repudiation by the partisans of non-historicity of jesus of regular historical method let us pause here and try to frame some ideas of the methods of this new school which denies that jesus ever lived:—
firstly, they are all agreed that the method they would apply to all other figures in ancient history—for example, to apollonius—shall not be used in connection with jesus. they carelessly deride “the attempt of historical theologians to reach the historical nucleus of the gospels by purely philological means” (the witnesses, p. 129). “the process,” writes mr. robertson, “of testing the synoptic gospels down to an apparent nucleus of primitive narrative” … “this new position is one of retreat, and is not permanently tenable” (christianity and mythology, p. 284).
if this be so, we had better abolish our chairs of history at the universities, and give up teaching it in the schools; for, in the absence of the camera and gramophone, this method is the only one we can use. when a mommsen sets polybius’s, livy’s, and plutarch’s lives of hannibal side by side and “tests them down to an apparent nucleus of primitive narrative,” does mr. robertson take him as a text for a disquisition on “the psychological resistance to evidence”? if not, why does he forbid us to take the score or so of independent memories and records of the career of jesus which we have in ancient literature [168]between the years a.d. 50 and 120, and to try to sift them down? why, without any evidence, should we rush to the conclusion that the figure on whom they jointly converge was a sun-god, solar myth, or vegetation sprite?
new testament literature taken en bloc secondly, we may note how this disinclination to sift sources and test documents prompts them to take en bloc sources and documents which arose separately and in succession. yet it is not simple laziness which dictates to them this short and easy method of dealing with ancient documents. rather they have inherited it from the old-fashioned orthodox teachers of a hundred years ago, who, convinced of the verbal inspiration of the bible, forbade us to estimate one passage as evidence more highly than another. all the verses of the bible were on a level, as also all the incidents, and to argue that one event might have happened, but not another, was rank blasphemy. all were equally certain, for inspiration is not given by measure. their mantle has fallen on mr. robertson and his friends. all or none is their method; but, whereas all was equally certain, now all is equally myth. “a document,” says (p. 159) the excellent work by mm. langlois and seignobos which i cited above,
(still more a literary work) is not all of a piece; it is composed of a great number of independent statements, any one of which may be intentionally or unintentionally false, while the others are bona fide and accurate?…. it is not, therefore, enough to examine a document as a whole; each of the statements in it must be examined separately; criticism is impossible without analysis.
we have beautiful examples of such mixed criticism and analysis in the commentaries on the synoptics of [169]wellhausen and loisy, both of them freethinkers in the best sense of the word.
incapacity of this school to understand evolution of christian ideas, i have given several minor examples of the obstinacy with which the three writers i am criticizing shut their eyes to the gradual evolution of christian ideas; they exhibit the same perversity in respect of the great development of christological thought already traceable in the new testament.
paul conceived of jesus as a jewish teacher elevated through his death and resurrection to the position of messiah and son of god. on earth he is still a merely human being, born naturally, and subject to the law—a weak man of flesh. raised from the dead by the energy of the spirit, he becomes future judge of mankind, and his gospel transcends all distinctions of jew and gentile, bondsman or free. in mark he is still merely human; he is the son of joseph and mary, born and bred like their other sons and daughters. as a man he comes to john the baptist, like others, to confess and repent of his sins, and wash them away in jordan’s holy stream. not till then does the descent of the spirit on him, as he goes up from the jordan, confer a messiahship on him, which his followers only recognize later on. astounding miracles and prodigies, however, are already credited to him in this our earliest gospel. in the non-marcan document, or q, so far as we can reconstruct it, he has become messiah through baptism (supposing this section to have belonged to q, and not to some other document used by luke and matthew); but few or no miracles1 are as yet credited [170]to him, and the document contained little except his teaching. his death has none of the importance assigned to it by paul, and is not mentioned; his resurrection does not seem to have been heard of by the author of this document. in matthew and luke the figure before us is much the same as in mark; but human traits, such as his mother’s distrust of his mission, are effaced. we hear no more of his inability to heal those who did not believe in him, and we get in their early chapters hints of his miraculous birth. in john there is, indeed, no hint of such birth; but, on the other hand, the entire gospel is here rewritten to suit a new conception of him as the divine, eternal logos. demonology tales are ruled out. his r?le as a jewish messiah, faithful to the law, has finally retired into the background, together with that tense expectation of the end of the world, of the final judgment and installation in palestine of a renovated kingdom of david, which inspires the teaching and parables of the synoptic gospels, just as it inspired philo, and the apocalypse of the fourth esdras and other contemporary jewish apocrypha.
especially in connection with the legend of virgin birth, now, in mr. w. b. smith’s works this development of doctrine about jesus, this succession of phases, is not only reversed, but, with singular perversity, turned upside down. similarly, mr. robertson and dr. drews, in order to secure a favourable reception for their hypothesis that jesus was a sun-god, insist in the teeth of the evidence that the belief in the virgin birth was part and parcel of the earliest tradition. as a matter [171]of fact, it was comparatively late, as the heortology or history of the feasts of the church shows. of specially christian feasts, the first was the sunday, which commemorated every week the resurrection, and the hope of the parousia, or second coming. the next was the epiphany, on january 6, commemorative of the baptism when the holy spirit descended on jesus and conferred messiahship.
this feast we cannot trace before the year 125 or 150, and then only among basilidians; among catholics hardly before 300. just as the story of the virgin birth was the latest addition to evangelical tradition, so it was the latest of the dominical feasts; and not till 354 did it obtain separate recognition in rome on december 25. of the feast of the annunciation and of the other feasts of the virgin we first hear in the sixth and succeeding centuries. from this outline we can realize at how late a period the legend of the virgin birth influenced the mind of the church at large; yet mr. robertson, to smooth the way for his “mythic” theory, pretends that it was the earliest of all christian beliefs, and without a tittle of evidence invents a pre-christian saviour-sun-god joshua, born of a virgin, miriam. the whole monstrous conception is a preposterous coinage of his brain, a figment unknown to anyone before himself and bristling with impossibilities. witness the following passage (p. 284 of christianity and mythology), containing nearly as many baseless fancies as it contains words:—
the one tenable historic hypothesis left to us at this stage is that of a preliminary jesus “b.c.,” a vague cult-founder such as the jesus ben pandira of the talmud, put to death for (perhaps anti-judaic) teachings now lost; round whose movement there [172]might have gradually clustered the survivals of an ancient solar or other worship of a babe joshua son of miriam.
such is the gist of the speculations of messrs. drews and robertson, as far removed from truth and reality as the athanasian creed and from sane criticism as the truculent buffooneries of the futurists from genuine art.
we have more than once criticized this tendency of mr. robertson to insist on the primitiveness of the virgin birth legend. he urges it throughout his volume, although here and there he seems to see the truth, as, e.g., on p. 189, where he remarks that “only the late third gospel tells the story” of mary and joseph going to bethlehem to be taxed, and “that the narrative in matthew” was “added late to the original composition, which obviously began at what is now the third chapter.” if the legend was part of the earliest tradition, why does it figure for the first time in the late third gospel and in a late addition to the first? in another passage he assures us that chapters i and ii of luke are “a late fabulous introduction.” clearly, his view is that, just in proportion as any part of the gospels is late, the tradition it contains must be early; and he it is who talks about “the methodless subjectivism” of dr. pfleiderer, who, he says, “like matthew arnold, accepts what he likes” (p. 450).
and in connection with schmiedel’s “pillars” the same inability to distinguish what is early from what is late is shown by mr. robertson in his criticism of dr. schmiedel’s “pillars”—i.e., the nine gospel texts (seven of them in mark)—“which cannot have been invented by believers in the godhood of jesus, since they implicitly negate that godhood.” of these, one is mark x, 17 ff., where jesus uses—to one who [173]had thrown himself at his feet with the words: “good teacher, what shall i do to inherit eternal life?” (i.e., life in the kingdom to come)—the answer: “why callest thou me good? no one is good, save one—to wit, god.” here many ancient sources intensify jesus’s refusal of a predicate which is god’s alone; for they run: “call thou me not good.” this apart, the second and third gospels may be said to agree in reading, “good master,” and, “why callest thou me good?”
in matthew, however (xix, 16), we read as follows: “behold, one came to him and said: master, what good thing shall i do, that i may have eternal life? and he said unto him, why askest thou me concerning that which is good? one there is who is good,” etc.
now, it is a result of criticism universally accepted to-day that matthew and luke compiled their gospels with mark before them, and that any reading in which either of them agrees with mark must be more original than the discrepant reading of a third. here matthew is the discrepant witness, and he has remodelled the text of mark to suit the teaching which had established itself in the church about a.d. 100 that jesus was without sin. he accordingly makes jesus reply as a greek sophist might reply, and not as a jewish rabbi; and, by omitting the predicate “good” before teacher, he turns the words, “one there is who is good,” into nonsense. by adding it before “thing” he creates additional nonsense; for how could any but a good action merit eternal life? the epithet is here superfluous. even then, if we were not sure on other grounds that the marcan story is the only source of the matth?an deformed text, we could be sure that it [174]was, because in mark we have simplicity and good sense, whereas in matthew we have neither. mr. robertson, on an earlier page, has, indeed, done lip-service to the truth that mark presents us with the earliest form of evangelical tradition; but here he betrays the fact that he has not really understood the position, nor grasped the grounds (set forth by me in myth, magic, and morals) on which it rests. for he is ready to sacrifice it the moment it makes havoc of his “mythological” argument, and writes (p. 443): “on the score of simple likelihood, which has the stronger claim? surely the original text in matthew.”
even if matthew, mark, and luke were rival and independent texts, instead of the first and third being, as they demonstrably are, copies and paraphrases of mark, the best—if not the only—criterion of originality would be such an agreement of two of them as mark and luke here present against matthew. mr. robertson, with entire ignoratio elenchi, urges in favour of the originality of matthew’s variant the circumstance that the oldest ms. sources of that gospel reproduce it. how could they fail to do so, supposing it to be due to the redactor or editor of mark, who was traditionally, but falsely, identified with the apostle matthew? if the reading of mark be not original, how came luke to copy it from him? the most obvious critical considerations are wasted on mr. robertson and his friends.
schmiedel on the disbelief of mary in her son dr. schmiedel again draws attention to the narrative of how jesus, at the beginning of his ministry, was declared by his own household to be out of his senses, and of how, in consequence, his mother and brethren followed him in order to put him under restraint. the story offended the first and third [175]evangelists, and they partly omit it, partly obscure its drift. the fourth evangelist limits the disbelief to the brethren of jesus. the whole narrative is in flagrant antagonism to the birth stories in the early chapters of matthew and luke, and to the whole subsequent drift of church tradition. being gifted with common sense, schmiedel argues that it must be true, because it could never have been invented. it, anyhow, makes for the historicity of jesus. what has mr. robertson to say about it? he writes (p. 443): “why should such a conception be more alien to christian consciousness than, say, the story of the trial, scourging, and crucifixion?” here he ignores the point at issue. in christian tradition, whether early or late, it was not the mother and brethren of jesus who tried and scourged and crucified him, but inimical jews and pagans. the latter are at no time related to have received an announcement of his birth from an angel, as his mother was presently believed to have done. we have, therefore, every reason for averring that the conception or idea of his being flouted by his own mother and brethren was a thousand times more alien to christian consciousness—at least, any time after a.d. 100—than that of his being flouted by a sadducean priesthood and by roman governors. once the legend of the virgin birth had grown up, such a story could not have been either thought of or committed to writing in a gospel. it is read in mark, and must be what we call a bed-rock tradition. if mr. robertson cannot see that, he is hopeless. did he not admit (p. 443) that it is “certainly an odd text,” so revealing his inmost misgivings about it, we should think him so. [176]
jesus is not deified in the earliest documents, nor do they reveal a “cult” of him the same vice of mixing up different phases of the christian religion shows itself in the insistence of this school of critic that it was from the first a cult of a deified jesus. thus mr. smith writes (ecce deus) as follows (p. 6):—
we affirm that the worship of the one god under the name, aspect, or person of the jesus, the saviour, was the primitive and indefectible essence of the primitive teaching and propaganda.
on the contrary, in the two basal documents, mark and q, no such worship is discernible. jesus first comes on the scene as the humble son of joseph and mary to repent of his sins and purge them away in baptism; he next takes up the preaching of the imprisoned john, which was merely that jews should repent of their sins because the kingdom of god, involving a dissolution of the existing social and political order, was at hand. this was no divine r?le, and he is represented not as god, but only as the servant of god; for such in the aramaic dialect of that age was the connotation of the title “son of god.” in mark there is no sign of his deification, not even in the transfiguration scene; for in that he is merely the human messiah attended by elias and moses. from a hundred early indicia we know that in the semitic-speaking churches of the east he remained a human figure for centuries; and the syrian father aphraat, as late as 336 in persia, is careful to explain in his homilies that jesus was only divine as moses was, or as human kings are. it was not till the religion was diffused in a pagan medium in which gods had children by mortal women that the gross deification of jesus emerged. the purport of these basal documents, moreover, is not to deify [177]jesus, but to establish as against the jews that he was their promised messiah and the central figure of the messianic kingdom he preached. that figure, however, was never identified with jehovah, but was only jehovah’s servant, anointed king and judge of israel, restorer of israel’s damaged fortunes, fulfiller of her political ideals and hopes. mr. smith argues that jesus was deified from the first because his name was so often invoked in exorcisms. he even makes the suggestion (p. 17) that the initial letter j of jesus “must have powerfully suggested jehovah to the jewish consciousness.” there is no evidence, and less likelihood, of any such thing. the name of jesus was during his lifetime invoked against demons by exorcists who rejected his message; just as they used the names of abraham, isaac, and jacob, so they were ready to exploit his powerful name; but neither jews nor christians ever confounded with jehovah the names or personalities they thus invoked; any jew in virtue of his birth and breeding would have regarded such a confusion of a man with his god as flat blasphemy.
worship of a slain god no part of the earliest christianity messrs. robertson and drews similarly insist that jesus was from the first worshipped as a slain god. in the gospel documents there is no sign of anything of the sort. it was paul who first diffused the idea that the crucified jesus was a victim slain for the redemption of human sins. we already have philo proclaiming that the just man is the ransom of the many, so that there is no need to go to pagan circles, no need to go outside the pale of greek jews, of whom paul was one, for the origin of the idea. he probably found it even in the teaching of gamaliel, in which he was brought up. mark asks no more of [178]his readers than to attribute the messiahship—a thoroughly human r?le—to his hero, jesus of nazareth. nor does matthew, who seeks at every turn to prove that the actions of jesus reported by mark were those which, according to the old prophets, a messiah might be expected to perform. how can writers who end their record of jesus by telling us how in the moment of death he cried, “my god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?” realizing no doubt that all his expectations of the advent of god’s kingdom were frustrated and set at naught; how, i say, can such writers have believed that jesus was jehovah? the idea is monstrous. the truth is these writers transport back into the first age of christianity the ideas and beliefs of developed catholicism, and are resolved that the first shall be last and the last first. they have no perspective, and no capacity for understanding the successive phases through which a primitive messianism, at first thoroughly monotheistic and exclusively jewish in outlook and ideals, gradually evolved itself, with the help of the logos teaching, into the athanasian cult of an eternal and consubstantial son of god.
abuse of the comparative method by this school of writers thirdly, these writers abuse the comparative method. applied discreetly and rationally, this method helps us to trace myths and beliefs back to their homes and earlier forms. thus m. emmanuel cosquin (in romania; paris, 1912) takes the story of the cat and the candle, and traces out its ramifications in the medi?val literature and modern folklore of europe, and outside europe, in the legends of the pendjab, of cashmir, bengal, ceylon, tibet, tunisia, annam, and elsewhere. but the theme is always sufficiently like itself to be really recognizable in the [179]various folklore frames in which it is found encased. the old philologists saw in the most superficial resemblance of sound a reason for connecting words in different languages. they never asked themselves how a word got out of hebrew, say, into greek, or out of greek into mexican. volumes were filled with these haphazard etymologies, and the idea of the classification of languages into great connected families only slowly made its way among us in the last century. i have pointed out that in regard to names messrs. drews and robertson are still in this prephilological stage of inquiry; as regards myths or stories of incident, they are wholly immersed in it. they fit anything on to anything no matter how ineptly,they never trouble themselves to make sure that the stories they connect bear any real resemblance to one another. for example, what have the zodiacal signs and the apostles of jesus in common except the number twelve? as if number was not the most superficial of attributes, the least characteristic and essential. the scene of the gospel is laid in jud?a, where from remote antiquity the jews had classed themselves in twelve tribes. is it not more likely that this suggested the twelve missionaries sent out by jesus to announce the coming kingdom than the twelve signs of the zodiac? even if the story of the twelve be legendary, need we go outside judaism for our explanation of its origin?
what, again, have the three maries in common with the greek moirai except the number three and a delusive community of sound? yet mr. robertson insists that the three maries at the tomb of jesus were suggested by the moirai, because these, “as goddesses of birth and death, naturally figured in many artistic presentations of religious death scenes.” as a matter [180]of fact, the representation of the parcae or fates in connection with death is rare except on roman sarcophagi, mostly of later date than the gospel story. and when they are so found, they represent, not women bringing spices for the corpse or mourning for the dead, but the forces, often thought of as blind and therefore represented as veiled, which govern the events of the world, including birth, life and death. and forget the innate hostility of jews to paganismthere was, therefore, nothing in the moirai to suggest the three maries at the tomb; nor is it credible that the hebrew christists, given as they must have been to monotheism and detesting all statuary, pagan or other, would have chosen their literary motives from such a source. where could they see such statuary in or about jerusalem? it is notorious that the very presence of a symbolic eagle used as a military standard was enough to create an émeute in jerusalem. the scheme of the emperor caligula or caius to set up his statue in jerusalem in 39–40 a.d. provoked a movement of revolt throughout palestine, with which the jews of egypt and elsewhere were in full sympathy. a deputation headed by philo of alexandria went to rome to supplicate the emperor not to goad the entire race to frenzy. in the magnificent statues which surrounded him on the parthenon hill, paul could see nothing but idols, monuments of an age of superstition and ignorance which god had mercifully overlooked.2 the hostility of the jews to all pagan art [181]and sculpture was as great as that of mohammedans to-day. yet mr. robertson asks us to believe (p. 327) that the gospel myths, as he assumes them to be, are “evolved from scenes in pagan art.” on the top of that we afterwards learn from him that it was the jewish high priest with legalistic leanings that presided over the christists or jesuists. imagine such a high priest’s feelings when he beheld his “secret society” evolving their system under such an inspiration as mr. robertson outlines in the following canons of criticism:—
as we have seen and shall see throughout this investigation, the christian system is a patchwork of a hundred suggestions drawn from pagan art and ritual usage (p. 305).
christism borrowed myths of all kinds from paganism (p. xii).
… the whole christian legend, in its present terminology, is demonstrably an adaptation of a mass of pre-christian myths (p. 136).
what a budget of mutually destructive paradoxes; and to crown them all mr. robertson claims in his introduction (p. xxii) that the method of his treatise is
in general more “positive,” less a priori, more obedient to scientific canons than that of the previous critics … who have reached similar anti-traditionalist results. it substitutes an anthropological basis, in terms of the concrete phenomena of mythology, for a pseudo-philosophical presupposition.
[182]
credulity attends hypercriticism fourthly, it is essential to note the childish, all-embracing, and overwhelming credulity of these writers. to them applies in its full force the paragraph in which mm. langlois and seignobos describe the perils which beset hypercriticism (p. 131, op. cit.):—
the excess of criticism, just as much as the crudest ignorance, leads to error. it consists in the application of critical canons to cases outside their jurisdiction. it is related to criticism as logic-chopping is to logic. there are persons who scent enigmas everywhere, even where there are none. they take perfectly clear texts and subtilize on them till they make them doubtful, under the pretext of freeing them from imaginary corruptions. they discover traces of forgery in authentic documents. a strange state of mind! by constantly guarding against the instinct of credulity they come to suspect everything.
for these writers, in their anxiety to be original and new, see fit to discard every position that earlier historians, like mommsen, gibbon, bury, montefiore—not to mention christian scholars—have accepted as beyond doubt. their temper is that of the bacon-shakesperians; and the plainest, simplest, most straightforward texts figure in their imaginations as a laborious series of charades, rebuses, and cryptograms. that jesus never existed is not really the final conclusion of their researches, but an initial unproved assumption. in order to get rid of him, they feign, without any evidence of it, a jewish secret society under the patronage of the jewish high priest, that existed in jerusalem well down into the christian era. this society kept up the worship of an old palestinian and ephraimitic sun-god and saviour, named joshua, son of a virgin, miriam. where is the proof that such a god was ever heard of [183]in ancient palestine, either early or late, or that such a cult ever existed? there is none. it is the emptiest and wildest of hypotheses; yet we are asked to accept it in place of the historicity of jesus. what, again, do we know of secret societies in jerusalem? josephus and philo knew of none. for the therapeut?, far from affecting secrecy, were anxious to diffuse their discipline and lore even among the hellenes, while the essenes had nothing secret save the names of the angels they invoked in spells. they were a well-known sect, and so numerous that a gate of jerusalem was called the essene gate, because they so often came in and went forth by it. were the pharisees and sadducees, the scribes, or the sicarii or zealots, secret sects? we know they were not. but is it likely that a sect composed in the main of jews, and patronized, as mr. robertson argues, by the high priest, would have kept up in the very heart of monotheistic judaism a cult of sun-gods and vegetation-spirits? could they there have given themselves up to the study of pagan statuary, art, and ritual dramas? what possible connection is there between the na?ve picture of hebrew messianism we have in the synoptic gospels and the hurly-burly, the tagrag and bobtail of pagan mythologies which mr. robertson and his henchman drews rake together pell-mell in their pretentious volumes? how did all this paganism abut in a messianic society which reverenced the old testament for its sacred scriptures, which for long frequented the jewish temple, took over the feasts and fasts of judaism, modelled its prayers on those of the synagogue, cherished in its eastern branches the practice of circumcision?
mr. robertson accepts the historicity of jesus after allafter hundreds of pages devoted to the task of [184]evaporating jesus into a solar or vegetation-god, and all the personages we meet in the gospels into zodiacal signs or pagan demigods, mr. robertson, as we have noticed above, finds himself, after all, confronted with the same personages in paul’s epistles. there they are too real even for mr. robertson to dissipate them into cloud-forms, and too numerous to be cut out wholesale. he feels that, if all paul’s allusions to the crucified jesus are to be got rid of as interpolations, then no pauline epistles will remain. he cuts out, indeed, all he can, but there is a residuum of reality. to identify paul’s jesus with the jesus of the gospels is too humdrum and obvious a course for him. so common-sense and commonplace a scheme does not suit his subtle intelligence; moreover, such an identification would upset the hundreds of pages in which he has proved that jesus of nazareth and all his accessories are literary symbols employed by the jewish “jesuists” to disguise their pagan art and myths. accordingly, he asks us to believe that paul’s jesus is a certain jesus ben pandira, stoned to death a hundred years earlier. this jesus is a vague figure fished up out of the talmud; but, on examination, we found mr. robertson’s choice of him as an alias for paul’s jesus to be most unfortunate, for competent talmudic scholars are agreed that jesus ben pandira in the talmud was no other than jesus of nazareth in the gospels. jesus most unkindly insists on being in at his own death,3 in spite of all mr. robertson can say or do; and his house of cards is crowned with the discovery that the apostles whom paul knew—not [185]being identical with the signs of the zodiac, like those of the gospels—were no other than the twelve apostles of the jewish high priest, and that they were the authors of the lately-discovered “teaching of the apostles.” he is very contemptuous for other early christian books which affect apostolic authorship in their titles, but falls a ready victim to the relatively late and anonymous editor of this “teaching,” who to give it vogue entitled it “the teaching of the lord by the twelve apostles to the gentiles.” “the jesuist sect,” he writes (p. 345), “founded on it (the didaché) the christian myth of the twelve apostles of jesus.” everywhere else in his books he has argued that the “myth” in question was founded on the signs of the zodiac. why give up at the eleventh hour the astral explanation for an utterly different one? i may add that in the body of the didaché the twelve are nowhere alluded to; that it must be a much later document than the gospels and paulines, since it quotes them in scores of passages; and that the interpolation of the title, with a reference to the twelve apostles, was a literary trick scarcely older than the fourth century, long before which age the pauline account of the resurrection was cited by a score of christian writers. lastly, we are fain to inquire of mr. robertson with whom he identifies “the lord” of the above title—with the jewish high priest, or with jesus ben pandira, or with the sun-god-saviour joshua.
theory of interpolations i have given many examples of the tendency of all these authors to condemn as an interpolation any text which contradicts their hypotheses. there is only one error worse than that of treating seriously documents which are no documents at all. it is that of [186]the man who cannot recognize documents when he has got them. it is well, of course, to weigh sources, and the critical investigation of authorship lies at the basis of all true history. but, as the authors above cited justly remark (p. 99):—
we must not abuse it. the extreme of distrust in these matters is almost as mischievous as the extreme of credulity. père hardouin, who attributed the works of virgil and horace to medieval monks, was every whit as ridiculous as the victim of vrain-lucas. it is an abuse of the methods of this species of criticism to apply them, as has been done, indiscriminately, for the mere pleasure of it. the bunglers who have used this species of criticism to brand as spurious perfectly genuine documents, such as the writings of hroswitha, the ligurinus, and the bull unam sanctam, or to establish imaginary filiations between certain annals, on the strength of superficial indications, would have discredited criticism before now, if that had been possible.
it is unhappily easier to discredit criticism in the realm of ecclesiastical than of secular history; and this school of writers are doing their best to harm the cause of true rationalism. they only afford amusement to the obscurantists of orthodoxy, and render doubly difficult the task of those who seek to win people over to a common-sense and historical envisagement, unencumbered by tradition and superstition, of the problems of early christianity.
professor smith’s monotheistic cult lastly, it is a fact deserving of notice that the genesis of christianity as these authors present it is much more mysterious and obscure than before. their explanation needs explaining. what, we must ask, was the motive and end in view of the adherents of the pre-christian jesus or joshua in writing the gospels and bringing down their god to earth, so humanizing in a story their divine myth? let professor [187]w. b. smith speak: “what was the essence, the central idea and active principle, of the cult itself?” here he means the cult of the pre-christian christ that invented the gospels and diffused them on the market place. “to this latter,” he continues, “we answer directly and immediately: it was a protest against idolatry; it was a crusade for monotheism.”
and yet he cannot adduce a single text from the gospels—not even from the fourth—which betrays on the part of jesus, their central figure, any such crusading spirit. jesus everywhere assumes his hearers to be monotheists like himself—he speaks as a jew to jews—and perpetually reminds them of their father in heaven. thus matt. vi, 8: “your father knoweth what things ye have need of”; matt. v, 48: “ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect.”
the monotheism of those who stood around the teacher is ever taken for granted by the evangelists, and in all the precepts of jesus not one can be adduced that is aimed at the sins of polytheism and idolatry. his message lies in a far different region. it is the immediate advent of the messianic kingdom, and the need of repentance ere it come. only when paul undertakes to bear this message to pagans outside the pale of judaism do we get teaching directed against idolatry; and in his epistles such precepts have a second place, the first being reserved to the preaching of the coming kingdom and of the redemption of the world by the merits of the crucified and risen messiah, the man jesus. most of paul’s letters read as if those for whom he wrote them were already proselytes familiar with the jewish scriptures. [188]
his great oriental cryptogram such is mr. smith’s fundamental assumption, and it is baseless. on it he bases his next great hypothesis of “the primitive secrecy of the jesus cult,” which “was maintained in some measure for many years—for generations even” (p. 45). “why,” he asks, “was this jesus cult originally secret, and expressed in such guarded parabolic terms as made it unintelligible to the multitude?” the reason lay in the fact that “it was exactly to save the pagan multitude from idolatry that jesus came into the world” (p. 38).
here the phrase “jesus came into the world,” like all else he did or suffered, is, of course, to be understood in a pickwickian sense, for he never came into the world at all. the gospels are not only a romance concocted by “such students of religion as the first christians were” (p. 65), and inspired by their study of plato,4 and of the best elements in ancient mythology; they are a romance throughout—an allegory of a secret pre-christian nazarene society and of its secret cult (p. 34). of this society, he tells us, we know nothing; esoterism and cult secrecy were its chief interests; the “silence of the christians about it was intentional,”5 and, except for the special revelation vouchsafed the other day to professor w. b. [189]smith, it would have remained for ever unknown, and christianity for ever enigmatic.
in accordance with this postulate of esoterism and cult secrecy among the pre-christian nazarenes, who subsequently revealed themselves to the world as the christian church, though even then they “maintained for generations the secrecy6 of their jesus cult,” the gospels, as i said, are an allegory or a charade. their prima facie meaning is never the true one, never more than symbolic of a moral and spiritual undersense such as old allegorists like philo and origen loved to discover in the bible. thus, as we saw above, when jesus is reported to have cast out of the jews who thronged around him devils of blindness, deafness, lameness, leprosy, death, what is really intended is that he argued pagans out of their polytheism. “it was spiritual maladies, and only spiritual, that he was healing” (p. 38). we ask of mr. smith, why was so much mystification necessary? we are only told that “it was in the main a prudential measure, well enough justified, but intended to be only temporary” (p. 39). what exact risks they were to shun which the sect kept itself secret, and only spake in far-fetched allegory, mr. smith does not inform us. is he, too, afraid of being regarded as a “tell-tale” (p. 48)?
professor smith resolves all the new testament as symbolic and allegorical as with the exorcisms, so with all else told of jesus. none of it really happened. as he never lived, so he never died. his human life and death are an allegory of the spiritual cult and mysteries which the pre-christian nazarenes and their [190]descendants, the christians, so jealously and for so long guarded in silence. if he never lived, then he never taught, not even in parables. by consequence the entire record of his parables, still more of his having chosen the parable as his medium of instruction in order to veil his real meaning from his audience, is all moonshine. here, as elsewhere, the gospel text does not mean what it says, but is itself only a nazarene parable conveying, or rather concealing, a nazarene secret—what sort of secret no one, save professor smith, the self-appointed revealer of their mysterious lore, can tell, and he is silent on the point. on mr. smith’s premisses, then, we cannot rely on the gospels to inform us of anything historical, and, so far as we can follow him, we must, if we would discern through them the mind of their nazarene authors, take them upside down. we must discern a pagan medium and homilies against polytheism in discourses addressed to monotheistic jews who needed no warnings against idolatry; we must also read the stories of jesus healing paralytics and demoniacs as secret and disguised polemics against idolatry.
yet claims, where it suits him, to treat it as historical narrative but here mark professor smith’s inconsistency. why is he sure that the nazarenes, and after them the earliest christians, were a secret society with a secret cult? they must have been so, he argues, because jesus taught in parables. “the primitive esoterism,” he tells us, “is admittedly present in mark iv, 11, 12, 33, 34.” these verses begin thus: “and he said unto them, unto you is given the mystery of the kingdom of heaven: but unto them that are without, all things are done in parables.”
now, mr. smith’s postulate is that he—i.e., jesus of nazareth—never lived, and so never said anything [191]to anyone. how, then, can he appeal to what he said to prove that there was a pre-christian jesus or joshua sect, itself secret with a cult and ritual which its members were ever on their guard not to reveal? surely he drops here into two assumptions which he has discarded ab initio: first, that there is a core of real history in the gospels; and, second, that the gospel can mean what it says, and that its nazarene author is here not allegorizing, as he usually did.
his theory contradicts itself but even if we allow mr. smith to break with his premisses wherever he needs to do so in order to substantiate them, do these verses of mark support his hypothesis of a sect which kept itself, its rites, and its teaching secret? i admit that it was pretty successful when it veiled its anti-idolatrous teaching under the outward form of demonological anecdotes, and wrote jews when it meant pagans and polytheists. but in mark iv, 34, we are told that “to his own disciples jesus privately expounded all things” after he had with many parables spoken the word to such as “were able to hear it.” it appears, then, that for all their love of secrecy, and in spite of all their precautions against “tell-tale” writing, the nazarenes on occasions went out of their way, in their allegorical romance of their god joshua, to inform all who may read it what their parables and allegories meant; for in it jesus sits down and expounds to the reader over some twenty-four verses (verses 10–34) the inner meaning of the parables which he had just addressed to the multitude. what on earth were the nazarenes doing to publish a gospel like this, and so let the cat out of the bag? instead of keeping their secret they were proclaiming it on the housetops. again, if the gospels are to [192]such an extent merely allegorical, that we must not assume their authors to have believed that jesus ever lived, how can we possibly rely on them for information about such an obscure matter as a secret and esoteric pre-christian nazarene sect? we can only be sure that the evangelists never under any circumstances meant what they said; yet mr. smith, in defiance of all his postulates, writes, p. 40, as follows: “on the basis, then, of this passage alone [i.e., mark iv, 10–34] we may confidently affirm the primitive secrecy of the jesus cult.” even if the passage rightly yielded the sense he tries to extort from it, how can we be sure that that sense is not, like the rest of the gospel, an allegory of something else?
the other passage of the gospels, matthew x, 26, 27, to which, with like inconsistency, mr. smith appeals by way of showing that the nazarenes of set purpose hid their light under a bushel, does not bear the interpretation he puts on it. it runs thus: “fear them not therefore: for naught is covered that shall not be revealed, and hidden that shall not be known. what i tell you in the darkness, speak ye on the housetops; and what ye hear in the ear, proclaim upon the housetops.”
absence of esoterism about jesus’s teaching the reasonable interpretation of the above is that jesus, being in possession, as he thought, of a special understanding, perhaps revelation, of the true nature of the messianic kingdom, and convinced of its near approach, instructed his immediate disciples in privacy concerning it in order that they might carry the message up and down the land to the children of israel. he therefore exhorts them not to be silent from fear of the jews, who accused him of being [193]possessed of a devil, somewhat as his own mother and brethren accused him of being an exalté and beside himself. no, they were to cast aside all apprehensions; they must go, not to the supercilious pharisees or to the comfortable priests who battened on the people, still less to gentiles and samaritans, who had no part in the promises made to israel, but to the lost sheep of the house of israel, and they must preach as they went, saying, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. they were to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils, and in general give freely the good tidings which freely they had received from their master, and he from john the baptist. if they so acted, discarding all timidity, then no human repression, no human time-serving, could prevent the spread of the good news. what was now hidden from the poor and ignorant among his compatriots would henceforth, thanks to the courage and devotedness of his emissaries, be made known to them; what was now covered, be revealed.
such is the context of “this remarkable deliverance,” as mr. smith terms it; and nothing in all the new testament savours less than it does of a secret cult of mysterious sectaries, waiting for mr. smith to manifest their arcana to us twenty centuries later. here, as everywhere else in the new testament, he has discovered a monstrous mare’s nest; has banished the only possible and obvious interpretation, in order to substitute a chimera of his own.
it was not a protest against paganism mr. smith credits his hypothetical pre-christian nazarenes with an ambition and anxiety to purge away the errors of mankind. the “essence, the central idea, and active principle of the cult itself,” [194]he tells us (p. 45), “was a protest against idolatry, a crusade for monotheism.” “the fact of the primitive worship of jesus and the fact of the primitive mission to all the gentiles are the two cardinal facts of proto-christianity” (p. xvii). why on earth, then, in concocting that pronunciamento of their cult which we call the gospels, did these nazarenes represent the jesus or joshua god, even in allegory, as warning his disciples on no account to disseminate his cult among gentiles and samaritans, but only among jews, who were notoriously monotheists and bitterly hostile to every form of idolatry? why carry coals to newcastle on so huge a scale?
why turn god jeshua into a man at all and granted that the nazarenes, in their anxiety to be parabolical and misunderstood of their readers, wrote jews when they meant pagans, was it necessary in the interests of their monotheistic crusade to nickname their one god jesus, to represent him as a man and a carpenter, with brothers and sisters, and a mother that did not believe in him; as a man who was a jew with the prejudices of a jew, a man circumcised and insisting that he came not to destroy the law of moses, but to fulfil it; as a man who was born like other men of a human father and mother; was crucified, dead and buried; whose disciples and galilean companions, when in the first flush of their grief they heard from mary magdalene the strange story of his first appearing to her after death, still “disbelieved”?7
the comfort of the initial “j” these nazarenes were, in their quality of “students of religion” (p. 65), intent on converting the world [195]from polytheism. why, then, did they call their sublime deity by the name of jesus? “the word jesus itself,” writes mr. smith,
also made special appeal to the jewish consciousness, for it was practically identical with their own jeshua, now understood by most to mean strictly jah-help, but easily confounded with a similar j’shu’ah, meaning deliverance, saviour, witness, matthew i, 21. moreover, the initial letter j, so often representing jah in hebrew words, must have powerfully suggested jehovah to the jewish consciousness.
but what jew of the first century, however fond of the tales about joshua which he read in his scriptures, was ever minded to substitute his name for that of jehovah merely because it began with a j and has been explained by twentieth-century hebraists as meaning jah-help? the idea is exquisitely humorous. while they were about it why did the nazarenes not adopt the name immanuel, which in that allegorical romance (which from mr. smith we know to be the character of matthew’s gospel) they fished up out of the hebrew prophet isaiah? if jehovah was not good enough for them, immanuel was surely better than the name jeshua, with its associations of pillage and murder. but apart from these considerations, as the name jeshua is hebrew, it follows that the secret sectaries who had this cult must have been of a jewish cast. but, if so, what jew, we ask, ever heard of a god called jeshua or joshua? as i have already pointed out, the very memory of such a god, if there ever was one, perished long before the book of joshua could have been written. like the gods daoud and joseph, with whom writers of this class seek to conjure our wits out of our heads, a god joshua is a mere preposterous superfetation of a [196]disordered imagination. “there were abundant reasons,” writes mr. smith (p. 16),
why the name jesus should be the aaron’s rod to swallow up all other designations. its meaning, which was felt to be saviour, was grand, comforting, uplifting. the notion of the world-saviour thrust its roots into the loam of the remotest antiquity.
supposed confusion of jesus with iēsomai one regrets to have to criticize such dithyrambic outpourings of mr. smith’s heart. but, granted there was a widespread expectation, such as suetonius records, of messiahs who were to issue from jud?a and conquer all the world, who ever heard of the name joshua being assigned in advance to one of them? who ever in that age felt the name jesus to be grand, comforting, uplifting? is not mr. smith attributing his own feelings, as he sat in a sunday school, to jews and gentiles of the first century? i add gentiles, for he pretends that the name jesus appealed to the greek consciousness also as a derivative of the ionic future ??σομαι iēsomai = i will heal. now what christian writer ever made this rapprochement? not a single one. surely, if we are minded to argue the man jesus out of existence, we ought to have a vera causa to put in his place, a belief, or, if we like it better, a myth which was really believed, and is known to have entered deeply into the lives and consciences of men? it is true that the idea of a messiah did so enter, but not in the form in which mr. smith loves to conceive it. the messiah was such a human figure as suetonius had heard of; he was a man who should, as we read in acts, restore the kingdom of david. “lord, dost thou at this time restore the kingdom to israel?” is the question the apostles are said (acts i, 7) to have [197]put to jesus as soon as his apparitions before them had revived the messianic hopes which his death had so woefully dashed. the incident is probably apocryphal, yet its presence in the narrative illustrates what a messiah was then expected by christians to achieve. judas maccab?us, cyrus, bar cochba, judas of galilee—these and other heroes of israel had the quality of messiahs. they were all men, and not myths. the suggestion, then, that the name jesus was one to conjure with is idle and baseless; and if his name had been obadiah or nathaniel, professor smith would have been equally ready to prove that these were attractive names, bound to triumph and “swallow up all other designations.” he only pitches on the name of jesus for his pre-christian saviour-god because he finds it in the gospels; but inasmuch as he sees in them mere allegorical romances, entirely unhistorical and having no root in facts, there is no reason for adopting from them one name more than another. how does he know that the appellation jesus is not as much of a nazarene fiction as he holds every other name and person and incident to be which the gospels contain? is it not more probable that this highly secretive sect, with their horror of “tell-tale,” would keep secret the name of their saviour-god, as the essenes kept secret the names of their patron angels? the truth is, even mr. smith cannot quite divest himself of the idea that there is some historical basis for the gospels; otherwise he would not have turned to them for the name of his saviour-god.
mr. smith denies all historicity to acts and epistles more consistently, however, than mr. robertson, professor smith denies that there are any allusions to the real jesus in the rest of the new testament. [198]the acts and epistles do not, he says (p. 23), “recognize at all the life of jesus as a man,” though “their general tenour gives great value to the death of jesus as a god.” this is a new reading of the documents in question, for the pauline conviction was that jesus had been crucified and died as a man, and, being raised up from death by the spirit, had been promoted to be, what he was antenatally, a super-human or angelic figure8—a christ or messiah, who was to come again on earth and judge mankind. of his mere humanity while on this earth, and as long as he was associating with human disciples, paul entertained no doubts. how could he, inasmuch as he had stayed with them at jerusalem? mr. [199]robertson, as we saw, although he dissipates jesus in the gospels into a sun-god-saviour joshua, nevertheless is so impressed by the pauline “references to a crucified jesus” (p. 364) that he resuscitates jesus ben pandira out of the limbo of the talmud. perhaps he strains at a gnat after swallowing a camel. anyhow, i will leave mr. smith to settle accounts with him, and turn to a fresh point, which has not occurred to either of them.
contrast of christian belief in jesus with cult of adonis or osiris it is this. adonis and osiris were never regarded by their votaries as having been human beings that had recently lived and died on the face of this earth. the christians, in strong contrast with them and with all other pagans ever heard of, did so regard jesus from first to last. why so, when they knew that from the first he was a god and up in heaven? why has the fact of his unreality, as these writers argue it, left no trace of itself in christian tradition and literature? according to this new school of critics, the nazarenes, when they wrote down the gospels, knew perfectly well that jesus was a figment, and had never lived at all. and yet we never get a hint that he was only a myth, and that the new testament is a gigantic fumisterie. why so? why from the very first did the followers of jesus entertain what mr. smith denounces as “an a priori concept of the jesus” (p. 35)? why, in other words, were they convinced from the beginning that he was a man of flesh and blood, who had lived on earth among them? the “early secrecy,” the “esoterism of the primitive cult” (p. 39), says mr. smith, “was intended to be only temporary.” if so, why could not the nazarenes, primarily interested as they were, not in lies and bogus, but in disseminating their lofty monotheism, have thrown [200]off the disguise some time or other, and explained to their spiritual children that the intensely concrete life of jesus which they had published in our gospel of mark meant nothing; that it was all an allegory, and no more, of a saviour-god, who had never existed as a human being, nor even as the docetic phantasmagoria of the gnostic? “something sealed the lips of that (nazarene) evangelist,” and the nazarenes have kept their secret so well through the ages that it has been reserved for mr. smith first to pierce the veil and unlock their mystery. he it is who has at last discovered that “in proto-mark we behold the manifest god” (p. 24).
now what possessed the nazarenes so firmly to impose on the world through the gospels an erroneous view of their god, that for 2,000 years not only their spiritual offspring, the christians, but jews and pagans as well, have believed him to have lived on earth, a man of flesh and blood and of like passions with themselves? was the deception necessary? the votaries of osiris and adonis were never so tricked. the adherents of the augustalian cult, the pious greeks and syrians who thronged to be healed of their diseases at the shrines of apollonius, believed, of course, that their patron saints and gods had lived, prior to their apotheosis, upon earth; and so they had. but a follower of osiris or ?sculapius would have opened his eyes wide with astonishment if you asked him to believe that his saviour had died only the other day in jud?a. not so a christian; for the nazarene monotheists had so thoroughly fooled him with their gospels that he was ready to supply you with dates and pedigrees and all sorts of other details about his saviour’s personal history. and yet all the [201]time, had he only known it, his religion laboured under the same initial disadvantage as the cult of osiris or ?sculapius—that, namely, of its founder never having lived at all. what, then, did “such students of religion, as the first christians were” (ecce deus, p. 65), imagine was to be gained by hood-winking their descendants for the long centuries which have intervened between them and the advent of professor w. b. smith? [202]
1 mr. robertson recognizes (p. 124), though without realizing how much it damages his theory, that the miracles of the gospels are “visibly unknown to the paulinists”—presumably the early churches addressed by paul in his epistle. do we not here get a glimpse of an early stage of the story of jesus before it was overlaid with [170]miracles? yet mr. robertson, in defiance of logic, argues that the absence of miraculous tales of jesus in the paulines confirms what he calls “the mythological argument.” ↑
2 it is true that this is from a speech put into paul’s mouth by the author of acts; but paul himself is no less emphatic in romans i, 23, where of the greeks he writes that, “though they knew god, they glorified him not as god?…. professing themselves wise, they were turned into fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible god for the likeness of an image of a corruptible man.” such were the feelings excited in paul by a statue of pheidias; how different from those it roused in his contemporary dion, who wrote as follows of it: [181]“whoever among mortal men is most utterly toilworn in spirit, having drunk the cup of many sorrows and calamities, when he stands before this image must utterly forget all the terrors and woes of this mortal life.” so strong was the prejudice of the church (due exclusively to its jewish origin) against plastic or pictorial art that eusebius and epiphanius condemned pictures of christ as late as the fourth century, while the eastern churches, even to-day, forbid statues of jesus and of the saints. of the great gulf which separated jew from gentile on such points mr. robertson seems not to have the faintest notion. ↑
3 i trust my readers will forgive my use of a fox-hunting phrase in so serious a context, but i cannot think of any other so apt. ↑
4 p. 48. after citing the rather problematic allusion to plato (rep. ii, 361 d) in the apology of apollonius (c. 172), the just man shall be tortured, he shall be spat on, and, last of all, he shall be crucified. harnack has said that there is no other reference to this passage of plato in old-christian literature. “why?” asks mr. smith. “because christians were not familiar with it? impossible. the silence of the christians was intentional, and the reason is obvious. the passage was tell-tale. similarly we are to understand their silence about the pre-christian nazarenes and many other lions that were safest when asleep.” this is in the true vein of a bacon-shakesperians armed with his cypher. ↑
5 see note (1). ↑
6 elsewhere mr. smith qualifies this position, p. 35: “of course, the cult was not intended to remain, and did not in fact remain, secret; it was at length brought into the open.” but perhaps mr. smith is here alluding to his own revelation. ↑
7 mark xvi, 9. the circumstance that mark xvi, 9–20, was added to the gospel by another hand in no way diminishes the significance of the passage here adduced. ↑
8 in the same manner, as we know from origen (com. in evang. ioannis, tom. xiii, 27), the samaritans had a messiah named dositheos, who rose from the dead, and professed himself to be the messiah of prophecy. his sect survived in the third century, as also his books, which, as origen says, were full of “myth” about him to the effect that he had not tasted of death, but was somewhere or other still alive. by all the rules of criticism as used by mr. robertson and his friends, we must deny that dositheos ever lived. the idea of a human hero being an angel or divine power made flesh was common among jews, and in their apocryph, “the prayer of jacob” (see origen, op. cit., tom. ii, 25), that worthy represented himself as such in the very language of paul and of the fourth gospel: “i who spoke to you, i, jacob and israel, am an angel of god and a primeval spirit, as abraham and isaak were created in advance of all creatures. but i, jacob, … called israel by god, a man seeing god, because i am first-born of all living beings made alive by god.” we also learn that uriel was sent forth by god to herald jacob’s descent upon earth, where he “tabernacled among men.” jacob declares himself to be “archangel of the power of god, and arch-captain among the sons of god, israel the foremost minister of the presence.” paul, we observe, did not need to go outside judaism for his conceptions of jesus, nor justin martyr either, who regularly speaks of jesus as an archangel. so also among the pagans. in augustus c?sar his contemporaries loved to detect one of the great gods of olympus just descended to earth in the semblance of a man. he was the god mercury or some other god incarnate. his birth was a god’s descent to earth in order to expiate the sins of the romans. thus horace, odes, i, 2, v. 29: cui dabit partes scelus expiandi juppiter, and cp. v. 45: serus in c?lum redeas—“mayest thou be late in returning to heaven.” ↑
