CHAPTER IV

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CULT

§ 1. The Primary Impulsion

Professor W. B. Smith, whose brilliant, independent, and powerful

advocacy of the myth-theory has brought conviction to readers not

otherwise attracted by it, has stressed two propositions in regard

to the evolution of the Jesus-cult. One is that the movement was

"multifocal," starting from a number of points; [225] the other that

the essential and inspiring motive was the monotheistic conception,

as against all forms of polytheism; Jesus being conceived as "the One

God." [226] That the first proposition is sound and highly important,

I am convinced. But after weighing the second with a full sense of the

acumen that guides all Professor Smith's constructive speculation, I

remain of the opinion that it needs considerable modification. [227]

In clearing up these two issues, we shall go a long way towards

establishing a clear theory of the whole historical process.

In the first place, a "multifocal" movement, a growth from many points,

is involved in all our knowledge of the highly important matters of the

history of the early Christian sects, and the non-canonical Christian

documents. Perhaps the proposition is even more widely true than

Professor Smith indicates. To begin with, we find at an early stage

the sects of (1) Ebionites and (2) Nazarenes or Nazareans, in addition

to (3 and 4) the Judaizing and Gentilizing movements associated with

"the Twelve" and Paul respectively; and yet further (5) the movement

associated with the name of Apollos. Further we have to note (6) the

Jesuism of the Apocalypse, partly extra-Judaic in its derivation;

and (7) that of the ninth section of the Teaching of the Twelve

Apostles, which emerges as a quasi-Ebionitic addition to a purely

Judaic document--not yet interpolated by the seventh section. Yet

further, we have (8) the factors accruing to the religious epithet

"Chrestos" [228] (= good, gracious), which specially attached to the

underworld Gods of the Samothracian mysteries; also to Hermes, Osiris,

and Isis; and (9 and 10) the Christist cult-movements connected with

the non-Jesuine Pastor of Hermas and the sect of the Eleesaites. [229]

And this is not an exhaustive list.

(11) That there was a general Jewish ferment of Messianism on foot in

the first century is part of the case of the biographical school. That

there actually arose in the first and second centuries various Jewish

"Christs" is also a historical datum. But the biographical school

are not wont in this connection to avow the inference that alone can

properly be drawn from the phrase of Suetonius as to a movement of

Jewish revolt at Rome occurring in the reign of Claudius impulsore

Chresto, "(one) Chrestus instigating." [230] This is not an allusion

to the Greek epithet Chrestos before referred to: it is either a

specification of an individual otherwise unknown or the reduction to

vague historic status of the source of a general ferment of Jewish

insurrection in Rome, founding on the expectation of the Christos,

the Messiah. In the reign of Claudius, such a movement could not have

been made by "Christians" on any view of the history. As the words were

pronounced alike they were interchangeably written, Chrestos (preserved

in the French chrétien) being used even among the Fathers. Giving to

the phrase of Suetonius the only plausible import we can assign to it,

we get the datum that among the Jews outside Palestine there was a

generalized movement of quasi-revolutionary Christism which cannot

well have been without its special literature.

(12) In this connection may be noted the appearance of a

quasi-impersonal Messianism and Christism on the border-land of

Jewish and early Christian literature. Of this, a main source is the

Book of Enoch, of which the Messianic sections are now by general

consent assigned to the first and second centuries B.C. There the

Messiah is called the Just or Righteous One; [231] the Chosen One;

[232] Son of Man; [233] the Anointed; [234] and once "Son of the

Woman." [235] Here already we have the imagined Divine One more or

less concretely represented. He is premundane, and so supernatural,

yet not equal with God, being simply God's deputy. [236] When then

we find in the so-called Odes of Solomon, recently recovered from an

Ethiopic version, a Messianic psalmody in which, apparently in the

first Christian century, "the name of the gospel is not found, nor

the name of Jesus;" and "not a single saying of Jesus is directly

quoted," [237] it is critically inadmissible to pronounce the

Odes Christian, especially when a number are admitted to have no

Christian characteristics. [238] When, too, the writer admittedly

appears to be speaking ex ore Christi, a new doubt is cast on all

logia so-called. Such literature, whether or not it be pronounced

Gnostic, points to the Gnostic Christism in which the personal Jesus

disappears [239] in a series of abstract speculations that exclude

all semblance of human personality. All the evidence points for its

origination to abstract or general conceptions, not to any actual

life or teaching. It spins its doctrinal web from within.

(13) And it is not merely on the Jewish side that we have evidence

of elements in the early Jesuist movement which derive from sources

alien to the gospel record. M. Loisy [240] admits that the hymn of the

Naassenes, given by Hippolytus, [241] in which Jesus appeals to the

Father to let him descend to earth and reveal the mysteries to men,

"has an extraordinary resemblance to the dialogue between the God

Ea and his son Marduk in certain Babylonian incantations." [242] He

disposes of the problem by claiming that before it can weigh with us

"it must be proved that the hymn of the Ophites is anterior to all

connection of their sect with Christianity." The implication is

that Gnostic syncretism could add Babylonian traits to the Jewish

Jesus. But when we find signal marks of a Babylonian connection for

the name Jesus in the Apocalypse we cannot thus discount, without

further evidence, the Babylonian connection set up by the Naassene

hymn. Nor can the defenders of a record which they themselves admit

to contain a mass of unhistorical matter claim to have a ground upon

which they can dismiss as a copyist's blunder the formula in which

in an old magic papyrus Jesus, as Healer, is adjured as "The God

of the Hebrews." [243] The very gospel records present the name of

Jesus as one of magical power in places where he has not appeared. A

strict criticism is bound to admit that the whole question of the

pre-Christian vogue of the name Jesus presents an unsolved problem.

There are further two quasi-historical Jesuses, one (14) given in

the Old Testament, the other (15) in the Talmud, concerning which we

can neither affirm nor deny that they were connected with a Jesuine

movement before the Christian era. One is the Jesus of Zechariah (iii,

1-8; vi, 11-15); the other is the Jesus Ben Pandira, otherwise Jesus

Ben Satda or Stada, of the Talmud. The former, Jesus the High Priest,

plays a quasi-Messianic part, being described as "The Branch" and

doubly crowned as priest and king. The word for "branch" in Zechariah

is tsemach, but this was by the pre-Christian Jews identified with the

netzer of Isaiah xi, 1; which for some the early Jesuists would seem

to have constituted the explanation of Jesus' cognomen of "Nazarite"

or "Nazaræan." [244] The historic significance of the allusions in

Zechariah appears to have been wholly lost; and that very circumstance

suggests some pre-Christian connection between the name Jesus and a

Messianic movement, which the Jewish teachers would be disposed to

let slip from history, and the Christists who might know of it would

not wish to recall. But the matter remains an enigma.

Equally unsolved, thus far, is the problem of the Talmudic

Jesus. Ostensibly, there are two; and yet both seem to have been

connected, in the Jewish mind, with the Jesus of the gospels. One,

Jesus son of Pandira, is recorded to have been stoned to death and then

hanged on a tree, for blasphemy or other religious crime, on the eve

of a Passover in the reign of Alexander Jannæus (B.C. 106-79). [245]

But in the Babylonian Gemara he is identified with a Jesus Ben Sotada

or Stada or Sadta or Sidta, who by one rather doubtful clue is put in

the period of Rabbi Akiba in the second century C.E. He too is said to

have been stoned and hanged on the eve of a Passover, but at Lydda,

whereas Ben Pandira is said to have been executed at Jerusalem. Some

scholars take the unlikely view that two different Jesuses were

thus stoned and hanged on the eve of a Passover: others infer one,

whose date has been confused. [246] As Ben Pandira entered into the

Jewish anti-Christian tradition, and is posited by the Jew of Celsus

in the second century, the presumption is in favour of his date. His

mother is in one place named Mariam Magdala = "Mary the nurse" or

"hair-dresser"--a quasi-mythical detail. But even supposing him to

have been a real personage, whose name may have been connected with

a Messianic movement (he is said to have had five disciples), it is

impossible to say what share his name may have had in the Jesuine

tradition. Our only practicable clues, then, are those of the sects

and movements enumerated.

It soon becomes clear from a survey of these sects and movements

(1) that a cult of a non-divine Jesus, represented by the Hebraic

Ebionites, subsisted for a time alongside of one which, also among

Jews, made Jesus a supernatural being. Only on the basis of an original

rite can such divergences be explained. The Ebionites come before us,

in the account of Epiphanius, as using a form of the Gospel of Matthew

which lacked the first two chapters (an addition of the second or

third century), denying the divinity of Jesus, and rejecting the

apostleship of Paul. [247] It is implied that they accepted the

story of the Last Supper and the Crucifixion. Here then were Jewish

believers in a Hero-Jesus, the Servant of God (as in the Teaching),

not a Son of God in any supernatural sense. Ebionism had rigidly

restricted the cult to a subordinate form.

On the other hand, we have in the Nazarean sect or fraternity a

movement which added both directly and indirectly to the Jesuist

evolution. In the so-called Primitive Gospel, as expiscated by the

school of B. Weiss from the synoptics, there is no mention of Nazareth,

and neither the epithet "Nazarene" nor "Nazarite" for Jesus. All three

names are wholly absent from the Epistles, as from the Apocalypse:

Jesus never has a cognomen after we pass the Acts. The inference is

irresistible that first the epithet "Nazarean," and later the story

about Nazareth, were additions to a primary cult in which Jesus had

no birth-location, any more than he had human parents.

I have suggested [248] that the term may have come in from the

Hebrew "Netzer" = "the branch," which would have a Messianic meaning

for Jews. Professor Smith, who makes a searching study of Hebrew

word-elements, has developed a highly important thesis to the effect

that the word Nazaraios, "Nazarean," which gives the residual name for

the Jesuist sect in the Acts and the predominant name for Jesus in the

gospels (apart from Mark, which gives Nazarenos), [249] is not only

pre-Christian but old Semitic; that the fundamental meaning of the name

(Nosri) is "guard" or "watcher" (= Saviour?), and that the appellation

is thus cognate with "Jesus," which signifies Saviour. [250] On the

negative side, as against the conventional derivations from Nazareth,

the case is very strong. More than fifty years ago, the freethinker

Owen Meredith insisted on the lack of evidence that a Galilean village

named Nazareth existed before the Christian era. To-day; professional

scholarship has acquiesced, to such an extent that Dr. Cheyne [251]

and Wellhausen have agreed in deriving the name from the regional

name Gennesareth, thus making Nazareth = Galilee; while Professor

Burkitt, finding "the ordinary view of Nazareth wholly unproved and

unsatisfactory," offers "a desperate conjecture" to the effect that

"the city of Joseph and Mary, the patris of Jesus, was Chorazin." [252]

In the face of this general surrender, we are doubly entitled to deny

that either the appellation for Jesus or the sect-name had anything

to do with the place-name Nazareth. [253]

That there was a Jewish sect of "Nazaræans" before the Christian era,

Professor Smith has clearly shown, may be taken as put beyond doubt

by the testimony of Epiphanius, which he exhaustively analyzes. [254]

Primitively orthodox, like the Samaritans, and recognizing ostensibly

no Bible personages later than Joshua, they appear to have merged in

some way with the "Christians," who adopted their name, perhaps turning

"Nazaræan" into "Nazorean." My original theory was that the "Nazaræans"

were just the "Nazarites" of the Old Testament--men "separated" and

"under a vow"; [255] and that the two movements somehow coalesced, the

place-name "Nazareth" being finally adopted to conceal the facts. But

Professor Smith is convinced, from the evidence of Epiphanius,

that between "Nazarites" and "Nazaræans" there was no connection;

[256] and for this there is the strong support of the fact that the

Jews cursed the Jesuist "Nazoræans" while apparently continuing to

recognize the Nazirs or Nazarites. That Professor Smith's derivation

of the name may be the correct one, I am well prepared to believe.

But it is difficult to connect such a derivation of an important

section of the early Jesuist movement with the thesis that Jesuism

at its historic outset was essentially a monotheistic crusade. On

this side we seem to face an old sect for whom, as for the adherents

of the early sacrament, Jesus was a secondary or subordinate divine

personage. Standing at an early Hebraic standpoint, the Nazaræans

would have no part in the monotheistic universalism of the later

prophets. The early Hebrews had believed in a Hebrew God, recognizing

that other peoples also had theirs. How or when had the Nazaræans

transcended that standpoint?

In the absence of any elucidation, the very ably argued thesis of

Professor Smith as to the name "Nazaræan" seems broadly out of keeping

with the thesis that a monotheistic fervour was a main and primary

element in the development of the Christian cult; and that Jesus was

conceived by his Jewish devotees in general as "the One God." This

would have meant the simple dethroning of Yahweh, a kind of procedure

seen only in such myths as that of Zeus and Saturn, where one racial

cult superseded another. But the main form of Christianity was always

Yahwistic, even when Paul in the Acts is made to proclaim to the

Athenians an "unknown God"--an idea really derived from Athens. Only

for a few, and these non-Jews, can "the Jesus" originally have been

the One God; unless in so far as the use of the name "the Lord" may

for some unlettered Jews have identified Jesus with Yahweh, who was

so styled. The Ebionites denied his divinity all along. The later

Nazareans were Messianists who did not any more than the Jews seem

to conceive that the Messiah was Yahweh.

The whole doctrine of "the Son" was in conflict with any purely

monotheistic idea. Nowhere in the synoptics or the Epistles is the

Christ doctrine so stated as really to serve monotheism: the "I and the

Father are one" of the fourth gospel is late; and the opening verses of

that gospel show tampering, telling of a vacillation as to whether the

Logos was God or "with God"--or rather "next to God," in the strict

meaning of pros. Here we have a reflex of Alexandrian philosophy,

[257] not the evangel of the popular cult. Formally monotheistic the

cult always was, even when it had become actually Trinitarian; and all

along, doubtless, the particularist monotheism of the Jews was at work

against all other God-names in particular and polytheism in general;

but that cannot well have been the moving force in a cult which was

professedly beginning by establishing an ostensibly new deity, and

was ere long to make a trinity.

So far as anything can be clearly gathered from the scattered polemic

in the Talmud against "the Minim," the standing title for Jewish

heretics, including Christians as such, [258] they at least appear

not as maintaining the oneness of God but rather as affirming a

second Deity, [259] and this as early as the beginning of the second

century. That the Jewish Rabbis took this view of their doctrine

is explained in terms of the actual theology of the Epistle to the

Hebrews. If there was any new doctrine of monotheism bound up with

Jesuism, it must have been outside of the Jewish sphere, where the

unity of God was the very ground on which Jesuism was resisted. As

such, the Jewish Christians did not even repudiate the Jewish law,

being expressly aspersed by the Rabbis as secret traitors who professed

to be Jews but held alien heresies. [260]

I have said that "the Jesus" can have been "the one God" only for

non-Jews. Conceivably he may have been so for some Samaritans. There

is reason to believe that in the age of the Herods only a minority

of the Samaritan people held by Judaism; [261] and there is Christian

testimony that in the second century a multitude of them worshipped as

the One God Sem or Semo, the Semitic Sun-God whose name is embodied in

that of Samson. Justin Martyr, himself a Samaritan, expressly alleges

that "almost all the Samaritans, and a few even of other nations"

worship and acknowledge as "the first God" Simon, whom he describes

as a native of Gitta or Gitton, emerging in the reign of Claudius

Cæsar. [262] Justin's gross blunder in identifying a Samaritan of the

first century with the Sabine deity Semo Sancus, whose statue he had

seen in Rome, [263] is proof that he could believe in the deification

of an alien as Supreme God, in his lifetime, in a nation with ancient

cults. The thing being impossible, we are left to the datum that

Sem or Semo or Sem-on = Great Sem was widely worshipped in Samaria,

as elsewhere in the near East. [264]

Returning to the subject of "the magician Simon" in his Dialogue with

Trypho, [265] Justin there repeats that the Samaritans call him "God

above all power, and authority, and might." Remembering that the Jewish

Shema, "the Name," is the ordinary appellative for Yahweh, we note

possibilities of syncretism as to which we can only speculate. The

fact that the Jews actually called their God in general by a word

meaning "Name" and also equating with the commonest Semitic name for

the Sun-God, while in their sacred books they professedly transmuted

the sacred name (altering the consonants) to Adonai = Lord ("plural

of majesty"), the name of the Syrian God Adonis, is a circumstance

that has never been much considered by hierologists. It suggests

that the Samaritan Sem also may have been "known" by other names;

and the certain fact of the special commemoration of Joshua among the

Samaritan Judaists gives another ground for speculation. The words

of Jesus to the Samaritan woman in the fourth gospel, "Ye worship

ye know not what," seem to signify that from the Alexandrian-Jewish

standpoint Samaritans worshipped a name only.

What does emerge clearly is that Samaria played a considerable part

in the beginnings of Christism. In a curious passage of the fourth

gospel (viii, 48) the Jews say to Jesus, "Say we not well that thou

art a Samaritan, and hast a daimon?": and he answers with a denial

that he has a daimon, but makes no answer on the other charge. The

fact that Matthew makes the Founder expressly forbid his disciples

to enter any city of the Samaritans, while an interpolator of Luke

[266] introduces the story of the good Samaritan to counteract the

doctrine, tells that there was a sunderance between Samaritan and

Judaizing Christists just as there was between the Judaizers and the

Gentilizers in general. From Samaria, then, came part of the impulse

to the whole Gentilizing movement; and the Samaritan Justin shows

the anti-Judaic animus clearly enough.

That Samaritan Jesuism, then, may early have outgone the Pauline in

making Jesus "the One God," in rivalry to the Jewish Yahweh, is a

recognizable possibility. But still we do not reach the conception

of a zealously monotheistic cult, relying specially on a polemic

of monotheism. Justin fights for monotheism as against paganism,

but on the ordinary Judaic-Christian basis. This is a later polemic

stage. Nor does the thesis of a new monotheism seem at all essential

to the rest of Professor Smith's conception of the emergence of

Jesuism. He agrees that it exfoliated from a scattered cult of

secret mysteries: the notion, then, that it was at the time of its

open emergence primarily a gospel of One God, and that God Jesus,

is ostensibly in excess of the first hypothesis. It is also somewhat

incongruous with the acceptance of the historic fact that it spread

as a popular religion, in a world which desired Saviour Gods. [267]

Saviour Gods abounded in polytheism; the very conception is primarily

polytheistic; and all we know of the cast and calibre of the early

converts in general is incompatible with the notion of them as zealous

for an abstract and philosophical conception of deity. Whether we take

the epistles to the Corinthians as genuine or as pseudepigraphic,

they are clearly addressed to a simple-minded community, not given

to monotheistic idealism, and indeed incapable of it.

In positing, further, a rapid "triumph" of Christism in virtue

of its monotheism, Professor Smith seems to me to outgo somewhat

the historical facts. There is really no evidence for any rapid

triumph. Renan, after accepting as history the pentecostal dithyramb

of the Acts, came to see that no such quasi-miraculous spread of the

faith ever took place; and that the Pauline epistles all presuppose not

great churches but "little Bethels," or rather private conventicles,

scattered through the Eastern Empire. [268] He justifiably doubted

whether Paul's converts, all told, amounted to over a thousand

persons. At a much later period, sixty years after Constantine's

adoption of the faith, the then ancient church of Antioch, the city

where first the Jesuists "were called Christians," numbered only

about a fifth part of the population. [269] "At the end of the second

century, probably not a hundredth part even of the central provinces

of the Roman Empire was Christianized, while the outlying provinces

were practically unaffected."

Rather we seem bound to infer that Christianity made headway

by assimilating pagan ideas and usages on a basis of Judaic

organization. It is ultimately organization that conserves cults;

and the vital factor in the Christian case is the adaptation of the

model set by the Jewish synagogues and their central supervision. Of

course even organization cannot avert brute conquest; and the organized

pagan cults in the towns of the Empire went down ultimately before

Christian violence as the Christian went down before violence in

Persia in the age of the Sassanides. But Christian organization,

improving upon Jewish, with no adequate rivalry on the pagan side,

developed the situation in which Constantine saw fit to imperialize

the cultus, as the one best fitted to become that of the State.

How then did the organization begin and grow? The data point

insistently to a special group in Jerusalem; and behind the myth of

the gospels we have historical and documentary ground for a hypothesis

which can account for that as for the other myth-elements.

§ 2. The Silence of Josephus

When we are considering the possibilities of underlying historical

elements in the gospel story, it may be well to note on the one hand

the entirely negative aspect of the works of Josephus to that story,

and on the other hand the emergence in his writings of personages

bearing the name Jesus. If the defenders of the historicity of the

gospel Jesus would really stand by Josephus as a historian of Jewry

in the first Christian century, they would have to admit that he

is the most destructive of all the witnesses against them. It is

not merely that the famous interpolated passage [270] is flagrantly

spurious in every aspect--in its impossible context; its impossible

language of semi-worship; its "He was (the) Christ"; its assertion of

the resurrection; and its allusion to "ten thousand other wonderful

things" of which the historian gives no other hint--but that the

flagrant interpolation brings into deadly relief the absence of all

mention of the crucified Jesus and his sect where mention must have

been made by the historian if they had existed. If, to say nothing of

"ten thousand wonderful things," there was any movement of a Jesus of

Nazareth with twelve disciples in the period of Pilate, how came the

historian to ignore it utterly? If, to say nothing of the resurrection

story, Jesus had been crucified by Pilate, how came it that there is

no hint of such an episode in connection with Josephus' account of

the Samaritan tumult in the next chapter? And if a belief in Jesus

as a slain and returning Messiah had been long on foot before the

fall of the Temple, how comes it that Josephus says nothing of it

in connection with his full account of the expectation of a coming

Messiah at that point?

By every test of loyal historiography, we are not merely forced to

reject the spurious passage as the most obvious interpolation in all

literature: we are bound to confess that the "Silence of Josephus," as

is insisted by Professor Smith, [271] is an insurmountable negation

of the gospel story. For that silence, no tenable reason can be

given, on the assumption of the general historicity of the gospels

and Acts. Josephus declares himself [272] to be in his fifty-sixth

year in the thirteenth year of Domitian. Then he was born about the

year 38. By his own account, [273] he began at the age of sixteen to

"make trial of the several sects that were among us"--the Pharisees,

the Sadducees, and the Essenes--and in particular he spent three years

with a hermit of the desert named Banos, who wore no clothing save

what grew on trees, used none save wild food, and bathed himself daily

and nightly for purity's sake. Thereafter he returned to Jerusalem,

and conformed to the sect of the Pharisees. In the Antiquities, [274]

after describing in detail the three sects before named, he gives an

account of a fourth "sect of Jewish philosophy," founded by Judas

the Galilean, whose adherents in general agree with the Pharisees,

but are specially devoted to liberty and declare God to be their only

ruler, facing torture and death rather than call any man lord.

A careful criticism will recognize a difficulty as to this section. In

§ 2, as in the Life, "three sects" are specified; and the concluding

section has the air of a late addition. Seeing, however, that the sect

of Judas is stated to have begun to give trouble in the procuratorship

of Gessius Florus, when Josephus was in his twenties, it is quite

intelligible that he should say nothing of it when naming the sects who

existed in his boyhood, and that he should treat it in a subsidiary

way in his fuller account of them in the Antiquities. It is not so

clear why he should in the first section of that chapter call Judas "a

Gaulanite, of a city whose name was Gamala," and in the final section

call him "Judas the Galilean." There was a Gamala in Gaulanitis and

another in Galilee. But the discrepancy is soluble on the view that

the sixth section was added some time after the composition of the

book. There seems no adequate ground for counting it spurious.

On what theory, then, are we to explain the total silence of Josephus

as to the existence of the sect of Jesus of Nazareth, if there

be any historical truth in the gospel story? It is of no avail to

suggest that he would ignore it by reason of his Judaic hostility

to Christism. He is hostile to the sect of Judas the Galilean. There

is nothing in all his work to suggest that he would have omitted to

name any noticeable sect with a definite and outstanding doctrine

because he disliked it. He seems much more likely, in that case,

to have described and disparaged or denounced it.

And here emerges the hypothesis that he did disparage or denounce the

Christian sect in some passage which has been deleted by Christian

copyists, perhaps in the very place now filled by the spurious

paragraph, where an account of Jesuism as a calamity to Judaism

would have been relevant in the context. This suggestion is nearly

as plausible as that of Chwolson, who would reckon the existing

paragraph a description of a Jewish calamity, is absurd. And it is the

possibility of this hypothesis that alone averts an absolute verdict

of non-historicity against the gospel story in terms of the silence of

Josephus. The biographical school may take refuge, at this point, in

the claim that the Christian forger, whose passage was clearly unknown

to Origen, perhaps eliminated by his fraud a historic testimony to

the historicity of Jesus, and also an account of the sect of Nazaræans.

But that is all that can be claimed. The fact remains that in the Life,

telling of his youthful search for a satisfactory sect, Josephus

says not a word of the existence of that of the crucified Jesus;

that he nowhere breathes a word concerning the twelve apostles,

or any of them, or of Paul; and that there is no hint in any of

the Fathers of even a hostile account of Jesus by him in any of his

works, though Origen makes much of the allusion to James the Just,

[275]--also dismissible as an interpolation, like another to the same

effect cited by Origen, but not now extant. [276] There is therefore

a strong negative presumption to be set against even the forlorn

hypothesis that the passage forged in Josephus by a Christian scribe

ousted one which gave a hostile testimony.

Over a generation ago, Mr. George Solomon of Kingston, Jamaica, noting

the general incompatibility of Josephus with the gospel story and the

unhistorical aspect of the latter, constructed an interesting theory,

[277] of which I have seen no discussion, but which merits notice

here. It may be summarized thus:--

1. Banos is probably the historical original of the gospel figure of

John the Baptist.

2. Josephus names and describes two Jesuses, who are blended in the

figure of the gospel Jesus: (a) the Jesus (Wars, VI, v, 3) who predicts

"woe to Jerusalem"; is flogged till his bones show, but never utters

a cry; makes no reply when challenged; returns neither thanks for

kindness nor railing for railing; and is finally killed by a stone

projectile in the siege; and (b) Jesus the Galilean (Life, §§ 12,

27), son of Sapphias, who opposes Josephus, is associated with Simon

and John, and has a following of "sailors and poor people," one of

whom betrays him (§ 22), whereupon he is captured by a stratagem,

his immediate followers forsaking him and flying. [278] Before this

point, Josephus has taken seventy of the Galileans with him (§ 14) as

hostages, and, making them his friends and companions on his journey,

sets them "to judge causes." This is the hint for Luke's story of

the seventy disciples.

3. The "historical Jesus" of the siege, who is "meek" and venerated

as a prophet and martyr, being combined with the "Mosaic Jesus"

of Galilee, a disciple of Judas of Galilee, who resisted the Roman

rule and helped to precipitate the war, the memory of the "sect" of

Judas the Gaulanite or Galilean, who began the anti-Roman trouble,

is also transmuted into a myth of a sect of Jesus of Galilee, who has

fishermen for disciples, is followed by poor Galileans, is betrayed

by one companion and deserted by the rest, and is represented finally

as dying under Pontius Pilate, though at that time there had been no

Jesuine movement.

4. The Christian movement, thus mythically grounded, grows up after

the fall of the Temple. Paul's "the wrath is come upon them to the

uttermost" (1 Thess. ii, 16) tells of the destruction of the Temple,

as does Hebrews xii, 24-28; xiii, 12-14.

This theory of the construction of the myth out of historical elements

in Josephus is obviously speculative in a high degree; and as the

construction fails to account for either the central rite or the

central myth of the crucifixion it must be pronounced inadequate

to the data. On the other hand, the author developes the negative

case from the silence of Josephus as to the gospel Jesus with an

irresistible force; and though none of his solutions is founded-on in

the constructive theory now elaborated, it may be that some of them

are partly valid. The fact that he confuses Jesus the robber captain

who was betrayed, and whose companions deserted him, with Jesus the

"Mosaic" magistrate of Tiberias, who was followed by sailors and poor

people, and was "an innovator beyond everybody else," does not exclude

the argument that traits of one or the other, or of the Jesus of the

siege, may have entered into the gospel mosaic.

§ 3. The Myth of the Twelve Apostles

All careful investigators have been perplexed by the manner of the

introduction of "the Twelve" in the gospels; and they would have

been still more so if they had realized the total absence of any

reason in the texts for the creation of disciples or apostles at

all. Disciples to learn--what? Apostles to teach--what? The choosing

is as plainly mythical as the function. In Mark (i, 16) and Matthew

(iv, 18), Jesus calls upon the brothers Simon and Andrew to leave

their fishing and "become fishers of men." They come at the word; and

immediately afterwards the brothers James and John do the same. There

is no pretence of previous teaching: it is the act of the God. [279]

In Matthew, at the calling of the apostle Matthew (ix, 9), who in Mark

(ii, 14) becomes Levi the son of Alphæus, the procedure is the same:

"Follow me."

Then, with no connective development whatever, we proceed at one

stroke to the full number. [280] Matthew actually makes the mission

of the twelve the point of choosing, saying simply (x, 1): "And he

called unto him his twelve disciples," adding their names. In Mark

(iii, 13) we have constructive myth:--

And he goeth up into the mountain, and calleth unto him whom he

himself would: and they went unto him. And he appointed twelve,

that they might be with him, and that he might send them forth

to preach, and to have authority to cast out devils.

And the lists converge. Levi has now disappeared from Mark's record,

and we have instead "James the son of Alphæus," but with Matthew in

also. The lists of the first two synoptics have been harmonized. In

Luke, where only three are at first called, after a miracle (v,

1-11), the twelve are also summarily chosen on a mountain; and

here the list varies: Levi, who has been separately called (v, 27)

as in Mark, disappears here also in favour of "James of Alphæus";

but there is no Thaddæus, and there are two Judases, one being "of

James," which may mean either son or brother. And this Judas remains

on the list in the Acts. Candid criticism cannot affirm that we have

here the semblance of veridical biography. The calling of the twelve

has been imposed upon an earlier narrative, with an arbitrary list,

which is later varied. The calling of the fishermen, to begin with,

is a symbolical act, as is the calling of a tax-gatherer. The calling

of the twelve is a more complicated matter.

In searching for the roots of a pre-Christian Jesus-cult in Palestine,

we have noted the probability that it centred in a rite of twelve

participants, with the "Anointed One," the representative of the God,

and anciently the actual victim, as celebrating priest. The Anointed

One is "the Christ"; and the Christ, on the hypothesis, is Jesus Son

of the Father. The twelve, as in the case of the early Jesus-cult

at Ephesus, form as it were "the Church." A body of twelve, then,

who might term themselves "Brethren of the Lord," may well have been

one of the starting-points of Jewish Jesuism.

But the first two synoptics, clearly, started with a group of only

four disciples, to which a fifth was added; and in John (i, 35-49)

the five are made up at once, in a still more supernatural manner

than in the synoptics, two being taken from the following of John

the Baptist. Then, still more abruptly than in the synoptics, we have

the completion (vi, 70):--"Did not I choose you the twelve, and one

of you is a devil?" It would be idle to say merely that the twelve

are suddenly imposed on the narrative, leaving a biographical five:

the five are just as evidently given unhistorically, for some special

reason, mythical or other.

Now, though fives and fours and threes are all quasi-sacred

numbers in the Old Testament, it is noteworthy that in one of the

Talmudic allusions to Jesus Ben-Stada he is declared to have had five

disciples--Matthai, Nakai or Neqai, Nezer or Netzer, Boni or Buni, and

also Thoda, all of whom are ostensibly though not explicitly described

as having been put to death. [281] As this passage points to the Jesus

who is otherwise indicated as post-Christian, it cannot critically

be taken as other than a reference to a current Christian list of

five, though it may conceivably have been a miscarrying reference

to the Jesus of the reign of Alexander Jannæus. In any case, it is

aimed at a set of five; and there is never any Talmudic mention of a

twelve. If, then, the Talmudic passage was framed by way of a stroke

against the Christians it must have been made at a time when the list

of twelve had not been imposed on the gospels. Further, it is to be

noted that it provides for a Matthew, and perhaps for a "Mark," the

name "Nakai" being put next to Matthew's; while in Boni and Netzer

we have ostensible founders for the Ebionites and Nazaræans. Finally,

Thoda looks like the native form of Thaddæus; though it might perhaps

stand for the Theudas of Acts v, 36. Seeing how names are juggled with

in the official list and in the MS. variants ("Lebbæus whose surname

was Thaddæus" stood in the Authorised Version, on the strength of

the Codex Bezae), it cannot be argued that the Gemara list is not

possibly an early form or basis of that in the synoptics; though on

the other hand the names Boni and Netzer suggest a mythopoeic origin

for Ebionites and Nazarenes. Leaving this issue aside as part of the

unsolved problem of the Talmudic Jesus, we are again driven to note

the unhistoric apparition of the twelve.

Following the documents, we find the later traces equally

unveridical. Matthew is introduced in the Acts as being chosen to

make up the number of the twelve, on the death of Judas; but never

again is such a process mentioned; and Matthew plays no part in

the further narrative. And of course the cult was interdicted from

further maintenance of the number as soon as it was settled that

the twelve were to sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes

of Israel, which had apparently been done in an early Judaic form

of the Apocalypse before it was intimated in the gospels. Even in

the Epistles, however, there is no real trace of an active group

of twelve. The number is mentioned only in a passage (1 Cor. xv,

5) where there is interpolation upon interpolation, for after

the statement that the risen Jesus appeared "then to the twelve"

there shortly follows "then to all the apostles," that is, on the

traditionist assumption, to the twelve again--the exclusion of Judas

not being recognized. The first-cited clause could be interpolated in

order to insert the number; the second could not have been inserted

if the other were already there.

That is the sole allusion. We find none where we might above all

expect it, in the pseudo-biographical epistle to the Galatians,

though there is mention in the opening chapter of "them which were

apostles before me," "the apostles," "James the brother of the Lord"

(never mentioned as an apostle in the gospels unless he be James the

son of Alphæus or James the son of Zebedee: that is, not a brother

of Jesus but simply a group-brother), and "James and Cephas and John,

who were [or are] reputed to be pillars." The language used in verse 6

excludes the notion that the writer believed "the apostles" to have had

personal intercourse with the Founder. Thus even in a pseudepigraphic

work, composed after Paul's time, there is no suggestion that he had

to deal with the twelve posited by the gospels and the Acts. And

all the while "apostles" without number continue to figure in the

documents. They were in fact a numerous class in the early Church. It

is not surprising that the late Professor Cheyne not only rejected

the story of the Betrayal but declared that "The 'Twelve Apostles,'

too, are to me as unhistorical as the seventy disciples." [282]

On the other hand, we have a decisive reason for the invention of the

Twelve story in the latterly recovered Teaching of the Twelve Apostles

[283] (commonly cited as the Didachê), a document long current in the

early church. Of that book, the first six chapters, forming nearly

half of the matter, are purely ethical and monotheistic, developing

the old formula of the "Two Ways" of life and death; and saying nothing

of Jesus or Christ or the Son, or of baptism or sacrament. Then comes

a palpably late interpolation, giving a formula for baptism in the

name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Even in the ninth

section, dealing with the Eucharist, we have only "the holy vine of

David thy Servant, which thou hast made known to us through Jesus thy

Servant." [284] The tenth, which is evidently later, and is written as

a conclusion, retains that formula. After that come warnings against

false apostles and prophets; and only in the twelfth section does the

word "Christian" occur. Still later there is specified "the Lord's-day

(kyriakên) of the Lord." Then comes a prescription for the election

of bishops; and the document ends with a chapter preparing for the

expected "last days."

Here then we have an originally Jewish document, bearing the title

Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, adopted and gradually added to

by early Jesuists who did not deify Jesus, though like the early

Christians in general they expected the speedy end of the world. Though

their Jesus is not deified, he has no cognomen. He is neither "of

Nazareth," nor "the Nazarite;" and he is an ostensibly mythical figure,

not a teacher but a rite-founder, for his adherents. They do not belong

to an organized Church; and the baptismal section, with its Trinitarian

formula, is quite certainly one of the latest of all. The eighth,

which connects quite naturally with the sixth, and which contains

the "Lord's Prayer," raises the question whether it belonged to the

pre-Christian document, and has been merely interpolated with the

phrase as to "the Lord ... his gospel." There are strong reasons for

regarding the Lord's Prayer as a pre-Christian Jewish composition,

[285] founded on very ancient Semitic prayers. Seeing that "the Lord"

has in all the previous sections of the treatise clearly meant "God"

and not "Christ," the passage about the gospel is probably Jesuist;

but it does not at all follow that the Prayer is.

Mr. Cassels, in the section on the Teaching added by him in the

one-volume reprint of his great work, points [286] to the fact that in

the recovered fragment of a Latin translation of an early version of

"The Two Ways," there do not occur the passages connecting with the

Sermon on the Mount which are found in the Teaching; and as the same

holds of the Two Ways section of the Epistle of Barnabas, it may fairly

be argued that it was a Christian hand that added them here. But when

we note that at the points at which the passages in the Teaching vary

from the gospel--as "Gentiles" for "tax-gatherers," [287]--the term in

the former is perfectly natural for Jewish teachers addressing Jews

in Gentile countries, and that in the latter rather strained in an

exhortation to Jews in their own country, it becomes very conceivable

that this is the original, or a prior form, of the gospel passage. The

Sermon on the Mount is certainly a compilation. This then may have

been one of the sources. And it is quite conceivable that the Jewish

Apostles should teach their people not to pray "as do the hypocrites,"

an expression which Mr. Cassels takes to be directed by Jesuists

against Jews in general.

Seeing that even conservative critics have admitted the probable

priority of the Teaching to Barnabas, it is no straining of the

probabilities to suggest that the Two Ways section of Barnabas is

either a variant, inspired by the Teaching, on what was clearly

a very popular line of homily, [288] or an annexation of another

Jewish homily of that kind. That in the Teaching is distinctly the

better piece of work, as we should expect the official manual of

the Apostles of the High Priest to be. It is inexact to say, as does

Dr. M. R. James, [289] that the section "reappears" in Barnabas. There

are many differences, as well as many identities. The other is not a

mere copy, but an exercise on the same standard theme, with "light

and darkness" for the stronger "life and death." It is a mistake

to suppose that there was a definite "original" of "The Two Ways":

it is a standing ethical theme, evidently handled by many. [290] If,

then, the Teaching preceded Barnabas, it may already have contained,

in its purely Jewish form, the Lord's Prayer, which is so thoroughly

Jewish, and items of the Sermon on the Mount, which is certainly a

Jewish compilation. And the justified critical presumption is that

it did contain them. The onus of disproof lies on the Christian side.

We now reach our solution. The original document was in any case a

manual of teaching used among the scattered Jews and proselytes of the

Dispersion by the actual and historical Twelve Apostles either of the

High Priest before or of the Patriarch after the fall of Jerusalem. The

historic existence of that body before and after the catastrophe

is undisputed; [291] and the nature of its teaching functions can

be confidently inferred from the known currency of a Judaic ethical

teaching in the early Christian period. The demonstration of that is

supplied by an expert of the biographical school who considers the

Teaching to have been "known to Jesus and the Baptist." [292] Such a

document cannot rationally be supposed to be a compilation made by or

for Christists using the gospels: such a compilation would have given

the gospel view of Jesus. [293] The primary Teaching, including as it

probably does the Lord's Prayer, is the earlier thing: the gospels

use it. It is in fact one of the first documents of "Christianity,"

if not the first. And its titular "twelve apostles" are Jewish and

not Christian.

Given, then, such a document in the hands of the early Jesuist

organization--or one of the organizations--twelve apostles had to be

provided in the legend to take the credit for the Teaching. [294]

The new cult, once it was shaped to the end of superseding the

old, had to provide itself to that extent, by myth, with the same

machinery. No step in the myth-theory is better established than this;

and no non-miraculous item in the legend is more recalcitrant than

the twelve story to the assumptions of the biographical school. The

gospel list of the twelve is one of the most unmanageable things

in the record. In a narrative destitute of detail where detail is

most called for, we get a list of names, most of which count for

nothing in the later history, to give a semblance of actuality to

an invented institution. We have clearly unhistorical detail as to

five, no detail whatever as to further accessions, and then a body

of twelve suddenly constituted. For some of us, the discovery of the

Teaching was a definite point of departure in the progression toward

the myth-theory; and it supplies us with the firmest starting-point

for our theoretic construction of the process by which the organized

Christian Church took shape.

§ 4. The Process of Propaganda

On the view here taken, there was at Jerusalem, at some time in the

first century, a small group of Jesuist "apostles" among whom the chief

may have been named James, John, and Cephas. They may have been members

of a ritual group of twelve, who may have styled themselves Brothers

of the Lord; but that group in no way answered to the Twelve of the

gospels. Of the apostle class the number was indefinite. Besides the

apostles, further, there would seem to have been an indefinite number

of "prophets," indicative of a cult of somewhat long standing. The

adherents believed in a non-historic Jesus, the "Servant" of the

Jewish God, somehow evolved out of the remote Jesus-God who is reduced

to human status in the Old Testament as Joshua. And their central

secret rite consisted in a symbolic sacrament, evolved out of an

ancient sacrament of human sacrifice, in which the victim had been

the representative of the God, sacrificed to the God, in the fashion

of a hundred primitive cults. This rite had within living memory,

if not still at the time from which we start, been accompanied by an

annual popular rite in which a selected person--probably a criminal

released for the purpose--was treated as a temporary king, then

derided, and then either in mock show or in actual fact executed,

under the name of Jesus Barabbas, "the Son of the Father."

Of this ancient cult there were inferribly many scattered centres

outside of Judea, including probably some in Samaria, the special

region of the celebration of the Hero-God Joshua. There was one such

group in Ephesus; and probably another at Alexandria, and another at

Antioch; Jews of the Dispersion having possibly taken the cult with

them. But the cult outside Jewry may have had non-Jewish roots, though

it merged with Jewish elements. So long as the Temple at Jerusalem

lasted, the small cult counted for very little; and it was probably

after the fall of Jerusalem [295] that its leaders added to their

machinery the rite of baptism, which the synoptic gospels treat as a

specialty of the movement of John the Baptist. Him they represent as a

"forerunner" of the Christ, who under divine inspiration recognizes the

Messianic claims of Jesus. All this is plainly unhistorical, even on

the assumption of the historicity of Jesus. [296] Whatever may be the

historic facts as to John the Baptist, who is a very dubious figure,

[297] the marked divergence between the synoptics and the fourth gospel

on the subject of baptism [298] show that that rite was not originally

Jesuist, but was adopted by the Jesuists as a means of popular appeal.

The recognition of this fact is a test of the critical good faith

of those who profess to found on the synoptics for a history of

the beginnings of the Jesuist cult. Canon Robinson [299] treats as

unquestionably historical one of the contradictory statements in John

iv, 1-2, of which the first affirms that Jesus baptized abundantly,

while the second, an evidently interpolated parenthesis, asserts that

only the disciples baptized, not Jesus. Though this interpolation

hinges on the first dictum, the Canon accepts it to the exclusion

of that, its basis. But the original writer could not have put the

proposition thus had he believed it. What he affirmed was abundant

baptizing by Jesus. Of this, however, the synoptics have no more hint

than they have of baptizing by the disciples. On any possible view

of the composition of the synoptics, it is inconceivable that they

should omit all mention of baptizing by Jesus or the disciples if such

a practice was affirmed in the early tradition. For them baptism is

the institution of the Forerunner, who is mythically represented as

hailing in Jesus his successor or supersessor, with no suggestion of

a continuance of the rite. If there is to be any critical consistency

in the biographical argument, it must at least recognize that baptism

is non-Jesuine.

The embodiment of the rite of baptism on the basis of the Baptist's

alleged acclamation of Jesus as the Messiah, either carried with it

or followed upon the claim that Jesus, hitherto regarded as a simple

Saviour-God, was a Messiah. After the fall of Jerusalem, the old

dream of an earthly Messiah who should restore the Kingdom of Judah

or Israel [300] was shattered for the vast majority of Jews. Even in

the Assumption of Moses, in the main the work of a Quietist Pharisee,

written in Hebrew probably between 7 and 29 of the first century,

[301] there is a virtual abandonment of Messianism, the task of

overthrowing the Gentiles being assigned to "the Most High." [302]

In the composite Apocalypse of Baruch, written in Hebrew, mainly by

Pharisaic Jews, in the latter half of the first century, probably as an

implicit polemic against early Jesuism, [303] we see the effect of the

catastrophe. In the sections written before the fall of Jerusalem,

the hope of a Messianic Kingdom is proclaimed; in those written

later there is either at most a hope of a Messianic Kingdom without

a Messiah or a complete abandonment of mundane expectations. [304]

What the Jesuist movement did was to develop, outside of Jewry, [305]

the earlier notion of a Messiah "concealed," pre-appointed, and coming

from heaven to effect the consummation of all things earthly. [306]

Such Messianism may have either preceded or proceeded-on an adoption

of the rite of baptism. Given a resort to Messianism by the Jesuists

after the fall of Jerusalem, the alleged testimony of the Baptist to

Jesus as the Appointed One might be the first step; and the resort

to the baptismal rite would follow on the myth that Jesus had been

actually baptized by John. In Acts, i, 5, Jesus is in effect made

to represent John's baptism with water as superseded by a baptism

in the Holy Ghost. [307] In the Pauline epistles we have trace of a

conflict over this as over other Judaic practices, Paul being made

to declare (1 Cor. i, 17) that "Christ sent me not to baptize but

to preach the gospel," though he admits having baptized a few. [308]

All that is clear is that the Jesuists were not primarily baptizers;

that they began to baptize "in the name of Jesus Christ," [309] with

a formula of the Holy Ghost and fire, but really in the traditional

manner with water; and that long afterwards they feigned that the

Founder had prescribed baptism with a trinitarian formula. [310]

Thus far, the local movement was not only Jewish but Judaic. It may

or may not have been before the fall of Jerusalem that a Jesuist

"apostle" named Paul conceived the idea of creating by propaganda a

new Judæo-Jesuist movement appealing to Gentiles. Such an idea is not

the invention of Paul or any other Jesuist; the idea of a Messianic

Kingdom in which the Gentiles should be saved is found in the Jewish

Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, written in Hebrew by a Pharisee

between the years 109 and 106 B.C. [311] But, thus made current,

it might well be adopted by Jesuists. The reason for supposing this

to have begun before the year 70 is not merely the tradition to that

effect but the fact that in none of the epistles do we have any trace

of that "gospel of the Kingdom" which in the synoptics is posited

as the evangel of Jesus. That evangel, which is a simple duplication

of the alleged evangel of the Baptist, and which we have seen to be

wholly mythical, being devoid of possible historic content, [312]

is part of the apparatus of the retrospective Messianic claim. But

the Pauline Epistles, even as they show no knowledge of the name

Nazareth, or Nazaræan, or Nazarene, or of any gospel teaching, also

show no concern over a "gospel of the Kingdom." Whether or not, then,

they are wholly pseudepigraphic, they suggest that a Paulinism of

some kind was an early feature in the Jesuist evolution.

According to the Acts, Paul's name was originally Saul, though no such

avowal is ever made in the epistles. The purpose of the statement

seems to be to strengthen the case as to his Jewish nationality,

which is affirmed in the epistles, as is the item that he had been a

murderous persecutor of the early Jesuists. All this suggests a late

manipulation of the traditions of an early strife. To claim that the

Gentilizing apostle had been a Jew born and bred would be as natural

on the Gentilizing side as to allege that the typically Judaic Peter

had denied his Lord; while the charge of persecuting the infant church

would be a not less natural invention of the Judaic Christians who

accepted the tradition that Paul had been a Pharisee and a pupil of

Gamaliel. In point of fact we find the Ebionites, the typical Judaic

Jesuists, knowing him simply as "Paul of Tarsus" in their version of

the Acts or in a previous document upon which that founded. [313]

And many Jewish scholars have declared that they cannot conceive

the Pauline epistles to have been written by a Rabbinically trained

Jew. [314] This does not preclude the possibility that the original

Paul, of whose "few very short epistles" personally penned [315]

we have probably nothing left that is identifiable, [316] may have

been such a Jew, but the presumption is to the contrary.

On the face of the case, nothing was more natural than that the Jesuist

movement should appeal to civilized Gentiles. Judaism itself did so,

striving much after proselytes. The question was whether the Jesuist

proselytes should be made on a strictly Judaic basis. Now, even if

the fall of Jerusalem had not given the impetus to a severance of the

cult from the dominating religion, the sacred domicile being gone, it

is obvious that an abandonment of such a Jewish bar as circumcision

would give the developing cult a great advantage over the other

in propaganda among Gentiles. Circumcision must have been a highly

repellent detail for Hellenistic Gentiles in general; and a gospel

which dispensed with it would have a new chance of making headway. And

such a severance certainly took place, though we can put no reliance

on the chronology of the Acts. [317] Paul [318] remains a doubtfully

dated figure, because the chronology of the whole cult is problematic.

But we can broadly distinguish between a "Petrine" and a "Pauline"

Christism. In the Acts (ii, 22-40), which clearly embodies earlier

lore, prior to that of the gospels, the Jesus Christ preached by Peter

is not represented as a saving sacrifice. As little is he a Teacher,

though he is a doer of "mighty works and wonders and signs." If

we were to apply the biographical method, the presentment might be

held to indicate the Talmudic Jesus. Only after his resurrection "God

hath made him both Lord and Christ"--that is, Messiah; and the Jewish

hearers are invited to "repent" and be "baptized ... in the name of

Jesus Christ unto the remission of your sins." Peter's Jesus, like him

of the Teaching, is the "Servant" of God, not his Son. And there is

no mention of a sacrament, though there is noted a "breaking of bread

at home" (42, 46) recalling the "broken" (bread) of the Didachê. The

sacrament, then, was apparently a secret rite for the Jewish group.

The speeches, of course, are quite unhistorical: we can but take them

as embodying a traditional "Petrine" teaching with later matter. Thus

we have baptism figuring as a Jesuist rite, whereas in the synoptics,

as we have seen, there had been no such thing. The story of Peter

being brought to the pro-Gentile view is pure ecclesiastical myth,

probably posterior to the Pauline epistles, which are ignored but

counteracted in so far as they posit strife between Pauline and

Petrine propaganda. Peter and Paul alike are made to teach that

"it behoved the Christ to suffer" (iii, 18; xvii, 3), even as they

duplicate their miracles, their escapes, and their sufferings. But

while Peter is pretended to have accepted Gentilism, it is Paul

who acts on the principle; and he it is who is first represented as

fighting pagan polytheism, notably at Ephesus (xix, 26). At Athens,

in a plainly fictitious speech, he is made to expound the "unknown

God" of an Athenian agnostic cult in terms of Jewish opposition

to image-worship, indicating Jesus merely as "a man" raised by God

from the dead to judge the world at the judgment day. It is after

this episode that he is made to tell the Jews of Corinth he will

"henceforth go unto the Gentiles." Nevertheless he is made to go on

preaching to the Jews. The narrative as a whole is plainly factitious:

all we can hope to do is to detect some of its historic data.

Two things must be kept clearly and constantly in view: first, that

what we understand by a literary and a historical conscience simply

did not exist in the early Christian environment; second, that in

all probability the Acts, which to start with would be a blend of

tradition and fiction, is much manipulated during a long period. We

are not entitled to assume that an "original" writer duplicated

the careers of Peter and Paul for purposes of edification. One or

more may have wrought one narrative, and a later hand or hands may

have systematically interpolated the other. [319] We are to remember

further that it was an age in which most Christians, assimilating the

eschatology of the Persians and the Jews--the spontaneous dream of

crushed peoples--expected the speedy end of the world, and did their

thinking on that basis. In such a state of mind, critical thought

could not exist save as a small element in religious polemic.

Let us then see what we reach on the hypothesis that early Jesuism even

in the first century, and possibly even before the fall of Jerusalem,

was running in two different channels--one movement adhering to

Jewish usage, making Jesus the Servant of God, and conceiving him as a

God-gifted Healer whose death raised him to the status of the Messiah,

the promised Christ or Anointed One who should either close the earthly

scene or bring about a new God-ruled era for the Jews. For the holders

of this view, the Kingdom of God was coming. Jesus was ere long to

come in the clouds in great glory and inaugurate the new life. To

ask for clear conceptions on such a matter from such minds would

be idle. There were none. The one idea connected with the mythical

evangel was that Jews should repent and prepare for the new life. To

that elusive minimum the latest biographical analysis, assuming the

historicity, reduces the "ministry" of the gospel Jesus. [320] The rest

is all post-apostolic accretion. On the other hand, the Petrine Jesus

has proved his mission for his devotees, first and last, by miracles,

and by his resurrection--things which the biographical school rejects

as imaginary.

Upon this movement there enters an innovator, Paul of Tarsus. Round

him, as round Peter, there are clouds of myth. That he was

originally Saul, a Pharisee, a pupil of Gamaliel; that he began as

a bitter persecutor of the Jesuists; and that he was converted by

a supernatural vision, become common data for the church. That the

charge of persecution was a Judaic figment, on the other hand, is

perhaps as likely as that the story of Peter's denial of his Master

was a Gentile figment. We are in a world of purposive fiction. But the

broad divergence of doctrine seems to underlie all the fables. Saul,

on the later view, changes his Jewish name to the Grecian Paul when

he plans to make the Jesus-cult non-Jewish, using the tactic of

monotheism against pagan polytheism in general, in the very act of

adding a Son-God to the Jewish Father-God, as so many Son-Gods had

been added to Father-Gods throughout religious history. To the early

Jewish Jesuists, the notion of the Son had been given by the old cult

of sacrifice, with its Jesus the Son--an idea obscurely but certainly

present, as we have seen, in the lore of the Talmudists.

Clearly it was the Pauline movement that made of Christism a "viable"

world religion. As an unorganized Saviour-cult it would have died

out like others. As a phase of Judaism, it could have had no Jewish

permanence, simply because its Messianism was a matter of looking

daily for an "end of the world" that did not come. After two centuries

of waiting, the Jews would have had as clear a right to pronounce

Jesus a "false Messiah" as they had in the case of Barcochab or

any other before or since. The mere belief in a future life, at one

time excluded from their Sacred Books, had become the common faith,

only the aristocratic Sadducees (probably not all of them) rejecting

it. On that side, Jesuism gave them nothing. Well might Paul "turn

to the Gentiles"--albeit not under the circumstances theologically

imagined for him in the book of Acts.

Even for the Gentiles, Jesuism was but one of many competing cults,

offering similar attractions. In the religions of Adonis, Attis,

Isis and Osiris, Dionysos, Mithra, and the Syrian Marnas ("the Lord,

a variant of Adonis = Adonai, one of the Jews' exoteric names for

Yahweh"), a resplendent ever-youthful God who had died to rise again

was sacramentally adored, mourned for, and rejoiced over, by devotees

just as absorbed in their faith as were the Jesuists. With vague

pretences of biographical knowledge, to which nobody now attaches any

credence, they were as sure of the historicity of their Vegetation-Gods

and Sun-Gods as the Christists were of the actuality of theirs. Had

a Frazer of the second century told them that their Adonis and Attis

were but abstractions of the annual sacrificial victim of old time,

they would have told him, in the manner of Festus (not yet obsolete),

that much learning had made him mad. They "knew" that their Redeemer

had lived, died, and risen again. The unbelief of philosophers,

or of scoffers like Lucian, affected them no more than scientific

and critical unbelief to-day disturbs the majority of unthinking

Christians. The busy sacrificial and devotional life of Hierapolis

would be as little affected by Lucian's tranquil exhibition of it as

the life at Lourdes has been by Zola's novel. On that side, we can

very easily understand the past by the present.

So little psychic or intellectual difference was there between

Jesuism and the other "isms" that Paul's propaganda made no measurable

sensation in the colluvies of the Roman empire. As Renan avows, even on

the assumption of the genuineness of the Epistles, he was the missioner

of a number of small conventicles, all convinced that they alone were

the "true Church of God upon earth." It is an error of perspective to

ascribe extraordinary faculty to the missionary who either converted or

"stablished" such believers; and it is plainly unnecessary to assume

in his case any abnormal sincerity or persuasiveness. If we were to

estimate him in terms of the records we should describe him either

as a halluciné or as a fanatic who had shed Christian blood in his

Judaic stage and never in the least learned humility on that score,

his phrases of contrition being balanced by the fiercest asperities

towards all who withstood him in his Christian stage. But we have no

right to draw a portrait of "Paul," who is left to us a composite

of literary figments testifying only to the previous activity of a

propagandist so-named.

One conclusion, however, holds alike whether or not we accept any of

the epistles as genuine: or rather, the more we lean on the epistles

the more it holds: Paul had no concern about the life, teachings, or

"personality" of his Jesus. [321] His Jesus, be it said once more,

is a speechless abstraction. One of the strangest fallacies in the

procedure of the biographical school is the assumption that the

acceptance of the epistles as genuine involves the admission of the

historicity of the Founder. In actual fact, it was a belief in the

substantial genuineness of the main epistles that first strengthened

the present writer in his first surmises of the non-historicity of the

entire gospel record; just as a perception of the historical situation

broadly set forth in Judges confirms doubt as to the historicity of the

record of the Hexateuch. The two will not consist. On the other hand,

Van Manen, who had previously been troubled about the historicity of

Jesus, was positively set at rest on that score when he reached the

conclusion that all the Paulines were supposititious. This happened

simply because he had scientifically covered the field only on

the Pauline side: had he applied equivalent tests to the gospels,

he would have reached there too a verdict of fabrication. There is

strictly no absolute sequitur in such a case. The myth-theory is

neither made nor marred by the rejection of the Paulines.

Even those who cannot realize the indifference of "Paul" to all

personal records of his Jesus--or, recognizing it, are content to

explain it away by formulas--must see on consideration that belief in

a Saviour God no more needed biographical basis in the case of Paul

than in the case of the priests of Mithra, who, it may be noted, had a

strong centre at Tarsus. [322] There is a certain plausibility in the

argument that only a great personality could have made possible the

belief in the Resurrection story--though that too is fallacy--but there

is no plausibility in inferring that a conception of a personality he

had never personally known was needed to impel Paul to his evangel,

which is simply one of future salvation by divine sacrifice for all

who believe. That is the substitution made by Gentile Christism for

the miscarrying Messianism of the Petrine doctrine. It was probably

the normal doctrine of many pagan cults--Mithraism for one, which

for three hundred years, by common consent, was the outstanding

rival of Christianity in the Roman empire. [323] It was, then, no

specialty of dogma that ultimately determined the success of the one

and the disappearance of the other. It was a concatenation of real or

"external" causes, not a peculiarity of mere belief.

§ 5. Real Determinants

The more we study comparatively the fortunes of the Christian and

the rival cults, the more difficult it is to conceive that it made

headway in virtue of sheer monotheism. If we assume that Judaism

had made its proselytes in the pagan world by reason of the appeal

made by its monotheism to the more thoughtful minds, we are bound

to infer that Christism was on that side rather at a disadvantage,

inasmuch as it was really adding a new deity, with a "Holy Spirit"

superadded, to the God of the Jews.

But the ordinary argument as to the vogue of "pure monotheism" at any

time is in the main a series of traditional assumptions. For the more

thoughtful of the ancients, polytheism was always tending to pass into

monotheism. We see the process going on in the Vedas, in Brahmanism,

in the Egyptian system, in the Babylonian--to say nothing of the

Greek. [324] It proceeded partly by way of henotheism--the tendency

to exalt any particular deity as the deity: partly by way of the

compelled surmise that all the deities of the popular creeds were but

aspects or names of one all-controlling Power. Wherever creeds met,

the more thoughtful were driven to ask themselves whether the heavens

could be a mere reflex of the earth, with every nation represented

by its special God; and to fuse the national Gods into one was but a

step to fusing the Gods of the various natural forces into one. Since

religions became organized, there must always have been monotheists,

as there must always have been unbelievers.

Nevertheless, polytheism is just as surely popular as monotheism

is inevitable to the more thoughtful who remain "religious" in the

natural sense of the term. One of the great delusions maintained by the

acceptance of the falsified history of Judaism and the conventional

religion of the Bible is the notion that the Jews were a specially

monotheistic people. They were not. [325] They were originally

tribalists like their neighbours, holding by a tribal God and a

hierarchy of inferior Gods. To this day we are seriously told that

Abraham made a new departure as a monotheist. Abraham is a mythical

patriarch, himself once a deity; and the deity represented to have been

believed in by Abraham is a tribal God. And not even the tribal God

was monotheistically worshipped. The Sacred Books are one long chain

of complaints against the Israelites for their perpetual resort to

"strange Gods"--and Goddesses. [326]

Two brilliant French scholars have advanced the thesis that this

alleged polytheism is imaginary; [327] and that the Israelites in

the mass always worshipped only the One God Yahweh. [328] But this

position, which is grounded on the inference that the mass of the

historical and prophetic literature is post-exilic, outgoes its own

grounds. Even if we assume, with the theorists, that Jewish monotheism

was universalist from the moment it took shape as monotheism in

literature, [329] we get rid neither of the question of pre-exilic

polytheism nor of that of popular survival. To say that the post-exilic

Jews are "the only Jews known to history," and that the apparently old

lore in Genesis is "perhaps really the most modern," being invented

for purposes of parable, is only a screening of the fact that the

Hebrews evolved religiously like other peoples. A resort to alien

Gods is seen to be universal in the religious history of the ancient

world. Every conquered race was suspected to have secret power in

respect of "the God of the land [330]"; and wherever races mixed,

cults mixed. It is only on a provision of special Sacred Books,

themselves treated as fetishes, that the attractions of alien cults

can be repelled; and not even Sacred Books can make real monotheists

of an uncultured majority. Even later Judaism, with its angels, its

Metatron, its Satan, was never truly monotheistic. [331] Islam is

not. The universalism which in later Judaism still commonly passes

for a specialty of the Hebrew mind was really an assimilation and

development of Perso-Babylonian ideas; [332] and Satan made a dualism

of the Jewish creed even as Ahriman did of the Persian.

In the Romanized world, Judaism had never a really great success of

proselytism, just because the more cultured had their own monotheism,

and had in Greek literature something more satisfactory than the

Hebraic, with its barbaric basis of racialism and its apparatus of

circumcision, synagogues and Sabbaths. The proselytes were made in

general among the less cultured--not the populace, but the serious

men of religious predilections, who were the more impressed by the

Sacred Books as rendered in the Septuagint because they were not at

home in the higher literature of Greece. And if Judaism could not

sweep the Roman empire in virtue of monotheism, Christism could not,

especially while it lacked sacred books of its own.

Professor Smith's thesis of a rapid monotheistic triumph is partly

founded on his own vivid interpretation of many of the gospel stories

of cast-out demons and diseases as a symbolism for successes against

polytheism. And his symbolistic interpretation, which is at first sight

apt to seem arbitrary, is really important at many points, accounting

as it does convincingly for a number of gospel stories. But if we

are to assume that all the gospel stories of casting out devils,

curing lepers, healing the lame, and giving sight to the blind,

were composed with a symbolic intent, we shall still be left asking

on what grounds the Name of Jesus made any popular appeal before and

after the symbolizing gospels were compiled.

Professor Smith draws a powerful picture of the relief given by

monotheism to polytheists. In his eloquent words, the "tyranny of

demons" had "trodden down humanity in dust and mire since the first

syllable of recorded time"; and the new proclamation "roused a world,

dissolved the fetters of the tyrannizing demons, set free the prisoners

of superstition, poured light upon the eyes of the blind, and called

a universe to life." [333] But let us be clear as to the facts. If

by "demons" we understand the Gods of the heathen, there was really

no more "bondage" under polytheism than under monotheism. Spiritual

bondage can be and is set up by the fear of One God who is supposed

to meddle actively with all life; [334] and the Jewish law was in

itself notoriously an intellectual and social bondage. It is expressly

represented as such in the Pauline epistles. If again we have regard

to the fear of "evil spirits," there was really no difference between

Jew and Gentile, for the "superstition" of the Jew in those matters

was unbounded. [335] Nor is there any ground for thinking that the

Jew had more confidence than other people in divine protection from

the spirits of evil.

In what respect, then, are we to suppose Jesuist monotheism to

have been an innovation? The argument seems to require that Jesuism

delivered the polytheist from belief in the existence either of his

daimon Gods or of his evil spirits. But obviously it negated neither

of these. Daimons of all sorts are constantly presupposed in Jesuist

polemic. The "freedom in Christ" proffered to Jews and Gentiles by

the Pauline evangel is, in the terms of the case, not a freedom from

the terrors of polytheism as such. It was certainly not regarded as

a freedom, from "demons," for exorcism against demons was a standing

function in the early church for centuries; and the fear of a demon

or demons is implicit in the "Lord's Prayer." What is proffered is

primarily a freedom from the Jewish ceremonial law, and secondarily

a freedom from fear in respect of the judgment-day and the future

life, the divine sacrifice having taken away all sin. We are told by

eloquent missionaries in our own day [336] that the Christian doctrine

gives a new sense of freedom and security to negroes, in particular to

the women; though we also learn on the other hand that where the two

religions can compete freely Islam makes the stronger claim in respect

of its exclusion of the race bar which Christianity always sets up

in the rear of its evangel. But here, if the fear of evil spirits is

really cast out, it is by a modern doctrine of their non-existence,

not found in the New Testament, but generated by modern science.

Whatever preaching of monotheism, then, entered into early Jesuism,

it gave no deliverance from belief in evil spirits: rather it added

to their number by turning good daimons into bad. What is more,

there enters into Christian polemic at a fairly early stage a use

of the terms "God" and "Gods" for the "saints" which is on all fours

with the common language of Paganism; [337] and this is a much more

common note than the "high" monotheism of the Apology of Aristides,

which has hardly any Christian characteristics. His monotheism is

rather Pagan than Christian. The broad fact remains that so far as

we can know the early Jesuist polemic from the gospels, the Acts,

the Epistles, the Apocalypse, or the patristic literature, it was

not a wide and successful assault on polytheism as such by an appeal

to monotheistic instinct, but just a proffer to Jews and Gentiles of

a kind of creed common enough in the pagan world, its inconsistent

monotheism appealing only to a minority of the recipients. [338] The

very miracle-stories which Professor Smith interprets as allegories of

monotheistic propaganda became part of the popular appeal as soon as

they were made current in documents; and they appealed (he will admit)

as miracle-stories, not as allegories. Peter and Paul in their turn

are represented as working miracles of healing. It was all finally

part of the appeal to primary religious credulity.

Of two positions, then, we must choose one. Either the miracle-stories

of the gospels, and by consequence those of the Acts, were as such

otiose inventions for an audience which, on the view under discussion,

would have been much more responsive to an explicit claim of triumph

over polytheistic beliefs, the thing they are said to have been most

deeply concerned about, or the miracle stories in general were meant

as miracle-stories, only some later symbolists seeking to impose a

symbolic sense on the records along with the Gnostic conception that

the Christ had spoken in allegories which the people were not meant to

understand. This later manipulation undoubtedly did take place. The

parable of the Rich One, as Professor Smith convincingly shows, is

an allegory of Jew and Gentile--the Rich One being Israel. But it is

not by such manipulation that cults are made popular, congregations

collected, and revenue secured. And it was on these practical lines

that Christianity was "stablished."

The factors which made this one Eastern cult gradually gain ground,

and finally hold its ground, as against the many rival cults, were--

1. The system of ecclesiæ, modelled at once on the Jewish synagogue

and the pagan collegia.

2. The practice of mutual help, making the churches Friendly

Societies--again an assimilation of common pagan practice.

3. The colligation of the churches, primarily by means of a new sacred

literature of gospels and epistles, and secondarily by a system of

centralized government, partly modelled on the imperial system.

4. The backing of the new Christian Sacred Books by the Jewish Sacred

Books, giving an ancient Eastern background and basis for the faith

in a world in which Eastern religious elements were progressively

overriding the Western, which had in comparison no documentary basis.

5. The giving to the whole process a relatively democratic character,

again after the model of the Jewish system, wherein the people had

their main recognition as human beings with rights. Thus Christianity

was at once a "secret society" under an autocracy, as were so many

Hellenistic religious groups, drawing members as such societies always

do in autocratically governed States, [339] and a popular movement as

contrasted with Mithraism, which always remained a mere secret society,

whence its easy ultimate suppression by the Christianized government.

6. It was the wide ramification and popular importance of the Christian

system that at length made it worth the while of the emperor to cease

persecuting it as a partly anti-imperial organization and to turn it

into an imperial instrument by making it the religion of the State.

To explain the process as the morally deserved success of a religion

superior from the start, in virtue of the superiority of its nominal

Founder, would be to adhere to pre-scientific conceptions of causation,

akin to the geocentric assumption in astronomy. Hierology ultimately

merges in sociology, as mythology and anthropology (in the English

limitation of the term) merge in hierology; and sociology is a study of

the reaction of environments as well as of the action of institutions

and doctrines. The Christian success was finally achieved by the

assimilation of all manner of pagan modes of attraction on the side

of creed, and the absolute ultimate subordination of the specialties

of early Christian ethic to the business of political adaptation.

And to all attempts to obscure the problem by figuring Christianity as

a continuously beneficent and purifying force it is sufficient here to

answer that it is in strict fact a religious variant which survived in

a decaying civilization, a politically and socially decaying world;

that it lent itself to that decay; and that it did less than nothing

to avert it.

Where superior hostile power efficiently fought it, it was suppressed

just as it suppressed the organized cults of paganism and some

(not all) of its own heretical sects. Its further survival, which

does not here properly concern us, was but a matter of the renewed

"triumph" of an organized over unorganized religions, and of the

adoption of that organization by the new barbaric States as before

by the declining Roman empire.