DR. JENSEN
[Babylonian influence on Greek religion slight;] The three writers
whose views I have so far considered agree in denying that Jesus was
a real historical personage; but their agreement extends no further,
for the Jesus legend is the precipitate, according to Professor
W. B. Smith, of a monotheistic propaganda; according to Mr. Robertson,
of a movement mainly idolatrous, polytheistic, and pagan. There exists
in Germany, however, a third school of denial, which sees in the Jesus
story a duplicate of the ancient Babylonian Gilgamesch legend. The
more extreme writers of this school have endeavoured to show that not
only the Hebrews, but the Greeks as well, derived their religious
myths and rites from ancient Babylon; and their general hypothesis
has on that account been nicknamed Pan-Babylonismus. This is not
the place to criticize the use made of old Babylonian mythology in
explanation of old Greek religion, though I do well to point out that
the best students of the latter--for example, Dr. Farnell--confine
the indebtedness of the Greeks to very narrow limits.
[on Hebrew religion more important;] The case of the Hebrew scriptures
and religion stands on different ground; for the Jews were Semites,
and their myths of creation and of the origin and early history
of man are, by the admission even of orthodox divines of to-day,
largely borrowed from the more ancient civilization of Babylon. Thus
Heinrich Zimmern (art. "Deluge," in Encyclopædia Biblica) writes: "Of
all the parallel traditions of a deluge, the Babylonian is undeniably
the most important, because the points of contact between it and
the Hebrew story are so striking that the view of the dependence of
one of the two on the other is directly suggested even to the most
cautious of students."
[yet a Jew may have possessed some imagination of his own] This
undoubted occurrence of Babylonian myths in the Book of Genesis has
provided some less critical and cautious cuneiform scholars with
a clue, as they imagine, to the entire contents of the Bible from
beginning to end. It is as if the Jews, all through their literary
history of a thousand years, could not possibly have invented any
myths of their own, still less have picked a few up elsewhere than in
Babylon. Accordingly, in a volume of 1,030 enormous pages, P. Jensen
has undertaken to show [47] that the New Testament, no less than
the Old, was derived from this single well-spring. Moses and Aaron,
Joshua, Jeroboam, Rehoboam, Hadad, Jacob and Esau, Saul, David and
Jonathan, Joseph and his brethren, Potiphar, Rachel and Leah, Laban,
Zipporah, Miriam sister of Moses, Dinah, Simeon and Levi, Jethro and
the Gibeonites and Sichemites, Sarah and Hagar, [Gilgamesch, Eabani,
and the holy harlot, protagonists of the entire Old Testament] Abraham
and Isaac, Samson, Uriah and Nathan, Naboth, Elijah and Elisha, Naaman,
Benhadad and Hazael, Gideon, Jerubbaal, Abimelech, Jephthah, Tobit,
Jehu, and pretty well any other personage in the Old Testament,
are duplicates, according to him, of Gilgamesch or his companion
the shepherd Eabani (son of Ea), or of the Hierodule or sacred
prostitute, and of a few more leading figures in the Babylonian
epic. There is hardly a story in the whole of Jewish literature
which is not, according to Jensen, an echo of the Gilgamesch legend;
and every personage, every incident, is freely manipulated to make
them fit this Procrustean bed. No combinations of elements separated
in the Biblical texts, no separations of elements united therein,
no recasting of the fabric of a narrative, no modifications of
any kind, are so violent as to deter Dr. Jensen. At the top of
every page is an abstract of its argument, usually of this type:
"Der Hirte Eabani, die Hierodule und Gilgamesch. Der Hirte Moses,
sein Weib und Aaron." In other words, as Moses was one shepherd and
Eabani another, Moses is no other than Eabani. As there is a sacred
prostitute in the Gilgamesch story, and a wife in the legend of Moses,
therefore wife and prostitute are one and the same. As Gilgamesch was
companion of Eabani, and Aaron of Moses, therefore Aaron was an alias
of Gilgamesch. Dr. Jensen is quite content with points of contact
between the stories so few and slight as the above, and pursues this
sort of loose argument over a thousand pages. Here is another such
rubric: "Simson-Gilgamesch's Leiche und Saul-Gilgamesch's Gebeine
wieder ausgegraben, Elisa-Gilgamesch's Grab geöffnet." In other words,
Simson, or Samson, left a corpse behind him (who does not?); Saul's
bones were piously looked after by the Jabeshites; Elisha's bones
raised a dead Moabite by mere contact to fresh life. These three
figures are, therefore, ultimately one, and that one is Gilgamesch;
and their three stories, which have no discernible features in common,
are so many disguises of the Gilgamesch epos.
[as also of the entire New Testament] But Dr. Jensen transcends himself
in the New Testament. "The Jesus-saga," he informs us (p. 933), "as
it meets us in the Synoptic Gospels, and equally as it meets us in
John's Gospel, stands out among all the other Gilgamesch Sagas which
we have so far (i.e., in the Old Testament) expounded, in that it not
merely follows up the main body of the Saga with sundry fragments of
it, like so many stragglers, but sets before us a long series of bits
of it arranged in the original order almost undisturbed." [48]
And he waxes eloquent about the delusions and ignorance of Christians,
who for 2,000 years have been erecting churches and cathedrals in
honour of a Jesus of Nazareth, who all the time was a mere alias
of Gilgamesch.
[John--Eabani] Let us, then, test some of the arguments by which this
remarkable conclusion is reached. Let us begin with John the Baptist
(p. 811). John was a prophet, who appeared east of the Jordan. So was
Elias or Elijah. Elijah was a hairy man, and John wore a raiment of
camel's-hair; both of them wore leather girdles.
Now, in the Gilgamesch story, Eabani is covered with hair all over
his body (p. 579--"am ganzen Leibe mit Haaren bedeckt ist"). Eabani
(p. 818) is a hairy man, and presumably was clad in skins ("ist
ein haariger Mann und vermutlich mit Fellen bekleidet"). Dr. Jensen
concludes from this that John and Elijah are both of them, equally
and independently, duplicates or understudies of Eabani. It never
occurs to him that in the desert camel's-hair was a handy material
out of which to make a coat, as also leather to make girdles of,
and that desert prophets in any story whatever would inevitably
be represented as clad in such a manner. He has, indeed, heard of
Jo. Weiss's suggestion that Luke had read the LXX, and modelled his
picture of John the Baptist on Elijah; but he rejects the suggestion,
for he feels--and rightly--that to make any such admissions must
compromise his main theory, which is that the old Babylonian epic was
the only source of the evangelists. No (he writes), John's girdle,
like Elijah's, came straight out of the Saga ("wohl durch die Sage
bedingt ist"). Nor (he adds) can Luke's story of Sarah and Zechariah
be modelled on Old Testament examples, as critics have argued. On the
contrary, it is a fresh reflex of Gilgamesch ("ein neuer Reflex"),
an independent sidelight cast by the central Babylonian orb ("ein
neues Seitenstück"), and is copied direct. We must not give in to the
suggestion thrown out by modern critics that it is a later addition
to the original evangelical tradition. Far from that being so, it must
be regarded as an integral and original constituent in the Jesus-saga
("So wird man zugestehen müssen, dass sie keine Zugabe, sondern ein
integrierender Urbestandteil der Jesus-sage ist").
[Jesus--Gilgamesch] From this and many similar passages we realize that
the view that Jesus never lived, but was a mere reflex of Gilgamesch,
is not, in Jensen's mind, a conclusion to be proved, but a dogma
assumed as the basis of all argument, a dogma to which we must adjust
all our methods of inquiry. To admit any other sources of the Gospel
story, let alone historical facts, would be to infringe the exclusive
apriority, as a source, of the Babylonian epic; and that is why we are
not allowed to argue up to the latter, but only down from it. If for
a moment he is ready to admit that Old Testament narrative coloured
Luke's birth-story, and that (for example) the angel's visit in the
first chapter of Luke was suggested by the thirteenth chapter of
Judges, he speedily takes back the admission. Such an assumption is
not necessary ("allein nötig ist ein solche Annahme nicht").
"So much," he writes (p. 818),
of John's person alone. Let us now pursue the Jesus Saga further.
In the Gilgamesch Epic it is related how the Hunter marched
out to Eabani with the holy prostitute, how Eabani enjoyed her,
and afterwards proceeded with her to Erech, where, directly or in
his honour, a festival was held; how he there attached himself to
Gilgamesch, and how kingly honours were by the latter awarded to
him. We must by now in a general way assume on the part of our
readers a knowledge of how these events meet us over again in
the Sagas of the Old Testament. In the numerous Gilgamesch Sagas,
then [of the Old Testament], we found again this rencounter with
the holy prostitute. And yet we seek it in vain in the three
first Gospels in the exact context where we should find it on
the supposition that they must embody a Gilgamesch Saga--that
is to say, immediately subsequent to John's emergence in the
desert. Equally little do we find in this context any reflex of
Eabani's entry into the city of Erech, all agog at the moment
with a festival. On the other hand, we definitely find in its
original position an echo of Gilgamesch's meeting with Eabani. [49]
[Evangelists borrowed their saga from Gilgamesch epos alone] Let us
pause a moment and take stock of the above. In the epic two heroes
meet each other in a desert. John and Jesus also meet in a desert;
therefore, so argues Jensen, John and Jesus are reproductions of the
heroes in question, and neither of them ever lived. It matters nothing
that neither John nor Jesus was a Nimrod. This encounter of Gilgamesch
and Eabani was, as Jensen reminds us, the model of every Old Testament
story in which two males happen to meet in a desert; therefore it must
have been the model of the evangelists also when they concocted their
story of John and Jesus meeting in the wilderness. But how about the
prostitute; and how about the entry into Erech? How are these lacunæ
of the Gospel story to be filled in? Jensen's solution is remarkable;
he finds the encounter with the prostitute to have been the model on
which the fourth evangelist contrived his story of Jesus's visit to
Martha and Mary. For that evangelist, like the synoptical ones, had
the Gilgamesch Saga stored all ready in his escritoire, and finding
that his predecessors had omitted the prostitute he hastened to fill
up the lacuna, and doubled her into Martha and Mary. In this and many
other respects, so we are assured by Jensen, the fourth evangelist
reproduces the Gilgamesch epic more fully and systematically than
the other evangelists, and on that account we must assign to John's
setting of the life of Christ a certain preference and priority. He
is truer to the only source there was for any of it. The other lacuna
of the Synoptic Gospels is the feasting in Erech and Eabani's entry
amid general feasting into that city. The corresponding episode in
the Gospels, we are assured, is the triumphant entry of Jesus into
Jerusalem, which the Fourth Gospel, again hitting the right nail on
the head, sets at the beginning of Jesus's ministry, and not at its
end. But what, we still ask, is the Gospel counterpart to the honours
heaped by Gilgamesch on Eabani? How dull we are! "The baptism of
Jesus by John must, apart from other considerations, have arisen out
of the fact that Eabani, after his arrival at Gilgamesch's palace,
is by him allotted kingly honours." [50]
So then Eabani, who as a hairy man was John the Baptist, is now, by a
turn of Jensen's kaleidoscope, metamorphosed into Jesus, for it is John
who did Jesus the honour of baptizing him. Conversely, Gilgamesch,
who began as Jesus, is now suddenly turned into John. In fact,
Jesus-Gilgamesch and John-Eabani have suddenly changed places with one
another, in accordance, I suppose, with the rule of interpretation,
somewhere laid down by Hugo Winckler, that in astral myths one hero
is apt to swop with another, not only his stage properties, but his
personality. But fresh surprises are in store for Jensen's readers.
Over scores of pages he has argued that John the Baptist is no other
than Eabani, because he so faithfully fulfils over again the rôle of
the Eabanis we meet with in the Old Testament. For example, according
to Luke (i, 15, and vii, 33) John drinks no wine, and is, therefore,
a Nazirean, who eschews wine and forbears to cut his hair. Therein
he resembles Joseph-Eabani, and Simson-Eabani, and Samuel-Eabani,
and also Absolom, who, as an Eabani, had at least an upper growth
of hair. And as the Eabani of the Epic, with the long head-hair of a
woman, drinks water along with the wild beasts in the desert, and as
Eabani, in company with these beasts, feeds on grass and herbs alone,
so, at any rate according to Luke, John ate no bread. [51]
Imagine the reader's consternation when, after these convincing
demonstrations of John's identity with Eabani, and of his consequent
non-historicity, he finds him a hundred pages later on altogether
eliminated, as from the Gilgamesch Epic, so from the Gospel. For
the difficulty suddenly arises before Dr. Jensen's mind that John
the Baptist, being mentioned by Josephus, must after all have really
lived; but if he lived, then he cannot have been a mere reflex of
Eabani. Had he only consulted Dr. Drews's work on the Witnesses to
the Historicity of Jesus (English translation, p. 190), he would have
known that "the John of the Gospels" is no other than "the Babylonian
Oannes, Joannes, or Hanni, the curiously-shaped creature, half fish
and half man, who, according to Berosus, was the first law-giver and
inventor of letters and founder of civilization, and who rose every
morning from the waves of the Red Sea in order to instruct men as to
his real spiritual nature."
Why could not Dr. Jensen consult Dr. Drews "as to the real spiritual
nature" of John the Baptist? Why not consult Mr. Robertson, who
overwhelms Josephus's inconvenient testimony to the reality of John
the Baptist (in 18 Antiq., v, § 2) with the customary "suspicion
of interpolation." Poor Dr. Jensen lacks their resourcefulness, and
is able to discover no other way out of his impasse than to suppose
that it was originally Lazarus and not John that had a place in his
Gilgamesch Epic, and that some ill-natured editor of the Gospels,
for reasons he alone can divine, everywhere struck out the name
of Lazarus, and inserted in place of it that of John the Baptist,
which he found in the works of Josephus. Such are the possibilities
of Gospel redaction as Jensen understands them.
One more example of Dr. Jensen's system. In the Gospel, Jesus,
finding himself on one occasion surrounded by a larger throng of
people than was desirable, took a boat in order to get away from them,
and passed across the lake on the shore of which he had been preaching
and ministering to the sick. The incident is a commonplace one enough,
but nothing is too slight and unimportant for Dr. Jensen to detect in
it a Gilgamesch parallel, and accordingly he writes thus of it: "As
for Xisuthros, so for Jesus, a boat is lying ready, and like Xisuthros
and Jonas, Jesus 'flees' in a boat." [52] Xisuthros, I may remind the
reader, is the name of the flood-hero in Berosus. Hardly a single one
of the parallels which crowd the thousand pages of Dr. Jensen is less
flimsy than the above. Without doing more violence to texts and to
probabilities, one could prove that Achilles and Patroclus and Helen,
Æneas and Achates and Dido, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and Dulcinea,
were all of them so many understudies of Gilgamesch, Eabani and his
temple slave; and we almost expect to find such a demonstration in
his promised second volume.
I cannot but think that my readers will resent any further specimens
of Dr. Jensen's system. He has not troubled himself to acquire
the merest a b c of modern textual criticism. He has no sense of
the differences of idea and style which divide the Fourth from the
earlier Gospels, and he lacks all insight into the development of the
Gospel tradition. He takes Christian documents out of their historical
context, and ignores their dependence on the Judaism of the period
B.C. 100 to A.D. 100. He has no understanding of the prophetic,
Messianic and Apocalyptic aspects of early Christianity, no sense
of its intimate relations with the beliefs and opinions which lie
before us in apocryphs like the Book of Enoch, the Fourth Esdras,
the Ascent of Isaiah, the Testaments of the Patriarchs. He has never
learned that in the four Gospels he has before him successive stages
or layers of stratification of Christian tradition, and he accordingly
treats them as a single literary block, of which every part is of the
same age and evidential value. Like his Gilgamesch Epic the Gospels,
for all he knows about them, might have been dug up only yesterday
among the sands of Mesopotamia, instead of being the work of a sect
with which, as early as the end of the first century, we are fairly
well acquainted. Never once does he ask himself how the authors of
the New Testament came to have the Gilgamesch Epic at the tips of
their tongues, exactly in the form in which he translates it from
Babylonian tablets incised 2,000 years before Christ? By what channels
did it reach them? Why were they at such pains to transform it into
the story of a Galilean Messiah crucified by the Roman Governor of
Judæa? And as Paul and Peter, like everyone else named in the book,
are duplicates of Gilgamesch and Eabani, where are we to draw the
line of intersection between heaven and earth; where fix the year in
which the early Christians ceased to be myths and became mere men and
women? This is a point it equally behoves Dr. Drews and Mr. Robertson
and Professor W. B. Smith to clear up our doubts about.
EPILOGUE
Of the books passed in review in the preceding pages, as of several
others couched in the same vein and recently published in England
and Germany, perhaps the best that can be said is this, that, at any
rate, they are untrammelled by orthodox prejudice, and fearlessly
written. That they belong, so to speak, to the extreme left,
explains the favour with which they are received by that section
of the middle-class reading public which has conceived a desire
to learn something of the origins of Christianity. Unschooled in
the criticism of documents, such readers have learned in the school
Bible-lesson and in the long hours of instruction in what is called
Divinity, to regard the Bible as they regard no other collection
of ancient writings. It is, as a rule, the only ancient book they
ever opened. They have discovered that orthodoxy depends for its
life on treating it as a book apart, not to be submitted to ordinary
tests, not to be sifted and examined, as we have learned from Hume
and Niebuhr, Gibbon and Grote, to sift ancient documents in general,
rejecting ab initio the supernatural myths that are never absent from
them. The acuter minds among the clergy themselves begin nowadays to
realize that the battle of Freethought and Rationalism is won as far
as the miracles of the Old Testament are concerned; but as regards
those of the New they are for ever trying to close up their ranks and
rally their hosts afresh. Nevertheless, the man in the street has
a shrewd suspicion that apologetics are so much special pleading,
and that miracles cannot be eliminated from the Old and yet remain
in the New Testament. He has never received any training in methods
of historical research himself, and it is no easy thing to obtain;
but he is clever enough to detect the evasions of apologists, and,
with instinctive revulsion, turns away to writers who "go the whole
hog" and argue for the most extreme positions, even to the length of
asserting that the story of Jesus is a myth from beginning to end. Any
narratives, he thinks, that have the germs of truth in them would not
need the apologetic prefaces and commentaries, the humming and hawing,
the specious arguments and wire-drawn distinctions of divines, any
more than do Froissart or Clarendon or Herodotus. If the New Testament
needs them, then it must be a mass of fable from end to end. Such is
the impression which our modern apologists leave on the mind of the
ordinary man.
I can imagine some of my readers objecting here that, whereas I have so
rudely assailed the method of interpretation of New Testament documents
adopted by the Nihilistic school--I only use this name as a convenient
label for those who deny the historical reality of Jesus Christ--I
nevertheless propound no rival method of my own. The truth is there
is no abstract method of using documents relating to the past, and you
cannot in advance lay down rules for doing so. You can only learn how
to deal with them by practice, and it is one of the chief functions
of any university or place of higher education to imbue students with
historical method by setting before them the original documents, and
inspiring them to extract from them whatever solid results they can. A
hundred years ago the better men in the college of Christchurch at
Oxford were so trained by the dean, Cyril Jackson, who would set them
the task of "preparing for examination the whole of Livy and Polybius,
thoroughly read and studied in all their comparative bearings." [53]
No better curriculum, indeed, could be devised for strengthening
and developing the faculty of historical judgment; and the schools
of Literae Humaniores and Modern History, which were subsequently
established at Oxford, carried on the tradition of this enlightened
educationalist. In them the student is brought face to face in the
original dialects with the records of the past, and stimulated to
"read and study them in their comparative bearings." One single branch
of learning, however, has been treated apart in the universities of
Oxford and Cambridge, and pursued along the lines of tradition and
authority--I mean the study of Christian antiquities. The result has
been deplorable. Intellectually-minded Englishmen have turned away from
this field of history as from something tainted, and barely one of our
great historians in a century deems it worthy of his notice. It has
been left to parsons, to men who have never learned to swim, because
they have never had enough courage to venture into deep water. As we
sow, so we reap. The English Church is probably the most enlightened
of the many sects that make up Christendom. Yet what is the treatment
which it accords to any member of itself who has the courage to
dissociate himself from the "orthodoxy" of the fourth century, of
those Greek Fathers (so-called) in whom the human intelligence sank
to the nadir of fanaticism and futility? An example was recently seen
in the case of the Rev. Mr. W. H. Thompson, a young theological tutor
of Magdalen College in Oxford, who, animated by nothing but loyalty
for the Church, recently liberated his soul about the miracles of
the Gospels in a thoroughly scholarly book entitled Miracles in the
New Testament. The attitude of the clergy in general towards a work
of genuine research, which sets truth above traditional orthodoxy,
was revealed in a conference of the clergy of the southern province,
held soon after its publication on May 19, 1911. The following account
of that meeting is taken from the Guardian of May 26, 1911:--
The Rev. R. F. Bevan, in the Canterbury Diocesan Conference on
May 19, 1911, proposed "that this Conference is of opinion that
the clergy should make use of the light thrown on the Bible by
modern criticism for the purposes of religious teaching." The
Bishop of Croydon moved the following rider: "But desires to
record its distrust of critics who, while holding office in the
Church of Christ, propound views inconsistent with the doctrines
laid down in the creeds of the Church."
He said it was needful to define what was meant by modern
criticism. He referred to a book which had been published quite
lately by the Dean of Divinity of Magdalen College, Oxford, a
review of which would be found in the Guardian of May 12. He must
honestly confess he had not read the book for himself.... He then
premised from the review that the work in question rejects the
evidence both for the Virgin Birth of Christ and for his bodily
Resurrection from the tomb ..., and added that the toleration by
Churchmen of such doctrines and such views being taught within the
bosom of the Church was to him most sad and inexplicable. If such
was the instruction which young Divinity students were receiving
at the universities, no wonder that the supply of candidates for
ordination was falling off.
The Rev. J. O. Bevan said it was not in the power of any man or
any body of men to ignore the Higher Criticism or to suppress
it. It had "come to stay," and its influence for good or evil
must be recognized.
The President (Archbishop of Canterbury) said that "Bible teaching
ought to be given with a background of knowledge on the part of the
teacher. He should deprecate as strongly as anybody that men who
felt that they could not honestly continue to hold the Christian
creeds should hold office in the Church of England. But he saw
no connection between the sort of teaching which the Conference
had now been considering and the giving up of the Christian
creed. The Old Testament was a literature which had come down to
them from ancient days. Modern investigation enabled them now to
set the earlier stages of that literature in somewhat different
surroundings from those in which they were set by their fathers and
grandfathers." With regard to the book which had been referred to,
the Archbishop said that, if the rider proposed was intended to
imply a censure upon a particular writer, nothing would induce him
to vote for it, inasmuch as he had not read the book, and knew
nothing, at first hand, about it. He thought members ought to
pause before they lightly gave votes which could be so interpreted.
The motion, on being put to the meeting, was carried with one
dissentient. The rider was also carried by a majority.
It amounts, then, to this, that a rule of limited liability is to
be observed in the investigation of early Christianity. You may be
critical, but not up to the point of calling in question the Virgin
Birth or physical resurrection of Christ. The Bishop of Croydon opines
that the free discussion of such questions in University circles
intimidates young men from taking orders. If he lived in Oxford,
he would know that it is the other way about. [54] If Mr. Thompson
had been allowed to say what he thought, unmolested; if the Bishops
of Winchester and of Oxford had not at once taken steps to silence
and drive him out of the Church, students would have been better
encouraged to enter the Anglican ministry, and the more intellectual
of our young men would not avoid it as a profession hard to reconcile
with truth and honesty and self-respect.
In the next number of the same journal (June 2, 1911) is recorded
another example of how little our bishops are inclined to face a
plain issue. It is contained in a paragraph headed thus:--
SYMBOLISM OF THE ASCENSION.
The Bishop of Birmingham on the Second Coming.
Preaching to a large congregation in Birmingham Cathedral ... the
Bishop of Birmingham said that people had found difficulty in
modern times about the Ascension, because, they said, "God's
heaven is no more above our heads than under our feet." That
was perfectly true. But there were certain ways of expressing
moral ideas rooted in human thought, and we did not the less
speak continually of the above and the below as expressing what
was morally high and morally low, and we should go on doing so
to the end. The ascension of Jesus Christ and his concealment
in the clouds was a symbolical act, like all the acts after his
Resurrection; it was to impress their minds with the truth of
his mounting to the glory of God. Symbols were the best means
of expressing the truth about things which lay outside their
experience; and the Ascension symbolized Christ's mounting to the
supreme state of power and glory, to the perfect vision of God,
to the throne of all the world.... The Kingdom was coming--had to
come at last--"on earth as it is in heaven"; and one day, just
as his disciples saw him passing away out of their experience
and sight, would they see him coming back into their experience
and their sight, and into his perfected Kingdom of Humanity.
Now, I am sure that what people in modern times chiefly want to know
about the Ascension is whether it really happened. Did Jesus in his
physical body go up like a balloon before the eyes of the faithful,
and disappear behind a cloud, or did he not? That is the plain issue,
and Dr. Gore seems to avoid it. If he believes in such a miracle,
why expatiate on the symbolism of all the acts of Jesus subsequent to
his resurrection? Such a miracle was surely sufficient unto itself,
and never needed our attention to be drawn to its symbolical aspects
and import. Does he mean that the legend is no more than "a certain way
of expressing moral ideas rooted in human thought"? May we welcome his
insistence on its moral symbolism as a prelude to his abandonment of
the literal truth of the tale? I hope so, for in not a few apologetic
books published by divines during the last twenty-five years I have
encountered a tendency to expatiate on the moral significance of
extinct Biblical legends. It is, as the Rev. Mr. Figgis expresses
it, a way of "letting down the laity into the new positions of the
Higher Criticism." Would it not be simpler, in the end, to tell
people frankly that a legend is only a legend? They are not children
in arms. Why is it accounted so terrible for a clergyman or minister
of religion to express openly in the pulpit opinions he can hear in
many academical lecture-rooms, and often entertains in the privacy of
his study? When the Archbishop of Canterbury tells his brother-doctors
that "modern investigation enables them now to set the earlier stages
of Old Testament literature in somewhat different surroundings from
those in which they were set by their fathers and grandfathers,"
he means that modern scholarship has emptied the Old Testament of
its miraculous and supernatural legends. But the Anglican clergyman
at ordination declares that he believes unfeignedly the whole of
the Old and New Testaments. How can an Archbishop not dispense his
clergy from belief in the New, when he is so ready to leave it to
their individual consciences whether they will or will not believe
in the Old? The entire position is hollow and illogical, and most
of the bishops know it; but, instead of frankly recognizing facts,
they descant upon the symbolical meaning of tales which they know
they must openly abandon to-morrow. One is inclined to ask Dr. Gore
why Christ could not have imparted in words to his followers the
secret of his mounting to the supreme state of power and glory? Did
they at the time, or afterwards, set any such interpretation on
the story of his rising up from the ground like an airship or an
exhalation? Of course they did not. They thought the earth was a
fixed, flat surface, and that, if you ascended through the several
lower heavens, you would find yourself before a great white throne,
on which sat, in Oriental state, among his winged cherubim, the Most
High. They thought that Jesus consummated the hackneyed miracle of
his ascension by sitting down on the right hand of this Heavenly
Potentate. If Dr. Gore doubts this, let him consult the voluminous
works of the early Fathers on the subject. The entire legend coheres
with ancient, and not with modern, cosmogony. How can it possibly be
defended to-day on grounds of symbolism, or on any other? The same
criticism applies to the legend of the Virgin Birth. The Bishop of
London is reduced to defending this thrum of ancient paganism by an
appeal to the biological fact of parthenogenesis among insects. Imagine
the mentality of a modern bishop who dreams that he is advancing the
cause of true religion and sound learning by assimilating the birth
of his Saviour to that of a rotifer or a flea!
The books of Dr. Drews and Mr. Robertson and others of their school
are, no doubt, blundering extravaganzas, all the more inopportune
because they provoke the gibes of Dr. Moulton; but they are at least
works of Freethought. Their authors do not write with one eye on the
truth and the other on the Pope in the Vatican, or on the obsolete
dogmas of Byzantine speculation. It is possible, therefore, to discuss
with them, as it is not with apologists, who take good care never to
lay all their cards on the table, and of whom you cannot but feel,
as the great historian Mommsen remarked, that they are chattering in
chains (ex vinculis sermocinantes). In the investigation of truth
there can be no mental reserves, and argument is useless where the
final appeal lies to a Pope or a creed. You cannot set your hand to
the plough and then look back.
It was not, then, within the scope of this essay to try to determine
how much and what particular incidents traditionally narrated of Jesus
are credible. Such a task would require at least a thousand pages for
its discharge; I have merely desired to show how difficult it is to
prove a negative, and how much simpler it is to admit that Jesus really
lived than to argue that he was a solar or other myth. The latter
hypothesis, as expounded in these works, offends every principle
of philology, of comparative mythology, and of textual criticism;
it bristles with difficulties; and, if no better demonstration of it
can be offered, it deserves to be summarily dismissed.
On the other hand, no absolute rules can be laid down a priori for
the discerning in early Christian or in any other ancient documents
of historical fact. But students embarking on a study of Christian
origins will do well to lay to heart the aphorism of Renan (Les
Apôtres, Introd. xxix), that "one can only ascertain the origin of
any particular religion from the narratives or reports of those who
believed therein; for it is only the sceptic who writes history ad
narrandum." It is in the very nature of things human that we could
not hope to obtain documents more evidential than the Gospels and
Acts. It is a lucky chance that time has spared to us the Epistles of
Paul as well, and the sparse notices of first-century congregations
and personalities preserved in Josephus and in pagan writers. For
during the first two or three generations of its existence the Church
interested few except itself. In the view of a Josephus, the Jewish
converts could only figure as Jews gone astray after a false Messiah,
just as the Gentile recruits were mere Judaizers, objects--as he
remarks, B. J., II, 18, 2--of equal suspicion to Syrian pagans and Jews
alike, an ambiguous, neutral class, spared by the knife of the pagans,
yet dreaded by the Jews as at heart aliens to their cause. [55] There
were no folklorists or comparative religionists in those days watching
for new cults to appear; and there could be little or no inclination to
sit down and write history among enthusiasts who dreamed that the end
of the world was close at hand, and believed themselves to be already
living in the last days. For this is the conviction that colours the
whole of the New Testament; and that it does so is a signal proof of
the antiquity of much that the book contains. If a Christian of the
first century ever took up his pen and wrote, it was not to hand down
an objective narrative of events to a posterity whose existence he
barely contemplated, but, as against unbelieving Jews, to establish
from ancient prophecy his belief in Jesus as the promised Messiah,
or perhaps as the Word of God made flesh. All Christians were aware
that Jews, both in Judæa and of the Dispersion, roundly denied their
Christ to have been anything better than an impostor and violator
of the Law. They heard the pagans round them echoing the scoffs of
their Messiah's own countrymen. Accordingly, the earliest literature
of the Church, so far as it is not merely homiletic and hortative,
is controversial, and aims at proving that the Jewish people were
mistaken in rejecting Jesus as the Messiah. The Jews neither then
nor now have fought with mere shadows; and just in proportion as they
bore witness against his Messiahship, they bore witness in favour of
his historical reality. It is a pity that the extreme negative school
ignore this aspect of his rejection by the Jews.
Let me cite one more wise rule laid down by Renan in the same
Introduction: "An ancient writing can help us to throw light, firstly,
on the age in which it was composed, and, secondly, on the age which
preceded its composition."
This indicates in a general fashion the use which historians should
make of the New Testament. We have at every turn to ask ourselves
what the circumstances its contents reveal presuppose in the immediate
past in the way both of ideas or aspirations and of fact or incidents.
In conclusion, I cannot do better than quote the words in which Renan
defines in general terms the sort of historical results we may hope to
attain in the field of Christian origins. It is from the Introduction
already cited, pp. vi and vii:--
In histories like this, where the general outline (ensemble)
alone is certain, and where nearly all the details lend themselves
more or less to doubt by reason of the legendary character of
the documents, hypothesis is indispensable. About ages of which
we know nothing we cannot frame any hypothesis at all. To try
to reconstitute a particular group of ancient statuary, which
certainly once existed, but of which we have not even the debris,
and about which we possess no written information, is to attempt an
entirely arbitrary task. But to endeavour to recompose the friezes
of the Parthenon from what remains to us, using as subsidiary to
our work ancient texts, drawings made in the seventeenth century,
and availing ourselves of all sources of information; in a word,
inspiring ourselves by the style of these inimitable fragments,
and endeavouring to seize their soul and life--what more legitimate
task than this? We cannot, indeed, after all, say that we have
rediscovered the work of the ancient sculptor; nevertheless, we
shall have done all that was possible in order to approximate
thereto. Such a method is all the more legitimate in history,
because language permits the use of dubitative moods of which
marble admits not. There is nothing to prevent our setting before
the reader a choice of different suppositions, and the author's
conscience may be at rest as soon as he has set forth as certain
what is certain, as probable what is probable, as possible what
is possible. In those parts of the field where our footstep slides
and slips between history and legend it is only the general effect
that we must seek after.... Accomplished facts speak more plainly
than any amount of biographic detail. We know very little of the
peerless artists who created the chefs d'oeuvre of Greek art. Yet
these chefs d'oeuvre tell us more of the personality of their
authors and of the public which appreciated them than ever could do
the most circumstantial narratives and the most authentic of texts.
NOTES
[1] Page 20 of The Christ Myth, from a note added in the third edition.
[2] Op. cit. p. 214.
[3] The Christ Myth, p. 9. (Zu Robertson hat sie meines Wissens noch
keiner Weise ernsthaft Stellung genommen, p. vii of German edition.)
[4] Christ Myth, p. 57. In the German text (first ed. 1909, p. 21)
Mr. Robertson is the authority for this statement (so hat Robertson
es sehr wahrscheinlich gemacht).
[5] Cp. Emile Durkheim, La Vie Religieuse, Paris, 1912, p. 121,
to whom I owe much in the text.
[6] Such reduplications are common in Semitic languages, and in John
xix, 23, 24, we have an exact analogy with this passage of Matthew. In
Psalm xxii, 18, we read: "They parted my garments among them, and
upon my vesture did they cast lots." Here one and the same incident
is contemplated in both halves of the verse, and it is but a single
garment that is divided. Now see what John makes out of this verse,
regarded as a prophecy of Jesus. He pretends that the soldiers took
Jesus's garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part,
so fulfilling the words: "They parted my garments among them." Next
they took the coat without seam, and said to one another: "Let us not
rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be." The parallel with
Matthew is exact. In each case what is mere rhetorical reduplication
is interpreted of two distinct objects, and on this misinterpretation
is based a fulfilment of prophecy, and out of it generated a new form
of a story or a fresh story altogether. In defiance of the opinion of
competent Hebraists, Mr. Robertson writes (p. 338) that "there is no
other instance of such a peculiar tautology in the Old Testament." On
the contrary, the Old Testament teems with them.
[7] Christianity and Mythology, p. 286.
[8] Dr. Carpenter had objected that "It has first to be proved
that Dionysos rode on two asses, as well as that Jesus is the
Sun-God." Mr. Robertson complacently answers (p. 453): "My references
perfectly prove the currency of the myth in question"!
[9] The Witnesses, p. 55 (p. 75 of German edition).
[10] Why necessarily from Josephus? Were not other sources of recent
Roman history available for Tacitus? Here peeps out Dr. Drews's
conviction that the whole of ancient literature lies before him,
and that even Tacitus could have no other sources of information than
Dr. Drews.
[11] On p. 299, Mary, mother of Joshua, does duty for Mary Magdalen. We
there read as follows: "The friendship (of Jesus) with a 'Mary' points
towards some old myth in which a Palestinian God, perhaps named Yeschu
or Joshua, figures in the changing relations of lover and son towards a
mythic Mary, a natural fluctuation in early theosophy." Very "natural"
indeed among the Jews, who punished even adultery with death!
[12] Needless to say, Dr. Frazer, as any scholar must, rejects the
thesis of the unhistoricity of Jesus with derision. Mr. Robertson,
in turn, imputes his rejection of it to timidity. "He (Frazer) has
had some experience in arousing conservative resistance," he writes
in Christianity and Mythology, p. 111. He cannot realize that any
learned man should differ from himself, except to curry favour with
the orthodox, or from fear of them.
[13] I could have given Professor Smith a better tip. Philo composed a
glossary of Biblical and other names with their meanings, which, though
lost in Greek, survives in an old Armenian version. In this Essene is
equated with "silence." What a magnificent aid to Professor Smith's
faith! For if Essene meant "a silent one," then the pre-Christian
Nazarenes must surely have been an esoteric and secret sect.
[14] Of course, it is possible that Jesus, before he comes on the
scene, at about the age of thirty, as a follower of John the Baptist,
had been a member of the Essene sect, as the learned writer of the
article on Jesus in the Jewish Encyclopædia supposes. If such a
sect of Nazoræi, as Epiphanius describes, ever really existed--and
Epiphanius is an unreliable author--then Jesus may have been a
member of it. But it is a long way from a may to a must. Even if it
could be proved that Matthew had such a tradition when he wrote,
the proof would not diminish one whit the absurdity of Professor
Smith's contention that he was a myth and a mere symbol of a God
Joshua worshipped by pre-Christian Nazoræi. The Nazoræi of Epiphanius
were a Christian sect, akin to, if not identical with, the Ebionites;
and the hypothesis that they kept up among themselves a secret cult
of a God Joshua is as senseless as it is baseless, and opposed to all
we know of them. In what sense Matthew, that is to say the anonymous
compiler of the first Gospel, understood nazoræus is clear to anyone
who will take the trouble to read Matthew ii, 23. He understood by it
"a man who lived in the village called Nazareth," and that is the
sense which Nazarene (used interchangeably with it) also bears in
the Gospel. Mr. Smith scents enigmas everywhere.
[15] How treacherous the argumentum a silentio may be I can
exemplify. My name and address were recently omitted for two years
running from the Oxford directory, yet my house is not one of the
smallest in the city. If any future publicist should pry into my life
with the aid of this publication, he will certainly infer that I was
not living in Oxford during those two years. And yet the Argument
from Silence is only valid where we have a directory or gazetteer or
carefully compiled list of names and addresses.
[16] See Luke x, 17-20.
[17] La Vie Religieuse, p. 134.
[18] In his De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus et earum rationibus
libri tres, printed at the Hague in 1686, but largely written twenty
years earlier.
[19] The Christ Myth, 2nd ed., p. 18.
[20] It is possible, of course, that Jewish Messianic and apocalyptic
lore in the first century B.C. had been more or less evolved through
contact with the religion of Zoroaster; but this lore, as we meet
with it in the Gospels, derives exclusively from Jewish sources,
and was part of the common stock of popular Jewish aspirations.
[21] In Mark xv, 39, the utterance of the heathen centurion, "truly
this man was a Son of God," can obviously not have been inspired
by messianic conceptions; it can have meant no more than that he
was more than human, as Damis realized his master Apollonius to be
on more than one occasion. Nor can Mark have intended to attribute
Jewish conceptions to a pagan soldier.
[22] For example, he gravely asserts (Die Weltanschauung des alten
Orients, Leipzig, 1904, p. 41) that Saul's melancholy is explicable
as a myth of the monthly eclipsing of the moon's light! Perhaps
Hamlet's melancholy was of the same mythic origin. A map of the stars
is Winckler's, no less than Jensen's, guide to all mythologies. But,
to do him justice, Winckler never fell into the last absurdity of
supposing that Jews at the beginning of our era were engaged in a
secret cult of a Sun-god named Joshua; on the contrary, he declares
(op. cit., p. 96), that, just in proportion as we descend the course
of time, we approach an age in which the heroes of earlier myth are
brought down to the level of earth. This humanization of the Joshua
myth was, he held, complete when the book of Joshua was compiled.
[23] Cp. p. 342: "In all his allusions to the movement of his
day he (Paul) is dealing with Judaizing apostles who preached
circumcision." And p. 348: "Paul's Cephas is simply one of the apostles
of a Judaic cult that preaches circumcision."
[24] To wit, of a Sun-god, who is also Mithras and Osiris, and of
a Vegetation-god annually slain on the sacred tree. We are gravely
informed that "not till Dr. Frazer had done his work was the psychology
of the process ascertained." Dr. Frazer must be blushing at this
tribute to his psychological insight.
[25] Euseb., in Esai, xviii, 1 foll., p. 424, foll. The words might
mean Justin; but when he quotes Justin he always gives his name. The
Gospels cannot be intended.
[26] Encycl. Bibl., art, "Paul."
[27] Words italicized in the sequel are citations of the text of Acts.
[28] I expect Dr. Drews and Mr. Robertson, in their next editions,
to broach the view that the earlier chapter was forged to explain
the later one, and that in the later one "The Seven" are a cryptic
reference to the Pleiades.
[29] The relevant part of this commentary is preserved in an old
Armenian version of which we have ancient MSS.
[30] The difficulties largely vanish on the assumption that Galatians
is the earliest of the Epistles, and that in Gal. ii, 1, dia d "after
four" was misread in an early copy as dia id "after fourteen." This
is Professor Lake's conjecture. Such misreadings of the Greek numerals
are common in ancient MSS.
[31] Christianity and Mythology, p. 354.
[32] Why did they not do so in their "teaching," if it was
intended (see p. 344) for the Jews of the Dispersion, instead of
confining themselves to precepts "simply ethical, non-priestly,
and non-Rabbinical"?
[33] Ecce Deus, p. 8.
[34] Note in Matthew the phrase (xxiii, 8): "But be ye not called
Rabbi: for one is your teacher, and all ye are brethren."
[35] The passage in which Josephus mentions John the Baptist runs as
follows: "To some of the Jews it seemed that Herod had had his army
destroyed by God, and that it was a just retribution on him for his
severity towards John called the Baptist. For it was indeed Herod who
slew him, though a good man, and one who bade the Jews in the practise
of virtue and in the use of justice one to another and of piety towards
God to walk together in baptism. For this was the condition under which
baptism would present itself to God as acceptable, if they availed
themselves of it, not by way of winning pardon for certain sins,
but after attaining personal holiness, on account of the soul having
been cleansed beforehand by righteousness. Because men flocked to him,
for they took the greatest pleasure in listening to his words, Herod
took fright and apprehended that his vast influence over people would
lead to some outbreak of rebellion. For it looked as if they would
follow his advice in all they did, and he came to the conclusion that
far the best course was, before any revolution was started by him, to
anticipate it by destroying him: otherwise the upheaval would come, and
plunge him into trouble and remorse. So John fell a victim to Herod's
suspicions, was bound and sent to the fortress of Machaerus, of which
I have above spoken, and there murdered. But the Jews were convinced
that the loss of his army was by way of retribution for the treatment
of John, and that it was God who willed the undoing of Herod."
[36] The suspect passage in which Josephus refers to Jesus runs thus,
Ant. xviii, 3, 3: "Now about this time came Jesus, a wise man, if
indeed one may call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works,
a teacher of such men as receive what is true with pleasure, and he
attracted many Jews and many of the Greeks. This was the 'Christ.' And
when on the accusation of the principal men amongst us Pilate had
condemned him to the cross, they did not desist who had formerly
loved him, for he appeared to them on the third day alive again;
the divine Prophets having foretold both this and a myriad other
wonderful things about him; and even now the race of those called
Christians after him has not died out."
I have italicized such clauses as have a chance to be authentic,
and as may have led Origen to say of Josephus that he did not
believe Jesus to be the Christ. For the clause "This was the Christ"
must have run, "This was the so-called Christ." We have the same
expression in Matt. i, 16, and in the passage, undoubtedly genuine,
in which Josephus refers to James, Ant., xx, 9, 1. Here Josephus
relates that the Sadducee High-priest Ananus (son of Annas of the
New Testament), in the interval of anarchy between the departure of
one Roman Governor, Festus, and the arrival of another, Albinus,
set up a court of his own, "and bringing before it the brother of
Jesus who was called Christ--James was his name--and some others,
he accused them of being breakers of the Law, and had them stoned."
In the History of the Jewish War, iv, 5, 2, Josephus records his
belief that the Destruction of Jerusalem was a divine nemesis for
the murder of this Ananus by the Idumeans.
There is not now, nor ever was, any passage in Josephus where the
fall of Jerusalem was explained as an act of divine nemesis for the
murder of James by Ananus. Origen, as Professor Burkitt has remarked,
"had mixed up in his commonplace book the account of Ananus's murder
of James and the remarks of Josephus on Ananus's own murder."
[37] So in Acts xviii, 12, we read of faction fights in Corinth
between the Jews and the followers of Jesus the Messiah; Gallio,
the proconsul of Achaia, who cared for none of the matters at issue
between them, is a well-known personage, and an inscription has lately
been discovered dating his tenure of Achaia in A.D. 52.
[38] Tacitus very likely wrote Chrestiani. He says the mob called
them such, but adds that the author of the name was Christ, so
implying that Christianus was the true form, and Chrestianus a popular
malformation thereof. The Roman mob would be likely to deform a name
they did not understand, just as a jack-tar turns Bellerophon into
Billy Ruffian. Chrestos was a common name among oriental slaves,
and a Roman mob would naturally assume that Christos, which they
could not understand, was a form of it.
[39] Mr. Robertson recognizes (p. 124), though without realizing
how much it damages his theory, that the miracles of the Gospels are
"visibly unknown to the Paulinists"--presumably the early churches
addressed by Paul in his Epistle. Do we not here get a glimpse of
an early stage of the story of Jesus before it was overlaid with
miracles? Yet Mr. Robertson, in defiance of logic, argues that the
absence of miraculous tales of Jesus in the Paulines confirms what
he calls "the mythological argument."
[40] It is true that this is from a speech put into Paul's mouth by
the author of Acts; but Paul himself is no less emphatic in Romans
i, 23, where of the Greeks he writes that, "though they knew God,
they glorified him not as God.... Professing themselves wise, they
were turned into fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible
God for the likeness of an image of a corruptible man." Such were the
feelings excited in Paul by a statue of Pheidias; how different from
those it roused in his contemporary Dion, who wrote as follows of it:
"Whoever among mortal men is most utterly toilworn in spirit, having
drunk the cup of many sorrows and calamities, when he stands before
this image must utterly forget all the terrors and woes of this mortal
life." So strong was the prejudice of the Church (due exclusively to
its Jewish origin) against plastic or pictorial art that Eusebius and
Epiphanius condemned pictures of Christ as late as the fourth century,
while the Eastern churches, even to-day, forbid statues of Jesus and
of the Saints. Of the great gulf which separated Jew from Gentile on
such points Mr. Robertson seems not to have the faintest notion.
[41] I trust my readers will forgive my use of a fox-hunting phrase
in so serious a context, but I cannot think of any other so apt.
[42] P. 48. After citing the rather problematic allusion to Plato
(Rep. ii, 361 D) in the apology of Apollonius (c. 172), the just man
shall be tortured, he shall be spat on, and, last of all, he shall
be crucified. Harnack has said that there is no other reference to
this passage of Plato in old-Christian literature. "Why?" asks
Mr. Smith. "Because Christians were not familiar with
it? Impossible. The silence of the Christians was intentional, and
the reason is obvious. The passage was tell-tale. Similarly we are to
understand their silence about the pre-Christian Nazarenes and many
other lions that were safest when asleep." This is in the true vein
of a Bacon-Shakesperians armed with his cypher.
[43] See note (1).
[44] Elsewhere Mr. Smith qualifies this position, p. 35: "Of course,
the cult was not intended to remain, and did not in fact remain,
secret; it was at length brought into the open." But perhaps Mr. Smith
is here alluding to his own revelation.
[45] Mark xvi, 9. The circumstance that Mark xvi, 9-20, was added to
the Gospel by another hand in no way diminishes the significance of
the passage here adduced.
[46] In the same manner, as we know from Origen (Com. in
Evang. Ioannis, tom. xiii, 27), the Samaritans had a Messiah named
Dositheos, who rose from the dead, and professed himself to be the
Messiah of prophecy. His sect survived in the third century, as also
his books, which, as Origen says, were full of "myth" about him to the
effect that he had not tasted of death, but was somewhere or other
still alive. By all the rules of criticism as used by Mr. Robertson
and his friends, we must deny that Dositheos ever lived. The idea
of a human hero being an angel or divine power made flesh was common
among Jews, and in their apocryph, "The Prayer of Jacob" (see Origen,
op. cit., tom. ii, 25), that worthy represented himself as such in
the very language of Paul and of the Fourth Gospel: "I who spoke to
you, I, Jacob and Israel, am an angel of God and a primeval spirit,
as Abraham and Isaak were created in advance of all creatures. But
I, Jacob, ... called Israel by God, a man seeing God, because I am
first-born of all living beings made alive by God." We also learn
that Uriel was sent forth by God to herald Jacob's descent upon
earth, where he "tabernacled among men." Jacob declares himself
to be "archangel of the power of God, and arch-captain among the
sons of God, Israel the foremost minister of the Presence." Paul,
we observe, did not need to go outside Judaism for his conceptions
of Jesus, nor Justin Martyr either, who regularly speaks of Jesus
as an archangel. So also among the pagans. In Augustus Cæsar his
contemporaries loved to detect one of the great gods of Olympus just
descended to earth in the semblance of a man. He was the god Mercury
or some other god incarnate. His birth was a god's descent to earth
in order to expiate the sins of the Romans. Thus Horace, Odes, I,
2, v. 29: Cui dabit partes scelus expiandi Juppiter, and cp. v. 45:
Serus in coelum redeas--"Mayest thou be late in returning to heaven."
[47] Das Gilgamesch Epos in der Weltliteratur, 1906.
[48] P. 933: "Die Jesus-sage nach den Synoptikern--wie auch die
nach Johannes--unterscheidet sich nun aber von allen anderen bisher
erörterten Gilgamesch-sagen dadurch, dass sie hinter dem Gros der
Sage nicht nur einzelne Bruchstücke von ihr als Nachzügler bringt,
sondern eine lange Reihe von Stücken der Sage in fast ungestörter
ursprünglicher Reihenfolge," etc.
[49] P. 818. So weit von Johannis Person allein. Verfolgen wir nun
die Jesus-Sage weiter.
Im Gilgamesch Epos wird erzählt, wie zu Eabani in der Wüste der Jäger
mit der Hierodule hinauszieht, wie Eabani ihrer habe geniesst, und
dann mit ihr nach Erech kommt, wo grade oder ihm zu Ehre ein Fest
gefeiert wird, wie er sich dort an Gilgamesch anschliesst und ihn
durch Diesen königliche Ehren zuteil werden. Welche Metamorphosen
diese Geschehnisse in den Sagen des alten Testaments erlebt haben,
darf jetzt in der Hauptsache als bekannt vorausgesetzt werden. In
zahlreichen Gilgamesch-Sagen fanden wir nun die Begegnung mit
der Hierodule wieder. Aber vergeblich suchen wir sie dort in den
drei ersten Evangelien, wo ihr Platz wäre, falls diese etwa eine
Gilgamesch-Sage enthalten sollten, nämlich unmittelbar hinter Johannis
Auftreten in der Wüste. Ebenso wenig finden wir an dieser Stelle etwa
einen Reflex von Eabani's Einzug in das festlich erregte Erech. Wohl
dagegen treffen wir an ursprünglicher Stelle ein Wiederhall von
Gilgamesch's Begegnung mit Eabani.
[50] P. 820. Jesu Taufe durch Johannes wäre sonst auch daraus geworden,
dass Eabani, nach dem er an Gilgamesch's Hof gelangt ist, durch Diesen
Königlicher Ehren teilhaft wird.
[51] Nach Lukas (i, 15 and vii, 33) trinkt Johannes keinen Wein,
ist also ein Nasiräer, der keinen Wein trinkt und dessen Haar nicht
kekürzt wird, ebenso wie Joseph-Eabani, wie Simson als ein Eabani,
wie Samuel-Eabani, wie Absolom als Eabani wenigstens einen üppigen
Haarwuchs besitzt, und wie der Eabani des Epos, mit dem langen
Haupthaar eines Weibes, in der Wüste mit den Tieren zusammen Wasser
trinkt, und wie Eabani mit diesen Tieren zusammen nur Gras und Krauter
frisst, so isst Johannes, nach Lukas wenigstens, kein Brot.
[52] P. 838: Wie für Xisuthros, liegt für Jesus ein Schiff bereit,
und, wie Xisuthros und Jonas, "flieht" Jesus in ein Schiff.
[53] I cite an unfinished memoir of my grandfather, W. D. Conybeare,
himself a pioneer of geology and no mean palæontologist, who owed much
of his discernment in these fields to such a training in historical
method as he describes.
[54] Within the last two months the theological faculties of Oxford and
Cambridge, and the examining chaplains (of various bishops) resident
in those universities, have addressed a petition to the Archbishop
of Canterbury praying him to absolve candidates for Ordination of the
necessity of avowing that "they believe unfeignedly in the whole of the
Old and New Testaments," because so many competent and well-qualified
students are thereby deterred from taking holy orders. The Archbishop
would, it seems, make the individual clergyman's conscience the sole
judge (to the exclusion of the Bishop of Croydon) of the propriety
of his retaining his orders in spite of his rejection of this and
that tradition or dogma. That is at least a sign that opinion is on
the move.
[55] Such is Renan's interpretation of this passage in L'Ante-Christ,
ed. 1873, p. 259, and he is undoubtedly right in detecting in it a
reference to the Christians scattered abroad in the half-Syrian and
pagan, half-Jewish and monotheist, cities of Syria.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Historical Christ;, by Fred. C. Conybeare