JESUS AND MYTHS.
Some learned men, in seeking a way to account for the Jesus of the New
Testament without accepting the reality of his existence, have sought
to set up a notion like this: It is true that the evangelists did not
invent this character, yet Jesus never really lived; he is only the
myth of Hebrew history.
We are to think of Jesus, they tell us, as we do of the Greek
Theseus, of the Egyptian Isis and Osiris, of the Thor and Odin of
the Scandinavian legends, of the Hindustanee Vishnu, or of Buddha,
and of scores of other myths that belong to the poetry, traditions,
superstitions, and religions of other nations. Much scholarship has
been mustered into the service of this notion. All this may appear more
absurd than serious to one whose education has made Jesus of Nazareth
real to his thoughts. It may indeed be so; but we must be fair even to
those who seem to us to advance absurd views. I cannot doubt that some
able and sincere minds have accepted a theory of Jesus that makes him
out only a Hebrew myth.
Let us look at this theory in a common-sense way, without burdening
these pages with tiresome and confusing quotations. There are some
things which may be plain enough to those who are unlearned in the
writings and legends referred to--some things that the learned cannot
deny. Myths are growths, and whatever grows--whether a tree, a man, a
thought, or a legend--grows under certain laws that cannot be violated.
There may be some laws under which myths develop unknown to me. But
some of these laws are unmistakable. I mention them, and you will see
for yourself that none of them are observed in the story of Jesus. The
story we find in the evangelists violates them all. If the conceptions
among other nations that are called myths are myths then Jesus cannot
be counted among them.
1. Myths originate and, as conceptions, are complete before written
history. In all nations the earliest historians relate mythological
stories that antedate all letters and all records. In some nations a
fragmentary history went to a sort of record before there was a true
written language. Rude pictures engraved on stone or painted, and what
are called cuneiform characters, such as are found on the bricks
or clay cylinders among the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, and such
hieroglyphics as are found on ancient tombs in Egypt, in Mexico, and
other countries--these tell us of national myths that belonged to a
period ages before even these crude attempts at writing were made. The
principle--it is invariable as a law--holds good in every nation that
has a myth or written history of any sort.
But the Jesus of the evangelists appeared, and the story of his life
was written, long after the most eventful and important history of the
Hebrew race was recorded.
2. About all myths there is something grotesque if not monstrous. They
are exaggerations of men or animals. Sometimes they are natural forces
represented as becoming incarnate in some fantastic shape. If in human
form the mythical characters are gigantic, strange, verging upon the
unnatural and impossible. But Jesus appears as a man, simply; he has
not a personal peculiarity to set him apart from his neighbors and
companions. Not a word in the story suggests any thing abnormal or even
singular. There is not a word to tell us of his personal appearance;
there is no suggestion of any thing un-human or extra-human in his form
or manner as he appeared among men. The halo about his head you see in
pictures is the pretty conceit of the painters; there is not a hint of
this, or any thing like it, in the story of the evangelists. There is
not so much as a word concerning his complexion, his stature, the color
of his hair or eyes, or the tones of his voice. He is just a man among
men--one who might have walked unnoticed in the streets of Jerusalem.
Read what the old books tell you of Grecian, Roman, Egyptian, and other
myths. How strange they are, how different from men! Jesus appears as
a man, and the evangelists have not one word to indicate that he was
peculiar in appearance in any respect.
3. Myths reflect their time, place, and race. This statement is without
exception. Theseus is of ancient Greece and is Greek in every sinew and
lineament. Odin and Thor come to us out of the dark German forests,
and are but exaggerations, in their virtues and vices, of the mighty
barbarians who dwelt in them. Isis and Osiris are as like Egypt as
the desert, the Nile, and its mysterious sources. Bel-Merodach is as
like Chaldea as the valley of the Euphrates and its lost civilization
could make him. Vishnu is as Hindustanee as the Ganges and its terrible
jungles and the fierce beasts that made men afraid. And so of them
every one, from the loftiest and noblest conceptions of godlike men
that ever inspired the Greek imagination with great ideals down to the
meanest and most devilish that ever filled the superstitions of African
or Australian bushmen with terrors. But in Jesus there is not a trace
of coloring from any scene or period in Hebrew history, from Abraham in
Ur of the Chaldees to the days of Cæsar Augustus.
4. In all nations myths defy chronology; they are without dates. In the
imagination of their people they seem to have existed not only from
the beginnings of national life, but to have gone before it. Think of
any of them--those that have come down to us from ancient nations,
as well as those that still hold their place in the folk-lore of
barbarous peoples. They are all without dates. We do not read of Isis
and Osiris appearing in the capital of Egypt in the days of Rameses
II.; the Egyptian gods are older than any of their dynasties and lived
before men kept genealogies. And so of all the gods of mythology;
they are without contemporaries known to any history. Myths precede
the invention of calendars; if time was counted at all the years were
without dates. How utterly different is the story of Jesus, that some
men tell us is only a Hebrew myth!
Of Jesus and the time of his appearing it is written:
“And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from
Cæsar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. And this taxing was
first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.” Augustus was emperor;
Cyrenius was governor in Syria; Herod was king in Judea.
5. Myths defy topography as they do chronology; they are not only
without dates, they are without definite localities. They appeared not
only some when that cannot be fixed in time, but somewhere that cannot
be found as a place. Their origin is shrouded in mystery. Some of the
contemporaries of Jesus made it a point against him, “As to this man we
know whence he is.”
In the story of Jesus we are told of places with such exactness that
the statements of the evangelists are to this day the best guides to
the scholarly men who make explorations in order to find relics and
fragments of lost history in Palestine. They do not tell us of Jesus
as appearing somewhere in their country, as Galilee, Samaria, Judea.
They tell us of Nazareth, Bethlehem, Bethsaida, Capernaum, Bethphage,
Bethany, the Mount of Olives. They tell us of the “beautiful gate of
the temple” which, he and his disciples looked upon, and of “Jacob’s
well” “near to the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son
Joseph”--the very spot where Jesus sat to rest, while his disciples
went to Sychar to buy bread of the baker--the well from which a woman
of the Samaritans drew water and gave him to drink.
6. Myths are not completed at once. They require long time--ages--for
their development. But the conception of the character of Jesus comes
into the thought of men with his manifestation and abides through the
centuries that have followed as it was first given to the world.
There is absolutely nothing like it in all Hebrew history that went
before him, as there is nothing like it in the history that comes after
him. And the conception of Jesus that is given by the brief accounts
of the evangelists is so finished, so complete, that the attempts of
after times to add to it in the stories of the so-called apocryphal
gospels have utterly failed of their design. No marvelous stories,
handed down from one generation to another, have in the least added to
or taken from the Jesus of the evangelists. What Jesus signified when
the gospels were written he has been through the centuries that have
followed him. What he was then he is to-day.
7. All myths belong to the infancy, never to the age of any nation.
They spring out of the morning mists; they never appear in the light of
day. If the story of Jesus had been placed in Chaldea, before the call
of Abraham, it also would have belonged to the infancy of a race. To
harmonize with the laws that govern the development of myths the story
of Jesus should have anticipated the first chapters in Hebrew history;
it should have been placed in that uncertain period that includes the
dispersion from Armenia, the second cradle of the human race.
But the story of Jesus is given to the world, fresh and complete, with
not one hint of it in all preceding history, in the last years, the
closing days of Hebrew national life in Judea.
The story antedates but a little while the destruction of Jerusalem
by Vespasian and his Roman legions; when Jesus was born Augustus was
emperor; when Jesus entered upon his ministry Tiberius Cæsar was in the
fifteenth year of his reign; his lieutenant, Pontius Pilate, governed
Judea as a subject province, and his soldiers kept the peace in the
holy city.
Consider how impossible it is for myths to originate after written
history, in the sun-glare of life in a full-grown nation. Even the
pretty stories of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table belong
to that far-away period in England when there was no written history
worth the name, when letters were almost unknown, when all was young
and fresh and ignorant, and the fairies still ruled in the forests.
Think of a myth starting up to-day in London under the shadow of St.
Paul’s and Parliament House. Think of the world in our time talking of
“Chinese Gordon” if there had lived no “Chinese Gordon.” If the people
who have letters, and write histories, and “turn the world upside-down”
with the gospel story, should leave the poor savages of the Congo
Valley to themselves, thousands of years from our times Livingstone
and Stanley will live in African traditions as godlike men; and so new
myths will be born, will grow and fix themselves in the legends of
these lands where they have done many wonderful works--but London and
New York will breed no myths concerning Livingstone and Stanley.