and that
they chose for their deity a successor and satellite of Moses with a
Hebrew lady for his mother. We may take it for granted, then, that the
parent society out of which the Christian Church arose was profoundly
and radically Jewish; and Mr. Robertson frankly admits as much when he
affirms that "it was a Judaic cult that preached circumcision," and
that "its apostles with whom Paul was in contact were of a Judaizing
description." Here is common ground between myself and him.
[If so, how could they devote themselves to pagan mystery plays?] What
I want to know is how it came about that a society of which Jerusalem
was the focus, and of which the nucleus and propagandists were Jews
and Judaizers, could have been given over to the cult of a solar god,
and how they could celebrate mystery plays and dramas in honour of that
god; how they can have manufactured that god into "a composite myth"
(p. 336), and constructed in his honour a religious system that was
"a patchwork of a hundred suggestions drawn from pagan art and ritual
usage." For such, we are told (p. 305), was "the Christian system."
[Robertson admits that Jews could never borrow from pagan rituals
in that age] We are far better acquainted with Jewish belief and
ritual during the period B.C. 400-A.D. 100 than we are with that of
the pagans. The content of the Greek mysteries is an enigma to our
best Hellenists; we know next to nothing of the inside of Mithraism;
for the oriental cults of the late Roman republic and early empire
we are lamentably deficient in writings that might exhibit to us the
arcana of their worship and the texture of their beliefs. Not so with
Judaism. Here we have the prophets, old and late; for the two centuries
B.C. we have the apocrypha, including the Maccabean books; we have the
so-called Books of Enoch, of Jubilees, of the Twelve Patriarchs, the
Fourth Ezra, Baruch, Sirach, and many others. We have the voluminous
works of Philo and Josephus for the first century of our era; we have
the Babylonian and other Talmuds preserving to us a wealth of Jewish
tradition and teaching of the first and second centuries. Here let
Mr. Robertson speak. As regards the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon
on the Mount, he insists (p. 415 foll.) that they were inspired by
parallel passages in the Talmud and the Apocrypha, and he argues with
perfect good sense for the priority of the Talmud in these words:
"It is hardly necessary to remark here that the Talmudic parallels
to any part of the Sermon on the Mount cannot conceivably have been
borrowed from the Christian gospels; they would as soon have borrowed
from the rituals of the pagans."
[Yet affirms that Christists, indistinguishable from Jews, did
so borrow wholesale] And yet he asks us to believe that a nucleus
of Jews, hidden in Jerusalem, the heart of Judaism, a sect whose
apostles were Judaizers and vehement defenders of circumcision--all
this he admits--were, as late as the last half of the first century,
maintaining among themselves in secret a highly eclectic pagan cult;
that they evolved "a gospel myth from scenes in pagan art" (p. 327);
that they took a sort of modern archæological interest in pagan art
and sculpture, and derived thence most of their literary motifs;
that the figure of Jesus is an alloy of Dionysus, Osiris, Adonis,
Krishna, Æsculapius, and fifty other ancient gods and demigods,
with the all-important "Sun-God-Saviour Joshua, son of Miriam";
that the story of Peter rests on "a pagan basis of myth" (p. 340);
that Maria is the true and original form of the Hebrew Miriam, and
is the same name as Myrrha and Moira (moira), etc., etc.
[The central idea of a God Joshua a figment of Robertson's fancy]
Such are the mutually destructive arguments on the strength of which
we are to adopt his thesis of the unhistoricity of Jesus. His books,
like those of Dr. Drews, are a welter of contradictory statements,
unreconciled and irreconcilable. Nevertheless, they reiterate them in
volume after volume, like orthodox Christians reiterating articles of
faith and dogmas too sacred to be discussed. Who ever heard before them
of a Jewish cult of a Sun-God-Saviour Joshua? Such a cult must have
been long extinct when the book of Joshua was written. Who ever heard
of this Sun-god having for his mother a Miriam, until Mr. Robertson
discovered a late Persian gloss to the effect that Joshua, son of Nun,
had a mother of the name? Even if this tradition were not so utterly
worthless as it is, it would prove nothing about the Sun-god. On the
basis of such gratuitous fancies we are asked to dismiss Jesus as a
myth. [It does not even explain the birth legends of the Christians] It
does not even help us to understand how the myths of the Virgin Birth
arose. Since when, I would like to know, did we need such evidence
against that legend? If I thought that the rebuttal of it depended
on such evidence, I should be inclined to become a good Papist and
embrace it. It is enough for me to have ascertained, by a comparison
of texts and by a study of early Christian documents, that it is a
late accretion on the traditions of Jesus of Nazareth. That is the
real evidence, if any be wanted, against it. Mr. Robertson admits that
the first two chapters of Luke which are supposed--perhaps wrongly--to
embody this legend are "a late fabulous introduction." Again he writes
(p. 189): "Only the late Third Gospel tells the story (of Luke i and
ii); the narrative (of the Birth) in Matthew, added late as it was
to the original composition, which obviously began at what is now
the third chapter, has no hint of the taxing."
[Evidence of the Protevangelion] This is good sense, and I am indebted
to him for pointing out that so loosely was the myth compacted that
in the Protevangelion (c. 17) the statement is that it was decreed
"that all should be enrolled who were in Bethlehem of Judæa," not
all Jews over the entire world.
[Robertson assumes the antiquity of the legend merely to suit his
theory] Surely all this implies that the legend of the miraculous birth
was no part of the earliest tradition about Jesus. Nevertheless, it
is so important for Mr. Robertson's thesis (that Jesus was a mythical
personage) that he should from the first have had a mythical mother,
that he insists on treating the whole of Christian tradition, early
or late, as a solid block, and argues steadily that the Virgin Birth
legend was an integral part of it from the beginning. Jesus was a
myth; as such he must have had a myth for a mother. Now a virgin
mother is half-way to being a mythical one. Therefore Mary was a
virgin, and must from the beginning have been regarded as such by the
"Christists." Such are the steps of his reasoning.
[The "Christists" at once extravagantly pagan and extravagantly
monotheist and Jewish] I have adduced in the preceding pages a
selection of the mythological equations of Mr. Robertson and Dr. Drews
in order that my readers may realize how faint a resemblance between
stories justifies, in their minds, a derivation or borrowing of
one from the other. Nor do they ever ask themselves how Jewish
"Christists" were likely to come in contact with out-of-the-way
legends of Bacchus or Dionysus, of Hermes, of old Pelasgic deities,
of Cybele and Attis and Isis, Osiris and Horus, of Helena Dendrites,
of Krishna, of Janus, of sundry ancient vegetation-gods (for they
are up to the newest lights), of Apollonius of Tyana, of Æsculapius,
of Herakles and Oceanus, of Saoshyant and other old Persian gods
and heroes, of Buddha and his kith and kin, of the Eleusinian and
other ancient mysteries. Prick them with a pin, and out gushes
this lore in a copious flood; and every item of it is supposed
to have filled the heads of the polymath authors of the Christian
Gospels. Every syllable of these Gospels, every character in them,
is symbolic of one or another of these gods and heroes. Hear,
O Israel: "Christians borrowed myths of all kinds from Paganism"
(Christianity and Mythology, p. xii). And we are pompously assured
(p. xxii, op. cit.) that this new "mythic" system is, "in general,
more 'positive,' more inductive, less à priori, more obedient to
scientific canons, than that of the previous critics known to me
[i.e., to Mr. Robertson] who have reached similar anti-traditional
results. It substitutes an anthropological basis, in terms of
the concrete phenomena of mythology, for a pseudo-philosophical
presupposition." Heaven help the new science of anthropology!
[A receipt for the concoction of a gospel] And what end, we may ask,
had the "Jesuists" and "Christists" (to use Mr. Robertson's jargon)
in view, when they dressed up all this tagrag and bobtail of pagan
myth, art, and ritual, and disguised it under the form of a tale of
Messianic Judaism? For that and nothing else is, on this theory, the
basis and essence of the Gospels. Was it their aim to honour paganism
or to honour Jewish monotheism, when they concocted a "Christ cult"
which is "a synthesis of the two most popular pagan myth-motives,
[24] with some Judaic elements as nucleus and some explicit ethical
teaching superadded" (p. 34). We must perforce suppose that the
Gospels were a covert tribute to the worth and value of Pagan
mythology and religious dramas, to pagan art and statuary. If we
adopt the mythico-symbolical method, they can have been nothing
else. Its sponsors might surely condescend to explain the alchemy
by which the ascertained rites and beliefs of early Christians were
distilled from these antecedents. The effect and the cause are so
entirely disparate, so devoid of any organic connection, that we would
fain see the evolution worked out a little more clearly. At one end
of it we have a hurly-burly of pagan myths, at the other an army of
Christian apologists inveighing against everything pagan and martyred
for doing so, all within a space of sixty or seventy years. I only hope
the orthodox will be gratified to learn that their Scriptures are a
thousandfold more wonderful and unique than they appeared to be when
they were merely inspired by the Holy Spirit. For verbal inspiration
is not, as regards its miraculous quality, in the same field with
mythico-symbolism. Verily we have discovered a new literary genus,
unexampled in the history of mankind. You rake together a thousand
irrelevant thrums of mythology, picked up at random from every age,
race, and clime; you get a "Christist" to throw them into a sack
and shake them up; you open it, and out come the Gospels. In all the
annals of the Bacon-Shakesperians we have seen nothing like it.