SUPPLEMENTARY MYTH
§ 1. Myths of Healing
It is significant that the later myth-making of the synoptics is partly
by way of reversion to the folk-lore in which the myth had risen,
partly by way of meeting non-Jewish Messianic requirements, partly by
way of Gentilism, partly by way of concessions to the Gnosticism or
occultism whose pretensions in the second century exercised so strong
a pressure on the Church. As Professor Smith points out, the story
in Mark (xiv, 51-52) of the youth who at the betrayal fled naked,
leaving his linen cloth in the hands of the captors, [402] is a
crude provision for the Docetic theory that the real Christ did not
suffer. Cerinthus taught that "at last Christ departed from Jesus,
and that then Jesus suffered and rose again, while Christ remained
impassible, inasmuch as he was a spiritual being." [403]
In this connection there arises for us the problem, stressed by
Professor Smith, as to the significance of the stories of wholesale
healing and casting out of devils. His thesis is that they were an
occult way of conveying the claim that Jesus by preaching monotheism
had cast out in Galilee the diseases and corruptions of polytheism,
pagan deities being "devils" for the Jew. And in view of the repeated
assertion, on Gnostic lines, that Jesus declared his teaching to
be made purposely occult, so as not to be understood by the people,
we cannot deny the possibility that some of the stories of healing
may have been so intended. Professor Smith, as I understand him,
argues [404] that a straightforward claim of wholesale overthrowing
of paganism would have offended the Roman Government; and that the
claim was put by metaphor to avoid that. The difficulty arises that
if the metaphor was not understood by Gentiles it missed its mark with
them; while if they did understand it their susceptibilities would be
particularly wounded by the metaphors of leprosy and blindness and
"devils." And there is the further difficulty that, as Professor
Smith notes, the stories of casting out devils relate solely to
half-heathen Galilee, while, as he also notes, there is no ultimate
trace of Jesuism there. [405] Why then should an allegory of casting
out polytheism have been framed concerning Galilee?
On any view, it can hardly be doubted that the stories of healing
made their popular appeal as simple miracles. Professor Schmiedel's
argument that the claim of Jesus (Mt. xi, 5; Lk. vii, 22) to heal
blindness and lameness and leprosy, and to raise the dead, must be
understood in a spiritual sense, seems to me a complete failure. He
contends that if it be taken literally the final claim that "the
poor have the gospel preached to them" is an anti-climax. But if we
take the miracle-claims to be merely spiritual, the anti-climax is
absolute; for the proposition then runs that the blind, the lame, the
leprous, and the spiritually dead have the gospel preached to them,
and the poor have the gospel preached to them also. On the other hand,
there is no real anti-climax on a literal interpretation. Plainly,
the provision of good tidings for the merely poor, the most numerous
suffering class of all, was the one thing that could be said to be
done for them. It could not be pretended that they had been made
wealthy. Thus a "pillar-text" falls, and we are left committed to the
literal interpretation as against both Professor Smith and Professor
Schmiedel. Both, however, will probably agree that most readers always
took the literal view. [406]
§ 2. Birth-Myths
And it was to the popular credulity that appeal was made by the stories
of the Annunciation, the Virgin Birth, the Adoration by the Magi and
the Shepherds, the stable, the manger, [407] the menace of Herod,
the massacre, and the flight. [408] The question that here arises for
the mythologist is whether the birth-myths had belonged to the early
Jesus-myth at a stage before gospel-making commenced, and had at first
been ignored, only to be embodied later. For suggesting that they had
been connected with the early myth I have been told by Dr. Carpenter
and Dr. Conybeare that I ignored the late acceptance of the Christmas
Birthday by "the Church," after I had expressly noted the late date
of that acceptance. These critics, as usual, miss the whole problem.
Either the birth-stories were old lore in Syria (or elsewhere in the
East) [409] or they were not. If not, their imposition on the gospel
story in the second century represents an assimilation of quite alien
pagan matter, with the assent of the main body of Jewish Nazaræans,
who accepted the opening chapters of the canonical Matthew. Of
such an assent, no explanation can be given from the standpoint
or standpoints of Dr. Conybeare and Dr. Carpenter. It would be a
gratuitous capitulation to Gentilism in a Jewish atmosphere, and
this without any sign on the Pauline side of a Gentile obtrusion of
such matter. [410] But if, on the other hand, we put the hypothesis
that such matter had been connected in Syrian folk-lore with the old
Jesus-myth, we at once find an explanation for the additions to the
gospel-story and a new elucidation of the myth-theory. The spread of
the Jesus cult would bring to the front the primitive myths connected
with it which the reigning Judaic sentiment had at first kept out
of sight as savouring of heathenism; and all Jesus-lore would have
a progressive interest for converts. Judaism, in its redacted sacred
books, admitted of quasi-supernatural births in such cases as those
of Sarah and Hannah; but an absolute virgin birth, a commonplace in
heathen mythology, [411] had there no recognition. Yet the idea was
as likely to survive in folk-lore in Syria as anywhere else; and as
Judaism became more and more a hostile thing, Judaic views would tend
in various ways to be set aside.
The hypothesis put by me is (1) that the certainly unhistorical
Miriam of the Pentateuch is inferribly, like Moses and Joshua,
an ancient deity; and that in old Palestinian myth she was the
mother of Joshua. In the Pentateuch she is degraded, as part of the
Evemeristic process of reducing the ancient popular Gods to human
status. That process, which affects Goddesses as well as Gods in
several ancient religions, [412] was for the Hebrew priesthood a
necessary rule. Polytheism was everywhere, in antiquity, and for
the Yahwists it must be cast out. A late Persian tradition that
Joshua was the son of Miriam [413] accents the query whether there
were no family relationships in the old Palestinian myths. That the
birth in a stable, with a ritual of babe-worship at the winter or
summer solstice, is very ancient both in the East and in the West,
is the conclusion forced on the mythologist by a mass of evidence;
and the location of the stable at Bethlehem in a cave connects the
Christian myth yet further with a number of those of paganism. [414]
If the matter of the myth was ancient for Syria, why should not the
names of the mother and the child be so?
The fashion in which the hypothesis is met by the more impassioned
adherents of the biographical view is instructive. Dr. Conybeare,
who thinks it inconceivable that "a myth" should be mistaken for "a
man"--though that mistake is the gist of masses of mythology--finds no
difficulty in conceiving that a real woman may be turned into a myth
within a century. For him, the gospel "Mary" (Maria or Mariam) must
be a real Jewess because in Mark (vi, 3) the people of Nazareth ask:
"Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James,
and Joses, and Judas, and Simon? and are not his sisters with us?" Any
thoughtful reader, comparing such a suddenly projected passage with
the opening chapters, realizes that it is on a wholly different plane
of ideas; that no one "author" can have posited both; and that the
later is part of a process of localization and debate, in connection
with the thesis that the healer could "do no wonder-work" at home
because of the unbelief of his own people. Furthermore, in Mark xv,
40, we have the group of women which includes "Mary the mother of James
the Little and of Joses," concerning whom we are told that when Jesus
was in Galilee they "followed him, and ministered unto him." How many
Maries, then, were mothers of James and Joses? Evidently the Mary
of the latter passage is not regarded by its writer as the mother
of Jesus. Then the prior passage is the later in order of time,
and alien to the other legends.
Our exegete, nevertheless, is not only at once dogmatically certain
that he has found a real Jesus, son of Mary, but proceeds to assert,
in three separate passages, that in Mark's gospel Jesus is known as
"the son of Joseph and Mary," though Joseph is never mentioned in that
gospel. It is of a piece with his instantaneous invention of a "genuine
tradition" out of a modern hint, perverted. And it is this operator
who, meeting with a list of analogies (so described) which suggest that
"Miriam" and "Mariam" are variants of a Mother-Goddess name generally
current through the East, becomes incoherent in explosive protest,
and begins by informing me that the "original form of the name is
not Maria but Miriam, which does not lend itself to [these] hardy
equations." As Miriam had been expressly named and discussed by me
in the very first instance, the intimation tells only of the mental
disconnection which is the general mark of this writer's procedure.
The question, of course, is not philological at all; and not only
was no philological "equation" ever hinted at, but the very passage
attacked begins with the avowal that it is impossible to prove
historical connections, and that what is in question is analogy of
"name and epithets." Nothing in philology is more speculative than
the explanation of early names. Any one who has noted the discussion
over "Moses," and noted the diverging theories, from the Coptic
"water-rescued" or "water-child" (mo-use) of Josephus and Philo and
Jablonski and Deutsch to the Egyptian "child" (mes or mesu) of Lepsius
and Dillmann, and the inference of an "abbreviation of a theophorous
Egyptian name" drawn by Renan and Guthe, will see that there is
small light to be had from "equations." When "Miriam" is expertly
described as "a distortion either of Merari [misri] or of Amramith,"
[415] the mythologist is moved to seek for other clues. The philology
of Maria and Mariam is a hopeless problem.
Now, if the Moses legend is to be held Egyptian, the Miriam legend
may well be so too; and in the items that the Egyptian princess who
saves the child Moses is in a Jewish legend named Merris, and that
one of the daughters of Ramses II is found to be named Meri, [416] the
analogy is worth noting. But the central mythological fact is that a
Mother-Goddess, a "Madonna" nursing a child, is one of the commonest
objects of ancient worship throughout Asia and North Africa. [417]
When, then, mothers of Gods born in caves, or Dying Demigods, are found
bearing such names as Myrrha and Maia; when Maia is noted to have the
meaning "nurse," and Mylitta that of "the child-bearing one," we are
not only moved to surmise a Mother-Goddess-name of many variants, of
which Miriam-Mariam is one, but to infer a wide diffusion of legends
concerning such a goddess-type. Figures of such a goddess abounded
throughout the East. [418] That is, in brief, the mythological case at
this point. Mary in the gospels, the virgin bearing a divine child,
flying from danger, and bearing her child on a journey, in a cave,
is the analogue of a dozen ancient myths of the Divine Child; the
Menaced Child is common to the myths of Moses and Sargon, Krishna
and Cyrus, Arthur and Herakles; the stable-ritual of the Adoration
is prehistoric in India in connection with Krishna; the "manger"
(a basket) belongs equally to the myths of Zeus, Hermes, Ion and
Dionysos; and the threatening king is a myth-figure found alike in
East and West. [419]
All this is ostensibly "sun-myth." And we are asked by Dr. Conybeare
to believe, on the strength of one late and palpable interpolation in
Mark, which has no other word concerning the childhood, parentage,
or birthplace of Jesus, its Son of God, that his mother Mary was
a well-known figure in Nazareth about the year 30, and that it is
merely she who is made to play the mythic part in Matthew about a
century later. The simple use of common-sense, even by a reader who
has not studied comparative mythology, will reveal the improbability
of such a development; and Dr. Conybeare, who vehemently denies, for
other purposes, that the early Christians in Palestine could have any
knowledge of pagan myths, is the last person who could consistently
affirm it. But when we realize that under the shell of official Judaism
there subsisted in Palestine as everywhere else the folk-lore of the
past; [420] when we remember the "weeping for Tammuz" at Jerusalem
and the location of the birth of Adonis in the very stable-cave of
the Christ-legend at Bethlehem, we can quite rationally conceive how,
once the Jesus-myth was well re-established, old pre-Judaic elements
of it came to the front, and found from the later gospel-compilers
a welcome they could not have had in the Judaizing days. [421]
The Joseph myth, again, is a very obvious construction. In Mark,
which Dr. Conybeare repeatedly and shrilly declares to be the primary
authority, Joseph is never once mentioned, though Dr. Conybeare,
with the eye of imagination, finds that he is. In Matthew, he figures
throughout the birth-story of the opening section, admittedly a late
addition. In Luke, still later, he is still further developed, Mark's
"son of Mary" becoming (iv, 22) "the son of Joseph," in a palpably late
fiction. Any critical method worthy of the name would reckon with such
plain marks of late fabrication. Joseph has been super-imposed on the
myth for a reason; and the reason is that a Messiah "the Son of Joseph"
was demanded from the Samaritan side as a Messiah the Son of David
was demanded (albeit not universally) from the Judaic side. [422] By
naming Jesus' earthly putative father Joseph, in the Davidic descent,
both requirements were met, on lines of traditionalist psychology.
When this solution is met by the Unitarian thesis that the idea
of a Messiah Ben Joseph is late in Judaism, and that it arose out
of the gospel story, we can but appeal to the common-sense of the
reader. [423] For the Rabbis to set up such a formula on such a
motive would be an inconceivable self-stultification. The lateness
of Rabbinical discussion on the subject can be quite reasonably
explained through its Samaritan origination. All the while, the
Joseph story in the gospels belongs precisely to that late legend
which the neo-Unitarian school is bound in consistency to reject as
myth. But the prepossession in favour of a "human Jesus" balks at
no inconsistency, and selects its items not on critical principles
but simply in so far as they can be made to compose with a "human"
figure that is to be conserved at all costs.
The curious myth-motive of the "taxing" [424] at Bethlehem in Luke,
an utterly unhistorical episode, has a remarkable parallel in the
Krishna-myth, [425] which has been cited in support of the thesis
that that myth in general is derived from the Christian story. The
general thesis breaks down completely; [426] and in this one instance
we are obviously entitled to ask whether the Christian myth is not
derived from some intermediate Asiatic source connecting with the
Indian. [427] As a mere invention to motive the birth at Bethlehem
the story seems exceptionally extravagant.
§ 3. Minor Myths
To discuss in similar detail the myths of the Apocryphal gospels
and the still later myths of Catholic Christendom would only be to
extend the area of our demonstration without adding to its scientific
weight. The general result would only be to prove derivations from
pagan sources and to exhibit more fully the process (a) of inventing
sayings of Jesus to vindicate different views of his Messianic
and other functions, and (b) of enforcing ethical views by his
authority. The legend of St. Christopher, for instance, is but a
variant, probably iconographic in motive, of a multiform pagan myth
which probably roots in a ritual of child-carrying. [428] Iconography
yields many evidences. The conventional figure of the Good-Shepherd
carrying a sheep, which like the Birth-Story has counted for so much
in popularizing Christianity, is admittedly derived from pagan art,
[429] like the conventional angel-figure. Even the figure of Peter
[430] as the bearer of the keys, head of the Twelve, and denier of his
Lord, connects curiously with the myths of Proteus and Janus Bifrons,
[431] both bearers of the cosmic keys.
Iconography, again, is probably the source, for the gospels, of the
myth of the Temptation, which professional scholars continue solemnly
to discuss as a "biographical" episode to be somehow reduced to
historicity. The story coincides so absolutely with the Græco-Roman
account, evidently derived from painting or sculpture, of Pan (in
figure the Satan of the Jews) standing by the young Jupiter on a
mountain-top before an altar, [432] that it might seem unnecessary
to go further. But, recognizing that "of myth there is no 'original,'
save man's immemorial dream," and remembering that there are similar
Temptation myths concerning Buddha and Zarathustra, we are bound to
extend the inquiry. The results are very interesting.
We are specially concerned with the versions of Matthew and Luke,
of which Dr. Spitta, by analysis, finds the Lucan the earlier,
[433] pronouncing the Marcan to be a curtailment and manipulation,
not the primary source, as was maintained by Von Harnack and many
others. [434] The essence of the story, as episode, is the presence
of the God and the Adversary on a high place, surveying "the kingdoms
of the world." This originates proximately in Babylonian astronomy
and astrology, where the Goat-God is represented standing beside
the Sun-God on "the mountain of the world," that is, the height of
the heavens, at the beginning of the sun's yearly course in the
sign Capricorn, which, personified, figures as the sun's tutor
and guide. Graphically represented, it is the origin of a series
of Greek myths--Pan and Zeus; Marsyas and Apollo; Silenus and
Dionysos--all turning on a goat-legged figure beside a young God on
a mountain-top. Satan and Jesus are but another variant, probably
deriving from Greek iconography, but possibly more directly from the
East, where the idea of a Temptation goes back to the Vedas.
The theologians, reluctantly admitting, of late, that the Devil could
not carry Jesus through the air, anxiously debate as to whether or
not Jesus had strange psychic experiences which he communicated to
his disciples; and, utterly ignoring comparative mythology, look for
motivation, as usual, only in the Old Testament. Spitta, after checking
these researches, and declaring that the man is not to be envied who
hopes to explain the story by Old Testament parallels from the forty
years of wandering in the wilderness, [435] confidently concludes
that it stands for the spiritual experience of Jesus in regard to
his Messianic ideal. [436] To such a biographical inference he has
not the slightest critical right on his own principles. The gospels
say nothing whatever of any communication on the subject by Jesus
to his disciples. The story is myth pure and simple, and belongs to
universal mythology.
Mark turned the story to the illustration of the doctrine laid down
in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, [437] that devils and wild
beasts will flee from the righteous man; and Luke and Matthew turn it
into an affirmation of the theological maxims of Jewish monotheism; but
these are simply the invariable practices of the evangelists, steeped
in the habits of thought of Jewish symbolism. The myth remains; and the
story, as story, has counted for a great deal more in Christian popular
lore than the theology. When the writer of the fourth gospel put the
miracle of turning water into wine in the forefront of his work, he
doubtless had symbolic intentions; [438] but his story is simply an
adaptation of the annual Dionysiac rite of turning water into wine at
the festival of the God on Twelfth Night. [439] It may have come either
from the Greek or from the eastern side. The duplicated tale of the
Feeding of the Five Thousand, again, is either an adaptation of or an
attempt to excel the story of the feeding of the host of Dionysos in
a waterless desert in his campaign against the Titans. [440] As the
God had the power of miraculously producing, by touch, corn and wine
and oil, his lore doubtless included miracles of feeding. The touch
of the seating of the people "in ranks, by hundreds, and by fifties"
(Mk. vi, 40) suggests a pictorial source.
Thus did paganism, chased out of the window of early Judaic
Christianity, re-enter by all the doors, supplying the growing Church
with the forms of psychic and literary attraction which ultimately
served to give it a general hold over the ignorant and uncivilized
masses of decadent and barbaric Europe. [441] Even with that machinery,
the Church was dissolving in universal schism when Constantine saved
it--or at least its body--by establishing it. As the Church broadened
its basis, especially after its establishment, its assimilation of
pagan ideas, names and practices, became so general that the process
has long been made a standing ground of Protestant impeachment of the
Church of Rome. [442] Middleton's Letter from Rome (1729) may be said
to begin the scientific investigation, which is still going on. [443]
Of that process the myth-theory is simply the attempted scientific
consummation. It is resisted as every previous step was resisted,
before and after Middleton, partly in sincere religious conviction,
partly on the simple instinctive resentment felt for every "upsetting"
theory about matters which men have habitually taken for granted. Some
of the best reasoned resistance comes from professional theologians who
have been disciplined by the habit of exact argument in the documentary
field; some of the worst, as we have seen, comes from professed
rationalists or Neo-Unitarians, who bring to the problem first and
last the temper of spleen and bluster which history associates with
the typical priest. Bluster never settles anything: argument, given
free play under conditions which foster the intellectual life, in the
end settles everything, even for the emotionalists who worship their
instincts. But as historical like physical science is a process of
continuous expansion and reconsideration, there can in this contest
be no "triumph" for anything but the principle of unending renewal
of thought, which is but an aspect of the principle of life. Insofar
as the solution now offered is inadequate, it will in due course be
improved upon; insofar as it is false, it will be ousted.
The average cleric, of course, does not attempt confutation. Realizing
that it is prudent to avoid debate on such matters, he relies on the
proved proclivity of "human nature" to beliefs which fall-in with
habit, normal emotion, and normal religiosity; and his faith is,
practically speaking, not ill-grounded. A thesis which looks first
and last to scientific truth is therefore not addressed to him. It is
addressed to the more earnest of the laity and the clerisy--hardly to
those indeed who hold, as an amiable curate once put it to me, that
"in the providence of God" all heresy is short-lived; but to those who,
caring for righteousness, do not on that score cast out the spirit of
truth. Many such are honestly convinced that the teaching on which
they have been taught to found their conceptions of goodness cannot
be the accretion of a myth; and many who acknowledge an abundance of
myth in the documents are still insistent on elements of "religious"
truth which they find even in systematic forgeries. The countenance
thus given by the more liberal and critical theologians to the more
uncritical stands constantly in the way even of the acceptance of the
comparatively rational views of the former. [444] There is reason then
to ask whether the notion that human conduct is in any way dependent
on visionary beliefs is any sounder than those beliefs themselves. On
this head, something falls to be said in conclusion.