THE JESUS PROBLEM
A RESTATEMENT OF THE MYTH THEORY
BY
J. M. ROBERTSON, M.P.
[ISSUED FOR THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LIMITED]
London:
WATTS & CO.,
17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C. 4
1917
CONTENTS
PAGE
Prefatory Note vii
Chapter I.--THE APPROACH 1
Chapter II.--THE CENTRAL MYTH 24
§ 1. The Ground of Conflict 24
§ 2. The Sacrificial Rite 31
§ 3. Contingent Elements 39
§ 4. The Mock-King Ritual 50
§ 5. Doctrinal Additions 53
§ 6. Minor Ritual and Myth Elements 57
§ 7. The Cross 61
§ 8. The Suffering Messiah 64
§ 9. The Rock Tomb 67
§ 10. The Resurrection 70
Chapter III.--ROOTS OF THE MYTH 72
§ 1. Historical Data 72
§ 2. Prototypes 91
§ 3. The Mystery-Drama 96
Chapter IV.--EVOLUTION OF THE CULT 107
§ 1. The Primary Impulsion 107
§ 2. The Silence of Josephus 121
§ 3. The Myth of the Twelve Apostles 126
§ 4. The Process of Propaganda 135
§ 5. Real Determinants 148
Chapter V.--ORGANIZATION AND ECONOMICS 157
§ 1. The Economic Side 157
§ 2. Organization 162
Chapter VI.--EARLY BOOK-MAKING 170
§ 1. The "Didachê" 170
§ 2. The Apocalypse 173
§ 3. Epistles 176
Chapter VII.--GOSPEL-MAKING 182
§ 1. Tradition 182
§ 2. Schmiedel's Tests 188
§ 3. Tendential Tests 192
§ 4. Historic Summary 202
Chapter VIII.--SUPPLEMENTARY MYTH 207
§ 1. Myths of Healing 207
§ 2. Birth Myths 209
§ 3. Minor Myths 217
Chapter IX.--CONCLUSION 223
Appendix A.--TRANSLATION OF "THE TEACHING OF
THE TWELVE APOSTLES," WITH NOTES 235
Appendix B.--THE MYTH OF SIMON MAGUS 248
PREFATORY NOTE
Most of the propositions in mythology and anthropology in this
book are founded on bodies of evidence given in the larger works of
the author. It seemed fitting, therefore, to refer to those works
instead of repeating hundreds of references there given. Readers
concerned to investigate the issues are thus invited and enabled to do
so. For brevity's sake, Christianity and Mythology is cited as C.M.;
Pagan Christs as P.C.; and the Short Histories of Christianity and
Freethought as S.H.C. and S.H.F. respectively. In the first three
cases the references are to the second editions; in the last case,
to the third. The Evolution of States is cited as E.S. Another work
often referred to is Sir J. G. Frazer's great thesaurus, The Golden
Bough, which is cited as G.B., the references being to the last
edition. Other new references are given in the usual way. The Ecce
Deus of Professor W. B. Smith is cited in the English edition.
Passages in brackets, in unleaded type, may be passed at a first
perusal by readers concerned mainly to follow the constructive
theory. Such passages deal controversially with counter-polemic.
THE JESUS PROBLEM
THE APPROACH
As was explained in the preamble to The Historical Jesus (1916),
that work was offered as prolegomena to a concise restatement of the
theory that the Gospel Jesus is a mythical construction. That theory
had been discursively expounded by the writer in two large volumes,
Christianity and Mythology and Pagan Christs, and summarily in A Short
History of Christianity, the argument in the two former combining a
negative criticism of the New Testament narrative with an exposition
of the myth-evidence. Criticism having in large part taken the form
of a denial that the records were unhistorical, it was necessary to
clear the ground by showing that all the various attempts of the
past generation to find in the gospels a historical residuum have
entirely failed to meet critical tests. Those attempts, conflicting
as they do with each other, and collapsing as they do in themselves,
give undesigned support to the conclusion that the gospel story is
without historic basis.
It remains to restate with equal brevity the myth-theory which, long
ago propounded on a very narrow basis, has latterly been re-developed
in the light of modern mythology and anthropology, and has in recent
years found rapidly increasing acceptance. Inevitably the different
lines of approach have involved varieties of speculation; Professors
Drews and W. B. Smith have ably and independently developed the theory
in various ways; and a conspectus and restatement has become necessary
for the sake of the theory itself no less than for the sake of those
readers who call for a condensed statement.
This in turn is in itself tentative. If the progressive analysis of
the subject matter from the point of view of its historicity has meant
a century and a half of debate and an immense special literature, it
is not to be supposed that the theory which negates the fundamental
assumptions of that literature can be fully developed and established
in one lifetime, at the hands of a few writers. The problem "What
really happened?" is in fact a far wider one for the advocate of the
myth-theory than for the critic who undertakes to extract a biography
from the documents. In its first form, as propounded by Dupuis and
Volney, the myth-theory was confined simply to certain parallelisms
between Christian and Pagan myth, and to the astronomical basis of a
number of these. From this standpoint the actual historic inception of
the cult was little considered. Strauss, again, developed with great
power and precision the view that most of the detail in the gospel
narrative is myth construction on the lines of Jewish prophecy and
dogma. But Strauss never fully accepted the myth-theory, having always
assumed the existence of a teacher as a nucleus for the whole. As
apart from the continuators of Dupuis and Volney, it was Bruno Bauer
who, setting out with the purpose of extracting a biography from the
gospels, and finding no standing ground, first propounded a myth-theory
from that point of view.
His construction, being the substantially arbitrary one of a
hypothetical evangelist who created a myth and thereby founded the
cultus, naturally made no headway; and its artificiality strengthened
the hands of those who claimed to work inductively on the documents. It
was by reason of a similar failure to find a historic footing where he
had at first taken it for granted that the present writer was gradually
led, on lines of comparative hierology and comparative mythology and
anthropology, to the conception of the evolution of the Jesus-cult from
the roots of a "pre-Christian" one. The fact that this view has been
independently reached by such a student as Professor W. B. Smith,
who approached the problem from within rather than by way of the
comparative method, seems in itself a very important confirmation.
What is now to be done is to revise the general theory in the light
of further study as well as of the highly important expositions of it
by Professor Smith and other scholars. An attempt is now definitely
made not merely to combine concisely the evidence for a pre-Christian
Jesus-cult, but to show how that historically grew into "Christianity,"
thus substituting a defensible historical view for a mythic narrative
of beginnings. And this, of course, is a heavy undertaking.
The question, "What do you put in its place?" is often addressed
to the destructive critic of a belief, not with any philosophic
perception of the fact that complete removal is effected only by
putting a tested or tenable judgment in place of an untested or
untenable one, but with a sense of injury, as if a false belief
were a personal possession, for the removal of which there must be
"compensation." In point of fact, the destructive process is rarely
attempted without a coincident process of substitution. Even to say
that a particular text is spurious is to say that some one forged or
inserted it where it is, for a purpose. That concept is "something in
its place." Some Comtists, again, are wont to commit the contradiction
of affirming that "no belief is really destroyed without replacement,"
and, in the next breath, of condemning rationalists who "destroy
without replacing." Both propositions cannot stand.
If it be meant merely to insist that explanation is replacement,
and that explanation is a necessary part of a successful or complete
process of destruction, the answer is that it is hardly possible even
to attempt to cancel a belief without putting a different belief in its
place; and that it is nearly always by way of positing a new belief
that an old one is assailed. The old charge against rationalism, of
"destroying without building up," is historically quite false. Almost
invariably, the innovator has offered a new doctrine or conception in
place of the old. True, it might not be ostensibly an equivalent, for
the believer who wanted an equivalent in kind. An exploded God-idea
is not for me replaceable by another God-idea: the only rational
"replacement" is a substitution of a reasoned for an authoritarian
cosmology and ethic. But in the way of reasoned replacements the
innovators have been only too quick, in general, to formulate
new conceptions, new creeds. They have really been too eager to
build afresh, and many untenable formulas and hypotheses are the
consequences.
These very attempts, naturally, are constantly made the objects of
still more hasty counter-attack. Every form of the myth-theory with
which I am acquainted, whatever its defects, has been the result
of much labour, and even if astray can be fairly pronounced "hasty"
only in the sense that it proves to be inadequate. It is not so with
most of the counter-criticism. The reader may rest assured that
it is not possible for any exposition of the new theory to be as
"hasty" as is usually its rejection. [1] Professional theologians
who cast that epithet are in general recognizably men who believed
their hereditary creed before they were able to think, and have at
no later stage made good the first inevitable omission.
Myth-theories, sound or unsound, are the attempts of students who find
the record incredible as history to think out, in the light of the
documents and of comparative mythology and hierology, the process by
which it came to be produced; and even as all myth is but a form of
traditionary error, so any attempt to trace its growth runs the risk
of error. It is one thing to show, for instance, that the Pentateuch
cannot have been written by "Moses," seen to be a non-historical
figure: it is another thing to settle how the books were really
made. In such cases, the "something in the place" of the tradition
is to be ascertained only after long and patient investigation and
counter-criticism. So with the investigation of the fabulous history of
early Rome. After several scholars had set forth grounded doubts, the
problem was ably and systematically handled by the French freethinker
Louis de Beaufort in 1738. Early in the nineteenth century, Niebuhr,
confidently undertaking "with the help of God" to get at the truth,
and falsely disparaging Beaufort's work as wholly "sceptical," effected
a reconstruction which has since been found to be in large measure
unsound, though long acquiesced in by English students. [2] In such
matters there is really no finality. If well-documented history must
in every age be rewritten, no less inevitable is the re-writing of
that which is reached only by processes of inference. And the gospel
problem is the hardest of all. Still more than in the case of the
Pentateuch problem, many revisions will probably be needed before a
generally satisfactory solution is reached.
There is nothing for it but to trace and retrace, consider and
reconsider, the inferrible historic process. Met as he is by
alternate charges of reckless iconoclasm and "hasty" construction,
the proper course for the holder of the myth-theory is to repeat with
dispassionate vigilance both of his processes--to show first that the
progressive effort to extract from the gospels a tenable biography
has ended in complete critical collapse, revealing only a tissue of
myth; and then to attempt to indicate how the pseudo-history came
to be compiled: in other words, how the myth arose. Such has been my
procedure in the preceding volume and in this.
It may of course be argued that the previous negative criticism of
the gospel record is indecisive; that the avowal of Loisy: "If the
trial and condemnation of Jesus, as pretended Messiah, could be put
in doubt, we should have no ground for affirming the existence of the
Christ," does not commit other inquirers, or that the historicity of
the trial story has not really been exploded; that the nullity of
the alleged Evangel has not been established; or that the complete
destruction of previous biographical theories claimed by Schweitzer
for himself and Wrede has not been accomplished. The answer is that
these issues are not re-opened in the following chapters. They were
carefully handled in the previous volume, to which I have seen no
attempt at a comprehensive and reasoned answer.
[The latest attack I have seen comes from a former antagonist, who
appears to lay his main complaint against the book on the ground that
it "omits to notice the theory of the synoptic problem which appears in
every modern text-book," that is, "the two-documents hypothesis." And
there emerges this indictment:--
As the theory has a vital bearing on the relative values of
different strata of tradition, Mr. Robertson cannot afford to
ignore it. If we apply to himself the crude principle he applies
to Paul and the evangelists, to wit, that if they don't mention
a thing they don't know it, we must assume that Mr. Robertson is
still ignorant of the very elements of the problem he is professing
to solve. Since he has no clear or tenable view of the documents
and their relations to one another, he obviously cannot answer
the historical questions they raise. [3]... Presumably he omits
to mention it because he does not see its significance. [4]
Before coming to the main matter, it is necessary to elucidate
the charge as to a "crude principle" applied to Paul and the
evangelists. The "principle" really applied was this, that if "Paul" in
all his writings, apart from two interpolated passages, shows no real
knowledge whatever of the gospels, and no knowledge whatever either of
the life or the teachings of Jesus as there recorded, we are compelled
to infer either that these details were not in any form known to Paul,
or that, if he knew them, he did not believe them. It is not a matter
of his not knowing "a thing": that is the sophism of the critic; it is
a matter of his not knowing anything on the subject. And so with the
synoptics and the fourth gospel. When one side relates something vital
to the record, of which the other side shows no knowledge whatever
[5]--as, for instance, great miracles--we are bound to infer that
the silent side, when it is the earlier record, either did not know
or did not believe the story. Or, again, when John alleges that the
disciples baptized freely and the synoptics make no mention of it,
it is clear that we cannot suppose them, in the alleged circumstances,
to have been ignorant of such a fact; while, if they are supposed to
have known it and yet to have kept silence, their credit as historians
is gravely shaken. The "principle," in fact, is that of critical
common-sense; and the critic's version of it is a forensic perversion.
On the next issue, it is perhaps well to explain to the lay reader
that the "two-documents hypothesis" is simply what Schmiedel--with
a very justifiable implication--named "the so-called theory of two
sources," a mere aspect of "the borrowing hypothesis" which constitutes
the main substance of the bulk of the documentary discussion of the
gospels in the last century, and which is simply the most obvious
way of attempting to explain the documentary phenomena. It dates from
Papias. As the critic asseverates, it is the theory of the text-books
in general. And for the main purposes of historic comprehension, it
is neither here nor there. The theory of two sources cannot possibly
cover all the data, even from the biographical point of view. The
effect of Schmiedel's article--a model of critical honesty and general
good sense which his successors might usefully strive to copy in those
regards--is to show that the hypothesis is quite inadequate even as a
documentary theory; and from the point of view of the rational student
it is simply neutral to the vital question, What really did happen,
in the main? He who has realized that the Entry, the Betrayal, the
Last Supper, the Agony, the Trials, and the Crucifixion, are all as
mythical as the Resurrection, is not at that point concerned with the
dispute as to priority among the gospels, or any sections of them. No
documentary hypothesis can possibly make the myth true.
At the vital point, in fact, the two-documents hypothesis is not even
ostensibly applicable: the synoptic narrative is one primary narrative,
subjected to minor modifications. It is admitted by Harnack to have
been absent from "Q," the Logoi "source" held to have been drawn upon
by Matthew and Luke. And that one narrative, as I have argued, is
not in origin a "gospel" narrative at all, but the simple transcript
of a mystery-drama, with almost the minimum of necessary narrative
insertion. If the exegete could bring himself to contemplate rationally
my hypothesis, he might find his documentary labours lightened. [6]
It is doubtless true that the determination of the earlier as against
the later form of a minor narrative episode, or of a teaching, is
often essential to the framing of a true notion as to its mode of
entrance; and such determination I have attempted many times. But
the notion that historicity is a matter of priority of documents
is, as Schmiedel sees, the fallacy of fallacies. Prisoned in that
presupposition, exegetes defending the record achieve inevitably the
very failure they impute: they are "ignorant of the very elements
of the problem they are professing to solve"--that is, the problem
of what really happened. They cannot realize the conditions under
which the gospels were compiled. They construct what they think a
"clear or tenable" view of the documents by the process of evading
the considerations which make it untenable or inadequate, and then
demand that their documentary formula shall be met by one in pari
materia. The answer to them is that their psychological as well as
their historical assumptions are false. Things did not happen in
that way. And two versions of a palpable myth do not make for its
historicity. There are two or more versions of most myths.
The indictment before us, in short, is an illustration of the mode
of theological fence discussed above. You undertake to show that the
most alert presentments of a given historical conception fail to stand
critical tests, and you are met with the reply: "We are not concerned
to discuss the presentments you deal with, which are not generally
accepted: we demand that you discuss instead the documentary theory
which in those presentments is treated as obsolete. If you do not
do this, you show you are incompetent." When on the other hand the
critical significance of an older theory is indicated, the reply is
made that that theory is "obsolete." One theory is too new, another
is too old, for discussion. All the while, the theory founded-on for
the defence is really the oldest of all. It was in fact the obvious
inadequacy of the familiar documentary hypothesis that dictated our
discussion of more up-to-date theories, as it had elicited these. If
our exegete's favourite hypothesis had had any power of satisfying
independent students, we should not have had such treatises as those of
the Rev. Dr. Wright and Dr. Flinders Petrie, or the searching analysis
and commentary of M. Loisy, to say nothing of the vigorous Dr. Blass.
In dealing with such writers, and particularly in following the
"real" procedure of M. Loisy on the main issues of historical fact,
I took what seemed to me the candid controversial course. To resort
instead to a mere exposure of the obvious insufficiency of the
"two-documents hypothesis" would be like arguing as if Genesis
were the only alternative to the Darwinian theory. Dr. Wright's
"oral hypothesis" is a vivid and interesting revival of what, as
I pointed out, had long ago been the "predominant" view. [7] Our
exegete nevertheless affirms that I regard it "as something new in
England." To the lay reader I would again explain the situation thus
handled. Theological discussion on the gospels has moved in cycles,
by reason of the invariable presupposition as to historicity, which
was a main factor in the partial failure of the mythical theory as
introduced by Strauss. As I expressly stated, the oral hypothesis was
before Strauss "well established." Then ensued the age-long discussion
of documentary hypotheses. At the close of the nineteenth century we
find Schmiedel saying:
Lastly, scholars are also beginning to remember that the
evangelists did not need to draw their material from books alone,
but that from youth up they were acquainted with it from oral
narration and could easily commit it to writing precisely in
this form in either case--whether they had it before them in no
written form, or whether they had it in different written form. In
this matter, again, we are beginning to be on our guard against
the error of supposing that in the synoptical problem we have
to reckon merely with given quantities, or with such as can be
easily ascertained. [8]
If I had written that, I should doubtless be told that I regarded
the oral hypothesis as "new." Dr. Schmiedel, it is to be hoped, may
escape the aspersive method of my critic. In point of fact, a return
to the oral hypothesis was inevitable in view of the insufficiency
of the other. Unfortunately it has been made on the old and fatal
presupposition of the historicity of the myth; but, as made by
Dr. Wright, it seemed well worth critical consideration. My critic
disparages that and other propaganda as "commanding no large measure of
assent anywhere." My testimony, I fear, will not help Dr. Wright; but I
will say that I found him an honest and extremely interesting writer,
admirably free from theological malice, and above all exhibiting a
thoroughly independent hold of his thesis. What amount of assent he
has secured is an irrelevant issue. I can only say that I found him
very readable. The scholarly and intellectual status of Dr. Flinders
Petrie, again, is such as perhaps to make it unnecessary to say--as
against similar disparagement in his case--that a thesis seriously and
vigorously embraced by him as superseding the older documentary and
oral hypotheses alike, seemed to me well entitled to consideration.]
The examination of the recent positions of independent writers
seeking to construct a documentary theory has, I think, sufficed
to safeguard the honest lay student of the myth-theory against the
kind of spurious rebuttal set up by those who, themselves innocent
of all original research, pretend that the fundamental historicity
of the gospels is established by a "consensus of scholarship." There
is no consensus of scholarship. I observe that M. Loisy, to whom I
devoted special study, is journalistically disparaged by the Very
Rev. Dean Inge. That disparagement--which, I also observe, I have the
undeserved honour to share--will not impose upon serious students,
who will realize that Dean Inge, himself transparently unorthodox,
has no resource in such matters but to disparage all who labour
with any measure of rational purpose to put concrete conclusions
where church dignitaries inevitably prefer to maintain rhetorical
mystification. For the purposes of serious students, M. Loisy is an
important investigator, Dean Inge a negligible essayist.
It is true that one of the positions I discussed--that of the school of
Weiss--is not "new." But in that case the reason for selection was not
merely that it was one of the efforts to reach something less neutral
than the "two-documents hypothesis," but that it is in substance
the position of some of the most recent and most virulent English
critics of the myth-theory. It is in fact the gist of the polemic
of Dr. Conybeare. I have shown, accordingly, that the thesis of a
primary biography is psychologically absurd in itself; and, further,
that like all the other documentary hypotheses it has been left high
and dry by the latest German exegetes, who, expressly assuming the
historicity of a Jesus, and founding on the gospels for their case,
reduce these to a minimum of tradition at which M. Loisy must stand
aghast. It is in England, in short, that the biographical school,
as represented by Dean Inge and Dr. Conybeare, is seen to be most
entirely out of touch with the movement of rational criticism.
It is in England, too, that we find the most uncritical reliance
put upon the "impression of a personality" said to be set up by
the gospels. This argument is still used without any attempt at
psychological self-analysis, any effort to find out what an impression
is worth. A generation or two ago, exactly the same position was
taken up in regard to the fourth gospel: both the Arnolds, for
instance, were confident that the vision of Jesus there given was
peculiarly real. Critical study has since forced all save the sworn
traditionalists and the mere compromisers to the conclusion that it
cannot be real if there is any substantial truth in the presentment
of the synoptics. Slowly it has been realized that the methods
which produce a vivid impression of "personality" are methods open
to fictive art, and differ only in detail from the methods of the
Bhagavat Gîta or the methods of Homer. If a strong impression of a
personality be a certificate of historicity, what of Zeus and Hêrê,
Athênê and Achilles, Ulysses and Nestor? Most critics who handle the
problem seem to work in vacuo, without regard to the phenomena and
the machinery of fictive literature in general, even when they are
moved to accept a hypothesis of fiction.
The vision presented in the fourth gospel is prima facie more lifelike
than that of the synoptics, because its main author is more of an
artist than his predecessors. It has been justly affirmed by Professor
W. B. Smith that
The received notion that in the early Marcan narratives the
Jesus is distinctly human, and that the process of deification
is fulfilled in John, is precisely the reverse of the truth. In
Mark there is really no man at all: the Jesus is God, or at
least essentially divine, throughout. He wears only a transparent
garment of flesh. Mark historizes only. Matthew also historizes
and faintly humanizes. Luke more strongly humanizes; while John
not only humanizes but begins to sentimentalize. [9]
Contemporary German scholars, such as Wellhausen, working on
the synoptics, begin uneasily to note the lack of reality and
verisimilitude in the presentment there given, avowing a deficit
of biographical quality where English amateurs still heedlessly
affirm a veridical naïveté. Wellhausen, tacitly clinging to the
biographical assumption, gives up section after section of Mark,
where our amateurs primitively acclaim as genuine biographic detail
such an item as "asleep on the cushion" (Mk. iv, 38). Following
another will-o'-the-wisp, Wellhausen is moved to claim the episode
of the widow's mite (Lk. xxi, 1-4) as having biographical flavour,
as if the admitted inventor of other Lucan episodes could not have
doctrinally framed this. There is no science in such tentatives. They
do but tell of a search for a subjective basis of belief when criticism
has dissolved the objective bases of the old assumption.
When it is pretended, as by Dr. Conybeare, that the mythical theory
rests on and grows solely out of the supernaturalist details in
the gospel story, the case is simply falsified. This writer never
seems to master his subject matter. Before Strauss, as by Strauss,
the myth-theory was widely applied to non-supernatural matter;
and to surmise a historical Jesus behind those details has been
the first step in all modern inquiry. The assertion that the
rejection of the historicity of Jesus "is not really the final
conclusion of their [myth-theorists'] researches, but an initial
unproved assumption" [10] is categorically false. Professor Smith's
biographical statement negates it. [11] As I have repeatedly stated,
I began without misgivings by assuming a historical Jesus, and
sought historically to trace him, regarding the birth myth and the
others as mere accretions. But the very first step in the strictly
historical inquiry revealed difficulties which the biographical
school and the traditionalists alike had simply never faced. The
questions whether Jesus was "of Nazareth," "Nazarene" in that sense,
or "the Nazarite"; and why, if he was either of these, he was never
so named in the epistles, stood in the very front of the problem,
wholly unregarded by those who profess to trace a historical Jesus
by historical method. The problem of "the twelve" is to this day
passed with equal heedlessness by critics professing to work on
historico-critical lines; and the question of the authenticity of the
teachings is no more scientifically met. It was because at every step
the effort to find historical foundation failed utterly that after
years of investigation I sought and found in a thorough application
of the myth-theory the solution of the enigma. Invariably that gives
light where the historical assumption yields darkness.
It is thoroughly characteristic of the spirit in which some champions
of the biographical view work that, in sequel to the falsification
of the problem just noted, we have from them the plea that if we
give up the historicity of Jesus, we must give up that of Solon and
Pythagoras; and that "obviously Jesus has a far larger chance to
have really existed than Solon." [12] Such a use of the conception of
"chance" reveals the kind of dialectic we are dealing with. One recalls
Newman's derision of the Paleyan position that the "chances" were in
favour of there being a God. "If we deny all authenticity to Jesus's
teaching," we are asked, "what of Solon's traditional lore?" Well,
what of it? Is it to be authenticated by the threat that it must
go if we deny that the Sermon on the Mount is a sermon at all? The
fragments of Solon's verse purport to have been written by him:
have we anything purporting to have been written by Jesus? The very
fact that we have only fragments of Solon is in itself an argument
in favour of their genuineness: to Jesus any evangelist could ascribe
any sayings at will. [13]
As usual, the critic falsifies the debate, affirming that "the stories
of Plutarch about him [Solon] are, as Grote says, 'contradictory as
well as apocryphal.'" What Grote really says [14] is that Plutarch's
stories "as to the way in which Salamis was recovered are contradictory
as well as apocryphal." He makes no such assertion as to the stories
of Solon's life in general, though, like every critical historian,
he recognizes that many things were ultimately ascribed to Solon which
belong to later times. [15] But the genuine fragments of Solon's verse
and laws are sound historical material. As Meyer claims, [16] the
Archon list is as valid as the Roman Fasti. It is precisely because
of the solid elements in the record that Solon stands as a historic
figure, while Lycurgus is given up as a deity Evemerized. [17] On the
principles of Dr. Conybeare, we must give up Solon because we give up
Lycurgus, or accept Lykurgos if we accept Solon. Historical criticism
does no such thing. It decides the cases on their merits by critical
tests, and finds the fact of a Solonian legislation historically as
certain as the Lycurgean is fabulous. The item that Solon's family
claimed to be descended from Poseidon is no ground for doubting
the historicity of Solon, because such claims were normal in early
Greece. Is it pretended that claims to be the Son of God were normal
in later Jewry?
The device of saying that we must accept the historicity of Jesus if we
accept that of Solon is merely a new dressing of the old claim that we
must believe in the resurrection if we believe in the assassination
of Cæsar. Both theses rest on spurious analogies; and both alike
defeat themselves, the older by carrying the implication that the
prodigies at Cæsar's death are as historical as the assassination;
the newer by involving the consequence that Solon accredits not only
Lycurgus but Herakles and Dionysos, Ulysses and Achilles.
The argument from Pythagoras is a still more fatal device. Of him
"it is no easy task to give an account that can claim to be regarded
as history." [18] And "of the opinions of Pythagoras we know even
less than of his life." [19] It is held to be certain that he taught
the doctrine of transmigration and originated certain propositions in
mathematics; but while the mathematical element has no analogue in the
gospels, the residual view of Pythagoras as vending in religion only a
"thoroughly primitive" set of taboos [20] would sanction, by analogy,
the view that the real Jesus was the Talmudic Ben Pandira, who dates
about 100 B.C., and was reputed a worker of wonders by sorcery. This is
a sufficiently lame and impotent conclusion from a polemic in favour of
the gospel Jesus, whom it leaves, in effect, a myth, as the myth-theory
maintains. As for Apollonius of Tyana, one holds him historical [21]
just because his myth-laden story is finally intelligible as history,
which is precisely what the Jesus story is not.
This said, The Historical Jesus may be left, as it is, open to critical
refutation. The present volume is theoretically constructive, and
does not unnecessarily return upon the other. It is open in its turn
to refutative criticism.
That description, it may be remarked, would not be accorded by me to
a mere asseveration that there "must" be a historical basis for the
gospels in a person answering broadly to the Gospel Jesus. Any one
who confidently holds such a view need hardly trouble himself with
the present thesis at all: and for me any one who affects to dispose
of the issue by merely fulminating the "must" is simply begging the
question. Those who, on the other hand, do but lean instinctively to
such a belief may be respectfully invited to reconsider it in the
light of all hierology. That there "must" be a historic process of
causation behind every cult is a truism: it does not in the least
follow that the historic basis must be the historicity of the God or
Demigod round whose name the cult centres.
Many Saviour names have been the centres of cults, in the ancient
world as in the modern. There were extensive and long-lived worships
of Herakles, Dionysos, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, in addition to the
age-long cults of the "Supreme" Gods. Is it claimed that there "must"
have been a historical Herakles, or Dionysos, or Adonis? If so, is
it further contended that there must have been a historical Jehovah,
a Jove, a Cybelê, a Juno, a Venus? If the Father-Gods and Mother-Gods
could be evolved by protracted mythopoeia, why not the Son-Gods?
It is perfectly true, as was urged by the late Sir Alfred Lyall,
that in India and elsewhere distinguished men may to this day be
deified; that ancestor-worship played a great part in God-making;
and that tribal Gods are in many cases probably evolved from
distinguished chiefs. But such cases really defeat the inference
drawn from them. Such God-making can in no instance be shown ever
to have set up what can reasonably be termed a world-religion. The
world-religions are the product of a far more protracted and complex
causation. They grow from far further-reaching roots. Above all,
they have never grown up without the services either of a numerous
priesthood or of Sacred Books, or of both.
Is it then contended that a Sacred Book must represent the originative
teaching of a real person and his disciples? It may or may not;
but what does not at all follow is that the personality deified or
extolled in the Sacred Book was real. Mohammed was a real person:
he made no claim to deity: he acclaimed an established God. The names
of Zoroaster and Buddha were probably not those of real persons: the
first figures as a cult-building priest; the second as a Teacher,
enshrined from the first in a luxuriant myth, whence his practical
deification. In both cases the specific centre of the religion is
the Book or Books; and it is beyond question that in both cases many
hands wrought on these. To say that only a primary personality of
abnormal greatness could have inspired the writing of the books is
really equivalent to saying that there must have been a historical
Jehovah to account for the Old Testament, and a historical Allah to
account for the Koran. Let it be freely granted that the writers of
Sacred Books were in many cases remarkable personalities. That is a
totally different proposition from the one we are considering.
The claim that the gospels could only have originated round the memory
of an inspiring and love-creating personality is in effect an evasion
of the multitudinous facts of hierology. The European who sees nothing
in the fact that the mythic Krishna is loved by millions of Hindoos;
that in ages of antiquity millions of worshippers were absorbed in the
love of Dionysos, mutilated themselves for Attis, and wept for Adonis,
is not really ready for a verdict on what "must" have been as regards
the building up of any cult. Are the Psalms, once more, a testimony to
the historicity of Jehovah, or is the hymn of Hippolytos to Artemis,
in Euripides, a proof of anything but that men can love an imagination?
The special claim for a historical Jesus arises out of the very fact
that Jesus alone among the Saviour Gods of antiquity (Buddha being
excluded from that category) is celebrated in a set of Sacred Books in
which he figures as at once a Sacrificed God and a Teaching God. [22]
But the worships of the Saviours Dionysos and Herakles and Adonis,
without Sacred Books (apart from temple liturgies), were as confident
as the worship of Jesus. Is the production of Sacred Books in itself
any more of a testimony to a Saviour God's human actuality than the
worship with which they are associated?
Historically speaking, the emergence of Sacred Books as accompaniments
of a popular cultus is a result of special culture conditions. In
the case of Judaism these have never been scientifically traced,
by reason of the presuppositions of the past. [23] But we can trace
later cases. Early Christism founded primarily on the Sacred Books
of Judaism; and it needed to produce books of its own if it was
to survive as against the overshadowing parent cult. Save for these
books, Christism would have disappeared as did Mithraism, of which the
scanty hieratic literature remained occult, liturgical, unpopular,
where Christism was committed to publicity by the Jewish lead. To
make of Sacred Books produced under those special conditions a special
argument for the historicity of their contents, or of their narrative
groundwork, is to embrace the fallacy of the single instance. And when
the contents utterly fail to sustain the tests of rational documentary
criticism, to fall back on a "must" for certification of the actuality
of the figure they deify is merely to renounce critical reason.
The rational problem is to account historically for the projection
as a whole, to explain the main features and as many minor details
as may be, as we explain the "personality" and the myth of Herakles
or Samson or Adonis, the doctrines and fictions of the Books of Ruth
and Esther, the religions of Krishna and Mithra and Quetzalcoatl. We
are now compendiously to make the attempt.
M. Loisy has declared [24] that "One can explain to oneself Jesus:
one cannot explain to oneself those who invented him." In the previous
volume it has been contended that M. Loisy has decisively failed to
"explain Jesus" as a possible person: in this we essay to explain
"those who invented him." M. Loisy is an illustrious New-Testament
scholar: he is not a mythologist or a comparative hierologist. It is
very likely that he would find it difficult to explain to himself
those who invented Tezcatlipoca; but it would hardly follow that
Tezcatlipoca was not invented. In point of fact, a large portion
of M. Loisy's own important critical performance consists precisely
in explaining away as inventions a multitude of items in the gospel
narrative. He can understand invention of many parts, and admits that
unless removed they make an incongruous whole. There is really no
more difficulty in explaining the other parts as similar inventions
than in explaining these. Thus the alleged difficulty is illusory.
The occupation of "explaining to oneself" imaginary beings has been the
occupation of theologians through whole millenniums. There can still
be found even a hierologist or two who believe in the historicity of
Krishna; as the judicious Mosheim in the eighteenth century confidently
believed in the historicity of Mercury and Mithra. Those--and they
are many--who are now content to see myth in the figures of Mithra
and Krishna, with or without the nimbus of Sacred Books, may on that
score consent to consider the thesis of this volume.
It will be no adequate answer to that to say, as will doubtless be
said, that the outline of the evolution of the myth is unsatisfying. In
the very nature of the case, the connections of the data must be
speculative. It may well be that those here attempted--some of them
modifications of previous theories--will have to be at various
points reshaped; and I invite the reader to weigh carefully the
views of Professors Drews and Smith where I diverge from them. The
complete establishment of a historical construction will be a long and
difficult task. But in its least satisfying aspect the myth-theory
is a scientific substitution for what is wholly dissatisfying--the
entirely unhistorical construction furnished by the gospels.
That has been under revision for a hundred and fifty years, with an
outlay of labour that is appalling to think of, in view of the utter
futility of the search--or, let us say, the labour in proportion to
the result, for toil even upon false clues has yielded some knowledge
that avails for rectification. But the labour has meant a steadily
dwindling confidence in a dwindling residuum of supposed fact; though
every shortening of the line of defence has evoked furious outcry from
the unthinking faithful. The first pious framers of "harmonies" of the
gospels were indignantly told by the more stupid pious that there was
no strife to harmonize: the Schmiedels and Loisys of to-day, striving
their hardest to save something by rational methods from the rational
advance, are execrated by those who believe more than they. The more
instructed believers are as warm in their resentment of the latest
and coolest negative criticism as were their fathers towards the
contemptuous exposure of the contradictions of "inspiration." Anger,
it would seem, always leaps to the help of shaken confidence. Let
the believer perpend.
It is not orthodoxy that is to-day fighting the case of the historicity
of Jesus. Orthodoxy is committed to the miraculous, to Revelation,
to the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and, if it
would be consistent, to the Ascension, which is on the same plane
of belief. Upon such assumptions, there can be no critical defence
worthy of the name. The defence is being conducted mainly by the avowed
or non-avowed Neo-Unitarians of the various churches and countries;
and these are simply standing either at the position taken up fifty
years ago by Renan, whose "biography" of Jesus was received with a
far more widespread and no less violent storm of censure than that
now being turned upon the myth-theory; or at the more nearly negative
position of Strauss, which was still more fiercely censured. Renan's
position, or Strauss's, is now the position of the mass of "moderate"
scholars and students. Those who have thus seen a denounced heresy
become the standpoint of ordinary scholarly belief should be slow to
conclude that a newer heresy will not in time find similar acceptance.
CHAPTER II
THE CENTRAL MYTH
§ 1. The Ground of Conflict
For the purposes of this inquiry, all miracles, strictly so-called,
are out of discussion. This does not mean that the myth-theory
of Jesus is an outcome of atheistic philosophy. One of the most
brilliant of modern books on Jesus is the work of an avowed atheist,
[25] who accepted substantially the whole of the non-supernatural
presentment of Jesus in the gospels, taking it to be a bad biography,
and subjecting the doctrine to keen but sympathetic criticism. This
writer, dismissing miracles as outside debate, had a conviction of the
historicity of Jesus which was in no way affected by a knowledge of
modern documentary criticism. On the other hand, Professor Arthur
Drews, author of The Christ Myth, expressly claims to urge the
myth-theory in the interest of theistic religion. Of course he too
dismisses miracles as outside discussion.
Those who are still concerned to discuss them, and to affirm such
beliefs as those of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, should
turn their attention to the well-known work of the late W. R. Cassels,
Supernatural Religion, [26] in which the whole supernaturalist case,
in its double aspect of "revelation" and miracles, is examined with an
abundance of learning, patience, and candour. Disparaged in its day
by professional orthodox scholars, that treatise has so completely
done its special work in the general criticism of supernaturalist
faith that, however common orthodoxy may still be, the matter is now
little debated among instructed men. Those who still hold the orthodox
position, therefore, are not here addressed. Our inquiry invites the
attention only of those who, abandoning the supernaturalist basis
of the Christian creed, seek to retain (it may be as the ground for
a transformed "Christianity") (1) the human personality which they
believe to have underlain the admitted myths of the record, and
(2) the teachings--or some of them--ascribed to the God-Man of the
Gospels. The problem is one of historical criticism, and does not turn
upon theism or atheism. The historicity of Jesus is maintained not only
by "Christians" of various degrees of heterodoxy but by some professed
rationalists; by critics eminent for judicial temper, as by Professor
Schmiedel of Zürich; and on the other hand by Dr. F. C. Conybeare.
These critics agree in regarding Jesus as a natural man, naturally
born, and it is to them that we must reply. When an orthodox Christian
like the Rev. Dr. T. J. Thorburn, holding by the Annunciation and the
Virgin Birth, sets himself to rebut the myth-theory [27] by scouting
myth analogies, it would be idle to argue with him. A writer who
can believe he has evidence for a story of human parthenogenesis
has no conception of evidence in common with us. It is accordingly
needless to point out that he constantly and absurdly misunderstands
the myth argument; [28] that he discusses Evemerism without knowing
what it means; [29] and that he merely juggles with such cruces as
the stories of the Transfiguration and the Ascension. From one at his
standpoint we can expect nothing else; and to those whom his exposition
satisfies no myth-theory can appeal. When he resorts to the device of
denying "spiritual insight" to those who accept scientific tests, he
merely exemplifies the normal procedure of orthodox incompetence. The
religious reasoner who flouts reason usually certificates and betrays
himself in that inexpensive fashion. Our argument is addressed to
those who profess to apply to Biblical matters the principles of
historical criticism.
The biographical school, as one may inoffensively term the variously
minded champions of the historicity of the record, abandon the Virgin
Birth and the Resurrection as impossibilities. That is to say, they
accept the myth-theory as regards those two cardinal items of the
Christian legend. They also in general recognize that the fourth
gospel, in so far as it differs vitally from the synoptics, is in
the main a process of myth-making. But, clinging to the alleged
substratum, most members of the school adhere to the fundamental
historicity of the Crucifixion. Here they stand with Strauss, who
found in the execution of Jesus by Pontius Pilate a solid historical
fact. Strauss is generally explicit as to his reasons for accepting
and rejecting; and while he resolves into myth at least nine-tenths
of the gospel narratives, finding them mere inventions to "fulfil"
supposed Old Testament predictions, he finds the testimony of Tacitus
unquestionable as to the execution. [30]
Now, the Annals of Tacitus is itself a questioned document; but
even if we take it as unquestionable it is admittedly only a late
statement of a narrative already made current by the Christists,
the Annals being commonly dated about 120 C.E. Either Tacitus was
founding on a Roman record of the Crucifixion or he was merely saying
what Christists said as to the origin of their sect. If the latter,
he supplies no historical basis. On the other hand, the unlikelihood
of there being a Roman record of executions in Palestine ninety
years before is so great that no Christian advocate now appears
to affirm it. Tacitus in fact gives no sign of consulting official
records, [31] his only traceable sources being previous historians,
notably Suetonius. Thus Strauss's express ground for accepting the
execution of a "Christ" by Pontius Pilate is really illusory; and
when we further find him pronouncing that the Barabbas episode must
be held fundamentally historical because it is "so firmly rooted in
the early Christian tradition," [32] we are again compelled to reject
his test. As we shall see, the Barabbas episode is unintelligible
as history, but highly intelligible as myth. At the very outset,
then, unverified assumptions are seen to be made by the biographical
school as to what may confidently be taken as historical, even when,
as in the case of Strauss, they affirm an abundance of myth.
Where Strauss was rash, later rationalistic writers have been more
so. My old friend, the English translator of Jules Soury's early work
on Jesus, took for granted that behind legendary heroes in general
there is always a nucleus of fact; but Soury, after postulating a
large part of the gospel story as veridical, gave up a number of his
own items. [33] As soon as he began to apply criticism, they were seen
to be arbitrary assumptions. Equally arbitrary is the assumption of
"some basis," made upon no scientific principle.
The biographical school in general adhere at least to the trial
and condemnation before Pilate, though many abandon as fiction the
trial before the Sanhedrim, which indeed was abandoned as long ago
as the third gospel, in favour of an equally fictitious trial before
Herod. As is seen by M. Loisy, the trial before Pilate is for the
historical critic the keystone of the tragedy story. If that goes,
there remains only a highly composite body of teaching, with no
identifiable historical personality to which to attach it.
But even as regards the trials there is wide divergence among the
biographical school. For instance, Mr. Charles Stanley Lester, an
ex-clergyman of Milwaukee, in his interesting work The Historic Jesus,
[34] entirely rejects the Sanhedrim trial, and likewise the gospel
account of the Pilate trial, but finds "probable history" in the view
that the priests privately persuaded Pilate to condemn Jesus on their
accusation without any trial. [35] Again, the anonymous author of The
Four Gospels as Historical Records, [36] an eminently keen, searching,
and candid critic, rejects alike the Judas story, the trial before the
Sanhedrim, and the trial before Pilate, [37] as he does most of the
other items of the gospel history, yet throughout seems to take for
granted the historicity of the "Great Teacher," the "Master," never
even raising that issue save in protesting that he has absolutely
nothing to say against him. [38] So completely does he destroy the
whole narrative, indeed, that he can hardly be said to maintain the
thesis of historicity, but he never calls it in question: he merely
destroys the biography. Mr. Lester, on the other hand, confidently
rejects a hundred details as myth, claiming that he presents the
gospels "relieved of the drapery of mythology and set free from all
dogmatic fictions"; [39] and yet no less confidently affirms a hundred
"undoubted" things, in a manner that almost outgoes M. Loisy.
If, faced by such procedures, the critical reader asks upon what
grounds the historical personality is accepted, he gets from the
able anonymous writer no answer, and from Mr. Lester, in effect, only
the answer that the teachings which appeal to him in the gospels are
self-certified as coming from the "Jesus" in whom he believes, while
the others are dismissed by him as inconsistent with his conception. As
a rule, the negative criticism is soundly reasoned; the constructive
is purely arbitrary. Yet Mr. Lester is an amiable and--apart from his
quaint animosity towards "the Semitic mind" [40]--a temperate critic,
warmly concerned for historic truth and loyally opposed to all kinds
of priestcraft, ancient and modern. What we must ask from such critics
is that they should bring to bear on their biographical assumption
the same critical method that they bring to bear on the multitude
of details which strike them as obviously unhistorical. Rejecting
miracles and self-contradictory narrative, they affirm a miraculous
and self-contradictory Person. That conception too must be analysed.
The Jesus of the Gospels is at once a Messiah (with no definite mission
as such), a Saviour God with whom the indefinite Messiah coalesces,
and a Teaching God who coalesces with both. The biographical school,
in the mass, posit a human Teacher, round whose teaching a Messianic
conception combined with a doctrine of salvation by blood sacrifice has
nucleated. If in this tissue there cannot be inserted the historical
detail of the trial before Pilate, there is nothing left but the
quasi-mythical detail of the crucifixion as an ostensible historical
basis for the Messianic and other teaching, so much of which is alien
to the early cult, so much of which is critically to be assigned to
previous and contemporary Jewish sources, and so much to later Jesuist
editors and compilers. Those laymen who are content to pick out of the
gospels certain teachings, such as the Sermon on the Mount, and call
these "Christianity," have not realized how completely documentary
analysis has disintegrated the teachings into pre-Jesuine Jewish
and post-Jesuine Gentile matter. The latest professional analysis,
as we have seen, leaves no Jesuine "Teaching" save an eschatology,
a doctrine of "last things," coming from a visionary Messiah with no
political or social message. [41] The bulk of the biographical school,
on the other hand, cling diversely to "something" in the Teaching which
shall be somehow commensurate with the "impression" made by the life
and death of the Teacher, which, from Renan onwards, they regard as the
real genesis of the myth of the Resurrection and the consequent cult.
Having shown, then, the cogent critical reasons for dismissing the
entire record of the triple episode of the Supper, the Agony, and the
Trials, as unhistorical, [42] it concerns us to show (1) that the whole
is intelligible only as myth, and (2) how the myth probably arose. The
sequence culminates in the Crucifixion, which, with the Sacrament,
is for the rational hierologist as for the orthodox theologian the
centre of Christianity. Equally the biographical school are committed
to maintaining the historicity of the event, without which they cannot
explain the rise of the cult. If then the myth-theory is to stand,
it must show that the central narrative belongs to the realm of myth.
§ 2. The Sacrificial Rite
In the Christian record, the Crucifixion is essentially a
sacrifice. "The essence of the Sacrament is not merely partaking of
a common cup or a common meal, but feasting upon a sacrifice ... and
this was found everywhere among Jews and Gentiles." [43] Thus the term
"Eucharist," which means "thanksgiving" or "thank-offering," applied
in the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles to the kind of sacrament
there indicated, and thence taken by Justin and other Fathers,
is clearly a misnomer for the thing specified in the gospels. Of
the gospel sacrifice, the sacrament is the liturgical and symbolic
application. [44] Or, otherwise, the crucifixion is the fulfilment of
the theory of the sacrament. On the view of the historicity of the
former, or of both, it would be necessary to show why the procedure
set forth in the gospels so closely simulated a human sacrifice; and
this is incidentally attempted in passing by M. Loisy. The scene of
derision by the soldiers, he says, "was perhaps connected with some
pagan festival usage." [45] But this at once admits the entrance of
the myth-theory, which affirms that an immemorial "festival" usage
is indicated. If Jesus was executed to please the Jewish multitude,
as is the view even of the most destructive of the later German
exegetes [46]--why should the execution take a pagan form? M. Loisy,
who had previously accepted as history the narrative of the Entry into
Jerusalem, with the public acclamation of Jesus as "the Son of David,"
is unprepared to believe with the German critic that within a week the
multitude cried "Crucify him!"; and he therefore wholly eliminates
that item from his biographical sketch. He implies, however, that
the doom of Jesus was passed by Pilate to please the priests, which
is equally fatal to the thesis of a pagan festival usage. He accepts,
further, the scene of the Mocking, with no ostensible critical reason,
but presumably in order to establish a history which would explain
the subsequent growth of the cult. In this process the salient episode
of Barabbas is dismissed by him as unhistorical. [47]
Thus the most distinguished critic of the biographical school has
no account to give of a second salient item in the record which,
being entirely non-supernatural, must be held to have been inserted
for some strong reason. It in fact closely involves the whole
myth-theory. Barabbas was in all probability a regular figure in
Semitic popular religion; and the name connects documentarily with
that of Jesus. The reading "Jesus Barabbas," in Mt. xxvii, 16, as
we have noted, [48] was long the accepted one in the ancient Church;
and its entrance and its disappearance are alike significant. It is
obviously probable that such a name as "Jesus the Son of the Father"
(= Bar-Abbas [49]), applied to a murderer, would give an amount of
offence to early Christian readers which would naturally lead in time
to its elimination from the current text. [50] But on that view there
is no explanation of its entrance. Such a stumbling-block could not
have been set up without a compulsive reason.
The anthropological and hierological data go to show that an annual
sacrifice of a "Son of the Father" was a long-standing feature in the
Semitic world. A story in Philo Judæus about a mummery in Alexandria
in ridicule of the Jewish King Agrippa, the grandson of Herod,
points pretty clearly to a local Jewish survival from that usage. A
lunatic named Karabas is said to have been paraded as a mock-king,
with mock-crown, sceptre and robe. [51] In all likelihood the K is a
mistranscription for B. In any case, "the custom of sacrificing the son
for the father was common, if not universal, among Semitic peoples,"
[52] as among others; and the Passover [53] was originally a sacrifice
of firstlings, human and animal, [54] the former being probably
most prevalent in times of disaster. "Devotion" was the principle:
surrogate sacrifices would normally be substituted. Sacrifice of a
king's son, in particular, was held to be of overwhelming efficacy by
early Hebrews and other Semites, as among other races in the savage
and barbaric stages. [55]
There is nothing peculiar to the Semites either in the general or
in the particular usage, both being once nearly universal; but it is
with the Semites that we are here specially concerned. The story of
Abraham and Isaac, to say nothing of that of Jephthah's daughter,
is a finger-post in the evolution of religion, being inferribly
a humane myth to promote the substitution of animal for human
sacrifice. And the Phoenician myth of "Ieoud," the "only-begotten"
son of King Kronos, "whom the Phoenicians call Israel," sacrificed
by his father at a time of national danger, after being dressed in
the trappings of royalty, [56] points towards the historic roots
of Christianity. Again and again we meet the conception of the
"only-begotten" "Son of the Father"--Father Abraham, Father Kronos,
Father Israel, the Father-King--as a special sacrifice in Hebrew and
other Semitic history. Kronos is a Semitic God; and in connection with
the Roman Saturnalia we have the record of a Greek oracle commanding to
"send a man to the Father"--that is, to Kronos. [57]
What is certain is that sacrifices of kings, which were at one stage of
social evolution normal, [58] inevitably tended to take other tribal
or communal forms; and a multitude of rites preserved plain marks
of the regal origin. Kings would inevitably pass off their original
tragic burden; the community, bent on the safeguard of sacrifice,
shifted it in turn. [59] Sacrifice of some kind, it was felt, there
must be, to avert divine wrath: [60] that conviction lies at the base
of the Christian as of the Jewish religion: it is fundamental to all
primitive religion; and it is happily beyond our power to realize
save symbolically the immeasurable human slaughter that the religious
conviction has involved.
Primarily, voluntary victims were desired; and in Roman and
Japanese history there are special or general records of their being
forthcoming, annually or in times of emergency. [61] Even in the case
of animal sacrifice, the Romans had a trick of putting barley in the
victim's ear to make him bow his head as if in submission. [62] But as
regards human sacrifices, which were felt to be specially efficacious,
the progression was inevitable from willing to compelled victims;
and out of the multitude of the forms of human sacrifice, for which
war captives and slaves at some stages supplied a large proportion
of the victims, we single that of the evolution from the voluntary
scape-goat or the sacrificed king or messenger, through the victim
"bought with a price," to the released criminal or other desperate
or resigned person bribed with a period of licence and abundance to
die for the community at the end of it.
In many if not in most of these cases, deification of the victim was
involved in the theory, the victim being customarily identified with
the God. [63] It was so in certain special sacrifices in pre-Christian
Mexico. [64] It was so in the human sacrifices of the Khonds of
Orissa, which subsisted till about the middle of last century. [65]
In the latter instance, of which we have precise record, the annual
victims were taken from families devoted by purchase to the function,
or were bought as children and brought up for the purpose. They
were "bought with a price." When definitely allotted, the males were
permitted absolute sexual liberty, being regarded as already virtually
deified. The victim was finally slain "for the sins of the world,"
and was liturgically declared a God in the process.
Such rites gradually dwindled in progressive communities from ritual
murders into ritual mysteries or masquerades; even as human sacrifices
in general, in most parts of the world, dwindled from bodies to parts
of bodies, fingers, hair, foreskins; from human to animal victims;
[66] from larger to smaller animals; from these to fowls; from real
animals to baked or clay models, fruits, grains, sheafs of rushes,
figures, paper or other symbols. It seems usually to have been humane
kings or chiefs who imposed the improvement on priesthoods. And as
with the victim, so with the sacramental meal which accompanied so
many sacrifices. Cannibal sacraments were once, probably, universal:
they have survived down till recent times in certain regions; but with
advance in civilization they early and inevitably tend to become merely
symbolic. In Mexico at the advent of Cortes, both the cannibal and the
symbolic forms subsisted--the former under conventional limitations;
the latter in the practice of eating a baked image which had been
raised on a cross and there pierced, for sanctification. [67] This
"Eating of the God" was very definitely a sacrament; but so were the
cannibalistic sacraments which preceded it.
Surveying the general evolution, we reach the inference that somewhere
in Asia Minor there subsisted before "our era" a cult or cults in which
a "Son of the Father" was annually sacrificed under one or other of the
categories of human sacrifice--Scapegoat, representative Firstling,
Vegetation God, or Messenger; possibly in some cases under all four
aspects in one. The usage may or may not have subsisted in post-exilic
Jerusalem: quite possibly it did, for not only do the Sacred Books
avow constant popular and legal resort to "heathen" practices of human
sacrifice, [68] but Jewish religious lore preserves in a variety of
forms clear evidence of institutions of human sacrifice which are
not recognized in the Sacred Books. [69] In any case, in connection
with the particular cult or rite in question there subsisted also a
Eucharist or Sacrament or Holy Supper, analogous to the sacraments
of the cults of Mithra, Dionysos, Attis, and many other Gods. [70]
At a remote period it had been strictly cannibalistic: in course of
time, it became symbolical. In other words, originally the sacrificed
victim was sacramentally eaten; in course of time the thing eaten was
something else, with at most a ritual formula of "body and blood." At a
certain stage, whether by regal or other compulsion or by choice of the
devotees, the annual rite of sacrifice became a mere ritual or Mystery
Drama--as in other cases it became a public masquerade. The former
evolution underlay the religions of Dionysos, Osiris, Adonis, and
Attis: the latter may or may not have gone on alongside of the former.
What does emerge from the gospel narrative concerning Barabbas and
Jesus is, not that such an episode happened: here the myth-theory is at
one with M. Loisy, who in effect pronounces the narrative to be myth:
but that in the first age of Christianity the name "Jesus Barabbas"
was well known, and stood for something well known. It was certainly
known to the Jews, for we have Talmudical mention, dating from a period
just after the fall of the Temple, that there was a Jewish ritual
"Week of the Son, or, as some call it, Jesus the Son," in connection
with the circumcision and redemption of the first-born child. [71]
From the inference of the currency of the name there is no escape:
attached to a robber and murderer it could never have got into the
gospels otherwise. And the myth-theory can supply the explanation
which neither the orthodox nor the biographical theory can yield. We
have outside evidence that a sacrifice of a "Son of the Father" was
customary in parts of the Semitic world. What the gospel story proves
is that it was known to have been a practice, either at Jerusalem or
elsewhere, to release a prisoner to the multitude in connection with a
popular festival, which might or might not have been the Passover. The
release may have been for the purpose either of a religious masquerade
or of a sacrifice. Either way, the religious rite involved was a rite
of "Jesus Barabbas"--Jesus the Son of the Father--and it involved
either a real or a mock sacrifice, in which the "Son" figured as a
mock king, with robe and crown.
The more the problem is considered, then, the more clear becomes the
solution. As soon as the Jesuist cult reached the stage of propaganda
in which it described its Son-God as having died, in circumstances of
ignominy, as an atoning sacrifice, it would be met by the memory of
the actual Barabbas rite. Given that the Barabbas victim was ritually
scourged and "crucified" (a term which has yet to be investigated),
it follows that wherever the early propaganda [72] went in areas
in which the memory of the rite subsisted, the Christists would be
told that their Jesus the Son was simply the Jesus Barabbas of that
popular rite; and the only possible--or at least the best--way to
override the impeachment was to insert a narrative which reduced the
regular ritual Jesus Barabbas to a single person, a criminal whom the
wicked Jewish multitude had chosen to save instead of the sinless
Jesus of the cult. In the circumstances given it was an absolutely
necessary invention; and no other circumstances could conceivably
have made it necessary. The story, by the unwilling admission of
M. Loisy, who conserves whatever he thinks he critically can of the
record, is a myth; and it is a myth which on the biographical theory
cannot be explained. The myth-theory has explained it. As for the
disappearance of the "Jesus" from the name of Barabbas in the records,
it hardly needs explanation. When the memory of the old annual rite
died away from general knowledge, the elision of the "Jesus" would
be desirable alike for the learned who still knew and the unlearned
who did not. [73]
§ 3. Contingent Elements
It is needless for the defender of the biographical theory to interject
a protest that the Barabbas story is only one item in the case. The
other items will all be dealt with in turn: that has been put in the
front because of its crucial significance. Incidentally it may be
further noted that the myth-theory explains the plainly unhistorical
item of "the thirty pieces of silver," confusedly explained from "the
prophet Jeremy" as "the price of him that was priced, whom [certain]
of the children of Israel did price" (Mt. xxvii, 9). The reference
is really to Zechariah (xi, 12, 13).
The story of the Betrayal is fiction on the very face of the narrative,
Judas being employed to point out a personage of declared notoriety,
about whose movements there had been no secrecy. [74] Judas is
demonstrably a somewhat late figure in the gospel legend, coming
from the later Mystery Drama, not from the rite on which it was
built. But, whatever may be the solution of the cryptogram about the
potter's field and the thirty pieces of silver in Zechariah, or the
historic fact about Aceldama, one thing is clear: "the price of him
that was priced," in Matthew, tells of the usage of paying a price
for sacrificial victims.
It does not follow that a price was regularly paid in the case of the
Jesus Barabbas rite, though the record actually insists on the item
by way of the Judas story: what is clear is that a memory of bought
victims subsisted after the fall of Jerusalem. It is not unlikely
that "Aceldama" was a field where sacrificial victims were either
slain or buried, or both. A passage in the Kalika Purana suggests
the procedure, and the probable significance of Golgotha, the "place
of skulls." In the Hindu rite, the human victim was immolated "at a
cemetery or holy place," upon which the sacrificer was not to look;
and the head was presented in "the place of skulls, sacred to Bhoiruvu"
(God of Fear). This could be in a special temple, or in a part of
the cemetery, "or on a mountain." [75]
At this point a warning must be given against the confusion set up by
the habitual assumption that "something of the kind" occurred under
Pontius Pilate. It is only on the biographical theory that that date is
valid. Pontius Pilate is simply a figure in the later Mystery Drama,
originally chosen, probably, because of his notoriety as a shedder
of Jewish blood. [76] We are not bound to prove that at his date
the usage of ritual human sacrifice, real or pretended, survived at
Jerusalem, though it may have done, as it survived at Rhodes in the
time of Porphyry in the form, perhaps, of a Semitic mystery drama. [77]
It is the assumption of the historicity of the Crucifixion that partly
disarms the theorem of Sir J. G. Frazer as to a coincidence of Jewish
sacrificial rites. [78] Noting that the details of the Crucifixion
closely conform to those of a human sacrifice sometimes practised
in the Christian era in connection with the Roman Saturnalia, and
also to those of a real or mock rite connected with the Babylonian
feast of the Sacæa, he resorts to the alternative hypotheses (a)
that the analogous Jewish feast of Purim, imported from Babylon after
the Return, and also involving either a real or a mock crucifixion,
chanced to coincide with the actual crucifixion of the gospel Jesus;
or that (b) Christian tradition "shifted the date of the crucifixion
by a month or so" to connect it with the Passover. As the official
Purim rite, though cognate with that of the Passover, cannot well have
been allowed to coincide with it, the theory of coincidence is barred;
and the theorist is assured by an expert colleague that "all that we
hear of the Passion is only explicable by the Passover festival," and
that "without the background of the festival all that we know of the
Crucifixion and of what led up to it is totally unintelligible." [79]
When, however, the unhistorical character of the gospel narrative is
realized, such difficulties disappear. The intention was certainly
to connect the Crucifixion with the Passover (in which the paschal
lamb--symbolizing Isaac--was customarily dressed in the form of a
cross [80]); and in the fourth gospel Jesus becomes an actual Passover
sacrifice. But the narrative is simply a reduction to historic form
of the procedure of a customary ritual sacrifice, habitual usages of
human sacrifice being represented as expedients of a single Roman
execution. With the exact seasonal date of the Jesus Barabbas rite
which here motived the gospel legend, the myth-theory is not primarily
concerned, though it has secondary interest. It was probably a Spring
Festival, and at the same time a New Year Festival, the period of
the vernal equinox having been both in east and west the time of
the New Year before that was placed after the winter solstice. It is
thus highly likely that there were analogous sacrificial festivals
at Yule and at Easter, one celebrating the new-birth of the sun and
the other the revival of vegetation. The Sacæa festival may or may
not have been identical with that known from the monuments to have
been called the Zakmuk [81] (New Year): either way, the features may
have been the same. There was in Judea, further, a hieratic year as
well as a civil, a Lesser Passover as well as the greater. [82] The
myth-theory does not depend on an agreed date, though the myth fixes
on an astronomical date, itself constantly varying in the calendar.
What leaps to the eyes is that the gospel legend preserves two
separated features of the festival of a Sacrificed Mock-King, which
as incidents in the life of the Teacher are wholly incompatible,
and which the biographical theory cannot reasonably explain--the
acclaimed and welcomed Entry into Jerusalem and within a week the
demand of the city multitude for the crucifixion. The Entry is an
elaboration of several myth elements, but it contains the item of the
acclaimed ride of the quasi-king, mounted on an ass (or two asses). If
the biographical school would but consider historical probabilities,
they would realize that the story as told cannot be historical,
with or without the strange antithesis of the multitude's speedy
demand for the prophet's death. Such a triumphal entry, for such a
person as the gospel Jesus, could not spontaneously have taken place:
it must have been planned; and, if arranged with such an effect as
the record describes, it would have given Pilate very sufficient
ground for intervention without waiting for a complaint from the
priests. Taken as history, it is wholly irreconcilable with the
"Crucify him" ascribed to a multitude whose support of Jesus had
been affirmed the day before; and accordingly M. Loisy, accepting
the Entry, rejects the latter episode. Strauss, hesitating to go,
"as has latterly often been done," the length of rejecting the Entry
on the ass as wholly mythical, finds it very much so; [83] and Brandt
incidentally dismisses it as "under the strongest suspicion of being
framed upon Old Testament motives from beginning to end." [84]
Thus the biographical school itself proffers a myth-theory,
without indicating an explanatory motive for the positing of a
contradiction. But when we realize that an acclamation of a quasi-king
riding on an ass was actually part of the ritual in a sacrificial
rite in which he was to be crucified, the two clashing elements
in the legend are at once explained in the full myth-theory. Their
separate handling and development was, just as intelligibly, part of
the process of gospel-making, the creation of an ideal Jesus. But
seeing that in the Sacæa festival the mock-king had a five days'
reign between his start and his death, [85] the original ritual gave
the interval which in the gospel story is filled with the acts of
the Teaching God. Five days is the accepted traditional interval from
Palm Sunday to Crucifixion Day.
[Even for the item of the two asses in Matthew there is a
myth-explanation. Many writers of the biographical school, who
compensate themselves for their difficulties by ascribing a peculiarly
crass stupidity to the apostles and evangelists at every opportunity,
decide that the narrator or interpolator posited the two asses, an
ass and its colt, because he found in Zechariah a Messianic prediction
so phrased, [86] and did not understand that the Hebraic idiom simply
meant "an ass." Yet one member of the school, Dr. Conybeare, fiercely
denounces myth-theorists for claiming to understand Jewish symbolism
better than the Jews did. Either principle serves the turn. When
Tertullian says that Jesus is the Divine Fish because fishes were
parthenogenetically born, and Jesus was born again in the waters of
the Jordan, Dr. Conybeare is sure of the wisdom of Tertullian. This
thesis, first found in Tertullian, is to decide the question, to
the exclusion of any reflection on the fact that the Sun at Easter
had before the Christian era passed from the sign Aries to the sign
Pisces in the zodiac. But when Matthew reads Zechariah's two asses
as meaning two asses, Matthew is to be dismissed as a Jew who did
not understand the commonest Hebrew idiom.
The simple fact that the Septuagint does not give the duplication,
putting only "a young colt," will serve to indicate to any careful
reader that the evangelist or interpolator was following the Hebrew,
and therefore is to be presumed to have known something of Hebrew
idiom. And the just critical inference is that both passages had
regard to the zodiacal figure of the Two Asses for the sign Cancer,
from which we have the myth of Bacchus riding on two asses. [87]
Further, it is probable that the similar passage in the Song of Jacob
[88] has also a zodiacal basis. These details, which Dr. Conybeare
absolutely withholds from his readers, indicate the mythological
induction put by the present writer. In an unconstruable sentence,
Dr. Conybeare appears to argue [89] that to secure any consideration
for such a thesis we must "prove that the earliest Christians, who
were Jews, must have been familiar with the rare legend of Bacchus
crossing a marsh on two asses," and "with the rare representation of
the zodiacal sign Cancer as an ass and its foal."
How the critic knows that the legend was rare at the beginning of
the Christian era he does not reveal; any more than he gives his
justification for calling the Asses sign rare in the face of the
statement of Lactantius that the Greeks call the sign of Cancer "(the)
Asses." This reference was given by me, as also the item that the
sign of the Ass and Foal is Babylonian. It was thus very likely to
be known in the Semitic world. Yet Dr. Conybeare obliviously informs
us that "it is next to impossible" that it should be known to "the
earliest Christians," when all the while he is arguing that Matthew
was not the gospel of "the earliest Christians." It is in perfect
keeping with this chaotic procedure that he first oracularly refers
me to Hyginus, whose version of the myth of Bacchus and the asses I
had actually cited and quoted; and then, discovering that I had done
so, yet leaving his written exhortation unaltered, he announces that
"by Mr. Robertson's own admission, Bacchus never rode on two asses
at all." It is difficult to be sure whether Dr. Conybeare does or
does not believe in the historicity of Bacchus, as he does in that of
Jesus; but seeing that Lactantius, as cited by me, expressly declares
that the two asses (= Cancer) carried Bacchus over the marsh, and
that Dr. Conybeare had already recognized that such a myth existed,
his absurd conclusion can be set down only to his habitual incoherence.
I have dealt in detail with his futile criticism at this point
by way of putting the reader on his guard against the method of
bluster. Comparative mythology is a difficult and thorny field, but
it has to be explored; and Dr. Conybeare, whose study of the subject
seems to have begun in the year of the issue of his book, [90] does
not even discern the nature of its problems. He avowedly supposes that
totems are Gods; and he argues that the Jewish and Hellenistic world
in the age of Augustus was at the mythopoeic stage of the Australian
aborigines of to-day. Of the phenomena of iconographic myth he is
evidently quite ignorant; and his dithyramb on the sun myth tells
of nothing but obsolete debate on the question. And it is in this
connection that he informs his antagonists, in his now celebrated
academic manner, that they are "a back number."
It has only to be added that as regards the documentary problem, in
this connection, Dr. Conybeare is equally distracted. It is far from
certain that at this point Mark's "colt" is not a "rectification"
of an original which Matthew accepted. The assumption--negatived
by themselves--that Mark and Matthew as we have them are both
primary forms, Matthew always following and elaborating Mark, is
one of the loose hypotheses which such critics when it suits them
take for certainties. But the question of priority of form does not
affect the fundamental issue. One of the suggestions put by me which
Dr. Conybeare has carefully withheld from his readers--if, indeed,
he ever really sees what is before him--is that the item of the
single ass or colt is probably a myth with another basis. "An ass
tied" appears to have been an Egyptian symbol pointing to a solar
date or a zodiacal or other myth, [91] and this symbol, which is
found in the Song of Jacob, is the form put upon the Mark story by
Justin Martyr. That the other symbol had a long Christian vogue is
indicated first by the fact that there actually exists a Gnostic
gem showing an ass suckling its foal, with the figure of the crab
(Cancer) above, and the inscription D.N. IHV. XPS., DEI FILIUS =
Dominus Noster Jesu (?) Christus, Son of God; [92] and, secondly, by
the mention of the ass and foal in the third Sermon of St. Proclus
(5th c.). [93] These details also Dr. Conybeare withholds from his
readers, for the purposes of his polemic.
That we are dealing with a conflict of symbolisms will probably be
the inference of those who will face the facts. But Dr. Conybeare,
who is here in good company, is quite satisfied that behind the Mark
story of Jesus riding in a noisy procession on an unbroken colt we have
unquestionable history. There must be no nonsense about two asses;
but for him the story of the unbroken colt raises no difficulty. He
further simplifies the problem by summarizing Mark as telling that
"an insignificant triumphal demonstration is organized for him [Jesus]
as he enters the sacred city on an ass"; [94] and by explaining that
"there was no other way of entering Jerusalem unless you went on
foot." [95] The "insignificant" is held to be sufficient to dispose
of the problem of the Roman Governor's entire indifference to a
Messianic movement. Thus functions the biographic method, in the
hands of our academician.
All the while, the item of the foal is, on his own interpretation,
a specified fulfilment of a prophecy, only in this case the prophecy
is in his opinion rightly understood, whereas in the two-ass story
it was misunderstood. By his own method, the critic is committed
to the position that the phrase "whereon no man ever yet sat" is
myth. [96] For serious critics in general, this is sufficient to
put in doubt the whole story. For our critic, a story of a triumphal
procession, with an unbroken colt, is simply resolved into one of an
"insignificant procession," with an ordinary donkey. Thus, under the
pretence of extracting history from a given document, the document is
simply manipulated at will to suit a presupposition. On this plan,
the twelve labours of Herakles are simply history exaggerated, and
any one can make any Life of Herakles out of it at his pleasure. We
must not say that Una rode on a lion, but we may infer that she rode
on a small yellow pony. It is the method of the early German deistic
rationalists, according to which the story of Jesus walking on the
water is saved by the explanation that he was walking on the shore.]
Part of the demonstration of the myth-theory, again, lies in the fact
that the first act of Jesus after his entry is to "cast out all them
that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrow the tables of the
money-changers, and the seats of them that sold the doves." That this
should have been accomplished without resistance seemed to Origen
so astonishing that he pronounced it among the greatest miracles of
Jesus, [97] adding the skeptical comment--"if it really happened." The
myth-theory may here claim the support of Origen.
Strauss could find no ground for rejecting the story as myth upon
his method of finding myth-motives only in the Old Testament. If he
had lived in our day he would probably have agreed that the episode
is singled out of the kinds of exploit which were permitted to the
victim in the Sacæa and the Saturnalia and such primitive sacrificial
festivals in general, and turned to a doctrinal account. Such liberties
as are described, all falling short of sacrilege, are among those
which could normally take place. It is by way of anti-Judaism that
the episode is utilized in the synoptics.
In the fourth gospel, where so many matters are turned to new account,
and so much new doctrine introduced, the purification is put with
symbolic purpose at the outset of the Messiah's career, in a visit to
Jerusalem of which the synoptics know nothing; and in this myth Jesus
makes "a scourge of small cords" to effect his purpose. That later
item was probably suggested by the effigy of the Egyptian Saviour
God Osiris, who bears a scourge as the God of retribution. In the
synoptics there is no symbol: the story is simply employed as part
of the superadded didactic machinery which alternately exhibits the
full development of the Messiah and the unfitness of the "Jewish
dispensation" to continue. Inferribly, the story of the fig-tree is
in the same case, signifying the condemnation of the Jewish cult,
though here there may be a concrete motive of which we have lost the
clue. But it is significant that while the gospel record could not
possibly assign to the holy Messiah such a general course as was
followed by the licensed sacrificial victim, it follows the story
of his Entry with that of one markedly disorderly act; whereafter
he goes to lodge in Bethany (Mt. xxi, 17) at a house which later is
indicated as that of a leper (xxvi, 6). There his head is anointed
by a woman; who in Luke, in a differently placed episode (vii, 37),
becomes "a sinner." Is not this another echo from the obscure tragedy
of the sacrificial victim, who was anointed for his doom?
§ 4. The Mock-King Ritual
Separately considered, the Crucifixion in the gospel story is as
impossible as the Entry. The cross, we are told, was headed with an
inscription: "This is the King of the Jews." Sir J. G. Frazer [98]
and M. Salomon Reinach [99] concur in recognizing that if the victim
had really been executed on the charge of making such a claim, no
Roman governor would have dared so to endorse it. [100] The argument
is that only by turning the execution into a celebration of a popular
rite could the procedure have been made officially acceptable. But to
extract such an explanation from the record is simply to stultify it as
such. If there really occurred such a manipulation of the death-scene
of an adored Teacher, how could the narrators possibly fail to say
as much? We are asked by the biographical school to believe that the
Crucifixion was made a farce-tragedy by treating the Teacher as the
victim in a well-known rite of human sacrifice, and also to believe
that the devotees who preserved the record, knowing this fact, chose
to say nothing about it, preferring to represent the procedure as a
unique incident.
It might perhaps be argued, on the biographical view, that the Roman
soldiers, who are held to have been Asiatics, chose to improvise
a version of a sacrificial rite which was unknown to the Jesuists,
and that the latter simply reported the episode without understanding
it, interpreting it from their prophets in their own way. But if the
record be historical it is incredible that in a cult which is claimed
to have made many adherents throughout the Roman Empire in east and
west in a generation or two, it should not quickly have become known
that the procedure of the Crucifixion was a copy of popular eastern
and western rites of human sacrifice. If there had taken place what
the hypothesis suggests, there was a purposive suppression. That is
to say, the credibility of the narrative is at this point vitally
impeached by a supporter of the biographical theory, which expressly
rests on the narrative as regards non-miraculous data.
And while on the one hand it is in effect charged with the gravest
suppressio veri, on the other it is charged, equally in the name of
the biographical view, with something more than suggestio falsi, with
absolute fiction. M. Loisy does not merely dismiss the Barabbas story
as unhistorical, offering no explanation of its strange presence: he
comes critically to the conclusion that Jesus on the cross uttered no
word, whether of despair, entreaty, or resignation. We need not ask
what kind of credit M. Loisy can ask for a record which he thus so
gravely discredits. The scientific question is, Upon what grounds
can he demur to the extension of a myth-theory to which he thus
contributes? If the record admittedly invented utterances for the
Teacher on the cross, why should not the whole be an invention? In
particular, why should not the trial before Pilate and the inscription
on the cross be inventions?
The inscription on the cross, we see, is for the great anthropologist
of the school impossible save as part of a simulated ritual. M. Loisy,
supporting the same general thesis, declares that "to say Jesus was not
condemned to death as king of the Jews, that is to say, as Messiah, on
his own avowal, amounts to saying [autant vaut soutenir] that he never
existed." [101] It is even so; and the supporter of the myth-theory is
thus doubly justified. The loyal induction is, not that in any rite
of human sacrifice exactly such a label was affixed to the gibbet,
but that probably some label was, and that the gospel framers (or
one of them) "invented" a label which stated their claim for Jesus
as Messiah. It was a fairly skilful thing to do, representing the
label as a Roman mockery, and thereby making it an appeal to every
Jew. [102] It is indeed conceivable that Roman soldiers taking part,
once in a way, in the rite of Jesus Barabbas, may have turned that
to a purpose of contempt by labelling the poor mock-king as the king
of the Jews. But such an episode would not be the enactment of the
scene described in the record. It would merely be a hint for it,
the acceptance of which was but an additional item of fiction.
That the Crucifixion, as described, is a normal act of ritual human
sacrifice, is even more true than it is shown to be by the parallels
of the Sacæa and the Saturnalia. The scourging, the royal robe, the
mock crown, were all parts of those rituals, which thus conform in
parody to the ritual of the mythic sacrifice of Ieoud, son of Kronos,
probably parodied in the ritual for the victim sacrificed to Kronos
at Rhodes. But so are the drink of wine and myrrh, the leg-breaking,
and the piercing with the spear. The crown is a feature of all ancient
sacrifice, in all parts of the world. Crowns of flowers were normal in
the case of human victims, in India, in Mexico, in Greece, and among
the North-American Indians, as in ordinary animal sacrifice among the
Greeks, Romans, and Semites. But even the crown of thorns had a special
religious vogue in Egypt, procured as such crowns were from thorn-trees
near Abydos whose branches curled into garland-form. Prometheus the
Saviour, too, receives from Zeus a crown of osiers; and his worshippers
wore crowns in his honour. [103] Either some such special motive or
the common practice in the popular rite will account for the record.
And these items of the mock-king ritual exclude the argument which
might possibly be brought from the fact that in the ancient world,
as among primitives in general, all executions, as such, tend to
assume the sacrificial form. The condemned criminal is "devoted,"
sacer, taboo, even as is the simply sacrificed victim, becoming the
appanage of the God as is the God's representative who is sacrificed
to the God. [104] It might therefore be argued that a man condemned on
purely political grounds could be treated as a sacrificial victim. But
there is no instance of the criminal executed as such being treated
as the mock-king. A criminal might be turned to that account, but
that would be by special arrangement: executed simply as a criminal,
he would not be crowned and royally robed. These details were features
of specific sacrifices: executions were only generically sacrificial,
and were of course in no way honorary. In the gospel story, the two
thieves are neither mocked, robed, nor crowned. They are not "Sons
of the Father," or deputies of the King.
§ 5. Doctrinal Additions
The question here arises, however, whether the triple execution was a
customary rite. All executions being, as aforesaid, quasi-sacrificial,
an ordinary execution might conceivably be combined with a specific
sacrifice. It is to be observed that no mention of the triple execution
occurs outside of the gospels: the Acts and the Epistles have no
allusion to it. It is thus conceivably, as was hinted by Strauss,
a late addition to the myth, motived by the verse now omitted as
spurious from Mark (xv, 28), but preserved in Luke (xxii, 37):
"And the scripture was fulfilled which saith, And he was reckoned
with transgressors." But we are bound to consider the possibility
that the triple execution was ritually primordial.
The story of such an execution in the "Acts of Saint Hitzibouzit,"
martyred at some time in Persia, is evidently doubtful evidence for
the practice, as Sir J. G. Frazer observes. The record runs that
the saint was "offered up as a sacrifice between two malefactors
on a hill top opposite the sun and before all the multitude," [105]
suggesting that the sacrifice was a solar one. This is possible; but
martyrology is dubious testimony. On the other hand Mr. W. R. Paton
has suggested that the triple execution was a Persian practice, and
was made to a triple God. [106] There is the notable support of the
statement in a fragment of Ctesias (36) that the Egyptian usurper
Inarus was crucified by Artaxerxes the First between two thieves. In
addition to the cases of Greek sacrifices of three victims may be
noted one among the Dravidians of Jeypore; [107] and the practice
among the Khonds of placing the victim between two shrubs. In the
Jeypore case one victim was sacrificed at the east, one at the west,
and one at the centre of a village; and in another case two victims
were sacrificed every third year. A triple execution might be a special
event, in which two victims were both actually and ritually criminals,
in order to enhance the divinity of the third. And we know that triple
sacrifices did occur. The throwing of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego
into the fiery furnace was ostensibly a triple sacrifice: it will
hardly be claimed as a historical episode in its subsisting form.
On a careful balance, however, the presumption seems rather against a
triple rite. What is quite clear is that for the early Jesuists the
"prophecy" in 53rd Isaiah possessed the highest importance. For us,
that lyric chapter is still somewhat enigmatic. Gunkel, who is here
followed by Professor Drews, [108] takes the view that the suffering
figure described is really that of the typical victim of the human
sacrifice; and it certainly fits that conception at points where
it does not easily compose with that of the figure of oppressed
Israel. [109] The victim was "wounded for our transgressions,
bruised for our iniquities"; and conceptually "with his stripes we
are healed." On the other hand, who were "we" for "Isaiah" if not
Israel itself? The only interpretation seems to be that the past
generations had suffered for the present; and this does not yield an
intellectually satisfying figure. But still more improbable, on the
whole, is the suggestion that the Hebrew prophet or quasi-prophetic
lyrist--whatever date we may assign to the chapter--has really
perceived and figured the tragic vision of the sacrificial victim as
he is here supposed to have done. It would be a psychological feat
extremely remarkable even for that highly gifted writer; [110] and
moreover it would finally compose still less with the general idea
of the context than does the supposed presentment of the suffering
People. It is difficult to reach any satisfying notion of Isaiah's
general meaning on the view of Gunkel and Drews.
We are thus far held, then, to the inference that, as Isaiah's
chapter was certainly taken by the early Christists [111] who had
adopted the Messianic idea to be a prophecy of their Messiah, the
Christ myth was shaped in accordance with it. There are three main
strands in the Christ myth, the Jesuist, the Christist or Messianic,
and that of the Teaching God. The "suffering" motive serves to bind
the three together; and the concrete item, "he was numbered with
the transgressors," bracketed as it is with "he poured out his soul
unto death," gives a very definite ground for the item of the forced
companionship of the malefactors in the Crucifixion scene. It is,
in short, apparently one of the specifically Judaic motives in the
myth construction. Earlier in the narrative the Messiah is frequently
grouped with "publicans and sinners": he comes "eating and drinking,"
in contrast with the ascetic figure of the Baptist. That feature is
probably part of the atmosphere of the myth-motive of the sacrificial
victim, with the leper-host and the anointing by the "sinner." But the
"two thieves" are inferribly supplied from another side.
In the first two gospels, the character of the unnamed anointress
is tacitly suggested by the very reticence of the description,
"a woman." In Jewry and in the East generally, the woman who went
freely into men's houses was declassed; and the "sinner" of Luke
was only a specification of the already hinted. But the story in
Luke of the homage of the good thief is clearly new myth, coming
of the widened ethic of the "gospel of the Gentiles." Matthew and
Mark have no thought of anything but the association of the Messiah
with typical transgressors in death: for them the two thieves are
hostile. The "Gentile" gospel improves the occasion by converting one
of the transgressors. No critical inquirer, presumably, now fails to
see doctrinal myth at the second stage. It is only the atmosphere of
presupposition that can keep it imperceptible in the first. In the
making of the gospels, ritual myth, doctrinal myth, and traditional
myth are co-factors; and it may be that even where doctrinal myth
is quite clearly at work, as in the staging of the Messianic death
"with transgressors," an actual ritual is also commemorated.
§ 6. Minor Ritual and Myth Elements
In the later myth the robbers, as it happens, are made to embody
certain features of sacrificial ritual. We are told in the fourth
gospel that the Jews "asked of Pilate that their legs might be broken,
and that they might be taken away,"--"that the bodies should not remain
on the cross upon the sabbath, for the day of that sabbath was a high
day." Accordingly the soldiers break the legs of the two thieves,
"but when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they
brake not his legs." The implication is that the men's legs were to
be broken by way of killing them--a patently untrue suggestion. [112]
The spear-thrust which "howbeit" was given to Jesus would have been
the way of killing the others if they were alive: breaking the legs
was a brutality which would not ensure death.
The explanation is that both leg-breaking and spearing were features
of sacrificial rites. It may have been by way of purposive contrast
to the former procedure that in the priestly ritual [113] of the
passover it is enacted that no bone of the (unspecified) victim
shall be broken. The breaking of the leg-bones in human sacrifice was
one of the horrible expedients of the primitive world for securing
the apparent willingness of the victim: it is to be found alike in
Dravidian and in African sacrifice. [114] An alternative method, which
tended to supersede the other, was that of drugging or intoxication,
of which we find still more widespread evidence. In ancient Jerusalem,
we find the practice transferred to ordinary execution on the cross,
the humane women making a practice of giving a narcotic potion of wine
and incense to the victim. [115] Thus associated with the deaths of
ordinary criminals, it suggested to some of the Jesuist myth-makers
a ground for specializing the record.
In the first two gospels, a drink is offered to Jesus on the
cross--wine [116] mingled with gall, in Matthew; wine mingled with
myrrh in Mark--"but he received it not"; this, in Matthew, after
tasting. The Marcan form is probably the first, as it describes
the customary narcotic: the idea is to indicate that in the case
of the divine victim no artifice was needed to secure an apparent
acquiescence: he was a voluntary sufferer. "Gall," in Matthew, may have
reference to pagan mysteries in which a drink of gall figured. [117]
In Luke, vinegar is ostensibly offered as part of the derision. In
John, no drink is mentioned till the end, when the dying victim says,
"I thirst." Having partaken of "a sponge full of the vinegar upon
hyssop," he says, "It is finished," and dies. In Matthew, this act
of compassion takes a simpler form, the sponge of vinegar being given
on the utterance of the despairing cry, while other bystanders jeer:
in Mark, the giver of the sponge also jeers.
It is needless to debate long over the priorities of such details:
as regards the drink of vinegar, all alike have regard to Psalm lxix,
21: "They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave
me vinegar to drink." For that reason, the wine-and-myrrh item is
probably primordial: it tells of the sacrificial rite; and the drink
of vinegar is a doctrinal addition; even as the rejection of the
narcotic is doctrinal. For the variations which distinguish each
narrative from the others, there is no reasonable explanation on
the biographical view: if devoted onlookers could not preserve the
truth at such a point, where could they be trusted? The mythical
interpretation alone makes all intelligible.
The fourth gospel, with its tale of the leg-breaking, supplies the
strongest ground for surmising the occasional occurrence of a triple
rite, in which the lesser victims were treated as sacrificed slaves
normally have been in African and other human sacrifice, while the
central victim was put on another footing. The express enactment in
regard to the mysterious paschal sacrifice suggests that bone-breaking
took place in others. In all likelihood, the original paschal sacrifice
was that of a human victim of specially high grade: the substitution of
the lamb was part of the process of civilization indicated in the myth
of Abraham and Isaac. And if the knowledge of the death-rite of Jesus
Barabbas could subsist in the first century or later, knowledge of an
early triple rite could subsist also. But this remains open to doubt,
though at several points the fourth gospel specially emphasizes the
historical derivation of the cult from a sacrament of blood sacrifice.
Nowhere else is the literal basis of the symbol of "body and blood"
so insisted upon. Its writers had present to their minds an actual
ritual in which the eating of the body of a Sacrificed God, first
actually, then symbolically, was of cardinal importance. The later
myth puts new stress on the conception, as if it had been felt that
the earlier was not sufficiently explicit; and it makes the Jewish
high-priest lay down the doctrine of human sacrifice from the Judaic
side. [118] It is in this atmosphere of sacrificial ideas that we
get the item of the piercing of the divine victim with a spear. The
detail is turned specially to the account of the Johannine doctrine
of resurrection by putting what passed in popular physiology for a
certain proof of death--the issuing of "blood and water." [119] But
here again we find both a Hebrew motive [120] and a pagan motive for
the detail. In the sacrifice of the sacred slave of the Moon-Goddess
among the primitive Albanians, the victim was allowed the customary
year of luxury and licence, and was finally anointed and slain by
being pierced to the heart with a sacred lance through the side. And
there are other eastern analogues. [121]
It is the fourth gospel, finally, that introduces the "garment without
seam," combining a Hebraic with a pagan motive. In order to fulfil a
"prophecy" held to be Messianic, [122] the synoptics make the soldiers
cast lots for the garments of Jesus. The fourth gospel specifies a
simple allotment of the garments in general, as if they could have
been numerous enough to go round the soldiery, but limits the act of
"casting lots" to the chiton, the under garment. Thus the soldiers
both "divide the raiment" and cast lots for the "vesture." The making
of this "without seam" is at once an assimilation of Jesus to the
high-priest and an assimilation of the Slain God to the Sun-God and
other deities. [123] A special chiton was woven for Apollo in Sparta;
as a peplos or shawl was woven for Hêrê at Elis. And this in turn
had for the pre-Christian pagans mystic meanings as symbolizing
the indivisible solar robe of universal light, ascribed to Osiris;
the partless robe of Ahura Mazda; Pan's coat of many colours, and
yet other notions. Always the story is itemized in terms of myth,
of ritual, of symbol, of doctrine, never in terms of real biography.
§ 7. The Cross
It is not at all certain, and it is not probable, that in the earlier
stages of the myth the cross as such was prominent. Early crucifixion
was not always a nailing of outstretched hands in the cross form,
but often a hanging of the victim by the arms, tied together at the
wrists, with or without a support to the body at the thighs. [124]
The stauros was not necessarily a cross: it might be a simple pile
or stake. In the Book of Acts (v, 30) Peter and the Apostles are made
to speak of Jesus "whom ye slew, hanging him on a tree." This was in
itself a common sacrificial mode; and all sacrificial traditions are
more or less represented in the New Testament compilation.
But there was an irresistible compulsion to a divinizing of the
cross as of the victim. Ages before the Christian era the symbol had
been mystic and sacrosanct for Semites, for Egyptians, for Greeks,
for Hindus; and the Sacred Tree of the cults of Attis, Dionysos,
and Osiris lent itself alike to many symbolic significances. [125]
The cross had reference to the equinox, when the sacred tree was cut
down; to the victim bound to it; to the four points of the compass;
to the zodiacal sign Aries, thus connected with the sacrificial lamb;
[126] and to the universe as symbolized in the "orb" of the emperor,
with the cross-lines drawn on it. The final Christian significance
of the cross is a composite of ideas associated with it everywhere,
from Mexico to the Gold Coast, in both of which regions it was or
is a symbol of the Rain-God. [127] The Dravidian victim, the deified
sacrifice, was as-it-were crucified; [128] as was a victim in a Batak
sacrifice, where, as on the Gold Coast, the St. Andrew's-cross form
is enacted. [129] The commonness of some such procedure in African
sacrificial practice points to its general antiquity.
It would appear, too, that in the mysteries of the Saviour Gods not
only a crucified aspect of the God but a simulation of that on the
part of the devotees was customary. Osiris was actually represented in
crucifix form; [130] and in the ritual the worshipper became "one with
Osiris," apparently by being "joined unto the sycamore tree." [131]
When, then, in the Epistle to the Galatians [132] we find "Paul"
addressing the converts as "those before whose eyes Jesus Christ was
openly set forth (proegraphê) crucified," and declaring of himself:
[133] "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus," we are at once
pointed to the Syrian practice of stigmata, which appears to connect
with both Osirian and Christian usage. In his remarkable account of
the life of the sacred city of Hierapolis--a microcosm of eastern
paganism--Lucian, after telling how children are sacrificed with the
votive pretence that they are oxen, records that it is the universal
practice to make punctures in the neck or in the hands, and that
"all" Syrians bear such stigmata. [134] One of the principal cults
of the place was that of Attis, the castrated God of Vegetation,
in whose mysteries the image of a youth was bound to a tree, [135]
with a ritual of suffering, mourning, resurrection and rejoicing. As
Dionysos was also "he of the tree," it is not improbable that he,
who also died to rise again, may have been similarly adored. On the
other hand, the representation of the Saviour Prometheus suffering
in a crucified posture tells of an immemorial concept. [136]
For the Jews, finally, the cross symbol was already mystically potent,
being a mark of salvation in connection with the massacre-sacrifice
of the Passover, and by consequence salvatory in times of similar
danger. [137] When with this was combined the mystic significance of
the sign in Platonic lore as pointing to the Logos, [138] the mythic
foundation for Christism was of the broadest. The crucifix is late in
Christian art; but the wayside cross is as old as the cult of Hermes,
God of boundaries. [139]
§ 8. The Suffering Messiah
By way of accounting for the Jewish refusal to see in Jesus the
promised Messiah, orthodox exegesis has spread widely the belief
that it was no part of the Messianic idea that the Anointed One
should die an ignominious death; and some of us began by accepting
that account of the case. Clearly it was not the traditional or
generally prevailing Jewish expectation. Yet in the Acts we find
Peter and Paul alike (iii, 18; xvii, 3; xxvi, 23) made to affirm
that the prophets in general predicted that Christ should suffer;
and in Luke (xxiv, 26-27, 44-46) the same assertion is put in the
mouth of Jesus. Either then the exegetes regard these assertions as
unfounded or they admit that one school of interpretation in Jewry
found a number of "prophetical" passages which foretold the Messiah's
exemplary death. And the A. V. margin refers us to Ps. xxii; Isa. l,
6; liii, 5, etc.; Dan. ix, 26.
Now, these are adequate though not numerous documentary grounds for the
doctrine, on Jewish principles of interpretation. Jewish, indeed, the
Messianic idea is not in origin: it is Perso-Babylonian; [140] and the
idea of a suffering or re-arising Messiah may well have come in from
that side. But equally that may have found some Jewish acceptance. We
can see very well that in Daniel "the Anointed One"--that is, "the
Messiah" and "the Christ"--refers to the Maccabean hero; but that
as well as the other passages, on Jewish principles, could apply
to the Messiah of any period; and the Septuagint reading of Psalm
xxii, 16: "They pierced my hands and my feet," was a specification of
crucifixion. It is not impossible that that reading was the result of
the actual crucifixion of Cyrus, who had been specified as a "Christ"
in Isaiah. We have nothing to do here with rational interpretation:
the whole conception of prophecy is irrational; but the construing
of old texts as prophecies was a Jewish specialty.
When then a theistic rationalist of the last generation wrote of the
gospel Jesus:--
His being a carpenter, occupying the field of barbaric Galilee,
and suffering death as a culprit, are not features which the
constructor of an imaginary tale would go out of his way to
introduce wherewith to associate his hero, and therefore, probably,
we have here real facts presented to us, [141]
he was far astray. Anything might be predicated of a Jewish
Messiah. Not only had the Messianic Cyrus been crucified: the anointed
and triumphant Judas Maccabæus, under whose auspices the Messianic
belief had revived in Israel in the second century B.C., had finally
fallen in battle; and his brother Simon, who was actually regarded
as the Messiah, was murdered by his son-in-law. [142]
It is not here argued that the Messianic idea had been originally
connected with the Jesus cult; on the contrary that cult is presented
as a non-national one, surviving in parts of Palestine in connection
with belief in an ancient deity and the practice of an ancient rite,
in a different religious atmosphere from that of Messianism. The
solution to which we shall find ourselves led is that at a certain
stage the Messianic idea was grafted on the cultus; and this stage
is likely to have begun after the fall of Jerusalem, when for most
Jews the hope of a Maccabean recovery was buried. Then it was that
the idea of a Messiah "from above," [143] supernaturally empowered
to make an end of the earthly scene, became the only plausible one;
and here the conception of a Slain God who, like all slain Gods,
rose again, invited the development. Jesuists could now make a new
appeal to Jews in general upon recognizably Jewish lines. They were
of course resisted, even as Sadducees were resisted by Pharisees, and
vice versa. The statement in the Messiah article in the Encyclopædia
Biblica that it is highly improbable that "the Jews" at the time of
Christ believed in a suffering and atoning Messiah is nugatory. No one
ever put such a proposition. But "the Jews" had in course of time added
much to their creed, and might have added this, were it not that the
Jesus cult became identified with Gentile and anti-Judaic propaganda.
In any case the idea arose among Jews, and quite intelligibly. The
picture drawn by Isaiah was a standing incitement to the rise of a
cult whose Hero-God had been slain. It was the one kind of Messianic
cult which the Romans would leave unmolested. At the same time it
committed the devotees to the position that the Messiah must come
again, "in the clouds, in great glory"; and the Christian Church was
actually established on that conception, which sufficed to sustain
it till the earthly Providence of the State came to the rescue. Some
of its modern adherents have not hesitated to boast that the common
expectation of the speedy end of the world gave the infant Church a
footing not otherwise obtainable. It was certainly a conditio sine
qua non for Christianity in its infancy.
As for the item of "the carpenter," we have seen [144] not only that
that is mythic, but that the myth-theory alone can account for it.
§ 9. The Rock Tomb
In the first gospel (xxvii, 57 sq.) we have a comparatively simple
version of the story of Joseph of Arimathea, a rich disciple of Jesus,
who gets the dead body of the crucified, wraps it in clean linen, and
lays it "in his own new tomb, which he had hewed out in the rock." In
Mark and Luke we have visibly elaborated accounts, in which, however,
while the rock tomb is specified, it is not described as Joseph's
"own," though it is represented as hitherto unused. Such a narrative
points very directly to the Mithraic rite in which the stone image of
the dead God, after being ritually mourned over, is laid in a tomb,
which, Mithra being "the God out of the rock," would naturally be of
stone--a simple matter in a cult whose chief rites were always enacted
in a cave. [145] Details thus thrown into special prominence, while
in themselves historically insignificant, can be understood only as
mythically motived. So noticeable is the Mithraic parallel that the
Christian Father who angrily records it exclaims, Habet ergo diabolus
Christos suos--"the devil thus has his Christs." In Mithraism the
rock tomb, which is an item in a ritual of death and resurrection,
is mythically motived throughout: in the gospel story, historically
considered, the item is meaningless.
Obvious as is the mythological inference, it is met by the assertion
that round Jerusalem "soil was so scarce that every one was buried in
a rock tomb." [146] Such a criticism at once defeats itself. If every
one was buried in a rock tomb, what was the point of the emphasised
detail in the gospels, which are so devoid of details of a really
biographical character? Obviously, rock tombs were the specialty of
the rich; and Joseph of Arimathea is described in all the synoptics
as a man of social standing. Is the motive of the story nothing better
than the desire to record that Jesus was richly buried?
"Scores of such tombs remain," cries the critic: "were they all
Mithraic?" The argument thus evaded is that there was no real tomb. If
there was one thing which the early Jesuists, on the biographical
theory, might be supposed to keep hold of, it was the place of
their Lord's sepulchre; yet nothing subsists but an admittedly
false tradition. At Jerusalem, as one has put it, there are shown
"two Zions, two Temple areas, two Bethanys, two Gethsemanes, two or
more Calvarys, three Holy Sepulchres, several Bethesdas." [147] It
is all myth. "There is not a single existing site in the Holy City
that is mentioned in connection with Christian history before the
year 326 A.D., when Constantine's mother adored the two footprints
of Christ on Olivet." [148] She was shown nothing else. [149] "The
position of the traditional sites of Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre,
in the middle of the north quarter of Jerusalem, seems to have given
rise to suspicions very early." [150] It well might. I have known a
modern traveller who, on seeing the juxtaposed sites, at once realized
that he was on the scene, if of anything, of an ancient ritual,
not of events such as are narrated in the gospels. The traditional
Golgotha is only fifty or sixty yards away from the Sepulchre; [151]
and near by is "Mount Moriah," upon which Abraham is recorded to have
sought to sacrifice Isaac.
Colonel Conder, who accepts without misgiving all four gospel
narratives, and attempts to combine them, avows that the "Garden
Tomb" chosen by General Gordon, in the latterly selected Calvary, is
impossible, being probably a work of the twelfth century; [152] and for
his own part, while inclined to stand by the new Golgotha, avows that
"we must still say of our Lord as was said of Moses, 'No man knoweth
of his sepulchre unto this day.'" [153] Placidly he concludes that "it
is well that we should not know." [154] But what does the biographical
theory make of such a conclusion? Its fundamental assumption is that
of Renan, that the personality of Jesus was so commanding as to make
his disciples imagine his resurrection. In elaborate and contradictory
detail we have the legends of that; and yet we find that all trace of
knowledge alike of place of crucifixion and tomb had vanished from
the Christian community which is alleged to have arisen immediately
after his ascension. The theory collapses at a touch, here as at
every other point. There is no more a real Sepulchre of Jesus than
there is a real Sepulchre of Mithra; and the bluster which offers
the solution that at Jerusalem every one was buried in a rock tomb
is a mere closing of the eyes to the monumental fact of the myth.
The critic is all the while himself committed to the denial that
there was any tomb. Professing to follow the suggestion [155] of
M. Loisy that Jesus was thrown into "some common foss," which in his
hands becomes "the common pit reserved for crucified malefactors,"
he affirms [156] that "the words ascribed in Acts xiii, 29, to Paul
certainly favour the Abbé's view." They certainly do not. The text
in question runs:
And when they had fulfilled all things that were written of him
they took him down from the tree, and laid him in a tomb.
The Greek word is mnêmeion--that used in the gospel story. There is
thus no support whatever either for the suggestion of "a common foss"
or for the allegation about "the common pit reserved for crucified
malefactors"--a wholly unwarranted figment. The second "they" of the
sentence is indefinite: it may mean either the Jews of the previous
sentence or another "they": but either way it expressly posits a
tomb. Yet after this deliberate perversion of the document, which of
course he does not quote, the critic proceeds (p. 302) to aver that
"the genuine tradition of Jesus having been cast by his enemies into
the common pit reserved for malefactors ... survived among the Jews";
and that the tomb story was invented as "the most effective way of
meeting" the imagined statement. Such an amateur inventor of myth is
naturally resentful of mythological tests!
§ 10. The Resurrection
If a suffering Messiah was arguable for the Jews, his resurrection
after death was a matter of course. The biographical theory, that
the greatness of the Founder's personality led his followers to
believe that he must rise again, is historically as unwarrantable
as any part of the biographical case. The death and resurrection of
the Saviour-God was an outstanding feature of all the most popular
cults of the near East; Osiris, Herakles, Dionysos, Attis, Adonis,
Mithra, all died to rise again; and a ritual of burial, mourning,
resurrection, and rejoicing was common to several. On any view such
rituals were established in other contemporary cults; and it is this
fact that makes it worth while in this inquiry to glance at a myth
which is now abandoned by all save the traditionally orthodox.
On the uncritical assumption that nothing but pure Judaism could exist
in Jewry in the age of the Herods, the notion of a dying and re-arising
Hero-God was impossible among Jews save as a result of a stroke of
new constructive faith. That simple negative position ignores not only
the commonness of the belief in immortality among Jews (the Pharisees
all held it) before the Christian era, but the special Jewish beliefs
in the "translation" of Moses and Elijah, and the story of Saul,
the witch of Endor, and the spirit of Samuel. The very belief that
the risen Elias was to be the forerunner of the Messiah was a lead
to the belief that the Messiah himself might come after a resurrection.
But it is practically certain that a liturgical resurrection was or had
been practised in contemporary cults which had at one time enacted an
annual sacrifice of the representative of the God, abstracted in myth
as the death of the God himself. And in our own time the survival of
an analogous practice has been noted in India. At the installation of
the Rajahs of Keonjhur it was anciently the practice for the Rajah
to slay a victim: latterly there is a mock-slaying, whereupon the
mock-victim disappears. "He must not be seen for three days; then he
presents himself to the Rajah as miraculously restored to life." [157]