THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE
[Multiplicity of documents converging on and involving an historical
Jesus] I have remarked above that if the Gospel of Mark were an
isolated writing, if we knew nothing of its fortunes, nothing of any
society that accepted it as history; if, above all, we were without any
independent documents that fitted in with it and mentioned the persons
and events that crowd its pages, then it would be a possible hypothesis
that it was like the Recognitions of Clement, a skilfully contrived
romance. Such a hypothesis, I said, would indeed be improbable, yet
not unthinkable or self-destructive. But as a matter of fact we have
an extensive series of documents, independent of Mark, yet attesting
by their undesigned coincidences its historicity--not, of course,
in the sense that we must accept everything in it, but anyhow in
the sense that it is largely founded on fact and is a record of real
incident. Were it a mere romance of events that never happened, and
of people who never lived, would it not be a first-class miracle that
in another romance, concocted apart from it and in ignorance of its
contents, the same outline of events met our gaze, the same personages,
the same atmosphere, moral, intellectual, and religious, the same
interests? If in a third and fourth writing the same phenomenon
recurred, the marvel would be multiplied. Would any sane person doubt
that there was a substratum of fact and real history underlying them
all? It would be as if several tables in the gambling saloon of Monte
Carlo threw up the same series of numbers--say, 8, 3, 11, 7, 33,
21--simultaneously and independently of one another. A few of the
habitués--for Monte Carlo is a great centre of superstition--might
take refuge in the opinion that the tables were bewitched; but most
men would infer that there was human collusion and conspiracy to
produce such a result, and that the croupiers of the several tables
were in the plot.
[Mark and Q the two earliest documents] Now Mark's Gospel does not
stand alone. As I have pointed out in Myth, Magic, and Morals, Luke
and Matthew hold in solution as it were a second document, called Q
(Quelle), or the non-Marcan, which yields us a few incidents and a
great many sayings and parables of Jesus. Now this second document,
so utterly separate from and independent of Mark that it does not
even allude to the crucifixion and death episodes, nevertheless has
Jesus all through for its central figure. No doubt it ultimately came
out of the same general medium as Mark; but that consideration does
not much diminish the weight of its testimony. If I met two people
a hundred yards apart both coming from St. Paul's Cathedral, and if
they both assured me that they had just been listening to a sermon
of Dr. Inge's, I should not credit them the less because they had
been together in church.
That both these documents--I mean Mark and the non-Marcan--were in
circulation at a fairly early date is certain on many grounds. So great
a scholar as Wellhausen, a scholar untrammelled by ties of orthodoxy,
shows in his commentary that Mark, as it lies before us, must have
been redacted before the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70; so vague are
its forecasts of disasters that were to befall the holy city. In Luke,
on the other hand, these forecasts are accommodated to the facts,
as we should expect to be the case in an author who wrote after the
blow had fallen.
[The first and third Gospels constitute two more such documents]
And another consideration arises here. Matthew and Luke wrote quite
independently of one another--for they practically never join hands
across Mark--and yet they both assume in their compilations that these
two basal documents, Mark and the non-Marcan, are genuine narratives of
real events. They allow themselves, indeed, according to the literary
fashion of the age, to re-arrange, modify, and omit episodes in them;
but their manner of handling and combining the two documents is in
general inexplicable on the hypothesis that they considered them to
be mere romances. They are too plainly in earnest, too eager to find
in them material for the life of a master whom they revered. Luke in
particular prefixes a personal letter to one Theophilus, explaining
the purpose of his compilation. In it we find not a word about the
transcribing of Osiris dramas. On the contrary, it will set in order
for Theophilus a story in which he had already been instructed. It
is clear that Theophilus had already been made acquainted with "the
facts about Jesus," perhaps insufficiently, perhaps along lines which
Luke deprecated. [Luke's prologue argues an indefinite number more
of such documents] However this be, Luke desires to improve upon the
information which Theophilus had so far acquired about Jesus. It is
clear that written and unwritten traditions of Jesus were already
disseminated among believers. The prologue is inexplicable otherwise,
and it implies a whole series of witnesses to the historicity of Jesus
prior to Luke himself, of whom, as I have said, we still have Mark
and can reconstruct Q. Both Matthew (whoever he was) and Luke, then,
are convinced of the historicity of Jesus, and regarded Mark and Q as
historical sources. They exploit them, and they also try to fill up
lacunas left in these basal documents, and in particular to supply
their readers with some account of his birth and upbringing. Both
supplements, of course, are largely fictitious, that of Matthew
in particular; but they both testify to a fixed consciousness and
belief among early Christians that the Messiah was a real historical
person. Such an interest in the birth and upbringing of Jesus as
Matthew and Luke reveal could never have been felt by sectaries who
were well aware that he was not a real person, but a solar myth and
first cousin of Osiris. Had he been known, even by a few believers and
no more, to have been not a man but a composite myth, people would
not have craved for details, even miraculous, about his birth and
parentage and upbringing. Was it necessary to concoct human pedigrees
for a solar myth, and to pretend that Jacob begat Joseph, and Joseph
begat Jesus? The very idea is absurd. They wanted such details, and
got them, just as did the worshippers of Plato, Alexander, Augustus,
Apollonius, and other famous men. In connection with Osiris and
Dionysus such details were never asked for and never supplied.
[Implications of Luke's exordium] In the covering letter which forms
a sort of exordium to his Gospel the following are the words in which
Luke assures us that others before himself had planned histories of
the life of Jesus:--
Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative
concerning those matters which have been fully established (or
fulfilled) among us, even as they delivered them unto us which
from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word,
it seemed good to me also, having traced out the course of all
things accurately from the first, to write them unto thee in order,
most excellent Theophilus; that thou mightest know the certainty
concerning the things wherein thou wast instructed.
This is not the tone of a man who trades in sun-myths. The passage
has a thoroughly bona fide ring, and declares (1) that Theophilus had
already been instructed in the Gospel narrative, but not so accurately
as the writer could wish; (2) that several accounts of Jesus's life
and teaching were in circulation; (3) that these accounts were based
on the traditions of those who had seen Jesus and assisted in the
diffusion of his Messianic and other teachings.
The passage cannot be later than A.D. 100, and is probably as early
as A.D. 80; many scholars put it earlier. In any case, it reveals a
consciousness, stretching far back among believers, that Jesus had
really lived and died. Moreover, it is from the pen of one who either
had himself visited, with Paul, James the brother (or, according to
the orthodox, the half-brother) of Jesus at Jerusalem (Acts xxi, 17),
or--if not that--anyhow had in his possession and made copious use
of a travel document written by the companion of Paul.
[Luke probably used a document independent of Mark and Q] A study
of Luke also suggests that he had a third narrative document of his
own. Thus, without going outside the Synoptic Gospels, we have two,
if not three, wholly independent accounts of the doings and sayings
of Jesus, and an inferential certainty that they were not the only
ones which then existed. In the earliest Christian writers, moreover,
citations occur that cannot well be referred to the canonical Gospels,
but which may very well have been taken from the other narratives which
Luke assures us were in the possession of the earliest Church. These
narratives, like all other wholly or partly independent documents,
must have differed widely from one another in detail; for their authors
probably handled the tradition as freely as Matthew and Luke handle
Mark. [Messianic and apocalyptic character of these early documents]
But the inspiring motive of them all was the belief that a human
Messiah had founded, or rather begun, the community of believers in
Palestine. That any of them were contemporary is improbable, for the
simple reason that the eyes of believers were turned, not backward on
the life of the herald, but forward to the Kingdom of God or kingdom
of heaven on earth which he heralded. They all felt themselves to be
living in the last days, and that the Kingdom was to surprise many
of them during their lifetime. Nor among the earliest believers
was this expectation confined to Jews alone; it extended equally
to Gentile converts. Thus Paul, in his epistles to the Corinthians,
labours to answer the pathetic query his converts had addressed to
him--namely, why the kingdom to come so long delayed; why many of them
had fallen sick and some had died, while yet it tarried. Men and women
who breathed such an atmosphere of tense expectation, as a passage
like this and as the Gospel parables reveal, could not be solicitous
for annals of the past. Still less is the attitude revealed that of
people nurtured on ritual dramas of an annually slain and annually
resuscitated god; for in that case they only needed to wait for the
manifestation they yearned for, until the following spring, when the
god would rise afresh to secure salvation for his votaries. The tone
of this passage of Paul, as of all the earliest Christian documents,
shows that the mind's eye of the common believer, as had been the
founder's, was dazzled with the apocalyptic splendours soon to
be revealed, with the beatitudes shortly to be fulfilled in the
faithful. They were as wayfarers walking in a dark night towards
a light which is far off, yet, because of its brightness and of the
lack of an interposed landscape to fix the perspective, seems close at
hand. Many a Socialist workman, especially on the continent, cherishes
a similar dream of a good time coming ere long for himself and his
fellows. He has no sense of the difficulties which for many a weary
year--perhaps for ever--will hinder the realization of his passionately
desired ideal. It is better so, for we live by our enthusiasms, and
are the better for having indulged in them; if the labourer had none,
he would be a chilly, useless being. Happily the Socialist seldom
reflects how commonplace he would probably find his ideal if it were
suddenly realized around him. Such were the eschatological hopes and
dreams rife in the circles among which the Synoptic Gospels and their
constituent documents first saw the light; they are revealed on their
every page, and, needless to say, are inexplicable on Mr. Robertson's
hypothesis. Devoid of sympathy with his subject, incapable of seeing
it against its true background, without tact or perspective, he has
never felt or understood the difficulties which beset his central
hypothesis. He therefore attempts no explanation of them.
[Character of the Fourth Gospel] Of the Fourth Gospel I have already
said whatever is strictly necessary in this connection. It hangs
together with the Johannine epistles; and its writer certainly had
the Gospel of Mark before him, for he derives many incidents from it,
and often covertly controverts it. It seems to belong to the end of
the first century, and was in the hands of Gnostic sects fairly early
in the second--say about 128. When it was written, the Gnosis of the
Hellenized Jews, and in especial of Philo, was invading the primitive
community. The Messianic and human traits of Jesus, still so salient
in Mark and Matthew, though less so in Luke, are receding into the
background before the opinion that he had been the representation
in flesh of the eternal Logos. All his conversations are re-written
to suit the newer standpoint; the homely scenes and surroundings of
Galilee are forgotten as much as can be, and Samaria and Jerusalem--a
more resounding theatre--are substituted. The teaching in parables
is dropped, and we hear no more of the exorcisms of devils. Such
things were unedifying, and unworthy of so sublime a figure, as
much in the mind of this evangelist as of the fastidious Professor
W. B. Smith. Hence it may be said that the Fourth Gospel has made
the fortune of the Catholic Church; without it Athanasius could never
have triumphed, nor the Nicene Creed have been penned, nor Professor
Smith's diatribes have attracted readers. [It is half-docetic] For
in it Jesus is becoming unreal, a divine pedant masquerading in a
vesture of flesh. When it was written, the Docetes, as they were
called, were already beginning to dot the "i's" and cross the "t's"
of the teachers who sublimated Jesus into the Philonian Logos; and,
as I said above, it is against them, no doubt, that the caveat--so
necessary in the context--is entered that in Jesus the Word was
made flesh. Similarly, in the Johannine epistles certain teachers
are denounced who declared that Jesus Christ had not come in the
flesh, and taught that his flesh was only a blind. [Ignatius's
account of Docetism] We have a fairly full account of these docetic
teachers in the Epistles of Ignatius, which cannot be much later than
A.D. 120. From these we gather that they adopted the ordinary tradition
about Jesus, and believed that he had been born, and eaten and drunk,
had walked about with his disciples, had delivered his teaching by
word of mouth, had been crucified by Pontius Pilate, had died, and
been buried. But all these operations had been unreal and subjective
in the minds of those who were present at them, as are things we see
in a dream. They had taken place to the eye and ear of bystanders,
but not in reality. The partizans, therefore, of the view that Jesus
never lived deceive themselves when they appeal to the Docetes as
witnesses on their side. The Docetes lend no colour to their thesis
of the non-historicity of Jesus, but just the opposite. Drews writes
(p. 57) that
[Drews misunderstands Gnosticism] the Gnostics of the second
century really questioned the historical existence of Jesus by
their docetic conception; in other words, they believed only in a
metaphysical and ideal, not an historical and real, Christ. The
whole polemic of the Christians against the Gnostics was based
essentially on the fact that the Gnostics denied the historicity
of Jesus, or at least put it in a subordinate position.
This is nonsense. The Docetes admitted to the full that the Messiah
had appeared on earth; but, partly to meet the Jewish objections to
a crucified Messiah, and partly inspired by that contempt for matter
which was and is common in the East, and has been the inspiring
motive of much vain asceticism, they shrank from believing that he
shared with ordinary men their flesh and blood, their secretions and
evacuations. Matter was too evil for a Messiah, much more for the
heavenly Logos, to have been encased in it, and so subjected to its
dominion; to ascribe real flesh to him was to humble him before the
evil Demiurge, who created matter. [Docetes accepted current Christian
tradition] The Docetes accordingly took refuge in the idea that his
body was a phantom, and that in phantom form he had undergone all
that was related of him in Christian tradition; to which their views
bear testimony, instead of contradicting it, as Dr. Drews and his
friends pretend. "If these things," writes Ignatius, "were done by
our Lord in Semblance, then am I also a prisoner in semblance." This
means that--mutatis mutandis--the arguments of the Docetes would turn
Ignatius too, chains and all, into a phantom. Again and again this
writer affirms that the Docetes believed quite correctly that Jesus
was born of a virgin and baptized by John, was nailed up for our
sakes under Pontius Pilate and Herod the Tetrarch, that he suffered,
died, and raised himself up out of the grave. They only would not
believe that he underwent and performed all this truly--that is,
objectively. They insisted that the Saviour had only been among men as
a phantom, in the same manner as Helen had gone through the siege of
Troy as a mere phantom. She was not really there, though Greeks and
Trojans saw and met her daily. She was all the time enjoying herself
amid the asphodel meadows of the Nile. Even so the disciples, according
to the Docetes, had heard and seen Jesus all through his ministry;
yet the body they saw was phantasmal only. The Docetes also argued--so
we can infer from Ignatius's Epistle to the Church of Smyrna--that, as
Jesus ate and drank after the resurrection in phantom guise, so he had
eaten and drunk before his death in no other than phantom guise. The
answer of Ignatius to this is: "I know and believe that he was in the
flesh even after the resurrection"; and he forthwith relates how the
risen Jesus approached Peter and his company, who thought they were
in the presence of a phantom or ghost, and said to them: "Lay hold and
handle me, and see that I am not a demon without a body." Everything,
then, that we read about the Docetes shows that on all points, in
respect of the miraculous incidents of Jesus's life no less than
of the natural, they blindly accepted the record of evangelical
tradition. Their heresy was not to deny what the tradition related,
but to interpret it wrongly. [Docetism in Philo,] Philo had long before
set the example of such an interpretation, when in his commentaries,
which were widely read by Christians in the second century, he asserted
that the angels who appeared to Abraham at the oak of Mambre, and
ate and drank with him, only ate and drank in semblance, and not in
reality. They laid a spell on the eyes of Abraham, and of the other
guests at the banquet. [and in Tobit] So in the Book of Tobit xii,
19, the angel says: "All these days did I appear unto you; and I did
neither eat nor drink, but it was a vision ye yourselves saw."
In the same way, Jesus laid a spell on the eyes of his followers, in
the belief of this very early sect of Christian believers. [Professor
Smith and Hippolytus] Professor W. B. Smith, like his two companions,
writes as if Docetism were an asset in favour of his thesis
that Christianity began as the cult of a slain God, and that "the
humanization of this divinity proceeds apace as we descend the stream
of tradition." Yet the Docetic doctrine, as given in the report of
Hippolytus, and adduced by Mr. Smith himself (p. 88), exactly bears
out the estimate of its import with which one rises from a study of
the Ignatian Epistles. It is from Hippolytus's Refutation of Heresies,
viii, 10, and runs thus:--
Having come from above, he (Jesus) put on the begotten (body),
and did all things just as has been written in the Gospels;
he washed himself in Jordan, etc.
Hippolytus was in contact with Docetes, and familiar with their
writings and arguments. What better proof could we have than this
citation of the fact that they servilely adopted the traditions of
Jesus recorded in the Gospels? They were not supplying an answer to
imaginary Jews who had objected to Christianity on the score that
Jesus had never lived. Their speciality was to interpret the Gospel
record, which they did not dream of disputing, along phantasmagoric
lines. There was still left in the Church enough common sense
and historic insight to brush their interpretation on one side as
nonsensical.
[Drews misunderstands Justin Martyr] Drews once more has conjured up
out of Justin Martyr a Jew of the second century who denied the human
existence of Jesus. The relevant passage is at p. 16 of his Witnesses
to the Historicity of Jesus, and runs as follows:--
It is not true, however, as has recently been stated, that no Jew
ever questioned the historical reality of Jesus, so that we may
see in this some evidence for his existence. The Jew Trypho, whom
Justin introduces in his Dialogue with Trypho, expresses himself
very sceptically about it. "Ye follow an empty rumour," he says,
"and make a Christ for yourselves." "If he was born and lived
somewhere, he is entirely unknown" (viii, 3). This work appeared
in the second half of the second century; it is therefore the
first indication of a denial of the human existence of Jesus,
and shows that such opinions were current at the time.
Professor Drews has, I regret to say, failed to read his text
intelligently. So I will transcribe the passage of Justin in full,
premising that it was more probably written in the first than in the
second half of the second century. The dialogue is between a Jew and
an ex-Platonist who has turned Christian, and the Jew says with an
ironical smile to the Christian:--
The rest of your arguments I admit, and I admire your religious
enthusiasm. Nevertheless, you would have done better to stick to
Plato's or any other sage's philosophy, practising the virtues of
endurance and continence and temperance, rather than let yourself
be ensnared by false arguments and follow utterly worthless
men. For if you had remained loyal to that form of philosophy and
lived a blameless life, there was left a hope of your rising to
something better. But as it is you have abandoned God and put your
trust in man, so what further hope is left to you of salvation? If,
then, you are willing to take advice from myself--for I already
have come to regard you as a friend--begin first by circumcising
yourself, and next keep in the legal fashion the sabbath and the
festivals and the new moons of God, and in a word fulfil all the
commandments written in the Law, and then perhaps you will attain
unto God's mercy. But Messiah (or Christ), even supposing he has
come into being and exists somewhere or other, is unrecognized,
and can neither know himself as such nor possess any might,
until Elias having come shall anoint him and make him manifest
unto all. But you (Christians), having lent ear to a vain report,
feign a sort of Messiah unto yourselves, and for his sake are
now rashly going to perdition.
There is a parallel passage in the Dialogue, c. cx, where the
Christian interlocutor, after reciting the prophecy of Micah, iv,
1-7, adds these words:--
I am quite aware, gentlemen, that your rabbis admit all the words
of the above passage to have been uttered about, and to refer to
the Messiah; and I also know that they deny him so far to have
come, or, if they say he has come, then that it is not yet known
who he is. However, when he is manifested and in glory, then,
they say, it will be known who he is. And then, so they say,
the things foreshadowed in the above passage will come to pass.
[The Jews in Justin testify to Jesus's historicity] The sense, then,
of the passage adduced by Drews is perfectly clear, and exactly the
opposite of that which he puts upon it. The Christ or Messiah referred
to by the Jew is not that man of Nazareth in whom the Christians
had falsely recognized the signs of Messiahship. No, he is, on the
contrary, the Messiah expected by the Jews; but the latter has not so
far come; or, if he has come, still lurks in some corner unrecognized
until such time as Elias, to whom the rôle appertains, shall appear
again and proclaim him. There is not a word of Jesus of Nazareth not
having come, or of his being still unrecognized. The gravamen of the
Jew is that the ex-Platonist had been chicaned by Christians into
believing that the Messiah had already come in the person of Jesus,
and had been recognized in him. The passage, therefore, has exactly
the opposite bearing to what Drews imagines.
[Second century Jews did not detest mere shadows] There is, too,
another very significant point to be made in this connection. It is
this, that the Jews of that age would not have borne the bitter grudge
they did against the Christians if the latter had merely devoted
themselves to the cult of a mythical personage, a Sun-God-Saviour,
who never existed at all. They were quite well capable of ridiculing
myths of such a kind, as the story of Bel and the Dragon shows. Jesus,
however, was a real memory to them, and one which they detested. Their
hatred for him was that which you bear for a man who has upset your
religion and trampled on your prejudices--the sort of hatred that
Catholics have for the memory of Luther and Calvin; it was not in any
way akin to their mockery of idols, their disgust for the demons that
inhabited them, their abhorrence of their votaries. It was hatred
of a religious antagonist, odium theologicum of the purest kind,
and hatred like that with which the Ebionites for generations hated
the memory of Paul. Jesus had violated and set at naught the law of
Moses. A solar myth could not do that.
To this hatred of the Jews for the memory of Jesus, and to the early
date at which it showed itself, Dr. Drews himself bears witness when,
on p. 12 of the work cited, he writes as follows:--
There is no room for doubt that after the destruction of Jerusalem,
and especially during the first quarter of the second century,
the hostility of the Jews and Christians increased; indeed, by the
year 130 the hatred of the Jews for the Christians became so fierce
that a rabbi whose niece had been bitten by a serpent preferred
to let her die rather than see her healed "in the name of Jesus."
[Chwolson on early Rabbis] Chwolson argues from this and similar
episodes that the Rabbis of the second half of the first century,
or the beginning of the second, were well acquainted with the person
of Christ. "Here," says Drews, "he clearly deceives himself and
his readers if the impression is given that they had any personal
knowledge of him." The self-deception is surely on the part of
Dr. Drews. Chwolson does not imply that any Rabbis of the years 50-100
had a personal knowledge of Jesus, in the sense of having seen him
or conversed with him; for he is not given to writing nonsense. He
does, however, imply that they knew of him as a real man who had
lived and done them a power of evil. If they had only known him as
a solar myth, their hostility to his followers, admitted by Drews,
would be inexplicable; equally inexplicable if, as Dr. W. B. Smith
contends, he had been a merely heavenly power, a divine Logos or God,
incidentally the object of a monotheist cult. In that case the Jews
would rather have been inclined to fall on the neck of the Christians
and welcome them; and their cult would have been no more offensive
to them than the theosophy of Philo the Jew, from which it would
have been hardly distinguishable. Justin Martyr furthermore makes
statements on this point which perfectly agree with the story of the
hostile Rabbi adduced by Drews. [In the Jewish synagogues Jesus was
regularly execrated] Not in one, but in half-a-dozen, passages he
testifies that in his day the Jews in all their synagogues, at the
conclusion of their prayers, cursed the memory of Jesus, execrated
his name and personality (for name meaned personality in that age),
and poured ridicule on the soi-disant Messiah that had been crucified
by the Romans. "Even to this day," Justin exclaims (ch. xciii), "you
persevere in your wickedness, imprecating curses on us because we can
prove that he whom you crucified is Messiah." He records (ch. cviii)
"that the Jews chose and appointed emissaries whom they sent forth
all over the world to proclaim that a godless heresy and unlawful had
been vamped up by a certain Jesus, a charlatan of Galilee. They were
to warn their compatriots that the disciples had stolen him out of the
tomb in which, after being unnailed from the cross, he had been laid,
and then pretended that he had been raised from the dead and ascended
into heaven."
[Eusebius's evidence on this point] At first sight the above is a
mere réchauffé of Matt. xxviii, 13; but Eusebius, who had in his
hands much first- and second-century literature of the Christians
and Hellenized Jews that we have not, attests a similar tradition,
and declares that he found it in the publications of the ancients. [25]
The priests and elders of the Jewish race who lived in Jerusalem
wrote epistles and sent them broadcast to the Jews everywhere among
the Gentiles, calumniating the teaching of Christ as a brand-new
heresy and alien to God; and they warned them by letters not to
receive it. And their apostles took their epistles, written on
papyrus ... and ran up and down the earth, maligning our account
of the Saviour.... It is still the custom of the Jews to give
the name of Apostles to those who carry encyclical letters from
their rulers.
Note that Eusebius does not weave in the story of the disciples
stealing their Master's body from out of the tomb. From his omission of
it, and from the dissimilarity of his language, we can infer that the
"publications of the ancients" from which he derived his information
were not the works of Justin, but an independent source, which may also
have been in Justin's hands. In any case, the Jews were not given to
tilting at windmills; their secular and bitter hatred of the very name
of Jesus, the relentless war waged with pen and sword from the first
between the Christians and themselves--all this is attested by the
earliest writings of the Church. It already colours Luke's Gospel, and
is a leading inspiration of the Johannine. It alone is all-sufficient
to dissipate the hypotheses of these twentieth-century fabulists.
[Evidence of Acts] Let us turn to the Acts of the Apostles, the only
book of the New Testament which contains a history of the Apostolic
age. In the last half of this book is embedded, as even Van Manen
admitted, a travel document or narrative of voyage undertaken by
its author in common with Paul. Whether or no the fellow-traveller
was the compiler of the Third Gospel and of Acts is not certain; but
he was assuredly a man named Luke. It does not matter. "It is not,"
writes Dr. Drews (Christ Myth, p. 19),
the imagined historical Jesus, but, if anyone, Paul, who is
that "great personality" that called Christianity into life as
a new religion; and the depth of his moral experience gave it
the strength for its journey, the strength which bestowed upon it
victory over the other competing religions. Without Jesus the rise
of Christianity can be quite well understood; without Paul, not so.
[Van Manen on Acts and Paul] We infer from the above that, on the
whole, Drews accepts the narrative of Paul's sayings and doings as
given in Acts, and does not consider it a mere record of the feats a
solar hero performed, not on earth, but in heaven. We gather also that
Mr. Robertson takes the same indulgent view of Acts, for he frequently
impugns the age of the Pauline epistles and the evidence they contain
on the strength of "Van Manen's thesis of the non-genuineness" of
them. "In point of fact," he writes (p. 453), "Van Manen's whole case
is an argument; Dr. Carpenter's is a simple declaration."
But Van Manen never for a moment questioned the historical reality
of Jesus. What he insisted upon is [26] that
there is no word, nor any trace, of any essential difference as
regards faith and life between Paul and other disciples.... He
is a "disciple" among the "disciples." What he preaches is
substantially nothing else than what their mind and heart are
full of--the things concerning Jesus.
Van Manen, however, allows
that Paul's journeyings, his protracted sojourn outside of
Palestine, his intercourse in foreign parts with converted Jews
and former heathen, may have emancipated him (as it did so many
other Jews of the Dispersion) without his knowing it, more or
less--perhaps in essence completely--from circumcision and other
Jewish religious duties, customs, and rites.
Concerning Paul the same writer says (op. cit., art, "Paul") that
Acts gives us
a variety of narratives concerning him, differing in their dates,
and also in respect of the influences under which they were
written.... With regard to Paul's journeys, we can in strictness
speak with reasonable certainty and with some detail only of
one great journey, which he undertook towards the end of his
life. (Acts xvi, 10-17; xx, 5-15; xxi, 1-18; xxvii, 1-xxviii, 16.)
[Evidence of the we sections of Acts] It is upon Acts, then, that Van
Manen bases his estimate, which we just now cited, of Paul's relations
with the other disciples. He refuses, and rightly, "to assume that
Acts must take a subordinate place in comparison with the principal
epistles of Paul." In effect, his assault on the Pauline Epistles
rests on the assumption that the record of Paul's activity presented
in Acts is the more trustworthy wherever it appears to conflict with
the Pauline Epistles, and in particular with Galatians. In accepting
Van Manen's conclusion, Mr. Robertson implicitly accepts his premises,
one of which is the superior reliability of Acts in general, and in
particular of the four sections enumerated above, and characterized by
the use of the word "we." For the moment, therefore, let us confine
ourselves to the ninety-seven verses of these "we" sections, which
are obviously from the pen of a fellow-traveller of Paul. We find it
recorded in them that Paul was moved by a vision to go and preach the
Gospel [27] in Macedonia; that at Philippi a certain woman named Lydia,
who already worshipped God--i.e., was a heathen converted to Jewish
monotheism--had opened her heart in consequence to give heed to the
things spoken by Paul. We infer that Paul's Gospel supplemented in
some way her monotheism. She and her household became something more
than mere worshippers of God, and were baptized. We learn that Paul
and his companion reckoned time by the Jewish feasts and fasts--e.g.,
by the days of unleavened bread--but at the same time were in the habit
of meeting together with the rest of the faithful on the first day of
the week, in order to break bread and discourse about the faith. At
Tyre, as at Troas, they found "disciples" who, like Paul, arranged
future events, or were warned of them through the Spirit. At Cæsarea,
of Palestine, they stayed with Philip the evangelist, who was one
of the seven, and had four daughters--virgins who did prophesy. They
also met there a certain prophet Agabus, who was a mouthpiece of the
Holy Ghost, and as such foretold that the Jews at Jerusalem, of whose
plots against Paul we elsewhere hear in these sections, would deliver
him into the hands of the Gentiles. Paul, in his turn, declares his
readiness to be bound and die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord
Jesus. they stay with an early disciple from Cyprus, Mnason, and,
on reaching Jerusalem, the brethren received them gladly. And the
day following Paul went in with us unto James; and all the elders
(of the Church) were present. Paul relates to them the facts of his
ministry among the Gentiles. In the course of the final voyage to
Rome, when all the crew have despaired of their lives, because of
the violence of the storm and of the ship leaking, Paul comes to the
rescue, and informs them that the angel of the God whom he served,
and whose he was, had stood by him in the night, saying: "Fear not,
Paul; thou must stand before Cæsar." He therefore could not perish by
shipwreck, nor they either. In Melita the trivial circumstance that
the bite of a viper, promptly shaken off by him into the fire, did
not cause Paul to swell up (i.e., his hand to be inflamed), or die,
caused the barbarians to acclaim him as a god; and in the sequel the
sick in the island flock to him, and are healed. At Puteoli Paul and
his companion find brethren, as they had found them at Jerusalem and
elsewhere; and presently they enter Rome.
In these sections, then, we have glimpses of a brotherhood disseminated
all about the Mediterranean whose members were Monotheists of the
Jewish type, but something besides, in so far as they accepted a
gospel which Paul also preached, about a Lord Jesus Christ; these
brethren solemnly broke bread on the first day of the week. In these
sections we breathe the same atmosphere of personal visions, of angels,
of prophecy, of direct inspiration of individuals by the Holy Ghost,
of the cult of virginity, which we breathe in the rest of Acts and
throughout the Pauline Epistles. [Philip one of the seven] We meet
also with a Philip, an evangelist, and one of the seven. Who were the
seven? We turn to an earlier chapter of Acts, [28] and read that in
the earliest days of the religion at Jerusalem, in order to satisfy
the claims of the widows of Greek Jews who were neglected in the daily
ministration, the twelve apostles had called together the multitude
of the faithful, and chosen seven men of good report, full of the
Spirit and of wisdom to serve the tables, because they, the Twelve,
were too busy preaching the word to attend to the catering of the new
Messianic society. The first on the list of these seven deacons was
Stephen, the second Philip. When, therefore, in the later passage
the fellow-traveller of Paul refers to Philip as one of the seven,
he assumes that we know who the seven were; and he can only expect
us to know it because we have read the earlier chapter which narrates
their appointment. The fellow-traveller of Paul, therefore, was aware
of the appointment of the seven deacons, and testifies thereto. Here
we have irrefragable evidence of the historicity of verses 1-6 of
chapter vi of Acts, and at the same time a strong presumption that the
fellow-traveller of Paul was himself the redactor, if not the author,
of the earlier chapters (i-xv) of Acts, as he is obviously of the
last half (ch. xvi to end); for that last half coheres inseparably
with the contiguous we sections.
[Literary unity of Acts] Have we, then, any way of testing this
presumption that the fellow-traveller who penned these we sections
also penned the rest of Acts? We have, though it is one which can
only appeal to trained philologists, and I doubt if Messrs. Drews and
Robertson are likely to give to such an argument its due weight. The
linguistic evidence of the we sections has been sifted and tested by
Sir John Hawkins in his Horæ Synopticæ. The statistic of words and
phrases cannot lie. It proves that the writer of Acts, and consequently
of the Third Gospel, "was from time to time a companion of Paul in
his travels, and that he simply and naturally wrote in the first
person when narrating events at which he had been present."
This is the best hypothesis which a study of the language of Acts
and of the Third Gospel permits us to accept. I do not say it is
the only possible one, and I expect Mr. Robertson and his pupil,
Dr. Drews, to reject it with scorn, for their philology is of the
sort which recognizes in Maria the same name as Moira and Myrrha. The
only other explanations of the presence of we in these sections are,
either that a compiler who used the diary of the fellow-traveller
left it standing in the document when he embodied it in his narrative,
through carelessness and by accident, or else that he left it of set
design, and because he wished his readers to identify him with the
older reporter, and so to pass for a companion of Paul. The first
of these explanations is very improbable; the second not only much
too subtle, but out of keeping with the babbling, but credulous,
honesty which everywhere shows itself in Acts.
[Van Manen's system of dating Luke and Acts would postpone all
ancient literature to the Middle Ages] It is true that Van Manen
assumes a priori, and without a shadow of proof, that Luke and Acts
were written as late as the period 125-150. His only argument is
that Marcion already had the former in his hands as early as 140;
and he is prone to make the childish assumption that the date of
composition of any book in the New Testament is exactly that of
its earliest ascertainable use by a later author. Such a mode of
reasoning is utterly false and uncritical, and would, if applied in
other fields, prove that the great mass of ancient literature was
not ancient at all, but composed in the tenth or later centuries
to which our earliest MSS. belong; for we have no citations either
in contemporary or in nearly contemporary writers of nine-tenths of
the whole volume of the old Greek and Latin literatures. Most of it,
if we applied Van Manen's canons of evidence (which, of course, are
accepted and improved upon by the three writers I am criticizing),
would turn out to have been written as late as the renaissance of
European learning. It is a fallacious test, and Van Manen would
have shrunk from the paradox of enforcing it in regard to any other
literature than the New Testament. It would appear as if the orthodox
traditionalists, by insisting that the Bible must not be judged and
criticized like other books, have prejudiced not merely their own
cause--that would not matter--but the cause of sober history. They
have invested it with such an atmosphere of mystery and falsetto, with
what I may call a Sunday-school atmosphere, that a certain class of
inquirers rush to an opposite extreme, and insist on canons of evidence
and authenticity which would, if consistently used, eliminate all
ancient literature and history. One form of error provokes the other.
[Ephrem's commentary on Acts] We have examined for their evidence
as regards the Early Church those sections which directly evidence
the hand of a companion of Paul, who was probably Luke the physician,
seeing that tradition was unanimous in ascribing the Third Gospel and
Acts to him. Some scholars have observed that the old Syriac version
cited by Ephrem the Syrian in his commentary [29] on Acts read in Acts
xx, 13, as follows: "But I, Lucas, and those with me, going before
to the ship, set sail for Assos," where the conventional text reads:
"But we, going before." The pronoun we in this passage cannot include,
as it usually does, Paul, who had taken another route and had left
directions that they should call for him; this may have led Ephrem
to substitute the paraphrase I, Lucas, and those with me. Anyhow,
without further evidence, we can hardly use Ephrem's citation as a
proof of the Lucan authorship of Acts. [Evidence of those parts of
Acts which cohere with the we sections] But we must anyhow consider
the evidence as to Paul's beliefs which is to be gathered from the
sections of Acts which immediately cohere with the travel document,
and which clearly depended for their information on a source closely
allied to them and of the same age and provenance. Firstly, then,
it is noticeable that all this last part of Acts is relatively free
from the fabulous details which mar the earlier part descriptive of
the exploits of Peter. Next we note that Paul, on entering a city,
goes straight to the Jewish Synagogue, and that the gospel with which
he undertakes to supplement their monotheism consisted not of tidings
about an ancient Palestinian Sun-god named Joshua, or Dionysus or
Krishna, or Osiris, or Æsculapius, or Mithras, nor about a vegetation
or harvest demon of any kind, nor about any of the other members
of the Christian pandemonium invented by Mr. Robertson and adopted
by Dr. Drews. No; on the contrary, at Thessalonica Paul spent three
sabbaths trying to convince the Jews in their synagogue that Jesus
must have been the Jewish Messiah promised in the Jewish scriptures,
because in accordance with prophecy he had suffered and risen from
the dead. That he taught them, further, that Jesus, qua Christ or
Messiah, was also the Jewish king whose advent they looked for, is
obvious from the fact that he was accused on this occasion, as on
others, of teaching, "contrary to the decrees of Cæsar, that there
was another king, one Jesus." At Corinth Paul found he was wasting
time in trying to persuade the Jews that Jesus was the Messiah whose
advent they expected; and he declared to them that thenceforth he would
devote himself to spreading his good news among the Gentiles. None
the less he persisted, wherever he afterwards went, in going first
to the synagogue, so as to give his compatriots a prior chance of
accepting his spiritual wares, according to the principle enunciated
in his epistles, that the promises were for the Jews first and only
after them for the Gentiles. In Acts xxv, 19, Festus lays before King
Agrippa the case against Paul as he had learned it from the Jewish
priests and elders at Jerusalem. It amounted to this, that Paul
affirmed that "one Jesus, who was dead, was really alive." We learn
in an earlier passage that Paul was a Jew of Tarsus, an adherent
of the Pharisaic sect which believed in a general resurrection of
good Jews, that nevertheless he had persecuted the adherents of
Jesus of Nazareth and connived at the murder of Stephen. He has some
difficulty in convincing the Roman governor of Judæa that he is not
a leader of the Jewish sicarii, or sect of assassins, who were ever
anxious to range themselves on the side of any Messiah ready to show
fight against the Roman Legions. The impression made on Festus, the
Roman Governor, by Paul's prophetic arguments about a Messiah who
had suffered and then risen from the dead was (Acts xxvi, 24) that
"much learning had made him mad." We can discern all through this
last half of Acts that attitude of Paul to Jesus which confronts us
in his epistles. Nothing interests him except his death on the cross
and his resurrection. Of the rest of his career we learn nothing. In
one passage, ch. xiii, 26 foll., we have a slightly more detailed
account of the staple of Paul's teaching, as delivered to the Jews
when he encountered them in their synagogues. He informed them of how
"they that dwell in Jerusalem and their rulers" had condemned Jesus;
"though they found no cause of death in him, yet asked they of Pilate
that he should be slain." They afterwards "took him down from the
tree and laid him in a tomb. But God raised him from the dead: and
he was seen for many days of them that came up with him from Galilee
to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses unto the people."
There is not much of a vegetation-god story about the above concise
narrative, which, however, is strikingly independent of the Gospel
legends concerning the burial and resurrection of Jesus; for,
according to them, it was the friends and adherents of Jesus, and
not the rulers, who condemned him, that were careful to bury him;
and his post-resurrectional appearances are here confined to his
Galilean followers, who, by virtue of their longer association and
intimacy with him, would be more likely than others to see him after
death in dreams and visions.
[Six independent and early documents involve a real Jesus] I have
now reviewed the historical books of the New Testament. We have in
them at least six monuments--to wit, Mark, the non-Marcan document,
the parts of the First and Third Gospels peculiar to their authors,
the Fourth Gospel, and the history of Paul and his mission given in
chapters xiii to xxviii of Acts. Perhaps I ought to add the first
twelve chapters of Acts, of which the information, according to
Van Manen, was derived from an early and lost document, the Acts
of Peter. That would make seven monuments. Unless all philological
analysis is false, the Third Gospel and Acts are from the pen of a
companion of Paul, and cannot be set later than about 90 A.D. Mark,
which he used, must be indefinitely earlier, and I have pointed out
that there are good reasons for setting its date before the year
70. The non-Marcan document, which critics have agreed to call Q
(Quelle), cannot be later than Mark, and is probably much earlier,
judging from the fact that it as yet reported no miracles of Jesus,
nor hints of his death and resurrection. Now all these documents
are independent of one another in style and contents, yet they
all have a common interest--namely, the memory of a historical man
Jesus; and such data as they isolatedly afford about Jesus agree
on the whole as closely as any profane documents ever agreed which,
being written independently and from very different standpoints, yet
refer to one and the same person. If we see a number of convergent
rays of light streaming down under clouds across a widely extended
landscape, we infer a central sun behind the clouds by which they are
all emitted. Similarly, we have here several traditions and documents
which converge on a single man, and are all and severally meaningless,
and their genesis impossible of explanation unless we assume that he
lived. It is sufficiently incredible that one tradition should (to take
the hypothesis of non-historicity in its most rational form--that,
namely, of Professor W. B. Smith) allegorize the myth of a Saviour
God as the career of a man, and that man a Galilean teacher, in whose
humanity the Church believed from the first. That six or seven parallel
traditions should all have hit on the same form of deception and
allegory is, as I said before, as incredible as that several roulette
tables at Monte Carlo should independently and at one and the same
time throw up an identical series of numbers. Credat Judæus Apella,
These writers who develop the thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus
because miracles came to be attributed to him--how could they not in
that age and social medium?--ask us to believe in a miracle which far
outweighs any which any religionists ever reported of their founder;
they themselves have fallen into fathomless depths of credulity.