ROOTS OF THE MYTH
§ 1. Historical Data
It does not follow from the proved existence of mystery-dramas in
pagan cults in the Roman empire in the first century, C.E., that the
Jesuists had a similar usage; but when we find in the New Testament
an express reference to such parallelism, and in the early Fathers
a knowledge that such parallels were drawn, we are entitled to ask
whether there is not further evidence. When "Paul" [158] tells his
adherents: "Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of daimons:
[159] ye cannot partake of the table of the Lord and of the table of
daimons," he is complaining that some converts are wont to partake
indifferently of the pagan and Christian sacraments. Few students
now, probably, will assent to the view that the "tables of daimons,"
with their similar rites, were sudden imitations of the Christian
sacraments. They were of old standing. But the Jesuist rite also was
in all likelihood much older, in some form, than the Christian era.
If there is any principle of comparative mythology that might fairly
have been claimed as generally accepted by experts a generation ago,
it is that "the ritual is older than the myth: the myth derives from
the ritual, not the ritual from the myth." [160] This principle,
expressly posited by himself as by others before him, Sir James
Frazer resolutely puts aside when he comes to deal with the Christian
mythus. Disinterested science cannot assent to such a course.
That there were "tables" in the cults of many Gods is quite certain:
temple-meals for devotees seem to have been normal in Greek religion;
[161] and in the cults of the Saviour-Gods there were special
collocations of sacramental meals with "mysteries." In particular,
apart from the famous Eleusinian mysteries there were customary
dramatic representations of the sufferings and death of the God in
the cults of Osiris, Adonis, Attis, and Dionysos: in addition to a
scenic representation of the death of Herakles; and a special system of
symbolic presentation of the life of the God in the rites of initiation
of the worship of Mithra. [162] It is not to be supposed that these
religious representations amounted to anything like a complete drama,
such as those of the great Attic theatre. Rather they represented
early stages in the evolution which ended in Greek drama as we know
it. Nearer analogues are to be found in the religious plays of various
savage races in our own time. [163] What the mystery-plays in general
seem to have amounted to was a simple representation of the life and
death of the God, with a sacramental meal.
The common objection to the hypothesis even of an elementary
mystery-play in the pre-gospel stages of Jesuism is that Hebrew
literature shows no dramatic element, the Jews being averse from this
as from other artistic developments of religious instinct. To this we
reply, first, that the mystery-play, as distinguished from the primary
sacrament, may or may not have been definitely Jewish at the outset;
and that the drama as seen developed in the supplement to the gospels
is certainly manipulated by Gentile hands. But the objection is in
any case invalid, overlooking as it does:
1. The essentially dramatic character of the Song of Solomon.
2. The partly dramatic character of the Book of Job.
3. The dramatic form of the celebration of Purim.
4. The existence in the Hellenistic period of theatres at Damascus,
Cæsarea, Gadara, Jericho and Scythopolis, the first two being, as we
learn from Josephus, built by Herod the Great.
5. The chronic pressure of Hellenistic culture influence upon Jewish
culture for centuries.
6. The prevalence of Greek culture influence at the city of Samaria,
Damascus, Gaza, Scythopolis, Gadara, Panias (Cæsarea Philippi).
7. The "half-heathen" character of the districts of Trachonitis,
Batanea, and Auranitis, east of the Lake of Gennesareth. [164] Galilee,
be it remembered, was late conquered "heathen" territory.
8. The long and deeply hostile sunderance, after the Return, between
the priestly and rabbinical classes and the common people of the
provinces. [165]
9. The "resuscitation of obsolete mysteries" among the Jews, and
the known survival of private sacraments and symbolic sacrifices of
atonement. [166]
10. The actual production of dramatic Greek poetry on Biblical subjects
by the Jewish poet Ezechiel (2nd c. B.C.). [167]
The eighth item needs to be specially insisted upon. It is frequently
asserted that nothing in the nature of a heteroclite cult could subsist
continuously in Jewry; that there were no religious ideas in the Jewish
world save those of the Sacred Books of the Rabbis. [168] This is a
historical delusion. The historical and prophetic books of the Old
Testament affirm a constant resort to pagan rites and Gods before the
Exile. There is official record of bitter strife and sunderance between
those of the Return and the people they found on the soil. Malachi
sounds the note of strife, lamenting popular lukewarmness, sacrilege
and unbelief. The simple fact that after the Exile Hebrew was no
longer the common language, and that the people spoke Aramaic or
"Chaldee," tells of a highly artificial relation between hierarchy and
populace. Never can even Judæa have been long homogeneous. "Neither
in Galilee nor Peræa must we conceive of the Jewish element as pure
and unmixed. In the shifting course of history Jews and Gentiles had
been here so often, and in such a variety of ways, thrown together,
that the attainment of exclusive predominance by the Jewish element
must be counted among the impossibilities. It was only in Judæa that
this was at least approximately arrived at by the energetic agency
of the scribes during the course of a century." [169]
The assumption commonly made is that all Jews and "naturalized" Jews
were of one theistic way of thinking, like orthodox Christians, and,
like these, could not imagine any other point of view. If for that
entirely one-sided conception the inquirer will even substitute one
in terms of the mixed realities of life in Christendom he will be
much nearer the truth. Over and above the hatreds between sects and
factions holding by the same formulas and Sacred Books, there were
in Jewry the innovators, then as now: the minds which varied from
the documentary norm in all directions, analogues of the devotees of
"Christian Science," Bâbists, British Buddhists, Swedenborgians,
Shakers, Second Adventists, Mormons, and so on, who from a more
or less common basis radiated to all the points of the compass of
creed. What faces us in the rise of Christianity is the development
of one of those variants, on lines of adaptation to popular need, with
an organization on lines already tested in the experience of Judaism.
Among the common cravings of the age was the need for a near God,
[170] one ostensibly more in touch with human sorrows and sufferings
than the remote Supreme God. For the earlier Hebrews, Yahweh was
a tribal God like Moloch or Chemosh, fighting for his people (when
they deserved it) like other tribal Gods; a magnified man who talked
familiarly with Abraham and Sarah, and wrestled with Jacob. [171]
Even then, the attractions of other cults set up constant resort
to them by many Yahwists, unless the historical Sacred Books are
as illusory upon this as upon other topics. To say nothing of the
continual charges against Jewish kings, from Solomon downwards, of
setting up alien worships, and the express assertion of Jeremiah [172]
that in Judah there were as many Gods as cities, and in Jerusalem as
many Baal altars as streets, we have the equally explicit assertion
in Ezekiel [173] that "women weeping for Tammuz" were to be seen in
or at the Temple itself. Now, Tammuz was a Semitic deity, borrowed,
it would seem, from the Akkadians, [174] an original or variant of
Adonis, the very type of the Saviour-God we are now tracing. Tammuz,
like Jesus, was "the only-begotten son." If it be argued that the
worship of Tammuz must have disappeared during or after the Exile,
since it would not be tolerated in the Second Temple, the answer
is that Saint Jerome expressly declares that in his day the pagans
celebrated the worship of Tammuz at the very cave in which Jesus
was said to have been born at Bethlehem [175]--a detail of some
significance in our inquiry. Tammuz = Adonis = "the Lord." That
worship, indeed, might conceivably be a revival occurring after the
fall of Jerusalem; but to say that there can have been no folklore
about Tammuz in Jewry or Galilee or Samaria between the time of
Ezekiel and that of Jerome would be to make an utterly unwarranted
assertion. The belief may even have survived under another God-name.
[Among the many obscurations of history set up by presuppositions
is that which rules out all evidence for community of source in
myths save that of philology, the most precarious of all proofs. The
argument on this subject has been conducted even by opposing schools
of philology as if all alike believed that every God, like every
man, is an entity with a name, traceable by his name, and remaining
substantially unchanged in his attributes through the ages. When Max
Müller propounded such derivations as that of Zeus from the Sanskrit
Dyaus, some scholars for whom Sanskrit was occult matter observed a
respectful deference, while others debated whether the derivations
were philologically sound. To mythological science, strictly speaking,
it mattered little whether they were or were not. God-ideas may pass
with little change from race to race through contacts of conquest,
the attached God-names changing alike for "absorbed" races and for
those which "absorb" them, whereas other God-names may endure with
little change for ages while the attributes connected with them
are being continuously modified, and the tales told under them are
being perpetually added to, and many are dismissed. The Zeus of
the Iliad is probably a wholly disparate conceptual figure from the
Dyaus of the early "Aryan," supposing the names to be at bottom the
same vocable. The philological fact is one thing, the mythological
fact another.
Writers like Dr. Conybeare, who have never even realized the nature
of a mythological problem, bewilder their readers by blusterously
affirming that there can be no homogeneity between myth-conceptions
unless the names attached to them in different regions and by
different races are etymologically akin. They irrationally ask
for linguistic "equations" where a linguistic equation by itself
would count for nothing, the relevant fact being the equation of the
myth-concepts. Blind to the salient facts that every "race" concerned
had undergone mutation by conquest; that God-names and God-ideas alike
passed from race to race by intermarriages, [176] by the effects of
enslavement, and by official adoption; [177] and that conquering races
constantly adopted wholly or partly the "Gods" of the conquered,
[178] they in effect assume that God-names and God-concepts are
fixed entities, traceable solely by glossology. As if glossology
could possibly pretend to trace, even on its own ground, all the
transformations of proper-names and appellatives through different
races and languages. The pretence that these are on all fours with
the general development of language is mere scientific charlatanism.
What mythology has to consider is the filiation and interconnection
of myth-concepts. This is so pervading a process that even Max Müller,
after denying that there could have been any "crossing" between Vedic
and alien lines of thought in respect of the closely similar Babylonian
fire-cult and that of Agni, consented to identify the Indian Soma,
God of Wine, with the Moon-God Chandra. [179] The transmutations of a
cognate myth-concept under the names of Dionysos (who has a hundred
other epithets) and of the Latin Liber, constitute a mythological
process which philology cannot elucidate. The scientifically traceable
facts are the prevalence and translation of such concepts as Wine-God,
Sun-God, War-God, Moon-God, Love-Goddess, Mother Goddess, Babe-God,
through many races and regions. One myth-factor of great importance,
unrecognized by many who dogmatize on such problems, is that of
the influence of sculpture, [180] through which such figures as
that of the Mother-Goddess become common property for many lands,
setting up community of belief on one line irrespective of prevailing
theologies. And it is quite certain that as the nations came to know
more and more of each other's Gods they borrowed traits and tales, thus
assimilating the general concepts attached to wholly different names.
Seeing, then, further, that, as in the case of Yahweh, it was often
a point of religious taboo that a deity should not be called by
"his real name," and that nearly all had many epithets, there was
no limit to the interaction and mutation of cults and God-norms. The
exact derivation and history of the worship of Tammuz in Jewry no one
can pretend to know; and no one therefore can pretend to know that it
was not interlinked with other cults of names associated with sets
of attributes, rites, and tales. In view of the idle declamation on
the subject, it seems positively necessary to remind the reader that
even if he believes in the historicity of Jesus he is not therefore
entitled to assume the historicity of Tammuz-Dumzi-Adonis, or Myrrha,
or Miriam, or Joshua; and that if he recognizes any connection,
in terms of attributes, between the God-concepts Mars and Arês, or
Zeus and Jupiter, or Aphroditê and Venus, or Artemis and Diana, and
does not in these cases fall back upon the nugatory thesis of "two
different deities," he is not entitled to do so over the suggestion
that one popular Syrian cult of a Lord-name may have connected with
another. There is really need here for a little critical vigilance,
not to say psychological analysis.]
Even if we assume the earlier Jewish cult of Tammuz to have been swept
away in the Captivity, the new conditions would tend to stimulate
similar popular cults. When, after the Exile, the conception of Yahweh
began under Perso-Babylonian influences to alter in the direction
of a universalist theism, the common tendency to seek a nearer God
was bound to come into play. There is no more universal feature in
religious history than the recession of the High Gods. [181] The more
"supreme" a deity becomes, in popular religion, the more generally
does popular devotion tend to elicit Son-Gods or Goddesses who seem
more likely to be "hearers and answerers of prayer." Sacred Books
certainly tend to check such a reversion; and in Islam the check has
been successful in virtue of the very fact that Allah, like the early
Yahweh, is in effect conceived as a racial God, or God of a single
cult. But the tendency is seen at work all over the earth.
The vogue of Apollo, of Dionysos, of Herakles, of Tammuz-Adonis,
of Krishna, of Buddha, of Balder, of Athênê, of the Virgin Mary,
of the countless deities propitiated by savage peoples who ignore
their Supreme Gods, are all testimonies to the natural craving
of religious ignorance for a near God. The same craving certainly
subsisted among the Hebrews in so far as it was not completely laid
by organized legalism. And seeing that the redactors of the Sacred
Books had actually reduced many early deities--Abraham, Jacob,
Joseph, Daoud = David, Moses, Joshua, and Samson--to the status
of patriarchs and heroes, [182] the craving would among some be
relatively strengthened. Jews who in time of trouble chronically
reverted to alien Gods and alien rites, even as did the Greeks and
Romans, could not conceivably fail altogether to adopt or cherish
cults analogous to those of Dionysos, Adonis, Osiris, so popular
among the neighbouring peoples.
The hypothesis forced upon us by the whole history, then, is that
there had subsisted in Jewry, in original connection with a sacrificial
rite of Jesus the Son of the Father, a Sacrament of a Hero-God Jesus,
whose Name was strong to save. If it took the form of a Sacrament of
Twelve, with the ritual-representative of the God, it would be closely
analogous to the traditional Sacrament of Twelve in which Aaron [the
Anointed One = Messiah] and the [twelve] elders of Israel "ate bread
with Moses' father-in-law before God." [183] Behind that narrative
lies a ritual practice. A sacrament of bread and wine is further
indicated in the mention of the mythic Melchisedek, "King of Peace"
and priest of "El Elyon," [184] "without father and without mother,
without genealogy, having neither beginning of days or end of life,
but made like unto the Son of God," who thus became for Christists
a type of Jesus. [185] A sacramental banquet of twelve seems to have
been involved in the sacrificial ritual of the Temple itself, where
a presiding priest and twelve others daily officiated. [186]
That Galilean or other Jews or semi-Jews, always in a partly
hostile relation to priests, scribes, and Pharisees, should in an
age of chronic war, disaster and revolution, maintain an old private
sacrament, with a subordinate worship of a Hero-God Jesus whose body
and blood had once literally and now symbolically brought salvation,
is not an unlikely but a likely hypothesis. The gospels themselves
indicate an attitude of demotic hostility alike to the king, the
priests, the scribes, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees. It is not
pretended that before and apart from Jesus there was no such hostility,
and that he generated it by his teaching. In a united community such
hostility could not be so generated. It was there to start with. If
then cults of Dionysos and Attis and Adonis, the annually dying and
suffering demigods, could openly subsist in the Hellenistic world
alongside of the State cults of Zeus and the other chief Gods, a secret
cult of a Hero-God Jesus could subsist in some part of Jewry, with its
survivals of rural paganism and its many contacts and mixtures with
Samaritan schism and Hellenistic culture. Yet further, if the popular
needs of the Hellenistic world could elicit and maintain a multitude
of private religious associations, each with its own sacramental meal,
[187] the same needs could elicit and maintain them elsewhere.
To this thesis it is objected that we have no mention of the existence
of a Jesus cult of any kind in the Hebrew books. But that is a
necessity of the case. The Sacred Books would naturally exclude all
mention of a cult which in effect meant the continued deification of
Joshua, [188] who had long been reduced to the status of a mere hero
in the history. That Joshua is a non-historical personage has long
been established by modern criticism. [189] That he did not do what
he is said in the Book of Joshua to have done is agreed by all the
"higher" critics. Who or what then was Joshua? He is in many respects
the myth-duplicate of Moses, whose work he repeats, passing the Jordan
as did Moses the Red Sea, appointing his twelve, "renewing" the rite of
circumcision, and writing the law upon stones. But he notably excels
Moses in that he causes the sun and moon to stand still by his word;
[190] and as this is cited from "Jasher," he is possibly the older
figure of the two.
And for the Jews he retained a special status. In his Book he is made
(with a "thus saith the Lord") to give a list of the conquests effected
by him against "the Amorite, and the Perizzite, and the Canaanite,
and the Hittite, and the Girgashite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite." In
Exodus xx, this very list of conquests, barring "the Girgashite,"
is promised, with this prelude:--
Behold, I [Yahweh] send an angel before thee, to keep thee by the
way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. Take
ye heed of him, and hearken unto his voice: provoke him not,
for he will not pardon your transgression; for my name is in him.
The Angel who possesses or embodies the secret or magical name [191]
is to do what Joshua in the historical myth says has been done under
his leadership: [192] both passages stand. Further, the Angel of the
passage in Exodus is in the Talmud identified with the mystic Metatron,
[193] who corresponds generally with the Logos of Philo Judæus,
the Sophia or Power of the Gnostics, and the Nous of Plotinus. The
eminent Talmudic scholar, Emmanuel Deutsch, surmised that the Metatron
is "most probably nothing but Mithra," the Persian Sun-God; and as
the promised Divine One in the Septuagint version of Isaiah, ix, 6,
bears the Mithraic titles of "Angel of Great Counsel" and Judge,
there is perhaps ground for some such surmise. It may have been,
indeed, that the redactors of the sacred books originally meant to
substitute the Angel for Joshua in the esteem of the people, giving
the former the credit for the exploits of the latter; but such a
manipulation would be in itself a confession of Joshua's renown. And
in the Samaritan Targums "the Angel of God" commonly stood for the
divine names Jehovah and Elohim. [194]
However that may be, the pseudo-historical Joshua could not have
been elevated by the Talmudists to a divine status in other regards
had he been a historical personage; and when we find him specially
honoured in Samaria [195] we can draw no inference save that he was
once a Palestinian deity. The fact that the name means "Saviour" [196]
is of capital importance. In Jewish tradition and in his Book he is
specially associated with the choosing of the Paschal lamb, the rite
of the Passover, and the rite of circumcision. [197] Here then is the
presumptive God for the early rite of Jesus the Son of the Father. As
we shall see later, "the Angel of the Lord" is found to equate with
"the Word of the Lord"--another cue for the gospel-makers. And in
the Jewish New Year liturgy, to this day, Joshua-Jesus figures as
the "Prince of the Presence," which again is supposed to identify
him with Metatron as = meta thronou, "behind the throne." Only as a
Palestinian deity thus subordinated to Yahweh is he explicable. And
as the "Angel of the Presence" again occurs in Isaiah, lxiii, 9,
figuring as Saviour and Redeemer, it is fairly clear that there was
some Jewish doctrine which made of Joshua a Saviour deity.
A high authority [198] pronounces that the "Angel of the Presence" is
"probably Michael, who was the guardian angel of Israel." But Michael
is a wholly post-exilic figure: was there no Hebrew prototype? However
that may be, the ritual connection of the name Jesus (Joshua) with
the title of Prince of the Presence has survived the intervention of
Babylonian angelology, and remains to testify to a status for Joshua
which can be explained only as a result of his original Godhood. [199]
[To this inductive argument the only answer, thus far, seems to be
to argue, as does Dr. Conybeare, that while "no one nowadays accepts
the Book of Joshua offhand as sound history," nevertheless Joshua
is there "a man of flesh and blood." [200] On the same reasoning,
Samson cannot be an Evemerized deity, though his mythical character is
clear to every mythologist. Such considerations our amateur meets by
alleging that if "half-a-dozen or more" men "come along" mistaking an
"astral myth" for a man, we should "think we were bewitched, and take
to our heels." [201] In this connection Dr. Conybeare represents me
as declaring Jesus to be "an astral myth." It is not clear whether
Dr. Conybeare, who supposes totems to be Gods, knows what "astral
myth" means, so I impute rather hallucination than fabrication. The
rational reader is aware that no such theory has been put or suggested
by me. [202] But as to his thesis, which would seem to imply that
even solar deities could never be supposed by "half-a-dozen" to be
real men, it is sufficient to point out that Herakles, the typical
solar Hero-God, was believed by millions in antiquity to be a real
man; and that Samson, obviously = the Semitic Shamas or Shimshai,
a variant of Herakles, was believed by millions of Jews to have been
a real man. It is needless here to go into the cases of Achilles and
Ulysses; but the reader who would know more of mythology than has been
discovered by Dr. Conybeare and his newspaper reviewers may usefully
investigate these themes.
As to Joshua, Dr. Conybeare, attempting academic humour, argues (p. 17)
that if the hero is "interested in fruitfulness and foreskins" he
ought to be conceived as a "Priapic god." The humorist, who pronounces
his antagonists "too modest," seems to be unaware that Yahweh had
the interests in question. Becoming "serious," he argues (p. 30) that
"even if there ever existed such a cult, it had long vanished when the
book of Joshua was compiled." For other purposes, he resorts (p. 16)
to the test, "How do you know?" "Vanished," for Dr. Conybeare, means,
"is not mentioned in the canonical Hebrew books." With his simple
conceptions of the religious life of antiquity, he supposes himself
to be aware of all that went on, religiously, in the lives of the
much-mixed population of Palestine. His statement (p. 31) that "the
Jews" in the fifth century B.C. "no longer revered David and Joshua
and Joseph as sun-gods" is as relevant as would be the statement
that they did not worship Zeus. No one ever said that "the Jews"
carried on all their primitive cults in the post-exilic period: the
proposition is the expression of mere inability to conceive the issue.
When, on the other hand, Dr. Conybeare proceeds to notice the thesis
that the ancient Jesuine sacrament would presumably survive as a
secret rite, he disposes of the proposition by calling it "a literary
trick." That would be a mild term for his express assertion (p. 34)
that I have claimed that "the canonical Book of Joshua originally
contained" the tradition that Joshua was the son of Miriam--an explicit
untruth. My reference to deletions from the book expressly pointed to
the theses of Winckler, a scholar whom Dr. Conybeare supposes himself
to discredit by expressions of personal contempt. Winckler never put
the hypothesis as to Miriam. [203]
As to the survival of many private "mysteries" among the Jews,
I may refer the reader to the section in Pagan Christs on "Private
Jewish Eucharists" (p. 168 sq.), and in particular to the dictum,
there cited, of the late Professor Robertson Smith (who has not yet,
I believe, incurred Dr. Conybeare's tolerably indiscriminate contempt),
that "the causes which produced a resuscitation of obsolete mysteries
were at work at the same period [after the Captivity] among all the
Northern Semites," and that "they mark the first appearance in Semitic
history of the tendency to found religious societies on voluntary
association and mystic initiation." To the "first" I cannot subscribe,
save on a special construction of "appearance." But Robertson Smith's
proposition was founded on the documentary evidence; and when he writes
that "the obscure rites described by the prophets have a vastly greater
importance than has been commonly recognized," with the addendum that
"everywhere the old national Gods had shown themselves powerless to
resist the gods of Assyria and Babylon," we are listening to a great
Semitic scholar, an anthropologist, and a thinker, not to a "wilful
child," as Dr. Conybeare may charitably be described, in words which,
after his manner of polemic, he applies to me.]
Finally, we have seen that a rite of "Jesus the Son," otherwise known
as the "Week of the Son," was actually specified by the Talmudists of
the period of the fall of the Temple. Taken with the item of the name
Jesus Barabbas, "Jesus the Son of the Father," and the five-days'
duration of the ritual of the sacrificed Mock-King, it completes a
body of Jewish evidence for the pre-Christian currency of the name
Jesus as a cult-name of some kind. It is now possible to see at once
the force of the primary thesis of Professor W. B. Smith [204] that
the phrase ta peri tou Iêsou, "the things concerning the Jesus," in
the Gospels and the Acts, [205] tells of a body of Jesus-lore of some
kind prior to the gospel story; and also the significance of the fact
that the narrative of the Acts represents the new apostle as finding
Jesus-worshippers, albeit in small numbers, wherever he went.
To suppose that this could mean a far-reaching and successful
propaganda by "the Twelve" in the short period represented to have
elapsed between the Crucifixion and the advent of Paul is not merely
to take as history, or summary of history, the miracle of Pentecost,
but to ignore the rest of the narrative. First we are told (viii,
1) that after the martyrdom of Stephen the Christists "were all
scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judæa and Samaria, except
the apostles." It is only to Samaria that Philip goes at that stage,
and his doings are on the face of them mythical. Yet Saul on his
conversion finds the "disciple" Ananias at Damascus. Then Peter
"went throughout all parts" (ix, 32), reaching Lydda, where he finds
"saints"; and then it is that "the apostles and the brethren that were
in Judæa heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God"
(xi, 1). It is after this that "they that were scattered abroad
upon the tribulation that arose about Stephen travelled as far as
Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to none save only
to Jews. But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene, who
when they were come to Antioch spake unto the Greeks [or Grecian Jews]
also, preaching the Lord Jesus" (xi, 19). Already there is an ecclesia
at Antioch (xiii, 1) with nothing to account for its existence.
At this stage it is represented that Saul and Barnabas customarily
preach Jesuism in the Jewish synagogues; and that only after
"contradiction" from jealous Jews at Antioch of Pisidia do they
"turn to the Gentiles" (xiii, 46), continuing, however, to visit
synagogues, till the Jewish hostility becomes overwhelming. At
Jerusalem, meanwhile, after all the gospel invective against the
Pharisees, there are found "certain of the sect of the Pharisees who
believed," and who stand firm for circumcision. Ere long we find at
Ephesus the Alexandrian Jew Apollos, who "taught carefully the things
concerning Jesus, knowing only the baptism of John," having been
"orally instructed in the way of the Lord" (xviii, 25), but had to
be taught "more carefully" by Priscilla and Aquila. Then he passes on
to Corinth. Paul in turn (xix) shows at Ephesus, where he finds other
early Jesuists, that they of the baptism of John, though by implication
they held that "Jesus was the Christ," had not received "the Holy
Ghost," which went only with the baptism of Jesus--the baptism which
only the fourth gospel alleges (with contradictions), the synoptics
knowing nothing of any baptism by Jesus or the disciples; and only
Matthew and Mark even alleging that after resurrection he prescribed
it. In all this the hypnotized believer sees no untruth. To the eye
of reason there is revealed a process of primitive cult-building.
In whatever direction we turn, we thus find in the Jesuist documents
themselves the traces of a "pre-Christian" Jesuism and Christism. At
Ephesus, the believers "were in all about twelve men"--the number
required for the primitive rite. The subsequent statement (xix,
9-10) that after Paul had debated daily for two years at Ephesus "all
they which dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and
Greeks," is typical of the method of the pseudo-history. Either the
whole narrative is baseless fiction or there were prior developments
of the Jesus-cult.
It may be argued, indeed, that such a work of manipulation as the
Acts is no evidence for anything, and that its accounts indicating a
prior spread of Jesuism are no more to be believed than its miracle
stories. But however fictitious be its accounts of any one person,
it is certain that there was a cult; and all critics are now agreed
that the book is a redaction of previous matter--probably of Acts
of Paul, Acts of Peter, Acts of the Apostles, and so on. And whereas
the most advantageous fiction from the point of view of the growing
"catholic" church would be an account of the apostles as everywhere
making converts, stories of their finding them must be held to have
been imposed on the redactor by his material. There also it must be
held to stand for some reality in the history of the cult, for the same
reason, that there was nothing to be gained by inventing such a detail.
§ 2. Prototypes
Still we are met by the objection that whatever the Acts may say the
gospels give no indication of any previous Jesus-cult. But that is a
position untenable for the biographical school save by a temporary
resort to the theory of myth-making. As Professor W. B. Smith has
pointed out, the gospels expressly represent that the disciples healed
the sick in the name of Jesus in places where Jesus had never been. For
the supernaturalists, that is only one more set of miracles. But the
biographical school, though it is much inclined to credit Jesus with
occult "healing powers," can hardly affirm such healing by means of a
magic name, and has no resource but to dismiss all such matter. [206]
Yet why should the evangelists have framed such a narrative save on
the knowledge that the name of Jesus was a thing to conjure with in
Palestinian villages?
It is true that the story is fully told only of the mission of the
Seventy. In Matthew the Twelve are "sent" out but neither go nor
return, for the narrative continues with them present. In Mark and
Luke, the Twelve go and return without reporting anything, though
Mark tells that they preached repentance, cast out many devils, and
healed many sick by anointing them with oil. Evidently the mission
was a heedless addition to the older gospel or gospels: the third
attempts to give it some completeness. It is only the Seventy who
make a report; and it is only of them (Lk. x, 1) that we are told
they were to go to places "whither he himself was about to come." As
the episode of the Seventy is in effect given up as myth even by many
supernaturalists (who feel that, if historical, the episode could not
have been overlooked in Matthew and Mark), the biographical school
are so far entitled to say that for them the record does not posit
a previously current Jesus-Name. But what idea then do they connect
with the sending-out of the Twelve, if not the kind of idea that is
associated with the sending-out of the Seventy?
M. Loisy feels "authorized to believe" (1) that Jesus in some fashion
chose twelve disciples and sent them out to preach the simple "evangel"
that "the Kingdom of God was at hand"--that is, merely the evangel
of John the Baptist over again; and (2) that "it seems" that they
went two by two in the Galilean villages, and were "well received:
their warning was listened to: sick persons were presented to them
to heal, and there were cures." To say this is to say, if anything,
that for the first Christians the Name of Jesus was held to have
healing power before his deification, and that it was a known name.
But we have stronger documentary grounds than these. The Apocalypse is
now by advanced critics in general recognized to have been primarily
a Judaic, not a Christian document. [207] The critics apparently do
not realize that this verdict carries in it the pronouncement that
Jesus was probably a divine name for some section of the Jews before
the rise of the Christian cult. The twelve apostles enter only in an
interpolation: [208] in the main document we have the "four and twenty
elders" of an older cult, [209] answering to the twenty-four Counsellor
Gods of Babylonia. Even if we assign the book to a "Christian" writer
of the earliest years, at the very beginning of the Pauline mission,
[210] we are committed to connecting the cult at that stage with
the doctrine of the Logos, [211] with the Alpha and Omega, and with
the Mithraic or Babylonian lore of the Seven Spirits. Of the gospel
story there is no trace beyond the mention of slaying: on the other
hand the Child-God of the dragon-story is wholly non-Christian,
and derives from Babylon.
The entire book, in short, raises the question whether the Jesus-cult
may not have come in originally (as so much of Judaism did), or
been reinforced, from the side of Babylon, down even to the name of
Nazareth, since there was a Babylonian Nasrah. As Samaria, the seat of
the special celebration of Joshua, is historically known to have been
colonised from Assyria and Babylon, the possibilities are wide. Suffice
it that the Apocalypse indicates a strong Babylonian element in some
of the earliest real documentary matter we have in connection with
the Jesuist cult in the New Testament; and at the same time makes
certain the pre-Gospel currency of a Jesus-cult among professed Jews.
Yet another clue obtrudes itself in the Epistle of Jude--or, as
it ought to be named, Judas--a document notably Jewish in literary
colour. Mr. Whittaker [212] was the first of the myth-theorists to
lay proper stress on the fact that the reading "Jesus" (= Joshua)
in verse 5, [213] alone makes the passage intelligible:--
Now I desire to put you in remembrance, though ye know all
things once for all, how that Jesus [that is, Joshua, instead
of "the Lord"] having saved a people out of the land of Egypt
the second time [214] [Moses having saved them the first time],
destroyed them that believed not. And angels which kept not their
own principality, but left their proper habitation, he hath kept
in everlasting bonds under darkness unto the judgement of the
great day.
The reference is certainly to Joshua, who is here
quasi-deified. Plainly, as Mr. Whittaker observes, "the binding of
erring angels can only be attributed to a supernatural being, and
not to a mere national hero."
And, as Mr. Whittaker also notes, we have yet another clear indication
from the Jewish-Christian side that Joshua in Jewish theology had a
heavenly status. In the "Sibylline Oracles" there occurs the passage:--
Now a certain excellent man shall come again from heaven, who
spread forth his hands upon the very fruitful tree, the best of
the Hebrews, who once made the sun stand still, speaking with
beauteous words and pure lips. [215]
"The identification of Christ with Joshua," remarks the orthodox
translator cited, "is a mixture of Jewish and Christian legend
(sic) which is unique. It is no question of symbolism here, as
Joshua in Christian writings is treated as a type of Christ, but
rather the confusion is such as might be made by an ignorant person
reading, Heb. iv, 8, 'if Jesus had given them rest,' and concluding
that Jesus Christ led the Jews into Canaan. The author, indeed,
identifies himself with the Jews, as where he prays (vers. 327 ff.):
'Spare Judea, Almighty Father, that we may see thy judgments'; and
were it credible that the whole book was the work of one author, we
should regard his religion as syncretic, and in full accord neither
with law nor gospel. But the book ... is of composite character. One
writer may have been a Christian; another filches occasionally from
Christian sources, but has no lively faith in Christ: like many of
his countrymen at this time, he suspends his judgment, and instead of
making a decision expends his energies in denunciation of the hated
power of Rome, and in speculations concerning the future."
It matters not whether the writer was or was not a confident
Christian: Judaic by upbringing or tuition he certainly was; and
his identification of Jesus the Christ with Joshua is one more of
the proofs that for many Jews Joshua had a quasi-divine status,
as was fitting for a personage who "made the sun stand still." Taken
collectively, the proofs cannot be overridden or explained away. Joshua
was for the Jews of the Hellenistic period the actual founder of
the rite of circumcision: [216] that is to say, mythologically,
he was the God of the rite. But still more weighty is the evidence
that his name lived on as that of the God-victim of a kindred rite;
and it is on that basis that there was founded the rite which is for
Christianity what circumcision had been for Judaism. Circumcision is
a rite of redemption, the giving of a symbolic part of the body to
"redeem" the whole--a surrogate for the Passover sacrifice of the
first-born, developed into a racial theocratic rite. It is significant
that the Saviour-God of this rite becomes the Saviour-God of the
rite offered in place of that of the Passover, whereby the primordial
human sacrifice is re-typified in that of the deity who once for all
dies for all. It is upon such roots of pre-historic religion that
the world-religions grow.
§ 3. The Mystery-Drama
That there was an actual mystery-drama behind the gospel tragedy is
revealed by the document itself, which is demonstrably not primarily a
narrative at all, but a drama transcribed, with a minimum of necessary
elucidation. Only the habit of reading with uncritical reverence can
conceal from a student the dramatic bareness and brevity of the record
in the synoptics--a record which in the fourth gospel is grafted,
without any real development, on a protracted discourse that only
artificially suggests circumstantial reality. Chapter xiii is as it
were inserted in the middle of that discourse; and chapter xiv proceeds
as from the end of chapter xii. The original document cannot have had
the story of the tragedy in this form. At the close of chapter xiv the
"Arise, let us go hence," is a slight artifice to suggest action where
there is none. Only at chapter xviii is the action resumed; and it is
as bare and formal as in the synoptics. Broadly speaking, the action
is something superadded. A long discourse has been wrapped round the
first section, but without altering its compressed character. The
synoptics know nothing of the Johannine discourses: the Johannine
document knows no more of a historic episode than do the synoptics:
it can only invent monologues.
Reading the synoptic account, we find a series of separate scenes,
with the barest possible explanatory connection and introduction. The
treason of Judas, in itself a myth, [217] is announced beforehand in
three sentences, with no sign of reflection on the meaninglessness
of the situation posited. A mystico-mythical episode of a message
from the Master to one who is to prepare the passover meal comes
next. In Matthew the message is to "such a man"--undescribed: in Mark,
a man carrying a pitcher of water is to be seen and followed, and
"wheresoever he shall enter in" the message is to be delivered to
"the goodman of the house," and the room will be shown ready. To
read biography in this, or to ascribe a "primitive" trustworthiness
to the Marcan story, is to cast out criticism.
But the Supper itself is presented with the same ceremonial effect;
the whole content being the mention of the betrayal and the dogmatic
meaning of the ritual. In Mark, the whole episode of the Supper
occupies eight sentences: in Matthew, where Judas puts his question
and gets his answer, ten. After the singing of a hymn, the scene
changes instantly to the Mount of Olives. No reason is assigned for
the going out into the night: it is taken for granted that the Divine
One is going to his death, of his own will and prevision. Either we
believe this, making him a God, or we recognize a myth. Biography it
cannot be. And drama it clearly is.
On the Mount, there is another brief dialogue, committing Peter
and the other disciples--a wholly hostile presentment. Again the
scene changes to Gethsemane, where the three selected disciples with
whom Jesus withdraws actually sleep while he utters the prayer set
down. There was thus no one to hear it. Any biographical theory which
is concerned to respect verisimilitude must here recognize something
else than narrative, and will presumably posit invention. But why
should invention take this peculiar form? If the object was to
impeach the disciples--and they certainly are impeached--is it not
an impossibly crude device to tell of their sleeping throughout the
prayer and its repetition, leaving open the retort: "You report
the words of the prayer: from whom did you get them if not from
those disciples, who must have heard them?" But if we suppose the
scene first presented dramatically, no perplexity or counter-sense
is involved. The impeachment is effectual; the episode is seen;
and no one is concerned, in presence of a drama, to ask how certain
words came to be known to have been spoken by any personage. It is
the reduction to narrative form that betrays the dramatic source. And
when we find in both Matthew and Mark, which clearly embody the same
original document, this sequence:
And again he came, and found them sleeping ... and they wist
not what to answer him [nothing has been said]. And he cometh
the third time, and saith unto them, Sleep on now, and take your
rest: it is enough; the hour is come: behold, the son of man is
betrayed.... Arise now ...,
the documentary crux, which the biographical school makes vainly
violent attempts to solve, is at once solved when we realize that in
the transcription two speeches have accidentally been combined. The
drama must have gone thus:--
The disciples still asleep.
Enter Jesus.
Jes. Sleep on now and take your rest. [Exit.
Enter Jesus. (Disciples still asleep.)
Jes. It is enough: the hour is come, etc.
The transcriber, missing an exit and an enter, has simply run two
speeches together; and the gospel copyists have faithfully followed
their copy, putting "they wist not what to answer him" in the wrong
place. In an original narrative the combination could not happen. In
the transcription of the copy of a play it could easily happen. We
find instances in the printing of the plays of Shakespeare and other
early dramatists.
[One antagonist of the mystery-play theory, making no attempt
to rebut the above solution, denies that it can be applied to the
midnight trial before the priests, elders, and scribes. Of this trial
M. Loisy recognizes the impossibility: pronouncing that, sans doute,
the asserted search for witnesses by night never took place. But,
says the objector [218]:--
(1) It may be incredible history; but it is impossible drama. I
defy Mr. Robertson to say how it could have been represented on
the stage, or why it should have been given a place in a drama
at all. And he is searching for evidence of drama.
(2) The incident exists only in Mr. Robertson's imagination. The
Greek phrase in Mk. xiv, 55, is the regular phrase for sifting
evidence, and does not imply or suggest any hunting up of witnesses
throughout Jerusalem.
We have here three propositions:--
1. The midnight search for witnesses is impossible in drama.
2. It is impossible to give a reason why it should have been put in
a drama.
3. The record does not say that it took place.
The first is at once annihilated by briefly dramatizing the alleged
procedure:--
Priest (or other official, to officials). Go and bring the
witnesses to convict this fellow. [Exeunt Officials.
Priest consults with his fellows.
Enter Officials with a witness. Exeunt Officials.
Witness is examined: the evidence is confused.
Enter Officials with another witness. Exeunt.
Witness is examined: evidence conflicts with that already given.
(And so with a series of witnesses.)
Enter Officials with two more witnesses.
Witnesses, examined, testify, with some contradictions in detail,
"This man said"--etc.
High Priest (standing). Answerest thou nothing? etc.
Where is the difficulty? It is precisely in drama, and in drama alone,
that the impossible narrative can pass as possible. Action on the
stage is always telescoped: time is always more or less ignored,
because the selected action must go on continuously. Again and
again in Shakespeare (or rather in pseudo-Shakespeare) we find
irrelevant and futile scenes interposed to create the semblance of
a time interval; but in Othello and Measure for Measure, to name no
other plays, the action is impossibly telescoped. The explanation
is that in the psychology of the theatre time is disregarded, save
by the most critical. The simple-minded audience of devotees which
witnessed the Christist mystery-play would never ask "How did they
hunt up those witnesses in Jerusalem at midnight?" Solvitur ambulando,
so to speak: they saw the trial. It is when the play is transmuted to
dead narrative, wherein a number of questions and answers are reduced
to a few bald statements, that the impossibility obtrudes itself.
Our critic defies us to explain how such a trial came to be put in
a drama. It is hard to see why he is puzzled. The general object
of the whole tragedy is to show Jesus as the victim, first, of the
priests, elders, and scribes--the Jewish ecclesiastical order, whose
hostility to Jesus is a constant datum of the gospels. At this stage
the mystery-play has become a Gentile-Christian performance, in which
even the Jewish disciples play a poor part, while the official class
are the mainspring of the tragedy. How could the priests be more
effectively impeached than by exhibiting them as producing plainly
suborned evidence to convict Jesus? Lord Tennyson, in our time, put
a bad freethinker in a bad play to discredit freethinking. And he
had non-canonical as well as canonical precedents. The apocryphal
"Acts of Pilate" appears to follow a drama in which a great many
gospel episodes were dramatized as well as the trial. [219]
As for the critic's assertion that a midnight search for witnesses
is not posited in the narrative, it is again impossible to follow
his reasoning. If the ezêtoun ... martyrian of Mark means "sifted
evidence," the ezêtoun pseudomartyrian of Matthew means "sifted false
evidence." The theory of "sifting" is impossible. I have had the
curiosity to examine ten translations--Latin, German, modern Greek,
Italian, French, and English, without finding that one translator
has ever dreamt of it. All agree with the current English rendering,
which means sought [false] testimony, because no other rendering is
possible. The record goes on, in Mark:--
... and found it [i. e. the required evidence] not. For many
bare false witness against him and their witness agreed not
together. And there stood up certain, and bare false witness
against him.... And not even so did their witness agree
together. And the high priest stood up....
According to the new theory, the prosecution "sifted evidence" which
"stood up," as did the high priest.
Defending his thesis, the exegete argues [220] that the "evidence" was
not written but oral; that is to say, the authorities had collected
witnesses during the day and had then kept them till midnight or
later without ascertaining what evidence they were able to give. The
narratives neither say nor hint anything of the kind; whereas if such
had been supposed to be the fact it would have been the natural thing
to say so.
But the thing alleged is unnatural. On the one hand we are asked to
believe that the authorities had before sunset collected a number of
witnesses, when they could not have any certainty of making the arrest;
on the other hand we are to believe that with all this extraordinary
fore-planning they had not taken the normal precaution of ascertaining
what the witnesses could say. In the transcribed drama as it stands,
the authorities are represented as knaves; in the interpretation
before us, framed to save the credit of the narrative, they are
represented as childishly foolish. The narrative as we have it defies
its vindicators. It tells that witnesses were sent for; and only in
a drama, in which time-conditions are ignored, could such a fiction
have been resorted to.] #/
The story is equally dramatic to the close. Everything is scenic,
detached, episodic: it is left to Luke (who elaborates the
Supper scene; gives a positive command of Jesus for the future
celebration where the previous documents merely show the rite as it
was practised; puts the denial of Peter before the trial; and drops
the whole procedure of the witnesses) to interpose the episode of the
daughters of Jerusalem between the Roman trial and the crucifixion;
and even that is parenthetic and dramatic, as are the burial and
the seeking; whereafter, in Mark, the gospel abruptly ends. The
rest is supplementary documentation. How much of that may have been
dramatized, it is impossible to say. That there had been evolution
in the mystery-play is involved in our conception of it. It began
with the simple Sacrament, at a remote period, the Sacrament itself
being evolved from a primitive and savage to a symbolic form, the God
being probably first represented, as in kindred rites, [221] by his
sacrificial priest; and later by the victim. [222] It is after the
primitive and localized cult seeks the status of a world-religion that
the ritual developes into a quasi-history; and we can see conflicting
influences in that. One writer causes Jesus to be buffeted and mocked
at the Jewish trial, as if to counterbalance the derision in the Roman
trial; even as Luke interposes a third trial before Herod, to make sure
that the guilt should ultimately lie with the Jewish government. In the
action as in the doctrine, the Gentile influence finally predominates.
The important point to note in the documentary evolution is that the
mystery-play remained a secret representation for some time after
written gospels were current. To begin with, all the mystery-plays
of the age were on the same footing of secrecy. What takes place
finally in the Jesuist cult is a simple adding-on of the mystery-play
to the gospels. It was not for nothing that the school of B. Weiss,
seeking to expiscate a "Primitive Gospel" from the synoptics, made
it end before the Tragedy. This was what they were bound to do by
their documentary tests; and the common objection that such an ending
is very improbable--a difficulty avowed by Weiss and weakly sought
to be solved by some of the school--is seen in the light of the
myth-theory to be a difficulty only for those who assume not merely
the historicity of a Jesus but the historicity of the whole tragedy
story down to the resurrection. Once it is realized that that story
is a dramatic development of an originally simple myth of sacrificial
death, the documentary difficulty disappears.
[It should not be necessary to point out the absolute falsity of
the assertion of Dr. Conybeare (Histor. Christ, p. 49) that in my
theory "The Christian Gospels ... are a transcript of the annually
performed ritual drama, just as Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare are
transcripts of Shakespeare's plays." In Pagan Christs (p. 201)
it is expressly argued that "the Mystery Play is an addition to
a previously existing document.... The transcriber has been able
to add to the previous gospel the matter of the mystery-play; and
there he loyally stops." And it is repeatedly pointed out that
the transcription has been made with the minimum of necessary
narrative connection. Thus the parallel with Lamb's Tales is
false even as regards the matter posited as constituting the play;
while the assertion that the whole of the gospel is represented
as a transcription of a play is pure fabrication. And this mere
falsification of the theory passes with traditionalist critics
as a confutation.]
Some account, indeed, the Jesuists must have given of the death
of their God or Son-God when they reached the stage of systematic
propaganda; and this was in all likelihood a bare statement such
as we have in the Epistles, that he was put to a humiliating death
and rose again. It is very likely that accounts of the manner of
the death varied in the first written accounts, as they certainly
would in the traditions or rituals current at various points; and we
may grant to the documentary critics that various versions may have
attached to early forms or sources of Mark and Matthew. A general
statement that Jesus was the "Son of the Father," and that he had
been put to death with ignominy, would elicit, as has been above
argued, the objection that "Jesus Barabbas" was certainly no divine
personage. The Barabbas story, then, explaining away that objection,
is a comparatively late development, of which, accordingly, we find
not a single trace in the Acts or the Epistles. But similarly the
Supper is not described in the Acts or the Epistles apart from the
plainly interpolated account in First Corinthians. And at the outset
the Supper would be emphatically secret matter, not to be written down.
Whatever conclusion, then, was given to the earlier gospel or
gospels, it did not include that. As little would it give the Agony,
or the trials before the Sanhedrim and before Pilate, throwing
the guilt of the tragedy on the Jews, or the episodes disparaging
the apostles. Judas is in all likelihood primarily a figure of a
Gentile form of the play, being just Judaios, a Jew, [223] created by
Gentile or Samaritan animus. What inferribly happened was a dramatic
development, by Gentile hands, of a primarily simple mystery drama,
consisting of the Supper, the death, and the resurrection, into the
play as it now stands transcribed in the synoptics, with the Betrayal,
the Agony, the Denial, the Trials, and the dramatic touches in the
crucifixion scene.
The school of Weiss, then, on our theory, reached by comparatively
consistent methods of documentary criticism a relatively sound
conclusion. The earlier forms of the gospel certainly had not the
present conclusion; and whatever simple conclusions they had were bound
to be superseded when the complete mystery play was transcribed--the
very transcription being a reason for their disappearance. At some
point, probably by reason of the Christian reaction against all pagan
procedure, the play, which in its present form must always have been
special to a town or towns, was dropped, and though the tendency was
to keep the Eucharist an advanced rite for initiates, and withhold
it from catechumens, [224] the reduction of the Tragedy to narrative
form became a necessity for purposes of propaganda. Without it,
the gospels were inadequate to their purposes; and it supplied the
needed confutation of the charge that Jesus was simply a victim in
the Barabbas rite.
This said, we have still to face the main problem of the evolution of
the Jesus-cult into a world-religion in which the God Sacrificed to
the God becomes also the Messiah of the Jews and the Teacher of those
who believe in him. And the tracing of that evolution must obviously
be difficult. The process of extracting true out of false history
is always so; and where the concocted history and its contingent
literature are the main documents, we can in the nature of things
reach only general conceptions. But general conceptions are attainable;
and we must frame them as scientifically as we can.