THE ART OF CRITICISM
[Repudiation by the partisans of non-historicity of Jesus of regular
historical method] Let us pause here and try to frame some ideas of
the methods of this new school which denies that Jesus ever lived:--
Firstly, they are all agreed that the method they would apply to all
other figures in ancient history--for example, to Apollonius--shall
not be used in connection with Jesus. They carelessly deride "the
attempt of historical theologians to reach the historical nucleus of
the Gospels by purely philological means" (The Witnesses, p. 129). "The
process," writes Mr. Robertson, "of testing the Synoptic Gospels down
to an apparent nucleus of primitive narrative" ... "this new position
is one of retreat, and is not permanently tenable" (Christianity and
Mythology, p. 284).
If this be so, we had better abolish our chairs of history at the
universities, and give up teaching it in the schools; for, in the
absence of the camera and gramophone, this method is the only one we
can use. When a Mommsen sets Polybius's, Livy's, and Plutarch's lives
of Hannibal side by side and "tests them down to an apparent nucleus
of primitive narrative," does Mr. Robertson take him as a text for a
disquisition on "the psychological Resistance to Evidence"? If not,
why does he forbid us to take the score or so of independent memories
and records of the career of Jesus which we have in ancient literature
between the years A.D. 50 and 120, and to try to sift them down? Why,
without any evidence, should we rush to the conclusion that the
figure on whom they jointly converge was a Sun-god, solar myth,
or vegetation sprite?
[New Testament literature taken en bloc] Secondly, we may note how
this disinclination to sift sources and test documents prompts them
to take en bloc sources and documents which arose separately and
in succession. Yet it is not simple laziness which dictates to them
this short and easy method of dealing with ancient documents. Rather
they have inherited it from the old-fashioned orthodox teachers of
a hundred years ago, who, convinced of the verbal inspiration of the
Bible, forbade us to estimate one passage as evidence more highly than
another. All the verses of the Bible were on a level, as also all the
incidents, and to argue that one event might have happened, but not
another, was rank blasphemy. All were equally certain, for inspiration
is not given by measure. Their mantle has fallen on Mr. Robertson
and his friends. All or none is their method; but, whereas all was
equally certain, now all is equally myth. "A document," says (p. 159)
the excellent work by MM. Langlois and Seignobos which I cited above,
(still more a literary work) is not all of a piece; it is composed
of a great number of independent statements, any one of which
may be intentionally or unintentionally false, while the others
are bonâ fide and accurate.... It is not, therefore, enough to
examine a document as a whole; each of the statements in it must
be examined separately; criticism is impossible without analysis.
We have beautiful examples of such mixed criticism and analysis in
the commentaries on the Synoptics of Wellhausen and Loisy, both of
them Freethinkers in the best sense of the word.
[Incapacity of this school to understand evolution of Christian ideas,]
I have given several minor examples of the obstinacy with which
the three writers I am criticizing shut their eyes to the gradual
evolution of Christian ideas; they exhibit the same perversity in
respect of the great development of Christological thought already
traceable in the New Testament.
Paul conceived of Jesus as a Jewish teacher elevated through his
death and resurrection to the position of Messiah and Son of God. On
earth he is still a merely human being, born naturally, and subject
to the law--a weak man of flesh. Raised from the dead by the energy
of the Spirit, he becomes future judge of mankind, and his gospel
transcends all distinctions of Jew and Gentile, bondsman or free. In
Mark he is still merely human; he is the son of Joseph and Mary,
born and bred like their other sons and daughters. As a man he
comes to John the Baptist, like others, to confess and repent of
his sins, and wash them away in Jordan's holy stream. Not till then
does the descent of the Spirit on him, as he goes up from the Jordan,
confer a Messiahship on him, which his followers only recognize later
on. Astounding miracles and prodigies, however, are already credited
to him in this our earliest Gospel. In the non-Marcan document, or Q,
so far as we can reconstruct it, he has become Messiah through baptism
(supposing this section to have belonged to Q, and not to some other
document used by Luke and Matthew); but few or no miracles [39]
are as yet credited to him, and the document contained little except
his teaching. His death has none of the importance assigned to it by
Paul, and is not mentioned; his resurrection does not seem to have
been heard of by the author of this document. In Matthew and Luke
the figure before us is much the same as in Mark; but human traits,
such as his mother's distrust of his mission, are effaced. We hear
no more of his inability to heal those who did not believe in him,
and we get in their early chapters hints of his miraculous birth. In
John there is, indeed, no hint of such birth; but, on the other hand,
the entire Gospel is here rewritten to suit a new conception of him as
the divine, eternal Logos. Demonology tales are ruled out. His rôle
as a Jewish Messiah, faithful to the law, has finally retired into
the background, together with that tense expectation of the end of
the world, of the final judgment and installation in Palestine of a
renovated kingdom of David, which inspires the teaching and parables
of the Synoptic Gospels, just as it inspired Philo, and the Apocalypse
of the Fourth Esdras and other contemporary Jewish apocrypha.
[especially in connection with the legend of Virgin Birth,] Now,
in Mr. W. B. Smith's works this development of doctrine about
Jesus, this succession of phases, is not only reversed, but, with
singular perversity, turned upside down. Similarly, Mr. Robertson
and Dr. Drews, in order to secure a favourable reception for their
hypothesis that Jesus was a Sun-god, insist in the teeth of the
evidence that the belief in the Virgin Birth was part and parcel of
the earliest tradition. As a matter of fact, it was comparatively
late, as the heortology or history of the feasts of the Church
shows. Of specially Christian feasts, the first was the Sunday,
which commemorated every week the Resurrection, and the hope of the
Parousia, or Second Coming. The next was the Epiphany, on January 6,
commemorative of the baptism when the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus
and conferred Messiahship.
This feast we cannot trace before the year 125 or 150, and then only
among Basilidians; among Catholics hardly before 300. Just as the story
of the Virgin Birth was the latest addition to evangelical tradition,
so it was the latest of the dominical feasts; and not till 354 did it
obtain separate recognition in Rome on December 25. Of the feast of the
Annunciation and of the other feasts of the Virgin we first hear in the
sixth and succeeding centuries. From this outline we can realize at
how late a period the legend of the Virgin Birth influenced the mind
of the Church at large; yet Mr. Robertson, to smooth the way for his
"mythic" theory, pretends that it was the earliest of all Christian
beliefs, and without a tittle of evidence invents a pre-Christian
Saviour-Sun-god Joshua, born of a virgin, Miriam. The whole monstrous
conception is a preposterous coinage of his brain, a figment unknown to
anyone before himself and bristling with impossibilities. Witness the
following passage (p. 284 of Christianity and Mythology), containing
nearly as many baseless fancies as it contains words:--
The one tenable historic hypothesis left to us at this stage
is that of a preliminary Jesus "B.C.," a vague cult-founder
such as the Jesus ben Pandira of the Talmud, put to death for
(perhaps anti-Judaic) teachings now lost; round whose movement
there might have gradually clustered the survivals of an ancient
solar or other worship of a Babe Joshua son of Miriam.
Such is the gist of the speculations of Messrs. Drews and Robertson,
as far removed from truth and reality as the Athanasian Creed and
from sane criticism as the truculent buffooneries of the Futurists
from genuine art.
We have more than once criticized this tendency of Mr. Robertson to
insist on the primitiveness of the Virgin Birth legend. He urges it
throughout his volume, although here and there he seems to see the
truth, as, e.g., on p. 189, where he remarks that "only the late
Third Gospel tells the story" of Mary and Joseph going to Bethlehem
to be taxed, and "that the narrative in Matthew" was "added late to
the original composition, which obviously began at what is now the
third chapter." If the legend was part of the earliest tradition,
why does it figure for the first time in the late Third Gospel and in
a late addition to the first? In another passage he assures us that
chapters i and ii of Luke are "a late fabulous introduction." Clearly,
his view is that, just in proportion as any part of the Gospels is
late, the tradition it contains must be early; and he it is who talks
about "the methodless subjectivism" of Dr. Pfleiderer, who, he says,
"like Matthew Arnold, accepts what he likes" (p. 450).
[and in connection with Schmiedel's "Pillars"] The same inability to
distinguish what is early from what is late is shown by Mr. Robertson
in his criticism of Dr. Schmiedel's "pillars"--i.e., the nine Gospel
texts (seven of them in Mark)--"which cannot have been invented by
believers in the godhood of Jesus, since they implicitly negate that
godhood." Of these, one is Mark x, 17 ff., where Jesus uses--to one
who had thrown himself at his feet with the words: "Good teacher,
what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" (i.e., life in the kingdom
to come)--the answer: "Why callest thou me good? No one is good,
save one--to wit, God." Here many ancient sources intensify Jesus's
refusal of a predicate which is God's alone; for they run: "Call thou
me not good." This apart, the Second and Third Gospels may be said
to agree in reading, "Good master," and, "Why callest thou me good?"
In Matthew, however (xix, 16), we read as follows: "Behold, one came
to him and said: Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have
eternal life? And he said unto him, Why askest thou me concerning
that which is good? One there is who is good," etc.
Now, it is a result of criticism universally accepted to-day that
Matthew and Luke compiled their Gospels with Mark before them, and
that any reading in which either of them agrees with Mark must be
more original than the discrepant reading of a third. Here Matthew
is the discrepant witness, and he has remodelled the text of Mark to
suit the teaching which had established itself in the Church about
A.D. 100 that Jesus was without sin. He accordingly makes Jesus
reply as a Greek sophist might reply, and not as a Jewish rabbi; and,
by omitting the predicate "good" before teacher, he turns the words,
"One there is who is good," into nonsense. By adding it before "thing"
he creates additional nonsense; for how could any but a good action
merit eternal life? The epithet is here superfluous. Even then, if
we were not sure on other grounds that the Marcan story is the only
source of the Matthæan deformed text, we could be sure that it was,
because in Mark we have simplicity and good sense, whereas in Matthew
we have neither. Mr. Robertson, on an earlier page, has, indeed,
done lip-service to the truth that Mark presents us with the earliest
form of evangelical tradition; but here he betrays the fact that he
has not really understood the position, nor grasped the grounds (set
forth by me in Myth, Magic, and Morals) on which it rests. For he is
ready to sacrifice it the moment it makes havoc of his "mythological"
argument, and writes (p. 443): "On the score of simple likelihood,
which has the stronger claim? Surely the original text in Matthew."
Even if Matthew, Mark, and Luke were rival and independent texts,
instead of the first and third being, as they demonstrably are,
copies and paraphrases of Mark, the best--if not the only--criterion
of originality would be such an agreement of two of them as Mark
and Luke here present against Matthew. Mr. Robertson, with entire
ignoratio elenchi, urges in favour of the originality of Matthew's
variant the circumstance that the oldest MS. sources of that Gospel
reproduce it. How could they fail to do so, supposing it to be due to
the redactor or editor of Mark, who was traditionally, but falsely,
identified with the apostle Matthew? If the reading of Mark be not
original, how came Luke to copy it from him? The most obvious critical
considerations are wasted on Mr. Robertson and his friends.
[Schmiedel on the disbelief of Mary in her son] Dr. Schmiedel again
draws attention to the narrative of how Jesus, at the beginning of his
ministry, was declared by his own household to be out of his senses,
and of how, in consequence, his mother and brethren followed him
in order to put him under restraint. The story offended the first
and third evangelists, and they partly omit it, partly obscure its
drift. The fourth evangelist limits the disbelief to the brethren
of Jesus. The whole narrative is in flagrant antagonism to the Birth
stories in the early chapters of Matthew and Luke, and to the whole
subsequent drift of Church tradition. Being gifted with common sense,
Schmiedel argues that it must be true, because it could never have
been invented. It, anyhow, makes for the historicity of Jesus. What
has Mr. Robertson to say about it? He writes (p. 443): "Why should
such a conception be more alien to Christian consciousness than, say,
the story of the trial, scourging, and crucifixion?" Here he ignores
the point at issue. In Christian tradition, whether early or late,
it was not the mother and brethren of Jesus who tried and scourged and
crucified him, but inimical Jews and pagans. The latter are at no time
related to have received an announcement of his birth from an angel,
as his mother was presently believed to have done. We have, therefore,
every reason for averring that the conception or idea of his being
flouted by his own mother and brethren was a thousand times more alien
to Christian consciousness--at least, any time after A.D. 100--than
that of his being flouted by a Sadducean priesthood and by Roman
governors. Once the legend of the Virgin Birth had grown up, such a
story could not have been either thought of or committed to writing
in a Gospel. It is read in Mark, and must be what we call a bed-rock
tradition. If Mr. Robertson cannot see that, he is hopeless. Did he
not admit (p. 443) that it is "certainly an odd text," so revealing
his inmost misgivings about it, we should think him so.
[Jesus is not deified in the earliest documents, nor do they reveal
a "cult" of him] The same vice of mixing up different phases of the
Christian religion shows itself in the insistence of this school of
critic that it was from the first a cult of a deified Jesus. Thus
Mr. Smith writes (Ecce Deus) as follows (p. 6):--
We affirm that the worship of the one God under the name,
aspect, or person of the Jesus, the Saviour, was the primitive
and indefectible essence of the primitive teaching and propaganda.
On the contrary, in the two basal documents, Mark and Q, no such
worship is discernible. Jesus first comes on the scene as the humble
son of Joseph and Mary to repent of his sins and purge them away
in Baptism; he next takes up the preaching of the imprisoned John,
which was merely that Jews should repent of their sins because the
kingdom of God, involving a dissolution of the existing social and
political order, was at hand. This was no divine rôle, and he is
represented not as God, but only as the servant of God; for such
in the Aramaic dialect of that age was the connotation of the title
"Son of God." In Mark there is no sign of his deification, not even in
the transfiguration scene; for in that he is merely the human Messiah
attended by Elias and Moses. From a hundred early indicia we know that
in the Semitic-speaking churches of the East he remained a human figure
for centuries; and the Syrian Father Aphraat, as late as 336 in Persia,
is careful to explain in his homilies that Jesus was only divine as
Moses was, or as human kings are. It was not till the religion was
diffused in a pagan medium in which gods had children by mortal women
that the gross deification of Jesus emerged. The purport of these
basal documents, moreover, is not to deify Jesus, but to establish as
against the Jews that he was their promised Messiah and the central
figure of the Messianic kingdom he preached. That figure, however,
was never identified with Jehovah, but was only Jehovah's servant,
anointed king and judge of Israel, restorer of Israel's damaged
fortunes, fulfiller of her political ideals and hopes. Mr. Smith
argues that Jesus was deified from the first because his name was
so often invoked in exorcisms. He even makes the suggestion (p. 17)
that the initial letter J of Jesus "must have powerfully suggested
Jehovah to the Jewish consciousness." There is no evidence, and
less likelihood, of any such thing. The name of Jesus was during
his lifetime invoked against demons by exorcists who rejected his
message; just as they used the names of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
so they were ready to exploit his powerful name; but neither Jews nor
Christians ever confounded with Jehovah the names or personalities
they thus invoked; any Jew in virtue of his birth and breeding would
have regarded such a confusion of a man with his God as flat blasphemy.
[Worship of a slain God no part of the earliest Christianity]
Messrs. Robertson and Drews similarly insist that Jesus was from the
first worshipped as a slain God. In the Gospel documents there is
no sign of anything of the sort. It was Paul who first diffused the
idea that the crucified Jesus was a victim slain for the redemption
of human sins. We already have Philo proclaiming that the just man
is the ransom of the many, so that there is no need to go to pagan
circles, no need to go outside the pale of Greek Jews, of whom Paul
was one, for the origin of the idea. He probably found it even in the
teaching of Gamaliel, in which he was brought up. Mark asks no more
of his readers than to attribute the Messiahship--a thoroughly human
rôle--to his hero, Jesus of Nazareth. Nor does Matthew, who seeks
at every turn to prove that the actions of Jesus reported by Mark
were those which, according to the old prophets, a Messiah might be
expected to perform. How can writers who end their record of Jesus by
telling us how in the moment of death he cried, "My God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me?" realizing no doubt that all his expectations
of the advent of God's kingdom were frustrated and set at naught; how,
I say, can such writers have believed that Jesus was Jehovah? The
idea is monstrous. The truth is these writers transport back into
the first age of Christianity the ideas and beliefs of developed
Catholicism, and are resolved that the first shall be last and the last
first. They have no perspective, and no capacity for understanding
the successive phases through which a primitive Messianism, at first
thoroughly monotheistic and exclusively Jewish in outlook and ideals,
gradually evolved itself, with the help of the Logos teaching, into
the Athanasian cult of an eternal and consubstantial Son of God.
[Abuse of the comparative method by this school of writers] Thirdly,
these writers abuse the comparative method. Applied discreetly and
rationally, this method helps us to trace myths and beliefs back
to their homes and earlier forms. Thus M. Emmanuel Cosquin (in
Romania; Paris, 1912) takes the story of the cat and the candle,
and traces out its ramifications in the mediæval literature and
modern folklore of Europe, and outside Europe, in the legends of
the Pendjab, of Cashmir, Bengal, Ceylon, Tibet, Tunisia, Annam,
and elsewhere. But the theme is always sufficiently like itself to
be really recognizable in the various folklore frames in which it
is found encased. The old philologists saw in the most superficial
resemblance of sound a reason for connecting words in different
languages. They never asked themselves how a word got out of Hebrew,
say, into Greek, or out of Greek into Mexican. Volumes were filled
with these haphazard etymologies, and the idea of the classification
of languages into great connected families only slowly made its way
among us in the last century. I have pointed out that in regard to
names Messrs. Drews and Robertson are still in this prephilological
stage of inquiry; as regards myths or stories of incident, they are
wholly immersed in it. [They fit anything on to anything no matter how
ineptly,] They never trouble themselves to make sure that the stories
they connect bear any real resemblance to one another. For example,
what have the Zodiacal signs and the Apostles of Jesus in common
except the number twelve? As if number was not the most superficial
of attributes, the least characteristic and essential. The scene of
the Gospel is laid in Judæa, where from remote antiquity the Jews
had classed themselves in twelve tribes. Is it not more likely that
this suggested the twelve missionaries sent out by Jesus to announce
the coming kingdom than the twelve signs of the Zodiac? Even if the
story of the Twelve be legendary, need we go outside Judaism for our
explanation of its origin?
What, again, have the three Maries in common with the Greek Moirai
except the number three and a delusive community of sound? Yet
Mr. Robertson insists that the three Maries at the tomb of Jesus
were suggested by the Moirai, because these, "as goddesses of birth
and death, naturally figured in many artistic presentations of
religious death scenes." As a matter of fact, the representation of
the Parcae or Fates in connection with death is rare except on Roman
sarcophagi, mostly of later date than the Gospel story. And when
they are so found, they represent, not women bringing spices for
the corpse or mourning for the dead, but the forces, often thought
of as blind and therefore represented as veiled, which govern the
events of the world, including birth, life and death. [and forget
the innate hostility of Jews to Paganism] There was, therefore,
nothing in the Moirai to suggest the three Maries at the tomb; nor
is it credible that the Hebrew Christists, given as they must have
been to monotheism and detesting all statuary, pagan or other, would
have chosen their literary motives from such a source. Where could
they see such statuary in or about Jerusalem? It is notorious that
the very presence of a symbolic eagle used as a military standard
was enough to create an émeute in Jerusalem. The scheme of the
emperor Caligula or Caius to set up his statue in Jerusalem in 39-40
A.D. provoked a movement of revolt throughout Palestine, with which
the Jews of Egypt and elsewhere were in full sympathy. A deputation
headed by Philo of Alexandria went to Rome to supplicate the emperor
not to goad the entire race to frenzy. In the magnificent statues
which surrounded him on the Parthenon hill, Paul could see nothing
but idols, monuments of an age of superstition and ignorance which
God had mercifully overlooked. [40] The hostility of the Jews to all
pagan art and sculpture was as great as that of Mohammedans to-day. Yet
Mr. Robertson asks us to believe (p. 327) that the Gospel myths, as
he assumes them to be, are "evolved from scenes in pagan art." On the
top of that we afterwards learn from him that it was the Jewish high
priest with legalistic leanings that presided over the Christists or
Jesuists. Imagine such a high priest's feelings when he beheld his
"secret society" evolving their system under such an inspiration as
Mr. Robertson outlines in the following canons of criticism:--
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 (p. 305).
Christism borrowed myths of all kinds from paganism (p. xii).
... the whole Christian legend, in its present terminology,
is demonstrably an adaptation of a mass of pre-Christian myths
(p. 136).
What a budget of mutually destructive paradoxes; and to crown them
all Mr. Robertson claims in his introduction (p. xxii) that the method
of his treatise is
in general more "positive," less a priori, more obedient to
scientific canons than that of the previous critics ... who have
reached similar anti-traditionalist results. It substitutes an
anthropological basis, in terms of the concrete phenomena of
mythology, for a pseudo-philosophical presupposition.
[Credulity attends hypercriticism] Fourthly, it is essential to
note the childish, all-embracing, and overwhelming credulity of
these writers. To them applies in its full force the paragraph in
which MM. Langlois and Seignobos describe the perils which beset
hypercriticism (p. 131, op. cit.):--
The excess of criticism, just as much as the crudest ignorance,
leads to error. It consists in the application of critical canons
to cases outside their jurisdiction. It is related to criticism as
logic-chopping is to logic. There are persons who scent enigmas
everywhere, even where there are none. They take perfectly clear
texts and subtilize on them till they make them doubtful, under
the pretext of freeing them from imaginary corruptions. They
discover traces of forgery in authentic documents. A strange
state of mind! By constantly guarding against the instinct of
credulity they come to suspect everything.
For these writers, in their anxiety to be original and new, see fit to
discard every position that earlier historians, like Mommsen, Gibbon,
Bury, Montefiore--not to mention Christian scholars--have accepted
as beyond doubt. Their temper is that of the Bacon-Shakesperians;
and the plainest, simplest, most straightforward texts figure in
their imaginations as a laborious series of charades, rebuses,
and cryptograms. That Jesus never existed is not really the final
conclusion of their researches, but an initial unproved assumption. In
order to get rid of him, they feign, without any evidence of it, a
Jewish secret society under the patronage of the Jewish High Priest,
that existed in Jerusalem well down into the Christian era. This
society kept up the worship of an old Palestinian and Ephraimitic
Sun-god and Saviour, named Joshua, son of a virgin, Miriam. Where is
the proof that such a god was ever heard of in ancient Palestine,
either early or late, or that such a cult ever existed? There is
none. It is the emptiest and wildest of hypotheses; yet we are asked
to accept it in place of the historicity of Jesus. What, again, do
we know of secret societies in Jerusalem? Josephus and Philo knew of
none. For the Therapeutæ, far from affecting secrecy, were anxious
to diffuse their discipline and lore even among the Hellenes, while
the Essenes had nothing secret save the names of the angels they
invoked in spells. They were a well-known sect, and so numerous that
a gate of Jerusalem was called the Essene Gate, because they so often
came in and went forth by it. Were the Pharisees and Sadducees, the
Scribes, or the Sicarii or zealots, secret sects? We know they were
not. But is it likely that a sect composed in the main of Jews, and
patronized, as Mr. Robertson argues, by the High Priest, would have
kept up in the very heart of monotheistic Judaism a cult of Sun-gods
and Vegetation-spirits? Could they there have given themselves up to
the study of pagan statuary, art, and ritual dramas? What possible
connection is there between the naïve picture of Hebrew Messianism
we have in the Synoptic Gospels and the hurly-burly, the tagrag and
bobtail of pagan mythologies which Mr. Robertson and his henchman
Drews rake together pell-mell in their pretentious volumes? How did
all this paganism abut in a Messianic society which reverenced the
Old Testament for its sacred scriptures, which for long frequented the
Jewish Temple, took over the feasts and fasts of Judaism, modelled its
prayers on those of the Synagogue, cherished in its eastern branches
the practice of circumcision?
[Mr. Robertson accepts the historicity of Jesus after all] After
hundreds of pages devoted to the task of evaporating Jesus into
a Solar or Vegetation-god, and all the personages we meet in the
Gospels into zodiacal signs or pagan demigods, Mr. Robertson, as we
have noticed above, finds himself, after all, confronted with the
same personages in Paul's Epistles. There they are too real even for
Mr. Robertson to dissipate them into cloud-forms, and too numerous
to be cut out wholesale. He feels that, if all Paul's allusions to
the crucified Jesus are to be got rid of as interpolations, then
no Pauline Epistles will remain. He cuts out, indeed, all he can,
but there is a residuum of reality. To identify Paul's Jesus with
the Jesus of the Gospels is too humdrum and obvious a course for
him. So common-sense and commonplace a scheme does not suit his
subtle intelligence; moreover, such an identification would upset
the hundreds of pages in which he has proved that Jesus of Nazareth
and all his accessories are literary symbols employed by the Jewish
"Jesuists" to disguise their pagan art and myths. Accordingly, he
asks us to believe that Paul's Jesus is a certain Jesus Ben Pandira,
stoned to death a hundred years earlier. This Jesus is a vague
figure fished up out of the Talmud; but, on examination, we found
Mr. Robertson's choice of him as an alias for Paul's Jesus to be most
unfortunate, for competent Talmudic scholars are agreed that Jesus
Ben Pandira in the Talmud was no other than Jesus of Nazareth in the
Gospels. Jesus most unkindly insists on being in at his own death,
[41] in spite of all Mr. Robertson can say or do; and his house
of cards is crowned with the discovery that the apostles whom Paul
knew--not being identical with the signs of the Zodiac, like those
of the Gospels--were no other than the twelve apostles of the Jewish
High Priest, and that they were the authors of the lately-discovered
"Teaching of the Apostles." He is very contemptuous for other early
Christian books which affect apostolic authorship in their titles,
but falls a ready victim to the relatively late and anonymous editor
of this "teaching," who to give it vogue entitled it "The Teaching of
the Lord by the Twelve Apostles to the Gentiles." "The Jesuist sect,"
he writes (p. 345), "founded on it (the Didaché) the Christian myth
of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus." Everywhere else in his books he
has argued that the "myth" in question was founded on the signs of
the Zodiac. Why give up at the eleventh hour the astral explanation
for an utterly different one? I may add that in the body of the
Didaché the Twelve are nowhere alluded to; that it must be a much
later document than the Gospels and Paulines, since it quotes them in
scores of passages; and that the interpolation of the title, with a
reference to the Twelve Apostles, was a literary trick scarcely older
than the fourth century, long before which age the Pauline account of
the resurrection was cited by a score of Christian writers. Lastly,
we are fain to inquire of Mr. Robertson with whom he identifies "the
Lord" of the above title--with the Jewish High Priest, or with Jesus
Ben Pandira, or with the Sun-God-Saviour Joshua.
[Theory of interpolations] I have given many examples of the tendency
of all these authors to condemn as an interpolation any text which
contradicts their hypotheses. There is only one error worse than that
of treating seriously documents which are no documents at all. It is
that of the man who cannot recognize documents when he has got them. It
is well, of course, to weigh sources, and the critical investigation
of authorship lies at the basis of all true history. But, as the
authors above cited justly remark (p. 99):--
We must not abuse it. The extreme of distrust in these matters is
almost as mischievous as the extreme of credulity. Père Hardouin,
who attributed the works of Virgil and Horace to medieval monks,
was every whit as ridiculous as the victim of Vrain-Lucas. It
is an abuse of the methods of this species of criticism to apply
them, as has been done, indiscriminately, for the mere pleasure
of it. The bunglers who have used this species of criticism
to brand as spurious perfectly genuine documents, such as the
writings of Hroswitha, the Ligurinus, and the bull unam sanctam,
or to establish imaginary filiations between certain annals, on
the strength of superficial indications, would have discredited
criticism before now, if that had been possible.
It is unhappily easier to discredit criticism in the realm of
ecclesiastical than of secular history; and this school of writers
are doing their best to harm the cause of true Rationalism. They
only afford amusement to the obscurantists of orthodoxy, and render
doubly difficult the task of those who seek to win people over to a
common-sense and historical envisagement, unencumbered by tradition
and superstition, of the problems of early Christianity.
[Professor Smith's monotheistic cult] Lastly, it is a fact deserving of
notice that the genesis of Christianity as these authors present it is
much more mysterious and obscure than before. Their explanation needs
explaining. What, we must ask, was the motive and end in view of the
adherents of the pre-Christian Jesus or Joshua in writing the Gospels
and bringing down their God to earth, so humanizing in a story their
divine myth? Let Professor W. B. Smith speak: "What was the essence,
the central idea and active principle, of the cult itself?" Here he
means the cult of the pre-Christian Christ that invented the Gospels
and diffused them on the market place. "To this latter," he continues,
"we answer directly and immediately: It was a Protest against idolatry;
it was a Crusade for monotheism."
And yet he cannot adduce a single text from the Gospels--not even from
the Fourth--which betrays on the part of Jesus, their central figure,
any such crusading spirit. Jesus everywhere assumes his hearers
to be monotheists like himself--he speaks as a Jew to Jews--and
perpetually reminds them of their Father in heaven. Thus Matt. vi,
8: "Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of"; Matt. v, 48:
"Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
The monotheism of those who stood around the teacher is ever taken
for granted by the evangelists, and in all the precepts of Jesus
not one can be adduced that is aimed at the sins of polytheism
and idolatry. His message lies in a far different region. It is the
immediate advent of the Messianic kingdom, and the need of repentance
ere it come. Only when Paul undertakes to bear this message to pagans
outside the pale of Judaism do we get teaching directed against
idolatry; and in his Epistles such precepts have a second place,
the first being reserved to the preaching of the coming kingdom
and of the redemption of the world by the merits of the crucified
and risen Messiah, the man Jesus. Most of Paul's letters read as if
those for whom he wrote them were already proselytes familiar with
the Jewish scriptures.
[His great Oriental cryptogram] Such is Mr. Smith's fundamental
assumption, and it is baseless. On it he bases his next great
hypothesis of "the primitive secrecy of the Jesus cult," which "was
maintained in some measure for many years--for generations even"
(p. 45). "Why," he asks, "was this Jesus cult originally secret, and
expressed in such guarded parabolic terms as made it unintelligible
to the multitude?" The reason lay in the fact that "it was exactly to
save the pagan multitude from idolatry that Jesus came into the world"
(p. 38).
Here the phrase "Jesus came into the world," like all else he did or
suffered, is, of course, to be understood in a Pickwickian sense,
for he never came into the world at all. The Gospels are not only
a romance concocted by "such students of religion as the first
Christians were" (p. 65), and inspired by their study of Plato, [42]
and of the best elements in ancient mythology; they are a romance
throughout--an allegory of a secret pre-Christian Nazarene society
and of its secret cult (p. 34). Of this society, he tells us, we
know nothing; esoterism and cult secrecy were its chief interests;
the "silence of the Christians about it was intentional," [43]
and, except for the special revelation vouchsafed the other day
to Professor W. B. Smith, it would have remained for ever unknown,
and Christianity for ever enigmatic.
In accordance with this postulate of esoterism and cult secrecy among
the pre-Christian Nazarenes, who subsequently revealed themselves to
the world as the Christian Church, though even then they "maintained
for generations the secrecy [44] of their Jesus cult," the Gospels,
as I said, are an allegory or a charade. Their prima facie meaning is
never the true one, never more than symbolic of a moral and spiritual
undersense such as old allegorists like Philo and Origen loved to
discover in the Bible. Thus, as we saw above, when Jesus is reported to
have cast out of the Jews who thronged around him devils of blindness,
deafness, lameness, leprosy, death, what is really intended is that
he argued pagans out of their polytheism. "It was spiritual maladies,
and only spiritual, that he was healing" (p. 38). We ask of Mr. Smith,
why was so much mystification necessary? We are only told that
"it was in the main a prudential measure, well enough justified,
but intended to be only temporary" (p. 39). What exact risks they
were to shun which the sect kept itself secret, and only spake in
far-fetched allegory, Mr. Smith does not inform us. Is he, too,
afraid of being regarded as a "tell-tale" (p. 48)?
[Professor Smith resolves all the New Testament as symbolic and
allegorical] As with the exorcisms, so with all else told of
Jesus. None of it really happened. As he never lived, so he never
died. His human life and death are an allegory of the spiritual cult
and mysteries which the pre-Christian Nazarenes and their descendants,
the Christians, so jealously and for so long guarded in silence. If he
never lived, then he never taught, not even in parables. By consequence
the entire record of his parables, still more of his having chosen
the parable as his medium of instruction in order to veil his real
meaning from his audience, is all moonshine. Here, as elsewhere, the
Gospel text does not mean what it says, but is itself only a Nazarene
parable conveying, or rather concealing, a Nazarene secret--what sort
of secret no one, save Professor Smith, the self-appointed revealer
of their mysterious lore, can tell, and he is silent on the point. On
Mr. Smith's premisses, then, we cannot rely on the Gospels to inform
us of anything historical, and, so far as we can follow him, we must,
if we would discern through them the mind of their Nazarene authors,
take them upside down. We must discern a pagan medium and homilies
against polytheism in discourses addressed to monotheistic Jews who
needed no warnings against idolatry; we must also read the stories
of Jesus healing paralytics and demoniacs as secret and disguised
polemics against idolatry.
[Yet claims, where it suits him, to treat it as historical narrative]
But here mark Professor Smith's inconsistency. Why is he sure that
the Nazarenes, and after them the earliest Christians, were a secret
society with a secret cult? They must have been so, he argues, because
Jesus taught in parables. "The primitive esoterism," he tells us,
"is admittedly present in Mark iv, 11, 12, 33, 34." These verses
begin thus: "And he said unto them, unto you is given the mystery
of the kingdom of heaven: but unto them that are without, all things
are done in parables."
Now, Mr. Smith's postulate is that he--i.e., Jesus of Nazareth--never
lived, and so never said anything to anyone. How, then, can he
appeal to what he said to prove that there was a pre-Christian
Jesus or Joshua sect, itself secret with a cult and ritual which
its members were ever on their guard not to reveal? Surely he drops
here into two assumptions which he has discarded ab initio: first,
that there is a core of real history in the Gospels; and, second,
that the Gospel can mean what it says, and that its Nazarene author
is here not allegorizing, as he usually did.
[His theory contradicts itself] But even if we allow Mr. Smith to break
with his premisses wherever he needs to do so in order to substantiate
them, do these verses of Mark support his hypothesis of a sect which
kept itself, its rites, and its teaching secret? I admit that it was
pretty successful when it veiled its anti-idolatrous teaching under
the outward form of demonological anecdotes, and wrote Jews when it
meant Pagans and Polytheists. But in Mark iv, 34, we are told that
"to his own disciples Jesus privately expounded all things" after he
had with many parables spoken the word to such as "were able to hear
it." It appears, then, that for all their love of secrecy, and in spite
of all their precautions against "tell-tale" writing, the Nazarenes
on occasions went out of their way, in their allegorical romance of
their God Joshua, to inform all who may read it what their parables
and allegories meant; for in it Jesus sits down and expounds to the
reader over some twenty-four verses (verses 10-34) the inner meaning
of the parables which he had just addressed to the multitude. What
on earth were the Nazarenes doing to publish a Gospel like this,
and so let the cat out of the bag? Instead of keeping their secret
they were proclaiming it on the housetops. Again, if the Gospels
are to such an extent merely allegorical, that we must not assume
their authors to have believed that Jesus ever lived, how can we
possibly rely on them for information about such an obscure matter
as a secret and esoteric pre-Christian Nazarene sect? We can only be
sure that the evangelists never under any circumstances meant what
they said; yet Mr. Smith, in defiance of all his postulates, writes,
p. 40, as follows: "On the basis, then, of this passage alone [i.e.,
Mark iv, 10-34] we may confidently affirm the primitive secrecy of
the Jesus cult." Even if the passage rightly yielded the sense he
tries to extort from it, how can we be sure that that sense is not,
like the rest of the Gospel, an allegory of something else?
The other passage of the Gospels, Matthew x, 26, 27, to which,
with like inconsistency, Mr. Smith appeals by way of showing that
the Nazarenes of set purpose hid their light under a bushel, does
not bear the interpretation he puts on it. It runs thus: "Fear them
not therefore: for naught is covered that shall not be revealed,
and hidden that shall not be known. What I tell you in the darkness,
speak ye on the housetops; and what ye hear in the ear, proclaim upon
the housetops."
[Absence of esoterism about Jesus's teaching] The reasonable
interpretation of the above is that Jesus, being in possession, as he
thought, of a special understanding, perhaps revelation, of the true
nature of the Messianic kingdom, and convinced of its near approach,
instructed his immediate disciples in privacy concerning it in order
that they might carry the message up and down the land to the children
of Israel. He therefore exhorts them not to be silent from fear of
the Jews, who accused him of being possessed of a devil, somewhat as
his own mother and brethren accused him of being an exalté and beside
himself. No, they were to cast aside all apprehensions; they must go,
not to the supercilious Pharisees or to the comfortable priests who
battened on the people, still less to Gentiles and Samaritans, who
had no part in the promises made to Israel, but to the lost sheep
of the house of Israel, and they must preach as they went, saying,
The kingdom of heaven is at hand. They were to heal the sick, raise
the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils, and in general give
freely the good tidings which freely they had received from their
Master, and he from John the Baptist. If they so acted, discarding
all timidity, then no human repression, no human time-serving, could
prevent the spread of the good news. What was now hidden from the
poor and ignorant among his compatriots would henceforth, thanks to
the courage and devotedness of his emissaries, be made known to them;
what was now covered, be revealed.
Such is the context of "this remarkable deliverance," as Mr. Smith
terms it; and nothing in all the New Testament savours less than it
does of a secret cult of mysterious sectaries, waiting for Mr. Smith to
manifest their arcana to us twenty centuries later. Here, as everywhere
else in the New Testament, he has discovered a monstrous mare's nest;
has banished the only possible and obvious interpretation, in order
to substitute a chimera of his own.
[It was not a protest against paganism] Mr. Smith credits his
hypothetical pre-Christian Nazarenes with an ambition and anxiety
to purge away the errors of mankind. The "essence, the central idea,
and active principle of the cult itself," he tells us (p. 45), "was
a protest against Idolatry, a crusade for monotheism." "The fact of
the primitive worship of Jesus and the fact of the primitive mission
to all the Gentiles are the two cardinal facts of Proto-Christianity"
(p. xvii). Why on earth, then, in concocting that pronunciamento of
their cult which we call the Gospels, did these Nazarenes represent
the Jesus or Joshua God, even in allegory, as warning his disciples
on no account to disseminate his cult among Gentiles and Samaritans,
but only among Jews, who were notoriously monotheists and bitterly
hostile to every form of idolatry? Why carry coals to Newcastle on
so huge a scale?
[Why turn God Jeshua into a man at all] And granted that the Nazarenes,
in their anxiety to be parabolical and misunderstood of their readers,
wrote Jews when they meant Pagans, was it necessary in the interests
of their monotheistic crusade to nickname their One God Jesus, to
represent him as a man and a carpenter, with brothers and sisters,
and a mother that did not believe in him; as a man who was a Jew with
the prejudices of a Jew, a man circumcised and insisting that he came
not to destroy the law of Moses, but to fulfil it; as a man who was
born like other men of a human father and mother; was crucified, dead
and buried; whose disciples and Galilean companions, when in the first
flush of their grief they heard from Mary Magdalene the strange story
of his first appearing to her after death, still "disbelieved"? [45]
[The comfort of the initial "J"] These Nazarenes were, in their
quality of "students of religion" (p. 65), intent on converting the
world from polytheism. Why, then, did they call their sublime deity
by the name of Jesus? "The word Jesus itself," writes Mr. Smith,
also made special appeal to the Jewish consciousness, for it
was practically identical with their own Jeshua, now understood
by most to mean strictly Jah-help, but easily confounded with a
similar J'shu'ah, meaning Deliverance, Saviour, Witness, Matthew
i, 21. Moreover, the initial letter J, so often representing Jah
in Hebrew words, must have powerfully suggested Jehovah to the
Jewish consciousness.
But what Jew of the first century, however fond of the tales about
Joshua which he read in his scriptures, was ever minded to substitute
his name for that of Jehovah merely because it began with a J and has
been explained by twentieth-century Hebraists as meaning Jah-help? The
idea is exquisitely humorous. While they were about it why did the
Nazarenes not adopt the name Immanuel, which in that allegorical
romance (which from Mr. Smith we know to be the character of Matthew's
Gospel) they fished up out of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah? If Jehovah
was not good enough for them, Immanuel was surely better than the
name Jeshua, with its associations of pillage and murder. But apart
from these considerations, as the name Jeshua is Hebrew, it follows
that the secret sectaries who had this cult must have been of a Jewish
cast. But, if so, what Jew, we ask, ever heard of a God called Jeshua
or Joshua? As I have already pointed out, the very memory of such a
God, if there ever was one, perished long before the Book of Joshua
could have been written. Like the gods Daoud and Joseph, with whom
writers of this class seek to conjure our wits out of our heads,
a god Joshua is a mere preposterous superfetation of a disordered
imagination. "There were abundant reasons," writes Mr. Smith (p. 16),
why the name Jesus should be the Aaron's rod to swallow up all
other designations. Its meaning, which was felt to be Saviour,
was grand, comforting, uplifting. The notion of the world-Saviour
thrust its roots into the loam of the remotest antiquity.
[Supposed confusion of Jesus with iesomai] One regrets to have to
criticize such dithyrambic outpourings of Mr. Smith's heart. But,
granted there was a widespread expectation, such as Suetonius records,
of Messiahs who were to issue from Judæa and conquer all the world,
who ever heard of the name Joshua being assigned in advance to one of
them? Who ever in that age felt the name Jesus to be grand, comforting,
uplifting? Is not Mr. Smith attributing his own feelings, as he sat
in a Sunday school, to Jews and Gentiles of the first century? I
add Gentiles, for he pretends that the name Jesus appealed to the
Greek consciousness also as a derivative of the Ionic future Iêsomai
iesomai = I will heal. Now what Christian writer ever made this
rapprochement? Not a single one. Surely, if we are minded to argue
the man Jesus out of existence, we ought to have a vera causa to put
in his place, a belief, or, if we like it better, a myth which was
really believed, and is known to have entered deeply into the lives
and consciences of men? It is true that the idea of a Messiah did so
enter, but not in the form in which Mr. Smith loves to conceive it. The
Messiah was such a human figure as Suetonius had heard of; he was a man
who should, as we read in Acts, restore the kingdom of David. "Lord,
dost Thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" is the question
the apostles are said (Acts i, 7) to have put to Jesus as soon as his
apparitions before them had revived the Messianic hopes which his
death had so woefully dashed. The incident is probably apocryphal,
yet its presence in the narrative illustrates what a Messiah was then
expected by Christians to achieve. Judas Maccabæus, Cyrus, Bar Cochba,
Judas of Galilee--these and other heroes of Israel had the quality
of Messiahs. They were all men, and not myths. The suggestion, then,
that the name Jesus was one to conjure with is idle and baseless; and
if his name had been Obadiah or Nathaniel, Professor Smith would have
been equally ready to prove that these were attractive names, bound to
triumph and "swallow up all other designations." He only pitches on
the name of Jesus for his pre-Christian Saviour-god because he finds
it in the Gospels; but inasmuch as he sees in them mere allegorical
romances, entirely unhistorical and having no root in facts, there
is no reason for adopting from them one name more than another. How
does he know that the appellation Jesus is not as much of a Nazarene
fiction as he holds every other name and person and incident to be
which the Gospels contain? Is it not more probable that this highly
secretive sect, with their horror of "tell-tale," would keep secret
the name of their Saviour-god, as the Essenes kept secret the names
of their patron angels? The truth is, even Mr. Smith cannot quite
divest himself of the idea that there is some historical basis for
the Gospels; otherwise he would not have turned to them for the name
of his Saviour-god.
[Mr. Smith denies all historicity to Acts and Epistles] More
consistently, however, than Mr. Robertson, Professor Smith denies
that there are any allusions to the real Jesus in the rest of
the New Testament. The Acts and Epistles do not, he says (p. 23),
"recognize at all the life of Jesus as a man," though "their general
tenour gives great value to the death of Jesus as a God." This is a
new reading of the documents in question, for the Pauline conviction
was that Jesus had been crucified and died as a man, and, being
raised up from death by the Spirit, had been promoted to be, what he
was antenatally, a super-human or angelic figure [46]--a Christ or
Messiah, who was to come again on earth and judge mankind. Of his mere
humanity while on this earth, and as long as he was associating with
human disciples, Paul entertained no doubts. How could he, inasmuch
as he had stayed with them at Jerusalem? Mr. Robertson, as we saw,
although he dissipates Jesus in the Gospels into a Sun-God-Saviour
Joshua, nevertheless is so impressed by the Pauline "references to a
crucified Jesus" (p. 364) that he resuscitates Jesus Ben Pandira out of
the limbo of the Talmud. Perhaps he strains at a gnat after swallowing
a camel. Anyhow, I will leave Mr. Smith to settle accounts with him,
and turn to a fresh point, which has not occurred to either of them.
[Contrast of Christian belief in Jesus with cult of Adonis or Osiris]
It is this. Adonis and Osiris were never regarded by their votaries
as having been human beings that had recently lived and died on the
face of this earth. The Christians, in strong contrast with them
and with all other pagans ever heard of, did so regard Jesus from
first to last. Why so, when they knew that from the first he was a
God and up in heaven? Why has the fact of his unreality, as these
writers argue it, left no trace of itself in Christian tradition and
literature? According to this new school of critics, the Nazarenes,
when they wrote down the Gospels, knew perfectly well that Jesus was
a figment, and had never lived at all. And yet we never get a hint
that he was only a myth, and that the New Testament is a gigantic
fumisterie. Why so? Why from the very first did the followers of
Jesus entertain what Mr. Smith denounces as "an a priori concept of
the Jesus" (p. 35)? Why, in other words, were they convinced from the
beginning that he was a man of flesh and blood, who had lived on earth
among them? The "early secrecy," the "esoterism of the primitive cult"
(p. 39), says Mr. Smith, "was intended to be only temporary." If
so, why could not the Nazarenes, primarily interested as they were,
not in lies and bogus, but in disseminating their lofty monotheism,
have thrown off the disguise some time or other, and explained to
their spiritual children that the intensely concrete life of Jesus
which they had published in our Gospel of Mark meant nothing; that
it was all an allegory, and no more, of a Saviour-god, who had never
existed as a human being, nor even as the docetic phantasmagoria of the
Gnostic? "Something sealed the lips of that (Nazarene) evangelist,"
and the Nazarenes have kept their secret so well through the ages
that it has been reserved for Mr. Smith first to pierce the veil
and unlock their mystery. He it is who has at last discovered that
"in proto-Mark we behold the manifest God" (p. 24).
Now what possessed the Nazarenes so firmly to impose on the world
through the Gospels an erroneous view of their God, that for 2,000
years not only their spiritual offspring, the Christians, but Jews
and pagans as well, have believed him to have lived on earth, a man
of flesh and blood and of like passions with themselves? Was the
deception necessary? The votaries of Osiris and Adonis were never so
tricked. The adherents of the Augustalian cult, the pious Greeks and
Syrians who thronged to be healed of their diseases at the shrines
of Apollonius, believed, of course, that their patron saints and
gods had lived, prior to their apotheosis, upon earth; and so they
had. But a follower of Osiris or Æsculapius would have opened his
eyes wide with astonishment if you asked him to believe that his
Saviour had died only the other day in Judæa. Not so a Christian;
for the Nazarene monotheists had so thoroughly fooled him with their
Gospels that he was ready to supply you with dates and pedigrees and
all sorts of other details about his Saviour's personal history. And
yet all the time, had he only known it, his religion laboured under the
same initial disadvantage as the cult of Osiris or Æsculapius--that,
namely, of its founder never having lived at all. What, then, did
"such students of religion, as the first Christians were" (Ecce Deus,
p. 65), imagine was to be gained by hood-winking their descendants
for the long centuries which have intervened between them and the
advent of Professor W. B. Smith?